How to Build Trust and Drive Innovation on The Branding Laboratory Podcast

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Transcript:

welcome Third Rock listeners to The Branding laboratory I'm your host dvo Chief experience officer for the brand

Storyteller and the fusion creative Brands and each week I have the privilege of speaking with extraordinary

leaders and entrepreneurs who are reshaping the way Industries work these conversations go Way Beyond the service

to explore the core philosophies the lessons and the challenges that Define the brands that we admire today and one

of the greatest rewards of this podcast is the opportunity to share the insights of some of the brightest Minds in

business people who are passionate about pushing boundaries and redefining what's possible and as I always say the stories

we tell are the brands we build and this show is a testament to the power of that concept let's dive

in in today's episode I'm really excited to sit down with Danny Nathan he is the

CEO and founder of Apollo 21 and we're going to explore the intersection of

innovation technology and Leadership and discuss how his company Apollo 21 is

helping businesses unlock growth through technology-driven Solutions and Venture

building so we're going to find out what that means to you Danny also shares some incredible insights on building and

sustaining a culture of innovation customer Centric problem solving and the

evolving nature of Technology whether it's in sports whether it's in entertainment or rodeos you're going to

learn a lot about what they're doing for the rodeo industry which is really quite fascinating and if You' never been to a rodeo you need to check one out anyway

this episode is packed with valuable lessons for anyone that's looking to lead with Innovation and integrity and

you're going to learn a little bit more about what integrity means to Danny so stay tuned for a deep dive into modern

business transformation on The Branding laboratory welcome listeners to another episode of The Branding laboratory I'm

your host dvo I'm glad to be here today I am the chief experience officer for the brand Storyteller and the fusion

creative Brands every week I sit down with entrepreneurs and thought leaders who are pushing the boundaries of

innovation and Leadership and today's episode is going to be particularly exciting as we dive into the world of

Aid driven Solutions Venture creation and digital transformation with a leader

who is sitting at the Forefront of these Technologies and I'm really excited to

dive into some of the really cool projects that he is working on you can expect a candid conversation so joining

me today is Danny Nathan he is the CEO and founder of Apollo 21 I like that name Danny's work with Apollo 21 is

helping businesses uncover hidden growth opportunities by combining technology

with transformative Venture building which I'm really excited to learn what that Venture building means he's worked

on Startup to global companies in fact you were directly involved with Bank of America's chat uh GPT uh sorry AI tool

is it Erica is that what the name of it is yeah yes yes it is yeah Erica so Danny Welcome to The Branding laboratory

thanks for having me I'm excited to chat so you've had a pretty cool Journey so far helping businesses become more agile

and Innovative and I'd love to I start off every podcast on how did you get

here what's your origin story where did this all begin what was the inspiration behind founding Apollo 21 how did you

find yourself at the intersection of technology and Venture griven Venture driven I'm really struggling with some

words today words are hard for me I've not podcast all morning but ventur driven growth there we go we got it out

perfect yes Apollo 21 is the culmination of 20 years worth of career so I started

way back in the day in advertising realized pretty quickly that I wasn't enjoying that uh moved on to work in

Innovation Consulting helping companies ideate and launch new products and figure out how to take the transition

into the world of the Social Web and the mobile web to Heart and figure out how

they were going to be present in that that'll set the time frame for when I'm talking about as well and then I've

spent the last I don't know 12 15 years bouncing between founding startups and

helping early stage startups get off the ground find product Market fit Etc and so all of that came to a head about

three and a half years ago I was serving as head of product for an LA startup focused on the video space and to make a

long story short I spent about the last year of my tenure there helping some of our other portfolio companies from from

our investors solve their technology problems and eventually my Founders and

the folks at the family office that had invested in US tapped me on the shoulder and said hey you seem to enjoy this why

don't you go do this and so that led to the formation of Apollo 21 and here we

are three and a half years later you have been on both sides of the coin in terms of helping build businesses versus

now launching your own do you have a preference between the two something or is it just different for every project it's a little different for every

project ultimately I do enjoy being in the seat that I'm in because it's it

comes down to me it's make or break it based on my merits and the merits of the team that I can put together and I have

the ability to build that team and to run the company and build the culture as I see fit which I really enjoy doing

that being said the thing that really gets me going is just the problem solving in general and that's part of

what I really enjoy about working with early stage companies and we do a lot of work with with later stage or growth

stage companies as well and regardless it's just a question of what problem are you trying to solve how can we wrap our

heads around that in a unique way how can we layer Innovation into the way that you're approaching that problem and

then how can we utilize technology to create some sort of solution that serves the business the customers

Etc you mentioned this term Innovation and it's an often-used term by a lot of different people in a lot of different

capacities and so I'm always interested to learn what Innovation means to you but I want to go back a little bit have

you always been at the Forefront even if you think of yourself as a kid and I look at myself as a kid I I was always

an entrepreneur I just never knew I that's what entrepreneurialism w was and in terms of like my friendships and the

groups that I ran like when I was in high school and even Middle School I was always starting these little clubs and building these little organizations I

was always doing something right and looking back I never really realized at the time that actually meant something

and would materialize into being a Serial entrepreneur like I am today but looking back I'm like man the

writing was on the wall at every corner so do you ever stop and reflect back to yourself in your younger years and like

it all starts to make sense now and let idea of creating and innovating and being more creative than the people

around you and just always looking for ways to solve problems that sort of stuff has that always been sort of part of your ethos it hasn't actually

interestingly enough the creative side of things has always been a part of who I am I started I didn't started I from a

very young age was involved in theater and that was my kind of creative outlet for a very long time and I was also

really excited about outdoor sports that did a lot of rock climbing and mountaineering and to me that was the representation of the problem solving

side of my brain and it wasn't until it actually wasn't until a couple of years into my career when I had my eyes open

to the opportunities of Entrepreneurship and what it took to start a business what it meant to start a business Etc

and it really just lit a fire for me and that's been the focus ever since but it's really been the last I don't know

18 or or so years that's been my focus and was a kid it was a little bit more normal kid stuff all right I guess I

wasn't a normal kid then so I guess I take that that was a poor example I I was not in that space again I just never

I never knew how to Target and identify it it wasn't until I got in I graduated college and I went into the workforce in

the corporate work Workforce and I realized okay this is not what I thought any of this was going to be is not what

I signed up for yeah like I and I very quickly realized that I didn't the autonomy you talked about building

culture and people use the word Freedom a lot but for me it was more about having the opportunity to be creative

build a culture build something for me solve problems and not have to have like

bandwidth and bandwidth of papers and bureaucracy and just red tape that I was en that I was just encumbering

everything for me that that's my direction why I got into entrepreneurialism in terms of in terms

of your origin story in terms of where you are today when you look back at some of the different pieces and all the

different pieces of the puzzle from startups to building companies to now running Apollo 21 is there one

interlocking metric that that you can say carried across in each of the different spheres metric in terms of

what is a kpi that has always been true or metric in terms of just what is the kind of the personal truth behind it

both actually fair I'm going to start with the second one I love how you clarified that by the way thank you yeah no

worries so the personal Truth side of it I find interesting so I started my career as a designer basically as a like

a visual designer and I've come to have this theory that building companies is

or entrepreneurship is like the ultimate end state of design and the way that I

think about it is if you start off as a designer often you start by pushing pixels and making something look pretty

and then a lot of people migrate from there into interaction design or user experience design you start thinking oh

okay not only does it need to look good but I need to understand how to do the thing that I want to do with it and as

you get more mature in that kind of setting you start to think about the business needs that layer into the

experience that you're trying to bring to a customer and you go oh okay I want this person to do this as they're trying

to accomplish whatever it is that our tool does but I also need to be mindful that we need to accomplish X Y and Z in

order for this to be a symbiotic relationship and ultimately as you start thinking about the business needs then

you get into the idea of oh interesting not only am I designing a thing for somebody to look at or a thing for

somebody to use or a thing that underpins a business I'm also designing

the business itself and thinking about what are the moving pieces how do I architect the business to align to the

progression of the product or the service that I'm creating and selling and so for me the I guess the metric has

always been the iteration of design thinking throughout my career and the learning of huh all right I understand

that part part of design what's the next part and then the next part and the next part and I'm not sure maybe there's another part that I haven't hit on yet

but this is where I am today and then as far as a key metric that is a literal kpi a metric that that kind of is the

Tie that binds for better or worse and this is a non-answer because it's not actually a metric but it's the customer

the thing that matters through all of it is the thing that is indicative of whether or not you were solving the

problem for the customer in a way that supports your business and so there isn't really a single metric for that

you have to figure that out every time you get into it but as long as you're putting that customer first and figuring

out what the need is layered with the business goal then ultimately my belief

is that you're on the right track I love that you said that because it is different in every situation and I've

I've run a couple of different businesses and even in my corporate life there was always a different problem we were solving for a different customer

that had a different type of need but at the end of the day the perception is reality yes what the customer perceived

about the deliverable solution that we were providing to them is all that really matters whether it was a widget

or a sock or whatever it might be and I'm always fascinated by that as that

Paradigm that dynamic between customer satisfaction and operational efficiency

and sustainability and because you have to consider your team you have to consider your business you have to consider everything that you're building

at the same time that you have to consider the customer right because ultimately you're not in if you have a

service or a product or a platform or whatever it is ultimately they're going to decide whether

you're right whether you survive whether you're sustainable whether you exist but

simultaneous to that and they don't give a which is always so funny to me like nobody cares about what we have to deal with as business owners they just

want to know that we're going to be able to deliver a product to them and I've always found it really fascinating how CEOs approach that Paradigm like

maintaining sustainability within my operation making sure that Revenue Works making sure my people are happy making sure that whatever is that I'm doing in

here is moving forward but at the same time I always have to put the customer front and center can you talk a little

bit about that from your perspective and how you manage that Paradigm it's interesting what you're describing in

many ways aligns to my thought process around Innovation as well and since we're here to talk about both I'll go

ahead and cram the two together here a lot of companies out there start off as

something that is innovative and disruptive and they're out there to change the world change the way that people do something shake up an industry

blah blah blah blah blah and ultimately once those companies find success effectively the momentum begins to slow

down the company gets bigger the team that needs to support them starts to grow and all of a sudden you hit that

whatever it is 150 person point where all of a sudden the person that started the company looks around goes oh I don't

even know everybody's name anymore or we don't even live in the same city anymore whatever it is and ultimately throughout

that process often what we'll see is that companies begin to optimize round

efficiency and they stopped to think about the Innovative mindset that got

them to where they are at that point in time and that's where that's where sort

of the death of innovation and ultimately the the downfall of a lot of companies comes into play because you

start to rest on your laurels you become the incumbent you think oh we're too big to die at this point and then somebody

else who is in your shoes now where you were whatever it was five 10 years ago

is suddenly looking at you going oh that's the guy that we've got to Dethrone let's go figure out how to mess up their world and somebody's always

coming for you and so we spend a lot of time talking with our clients and talking in general about what we refer

to as a culture of innovation and it's basically how do you structure a company so that people within the

organization understand the overarching Strategic goal but have the freedom to

explore and to try things and ultimately what comes down to is the freedom to fail without major repercussions in

terms of oh God am I going to lose my job at my next performance review or whatever because those are the people

that are exploring and doing weird things that are going to suddenly crack open new opportunities and make you go

oh my God we never thought about that idea that way how do we take that and run with it and what would happen if we

disrupted ourselves instead of waiting for somebody else to come and do it that's easy to say when you're a solopreneur because you are the culture

of innovation you are everything rests on your L everything rests on what you do or don't do but you got into this

space where you you're now managing teams you have employees and all that sort of stuff so who is ultimately

responsible for maintaining that culture of innovation and making sure that your team is all on the same page brand

alignment brand messaging Vision whatever the cool mantras you want to throw out there is it the CEO or if you

have a team whether it's human resources or you've got an operations manager a COO whatever it is it their

responsibility to maintain their individual silos or is it your responsibility as a CEO that ultimately

must guide and become the North Star for that brand it's the latter I think it always comes down to whoever is running

the show assuming that's the CEO yes it is their responsibility to set the tone

and to enable that type of thinking to happen within the organization and that's really where culture comes to

life and then it also has to be supported by the SE Suite as a whole as well if you get a CEO that's yelling be

more innovative try this do weird things and your coo or your CFO is walking

around in the background tapping people on the shoulder going don't do that it's going to cost money then it's never going to work and ultimately what you're

doing is ruining your own culture so there has to be alignment there but yes it has to be born out of one person who

has the the vision and the wherewithal to Champion that kind of mentality and then to ensure that they're surrounding

themselves with other people that have similar beliefs and that will help them ingrain that culture in every new person

that comes in the door I love your take on that and we're fully in alignment on that I was having this debate with somebody the other day who felt like it

was the opposite of that that as a CEO it's your job yeah true story that as a CEO it is this is the position that

you've earned and as such your team is beholden to whatever your vision is and

it's their job to get on board with that and that it's not their responsibility to manage the individuals that are

working for them whether it's a sea Suite or the factory line worker their job is to guide the company into the

future whatever that means and I was like that's really nebulous what exactly does that mean if you're guiding the future but you're not managing your team

and and they're not in alignment with you then you're not managing you're not managing the company you're not guiding towards the future it let me just think

about this idea between there there are multiple types of CEOs right yeah but there's two opposing thoughts on this

that I've come to the conclusion of having worked for different types of CEOs there's the ones that feel that way

that are entitled to their position and then there's the ones that are more people managers that are really involved in developing their employees developing

their staff because for me having seen both of those types of CEOs and and now trying to model my own behavior as a CEO

that has a team it it feels to me like what you described and your answer is the right way to do that and I don't

know if there's a right or wrong but there probably is ultimately as a CEO it's your job to build the people that

are supporting the the brand and the vision and if they're out of alignment then you have a whole bunch of things that are just going in a bunch of

didactic ways that are probably not conducive to running a successful business right yeah I think what you're driving at is the dichotomy between the

Visionary CEO and the operational CEO and the Visionary CEO is the one that's going to charge ahead into the future

and probably and I'm speaking of gross generalizations here but may not be as

involved or want to be as involved in sort of the the onetoone management of the team but rather is going to look

around and go no we're going this way and everybody's got a everybody's got to get on board if you're not on board with the vision then go away whatever and the

contrast that is the operational CEO going okay we need to manage the team we need to make sure that everybody is free

to do their best work or again whatever euphemism you want to throw at that and to your point neither one is wrong but

they're definitely different styles and I think that a lot of it comes down to where you are in your company's life

cycle and what you want from the company looking into the future and so thinking

about the operational CEO I think stereotypically we would say is better at keeping the Train on the tracks and

running smoothly and moving in the direction that it has always moved because it is on tracks whereas the

Visionary CEO is you're I don't know if I'm going to take the crappy metaphor it's the airplane to your train and

going nope we're going to go wherever the heck we want and you're all along for the ride eloquently stated in terms

of I love what you said in the beginning of this conversation around freedom to explore or really freedom to fail and in

terms of guiding your people so that they have the opportunity to do that as it pertains to yourself though do you

practice what you preach are you one of those types of individuals that holds themselves to a a a inexplicable

standard in terms of not ever being able to achieve that and looking back and beating yourself up because you didn't

allow yourself to fail or are you practicing what you're preaching oh I live by a personal Mantra that has

failed beautifully I am 100% on board with the idea that failure is a fact of

life and there's no way that you're going to move through life without encountering failure whether that's

business or personal or whatever it is and so rather than trying to fight the idea of failure I've simply learned to

embrace the notion that when I fail it is generally a learning experience and an opportunity for me to move forward

with greater knowledge the only point of kind of inexcusable failure in my

opinion is is a lack of trying if you're not even going to bother to put yourself out there then that's a failure that

you're not going to overcome it's a character flaw if you will versus enabling yourself to get out and try

things and figure out what works and what doesn't without without beating yourself up over it and we fail look we

fail all the time and every company goes through periods of struggle and then periods of success and so on and so

forth and I think in a lot of ways it's cyclical you set a goal for yourself you try and reach that goal you probably

fail multiple times along the way until eventually you have that sort of light shining moment where you go oh and you

go oh my God we should do this and then all of a sudden you hopefully find yourself in a cycle of success until the

next challenge comes up and then you go and fail again and look some failures are big and they're painful and they're

really hard to get over and some failures are I forgot my lunch today I guess I'll have to order something

whatever but I'm really enjoying this conversation we're talking with Danny and Danny Nathan he's the CEO of Apollo

21 and I tell my children to that point because failure is in in every

opportunity it's an opportunity to learn something but one of the things that I also try to instill in them is that if

you continue making the same mistake over and over there's something in your process that isn't working so you can be

stubborn all you want but if you're not getting the results that you want you need to take a look at what it is that you're doing and be able to learn from

that and adapt from that not just saying oh Dad you told me to fail it's okay but it is okay to fail but if you keep

making the same Evan mistake over and over you need to stop back and take a step back and say okay why does this

keep happening to me failure without learning is is a flaw but failure is an

opportunity to learn and then taking advantage of that opportunity I think is perfectly fine and the way that the

world works it's the way we do things do looking back at your career in the trajectory were there some Marquee

moments where you had these failed opportunities that enabled you to be pivot make an adjustment and learn from

that opportunity and something bigger and better came out of it that you hadn't even anticipated absolutely as I mentioned

earlier I started my career in advertising which in and of itself ended up being a massive failure in large part

because I spent two years getting a graduate degree and then realized immediately that I didn't want to do it

which was a failure in its own right but more interestingly was the moment when I

realized that I just couldn't hack it in advertising anymore and it was in a very specific meeting at my last job at an ad

agency and I remember walking out of that meeting just going okay I'm done there's no way I cannot keep doing this

every single day for years or decades and it was that moment that kind of

became a trigger for change for me and I remember I left the building that day I went and bought a stack of books about

as tall as I was that that I refer to as my second master's degree it was a self-taught moment of okay I've learned

a bunch of stuff but I've realized that in practice I don't believe in it so I'm going to go out and find all of the books and the the learning material that

I can to teach me how to do things in a way that aligned to what I think is correct and this was at a time when the

way that people use technology was very much in flux this was early 2000s pre

pre smartphone and preal media and all of that stuff and right on the cusp and I kept looking around going wait the

world is changing we have access to information and technology that changes the way that we can think about and do

things and interact with one another and with Brands and so on and so forth and so I went out and just taught

myself how I thought about approaching all of that and then that became the onus for my job search basically and I

as I said I took it upon myself to get out of the world of advertising and that was the lens that I went and talk to

people through it was okay I see the world in this way and if you don't see the world that way that's fine you're

allowed to have your own perspective but I know that I'm not going to succeed here and so it gave me a really solid

litmus test for understanding what I wanted out of my next job and ultimately

I ended up in a place that fulfilled that that need for me and just an utterly amazing fashion and it was I

spent five years at an innovation consultancy that was just ripe with opportunity and had chances to do things

and interact with people and meet people that I would never have otherwise been put in front of I flown to the UK and

sat at a table across from James Dyson to talk about how to launch his latest product for him and it was was just

amazing experiences like that that helped shape my view of everything

moving forward and then of course ultimately there was failure in that experience as well I probably stayed

there a year maybe two longer than I should have because I thought I had more to learn and eventually I realized that

it was time to go and that led to my starting my first company and so at every step there's always a a failure

moment that for me triggers whatever the next big thing is for me it's a ballsy

and courageous move to be able to just walk away from something and be able to have the wherewithal to understand that

it's not working for you and just recognize that because if you take a look at a lot of people and I have a lot of friends that are in this space that

are stuck in a a job I was just having a conversation in the airport a couple days ago with this somebody who I met on

the plane wonderful conversation makes a lot of money doing something in the banking industry but hates his life he's

I like I hate my life and I was like why don't you do something do you ever have any dreams any aspirations he man I have

so many aspirations I filled 10 journals with and I was like are you doing anything about those and he's like how can I I have a family I've got kids I

have a job and so people get caught on this treadmill and they get into a point of where they think there's no return

and they're just like it I'm just going to ride this out for the rest of my time and it's unfortunate because there's a lot of things that that don't

that aren't brought to the universe because of somebody's great idea but lack of courage to step into that space

because whether they're comfortable or they're scared or whatever it is a lot of respect for you being able to do that it's not it's not a capability that

everyone possesses no but to be fair I was also pretty young and didn't have a family or anything like that to worry

about and I was very much at a point where I was trying to figure out about who I was before I had gotten to the point of family and all of that fun

stuff and so I was in many ways I was fortunate enough to have the realization early enough that I could do something

about it without feeling like I was stuck sure fair enough I can agree with that you've worked on some pretty impressive projects in your career

including Bank of America's chatbot Erica can you share sort of some pivotal moments around the creation of that your

involvement with that how are you helping business Drive transformation with this what was your role in that whole episode yeah the Bank of America

project I'm happy to share a bit about I'll be frank it's not perhaps necessarily the most indicative of the type of thinking that we tend to

Champion but we were fortunate we were called in to help with the kind of

reenvisioning of what Erica could be and so this was two two and a half years ago right at the Forefront of all things AI

becoming part of the everyday vernacular and kudos to the Bank of America team they were aware enough to recognize that

the current iteration of the the Erica chatbot which at the time was just a Q&A bot it was pre-programmed and it was

very easy to fall outside of the the lines where it could answer the questions and they wanted to think about

what the opportunities were how it would come to life and what type of access to

customer data it might need in order to provide value for customers and we were brought in to help think about largely

what the sort of user experience of that was and where people might want Erica to

pop up in their interactions with Bank of America should Erica for example be able to start a conversation or is Erica

only on call do you want Erica to be able to send you a push notification that says hey balance alert or

congratulations your paycheck just landed or whatever it was or is Erica only there when I summon her and so it

was a really exciting time to think about what the interactions with a

datadriven AI platform might look like from the customer perspective especially

at a time when people weren't quite as comfortable as they are today with the idea of AI the idea that something might

be watching out over my data and when you're talking about financial data in particular people get a little quickly

about it for obvious reasons and so there was a lot of a lot of kind of fine line to navigate there around how much

is too much what could we do in the future once people get comfortable with it what should it be today how do we get

to the point where Erica goes from canned responses to generated responses

that feel conversational and things like that so it was a lot of fun to be involved with you said it wasn't the

most indicative of the top type of of things that you Champion as a as a company what are some of the factors

that you Champion as as Innovative and and and transformative so a lot of the

work that we do again is grounded in this idea of building or helping companies build a culture of innovation

and then helping them bring something to life through that lens so that they can

not only understand what a culture of innovation means and looks like but they can also then see what the output of

that effort is and we're split probably 6040 actually between work that is focused on internal operations so

Building Technology for use inside the house versus Building Technology for customer use and both challenges offer a

lot of interesting opportunity I'll give one example we had a client in in the western Sports space of all things so

think Cowboys and Road IO and all of that fun stuff and originally they came to us as a relatively new company and

basically said hey we believe that this space is ripe for disruption that

technology can help play a huge role in that and to that end we started this

company by buying five others and we now have a whole stack of data but it's all spread in a bunch of files on somebody's

computer and we don't know what to do with it we can't do anything with it and what started as basically a six we

engagement just helped them make sense of the data that they had at their disposal grew into about a year and a

half engagement that saw us building everything from their data management platform to their marketing operations

technology to literally an internal platform for the management of six to

700 rodeo events a year and then we then turned our attention to more of the

consumer space and ended up building what was effectively like ESPN for the world of rodeo and at every step all of

it was was Data driven led by customer development processes and really

grounded in the fact that we had a unique opportunity to talk to fans in

the space and athletes in the space to understand exactly what each of them were lacking in the idea of rodeo fandom

to date so that we could help bring that to life for them and one of the really interesting insights that came to bear

there was unlike a lot of other sports Rodeo has a very blurry line between who

is a fan and who is a participant because the the amateur kind of rodeo

events are very much a stepping stone into the world of professional rodeo and

the way that you become a rodeo professional is literally by coming up through the ranks and so what you find

is that the folks that are the sitting in the stands as fans at some of the really big rodeos around the country around the world are also the next

weekend going out and competing themselves and so there 's this really weird blurry line between are you a fan

or are you an athlete or maybe you're both and that's amazing and so we built all of the technology and in particular

the the rodeo application with that kind of Truth in mind so that people could

feel like they were living in both worlds this truth you speak of where there people living in both worlds is

this something that this company was aware of or is this something that you had uncovered in looking at the data no

this was very much something that we uncovered in the customer development process when we started with the expectation that we were actually going

to build two applications for them one for fans and one for athletes and it was

on our recommendation after going through the customer development process and interviewing a bunch of both fans

and athletes that they combin them into a single experience so that we could

take advantage of that Discovery when you're working with corporations or businesses and

organizations and there's a lot of moving Parts like this like you just described and there's a lot of people and a lot of context and a lot lot of

history and a lot of learned behaviors good or bad there's a lot of unpredictability with Innovation and

transformation yeah how do you manage fear of change with these types of situations fear of change is always one

of those things it's a little bit tough to navigate especially when you're dealing with larger companies and

dealing with companies that have a lot of folks that are potentially concerned about what the impacts of your work

might be on their career and their personal life because as we know the idea of we're going to build AI to take

the jobs of n number of people for example we still need to be aware that there are n number of people sitting around who are getting paid by that

company to do the thing and so we Tred to maintain an awareness around what the

ramifications of the that development are but we also need to help those companies understand

that if things were going really well they probably wouldn't be calling us in the first place they wouldn't be

thinking about how to solve unique problems because they wouldn't have them if everything was hunky dory and so

there's very much a a kind of dichotomy there around how do we protect the

people and make sure that they're comfortable with the idea of what we're building but at the same time how do we create enough change within the

organization that it enables forward growth and forward momentum that perhaps they're not seeing today and so we do a

lot of work to help educate Executives in the space and help them understand what some of the Fallout might be from

the decisions that are being made and then we also do a lot of work talking with the folks that are in the building

who are going to be using whatever the thing is that we're going to create so that we can understand what their needs

are exactly and then understand also what part of their job we can help to make easier for example that doesn't put

the job in Jeopardy but rather makes them 10x at that job so that they can

outperform you know what they're used to I love that you said that because in my experience and and I I don't have as

transformative experiences perhaps as what you're doing but in my world especially when working with small

businesses there's always somebody or someone or a small group of people who are not on board with the changes who

are not on board with the adaptations whether it's rebranding whether it's marketing whether it's content creation

whe whether whatever it is and so there's always somebody that's causing some sort of disruption to the antithesis of what we're trying to do

and you what you said really resonated with me you said education and meeting people where they are and then letting

them see the causation behind what you're doing as opposed to just like jaming it down the throat you're just going to do this we said so so it's

really that's a really important point to notice like whatever industry you're operating in it's really important to we

talked about this at the outset perception is reality so if somebody you're working with is thinking that my

job security is at stay care I'm going to become obsolete maybe I'm not going to be as important as I was maybe I'm

not going to have that juicy title that I had whatever it is right because there's always going to be with transformation there's always going to be adjustments but if you can Target

that stuff early on and systemically approach that by meeting them where they are it's a really it's a much better

optimal approach than just trying to jam it down their throat oh yeah jamming something down somebody's throat is a Surefire way to make them not want

whatever it is because you're not giving them a choice in the matter and a lot of the a lot of the work that we do a lot

of the exercises that we go through the workshops that we run the learnings that we set out to take from our clients so

that we can help them move forward involve people at all ranks of the organization as opposed to just the

Executive Suite for example and we do it for exactly that reason so that everybody feels like they've had a

chance to be heard and so that the insights that can be borne from people who are on the front line of that

organization that Executives may not even be aware of have a chance to be surfaced so that those people feel like

rather than coming in and cramming something down their throats they have had a chance to input on and really help

direct whatever that Innovation effort is or whatever that new product is ETC

so that they feel bought in and a lot of people just by giving them an opportunity to be heard can be brought

on board and shifted in mindset from oh God you're coming to steal my job or make me obsolete to oh wow you're really

doing something interesting that hopefully is going to make my job easier or that's here to benefit the company as

a whole or whatever the case may be in terms of aollo 21 I'd like to talk a little bit about that business for a

minute you're helping companies scale through these Tech driven Solutions can you talk a little bit about the company

and if you had to if you had to distill it down into just a small elevator pitch what does Apollo 21 do what problem do

they solve ultimately for companies so Apollo 21 is a weird combination of an

innovation consultancy and a product design studio and what I mean by that is

we help companies strategically view what the opportunities are for Innovation and help them understand why

companies that commit to Innovation as a practice to building a culture around Innovation outperform those who do not

and there is very much data that backs it up I'll give you a couple of examples we have data that shows that companies

that focus on building a culture of innovation generally see as much as a 22% greater performance in their

financials and as much as a 900% greater increase in their stock price over time

as compared to companies that are focused on reactive problem solving in the moment versus taking a point of

looking for what's coming next and so um we very much believe in that and then

combined with the ideals of what it takes to design a great product or a service and the capabilities to actually

bring that to life that becomes one of the key differentiators for us a lot of folks hire a consultant or a consultancy

and they expect that person's going to come in hopefully they're going to have some really great ideas or unique insights but ultimately what they're

going to get is a presentation or a paper or whatever that says you should

Dot and gives a whole stack of changes that should be made but then that person leaves and the company's left there left

with we should but how do we and why what's the output and what are some of the things that we should look out for

as we do the things that we should and we pride ourselves very much on not just

handing over a you should document and walking away but rather helping plan for the future and helping to execute those

plans in a manner that aligns to those companies needs and we in doing so we go

so far as to operate under the expectation that our clients will eventually outgrow us if we do our jobs

so if we help a company create something Innovative build a new product and

ground that product in technology eventually they're going to look at us and say hey this is great it's changed a

bunch for us it's time for us to bring it inh house and we have learned by

mistake that rather than fighting that we're better off just embracing it from

outset and working with our clients to understand what the future might look like in success and how to plan for that

eventuality so that nobody is caught off guard at that moment when they eventually look at us and go hey can you

help us hire a VP of engineering or can you help us build our engineering team so that we can take this away from you

and our answer is yes absolutely in fact we will start from day one with that in mind so a lot of this projection that

you're doing in these build outs and these scale ups and these Innovations in these Transformations are they based

upon AI data that is future state or can can you walk us through some of the process and on how you're coming up with

innovative ideas to lead a company into a different Stratosphere or a different area or a different industry or a

different product whatever it is but you still have the security of understanding what that impact might be it is less

grounded in a huge pool of AI data although that is becoming more of a possibility and more of a reality in

terms of how we can utilize data to better inform what that future State might look like a lot of what we're

focused on today is is simpler than that a lot of companies that are struggling

around the ideals of innovation the ideas of longevity and what the future might look like for them are struggling

based on very simple problems it could be operational problems it could be slowdowns in sales or misalignment with

customer needs over time it could be an inability to keep up with the potential

that technology brings to the table for them could be all sorts of things and so we start very simply by figuring out

what the biggest pain points are helping that company prioritize what pain points will have

the biggest impact on their business and what impact what will align most thoroughly to their customer needs and

then helping them bring that to life and the future state vision is really based on okay you've stated that you have

these five seven whatever problems we've helped you prioritize down to the top

one to three let's think for a moment about what the world looks like if solution number one is a

success are you going to need more people is it going to change the Dynamics of your customer service team

are you going to need people with skill sets that you don't currently have in-house like a software team for

example and we just start asking the right questions at the right time to begin to uncover that so that rather

than getting to a point 68 12 months down the road where're they look at us and unexpectedly say oh wow I think we

might want to hire an engineering team we just start talking to them about that from day one and go hey you're hiring us

because you don't have the capability to do this in-house let's talk about what happens when you get to the point where

you want to do this in-house and let's talk about how we're going to formulate the team that's going to build this today with that in mind so that nobody's

caught off guard so that there's no misalignment of expectations that you're going to spend X dollars with us to

create something new and then be surprised by what it takes to keep that thing alive and growing over time for

example is this a process that you have refined over time did you always always

let me back up in this Innovative approach to things and being able to almost predict the future so to speak

you're looking at specific variables and I I I I say that sort of tongue and cheek but you're look you've learned to

look at variables in a business operationally and and you can see the writing on the wall because every

business has a forecasted Trend right and so your taking all of those experiences and all those different

contexts and all your different experiences with these different types of businesses and you're using that to help formulate the next decision and the

next decision and the next decision is that kind of the process yeah basically it's I guess to put it I'm dumbing it

down sorry I don't mean to make it sound so like inferior no no you're hitting the nail in the head what I started to say was rather than thinking about it

from the perspective of artificial intelligence to help figure out what that future state looks like we rely on

real intelligence we rely on the experience of the people who have done it over and over on our team and look

when somebody brings us in I'll go back to our rodeo client as an example our team didn't have expertise in the rodeo

space in fact most of us were not exactly Rodeo Fanatics heading into that project and so there's an interesting

balance and a ton of collaboration that goes into a world where we can learn

about rodeo and the needs of fans and athletes in the rodeo space quickly

enough to be dangerous and to help as you pointed out predict what that future might look like alongside of our clients

but it doesn't happen in a vacuum we don't go lock ourselves in a room and go all right we're going to plug ourselves into the Matrix and download rodeo it

happens because we work intensely closely with our clients to understand

the thing that they are the expert in so that we can then layer in the thing that we are the experts in around okay if

this is the way that it acts today how do we want that to come to fruition in the future what role does technology

play what happens when we already know that in this world every one of those fans is walking around with a

supercomputer in their pocket and what does that mean for the way that they interact with rodeo and so it's very

much this collaborative combination of sucking the expertise out of our clients

and then layering in our own experience and Future Vision around what we can do

to help them become what they want to be in the future expertise vampires I like

that yes I might have to steal that that's great in terms of communicating

complex Solutions which is this is something that I encounter a lot of times especially with people who who

have never done a lot of marketing who don't have a lot of experience with brand messaging who don't have a social

media presence their website is completely out of day that hasn't been updated since 1998 type of thing and a

lot of times I'm going into these conversations with them and I'm communicating I notice I catch myself that I'm communicating complex solutions

that need to be dumbed down so that they are again meeting people where they are that are accessible and compelling do

and I'm suspecting again I don't know the type of people you work with but given the nature of what you do I imagine there are situations and

scenarios like that pop up frequently where you have to reorient yourself and take the information how you would

normally dispense it and break it down to simplified uncomplex terms is that

something that you encounter often and if so what's the approach you take with that we deal with that all the time and

a lot of that I have grown I've personally grown a knack for doing what you're describing throughout my career

and figuring out how to take the words that are coming out of my engineering team's mouths and rearticulating them in

a way that somebody who does Rodeo for a living or whatever can understand and part of that comes down to our kind of

overarching approach we always take a crawl walk run approach to our projects and explaining to somebody the idea of

okay first we're going to crawl then we're going to walk then we're going to run is also very much the way that I

find we articulate those types of ideas okay the first thing we're going to do is make it so that people can achieve

blank what is the thing that we want a rodeo fan to get out of using the the application and when we're talking to

our Engineers we might say hey we want to hook up a live stream and have a an h264 file that's downloaded in whatever

packets at a time blah blah blah and they're going to go okay cool I got it but if you say that to your client they're go what we go we're going to

make it so that your fans can watch rodeos on their phone oh cool okay great and so it's really as you've pointed out

a couple of times it's meeting people where they are it is learning the vernacular and figuring out where their

education level Falls in terms of understanding what you're going to be talking about and then helping to

articulate it in ways that make sense to them and look if ultimately if we can't

achieve that then the rest of what we do fails because if you can't help somebody

understand what you want them to build or what there is opportunity to build or how want to go about it then they're

never going to sign off on building it and so becoming the interpretation layer between the world of technology and the

world of that particular business is deeply ingrained in all of our projects

because it has to be yeah I would imagine do you worry that technology

will ever supersede the experiential aspect of you have rodeos on phones and

you have social media experiences and you have meta virtual all these different things that are popping up where it's taking out the Human

Experience in the sense of like us flesh to flesh enjoying something sitting in a rodeo show I was at NASCAR as a client

of mine and I was at the the race this weekend and I was blown away by how many

people were not actually watching the race but were watching the race on their phone in the grand stand and they were

sitting in the tarmac or they were out by the concession fascinating yeah and I was blown away I was like the NASCAR is

very culture centers around making it experiential that is what they are you can go out of the pits you can stand

next to the cars I was literally standing next to Michael Jordan 2 feet from Michael Jordan on Sunday like this

the crazy yeah like the craziest thing and I just but at the same time there was all that there was we went up into

the grand stand just to have that bird's eye view and I was looking around and aside from the innumerable number of

people that didn't have their shirts on there was a lot of people that were watching their phones and engaging in

this virtual experience that I just remember thinking and they weren't watching anything else I I would look into their phone looking

down and they were literally watching the race and cuz Nascar has this portal where you can interact and hear the radio announcers and all these that's

the thing yeah that's the thing right there I it is very

much it's very much an interesting kind of experiential moment where you go to a

thing an ascar race to watch the thing but we have grown accustomed to the idea

that there is more of the story available to us around that event and that experience

than what we can immediately take in face to face and I think that people are

growing accustomed to the moment of oh yeah I want to see it and I want to be there and I want to hear the screaming

and the engines and whatever but I also want the experience of the story that

gets told through the greater access to I don't know in sports we talk a lot about how data drives the storytelling

and the experience because if you think about sports and how people interpret it and understand the the

trajectory and the Arc of a player's career or a driver's career or a team's progression or whatever it's told

through the data how many wins how many losses how many three-pointers led to this win whatever it was and so there's

that Inseparable moment of datadriven Storytelling that I think people are now accustomed to wanting to suck up in that

experience and I guess we've just gotten to a point where we're okay with it

standing in front of some of the human interaction that also makes life amazing and that we want but at the same time

it's part of what makes people feel engrossed and connected in that sport

yeah it's a wonderful conversation to have and it's worth exploration and and someone like you certainly has some

really cool insights on it I've often wondered have we gone past the point of no return because I turned on the TV a

couple of nights ago and I don't watch sports very often but there was an NFL game going on and I was blown away first

and foremost that you can change from the game itself to like different CH like different camera views of the game

right then you can switch it to a broader expansion where you can have like multiple games going on at the same

time and then if you zoom into a game there's literally like a running I can't even describe it because I don't watch

sports very often but I was blown away by the amount of statistics and back background information that was lamb

basting all over the screen at various points of the game and I'm just like this is my head was like on a

swivel trying to take it all in and and I hadn't watched a g this was an NFL game by the way and I haven't watched an

NFL game in maybe five years and the evolution between five years ago and today dude it's like a complete

metamorphosis and so it made me start to think have we superseded the humanity of sports and like sitting with our popcorn

and getting our beer and our just sitting in the stands and enjoying the game and have I got I got what happened

to my camera have we gone past that point of no return and I'm going to let you answer that while I fix my camera

sure I think in many ways we have and I think it is an evolution of how people

want to consume sport through that kind of statistical

datadriven understanding of what the thing is that they love and I think

we've just reached a point where yes people are willing to give up the inherent sort of sitb back experience of

drink a beer eat popcorn and watch a game in favor of the leaned in experience of oh this is happening how

do I understand what the relevance of that is I'm watching and people are so now connected to multiple teams and

multiple outcomes of what's going on that it's almost inherent in just trying

to keep up with the sport itself like sports in general and let me be clear I'm not a big sports fan either I just

happen to have worked in the space enough to have seen the value of kind of those experiences and what data does

especially for people who really are deeply driven fans of a given Sport and

yeah I think that we've hit the point of tradeoff where people want the leaned in experience of sucking in all of the

information and understanding it halftime of whatever game you're watching that because this team is ahead

by three and this other game that's happening over here that team's behind that now this team is gonna overtake

that team and I don't know I'm I'm gonna butcher this because I'm not a sports guy in spite of whatever I'm rattling

off here but whatever the The League rankings are at the moment like that's going to change based on the output of

what's happening right now and I think people want to keep up with that in the moment in ways that we just couldn't

even imagine in the past think about it like it used to be you had to get to the newspaper the next day to find out what the results were and now people are

going no I don't need that I got this right here yeah it's absolutely just mindboggling how quickly the pace has

moved I want to shift gears uh for the last part of our call and I know we don't have a lot of time but I'm fascinated by CEOs and Business Leaders

concept of leadership it's something that's just always intrigued me and and no matter who you talk to no two people

have the same philosophy on how to handle controversy or how to handle conflict or how to handle success and

all those different things when you look at yourself as a leader an innovator a transformative CEO and you had to

cherry-pick a few elements of what makes you a leader and what makes a good leader where do you fall in that and

what's what how does that materialized for you I think the simplest way to state that is put people first I so I'll

give an example we run a completely remote team we operate in what's called a row a results oriented work

environment so we don't have standard work hours as long as you're basically

as long as you're making it to the meetings that I need you in and articulating when you can't make it so

that we can either plan accordingly or execute without you I don't care when

your work gets done I don't care where it gets done I don't care if you're in an office or on a beach or whatever and

more importantly we've built so we've built a a team and a culture around that

mentality and the outcome of that is people learn to support one another and people learn to help one another have

the moments that make us human and whether that's it's my kid's birthday I'm going to be out for the afternoon or

God forbid I got to run a kid to the doctor or pet to the vet or whatever it is understanding the reality is that

when push comes to shove these are the things that are important to people and in life not whether or not this pixel on

the website gets pushed at this exact moment or when push comes to shove

whether or not that website is live now or tomorrow and I I say that carefully because obviously we try to respect our

clients deadlines for things like website launches or whatever it is but at the same time there is a human

element around leadership and I think the more that you can treat people like humans and acknowledge the fact that

they have lives outside of whatever it is you're doing with them regardless of how passionate they are about it because

the flip side of that is we hire people who love what they do and who love the work that we're doing and it's awesome

because they are then personally committed to it and having fun executing on it and that's a perfect balance

because if somebody is invested in and enjoying the work that they are doing for you for your clients Etc then you

also know that when they say I need tomorrow afternoon off it's my kids birthday party or whatever that there is

a level of importance to that moment for them that warrants respect and I think

it creates a really nice kind of symbiotic environment where people

understand what one another value and help aim to help those people achieve

those things yeah I like the answer there's a lot of empathy and compassion in what you just said and goes back to

what we talked about multiple times is is meeting people where they are and understanding their needs and how can I

serve those needs but at the same time not compromise the operations of what I'm trying to build here in in in in

terms of you and your the fragility of who you are as a leader and I'm going somewhere with this do you ever have

doubt around the things that you're doing or do you ever have fears do you

look at some of the challenges that you're facing and if so you're human I can't imagine that you're not and these are internal conversations single EX so

as as someone who has seen a lot of different things and had a lot of success and doing different things and working with different types of people

how do you manage these challenges how do you manage these fears these self-doubts what is do you have some

sort of tips and hacks that you could share in your

journey honestly it all comes down to we're all just figuring it out as we go

and and I look I hit moments all the time where I go oh God was that the right decision or I don't know what

decision to make and there are moments in that process where I lean on the

people around me and I bring in particularly the senior leadership on my team who I trust deeply and have worked

with for years even prior to Apollo 21 so we've built a lot of trust amongst

ourselves with one another to help figure out what's going on and then there's moments that to be frank I don't

bring to the team because I don't want them to be concerned I don't want something to weigh on their mind that

might you know distract them unnecessarily and a lot of it is just figuring out when the right time is to

talk to somebody else about that issue and figure out who the someone else is

that we should be talking to so that you can figure out a path through all of it

and a lot of it comes down to exactly what I've been talking about treating people like they're human helping them understand that you two are human and

and dealing with the things that come up in that process at every step of the

way in terms of couple closing questions in terms of the message

[Music] or the perspective that you would want people to have about you and your

business and you're in a crowded room and you just finish delivering a lesson or a keynote or a workshop or whatever

it is or if you could take all the people that you've ever had an experience with and put them all in one room and and then you were no longer

there for a minute is there a central message that you'd want them to have about who you are Danny

Nathan uh I am firmly of the belief that when

we're dealing with business and with people and with all of the things that we've been talking about dealing with

Integrity is one of the most important aspects of this building a level of trust and understanding around having

somebody's best interest at heart and I try to I personally try to bring that to

everything that we do at Apollo 21 regardless of whether that is internal

facing towards my team or external towards a client and I've had moments where that was questioned and I think

that more than anything else that I have run into in running Apollo 21 the some

of the most painful moments are when that comes into question because it means that frankly ultimately I have

failed yes when my Integrity comes into question it means that I have failed because it means that at some point

along the way I didn't instill enough trust and confidence in myself and my

team so that somebody understood that when something went wrong when something

took longer to get through development than we expected when we've been saying for two or three weeks we're almost done

and it's still dragging on those are the moments when that level of trust and

integrity come into play because they are the defining moments between whether somebody looks at you and says I believe

that you have our best interest at heart I believe that you understand what's going on and I trust that when you say

you're still working on it you're still working on it for the betterment of our

business and our relationship to me that's the that's the one thing that I

would hope that room full of people would believe in common about me and

working with Apollo 21 that's interesting that you say it that way I wouldn't have thought Integrity would

have been come to question if you were didn't deliver on a project the right way unless there was something that you

said you were going to do and you didn't do I was I I I guess when you were telling that story I was thinking more in the long along the lines of

proficiency and qualitative and all those sorts of stuff but I I like the perspective it's interesting to consider

the word integrity itself and what a lot of what we do often is trying to build

something that hasn't been built before and we do our best to figure out how long we think it's going to take or how

many people or how much money or whatever but we're not always right and

our being wrong is not malicious I it's one thing I can say with confidence it is never a malicious mistake to try and

sure ring more money out of a client or something like that and so that's

why why Integrity comes to mind in that process because it's me trying to

instill the belief that we are doing everything that we can to create success for the people around us I really love

that and I like you how you said it because it repositioned my Paradigm around it you you mentioned you getting

your second master's degree these books behind me are my first master's degree I had an experience um with the marketing

company it's why I'm doing what I'm doing today where they didn't have integrity where I spent a lot of money

on something that gave me very little results and I just remember thinking through the process early on I started

seeing the lack of customization the lack of tailoring the lack of meeting where I am the lack of breaking things

down for me and making simplifi complex Concepts simple for me to understand and things of this nature and I just

remember thinking there's got to be a better way to do this manage a client's expectations but still deliver quality and at the same time have sustainability

but actually add some value and everything I've heard you say so far and thank you is add value what problem do

you solve how can you be Innovative how can you be transformative how can you meet the client where they are and fix something for them because in the end

that's all that really matters and I went back to school so that I could figure out how can I deliver a result

that I wanted to see in my company that it that they came so far off that I'm was like this has just been a total

waste of eight months and I just this has been a really cool conversation man I really appreciate you taking the time to to join us on The Branding

Laboratories any closing thoughts anything you like to add where can people find you what's the best way to connect with you yeah all that fun stuff

best way to find us is on our website Apollo 2.io we also have what I personally

think is an awesome newsletter but that might be because cuz I write it every week that is called innovate disrupt or die and you can find that at innovat

disrupt or die.com and then of course we're on all of the requisite socials and all of that fun stuff I'm pretty

active on LinkedIn so come find me come say hello if you happen to be in New York I run a monthly Founders dinner and

we actually meet in person and talk face to face technology hasn't broken everything yet I love that there's not

an app if I go to a Founders dinner that the people going to be on their phone while you're up there doing the engagement there's no up there it is

literally six people sitting down around dinner and I've debated a no phones policy but so far it hasn't been a

problem awesome man I really appreciate your time thank you for joining and that

our paths cross in the near future wow what an incredible conversation thank you Danny for coming

on the show today we took a deep dive into the world of innovation and

Entrepreneurship and Leadership with Danny Nathan the the Visionary CEO behind Apollo 21 we talked about

building a culture of innovation to self inom complex business challenges with cuttingedge technology Danny shared some

powerful insights that that any leader entrepreneur can learn from and his approach to customer Centric problem

solving and navigating fear of change and and maintaining Integrity in

business relationships it's something we can all aspire to in our own Journeys and I really appreciated the insights that that he dropped if this episode has

inspired you to rethink how you approach Innovation or leadership don't stop here

head over to Apollo 21. to learn more about the transformative work that Danny and his team are doing

over there it's it's refreshing to hear these insights from someone that is doing just amazing things across the planet as always thank you for tuning in

to the brand new laboratory don't forget to subscribe leave me a review I want to

know how I'm doing and follow us on social media to keep the conversation going and if you're ready to take your

business to the next level you can find me that's right dvo yours truly at

thebrand storyteller. comom for more insights resources blogs intellectual thought seed thought leadership all

sorts of things that we can help you tell your Brand Story a little bit better to connect with the Right

audience so if you're struggling to to find who that audience is if you're struggling to better understand how you

can show up in your best light I'm going to help you tell that story so check me out on the brandstory tell.com until

next time stay real keep innovating and lead with purpose my friends I'll see you on the next episode of The Branding

laboratory peace

thanks for tuning in to The Branding laboratory if you enjoyed today's episode be sure to subscribe and leave a

review connect with us on social media for more branding tips and insights and remember your story matters until next

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