The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Lori Zoss Kraska, Founder Growth Owl, LLC

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

Lori Zoss Kraska, Founder Growth Owl, LLC Thegrowthowl.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast.

We certainly, certainly appreciate you tuning in. Be sure to put your hands around the neck of, no, don't do around the neck. Put your arm around friend, neighbor, relative. Tell them to subscribe to the show and say, please, for the love of God, join the family that loves you, but doesn't judge you. So tell them to subscribe to the show. Go to iTunes. They can subscribe there. You can go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss and all the groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those crazy places those kids are playing. They're amazing guests on the show. She's going to be talking to us about how she does it and what she does.

Lori Zoss-Kraska is on the show with us of Growth Owl, LLC. She possesses over 22 years of experience in revenue generation management, corporate sponsorship support, corporate cause marketing, fundraising, corporate social responsibility, nonprofit consulting, executive sales management, training, and marketing strategy roles, earning her a reputation for established pathways, quickly to exceeding revenue, fundraising goals, building high-performance teams, and developing relationships quickly and outpacing expectations. Welcome to the show, Lori. How are you? I'm good, Chris. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be here. Thanks for coming. We're so excited to have you. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. Yeah, you can find me at thegrowthowl.com. There you go. Very simple and easy. So give us an overview of who you are and what you do. So Growth Owl LLC specifically works with nonprofits, associations, and other purpose-driven organizations to help them secure or find

corporate funding, corporate sponsorship, or some sort of corporate partnership. So I specifically work in that lane of corporations. And the way I got to this point, because I've had my business since 2018, I spent just about 10 years in public media, working with PBS and NPR stations, doing the same thing. I had a team of people and myself that would go out and find sponsorship for the programming. A lot of people don't realize that local NPR and PBS stations are responsible for finding sponsorships for their programming. So that's what I did. And I absolutely loved it.

I'm still a fan of PBS and NPR. I actually have some clients that are local stations. But I thought to myself, it would be great if I could take that success and put it into my own business and work with other types of nonprofits, associations, purpose-driven organizations to help them in front of corporations. And besides representing, I also offer lots of training. I can come in. I work with executive directors, presidents. I work with development teams to train them on how to effectively engage and get sponsorship dollars. I also do top talent recruitment. You know, it's a tough market right now to find, you know, really good talent, right? So because it's really

a candidate's market. So I've been helping other nonprofits, associations, purpose-driven organizations find people like me to work for them full-time as well. And then research. There's a lot of research involved to kind of help nonprofits that are really new to this corporate space. Is this something that I really want to do? What is the viability of it? Can you help me with that? So that's just a small menu of what I do with Growth Owl LLC.

That's cool. Why did you call it Growth Owl? So I got to tell you, I've always loved owls. And if you think about all of the things people recognize with owls, their wisdom, they can turn their heads almost a complete 316 quite, but a good consultant, I think, or advisor can look at things all around you and give you a really good perspective. Owls can also see in the dark. And that's something that I kind of like to say I do in my own consulting practice. I can take a look at things that seem a bit murky

for clients and make some clarity out of it. And then growth, growing revenue, because at the end of the day, no matter what I'm doing for the organization, we want to help them grow sponsorship revenue to help them with their bottom line. It's kind of funny. Everyone wants to make more money. What is that all about? Well, what's the owl about? No, the making more money. So give us a bit of an origin story. What got you into this business and led you down this pathway?

Like I said earlier, I spent just about 10 years in public broadcasting, and I'd like to say I really honed my craft in speaking with corporations. It's a different animal than, let's say, if you work for a nonprofit and you individually find funding from specific people, or you work with private foundations, or you worked in planned giving. Corporate sponsorship, corporate funding is a little bit different. There's a bit of a different lingo to it. It's a long game. You have to have some patience.

And relationship management is just key, getting to know these organizations and then getting to know you. So I have a really good understanding of that. And I just really wanted to build off of that to help all different types of organizations, not just the public broadcasters that I was used to working with. Wow. What are some success stories that you maybe want to cite or tease out to us? Sure. So I will say that with many of my clients, I do cite non-competes, or not non-competes, but non-disclosure, but I could be pretty much, I could be general. So I've worked with small two-person nonprofits

that work in the marine animal space. And they were looking for some corporate sponsorship and we were able to do that. And that was just with somebody with two people. I also work with multi-million dollar nonprofits that have national and international footprints that are helping people, animals, places, things all around the world and help them better leverage themselves with

corporations. You know, some of the organizations I work with, they were successful to a point, but they couldn't get past like a threshold number to bring in dollars or just start partnerships. So someone like me can come in and just kind of, you know, tailor it a little bit, just kind of re-hone what they're doing. Sometimes it's just a small tweak that can be the difference between six or seven figures coming into your organization. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes it's just that little thing that once you pull it out, it's kind of like a,

it's kind of like, what was the old thing about the tiger and the needle in this bar or whatever? You just pull it out. Oh, right. Yeah. Exactly. It's amazing. You know, sometimes it's like, it's kind of like a combination safe. You're sitting there twisting all the dials and you're trying to, and you just have to

get that right, you know, dial setting and, you know, left or whatever, you know. Yeah. You know, I tell people corporations are like people, they're read by people and they're all very different and unique. So someone like me can come in and help them quickly assess the organization that they're looking to potentially get sponsorship or funding from, and then give them kind of a pathway to how I think they'd be successful in engaging them. You know, there are companies that are very strict and very conservative and how they like to be contacted. Other companies are much more loose. And when you get on a Zoom, there is a CEO that's in a t-shirt and jeans. And so you have to just

kind of figure out the corporation that you're reaching out to and find the style that they respond to because they're not all alike. Yeah. Yeah. And I imagine every corporation is different, right? Absolutely. And the various culture and management style. Yeah, from top down. And like I said, there are some corporations that like to be contacted more formally, sometimes a letter of engagement, sometimes a formal email. While others, they're very easy to engage a simple

LinkedIn message. Hey, let's have a virtual chat, virtual coffee for 15 minutes. Let's even see if there is an interest here between the two parties. So we engage people very differently and corporations very differently. Yeah. So you work with nonprofits. Sometimes that's a hard space sometimes to work in, especially given their budgets. What are some things that you help nonprofits with? Well, I like to say I help all sizes of nonprofits. Like I mentioned earlier, a small nonprofit with two people, some of the much larger nonprofits I work with that, again, have international footprints to them. When I come into a situation, sometimes you're right. Sometimes

they just don't have the budget for someone like me, but I have no problem giving a couple of nuggets in a consulting call just because of the good work they're doing. For larger organizations, I can do anything from, again, representing them to in front of a corporation, actually taking them from making a phone call or a Zoom call to proposal to actually, per se, closing the deal. That sounds kind of salesy, but I think you know what I mean. Yeah, you got to close. Right, and then I also have clients that just say, you know, Lori, all I need is for you to get me in the door.

Can you get me in the door and I'll take it from there? So I have clients where we do that. I also love to do training. It's one of my favorite things to do, whether it be coming in one day, I take a flight out to whomever, wherever, and we do a one day intensive of how do we do this? What is the right messaging to get corporations interested in what we're doing? And what is the process process or a much longer training where we actually build in some coaching and mentoring sessions as well. And so I like to say that there is something for all sizes to work with when working with me. Definitely. You do

public media broadcasting consulting as well. Tell us about that. Are you PBS and NPR value propositions and stuff? Yeah. So I work with a few local stations throughout the United States and I help them in areas like how do you manage their outbound salespeople in public media? It's not called sales. It's called corporate support or underwriting. Those are the people that go out and find the sponsorship for the programming that's on the air. So I can help manage them remotely. I also can help provide, put together a strategy, a corporate support strategy for the stations to give them a sense of how much they can expect in terms of viability in their market to sustain corporate support. And then basic, you know, basic training. Sometimes I'll just go into a market or we'll do a Zoom training on sales skills,

on prospecting, on how do you leverage your LinkedIn space to get people speaking with you. So, and also do some research for public media stations as well. And as of late, been doing some recruitment too for development folks. Yeah. Developments, recruitment's like something else these days. I mean, it's just everywhere I go, everyone's hiring, you know, which is interesting because we're even starting a recession right now. Yeah. Starting to see some layoffs. So the job market hopefully will open. But I think the recent thing that came from the labor department last day or two is that they're they're pretty full with stuff you know chris i like to say that

if you can associate yourself with a revenue line or associate yourself with bringing money into the organization that's a pretty good position to be in during a recession and then you do speaking as well so you you do bring your speaking panelists. I do. Yeah, I love I've worked. I've done speaking engagements at various conferences for public media, for associations, for universities. I speak on generating corporate sponsorship. I speak on the DEI and sustainability space in terms of corporations being very interested and engaged in working with nonprofits and associations that hit those areas that they can get involved in. And I also do speaking around being a female entrepreneur and being an entrepreneur in general.

And there's always ups and downs, but I absolutely love it. And I am an advocate for starting your own business. So I'd love to talk about that as well. Yeah. You know, I'm kind of, there was a lot of people who started their own business when coronavirus hit and now it's going to hit. And we had like a record number of people that went out and started their own business, got business licenses. I know there's a record number of people that got into podcasting, which I always find funny. Yeah. It's just extraordinary.

I think literally there's only like 2% of good podcasts out there. And, you know, because I've been trying to do around with my book and doing podcasts on them. Yeah. I'm really stickative about who I do podcasts with because I want the media to be up there in a year. Absolutely. Right.

We've actually had like top book authors, guys who were on like top shows for TV that I was checking their media to, to watch their interviews before. And, and like the people in a pay their go daddy bill for a recent podcast they're on. And I'm like, serious,

like, like you're out of business already and you've got talent on your show? It's just crazy to me, but I imagine that with the coming recession that we're going to go through over the next one to two years, we're going to have lots more people

going into business because they're going to have to because of layoffs and the economy is going to cool a bit. Probably have more people getting into podcasting. It's always fun to me that people call me up after being on the show. They go, I really love being on the show. I really love it. You make it seem so easy. I'm like, well, I've been doing it for 12 years. And they go, I'm going to do a podcast. And I'm like, okay, well, have fun with that. And they'll call me later and they go, this is really hard.

There you go. But, you know, speaking about business and teaching people business, how to do business, you know what I mean? Sometimes these are the times that create a lot of people who need to go start their own companies.

That's right. Absolutely. And usually sometimes the best innovative times that come out of these periods. Yeah, it really forces you to be creative. And I think the best advice that I got, because I spoke to a lot of people that started their own businesses before I did, and the consistent advice that I got was, don't be afraid to try new things. And also realize that

what your business looks like year one, if you're doing it right, it's going to look different in the next four years. And they're right. So, you know, you can't be afraid of change and you've got to try new things and you can't stay stuck in the ways to be successful. That's true. Because, you know, a lot of people, and I talked about this in my book, a lot of people will get a business model. Sometimes it's successful, sometimes it won't. They'll run that thing into the ground over a course of, you know, months to years. And they won't adjust. You know, they're like, oh, this works.

We just got to keep doing it. And we're just probably hitting a spot. And it's like, no, you constantly have to adjust. The market adjusts. The industry adjusts. Your vendors adjust. Your supply chains, as we've learned. Right.

That's right. It's that definition of insanity, right? Yeah. I mean, I never... Being over and over and expecting the same result, you can't. Yeah. It's amazing. I used to do a lot of first-writer refusals on companies that were going bankrupt and being like, call me, but don't call me right before you go to the... Or before you're dead. And they would always call right before they were dead. And I saw that first-writer refusal and I'm like, no, you're at and they would always call right before they're dead make me i just thought it's that first right refusal i'm like no you're you're at the door you know i told you i needed i needed

you i had the moment now but you know it's funny they're like well we thought you could save it and i'm like i could save it but you can't save it yes you're the problem right and they never liked it when i would have to say you know we'll take over the company and give you some walking money, but we're going to save your credit. So probably save your marriage. But you have to go because you are the problem. They never liked that. But I mean, it's what you do. We said to a few people, what are some other things that you talk about? What are some other topics I think I see here on your website? You have a whole list of stuff. Yeah. So outside of, you know, some of the things like I mentioned with DEI and sustainability, corporate sponsorship, I love talking about

entrepreneurship and, you know, also just talking about staying motivated. You know, sometimes that's hard to do, especially if you hit rough times or you're in a slump. So I really like to talk about the power of perseverance, the power of positive thinking. I think those all go a very long way. I'm a definite believer in what you put out there comes back to you. I think there's a reason some people kind of walk around with a cloud over their head sometimes. It's not a perfect world by any means and tough things do happen, but how you react to that really is your test of perseverance and how you can, you know, keep moving forward. So I love to talk about those things.

You know, you talk on your front page about connecting purpose-driven organizations to revenue and resources. Can you give us like an example or kind of touching on what a purpose-driven organization is? Yeah, so a purpose-driven is an organization. It's not necessarily a nonprofit. It can be a startup. It could be a for-profit startup. I love working with startups. I love working with young entrepreneurs who are kind of new to everything. And with startups, a lot of the times what I find is you've got some amazing genius people behind some amazing concepts, but their issue, and I'm not telling tales out of school. This is what they come to me about. This is what they say. They're not exactly

the most effective communicators to kind of give that elevator pitch or to communicate it right away. What I find is that startups, founders, they get really, really in the weeds and into the details sometimes that you just start to lose people. So my job, especially working with startups of purpose-driven organizations, is to kind of help clarify and bring some brevity to what it is that they're trying to achieve and then help communicate that to potential corporations or potential funders. So they have just enough understanding that they want to know more. I think the issue with a lot of startups is that they try to throw too much information at once in an initial meeting. And you just start to lose people, especially when it's a corporate contact.

So I work on the communication front with a lot of these startup founders on how do you really put together a really good message to craft that's going to resonate and give just enough to get that second meeting. Yeah. Building companies is hard, man. I think it's like podcasting. People don't realize that it's much harder than you realize. And it's much more complex. People are just like, I need to start a company and you're just the boss. Yeah. And, you know, I've learned that you have to ask for help.

And I still am kind of the type of person. I'm very type A. I like to do everything myself, right? But there are things that I realized in my business I needed to let go and let other people do it. And I'm so glad that I did because it's freed up more time for me to do the things that I really like, the client-based stuff. But also there are also larger things where you need to bring in industry experts. So I might know a little to be dangerous, but letting go and letting people that know what they're doing from an industry standpoint to help you is essential. And I find that those are the people that are really successful. They're not

afraid to ask for help and then give it. Yeah, most definitely. What are some other aspects of how you do and what you do that we haven't touched on? So, you know, something that's become, I don't want to say popular, but I think that's something that's become really relevant, especially since the pandemic, is how we connect with people, whether a corporate decision maker who is a chief development officer or if you're trying to get a venture capitalist. The role of social media, especially something like LinkedIn, has become essential. To give some perspective for you, before the pandemic, when I was doing work on behalf of nonprofits and associations, and I was connecting with corporations, I would get a lot of responses via email. Now, not so much. I'm doing a lot more connecting and having very brief conversations via LinkedIn. And then taking those messages and

those conversations offline, either off of LinkedIn and going on to Zoom or something in person. So it's very interesting how the platform of how I'm contacting people and how others are contacting people has really started to shift to this focus on professional social media like LinkedIn. You know, there's even businesses now, there's business strategies around TikTok, which, you know, initially to me, I'm like TikTok for business. And then the more I looked into it, like, wow, there's something here. So again, going back to, you know, you have to adapt and try new things. So I think that's something that's really changed in my business. And then also that I offer to

clients is kind of a consult, you know, what's kind of something that we can take the dust off of and try something new in terms of how you're contacting potential funders. You know, the, the LinkedIn has really come into its own, especially with the LinkedIn newsletter. I love that thing. Ours is just growing all the time and the eyeballs it gets. The LinkedIn group, of course, years ago, you know, I used to be one of the top 1% on LinkedIn search for, I think like the first 10 years or something. And then built a group from zero to 122,000 over there. LinkedIn has just been really nice.

It hit a hiccup for a while when Microsoft bought it up and screwed it around a little bit, but it's finally come out of its funk and yeah, it's really a place to be and it's just not for recruiting so much anymore, although it kind of leans heavy that way, but it's good for business. The new audio thing. Have you gotten any of those LinkedIn audio rooms? I haven't gotten a chance to get in on you. No, I haven't.

No. Yeah. I mean, Clubhouse was very good for business that way. And it was kind of a blip on the screen, kind of a lockdown app, if you will. But then it kind of, you know, there's a lot of personal stuff on there, which kind of negated it. You know, a lot of people that were doing different things that were, you know, and I mean, some people just weren't good people on it. Let's put it that way. We're the best people, you know, and they host rooms and not the best people. So, you know, with LinkedIn, hopefully, I don't know, it'll be interesting. I've been trying, bugging them, trying to get on it, but yeah, LinkedIn's definitely a

way. Anything you want to touch on before we go out about who you are and what you do? Well, you know, going back to LinkedIn for a second, because I think this is an important point. The whole balance with LinkedIn is how do you balance wanting to make a connection with someone to tell them about how excited you are about something that you have a feeling they're going to like with not being salesy? That's the biggest thing. I think what's great about LinkedIn is that people will call you out if they think you're being way too salesy. I get prospected every day with a LinkedIn in message. Hey, this is the latest thing. We can get leads for you. Leads, leads, leads, leads. Right. So it's very important that if you're doing work like I do, or if you're a nonprofit and you're trying to engage with higher level of folks and corporations that controls funding and

sponsorship money, you keep your messages very brief and very, you know, just very, hey, I'd love to hear more about what you're doing with your mission, vision, and values. I think there's a connection here. Would love to have a 15-minute virtual coffee. Just keep it very soft, not salesy at all, and just kind of let the relationship and the process kind of unfold. Don't get too aggressive. It's like asking to marry someone on the first date. You don't want to do that, right?

Wait, that's a bad thing? Explain to my first nine marriage. Anyways, I just wanted to mention that about LinkedIn because I see so much on LinkedIn where it's a very aggressive messaging where actually if you're just take it back, keep the message brief and just talk about the mission, vision and value connection. That's a great place to start. Yeah, it definitely is. It's a heck place to start. Yeah, it definitely is. It's a heck of a place. But yeah, you definitely will probably want to consult with someone like you on how to do it without destroying an alien in your whole base. That's right. When people approach me wrong and it's awful, I lose the connection, delete the thing so they can't keep contacting me.

And I'm like, bye. Yeah. It's kind of like if you, I don't know, you ask a girl on a date or give her a bad line, she just goes, bye, done, never again. That's right, Chris. You blew it, which is the story of my dating life. That's another show, right, Chris? That's another show.

We have the dating coach on for that. Oh, no, it looks good. Well, it's been wonderful to have you on. We certainly appreciate it, Lori. Give me your.com so we can find you on the interwebs again. Sure. It's thegrowthowl.com. There you go.

Guys, be sure to check it out. Thank you, Lori, for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thank you. And thanks so much for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Hit the bell notification button. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss.

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