Episode 14 Transcript

Brent Trimble: Welcome again to the Professional Services Pursuit, a podcast featuring expert advice and insights on the professional services industry. Again, I'm Brent Trimble. My guest today and we're excited to have is the executive vice president of strategy and a co-founder of Hero Digital. His name is Owen Frivold. Owen, we're thrilled to have you on the show. There are a few topics we want to dive into around talent, as well as this notion of turning services into products and productization, something you've had some success with at your agency. So we're excited to explore those topics, but first, we want to hear a little bit about you, tell us a bit about yourself and your leadership role and mission at Hero Digital.

Owen Frivold: First of all, thank you Brent for having me, really appreciate it. So as you lead to, I head up strategy at Hero Digital. It's almost eight years now. And to your point around purpose and mission and leadership function, if you will, at Hero, it's been a long journey coming from landing the first client to getting to the size that we're at now. And I’ve worn many hats, started off in a client services, portfolio management capacity. I also led a business unit within Hero, especially as we were growing and acquiring other firms. We had several different divisions at one time and have since integrated them. And about two years ago, right as COVID hit, it moved from the client services side to the practice side to help lead and scale a strategy practice for Hero, as we were refining our focus. And looking at a lot of the challenges that our clients were facing and looking to codify, clarify and effectively to your point, productize a lot of the solutions or key needs, if you will, that we were starting to see requiring solutions for a broad swath of our client-base.

Brent Trimble: That's awesome and eight years, I'm sure for you sounds like quite some time, it's relatively a short trajectory for the size and scope that you've been able to achieve. But for context, as we dive into things like talent and building products, give us a sense of size and the array of things that you really deploy for your clients at Hero. I know for instance, you do a lot on the experience side of things, digital experience, digital transformation, you're a big Adobe partner. But within that digital realm, there's quite a bit and I know you guys are pretty deep, so just give us some dimensions.

Owen Frivold: So the heart of when we started, which is around 2014, we were seeing this trend of CIO spend moving over to the CMO. And with that a need to have a strong understanding of how these solutions were built, but also how to best deploy all the sort of CXM (customer experience management) solutions. So that's where we started and then over time evolved into a firm that really could and this isn't specific to Hero’s official positioning, but for a long time, we essentially focused on the digital experience layer going from the glass all the way down to the CRM and essentially across all sets of services. So design, UX, strategy, content, technology, data. And so essentially creating all those solutions that allow for any brand effectively to transform into a business that is truly digital, not just doing digital things. And that I think has been sort of a primary driver for us when it comes to how we've been able to stand out in a marketplace that we all know is very crowded.

And one of the key things that we did in bringing on our CMO, Kenneth Parks, a few years back was really helping us find our core purpose and north star for ourselves; our value system. And we really anchored it around this notion of truth and beauty. This idea of how do you unearth some of the key human truths tied to what can create value for your end consumer. And then tying that to beauty being the response. And abstractly, if you will, the idea of thinking about putting people first, so what's good for people is good for business. And you were asking around products and solutions, that’s actually been a primary driver for how we think about crafting some of the solutions that we developed. So we've launched a solution around helping brands understand where they're going, set that north star vision and then build the case for it. And the case for change being sort of a massive thing, especially when COVID hit, right as I was joining the strategy practice, that became a really key thing is how do you substantiate, you know, the decisions that you're gonna make. And with a limited set of dollars and an unlimited set of possibilities of different technologies and things that you can try and apply to reach those ends of consumers.

What ended up happening is what people value and their values became a key component to their decision making when COVID arose. People were sitting at home and they were reflecting and looking at different ways that we in many ways were fortunate that right as we were crafting this next wave of solutions, we were sort of observing these things. And through the custom research that we were doing, we found these key points that we felt could help make sense of a lot of the uncertainty going on around what consumers might want. And that ultimately those were the seeds, if you will, that helped us then think about what kinds of productized services and solutions we'd be able to provide that we've since stood up over the course of the last two years.

Brent Trimble: So in the context of the pandemic and with the world adopting and resigned themselves to there probably will never be a completely COVID-free world. But it’s interesting, we have a wide array of digital experience, agency, creative and strategy-type clients. And heard from a lot of the service industry, the pace of business for firms in your space and I'd love to hear firsthand was simply just torrid because there's so much pent up demand still to digitize experiences, like retail and I'm preaching to the choir of one here today as you're listening. But so much of that was concentrated. I saw businesses here in the outskirts, in New York City and everyone's in lockdown. I'll give you an example of a digitized business model. A wholesale distributor of really fine food to great top echelon restaurants in the city, sitting on warehouses of food, where the restaurants are shut down, quickly spun up an e-commerce model where people could band together in their streets and bulk and put in these orders and started shipping residential. I mean, that was digital transformation and maybe never had that in their roadmap, but technology has matured. We know the experience wasn't as elegant, maybe as going on a really refined D2C website and remembering profiles and so forth. But an example of that, walk us through an example or two of where you saw that maybe a longstanding client who had some ideas or maybe nascent, but they accelerated. Or even just a new client coming to you at that time saying we've got to refactor digital experiences at the forefront, please help us.

Owen Frivold: So I'm gonna cover a couple points first and then kinda speak to an example. I think the positive externality of all this, is that throughout it all the status quo had to change. It was adapt or die. I hate to say it that way, but it was right. And so many things got called in the question that you saw brands and businesses of all sizes, willing to take more risks. Again, it wasn't in a time of prosperity either, so you really had to help them by placing the right bets because they needed to take on that risk, but also help them think through how to substantiate that and think it through. So just like the example you shared, as a means by which that business was able to pivot on a dime and pressure test solutions that previously might have hurt the brand. They might be averse, or might be distracting. Guess what, now you have two forms of revenue streams down because now they can do a direct-to-consumer play. And I'm sure they've all that experience you just called out. And at the same time, you're looking at that same business that forced them to look at a different way to bring in revenue back on the rise. So all of a sudden you've diversified your portfolio of revenue streams. It's kind of interesting.

So what we ended up seeing is early days, banking clients was a big one because you also had these FinTech disruptors coming in, but basically we saw a ton of traction. We did some custom research because no forecasting model had in it a placeholder for what happens when a pandemic hits and how do you project demand. It also created a level playing field for a lot of firms that didn't necessarily have their own data systems to go hey, if you ask the right questions and can gather the right data, you can actually stand out among a crowd of very much bigger players. If you're focused on trying to make sense of the world in ways that then help unlock that decision-making process that some of these brands are going through. So going back to an example, we have several banks that we work with, where again, a lot of the way in which their compensation models worked, everything else was tied to in-branch traffic and those branches were closed. And so how do you help these businesses adapt to not wanting to furlough staff as they rightfully shouldn't, but get their employees who are eager to learn because that's another point of focus, right? You have employees who are needing to adapt their ways of working in order to maintain their livelihoods. And all of a sudden you saw this interesting play where the business model and the staff were more open than ever for change.

So we saw a lot of great new ideas and ways of working and innovative thinking, even at the service design level, if you will, oriented around areas that were predominantly focused as sort of the front door being a physical presence. So retail banks for one, hospital networks for another and lives and livelihoods, those two categories of businesses. I hate to think of a hospital network as a business, but in some respects, you have to, but those two categories were the ripest for change and needed the solution that you're alluding to. And so we saw that a ton, we also saw from it, bonding if you will, or in a sense, the adapter, that also means you go further together. So you saw consideration around allying, partnering, buying versus building custom because the rate that you had to essentially adapt was so high that you couldn't really do it alone. And we’ve also seen clients come up with new offerings that really speak to the value that their customers are looking for. The perfect example is credit cards. You have banks that have credit cards tied to rewards to travel for the first 18 months of COVID if you will.

So in thinking through how do you pivot and how do you also just build that resiliency in once and try and maintain, that became a really key part of where we start to see a lot of patterns across a bunch of different categories of clients. And that's where we start to go okay, we need to think about how we productize, systematize for lack of a better way of describing it, our offerings. Because we're seeing the same requests, a regional hospital network and a regional bank are both speaking to the core needs on the Maslow hierarchy of needs. They're both needing to adapt, they're having different constraints, but ultimately need to service people at a level that is so critical. How do we help them adapt, build and modify and also justify. So the appetite for change, the need to justify it, were so much greater too. So those are all the factors that we use to stand up to some of the solutions.

Brent Trimble: Yeah. And you used two terms around lives and livelihood and listeners of our podcast that we thank for listening as well as the array of clients that we serve. They're really talent-based organizations, right? They're talented people, resources, whether they're talented on the engineering side or strategic, creative, experience, content and everything in between. And traditionally in an agency model, management, consulting model, life and livelihood are sometimes strained. I mean it's a long hour business, it has been for a long time. And one of the things we feel the pandemic really kind of turned on its head with this notion that this agency, creative consulting model couldn't exist with decentralization. It still had to be people coming together in conference rooms, working through the weekends to craft wonderful pitches and strategic ideas. And that's kind of been proven fall, there's been incredible work produced in the past couple years with folks working in remote locations. But talk us through maybe how you around this notion of if we simplify and productize some commonly referenced offerings, is that helping you arrive solutions faster and therefore having a great downstream effect on your talent. They're able to work in different constructs, more efficiently. Talk us through some of the benefits of taking a service. And for those who listen, I encourage them to check out Hero Digital. I mean, the array of things you offer is very vast, explain to us how that when down into some products and compartments has benefited your talent.

Owen Frivold: Yeah, absolutely happy to. So the first was obviously just building muscle memory and you have your frameworks,and everything else, but a lot of it is tailoring it to the client. And that doesn't go away, especially in strategy, you have to maintain that. But I think one, it's a good anchoring point. And so a couple things I think I should start with is one, we started by doing it inside out. So we didn't promote what the solution was and then build as we go, we built the foundation of it looking at the various needs that we had been servicing for some time. We sort of bubbled up the common themes that then made sense for us to codify. And then we deliberately built them and invested in building the right toolsets. So the benefit was you didn't have a build-as-you-go approach for our talent either. And it wasn't that it was so abstract that you couldn't apply it, we had it applied to clients in the moment, but we weren't essentially piloting the solution and defining it. We had defined it, we invested deliberately in establishing that because we felt it was really critical to get right.

And essentially the dividends it would pay is in the benefits that we would yield with our employees and with our clients. Which was a repeatable way of working with key milestones to get them in a way that onboarding is easier because to your point with demand going up, it's not just about existing talent starting to come together, but it's also just reducing the cognitive load of having to solve everything from scratch every time. But also knowing essentially, there's a point of view that this firm is taking on how they want to solve a problem in this space. And so it allowed us also to differentiate that way. So even as an employer brand, when you're talking about the types of work that you're doing and infusing your values into the way you craft it is a lot harder to do when you're building as you go at the whim of a client. Versus doing it as a deliberate sort of R&D investment, for lack of a better way of saying it. And so I think the other benefit was the team felt like they were part of it, they weren't just reactive. They were proactive in the way in which they were building this, which I gave them a sense of ownership and pride. I'd like to think in the solution being led by their value system and how we wanted to stand out, not just in reaction to demand coming through exclusively. So hopefully that helps answer your question.

Brent Trimble: It does. And it's interesting because you talk about building everything from scratch and certainly many of us have participated in whether it's coming up with a perspective, strategic approach in a pitch or helping a client solve an issue. And we come to the whiteboard with more or less a blank slate. Had there been any pushback or feeling of confinement by strategists or do they recognize that building within a framework and using that to organize thinking leads to efficiency and productivity and usually greater insights.

Owen Frivold: It's a great question. I think the way we looked at it was what are the foundational elements of our toolbox not what is the most prescriptive way of working. Because every brand that we engage with, if we're helping them sort of think through, okay, what are the next five years gonna look like? You go through a sort of traditional set of coverage areas: Culture, category, competition, your own company, your customer base, the consumer. So you infuse all those elements and you have to think through what are the right tactics? What are the right approaches to fit the needs of a specific client? But then from there, how you choose to infuse those learnings are really gonna be dependent on many different things. Everything from what kind of industry you're in, like we alluded to with financial services, right, we built out a means by which you can essentially create a value model tied to the various goals that a business might have. So for example, if you want to focus more on customer retention and cross-selling, then there might be a way in which you're gonna inform your roadmap and the kind of feature set that you wanna do. But if you choose to toggle differently and wanna go more towards expansion of net-new customer base, there might be different tactics.

So when we established these tools, we didn't make them so prescriptive, we made them more guideposts along a journey to get to an end state where the inputs could be malleable enough tied to where a company was at in its journey on digital transformation. Which I firmly believe you're never done. I think we'd all agree that there's always some new technology that can be applied. So essentially what we did is we deliberately respected the fact that you can't get overly process-oriented, overly prescriptive in the approach to a way where it's like oh, we're doing it wrong. It's more hey, these are the key pillars that get you to that end state. These are the must haves, these are the ways of working within certain activities along that journey, as opposed to making it something that was so dogmatic that essentially a brand would either accept or reject. We made it more something that was malleable. I don't know that nuance makes sense, but I think that was a key thing for us to provide.

Brent Trimble: Start us a little bit on this track of talent and the benefits of these components and products you've built. And you brought up this notion of being an employer brand, have you found a benefit to this in the interview process or maybe attracting talent? There's great analogies for management consulting, like McKinsey has their famous frameworks and you can go to the 7Ss or the Nine-Box Matrix and these building blocks of theses. Chiat Day famously had a kind of planning framework and the golden era of advertising coms. Has this helped you, even someone in a content practice all the way over to maybe an engineer and say we've developed the tools and they're gonna help you execute better?

Owen Frivold: The short answer is yes. We've been at it for eight years and like you said, it's a relatively short trajectory, all things considered. The only consonant has been changed in evolution. And so what it's been great for discerning as well is and we all know this, right? I love Ray Dalio that said you don't want Einstein on your basketball team, it doesn't mean that he is not valuable. It's also allowed us to discern who are the right people to join our team. So it's also a little bit of, we are in the midst of establishing those types of tools. And we want people who are eager to be a part of that definition and evolution. It's very different than going to a place where essentially is what their brand has been versus an organization where the malleability, the adaptability, the nimbleness is part of what makes your value prop so appealing to brands. And so I think it's spoken as much to us as being able to discern who's the right fit, knowing where we are in our journey to establish that. And when you do get people who sort of get it and quick, you get that passion, you get that sense of commitment too. Because they wanna be part of a solution that they've been able to put their fingerprints on and not just come into someplace that's fully baked and okay, we use this toolset or do it this way.

There's a positive externality to the circumstances in which we found ourselves working remotely and everything else, which is the best idea wins oftentimes. Like the best solution to problems that haven't been proven. And there is no expert in COVID, right? No matter who you go to, McKinsey, down to boutique firms, there are no experts in this. No one was around during the Spanish flu and can go “When that hit, we knew what to do.” So what was nice is it sort of created an idea of meritocracy and a solution to meritocracy. And what we were certainly able to benefit from was you found yourself in an environment where if you could detect the right patterns that you were seeing as common needs, systematize them so that they were reasonable. And added the value that a brand needed, you could capture a much greater portion of spend share within an existing account, because a lot of these things became jump balls in the agency, ecosystems within clients.

And it's not like they were gonna go to procurement, want to onboard yet another vendor, or partner or agency or consultancy. For a good portion of 2020 and into 2021, we unlocked a bit more and we saw a lot of our efforts come to fruition. Also a good benefit was if you could demonstrate, you understood and could identify those patterns and your team could and they could really relate. And empathy became such a valuable component in that sense that it really allowed us to flourish in a time that obviously from a health standpoint was a huge concern for everyone. But from a business standpoint, it allowed us to really adapt and frankly, even reposition ourselves in the eyes of not only our existing clients, but the market as well.

Brent Trimble: Well, I won't ask you to share proprietary growth rates or anything like that, but it sounds like there's just been fantastic growth. And some of that is obviously in the position you're at. I mean we have partner firms who found themselves, unfortunately in the first year of COVID, they were focused on the travel and tourism industry and they got clobbered. And now of course they're beneficiaries of pent up demand. But one thing around talent and being an employer brand and in a space that historically had higher than average churn, I'd heard anecdotally from a few agency leaders like yourself that of course we all have heard ad nauseum about the great resignation. And a lot of talent migration and folks reevaluating the meaning of work and better integration of work and life, those types of things. I'd also read an interesting quote, I think it was from the chief operating officer at S4, you know, sir Martin's new couple year venture now, saying that they're seeing more resignation on the client-side. And therefore a bit more reliance on them as partners and your procurement and looking to onboard another partner. And then instead just leveraging more and more of the expertise, someone like you have brought. Have you seen that manifest in work? And then speak to us a little bit about resignation, churn and talent.

Owen Frivold: And I think if you look at the duration of COVID and reaching a different chapter of it, at the start it was is it brand, demand? We don't know. How do you make sense of it all?

Brent Trimble: You hope it's a stable chapter in a short pamphlet and not a not war and peace, right?

Owen Frivold: Exactly. Then from there, it became how do we redeploy, how do we think through that? So if you sort of break it into different chapters through most of 2020, we didn't see a ton of churn. We saw a lot of almost self-preservation, so the need to really act. So there was bias towards action because something needed to get done on the client-side. Need for guidance, need for the right partnership, strategic partners who could help you think through it. Enter 2021, a bit of a stuttering step, quite frankly, in the sense that we thought they’re opening up and Delta and Omicron hit and those threw some uncertainty back into the mix. We did start to see a little bit of that churn and so in the best of ways where you once had one client and now you have two because they take you. And whoever's leaving on the client-side also wants to refer you in because they appreciate what you've done and the value you've provided. So it's not a breakup, it's quite the contrary, essentially it's additive and value.

Now when it comes to the actual reliance, at the end of 2021 start of 2022, we've seen market dynamics affect a few things as well. Obviously interest rates and not knowing exactly what's gonna happen there, inflation. The great reshuffling means that on one hand, you're relying on partners, on the other hand, you also need a stakeholder that you can hold accountable to decisions and budget spend and things like that. And when that seat is vacant for too long, you can also air on the side of concern because while they might be leaning on you as a partner, the accountability dynamic is different. Like you are literally influencing ways in which they're running their business with no clear party accountable on their side and outsourcing that. It can only go for so long. So to answer your question, we're seeing different scenarios, a lot of which is really tied to stabilizing the core of who is on their team and who's not. And then basically reinvestment in their own employee base. So what's kind of interesting if you think about it is for so long career advancement has been you gotta go somewhere else to make more, especially in the agency space. You sort of ping pong back and that's the way you do it. But because of the demand, because of the gaps in the client-side, brands in general are having to think about it being a candidate's market, so how do you garner? And loyalty, even in a post-Trump era is kind of a weird term to talk about. And don't mean to politicize that, I just think that term can sometimes mean different things.

So the idea of how do you garner a commitment or a buy-in in a fulfilling environment for your employee because the cost to replace the risk to delivery is so much greater now on both sides of the house that I kinda like the fact that you have to sort of reinvest in the people that have helped you get to this point. And it’s meant to be rewarding those who have been there with you along the way, not just the net-new, fresh people that are joining. So it addresses both sides of the house, but I think one of the things we've seen throughout this last chapter, if you will, of COVID is yeah, some clients are leaning on us more because they have departure, but also seeing them make sure that they're taking care of the people who have helped them through this more. And so that I think has actually been an interesting byproduct of it, it’s like who are they recommitting to in a sense? And renewing their commitment in ways that then only strengthen our bonds with that brand because our partnership with that individual is tied to the value that they're providing to their business.

Brent Trimble: Yeah it does. And continuing to grow and cultivate folks from within, you can't recast a free agent superstar team every year and have to replace them every 18 months. You can achieve that in some sports sometimes, but you still have to have that, to your point, the people that brought you there as the bull work of talent. As we approach the end of our discussion here, I'd love to hear your thoughts, flip that back on maybe yourselves and on the agency talents side of things. I've seen and heard of some really interesting, innovative ways that agencies are helping to retain and cultivate their own talent, kind of recognizing very similar patterns. I read for instance a really interesting article in the Drum, I think around the holidays where some agencies were experimenting with four day work weeks and finding that it’s actually doing really well. There's compensation changes and there's of course different perks. And we've seen that pattern over the past decade or so, particularly in your space because you’re very focused on digital, big tech pulling folks away and it’s really hard sometimes to compete with those types of perks. But yeah, share some lessons learned on your side as well as maybe some observations from the field you've seen.

Owen Frivold: Yeah, I’d love to. So a couple broader statements I'd say we're not all shelter in place, we're certainly in sort of a muted existence relative to 2019. And I keep going back to this, but it's really true, what people value comes to the forefront and when your commute is five seconds between your office and the kitchen, like it is for me and the kids and everything else. And the kinds of perks and the ways in which you are providing assistance or support to your team, it's materially different. There is no commute back with a 20 minute listen to a podcast or in silence, or whatever it may be, there is no decompression time. And there's a lot of talking before around like it's not about the ping pong table or whatever. And I don't know if you're familiar with this, but there's the ping pong table index out here in the Bay Area of like frothiness tied to the purchases of ping pong tables in this market. The key point is that we realize that it's basically a portfolio of compensation elements, it's certainly not just compensatory. And it also has to be something that you infuse in culture, it cannot just be something on a sheet of paper and you can't bring to life.

So I think one of the points you brought earlier that I think is not a perk, but I think is really critical is being able to protect flow time. Like even in just your ability to do work and it's not about not working, it's about being in a place where it is uninterrupted, gives you time to do your best work. It is a time that's respected across the organization as one that is meant to be separate from the chaos of the culture that has to come from working remotely. So even those kinds of tactics are there. I think that's been one that we've adopted of just protecting, creating and establishing and protecting and preserving this ritual of having flow time during the week that you don't book over. It’s not a perk and I'll be the first to acknowledge, but I think it's an element that I think helps people feel like they're better set up for success. And in so many ways, that becomes part of what allows people to feel more fulfilled. It’s whatever they're working on and spending a ton of time on, they have a better shot at creating the quality of an outcome that they’re wanting to achieve. So some of that is just tied to rituals as an organization that you have to adapt to being more accommodating. Others have been essentially just respecting flexible schedules, making sure to the best of your ability, you don't book people across multiple times. So all those things are not perks per se, but they are cultural norms and rituals that you have to stand by if you want to ultimately create an environment where people feel like they're set up for success.

Brent Trimble: Yeah and I was gonna say, to that point, probably immediately evident in a new joiner's critical 30, 60, 90 days. Like this place is a bit different, I have some empty time on my calendar to actually execute some work. And it's not a situation where my entire day is consumed with interactions. And I do my real work in the evening, which has been part of the course for a lot of folks in a consulting framework and so forth. Yeah, that's really excellent.

Owen Frivold: Yeah, so that's one and then the other I think is mental health. That's been such a critical piece. I think a lot of firms, rightfully so, have just put that as part of their benefits packages and all that. Whether it's solutions like Headspace or things that are more tied to their actual health benefits and the rise of all sorts of fantastic solutions that help people get the help that they need in a remote environment as well. I think that's been one that, again, it doesn't stand out as particularly unique, but I think it's been a critical one. The other is there's a company called Filo out here and I love this concept, you essentially get paid to go on vacation. That's not the headline and essentially, you take a week off and then at the end of it, you input on how it went and you basically get up a voucher for lack of a better way that's paid to you. So it's a form of compensation that you can only get through actually taking a break. And I have a family member who works there, but I honestly think just that concept of essentially rewarding taking breaks in an environment where essentially it's so easy to burn out now because you have no transition. The challenge to compartmentalize is greater than it's ever been, those kinds of things. I think they speak well and I think they're the types of ways to essentially put your money where your mouth is and say hey look, we want you to feel like this is something that is rewarding to you, it is in punitive and the way we do that is make sure that when you do take that time, you actually have an added benefit to it.

I think it is a lot harder to charge your battery back up when it's at zero. And I think the half-life where people are burning out faster than ever. I think in this environment when they're not with the kinds of conditions that allow them to compartmentalize, to take breaks and not feel guilty. To understand and respect their own headspace enough to recognize when they need to talk to someone or ask for help. And it's not even in a mental health capacity, just in a social capacity. So I think those are the things that as we look to more solutions, we've found to be the most fitting to go after. Obviously there's comp and other variables that are evidently at play, but at the end of the day my firm belief is after a certain point, whether you make an extra 5, 10%, if the quality of the time you're spending working isn't any better, or even worse, that additional comp is used as justification for the environment in which you have to work, people are gonna quickly turn. The turnover rates aren't only gonna accelerate. And so I think that to me is a core area of focus for services firms and brands alike. I don't think there's a distinction there in particular. I think as we're normalizing around these things, it's really critical to make sure that those are the key components of it.

Brent Trimble: And not normalizing and thankfully, I think getting away from this notion that continuous 80 hour weeks are a sign of strength and endurance and rigor and intelligence, right? I think that term you brought up, half-life burnout, you could put some metrics around that, some qualifiers, but I hadn't heard it conceptualized that way. And you're absolutely right because if you think of just the mechanics of screen refresh rates to your optic nerves and just feeling that exhaustion at the end of the day of just staring at a screen.

Listen, this has been an incredibly energizing conversation and great, I think, for our listeners who really need to hear from peers and leaders in the space as they tackle some of these issues. And you've given us some conceptual strategic frameworks to think about around the repeatable work and frameworks, as well as some great tactical anecdotes around talent recognition and retention. And on behalf of the listeners, really appreciate the time you've invested today because it's a big investment of time and we appreciate that.

For those listening, again, our guest has been Owen Frivold, he's the executive vice president and leads the strategy practice as well as a co-founder at Hero Digital. And for any inputs or questions around the podcast, always feel free to reach out to us at podcastatmavenlink.com. Any follow up questions, ideas for guests and remarkably, we do have people reach out to that from time to time. But again Owen, thanks for the great conversation, I've really enjoyed having you today and look forward to connecting.

Owen Frivold: Thank you so much