Peppercomm’s Jackie Kolek On How To Take Your Company From Good To Great

Open your mind to new ways of thinking: With the idea that unexpected ideas come from unexpected places, humor is the key. When you can laugh, you disrupt your traditional patterns of thinking, which enables you to open your mind and come up with a non-obvious solution.

As part of my series about “How To Take Your Company From Good To Great,” I had the pleasure of interviewing Jackie Kolek — Senior Partner and Chief Innovation Officer at Peppercomm.

As Chief Innovation Officer, Jackie is responsible for identifying challenges and opportunities Peppercomm clients are facing and developing new solutions and services to help them mitigate risks and capitalize on changes to drive their business forward.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I joined Peppercomm in 2000 — always joking I have “decades and decades of experience” — and have helped to build the firm’s financial and professional services business, which I now lead, in addition to my role as Chief Innovation Officer. The majority of my days are spent working with my team developing and executing fully integrated campaigns that include media relations, social media, content development, content marketing, experiential and crisis communications, as well as identifying client needs and developing new products and solutions to help them be successful when their organizations.

I am also a member of Page Up and active in several local community service organizations in my hometown of Westport, CT, including the Westport Chapter of the National Charity League and Homes with Hope, a grassroots organization dedicated to helping people to live independent and self-sufficient lives.

I live in CT with my husband, two children and our two dogs, a Goldendoodle named London and a Sheepadoodle named Milan.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?

Our motto at Peppercomm is “we take our clients seriously and our business seriously, but not ourselves.” There are so many funny stories, from travel debacles (like the time my boss and I drove an hour east instead of west on a highway in Western MA and missed a media training) to new business “adventures” — both from myself and people on the team I’ve been working with for decades.

Perhaps the most legendary was a pitch for a company that provides wheelchair-accessible vans. It was a last-minute meeting, and we weren’t exactly prepared. While we were rehearsing, we handed the presentation to a team member who wasn’t in the pitch to clean it up and add some pictures. No one bothered to check the deck afterward and halfway through the presentation the client stopped us and said “um, you do know those pictures are of our competitor’s product?”

Um, we did not know.

Next, we went to recommend a “big idea” that involved partnering with the TV show, Extreme Makeover. The client politely responded that they had already done the same campaign …the previous year. During the pitch, Steve Cody (Peppercomm’s CEO) and I just looked at each other with a look that said “time to pack it up and go home.”

I learned a few things from that. Obviously, do your research and double-check everything before presenting. But more importantly, that pitch lacked a clear owner. Several of us had our hands in it, but no one was driving or taking full ownership and responsibility. We’ve learned that every pitch needs a clear “owner,” and the buck starts and stops with that leader.

Additionally, we simply did not have the time to do what we needed to do properly, and we should have just not accepted the meeting unless they gave us more time. By throwing something together last minute and rushing ourselves, we did ourselves and the prospect a disservice. If you don’t have the time to provide a thoughtful response, you can do more harm than good. Now we’ll make the decision not to pursue something if we do not have the time to do it thoughtfully.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

About 12 years ago our founder and CEO, Steve Cody was having what he likes to call his “5th or 6th” mid-life crisis and started taking stand-up comedy lessons. While today he classifies himself as a highly mediocre comedian, he started noticing a marked improvement in his business communication abilities — listening, presenting, creating an immediate rapport with an audience — also, dealing with hostile or impassive audiences.

Since that time, leveraging the power of humor to unlock creativity, inspire audiences and drive a change in thinking has been Peppercomm’s major differentiator.

We know laughter stimulates alpha brainwaves which helps the human brain inhibit obvious associations and connect the dots of seemingly unrelated ideas in fresh ways. It shifts your wavelength thinking and process from linear beta — tasks, facts, etc. — to big picture alpha — creativity, strategy, joy. Operating on this wavelength gives us the ability to create opportunities clients never knew they had.

And during the pandemic, we recognized the strong need to motivate, inspire and connect with audiences in a different way — as well as to adapt to shifts in the way we work and collaborate — especially as our own employees and clients grappled with the long-term impacts of remote work. This led us to evolve our traditional comedy training to solve the challenges companies are facing with employee engagement, retention and recruiting, through a human-centric approach.

According to a Hewitt & Associates study, companies that use humor to engage employees report shareholder returns 19% higher than their competitors. Additionally, a study by Ipsos found a correlation between employee retention and the sense of humor of the managers at those organizations. Due to this, we partnered with industry thought leaders, including academics, professional comedians and Second City alumni to launch Change Agent in 2021 — to both increase the employer and employee experience and help our clients capitalize on the proven profit enhancement of incorporating humor.

For the past ten years, Peppercomm has been leveraging the tenets of humor to engage our own workforce and won countless culture awards along the way, most recently being named one of Crain’s New York Business’ Top 100 Places to Work in 2021.

Ok, thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the focus of this interview. The title of this series is “How to take your company from good to great”. Let’s start with defining our terms. How would you define a “good” company, what does that look like? How would you define a “great” company, what does that look like?

To me, a great company is continually punching above its weight. A company that is outflanking their better-resourced or better-known competitors in new and different ways. A good company is doing well, plugging along — but a great company is really breaking through and rising to the challenge.

Peppercomm’s differentiator is incorporating humor into not only our everyday interactions but also our company ethos. We not only use this to help our clients punch above their weight, but we do it ourselves! We use a method called “alpha thinking” (based on that same creativity that laughter sparks in the brain) to identify whitespaces and think big and differently.

For example, we developed a proprietary research platform — Mindset.AI — to help our clients identify clear data on their audiences’ emotional mindsets and make informed decisions on proactive strategies. We also launched the Laughing Matters podcast to connect with guests from all walks of life who share one belief: laughing matters (and it matters a LOT).

Businesses need to innovate constantly in making that leap from good to great.

Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know to lead a company from Good to Great? Please share a story or an example for each.

1. The greatest ideas can come from unexpected places: Peppercomm recently formed a new Laughing Matters Council with leaders from across the humor spectrum to provide insights and guidance on how to leverage humor in business. One thing we hear from our Council members is that the best insights come from the people you least expect. It could be the intern listening to the conversation from afar who brings the breakthrough idea. This is why it’s essential to have representatives from not only all departments but also from all walks of life involved in the process of innovating.
2. Open your mind to new ways of thinking: With the idea that unexpected ideas come from unexpected places, humor is the key. When you can laugh, you disrupt your traditional patterns of thinking, which enables you to open your mind and come up with a non-obvious solution.
3. Take your business seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously: This is a company mantra here at Peppercomm and speaks to our ability to be self-deprecating, which leads to much more authentic interactions both with clients and among ourselves.
4. Make sure your people are driven by an authentic culture: Clients and customers come and go. But if you want to keep people for eight, 10, 12, 15 years (like we do at Peppercomm), that means being people-focused. Great leaders create opportunities to build bonds in authentic ways where all voices feel like they’re being heard. At Peppercomm, our standup comedy training gives employees the chance to poke fun at senior leadership. Remember, the longer your staff stays the more expertise and experience you bring to the table versus your competitors.
5. Be cautious in determining how and when to employ humor: Comedy/humor is not for everyone. You must begin by taking the pulse of your audience. For example, we have several client relationships that operate in a traditional, buttoned-up and nearly always serious fashion. However, we use comedy training to sharpen our staff’s listening skills, so they instinctively know if, and when, the other party enjoys laughter and believes in making it an intrinsic component of the relationship.

Extensive research suggests that “purpose-driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. Can you help articulate for our readers a few reasons why a business should consider becoming a purpose-driven business, or consider having a social impact angle?

If you’re thinking about purpose-driven businesses, it’s less about what you do from a pro bono or charitable aspect, and more about enabling your people to understand why they come to work every day and using that as your North Star. When you have a clearly articulated purpose that guides your organization, that should also guide your decision-making and lead you to become a truly authentic organization.

Not only will this help attract and retain talent and customers — because you (and they) know who you are — but it also can help you in challenging times. When you’ve got a truly defined purpose, you know the answers to difficult questions: Should we work with this customer? Do we need to fire this client? Do we hire this person? Do we let that person go?

During a corporate crisis, that’s the time to really lean into your purpose to drive your response. When you can do that, you’re operating clearly and consistently, and people know who you are. Your North Star may not be right for everybody, but that’s what your purpose is — and it has to be authentic.

What would you advise to a business leader who initially went through years of successive growth, but has now reached a standstill? From your experience, do you have any general advice about how to boost growth and “restart their engines”?

Many organizations plateau because they’re doing the same old things but expecting different outcomes, which of course is also the definition of insanity. But the science of humor is the key to unlocking new ways of thinking and driving innovation. It reduces stress, unleashes creativity and can change the game for organizations looking to reframe the challenges they’re facing.

Generating new business, increasing your profits, or at least maintaining your financial stability can be challenging during good times, even more so during turbulent times. Can you share some of the strategies to keep forging ahead and not lose growth traction during a difficult economy?

Lean into research to really understand your stakeholder’s mindset. At Peppercomm, we built a proprietary analytics tool called Mindset.AI that enables us to gain a deep understanding of an audience’s pain points and current emotional states so that we can help our clients communicate with their target audiences in real-time effectively.

This approach answers the question: What is it that your stakeholders need to hear from you and how can you build a stronger relationship with them? From there, we help clients understand how their competitors are addressing these stakeholders. This analysis leads to creating a truly unique value proposition for our clients that enables them to capture the white space that will move the needle with their customers.

We did that with our humor offerings, as well. We researched, we listened, we analyzed and we identified a white space in approaching business with humor. So many people assume humor is about standing up and being funny or telling a joke and being the center of attention. But it’s not. It’s about empathy. It’s about reading your audience and knowing what’s funny to them, not to you. Because if you just go up and start telling random jokes not reading the audience, you’re going to flop.

Companies should constantly be questioning their operations and constantly innovating. Because if they’re behind, they need to get ahead; and if they’re leading, they’re always at risk of being outflanked by their competition. It happens time and time again with these big players. The key tenant of humor is reading your audience — and innovation should always start with the audience in mind, not yourself.

As you know, “conversion” means to convert a visit into a sale. In your experience what are the best strategies a business should use to increase conversion rates?

I think one thing to keep in mind is the end goal is not always a quick sale. You need to focus on the bond that you’re building. What is the relationship with your clients and with your employees? That’s why we feel so passionate about humor in business — it is all about building chemistry and rapport with people.

Of course, the main way to increase conversion rates is to create a trusted and beloved brand. Can you share a few ways that a business can earn a reputation as a trusted and beloved brand?

Building a trusted and beloved brand is about building an emotional connection. So how are you building that emotional connection? It’s by tapping into what your customers care about and making sure you’re thinking about the threats that you may face down the line. It’s one thing to become a beloved brand, but even harder to stay one. So, make sure you’re always prepared to neutralize a crisis because things could happen out of your control, and you need to make sure that you protect that trusted reputation for the brand you have built.

How can our readers further follow you online?

Always available to connect on LinkedIn!

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!