Brooke Wright With LOCAL

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio brought to you by on pay Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:24] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio, and this is going to be a fun one, but before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor on pay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories today on Atlanta Business Radio. We have Brooke Wright with local. Welcome, Brooke.

Brooke Wright: [00:00:41] Hey, Lee, thanks so much for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:43] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Loku. How are you serving, folks?

Brooke Wright: [00:00:47] Yes, I’d love to. Well, we are a consulting firm. We’re located in Old Fourth Ward of Atlanta, our headquarters where we are today. We’ll talk a little bit more about in the show. It’s called the be nice house, but local was started about five years ago out of a need that my two business partners, Neil Bedwell and Andrew Esterday, who’ve been on the show in the past that we all saw coming out of some of our marketing careers working in or for Fortune one hundred organizations. There’s constant change going on in any organization, but especially those big ones. And so whether it was an HR team that was working on a massive reorganization or an IT team that had a new piece of technology that they needed employees to all use or just a training program to help a team become more brand focused or customer focused. We just saw a gap that a ton of times there was a lot of resources and investment put into these change initiatives that needed to take place. But when they got time to roll those out to employees, the communication of those often was just maybe even a series of emails that the change that they needed to stick wasn’t sticking because of the communication.

Brooke Wright: [00:02:04] So as marketers, we were all marketers in our prior career. We saw an opportunity. You know, if we were launching a product to consumers on the outside, we’d spend tons of time and resources looking at our audience first and then crafting very specific communications on different channels to those different audiences. And we just didn’t see the same thing happening inside of organizations. So we turned everything we knew as marketers on the outside to the inside of businesses and working with Fortune. One hundred companies today to doing what we call change, marketing, marketing, change to employees to to really drive inspired change versus change that’s maybe compliance based and thinking of employees is an audience that we’ve got to think about worth winning, not just communicating with through some pretty direct messaging and emails. So we’re really humbled. We just were named on the Inc five thousand fastest-growing companies and Atlanta’s best places to work for the second year in a row. So some exciting things happening down here in Old Fourth Ward at local.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:09] Now tell me a little bit about your work in terms of how the companies you’re working with. Choose the you to solve this problem. Every company is part of their mission statement, has a variation of our people are the most important asset. Yeah. And you can cut and paste that into pretty much across industry. It doesn’t matter the size. They all at least give lip service to that kind of the way of thinking are the. And it gets to the heart. I would think a lot of it is the culture of the organization. Exactly. And when you’re having these kind of conversations with your prospective customer or your your actual customer. How how much do they mean it? You know, they say it, but but, you know, actions speak louder than words. How much disconnect are you seeing or incongruity between the intention or the aspiration to to behave in that manner and the actual behavior?

Brooke Wright: [00:04:13] That’s that’s a great question we could spend all day talking about.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:17] All right. We have all day. Let’s let’s do it.

Brooke Wright: [00:04:20] But the quick answer, I think organization, a lot of organizations do talk about being people first. We talk about that in our own team here at local and people. First is it’s a great ambition. But to live that out, the bigger you get is really challenging. And so we just look at it really simply that being people first is really about listening first, listening to employees, listening to where they’re at. As we see these huge transformations happening within organizations, it’s often and very common that we see great intentions, but just not slowing down to see how that change may be received from an employee standpoint first. And again, like we do that in the marketplace, we listen to potential customers if we’re launching a new product. But people first really starts with understanding people and their needs and their feelings and how change may be received on their end. So all of our clients have great intentions of that. Unfortunately, the speed in which a lot of this change has to happen prohibits that and a lot of organizations. But we have seen with COVID just a huge uptick in looking at employees and employee engagement differently. As we’re working in virtual environments, we don’t have the face to face contacts that we used to have. There is just a much more intentional need for employers to be spending more time listening.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:46] Now, as part of your work as a marketer, I’m sure you believe in metrics and and choosing the metrics that matter as kind of the benchmark of how well you’re doing. Has the recent kind of employee tightness in the market and the demands of the employees really exacerbated some of these issues where these aren’t no longer? Yeah, let’s get to this down the road. But this becomes now vital to even just staying in business for a lot of folks that are desperate to, you know, to get the right employees to work there and keep them. Is this stuff really at the forefront nowadays, more so than maybe a couple of years ago?

Brooke Wright: [00:06:31] One hundred percent. We’re having daily conversations with clients from everything from talent acquisition. How what are we making appealing in our culture to get new people in? What are we doing to help those people grow and develop and want to stay a part of our culture once they’re here? And employee engagement data, as you mentioned metrics, that’s huge. It’s a key part of what we do. We have our own tools that we use and a lot of our projects and client work, but we’re also leveraging a lot of the tools that they’re using and their HR teams. Hr Teams is one of the main groups that we work with in our client relationships, and so that data is hugely important. But yes, COVID and the talent market that we’re in, all of that has elevated the need to look at metrics more closely.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:19] And it’s the metrics that matter. Like I would imagine one of the pain points that they’re seeing is, Hey, why aren’t we keeping enough people? Why are these great people, you know, going out the door as fast as they’re coming in? Hey, maybe we should call the local folks to help.

Brooke Wright: [00:07:34] We would love that. We would love that.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:36] But is that is that usually the pain point is that somewhere around the retention? Because that’s a noticeable thing for anybody. They don’t have to be that paying that close of attention to notice, Hey, where’s where’s Mary? She was great. How come she’s not here anymore?

Brooke Wright: [00:07:53] Yes. Retention is one of the key metrics that we look at, and we a lot of the work we do with clients is around that. So like I said, that talent acquisition and and retention, how do you keep people happy? And that’s not just about giving them the tools that they need to do their job, it’s it’s looking at them like a human being and and knowing and understanding them and what makes them tick within their job, what they care about, what they’re passionate about and how the organization is nurturing up.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:21] Now in your work internally for your own organization, you decided to invest in office space. That is a little different and maybe is kind of has a bigger y associated with just coming up with a different type of headquarters for your company. Can you talk about that?

Brooke Wright: [00:08:39] Sure, I would love to. Yeah, it’s maybe a little bit ironic that we’re talking about a physical office space in the middle of a pandemic. But funny enough, we’ve signed the lease on a new space in the middle of Old Fourth Ward a month before the pandemic. Hit so we have continued to evolve our vision for what return to work looks like in the future of work for our own company, just like we do for a lot of our clients. But we’re just really excited to kind of officially show the world this space. It’s a space we created to really create community and culture within our own team, but also as a hub for the community here in town, for the film industry to utilize the space. But it’s a historic building on Edgewood Avenue that was humble beginnings as a engine repair shop turned church turned yoga studio turned skateboard skateboard manufacturing facility. And now it is what we call the be nice house. The owner, prior for 20 years, had painted a beautiful graphic on the side of the building before selling it a couple of years ago. That said, be nice and just a reminder to the neighborhood of just a simple, simple thing we should live by. And so we wanted to carry on that tradition. And so we call this space to be nice house. It’s a nontraditional office space, not a desk in sight. A huge twenty five hundred square foot outdoor courtyard and a lot of living space. That was what we created as a safe way for our team to return with plenty of room to spread out. But also our team just loves coming together and one of the safe place to do that, even in a COVID work environment.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:25] So now with this space, the way that it’s configured, how, how, how does that impact the community as a whole outside of your own folks?

Brooke Wright: [00:10:36] Yeah, that’s a great question. So we wanted the space to be a place of gathering and people coming together. So we’ve been using it for community events, meeting lots of bringing local business owners together and the old Fourth Ward community to come together and think about community initiatives that we need to be all collectively participating in to help the neighborhood. Just next week, we’ll be hosting an event with the Atlanta Design Festival on design and the black image with some, some great speakers here. So just as a gathering place, you know, community and culture is key to what we do as a business, and we wanted this place to be more than an office, which is why we call it a house and a place together.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:23] Now can you walk through the thought process? Obviously, it happened pre-pandemic, so maybe the thinking was different once the pandemic hit. Maybe there was some changes in how it how you finished, but talk about, like why it was important to build something that serve the community, not just, Oh, let’s just get a good space for us because that’s what we need.

Brooke Wright: [00:11:45] Yeah, our team, you know, we’re a team that’s passionate about change, obviously, with the work that we do within organizations, that change comes in a lot of forms and a big part of that. And what’s important to us as a business is change in our community and not just talking about it, but actually doing something about it. And so having a physical space to do that, just it gave us a great platform to be able to come together with others in the community who have the same passion.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:16] And then since you it’s open now, right?

Brooke Wright: [00:12:20] Yeah, we’ve been open since January, so it is open now.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:25] So now how does it work if there’s somebody in the community that is interested in, Hey, we have this event now, they can look to you and say, Hey, you might be able to do it here, hosted here.

Brooke Wright: [00:12:37] Is that how it works? Yes, you can reach out to us on our website, local industries. And there’s a nice little tab there for the B Nice House with lots of fun photography to actually see the space. It’s kind of hard to describe a space. It’s kind of like trying to describe what a delicious cheesecake tastes like to somebody, but you really need to come and see it and experience it. So we love to have coffee with anyone who is just even interested in thinking about what does a future workplace look like in this world we live in? Or they have a great event coming up that you’re looking for a unique environment to do that, that that can be safe as well. So we would love for anyone who’s interested to come grab a cup of coffee with us.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:18] So it could be, you know, a one time event or semi-regular. Or it could be like, Hey, I want to work out of there, like I moved my small team there.

Brooke Wright: [00:13:28] Yeah, they can. If you want to host a meeting with your team, we call it kind of a retreat from business as usual. You know, everyone needs a chance to get away. And because we have ample outdoor space, that’s been a great option for people. We’ve hosted a lot of photo shoots and film events with the local film industry here, in addition to some of those community events that we just talked about. So lots of different use use cases for the space.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:53] So now in your work and serving organizations and their people, does it do you still get to scratch the itch of marketers and helping them with their marketing? Or is your work solely just internal?

Brooke Wright: [00:14:06] That’s a great question, so we work with a lot of marketing teams still, but mainly on the internal side, so helping marketing teams selling ideas across the organization. When we were working in corporate America, one of the things that we saw is that marketing teams, you have these big ideas for things you want to do on the outside. And then we joke that they get dropped into the corporate blender and they come out kind of a fraction of what they started as. And we saw that as some of the dysfunction of ideas just not circulating well internally to get them sold in, to be able to to do what you wanted to do on the outside as a marketing team. So we support a lot of marketing teams from that standpoint. We don’t do external marketing, but we help the teams make sure that their ideas can come into fruition on the outside.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:55] Well, congratulations on all of the success. If somebody wants to connect with you, whether it’s to help them kind of optimize their own team, or if they’re a local business that wants to, you know, check out the event space, what’s the coordinates? What’s the website?

Brooke Wright: [00:15:11] It’s local industries and there’s an easy place on there just to email us at hello at local industries and we would love to chat and grab a cup of coffee.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:22] Well, congratulations again on all the success, Brooke. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Brooke Wright: [00:15:27] Thank you, Lee. It was fun.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:29] All right, this is Lee Kantor. We’ll see, y’all next time on the Atlanta Business Radio.