Busy Isn't Bold': The Banking Branding Problem

Well, hello. It’s me, Mary Wisniewski, editor-at-large for Cornerstone Advisors and host of Money Isn’t Everything, a show that explores anything other than just holding money because, well, that’s a commodity thing.

Today on the show is Allison Netzer, who just published her second edition of Think Like a Brand, Not a Bank.

And it’s a super lively read with lovely illustrations.

That’s an ad.

We get into ideas and strategies of what makes for compelling messaging for an industry where it feels really hard to stand out.

And Allison gets vulnerable by sharing how her thinking changed from edition one to edition two based on her lived experience.

Here’s our conversation.

Allison, welcome to Money Isn’t Everything.

It’s great to see you again.

It is always good to see you, and I agree money is not everything.

So glad to be here.

I’m glad we’re in alignment because it can be awkward.

Awkward.

Yeah.

Well, we meet again because we’ve done a panel together.

Our worlds collide here and there, and it’s always a joy to be able to connect with you, but especially now because not only have you gotten your wisdom tooth pulled recently, but you have your reissued book out.

Thank you for sending it to me, Think Like a Brand, Not a Bank.

I wanted to start there because, why revisit this book now?

Yeah, relatively now.

Relatively three years later.

I like to use the word three-ish years.

Yeah, we haven’t aged at all.

I know.

It’s hard.

You know, it’s interesting.

When I wrote the first edition, I was the CMO at a fintech, and my friend and I, Liz High, wrote the first one.

It was really about, in a perfect world, what our ideal would be.

When we were going out and working with, we worked with 22, 23 digital bank brands.

So it was really hope for the future.

And since that time, I’ve actually started my own company.

So I spent the last three years actually practicing what we wrote the first time.

And like you and I have kind of chatted, some of it held up brilliantly.

Some of it did not when you’re trying to make a living doing these things.

So I really want to bring that transparency to readers.

But also, I’ve had the chance to work with so many other great people and organizations since then.

I wanted to bring their stories into it, how they’re doing this work in the world, bring some fresh data.

And it also just keeps me sharp.

So yeah, that was the labor of love.

And man, I started before AI.

I could have done it in like a weekend instead of writing it.

But actually did it the old-fashioned way.

Well, but now you can claim that.

There’s before and after ChatGPT, and I’m glad we both can say, yeah, we could write before.

So take that.

We could.

Yeah.

Version three may come out next week, but version two was actually written by a person.

A labor of love.

And I know one of the enhancements were illustrations, which make your points so fun.

Yeah, it’s so fun.

I have to give full credit to Kelsey Weaver, who’s the illustrator.

There are some great illustrations.

But it’s one of these things, Mary, kind of like how you and I have gotten to know each other.

Kelsey and I were at dinner in New York with some other bankers.

I don’t know.

We just got talking about things, and she’s like, “Oh yeah, I doodle.”

I was like, no idea.

I’ve known her for years.

And she’s like, “Yeah, I’ll totally do some illustrations for the book.”

And I was like, that would be amazing because pictures speak a thousand words.

A couple weeks later, she sends me this pack of amazing illustrations she did on a plane trip to South Africa.

Wow.

Yeah, it adds to it.

I wouldn’t have thought so.

Yeah, it was really cool.

It’s a wonderful outcome of it in here too.

And Allison, I want to get into, lived experiences always reveal more.

Like, oh yeah, this is good, this isn’t good.

But what’s one or two examples where you’re like, oh yeah, this needed a rewrite for sure, or the thesis maybe was a bit different than what you first thought?

Yeah.

I’m all good admitting to it.

I think if I can go back in time, what we glossed over in the first edition was how far away most marketers, and also leaders, are from the strategy table.

Having a brilliant idea, whether it’s about brand or go-to-market, it’s not enough.

You actually have to have the credibility internally to be constantly marketing the marketing, to sell this sort of brand work.

Because you’ve got a lot of headwinds, tailwinds, I can never remember which one.

You’ve got whatever the things that make it hard are, wind blowing against you.

Because, and a lot of this is our responsibility as marketers, it’s seen as more of an arts-and-crafts profession in many cases.

So we just make it harder on ourselves a lot to get some of these principles through.

I think that was underserved in the first one.

And then I think the second improvement, or thing that is better now than before, is just more stories.

It’s just the benefit of time.

There are so many great organizations that are out there practicing this, either on purpose because we’ve worked together and they read the first book, or they’ve just sort of picked up on it and made it their own and made it awesome.

There are a couple good examples in there of companies and banks that have done that.

So I think that’s just more stories, less about how I think the world should be and more about how people are actually doing it out in the world, which I always think is going to be more interesting.

It often can be.

And now my brain is conjuring up.

You referenced Liquid Death in this version of the book, which I think is really cool for those who are maybe unaware of Liquid Death.

It’s water, but it’s branded with an edge.

I remember I was doing a yoga class and I saw someone with a bottle.

I was like, “Is that liquor?”

But then I learned, no, it’s water.

Yeah.

And it’s the only way I can get my sons to drink water, is Liquid Death water, because they think they’re cool and being dangerous.

But that’s the only way I can get them to hydrate, which is why I started looking into Liquid Death.

And then they ended up in the book.

Yeah, they ended up in the book.

And it’s a point of, brand messaging is so important.

A bottle of water could just be a bottle of water, just like a bank account could be a bank account.

But what do you think is the most important takeaway for a bank or credit union or even a fintech company in thinking about an example like Liquid Death?

Yeah, I think it’s a good example because we talk all the time about, for better or worse, we’re mostly in a commoditized industry.

With fintechs, there are only so many ways to check your balance.

With banks, there are only so many ways to, I mean, yeah, you can make it spin around.

You can do lots of things.

I’m joking, but you get the point.

At a certain point, it’s kind of like the iPhone camera.

How much better can it get?

And the choice you make, the strategic choice you make, whether you’re in banking or fintech, is you can throw your hands up and say, “Well, we’re a commodity industry, so we’re just going to kind of go with what we’ve got. We’re just going to status quo it.”

But if you take the Liquid Death example, they made a group, and what we would kind of call our ICP, or ideal customer profile, they took that audience and they made that audience the hero of the story.

And the backstory with Liquid Death is it started with rock-and-roll musicians who wanted to hydrate on stage but didn’t want to look stupid with a bottle of Dasani, but also didn’t want to crush beers.

That’s how it started.

So instead of saying, look, water is a commodity, just put a sticker on it, put it on stage, they really leaned into, how can they take a commodity plus a customer problem and bring those together?

So they didn’t make the water more expensive.

At first, they didn’t flavor it.

It was just straight-up water.

It was the packaging and positioning around it, which is a lot of what brand thinking is.

It’s not saying you need to create a bunch of new products to reach your customers.

It’s a lot of times the clarity and the packaging and positioning around it, but not accepting defeat.

We cannot accept, well, we’re a commodity.

Maybe the product is.

But the problem to your customer is anything but a commodity.

More than likely, it’s the first time they’re running into it.

First home, savings, children.

It is not a commodity to them.

It may feel like a commodity to us.

No, I think that’s such an important part.

And this is partly why I named this show for multiple different reasons, but one, money isn’t everything because a bank and a credit union don’t just want to be a place that holds money because that’s not compelling in terms of trying to get customers.

Yeah.

Just that little old thing.

Just that little old thing.

But it’s the messaging, right?

A lot of times when people find, oh, you’re into branding or you’re a brand marketer, it’s not always about the visuals.

The visuals can certainly help, but unless you’ve got that real clarity of who you serve and why you’re serving them.

And spoiler, it’s not, who you serve are people in your community because they live there.

That’s not an answer.

You’ve got to go deeper than that, just like Liquid Death did.

And really keep clicking down until you can get something that just pulls you out of that commodity view internally.

Because unless you pull out of that internally, it’s never going to manifest externally.

I totally agree.

The key to success.

Well, this brings up, there’s one segment of the show called “That’s What You Said.”

In this case, that’s what you wrote.

And there were so many good lines, so I was really challenged.

So you’ll see me sprinkling it throughout this conversation.

But one is, “Your biggest competitor isn’t another fintech or bank. It’s the belief that you already understand your market.”

I love this.

But let’s unpack it a bit.

I imagine you probably see this a lot in the industry, executives thinking this.

So what’s wrong with it, and how can one course correct?

Sure.

Well, I tell you, it’s a little bit of a tough-love moment.

And it could be awkward in meetings to bring it up.

One, you’re not the customer.

You may have worked at the bank or the fintech for 20, 30 years.

You may have spent some time on the front lines.

But that assumption, Mary, I call it the assumption trap.

That to me is the biggest competitor because it calcifies your thinking.

You’re making massive assumptions with little tiny slivers of data and a hell of a lot of filters put in.

And the mission is not, how do you serve Mary today on Monday, March 2nd?

That assumption that I know what you’re coming in for and I know what you’re about.

That may work for today in today’s conversation.

But what I’m trying to do is appeal and be with you for everything you aspire to be, whether you’re a bank buyer or you’re a bank consumer.

So my aperture has to be so much wider than just my personal lived experience.

But keeping the eye out for assumptions, like, is that assumption or is that fact, is huge.

And there’s a whole checklist you can go through.

I do it myself because, as long as I’ve been doing this, I make assumptions right off the bat when I’m meeting with people.

I’m like, “Oh, this is your problem. This is it.”

I stop listening.

And when you stop listening, you stop branding.

So it’s kind of a silent killer, but man, it’s pervasive.

You know what?

That just makes me think everybody in this industry needs an editor.

Because one of the lessons I learned writing at American Banker, it’s brutal getting great at it, but it’s like, is this a fact?

Yeah.

But it’s so powerful.

And it’s about being factually correct, but it’s also about the mindset.

Because as an editor, and one of the things I think makes you great at editing and all the things you’re doing, is there’s a curiosity.

And we’ve talked about that before.

When you get beyond the assumption, you also start getting into that curiosity.

And that’s where that creativity comes from and that energy, and that’s where you can move mountains.

But if you stay in that assumption world, besides maybe not having the facts correct, you’re not kindling any kind of curiosity.

It’s the same different day.

And that just erodes it, erodes you and it erodes your brand.

Yeah.

No, you see this a lot in the industry, and it is a dangerous thing.

And also something else you had written, “Busy isn’t the same as bold.”

I sort of feel like these things connect because I feel like there are a lot of people who just think, look, task check, task check.

I’m doing all my stuff.

But maybe you’re not creating something interesting that will elevate the brand and ultimately your business.

But that’s my interpretation of your sentence.

I think it’s yours.

We’re going to go with it.

No, we’re just going with that.

And it’s funny.

I had that T-shirt on earlier, but then I was like, oh, I’m going to dress up for Mary’s podcast, so put on this jacket.

But yeah, no, busy does not equal bold.

And it kind of goes back to when I was talking about so much of a marketer’s role is unfortunately to try to justify our existence.

And the easiest way to do that is just to have a whole checklist of stuff that we’ve done.

Activity-based marketing.

But man, I’ve got to tell you, I meet with so many, especially on the fintech side of things.

They’re year five, six, seven, and they’ve been doing stuff and they’ve been investing.

They’ve got the product.

The message is in the market.

But they haven’t broken through yet.

And it’s because they haven’t done anything bold.

They’ve done a ton of stuff.

But as a marketer and as a company, it actually works against you because if you’re doing 20, 30, 50 things, how are you going to single-source attribute anything?

You’re going to be worn out.

It’s just like, when you’re just doing stuff, you’re contributing to the noise.

And you’re either going to be a victim of the noise as a brand, or you’re going to break through the noise.

I know that’s overly simplified, but it’s like you’re creating your own, again with assumptions, you’re creating your own competition when you just do activity-based marketing.

Because you’re putting mixed messages out there that you end up fighting against.

You’ve got to put a webinar out there to clarify the campaign that you did a month ago that was scattered.

And it’s just like this and this and this, instead of taking a moment and saying, we’re going to do one thing.

And this is easier said than done, but we’re going to focus on breaking through, not on contributing to noise.

And it’s hard because it’s risky internally as a marketer.

But it’s just what I’ve seen to be successful.

Yeah.

I’ve heard you also mention campaigns maybe aren’t your favorite thing as a general thing.

They’re not my least favorite thing.

I want to talk about that.

Why are they your least favorite thing?

Yeah.

Well, I think some of it is PTSD from being an old-school marketer in many ways and being judged on my campaigns back in the day.

But look, it gives you this false sense of security that you’re doing and accomplishing something.

We’re running a campaign.

Well, what does that mean?

Break it down.

We’ve got some ads out there.

Maybe we’re doing, we’ve got a collection of stuff that we’re doing that we’ve sort of loosely thematically put together.

Who does that serve?

It doesn’t serve your customer.

It serves you.

Did they ask for three webinars, two white papers and six ads?

Probably not.

But that’s what it...

There’s someone out there, Allison, who would ask for that, and that would be an interesting individual.

That is awesome.

And they’re probably not going to love working with me.

But I’m saying it a little tongue-in-cheek.

It goes back so much to, who are you doing this work for?

If it’s for you or it’s because your competition has done it, my very strong advice to you is not to do it.

Because you’re contributing to the noise, which makes it harder for you to break through.

So you’re hurting yourself.

Campaigns are an organizing principle for messages and stuff you want to get out there.

Think beyond that and think of better ways to do that than just by lumping them together and saying that you’re out there in the market.

It’s just a false positive.

It is a false positive.

And now I’m remembering we were on a panel in the fall together, and one of your points was, not everyone needs to be posting on LinkedIn from a company.

And I want, yes, I imagine it’s because voice and style matter.

Just writing whatever sentence is not going to be catchy.

But let’s unpack it a bit more.

Why is it important that someone isn’t necessarily writing on LinkedIn just because they see other people doing it or whatever?

No, when I say this to people, they’re like, “Wait a minute. Don’t you want everyone to have a personal brand and be out there?”

I’m like, maybe.

But as a marketer, the employees are my audience too.

And if I’m working with the CTO that’s literally going to break out in hives if he or she has to write on LinkedIn, why would I do that to that person?

They might be amazing at doing a technical AMA, or ask me anything.

They might love going and being a host at hackathons, which no one else in the company wants to do.

So it’s like, know your audience and deploy them in the way and distribute them, because you productize the person.

Distribute that CTO in the way that he or she is going to be the most comfortable, because then they’ll be the most effective.

If you’ve got an amazing talking head as a CEO, get him or her in every possible thing where there’s gigantic pictures of their heads and quotes.

They love that.

They’ll do it all day long, and their audience expects it from them.

So again, it’s not about just taking things like, do a campaign, do LinkedIn.

What you’re really wanting to do is find the people to productize in the company and deploy them, the right product to the right person, just like you would a technical product.

It’s the exact same thing.

Yeah.

No, I can feel that on a personal level because I know when I’ve been made into doing certain tasks that I’m like, oh, this isn’t exactly my medium.

I’m like, get ready for some awkward.

Yeah.

And nobody likes that, right?

It’s cringe for everyone.

And it’s not like the CTO in this example, it’s not letting them off the hook to row the boat.

It’s just finding them a spot where they can be really effective.

Because again, if I’m just chasing the C-suite around to publish the canned messages that I give them on LinkedIn, that’s me being busy.

That’s not me being bold because I’m running around.

Have you posted your LinkedIn yet?

You really got to get on LinkedIn.

What do you want to do?

And let’s do that.

Let’s start there because I can’t really give you data that says, hey, if you do these awkward canned messages on LinkedIn, we’re going to sell more stuff.

I don’t have that data point.

Nobody has that data point.

Nobody has it still.

Well, I also wanted to draw from one of your personal examples, and it’s when you were working at Nymbus.

Because in your book I saw that you went from a 192-page website to a single one.

That is why I love cutting things out.

I don’t think enough people know, that is the art of a story.

It’s like, yes, cutting out is what makes something pop, not adding.

But that is a huge reduction.

Allison, how did you do that?

And did it hurt?

Yeah.

Yeah, it hurt.

It was extreme and it was risky.

I can’t remember the name of the person.

They’ve got the famous example, “I wrote you a long letter because I didn’t have time to write you a short one.”

It takes longer to cut down than to add.

Yeah.

And it was at that point in Nymbus’ company history where we wanted to really be seen differently, not just for the technology that we’re bringing to market, but just the type of company and culture we were becoming.

Just very simple and very purpose-based.

Normally when you step into a website project, you’ve got a bunch of pages, you start cutting it down.

We tried that for the first few days.

I was like, no, we’re going to go to a one-page website.

If we can’t clarify in one page what we do, then the rest of this is, again, it’s just noise.

So we did.

We just did one page.

Still actually, if you go to it today, it is technically one page with some links out.

But besides it being kind of an extreme visual example, I have to tell you internally how much it kind of clarified for the teams what the mission is, who we were there to serve and how we did it.

All CEOs, all C-suites are always like, we need to find our North Star.

We need to get everybody around the North Star.

There is no better way to do that than force yourself to go down to a web page, one single web page.

Even if you just did it as an exercise and not in real life.

We did it in real life.

It’s amazing.

It’s absolutely amazing what it’ll do because you just have so much stuff left over.

And all that legacy stuff, that’s all emotional weight too internally.

It’s not just that you have 15 product pages.

You’ve got 15 sets of PTSD for all of those products that every employee is looking at every day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So yeah, it was extreme.

I remember it.

And I bet you do.

Yeah.

And you have a backup plan, right?

You can always revert.

Yeah.

No, there’s always an undo button.

I like this.

I like that as the thing.

There are no permanent decisions, right?

Even marriage.

You can always go back.

And in all seriousness, that’s how a lot of the kind of crazy things that I’ve done and continue to do, how I position them.

I’m like, we can always go back.

We can always change it back.

But part of branding and marketing is to get people to notice.

So yeah, if you go down to a single dark-background website after looking like corporate whatever for however many years, people are going to notice.

Mission accomplished.

Mission accomplished.

Yeah.

That’s like cleaning the ultimate junk drawer, which I have at least five to seven of.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

But you know what?

You can clean it out and you can always stuff back in.

All right.

Well, I really love that point.

And then I wanted to, and this is equally as important and I think under-discussed in the industry, you make the point that distribution is just as critical as creating the content.

And I see this.

I feel this.

I know this from many different professional roles.

But how ought a brand, especially a financial services one, start thinking about distribution, I would say, before creating the content?

Yeah, absolutely.

Content, especially with AI, the bar is lowered in many ways.

But anyone can create content, and that used to be kind of the long pole in the tent.

What I love about prioritizing distribution is, one, it’s a great way to differentiate because there are lots of kind of niche and smaller and more purpose-built distribution channels for your content.

So you’re not contributing to noise.

You’re actually contributing to the conversation that’s happening there.

Having great distribution channels also means you can finally take advantage of all those great relationships you’ve built over the years.

You can buy some distribution.

But the really good distribution usually comes from relationships and the quality of what you’re putting out there, not the quantity.

So I think when you’re developing content, of course, you always think about who you’re writing it for, but you also want to think about how it’s distributed.

And I don’t mean make it shorter for Twitter and longer for this.

That’s not what I’m talking about.

That was kind of the approach five years ago.

It’s really looking at, say, XYZ website.

What do they have up there now?

What could you put out there that would be different, whether it’s the way that it looks, the way that it sounds?

Being a student of the game, not just of your own company, but of the companies that are there to distribute your message.

And if you become experts on those and build relationships with those folks, knowing who the podcast producers are, not just the person that talks on the podcast, that’s where those breakthrough moments really come from.

I really love that point.

And it kind of blurs into this point that you also make of purging the BS from any kind of content.

It’s everywhere, right?

Platitudes left and right.

But you had given examples, and one that I just put a note on was, swap in buyer language, not internal capability words.

Don’t say, “integrated solutions for digital transformation.”

Say, “We help banks build brands that drive growth.”

I think that is very striking and very telling, and certainly something the industry needs a lot of work on, in my opinion.

But yeah, it’s hard to do.

It’s hard to do because in many cases the companies and the FIs have become product-led.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but then the language starts to seep in as well.

And it goes back to that assumption.

Well, everyone knows what AC is.

No, they do not.

You know?

Everyone knows...

No, they do not.

Right?

Because we think about it all day long.

So of course you know.

Even direct deposit, like maybe.

But again, that’s not the point.

Who are you writing this for?

And if you’re writing it to explain yourself, then you’re not at the right message yet.

So you have to keep layering it down until you’re actually speaking in real language.

And it’s not to manipulate or to get people necessarily to listen to you more.

That happens.

But the reason why I push folks to get to that point is so that internally they can keep in mind who they’re doing the work for and who it benefits, and that they’re not the customer.

So it actually forces that internal discipline that also has the benefit of attracting more customers externally as well.

Allison, you’ve given the audience so many ideas here in this conversation.

I’m wondering, any creative exercises you find work for a lot of different brands to help them either get better with their language or declutter their content?

Yes.

Declutter their content.

Well, you take a broom.

Yeah.

Listen, I love exercises.

I love kind of game-based stuff.

Shameless plug, anything I use with my clients, like frameworks or games or exercises, I actually put all on the website.

It’s not gated.

So everything I’ve ever used in a workshop is there.

The assumption audit is there.

Box Edge, which is kind of trying to lead with your differentiation.

Start with your box and then differentiate.

All of that is there.

If you’re not into that, a book that I love and I absolutely use religiously is Gamestorming.

So I bring a game or an exercise in, even if I’m just doing it myself, to run those exercises.

And I do it all the time, just to try to get better and better.

But yeah, audits, little checklists.

Again, it can’t be this huge transformation where we have to throw everything out and all of a sudden we’re going to start doing this and this.

It’s like anything.

Start small.

Where I always recommend starting is your own internal communications.

If you’re going to get on the stage and say, you know, we need to use customer-centric language and we need to be clear, but you’re not doing that yourself on your own internal emails.

So it’s always start with yourself.

Kind of be the change, if you would.

And then it’s interesting.

The responses you get back start to be a little bit different tone.

And so then when you go to roll out, say, new messaging, it’s not like, oh great, it’s another marketing initiative with new messaging.

It already sort of feels like you’re doing it.

So it doesn’t feel like it’s coming down from the top or randomly.

It’s like, yeah, I already do this.

No big deal.

So no big deal.

Oh, it really is no big deal.

I mean, most of the time, all the time, and all of the time, really.

It just depends what kind of mental state one is in when one is the employee.

True.

But Allison, you alluded to your website, and I wanted to ask, if people want to reach out to you, what’s the best way?

Yeah, I’m hanging on LinkedIn all day like a weird LinkedIn stalker.

So LinkedIn’s great.

The website, BrandThink.co.

It’s got all my stuff on there.

I love to hear from folks.

If you’ve read the book, if you haven’t, you want a copy, whatever.

I learn from the dialogue.

This is why I started the company.

At a certain point, you’ve done all the things.

So you’re only going to learn and get better from talking and working with others.

So yeah, everything that’s out there has been tested on a real person.

And two last questions.

We’ve mentioned AI a couple times, GenAI.

And I’m wondering, you are seeing so many more professional workers produce something or other, and to varying degrees of good, bad, and of course that’s a little bit arbitrary, but sometimes it’s obvious.

But what do you think the advantage is now for a world in which everyone’s a content producer of varying degrees of skills, let’s say?

What is the advantage?

What is the advantage that one ought to aspire to or seek out?

Yeah, that’s another great question.

I think if I had a magic wand, I would have us all quit trying to detect what’s AI and what’s not.

It’s this weird obsession we all have.

We’re like, that’s AI slop.

That’s not.

It’s like, okay.

Did you get something out of it?

Okay.

If you did, you did.

I mean, I do think there’s a difference if someone’s charging you millions of dollars for something that they spent 10 minutes on.

That doesn’t make sense.

But this obsession on...

I wish it would be amazing.

But you get what I’m saying.

I think there’s a fine line.

But what I love about AI, coming at it from a marketing perspective, is two things.

One is our value, at least in my mind, has always been about the edit, the taste.

People talk a lot about taste.

And not just that you can do something, but where should it go?

How does it fit into the overall story?

Not just producing it, but the quality, and also, again, where are you going to distribute it?

How does that contribute to the narrative?

Really thinking through those pieces and allowing us to spend our time on those.

Because that’s where I think great marketers and great strategists shine.

And I also think, and again this might be more kind of my age and stage, but with using AI, I wake up feeling like I want to build something.

I want to create something.

I’m breaking things.

I’m screwing things up.

I’m learning from them.

And I’m hacking away in my little terminal window late at night.

Am I writing any better?

Maybe.

Am I producing more stuff?

Maybe.

But man, the mentality that I’m bringing to it is totally refreshed.

Because it’s like that builder mindset.

It’s like, if everyone is doing it this way, how can I do it even better?

How can I bring more of me into the AI so I stand out?

So I think it’s really rejuvenating a lot of, and kind of making me fall in love with a lot of the parts of marketing again.

So that’s what’s cool about it for me.

It’s never been about doing stuff faster.

There have always been ways to do that.

But man, getting back to that builder energy.

That’s it.

That is it.

It’s that frantic energy that it can create in you too.

And Allison, last question.

What’s the image on your phone’s lock screen?

The image on my phone?

I don’t even know.

I use a dumb phone.

Oh.

Well, that’s telling.

And that’s a thing I should do too.

Yeah.

So I don’t have one, is the answer.

It’s a black screen and it says messages, podcast.

That’s it.

I love it.

I love it.

Well, Allison, such a treat to be able to chat with you again.

Thank you so much for the time today and joining me.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks for having me on.

Okay.

So one thing I want to exclamation point is her point: busy isn’t bold.

And the one thing the industry shouldn’t do is take this attitude of, we’re just going to status quo.

Not a good idea for growth.

And remember, Liquid Death gave water a cool rebrand.

Next up, I’ll be speaking with AlgoPear in April.

But you could see me before then.

If you’re at Fintech Meetup, please say hello.

I’ll be on a panel and also be working it around the casino in meetings.

Catch you then.