Leading the Way with Jill S. Robinson

In this two-part episode, Jill sits down with accomplished UK arts leader Tom Bird (Chief Executive at Sheffield Theatres). Drawing inspiration from Nina Simon's book, "The Art of Relevance" and their own personal leadership experiences, Jill and Tom engage in a rich dialogue about how to keep audiences at the center of every decision and what relevance means in today's arts and cultural industry. 

For additional resources and to sign up for the podcast newsletter, we invite you to visit our website at leadingthewaypodcast.com. 

Creators & Guests

Host
Jill S. Robinson
CEO and Owner, TRG Arts

What is Leading the Way with Jill S. Robinson?

Leading the Way with Jill S. Robinson is a journey into the international arts and culture industry. Join Jill, a driving force in the sector who has counseled arts leaders for more than three decades, for conversations with some of the most insightful and daring minds leading the way to a resilient 21st century.

[00:00:03.130] - Jill Robinson

Jill Robinson here, CEO of TRG Arts, the consultancy firm that works globally to strengthen the arts and cultural sector. And today as part of that effort, I'm launching a new podcast called Leading the Way with Jill Robinson. Leading The Way is going to be focused on the issues that we think and I think leaders need to be consider as they make their way into the next decade of arts and cultural management and guidance. I'm joined by Tom Bird who's chief executive of Sheffield theatres in Sheffield, England. Tom's career you're going to hear him describe started in London with Shakespeare's Globe and together we talk about the concept of putting customers at the center and the issue of relevance and also what it means to fling doors wide open and invite new members of the community in. I hope you enjoy this inaugural episode. I'm grateful you chose to join me today. Tom, thank you so much for joining me for the inaugural episode of Leading the Way with Jill Robinson. I'm so pleased that you could be here with me this afternoon, your time. You are broadcasting in from Sheffield in England, I'm here in Colorado and we're also going to be talking about a really wonderful book by Nina Simon called The Art of Relevance.

[00:01:41.930] - Jill Robinson

Thank you for making the time today.

[00:01:43.890] - Tom Bird

Thanks so much Jill, it's great to be here.

[00:01:47.570] - Jill Robinson

So let's start with just a little, just give my listeners and viewers just a top line about your career and give me us a sense of when you became aware of putting customers like when did customers become an important part of your leadership or management awareness.

[00:02:16.410] - Tom Bird

Sure. So now I'm chief exec at Sheffield theatres which is the biggest producing theatre complex outside of London within the UK. But I've come on a journey to get here that's taken me all around the world and both as a programmer as well as a producer of theatre. And the first moment that I really led and is also the first moment that I really had to think carefully about putting customers front and center. And that's when the Olympics were in London in 2012 and I worked for the Globe at the time and Shakespeare's Globe on the South Bank of the Thames.

[00:03:07.070] - Jill Robinson

Right.

[00:03:07.580] - Tom Bird

And we were given really not very much money, half a million pounds in order to go towards really one of the most ambitious theatre festivals that I think has ever been put on anywhere, which was called Globe to Globe. And we said we want to do each Shakespeare play, all 37 Shakespeare plays, but each one will be in a different language and each one will be by a different theatre company from a country.

[00:03:35.190] - Jill Robinson

Wow.

[00:03:36.950] - Tom Bird

So firstly, at the start it was great because they said to me, here's a travel budget and you can travel around the world watching things. And then I realized this was a mammoth like unprecedented undertaking. But anyway, we programmed the shows, and we programmed shows from South Sudan, and we programmed Cinderelline from South Sudan and a comedy of eras from Afghanistan and Romeo and Juliet from Rio de Janeiro, and, like, all these incredible things. And we were part of that wonderful cross border celebration that happens in a city when the Olympics are on. But then you think, once you've got that program in place and it all looks great and the brochure is there, and I wouldn't do these things in this order now, but then you think, gosh audiences. Right? Audiences. And they're different audiences from what you can't just lazily go to the Globe's audience with the Comedy of Errors in Find It's London. So you can find these people, but you need to find Persian speakers in London and Portuguese speakers in London. And so we put together a team, an extraordinary marketing team led by Meg Dobson. And they pounded the streets and they did data analysis, and they showed up at, like, Somali coffee mornings, and they brought audiences to that festival.

[00:05:09.660] - Jill Robinson

So relates to the book we're reading. I mean, like, so relates to the book. Keep going. But wow.

[00:05:15.770] - Tom Bird

Yeah. So we ended up in a situation where 86% of the people who came to the festival had never been to the Globe before.

[00:05:25.590] - Jill Robinson

Wow.

[00:05:26.390] - Tom Bird

That's really because we were showing up in communities like, you could literally only do this in London, New York, and almost no other city on the planet, because all those communities, linguistic, cultural communities are there.

[00:05:41.620] - Jill Robinson

But.

[00:05:45.390] - Tom Bird

It was a fantastic kind of baptism of fire, of putting audiences, customers front and center. We weren't saying Come for free. We were saying you got to buy a ticket. But what we did is I guess we made it a crucial part of each community's kind of year by showing up and being part of that community as much as we could in advance.

[00:06:13.910] - Jill Robinson

Wow. There's such a microcosm of relevance. I'm super curious. What was your role at the Globe at that time? What was your title or what was.

[00:06:24.760] - Tom Bird

Your yeah, I was director of that festival. I'd been put in charge of that festival quite young because I had an interest in the international I knew my Shakespeare well enough to have those conversations on the programming side. And I had been running a completely different part of the Globe's operation, but managing budgets well and leading teams in that area, which was music. And they took a chance on me. They took a chance on me.

[00:07:01.380] - Jill Robinson

It was transformative. Yeah. Boy, oh, boy. It sounds like it. Two questions. Did you use price? Did you have to fight a perception that price would need to be different to get people in? Or was it sort of standard pricing, like the Globe normally charged?

[00:07:19.230] - Tom Bird

See, the Globe has this five pound yard.

[00:07:24.750] - Jill Robinson

That's right.

[00:07:25.840] - Tom Bird

That's like a silver bullet for Price total. You know this better than anyone, almost in the world. But the show has what you call the perception of success. If that yard is full, the first thing you do before you sell the 40 pound ticket is you sell the five pound ticket. Otherwise no one thinks the show is any good.

[00:07:49.180] - Jill Robinson

Yeah, I have been there and I know exactly what that looks like. And it's electric. I would never want to sit there parenthetically, but it's electric. Or standing there, actually.

[00:07:59.340] - Tom Bird

Yeah, it's a bizarre one because I'm not even interested in selling the tickets for 50 pounds until I've sold the tickets for five pounds. We don't have an event, right?

[00:08:11.520] - Jill Robinson

No, completely and entirely, which is I probably have seen as many venues as anyone, really. I've spent three years looking at venues and Shakespeare's Globe is distinct. It is distinct in so many ways. Okay. And do you have any knowledge or data or information about whether or not those communities stuck? Was it one and done or did it stick?

[00:08:46.730] - Tom Bird

We do, and I don't know off the top of my head, but the Globe kept that data on how many people came back. And I don't have the exact figures to hand, but I know it was good enough for us to continue that international programming. So the following year we had a show from Tbilisi, Georgia, a show from Hyderabad, India and a show from Hong Kong, all in the languages of those countries because we knew that we could get the audiences back to a sufficient level. The question always for us was, well, will they also come and see our core program and can we cross that audience over as well? And that was always like a long term thing, so I don't know how well that has worked. It'd be really interesting to talk to the Globe about.

[00:09:39.210] - Jill Robinson

So did you go directly from there to York?

[00:09:41.980] - Tom Bird

Yeah, but I then spent six years as executive producer there. So off the back of that festival they said, OK, you can be part of the more senior team. And that meant organizing, really. That meant making sure that everything the artistic director said happened. And the artistic director, Dominic Was, he said once, I want tour Hamlet to every country in the world. He said once I want to tour a massive the biggest production of Merchant of Venice you've ever seen with Jonathan Price to like rural cities in China. And he said once let's make a film of every single Shakespeare play and make a 37 temporary cinemas along the South Bank in London. So it was such an exciting time and it wasn't just put on a production of Roman Juliet, my goodness. But that really allowed me to lead on big projects and to also kind of lead the Globe team in the transition between artistic directors, the Globe theatre team. So the structure of the Globe is that this is worth saying very briefly, is that there are different areas there's an education team, and there's a huge kind of exhibition team, and they're fairly distinct from one another, or they were when I was there.

[00:11:14.940] - Tom Bird

And Neil, the chief exec, has done a huge amount of work at gluing those together. Actually, at the time, it was quite a distinct operation. So I suppose I was leading that team through I was second in command, leading that team through transitions between artistic directors, which was really interesting thing as.

[00:11:36.430] - Jill Robinson

Well, I am sure. Okay, so before we go from there to York, what was the most exciting, aside from the Olympics? You caught the vision, you made it happen, and it was so cool. I'm just super curious. For me personally.

[00:11:53.490] - Tom Bird

In the Globe yeah.

[00:11:55.240] - Jill Robinson

At the Globe, like, you just named off a handful of really audacious. Did any of them happen? And if so, which one was so exciting you can't even stand it?

[00:12:04.730] - Tom Bird

Yeah. We toured Hamlet to 189 different countries in a two year period. We made this eight actor production of Hamlet. We took twelve actors on the road, we got on a boat on the Thames underneath Tower Bridge. We sailed to Amsterdam and we played in the National theatre in Amsterdam. And we went on to play between the two anniversaries for Shakespeare, 23 April 2014 and 23 April 2016. One is the anniversary of his birth, one is of his death. I can't remember the exact maths. We played in 189 different countries. We tried to get to every country in the world. That was the plan. We didn't get to North Korea and we didn't get to Niger in Africa, and we didn't get to South Sudan and one or two others just because we just couldn't do it safely. But we had some extraordinary, really extraordinary experiences. The penultimate performance was in Elphinor. We were doing Hamlet in Elfinor in the ballroom to the Queen of Denmark, which was surreal. And then President Obama came to the final performance in the Globe, and so he came onto the stage, and he knows his Shakespeare right, which was really cool.

[00:13:34.120] - Tom Bird

So we expected to sort of tell him about Hamlet. No way. He knew it all, and he wanted to have a debate about Hamlet. And it was great to have that recognition from someone we all admired so much.

[00:13:49.870] - Jill Robinson

Wow. Well, that was just a real pleasure for me to hear. I mean, we've known each other now for some number of years, and I didn't know that set of experiences you've had deep and wide and super interesting. Okay, so you go from being executive producer at Shakespeare's Globe to York theatre Royal.

[00:14:17.210] - Tom Bird

Yeah. Which is york theatre Royal is one of the oldest I mean, it's the second oldest theatre company continuously operating in the English speaking world, so it's been around for centuries. But it's a small community focused producing theatre in the north of England. I'm from the north of England. People in the States may not be aware of this, but there's a tension that is, I'm sure replicated in the States in a different way between London and the north of England, right?

[00:14:58.690] - Jill Robinson

You guys have your equivalent versus center of the country. Same in Canada coast and center.

[00:15:06.450] - Tom Bird

I really didn't want and don't want the cultural life of the north of England to be inferior to that that's available in London. And I wanted to go home a little bit in order to raise a family there, but also to play my part and I suppose use some of the experience that I've built up over 15 years in London to contribute into the cultural life of the north of England.

[00:15:40.910] - Jill Robinson

And so that's when we got experience with each other. TRG and York, theatre Royal and you when you were looking to shift some things related to customers, talk about that, just like what were a couple, three things that you were interested in making happen there that you feel like you were able to accomplish?

[00:16:01.690] - Tom Bird

I mean, so many things, but we didn't really use data at all. And even beyond that, there was a culture of not really using any evidence to ground decision making. And it was kind of okay to say you should never do a children's show in the Easter holidays without what you would want. And what I would want at that moment, which was, tell me how many families are coming. We did a bit of work early. We did a bit of work on let's get some data and let's use evidence to make our decisions and let's just show evidence for when we're presenting decisions that we're making, when we're presenting those to board or to stakeholders or to each other. You know, this TRG helped us a huge amount, really. We just didn't have the right data permissions in know, the systems weren't really in place. Vicki Biles did a huge amount of work. Our communications director did a huge amount of work on really turning the way we asked patrons for permissions. She turned that inside out. Again, maybe not such a thing in the States, but in the UK you have to get explicit consent, really to process data.

[00:17:29.070] - Tom Bird

So we did that. We then also did a seat plan and totally revitalized the seat plan and reimagined the seat plan. And even at that stage, I've been trained to think that the last seat in the house, if it's in the back of the gallery, should be really cheap, even if the demand for it is off the scale. But even being quite an experienced theatre producer, that was still, like, for some reason, that was still a bit of pill for me to swallow it.

[00:18:06.010] - Jill Robinson

It's a huge paradigm shift for almost.

[00:18:08.000] - Tom Bird

Everyone because you had been trained up to that point in the opposite. And the other thing we did, I mean, we did so many things. The other thing we did is we stopped spending so much on outdoor advertising. And we did again, a complete shift towards a sort of more personalized, tailored, segmented way of marketing at York.

[00:18:34.130] - Jill Robinson

Relationships like what we're going to be talking about related to the book. Right. Marketing at the end of the day is communication. And if we can segment, then we can relate to people as if we know who they are and talk to them in that way. It's not magic, but there is a science to it. For.

[00:18:58.570] - Tom Bird

Big, there were some big transformations to make at York. We had a Pantomime, which is a Christmas show people will know in the UK. It's a traditional Christmas show that theatres do every Christmas and it's like the equivalent of the Nutcracker in North America Christmas Girl. It's a fairy tale comedy, there's no real way of explaining it. And it earns 65% of the revenue in York theatre Royal in the year, and it's on for a few weeks at Christmas, so you have to get it right. And we had had one of probably the most famous pantomime in the country and it had been going since the early seventy s, and clearly in the was an amazing piece of work and it had started to kind of run out of gas and it was still too early for us to kind of talk about that. But the renewed focus on data that I was talking about before meant that you were looking at the Pantomime audience data there, for example, and thinking, gosh, we have a problem with this is running towards the edge of a cliff. So that's a huge change I had to make.

[00:20:23.290] - Tom Bird

There was really changing that pantomime and out of the old in with the new on that pantomime, which drew I remember those conversations.

[00:20:30.130] - Jill Robinson

It was terrifying, I think because the shift was it had been so beloved.

[00:20:34.980] - Tom Bird

Yeah. But it had lost the ability to attract audiences. It lost the ability to retain audiences, to acquire new audiences. And in that world you're just like, oh, we've got a problem. It's irresponsible not to do something even if it's not a problem right now, it's irresponsible not to do something about this. And we had a conversation in Sudlus, Wales, that I'll always remember and appreciate, where I almost was reaching out to a few people in the industry who I respected for kind of permission, for want of a better word, to do this. And I'll appreciate that conversation forever because hopefully it stands theatre in good stead.

[00:21:17.770] - Jill Robinson

It certainly did. And while it was bumpy in the transition for a minute, I think it turned into something that is a very positive thing in York and for the theatre company. Okay, so Sheffield theatres, we can come back to know if we want to, we will wind our way through. But Sheffield theatres tony award winning Life of Pie sheffield theatres and also the awards in the UK in London. I'm forgetting the name. Tell me the name.

[00:21:52.790] - Tom Bird

Oliviers.

[00:21:54.010] - Jill Robinson

The Oliviers, which are equal and wonderful. So I don't know what the awards were at the that and I haven't seen the production. Just between you and me, I need to see it because everyone that I talk to who does see it just raves about its beauty and its impact. So Sheffield theatres, as you described, is the largest regional theatre, extremely well regarded globally, but in England. And you came into a theatre company that was like you was wanting to take a leap in understanding customers and patrons and really change operations to put customers and patrons at the center. And at the time, Dan Bates, who was the chief exec, then began a data driven process to understand, in our parlance, advocates, buyers and tryers. Who are the first timers? What's the likelihood of hanging on to them? How does programming have an impact? What might reporting look like? How could we integrate that into our operations through ticketing systems and through training? And how could we segment and grow? And one of the things that we did with Dan and Rob, your artistic director, was embark on a more than a year long process with Fred Reichld, who was the originator of the Net promoter system and score Fred and TRG and six theatre companies.

[00:23:45.760] - Jill Robinson

Sheffield was the only one in England embarked on a process of saying we're going to listen and we're going to systematize that listening through surveys. Yes. But even then we've talked about this. Surveys were something that became a tactic that if I check the boxes and I'm doing the surveys, then I'm done just like the score became a measure and sometimes the measure and would miss the point if all you were doing were surveys and tracking your score. And so with we, with Sheffield and five other theatres, one in Canada and the rest were in America began to, yes, do surveys at various times to various segments and constituents, but more importantly, with the artistic leader in sort of arm in Arm designed systems to take the feedback, examine it and see what we could learn about reactions to programming. But more, much more often, it was reactions to the environment or the experience. I'm curious, as you've been at Sheffield theatres now, how long? Four months. How long?

[00:25:19.590] - Tom Bird

Four or five months.

[00:25:20.760] - Jill Robinson

Yeah. And so in that four or five months, what has stuck? What have you heard? What did you walk into and observe about Sheffield's culture of keeping the customer maybe as important as the mission or alongside the mission? How would you describe what you see there?

[00:25:44.190] - Tom Bird

Yeah, I mean, there's a high functioning, massively patron centric team here. There's this kind of super collaborative and communicative communicative axis between our director of customer experience, Caslaurant, and our communications director, Rachel Nutland in particular. That means that they are talking to each other all the time and working together all the time on present customers and future customers. Obviously that relationships are important, but together they make up not officially here, and it's not named this, but they make up the kind of patron services the dream kind of patron services department that we've talked about in the past where you're really caring of those who are joining us at Sheffield theatres and you are making decisions only really based on data and evidence in terms of how you're going to sell shows, what shows you're going to program into our into our presenting space, the Lyceum and so on. And there are regular feedback loops as well in terms of we're asking audiences and customers and donors and other stakeholders all the time what they think of us. We're now turning to think about a kind of longer term vision and we want to do a huge and enhanced listen to the community more widely.

[00:27:49.990] - Tom Bird

To answer the question that Nina Simon poses in her book, which is what do the people of Sheffield, the equivalent of Santa Cruz, what do the people of Sheffield want this to so that's an interesting next stage in that listening process.

[00:28:05.950] - Jill Robinson

Describe Sheffield, like describe what you see as the current audience at Sheffield theatres, which also includes that funny pool thing that you do. That's not pool. What's it called? The game? What's it called?

[00:28:26.130] - Tom Bird

Snooker?

[00:28:30.610] - Jill Robinson

Yes, snooker, which is not cool, but it's its own game. But the campus attracts well, you describe.

[00:28:41.030] - Tom Bird

So the city is huge, colossal city that's not well known because it doesn't really shout about itself a huge amount, but it's the fourth biggest city in the country and it's a steel making place like think Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. It's absolutely founded in steel and the steel industry has declined and so it's looking for the next thing, but it hasn't quite worked out what that is. And I'm like it's culture. So that's the city. It's a kind of hardworking, huge industrial city in the north of England with a lot of potential, huge amount of economic potential. The campus of the theatres, it's quite an enviable business model to lots of peers and colleagues in that there is the Crucible, which is a thousand seat thrust stage producing theatre, the architecture of which is vaguely similar to Stratford, Ontario and the Guthrie in Minneapolis, but it's kind of unique. And we've produced shows in there, including the shows you've mentioned that have done well recently. Then there's also a large 19th century theatre, the Lyceum, which is just over 1000 seats and we don't make anything in there. We present touring work in there. And the function of that is not really mission led at all.

[00:30:20.070] - Tom Bird

It's kind of commercial in order to fund the cool. And then there's the Playhouse, which is where we experiment, which is a flexible black box type space. So it's three theatres and they're all really distinct in terms of what they're here for and we love and adore them all. And they make up a kind of business model that just about uh huh.

[00:30:44.750] - Jill Robinson

And so the people of Sheffield who are attending or visiting the campus, do they look like the traditional what I would call the traditional theatre goer today, which is highly educated, higher income, mostly older, mostly Caucasian or white? Is that who's attending today, or is it more diverse than that?

[00:31:11.430] - Tom Bird

It depends so much on the product, but fundamentally, yes is the answer. And we're taking steps, like so many people are, to change that. But at the moment, we're in this sort of position where there's this sort of paradox which lots of people listening to this will recognize, which is we're kind of generating revenue at scale, and it feels really tough to generate revenue at scale and simultaneously reach out to new communities. And in our case, the city of Sheffield is kind of divided between an affluent west and a not affluent east.

[00:32:00.630] - Jill Robinson

Like so many cities.

[00:32:02.400] - Tom Bird

Okay. Yeah. And unsurprisingly, lots of our audiences come from the west, and we'd like Sheffield theatres to be for everyone in the city. So the big challenge is how do we do that and continue to generate revenue at the scale we need to?

[00:32:20.990] - Jill Robinson

Okay, so you and I have read this book, the Art of Relevance by Nina Simon, and I find it to be one of the most easy to read, beautifully spoken, playbooks, kind of for this precise conversation. And one of the observations that I have that she addresses in the book actually builds on what you've just described and is, I think, even more high pitched. The volume on this is even higher now since the pandemic, since the social and societal divisions and reckoning that has happened during this pandemic time in a variety of ways that has been felt differently in the regions and countries in which we work, but which we all feel I see it very, very clearly. We all feel and can place in our communities. And so the nonprofit model or the charitable model, I find and leaders and boards, I find, find themselves on their heels a little bit because there are so many things to raise money for right now. There are so many places that we could support. And so the question is of arts and culture, why should we, aside from the commercial entertainment value? And there certainly is that, but why should we support you?

[00:34:05.330] - Jill Robinson

And the answer that often we find ourselves compelled to give is, well, because we believe it. We believe it. I believe it. You only have to see what happened. You remember there was a UK theatre conference that David Brownlee and we hosted. This was in 18 or 19, and it was down in the West End at a venue that I can't remember, but during the immigration crisis that hit Western Europe, there was a refugee camp in Calais, in France, and there was a gentleman who came to that theatre conference who spoke about how the refugees built an art tent. Do you remember hearing about this? Because they just needed to set aside their misery and remember their humanity. Right? And so we know as people who believe in our culture that creativity is in fact available to and could be an important part of anyone's diet and lives. Right now, I feel like more than ever, we want theatre, symphony, the classical music, dance to be for everyone. But she asks the question actually, like, can it be for everyone, really? And how do we really imagine I'm going to struggle to say this in the right way, but it's one of the what does she call it, one of the delusions about relevance, which is that it can be for everyone.

[00:35:47.540] - Jill Robinson

It should be. And so in response to that, just give me some reactions to that because you just said we want to listen because we want Sheffield theatres to be for the entirety of Sheffield.

[00:36:01.810] - Tom Bird

Yes. I just flip that and say we must make sure we're not relevant to no one. There's a double negative there, but do you know what I mean? We must make sure. I think what I took, the first thing I took from Nina's book is every time we make something, we have to be searching for that positive cognitive effect that she talks about. We have to make sure that's almost like a litmus test for anything we do. And if it's not going to lead to a positive cognitive effect in one community, and it definitely doesn't have to be for everyone. It might be that at that moment it's for people from the west of sheffield, but now and again it has to be for people from the east of Sheffield as well. And the north of Sheffield. If we're not thinking about how we generate some positive cognitive effect in those communities, then we're not doing our job right. And she says, importantly, that familiarity is not enough, right? It's not enough to just say we're going to do a show about this area of town without thinking, yeah, but what's the content of that show?

[00:37:27.650] - Tom Bird

And why is that going to be a positive experience? And why is that going to give a key to Sheffield theatres in a more permanent way to someone from that? Was that's just so important? I think to us in terms of what we do. And I don't think that that means that you can never do Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet. It just means you have to think about when you do it and why you're doing it and who you're doing it for.

[00:38:01.290] - Jill Robinson

And that wraps up part one of my insightful conversation with Tom Bird. We've journeyed through Tom's impressive career, learned about his leadership path and his perspective on keeping customers at the heart of every decision. But we're only just scratching the surface in part two of our conversation. We're going to. Delve deeper, reflecting more on Nina Simon's groundbreaking book The Art of Relevance, we'll discuss how to lead with our ears and explore strategies for baking relevance into the arts business model, making our organizations not just accessible, but also meaningful to the communities we serve. If you've joined our conversation thus far, you won't want to miss part two as we continue to explore these crucial themes about leadership in the arts sector. See you in the next episode.

[00:38:56.010] - TRG Arts

That's all for this episode of Leading the Way with Gilles Robinson, brought to you by TRG Arts. Thanks for listening and believing that insightful, daring and innovative leadership is the way to a more resilient future for the arts and cultural industry. Make sure to subscribe to Leading the Way on Apple podcasts and Spotify. And if you found this episode helpful, please rate and review the show. For additional resources and to sign up for the podcast newsletter, we invite you to visit our website@leadingthewaypodcast.com.