Joel G Goodman

The importance of connection

2026-05-11T00:00:00Z

I am extremely lucky to have the friends that I do. They are smart, kind, extremely sharp, and always thinking about ways to improve the lives of those in their circle. At first blush, you’d think this is a rare quality in people today, but when everything aligns just so, you end up with a growing circle of friends who operate similarly.

Last November (2025), when Ashley mentioned a retreat that she and Mallory were developing, I got excited. This is an idea lots of us had thrown around for… probably longer than any of us want to admit. But leave it to them to make it actually happen.

Higher ed marketing is a small community of passionate people. When I was coming up alongside Mallory, Ashley, Seth, and others, we had Twitter. I mean original Twitter. It was only like 2 or 3 years old. Hashtags had just been introduced as canon. Retweets were still manual. We had real, actual connection.

You’d follow someone on Twitter, chat with the wider #hemktg community, and then meet up at conferences. The connection never broke, and the best conversations and inside jokes happened outside of conference sessions. The overprofessionalization of this industry — hell, all industries — has taken a lot of that away from us.

As we progress in our careers, as social media becomes increasingly less social, as we get folded into commodity culture, our circles get smaller. It’s hard to talk to colleagues about challenges and ideas when competition and upward mobility are direct pressures. It’s more difficult to stay at the top of your game, but even worse, it’s hard just to stay connected to the human side of what we’re all supposed to be doing.

People for people

The inaugural cohort of Let’s Go Upstate seemed directly positioned to remedy this. Get about 30 of the smartest higher ed marcomm and advancement leaders in a boutique hotel in Saratoga Springs for three days and see what happens.

What happens is a lot of rest, creative expression, inside jokes, and new friendships.

For me, it felt like those early days of my career when no one cared about titles, and we were all kind of figuring it out. But in reality, a lot of us know what we’re doing and really just need time to share it with other people who get it.

That’s what Upstate gave us: No-pressure time to really connect with our people.

One of my personal highlights was walking to Saratoga Olive Oil Co. with Kathryn Bazella and discovering a mutual love for the criticisms of Walter Benjamin and the philosophies of Roland Barthes. But more than that, I immediately recognized that my brand-new friend Kathryn is a deeply kind person.

Through leading a pizza-making (well, topping… not enough time to teach dough) class, doing some improv exercises, and chatting Enneagram while introducing my dinner companions to Braulio shakeratos, this was all about connection at the best levels.

We were people there for people. We could ignore pretense and work pressure. We could leave room to be curious and inspired. We could devote a few days to being excited for our new friends and our collective new ideas.

So what?

Ashley asked us, “so what?” as we were all reflecting on the few days we had together. My big thought was that we have to keep this going. We have to keep talking to each other. We have to be real friends.

Mallory, Seth, Nick, and Ashley are still some of my closest friends, and we met through work anywhere from 15-18 years ago. In another 15 years, I’m expecting to say the same of this group of people that got together upstate to be a part of this experiment.

The biggest shift

2026-04-21T00:00:00Z

About seven months ago, as of writing, I took a job with an Australia-based technology company. I chose to begin winding down what had been my life’s work, building a respected boutique agency in higher education, and move into a growth marketing VP position. Those years in Austin, when my designer friends were taking jobs at tech companies, weren’t lost on me. But I never thought I would do the same.

But friends, higher ed is in a way. Even now, supporting those agencies I used to compete with, I see just as sharply the challenges HE faces. Everyone is facing headwinds—the institutions, the agencies, and yeah, even the tech product vendors. No one has money, everyone needs money, and the pressure just keeps mounting.

For me, edging away from my own business was a calculated move. Like, have you seen the state of the US? Higher ed has got it rough. I feel like I’ve described this over and over again, but we’re looking at culture wars, a government that’s openly hostile to education, overhyped “AI” discourse threatening to take our jobs, less money, more consolidation of agencies, campus closures, and a rise in “do more with less”. It’s exhausting.

I’ll be upfront: Bravery lost two bids, and I couldn’t keep things moving. That’s how tenuous it is for a lot of smaller shops. They’re on the brink, and if they lose a job because they are forthcoming about using contractors (by the way, everyone uses contractors) or a committee of new faces picks someone else, that could be the final blow.

Bravery did great work, though. For 13 years, we elevated the design language of so many institutions. We generated so much revenue for colleges and universities. Largely, we put the infrastructure in place for institutions to realize those ambitions. We didn’t focus on the flashy. We kept our sights on the real people looking for a better future through education.

I believe a lot of the inefficiencies in higher ed marketing can be soothed by better tech infrastructure. And I’m not talking AI. Basic infrastructure. And that’s why I made the move that I did. It’s more education. It’s more visibility. And the organizations that choose to put Squiz SaaS products in place see big gains

I’ll tell you what, transitioning from running your own business for over a decade to working at a global tech company with several hundred employees was a lot harder than I thought. I’ve learned a lot about myself in the process. And I’ve done a lot of soul searching.

But not worrying about where a paycheck is coming from does free my brain up a bit to work on my podcasts, videos, and side projects (like redesigning this blog). I’m hoping to be a bit more consistent with writing here, too.

Some other life updates;

We went from Louisville to Spokane to Nashville.
I’m restarting my Higher Ed Hot Takes podcast as a video pod. If you missed it while I wasn’t writing to you, check it out. They are short episodes.
Playing around with Claude and I built this little listening autobiography from my last.fm history and Discogs record collection. It’s fun.
Ron Bronson and I started a book club podcast in 2025, and I think we’re bringing it back. I love getting to apply my media theory skills.

Cheap, fast, or good?

2024-02-22T00:00:00Z

The old adage goes, “You get what you pay for.”

When it comes to working with agencies or contractors, I think that’s especially true. I get a bit angry looking at the landscape of buzzwords tied to products or lowball bids from glorified keyboard jockeys all aimed at convincing smart people there’s an affordable, quick fix to the problems.

No place does this make me angrier than in the higher ed web space. Small colleges and universities nationwide — from career colleges to four-year privates — get targeted all the time. Whether it’s a new AI chatbot promising to fix their lead issues or a web firm saying they can build a WordPress site for around $10,000, higher ed gets swindled out of its money on a routine basis.

Cheap is cheap

Let’s talk web projects. At Bravery, we’re not the most expensive player in town, but we are priced fairly and make decent margins on our work. We also practice value-based pricing because we know our work performs. When Bravery does a website redesign or a performance audit, there will be positive results.

I recently joined a mandatory pre-bid conference (hey, procurement offices. Stop doing that.) where over 80 agencies joined. The vast majority were companies that don’t work in higher ed, many of which were not US-based. I can only imagine the undervalued bids the procurement office had to sift through, wasting a few dozen hours that could have been spent developing better stewardship policies.

As we’re working toward launching SpeedyU, our higher ed website performance database, I’ve been reminded of the small colleges across the Midwest that decided to hire local design shops to build their websites, probably for around $20,000. Their websites are slow to load, have accessibility issues, and certainly do not reinforce the image that you’ll receive a quality education from the institution.

This is a matter of priorities. When the cheap website performs like a cheap website, they turn to dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into a media buying agency that is only concerned with the administrative fees they charge on top of the ad spend. CPLs are low, but why are they still facing dwindling enrollment?

Garbage in, garbage out

Maybe they should try live chat on the website. Never mind that they can’t afford enough admissions staff to service all the chat requests in a timely manner. The solution? AI chatbots! Right?

Except the cheap website’s slipshod information architecture is confusing, and there is no formal content strategy to speak of. Did you know chatbots are trained on your existing website’s content? Did the vendor tell you that? Did they explain that chatbots don’t make your content better?

Don’t fall for predators

One simple truth is at play: you get what you pay for. Sometimes, you can pay a little less and get immense value (hi, we’d like to work with you), but there is a floor. A college website for less than $80,000? LOL. Did you want applicants with that?

A silver-bullet “personalization” feature? How about a chatbot? Or a carousel? Or a campus map? Just don’t expect any attributable return on your investment.

Spending where it counts

One of the biggest challenges for colleges and universities in the U.S. is spending money where it will make a difference. Cutting through the paid advertising noise and vendor calls to determine if that money is ever coming back takes some knowledge.

Not every vendor or agency cares enough to make sure what they give you makes a difference for your brand. Look at all the M&A (that’s mergers and acquisitions) games being played across the big agency space in higher ed right now. Sure, I want to make some money from the services we offer at Bravery, but I’m not looking to get rich at the expense of mediocre work and my clients’ reputations.

Do we pitch above our weight sometimes? Yes. It’s how my work has grown in stature and performance. We have to stretch. But Bravery will never put something out there that I wouldn’t put my name to.

When you spend money on quality, you see the value fast. When you cheap out, you will end up dumping more money down the drain to try and fix it later.

Stewardship rests in longevity first. You might even get some quick wins if you pick the right investment.

Forget not the outcome

2023-05-12T00:00:00Z

People are forgetful.

I was a Communication major in college, so you’d think I would remember this simple truth. And the thing is, time makes people more forgetful.

Thinking back on past work projects that have gone over schedule, there has inevitably been a challenging conversation that has to happen to get things back on track. Every time I’ve had one of those conversations, there’s inevitably a question that was answered months ago. They’ve just forgotten the answer.

And it’s my fault. We’re not doing a good enough job of reiterating the why of the project. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day strategy and execution, but it’s clearly important that we center our meetings and conversations around common goals.

During a website redesign project, clients tend to think about the deliverable as the goal when that launched site is really just a tool—redesigning a university website “just because” isn’t a good reason to spend that money. You need that site to affect your outcomes.

You need new inquiries and applicants. You need better SEO placement. You need increased engagement. You need emotional responses. A new website is a thing—it’s not the outcome.

Reframing deliverables to be about results might be the key. Sure, you’ll get a new site, but the deliverable isn’t HTML, CSS, JavaScript, content docs, and Figma files. It’s that increase in conversion. It’s that jump in revenue. It’s that housing crunch you haven’t experienced in a while.

Think of it this way. When someone buys a vineyard, the goal isn’t to plant the vines so they can look at them. A lot of work goes into clearing the land, tilling the soil, analyzing the minerality and composition of the dirt, and choosing the right grape varietals.

When those vines are planted, the vintner doesn’t stop and relax. They know the job isn’t done. The vines, the fruit, and the land are a constant reminder of their goal — to harvest, press, ferment, age, and enjoy the (literal) fruits of their labor.

It’s the same with a new website or marketing campaign. (Ugh, can we go back to the vineyard?)

And I have to be more diligent, personally, in framing it that way. Non-strategists tend to see the object as the result and forget about why the object is there in the first place.

On the flip side, the faster we get that object live and working, the less re-explaining needs to be done.

Because people are forgetful.

Moving on ain't so bad

2022-10-25T00:00:00Z

In 2012 my wife and I packed up our townhouse in the north Chicago 'burbs and took a two-day drive to central Texas. I had decided to start Bravery Media, and Austin was the place where, according to Google, anyway, all the young people were moving.

Austin’s been a good home. We’ve made so many friends, grown as people, and stretched our understanding of life. I learned to bake bread, make pizza, and appreciate wine. I went to countless concerts and have hosted more friends in our small spaces than anywhere else I’ve lived. I built a business from a few freelance clients to three full-time employees and work we can be proud of.

It has also been a place of challenge and heartbreak. We lost our pup here to kidney failure and weathered a rocky point in our marriage. There were slow business years and friendships that drifted away.

Transitions like these are often bittersweet, but after a decade, it’s time for the Goodmans to push on to the next adventure: Louisville, Kentucky.

Folks who have lived in Austin or visit frequently will tell you it’s a town of transition. When we first moved here, it felt like a vacation. No doubt that was partially due to coming from a hyper-stressful work situation to the land of work-life balance.

An Austin Beerworks delivery van is parked next to what was about to open as Bufalina Pizza, circa 2013.

I remember working out of Capital Factory before it was officially open. We’d walk around downtown for lunch, dropping into taco trailers. Austin felt full of possibility, remarkably great food, and an energy we hadn’t really experienced before. And I’ve been proud of this city, despite being in the middle of a giant state with inequitable politics and hateful people in power.

But one day we woke up out of the COVID pandemic and didn’t recognize our city. The house across the street from us that couldn’t sell for $620,000 four years prior had been bought for $1.2M by a family from Los Angeles and was back on the market for $1.5M. Our neighbors, primarily legacy Black families who had owned their property for years, were being forced out by these out-of-towners. The house we’ve rented for 8 years is, as Jessica puts it, returning to the earth. But the rent keeps going up and at this rate it doesn’t make sense to try and buy property here.

If you follow me on Instagram you’ve seen our latest experiences in dining around town. We try to be the best guests when going out because hospitality is a hard job and the best experiences are cooperative. But when you walk out of a James Beard-nominated restaurant in Austin, TX with a $700 bill for four people, that meal had better be one of the best in town. And it wasn’t.

I never thought I'd get to see Mineral live and then I saw them six times in five months. Even better, Chris Simpson lived in our neighborhood.

The Silicon Valley-ization of Austin has led to lower standards. Some of our favorite places have closed, not because they weren’t doing well, but simply to cash out on the ludicrous value of the properties they bought in 2009. But when new spots open up, they’re all about influencer culture with no substance. It’s sad. All that promise and potential ended up in a capitalistic-consumption wonderland of mediocrity.

That’s not to say it’s all bad.

This is not a love letter

Most of what I’ll miss about Austin are the people and our favorite places. I’ll miss Lazarus Brewing, Bufalina Pizza, Nickel City, and Greater Goods Coffee. I’ll miss Trent & Liz, Marcus & Faith, Steven and Rania and all the Bufalina staff. I’ll miss Chuck, Eric, Bryce, and the Austin Tottenham Hotspur Supporters Club — but I won’t miss Mister Tramps, the bar we’ve gathered at for the past 10 years. I’ll miss talking with Matty B about his next pop-up idea and critiquing the new F&B places in town. I’ll miss Dan and Amanda and Travis. I’ll miss BOGO burger night and 2nd Tuesday steak night at Nickel.

I’ll especially miss all of the Lazarus staff. They’ve become close friends and I’ve spent so many hours learning about them and feeling their incredible hospitality. Austin has some gems and those people are the best of the best.

This is obviously not a love letter to Austin. We’ve had a complicated relationship the past few years, and I’m exhausted trying to keep up financially with the market here. But ten years is a long time to be committed to a place. Second only to where I grew up, Austin is where I’ve spent the most of my time on earth.

And I’m ready to say, “so long for now.”

Trouble Bar is the whiskey bar of our dreams in Shelby Park, Louisville.

The next chapter

Louisville, Kentucky today feels like Austin in 2012. Maybe a little before 2012. In Austin, to do anything, you need a couple of investors and a few million dollars in capital. Louisville is not that. The pace is slower. There’s a lot of whiskey. The food scene sleeps on the national stage but gets its fair share of James Beard nods. The music is chef’s kiss if you’re into bluegrass, but there’s also a cool metal, emo, and indie scene.

It’s a college town with at least eight institutions in town and several more nearby in Indiana.

We’re lucky to be moving with close friends from Austin, and this move is the easiest ever because we’re moving into their furnished house (they have another one) for the first bit while we get our bearings. I’m excited for a new adventure. I’m excited to get on top of the debt we’ve built up during slow business years. And I cannot wait to dig into the local hospitality scene.

By the way, we have a guest room. If you’re passing through Louisville, gimme a shout.

Working harder, not smarter

2022-03-15T00:00:00Z

As I’m coming up on the 10th anniversary of leaving my last university job, moving to Austin, TX, and starting Bravery Media, I’ve been laser-focused on pulling together what I’ve learned the past decade. So it feels a bit strange to just now be writing down a truth about the higher education industry that I’ve been talking about for years. I may have even talked about it on a Thought Feeder episode or two.

The super-smart folks at SimpsonScarborough recently published their Higher Ed CMO study results. One of the points that I found especially interesting was the breakdown of marketing budgets in the industry. Specifically, institutions allocate 56% of their marketing budgets toward labor compared to only 25% at mainstream corporations. Or, to put it another way, corporations spend 9x more on marketing tech than universities.

There’s a stigma that the work we do for colleges and universities is somehow inferior or incomparable to that done in the wider private sector. Never mind that we manage multimillion-dollar brands, sell a product that costs the same or more than a car, and share the same target markets as lifestyle brands competing for the same attention. But then those numbers come out, and it makes me think.

Marketing inefficiency

So let’s break this down a bit. It’s widely accepted that salaries in higher ed are low. The expectation is that we’ll find mission-driven people who believe in the cause. And to be quite honest, that was true for decades. The brilliant web and digital community I found when joining the industry in 2007 stuck around because, despite the monetary compensation, they felt like they were making some sort of difference.

Then competition heated up. Colleges no longer compete just with each other. Instead, we compete with companies providing their own certifications, alternative education routes, edutainment companies like MasterClass, and the discourse that higher education is overpriced and worthless. Heck, some residential programs compete with their own university’s online programs (or, at worst, their OPM vendor).

All of this created more work. We need more content; we need a better website; we need more recruitment outreach; we need more video! And on and on and on. And while some institutions have the leadership in place to think intelligently and strategically about solutions, most of those CMOs and SVPs are hamstrung by antiquated hiring practices, low budgets (SimpScar found higher ed invests 4x less in marketing overall), and small salaries.

Most institutions try to solve this work output problem by hiring more people. It doesn’t matter that in most cases, the foundations for effective marketing are crumbling. Adding more people to the team means more output. But the cycle never ends.

The crux of this is that lower salaries limit the talent pool. With a lot of higher ed’s talent leaving for private and public sector work, institutional demand for talent is urgently increasing while budgets stay the same. So, in the end, entry-level or just plain mediocre talent is acquired. And that doesn’t even consider whether the best positions are being created.

To flatten or not to flatten

There are options, of course. I’ve been in the industry long enough to see the operational cycles that grip higher ed. When the economy is good, we try to verticalize our marketing operations; when it’s bad, we flatten out. Anecdotally, most MarTech put in place serves website and social media content development. Maybe a new CRM is purchased. But primarily, institutions don’t have the expertise to generate the insights they need.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a university’s core competencies lately. Presidents are usually academically inclined (there are exceptions, of course) and rely on their staff to do the operational side of the business. But how does an institution know how to hire effectively for those positions?

In my opinion, there are a couple key areas that an institution could outsource and get better value while integrating their marketing operations.

1. Website infrastructure and performance

First up is the website. IT services can be better applied to internal-facing digital applications rather than maintaining web servers. Cloud hosting has already made substantial headway in higher ed, but let’s take that further.

I’ll also remind you of higher ed’s slow page speed epidemic, committee-designed websites, and just general awareness about how much more valuable the .edu website could and should be to the institution’s recruitment process. But unfortunately, modern web performance optimization isn’t a core competency for most universities. But shout out to Erik Runyon for being one of the few brilliant exceptions.

I think outsourcing the infrastructural management of the site, including hosting, web page speed optimization, and accessibility QA, while a very different operational shift, can provide enormous value. Reassign or (gasp) say goodbye to technical web staff and find a partner who will work with your marketing team to finely tune your website. [insert plug for Bravery, because we’re doing this already]

2. Data analytics and testing

Most institutions can’t afford to staff a data analytics team, have no idea how to do it, or both. They no doubt have analytics on their site and maybe run Slate or Salesforce or Hubspot, but their marketing staff hired to do content or design or development get tasked with figuring out what all that data means.

In the end, what a university marketing team needs most is actionable, data-informed insights. So find a partner who will put the right web-focused MarTech in place, parse the data coming in, and provide timely insights into how your website performs. Even better if they’re also your design team, web optimization management team, and testing team.

Combined with outsourcing your web infrastructure, an institution could get the expertise of both data analytics and technical web teams at the cost of 2-3 full-time employees and make subscriptions to 3rd party tools like Gather Content, SiteImprove, and a web CMS superfluous. The right partner, producing results, will quickly generate a lot of new revenue for the institution. [I’ve got something up my sleeve if you’re interested in this.]

Making it work

Deploying more tech isn’t necessarily the answer. In fact, if you don’t have the staffing to understand what the tech is telling you in the first place, it’s for sure not the answer. And in most cases, putting a new CMS or “Digital Experience Platform” in place is the wrong way to be thinking about it.

Higher ed needs more marketers who can inventively communicate your brand promise, deploy strategies across campus, and unify the community. The bolt-on work that happens due to organizational silos and limited budgets is increasingly showing its cracks. But we don’t need to blow the whole thing up — we just need to get back to working smarter.

Throwback: On flight

2022-02-24T00:00:00Z

Note: This is a piece I wrote on March 26, 2013. It’s an oldie but one that means a lot to me. I hope you enjoy it.

I grew up around airplanes. As a kid I thought the coolest thing ever was that my dad was a pilot and some of my earliest memories are set in Chino, CA at the Chino airport, inside of my dad’s hangar. He flew for his uncle’s hotel business but the planes felt like our own since he also cared for them and maintained them. I would often go to work with him and the smell of jet fuel (and the occasional scent of cows from the nearby dairy farms) worked its way into that pool of scents that trigger vivid emotional memory in me. And I like it that way.

When I was younger he would let me “fly the plane” — he would let me sit in the co-pilot’s seat and hold onto the yoke while he gently pulled back or pushed forward to keep the plane level and on course. The huge and heavy headset smelled like warm leather and had a hard time staying on my small head. But my dad’s voice would crackle through the cups as he spoke with air traffic control, reciting our vessel’s identifiers and stating our current altitude and direction.

I once read a book about the history of commercial flight in America called Flying Across America. This story lauded the grandeur and nobility of those first aviators. And when we think about those early symbols used to advertise travel by air we recognize the created persona of a square-jawed man in a suit and cap, ready to face the wild blue yonder and protect his precious human cargo, bringing them safely to their final destination. That gravitas may have lost a good bit of its worth in American culture today, but I’ve known that wonder and pride in the aviator I grew up with. If ever I thought of my dad as a hero it would certainly be in this form.

Tonight I am on American Airlines flight 2211 flying from DFW to PDX. The S80 we’re in feels tired but not rickety like some Airbusses I’ve ridden in. It’s about one in the morning Central time and many of the passengers are asleep, including my wife who is sitting in the window seat next to me. We’ve passed bright cities with thousands of orange and yellow dots glowing up from the surface, piles of snow on mountaintops, and thick layers of cloud below us. It’s fairly peaceful for a change, and perhaps it’s just because we’re flying at night for the first time in a long time, but the four hours of flight time isn’t driving me completely stir crazy.

I’ve always loathed commercial flight. My dad flew smaller prop and turboprop airplanes and we would often tag along on work trips, taking family vacations while he was transporting his uncle or going to pick someone up in Branson, Sacramento, Moses Lake… we didn’t have to worry about security screenings, just how much baggage we stowed. No lines, either. Just climbing aboard the Commander or the Merlin, and settling in for a gentle flight.

People always talk about how they hate small planes. I love them. I don’t understand those averse feelings — a larger plane is a lot more weight to fall out of the sky. They’re not more or less safe than flying in a small plane. I only recollect one scary instance in a small plane. I must’ve been eight years old, or maybe ten. And I believe my dad and I were in the Cardinal, a small six-seater plane (including pilot and copilot). I don’t remember if anyone else was in the plane, but I was sitting right-seat next to my dad when we hit a pocket of air. It had been a windy afternoon anyway but in this instance I remember seeing the ground out of the front windscreen and a massive bump. But that’s it. A lackluster description? Perhaps. But it’s been pushed out by so many great memories of flying with my dad.

One of the best parts about regional airports and flying on smaller planes are those great diners that the old flight guys gather at on Saturday mornings. You’ll no doubt find an ex-Air Force pilot or two in there, recalling flights they had as younger men. Weathered and kind old men who love seeing a young’n light up when they tell their stories. Over greasy eggs and bacon and bad coffee the young pilots mix with the old, accepting the legacy from the wizened fly boys’ stories, and passing them on to their kids. Those places always have the best onion rings, too.

When you step back and think about it, travel by flight is a pretty big deal. We’ve lived with it for so long and it’s become so commonplace that nearly everyone has flown at least once in their lives. And because so many of us don’t give it a second thought, I wonder if the excitement and weight that I felt as a child still exists for those who are taking their first voyage aboard a jetliner. I hope so.

Because really, human flight is amazing. For centuries people dreamed of making it happen. da Vinci even tried his hand at a flying machine. It took thousands upon thousands of hours of human thought to finally get it right, to finally create something that would allow men to take to the air and escape their troubles on the ground. And when we think of it that way, it becomes more than just a train ride through the air like the early airlines tried to sell it as. Indeed, it becomes a kind of hope held out to those who need it. It becomes a symbol of overcoming all obstacles. It becomes a penultimate achievement of ingenuity and will. We push off from the unforgiving soil we’ve lived on for so long, and find new escape, a new adventure, and new courage in the air.

I’ve flown a lot in my life. I’ve flown in small planes all over this country. I’ve taken larger planes to England, to Hungary, to Portugal, and as a small child, to Indonesia. And though I’ve experienced it so many times, that initial rise of the craft, the kick of the landing gear going up, and the whoosh of our ascent always reminds me of my dad, of a great childhood, of exploring the airport and seeing the project planes with their owners working on them, of airshows and diners…It reminds me of how blessed I am. And it reminds me that I am a traveler at heart.

Meditations out of the pivot

2022-02-14T00:00:00Z

Sometimes I feel like I’ve had a thousand ideas for great businesses, tech products, or podcasts but have just mistimed it all. Either I’m way too early or I can’t put the right people-pieces in place to make the whole thing come to fruition. It’s a frustrating existence that I know I share with more than a few other people. We hustle and hope that eventually one of them will just hit.

There have been a couple of times in my life where I’ve been able to start on one of those ideas, line up prospective customers, get branding set, and have an excellent team surrounding me. Invariably, it seems, something happens to derail things. At this point, I should pause and thank my friends out there that have been on those journeys with me.

At the end of 2019, I had one of those chances. I put a call out on Twitter, got a small group together, and started University Insight. The makeup of that team has changed since then and despite having lined up some interested partners, validated the concept with some of my own trusted industry friends, we just couldn’t push it over the line. University Insight had to pivot or remain stalled out. We left our first idea to rest while I focused on refocusing.

For me, the real emotional challenge is what happens when those orphaned ideas and half-built moments of brilliance sit stagnant until someone else picks up on the market need and turns it into a viable offering. Sure, I’ve pivoted, but have I really moved on?

Each idea I have feels personal. I wrestle with them, looking at every possible outcome, every strategy. They are a part of me. Maybe that feels a bit melodramatic but I think a piece of me always assumes I’ll work my way back to building on those past thoughts. There’s no real moving on, just a pause and a nagging feeling that something was left undone.

We can’t follow every rabbit trail and build every great idea. But what’s the salve for knowing you had a great idea but someone else will get the recognition for it? How do founders and “ideas people” disassociate that part and stay focused?

In some ways I think it’s best that I’ve always been a background person, pulling the strings and making things happen. I like to say I don’t need the recognition, but internally I feel different. I want to be known for doing great work, having great ideas, and having created something meaningful for the better. It’s in the liminal spaces where I need to calm my mind and focus on what’s next.

And what’s next for me, for Bravery, and for University Insight is really exciting.

Unlocking the Enneagram

2021-03-24T00:00:00Z

In the scope of things, my time with the Enneagram has been short. Considering it has existed in society in one form or another for several centuries (some think perhaps as far back as Pythagoras), my five years reading about and working to understand the Enneagram is pretty tiny. But because I’ve seen it popping up again in more professional spaces, I want to share what I’ve learned.

https://twitter.com/josieahlquist/status/1371298185637810177

What is the Enneagram?

Oof. This is a big question. Let’s start with this. The Enneagram is not a personality sorter.

Most of us have taken the Meyers-Briggs (MBTI), StrengthsFinder, or other personality sorters that tell us about ourselves. They all come with pseudo-scientific surveys that place attributes on you based on how you answer their questions. These are big-business and have only been around for the past 100 years or so.

The Enneagram is so much more than a personality sorter. Where most of these tools tell you what you are, the Enneagram helps you realize what your core tendencies are — good and bad — and then invites you to do the work to become someone more whole.

So, where do we start? First off, we need to understand what the Enneagram is and how to approach it. And while it does share the reductive qualities of classifying our behaviors into a limited number of types, there are some differences from your typical sorters.

The basic gist is this. Everyone has one of nine types. While you may see character traits in multiple types, the goal is to recognize the one that is the most like yourself. This is because the Enneagram takes into account the crossovers in various patterns of behavior. The more “scientific” personality sorters give you a combination of attributes — 5 core strengths (even though everyone has all of them) or 4 types in your character index — the Enneagram doesn’t because it’s not concerned with telling you what you are.

Actually, the Enneagram wants you to discover who you are. Remember how I said it’s not a scientific framework? Ever taken the Enneagram test and been tied for certain types? When I first started on this journey, I did. And coming from an academic background, I didn’t understand why I needed to choose. But the Enneagram is more closely tied to the ancient mystics.

Did I lose you? I hope not.

The Enneagram Diagram

Figuring out your Type

To be truthful, figuring out your Type can be difficult. The best way to start is to read about each Type. Then decide which one sounds the most like yourself. If you get stuck, the various tests out there can be helpful. But as I told my friend Mallory, these tests are just one piece of information.

The true power of the Enneagram is in its potential to change your life. The whole point of this, from my perspective, is to recognize the core tendencies or behaviors you have, why you have them, and whether they are helpful or not. From there, you can find balance and personal growth to be who you want. There are two sides to every coin, and each Type has a good (healthy) side and a not-so-good (unhealthy) side.

For instance, I am a Type 8. Eights are often perceived (and recognized) as being angry, dominating, and powerful. In our default state, we seek power to insulate and protect ourselves. If you look at that chart up a bit, you’ll notice the Eight has lines connecting it to the Two and the Five. When Eights are healthy, we integrate to a Type 2 — we become caring and use our power to protect those that need it. When we’re unhealthy, we disintegrate to a Type 5 where we become closed off, detached, and dismissive of other people’s feelings.

We are always on a spectrum between healthy and unhealthy, and the goal is to recognize that and find stability.

Where do you land? If you can recognize the difference in your behavior when you’re stressed out versus when everything is excellent, that can help you figure out your Type.

Mistyping

One of the more common things to happen when using the Enneagram is mistyping — thinking you (or someone else) is one Type when you are really another. While I’d like to blame the tests for this, I know it’s been a challenge for a very long time. And this underscores why it’s so important to have an open mind at the beginning of your journey. Really be open and vulnerable with yourself.

When I first started looking at the Enneagram, I also took a test. And I was so confused. I was tied for Type Eight and Type Five, and a few others were close by. But I was also very stressed out by work at the time, and I was a little skeptical of this whole new “personality sorter” because I was perfectly happy with StrengthsFinder, thank you. I could’ve easily mistyped myself as a Five. Friends who didn’t know much about the Enneagram could’ve easily mistyped me as a Five or something else.

The trouble is that you then start to look at your life and your behavior patterns through a distorted lens, and everything becomes more confusing until you either realize you were mistyped or do something worse like blow up a job or a relationship. This happens. I’ve heard stories through Enneagram counselors and trainers.

But it also points to the importance of not typing others. I’ve heard one Enneagram trainer call this “the ultimate party foul” — you start learning about the Types and think you know your stuff, so you type all your friends. And yeah, it can be fun, but it can also cause some damage.

First, you may have mistyped your friend, and they’ll start this journey thinking they’re one thing when they’re really another. But worse, you’ve deprived them of the start of their journey. They haven’t been properly introduced to the Enneagram or dug in deep enough to understand the different Types.

My wife and I have been studying this long enough to be pretty good at typing people. But we’re careful to keep it to ourselves unless asked, and even then, we want the person to discover it for themselves.

What society gets wrong

The biggest mistake people make with the Enneagram is in using it as an excuse for their bad behavior. “Oh, I’m just angry all the time because I’m an Eight” is not a good excuse for hurting people. I’ve learned this and done the internal work to keep that in check. Do I still blow up on occasion? Definitely, but I’m not making excuses for myself.

Type 7s can be easily distracted, always wanting the next thing. This doesn’t mean it’s an excuse to leave someone high and dry because something more interesting walked by.

And I think that’s the point. The Enneagram isn’t a box that you’re trapped in. It’s a lightbulb that lets you see the pain, trauma, and circumstances that made you put up this coping mechanism to protect yourself while showing you ways to grow and develop mastery over those behaviors.

Yes, it can help us recognize the core motivations and fears of others around us, too, but the real power is in knowing our true selves better. And maybe at that point, we can be empathetic with our colleagues and friends while trying to help them recognize they are not stuck either.

So much more

The Enneagram is deep and wide, and this post is just the basics. I recommend picking up a book about it. If you have a faith practice or consider yourself at all spiritual, I can recommend a few good books to check out. I’d be careful about taking too seriously all the Instagrams and fluffy things that popped up over the past couple of years. They’re fun but very surface-level.

I do recommend checking out the Sleeping At Last podcast and their episodes on the nine types. The first one is linked in this post for you.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0ooZAawht1dOswH9c7osMu?si=tNXHwIH4R6WqIe_i5eAqDw

And if you ever want to talk, let me know. I love nerding out on this stuff.

How do you like the new look of my newsletter and website? I left Substack after the recent (March 2021) news that they are actively giving space to authors that spew transphobic views and other hateful rhetoric. I don’t want to be supporting a platform like that, and they don’t deserve whatever data of yours they were collecting from my newsletter. This is now totally owned and managed by me.

Higher ed's slow page speed epidemic

2021-03-04T00:00:00Z

I love seeing new redesigns launch in higher ed, or at least I want to love it. There’s my initial excitement to see something new, but that’s normally immediately tamped down when I head over to Google’s Page Speed Insights or pop open Lighthouse in my browser’s dev tools. That’s when the excitement abruptly ends and frustration takes over.

With what it costs both financially and in terms of human energy to redesign a college or university website those scores should be great, and they never are. Why do I care about this so much?

The thing is, quick load times aren’t just a “nice to have” feature on your site. Slow website speeds contribute to a lot of the problems higher ed complains about day-in and day-out. If you’re spending a couple hundred grand or more on a redesign, it needs to work for you, not against you.

I run a small agency and I don’t trash talk the big competition because I know lots of great people at those agencies and they are very smart. But select any of the big agencies in higher ed. Go to their website and find the latest project they launched. Then go to Google Page Speed Insights and drop that university’s URL in. I’ll wait…

So, what are some of the consequences of your slow website?

Poor conversion rates

People expect websites to load quickly and there’s plenty of data that shows the majority of web users will bounce as loading times pass the 3-second mark. In some sectors, that bounce rate is 48% or higher. And it gets worse when we get down to expectations on a phone.

A slow website that’s causing high initial bounce rates is just like cutting your university off at the knees. You’re not leaving money on the table, you’re slamming a door in your visitor’s face. They don’t get a chance to convert because they don’t even make it through the door.

Reduced search engine rankings

Sure, you may own the keywords for your particular institution’s name + program offerings, but our industry is only getting more competitive. That lead may not be around forever as your competitors start offering similar programs or as the big online players move in.

Google takes into account site speed when determining your ranking. There are a bunch of different metrics it looks at including the payload your site is delivering on first load. Erik Runyon (👋🏼 Erik) and I have been chatting about the large payloads newly designed university sites are delivering and it’s pretty disheartening. 8MB, 14MB, even into the 20MB+ range.

But everyone has to have that big video background, right? That video does nothing to help your on-page conversion rate and almost definitely hurts your search engine rankings by slowing down your site.

Harmful user experience

This is the biggie for me. I tend to view slow websites as an accessibility issue. Web accessibility is an inclusive field of work and study. When your website is slow, you’re ignoring the prospective student that lives in a rural area, or only has the internet on their phone, or only has a dial-up connection, sometimes. And what sort of message does that send about your institutional values?

Site speed optimization as hospitality

I’ve written before about living hospitality in everything we do. A posture of hospitality has to be active. Being hospitable is a choice we make. It’s about not stopping at being empathetic, but acting upon that empathy with kindness.

When redesigning a website, we should never stop at what looks good to internal stakeholders. Nice-looking is subjective, inclusivity is not. It pains me that so many institutions pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to redesign their website to end up with something that performs so poorly. It hurts because I’ve never encountered someone in higher education who is purposefully trying to cause harm to prospective students or the institution. Sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know.

But that leaves us with a challenge. Who takes responsibility? To my mind, the blame is shared, but the agency — chosen to be the expert consultant on the project — bears the brunt. Their responsibility is to communicate how bad choices impact the institution’s reputation and bottom line. Maybe the agencies that let these poorly optimized sites out into production do that. I don’t know. I’m not in the room.

Regardless, it’s an agency’s responsibility to do as much as possible to make that website a success when it goes live. Do no harm. Slow websites only do harm. Code needs to be optimized, frameworks need to be ditched, images need to be properly sized and deferred, CSS and JavaScript need to be used with efficiency in mind. Put a CDN in place.

The past two years Bravery has been doing a lot more consulting around conversion rate optimization (CRO) and this is the low-hanging fruit we find on every project. It truly is an epidemic. We’re working on a few ways to combat this, so look for that soon.

In the meantime, the next time you’re looking to redesign your website, ask for the Lighthouse scores for that agency’s last five projects. Keep site speed in your mind as something that affects your website’s accessibility. A fast loading site is a kindness that directly affects the institution’s efficacy.

Note: I love doing optimization work and do it a lot. If you know of an institution that needs help with this, send them my way! We’ve been helping a wide range of colleges and universities improve their conversion rate, application pool, and deposited student rate for years. And the next time you start planning a redesign, consider budgeting extra for a code and optimization review with Bravery after launch. Think of it like an insurance policy for your expensive web redesign.

Throwback: On music [memory]

2021-02-10T00:00:00Z

Note: I’m going to revisit some past writings every once in a while. This essay was originally written and published exactly eight years ago on Feb 10, 2013.

I often heard my mouth saying and saw my fingers typing this statement:

“I love music because of its memory.”

I’ve written it down again and though my memory has lessened over the years, there’s no doubt in this mind that my own love for musical artistry is rooted in its ability to capture and store entire memories within the confines of three to five minutes and that upon listening to several simple bars [I spend too much time // Chasing windmills] we are transported through time and space and sight and smell back to a state so vivid we can’t help but fall back in love with the song.

In the old days, I had a playlist of songs that moved me–that’s what I called it too, “Songs that Move Me”–and it consisted of what I thought were moody songs, often matched up with rainy days [and Mondays always get me down…] and melancholy. But more than tonality and mood, these songs tugged at my mind and brought to the surface people and places, scents and temperatures, and a gamut of feelings long since forgotten.

I closely tie, for instance, Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American to hot summers in the desert [So come on Davey // Sing me something that I know] with friends. And those summers are tied to freedom and the thought of the unknown. The frivolous naiveté that became eternally fused to those brilliant tracks has stuck with me so that whenever I hear the record, I can’t help but throw my hands up, sing at the top of my lungs, and unabashedly rock out.

I wrote this narcissistic little number on 5 April 2007:

Do you remember how good Bleed American was? I listened to it today for the first time in forever – probably a year or two. I remember how cool I was coming to college with the music I listened to, and how no one else was into emo or indie, or underground music. Armed with an arsenal of CDs and a broad knowledge of how the emo and post-emo movements started, I felt great.

Do you remember when all of that ended? When everyone knew who Death Cab for Cutie was and when you weren’t cool if you hadn’t heard of Ryan Adams? Elitism is great because you can disregard all of these people if you can still bring up a band that no one’s heard of. But I miss the feeling of being included in a small group of people who know.

I’m on my feet, I’m on the floor, I’m good to go…

Just listen to that record again. Even before you dig out Clarity again. Put the disc in your car, crank up “A Praise Chorus,” and sing along like you used to.

When winter rolls around I most often think of Ghosts by Sleeping at Last. I remember listening to this record while sitting in my dorm room at college in Southern Illinois. The snow was just stopping… we had gotten nearly a foot and it was interterm which meant very few people were on campus. I grabbed my new digital camera and walked around campus with a friend of mine who had grown up in Germany. I got back to my room shortly after and turned up this album.

We could hold our breath forever // Or maybe for a while // The best will surely come // Until then you’ll feel nothing // Until then we’ll feel nothing at all

Next is Start Here by The Gloria Record. That album reminds me of cold and winter, but also of broken relationships and a little heartache. Time heals all wounds to the point where certain tracks [I was born in Omaha // To steal her skeptic heart // My piano fingers tugging at the chord] bring a faint memory and a healthy touch of warm melancholy to mind. I love that record for far more reasons that a little pain. Its incredibly deep and knowing songwriting makes me want to write and write well. I feel many songs are written in the vein of Mineral’s EndSerenading–and why shouldn’t they be since they both come from the brain of Chris Simpson—[Why am I so deaf at twenty-two // To the sound of the driving snow // that drives me home to you], a constant favorite in my collection of musical memories.

There was this night during the first semester of college where I had just put the finishing touches on a song called “9–27”. Several of my good friends at the time had collaborated with me on it. As all freshmen with guitars do, I played it for a few people. This night was strange. The muggy heat of the summer rolled back through town, it was around eleven at night. I emerged from my building to find the thickest layer of fog I’d ever stood in covering the campus.

A strong glow of orange enveloped me as the beams from the campus lighting refracted a million times through the thick blanket of water vapor. I sat down on the bench–an act which, a year later, would be coined ’stooping’–and sat in quiet warmth. Today I’m not even sure what it was I was thinking about though I remember being a little bit sad. Perhaps for me, it was due to a month of uncomfortable strain. I was a stranger when I stepped on campus and I was working hard to invent myself as who I wanted to be. That’s not to say I was playing a game or putting up a façade, not at all. I was trying to actually be the best version of me I could be. And maybe that’s why the song is the way it is. And maybe that’s why the memory sticks out so brilliantly in my mind.

There’s such raw emotion in those songs I love to listen to… or, at the very least, these tracks each pull out of me an emotional twinge that I sometimes forget I ever had. And that may be the point of this musing: I’m afraid I will forget the pain, the joy, the incredible times I have had with friends old and new. At the end of the year, I’m always a little annoyed that I am expected to have listened to all of the new music that has come out during the past three hundred and sixty-five days. I like nostalgia. I find comfort in seeing and feeling the friends I have missed for the past few years just by putting needle to groove or pressing play in iTunes. Why must I hear the new drivel some supposedly cool band has released? And if I’m honest, I know it’s because I will miss out on some great music.

During the summer I pull out Ryan Adams’ Rock n Roll and roll down my windows. [Everybody’s cool playing rock n roll // everybody’s cool playing rock n roll // I don’t feel cool, feel cool at all]. Despite its dismal critical reviews and the fact that it had several radio singles, I think the album is just raucous fun.

I remember one summer of working at OfficeMax. This particular evening we finished setting the shelves late and got out of the store around ten at night. I immediately jumped in my ’96 Ford Windstar [And everybody knows the way I walk // And knows the way I talk // And knows the way I feel about you], rolled every possible window down–albeit in that car it was only two from windows that retracted–and turned up “Wish You Were Here” on the drive home.

Fall time comes [And I guess my little bird can sing] and I immediately reach for Love Is Hell (parts I and II). First, because it’s such a perfectly fluid and deep record sonically, and second, because it fits wet weather so well. The cover of “Wonderwall” on that record is so hauntingly beautiful… it’s one of the greatest tributes to Oasis and that most famous of famous tunes. Ryan’s voice drips with overtones of Morrissey throughout the record, and I think that’s a great thing.

But before Love is Hell can play, those few days between the end of Summer and the beginning of Autumn, On a Wire by The Get Up Kids must be spun repeatedly. The album is set up so perfectly to transition out of the heat and excitement of summer into the more rational and controlled chill of fall. The romanticism of it all… [The sun will set, the stars would shine // The trees would shake, we’d all feel fine // Let’s take the moon and make it shine for everyone] this record feeds into my favorite time of year and remains one of my favorite albums of all time thus far. It reminds me of pulling into Greenville the summer before my senior year and walking into the house I was sharing with my buddy Dan. He was the one who got me into The Get Up Kids.

Music has always been central to the way I relate to people and to the world. I remember John and I talking about pre-ordering Transatlanticism around the same time we got Mae’s destination:beautiful and Copeland’s Beneath Medicine Tree. Those two albums were way more formative to me than Death Cab for Cutie’s lame offering. [Take the map and point to anywhere // I don’t care] I listened to those records non-stop. The summer before my senior year of college I even got an internship at Copeland’s record label, The Militia Group—now shuttered, but no less inspiring–and made some of the most lasting connections and friendships I ever have. [You know I won’t mind if you // monopolize all of my time // I won’t say a thing at all].

That summer at Militia taught me a lot, even if it was only 20 or so hours a week. We were doing social media marketing before it was even a real thing. We were selling out shows and merch first-runs because of Myspace posts. We were asked for input about the next Rocket Summer music video. And Chad Pearson fueled my love for alt.country by handing me a demo from The Light Wires.

I’ll send a letter // addressed to you // It says you’re my California brown and blue

Even in this town, I have three friends who are all Militia connections. [The only music // I want to hear // Is the sound of the last light that disappears] (Denison Witmer)

It’s that strange thread of musical connection and memory that continues to find me in life—connected to my wife, to old friends, to new friends. Today it reaches over wires and packets and pixels to connect me to people I’ve never met in person and keep me connected to those I don’t often get to see. I hope that I am always able to recall life through song. And I hope to create new music-memories with those I live around and alongside today.

Stands on shifting sands // The scales held in her hands // The wind it just whips her away // And fills up her brigantine sails She’ll carry on through it all // She’s a waterfall

Maybe we've misunderstood the 2020s.

2021-01-21T00:00:00Z

When COVID and a recession and everything else hit in 2020, a lot of us who work on the web got way burnt out. Working in higher ed and having a podcast, I’m privy to a lot of marketing Twitter chatter. My friend and cohost, J.S., posts a lot of good content calling out bad practices and suggesting better approaches. But when everyone got exhausted, the calls for “empathy” started.

After the seditious attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Republicans who had hinged their political prospects and careers on divisive, hate-filled rhetoric started calling for unity and healing.

The thing is, none of these people really want empathy. What they are seeking is sympathy and implicit acceptance of their actions. Best case, empathy is used as an excuse or an avoidance tactic.

Maybe this is the decade for justice rather than empathy. Many of us have spent a long time in our privilege, listening (or half-listening), making excuses for the way we do things. But our colleagues, neighbors, and friends who are marginalized have made it clear that empathy isn’t doing them any good.

One fear I have with the new White House administration is that their desire to focus on unity will come at the expense of digging out the rot. Similar things happened when Barack Obama took office. Those indiscretions helped build the ideology that fueled a Trump presidency, the re-mainstreaming of white supremacy, and the domination of conspiracy theories and misinformation.

Unity doesn’t come without justice. Lasting success doesn’t come without justice. Respect doesn’t come without justice. And justice doesn’t come without facing hard truths.

When you don’t seek justice, you enable injustice. And at some point, you become complicit in it. For instance, marketers who are told to post something that is offensive, racist, or culturally tone-deaf have a responsibility to push back. I’d go so far as to say that if they espouse values of equity, they have a duty to quit that job or be labeled alongside that content.

To lower the stakes, if you’re called out for bad practices, don’t whine about needing empathy right now. Fix the problem. Stop perpetuating things that harm others.

So what does justice look like? It’s making sure your website and social content are inclusive of all people. Optimizing your website’s speed so you can serve people in rural areas or without access to fast internet. It’s researching the cultural weight of memetics before putting out a meme that objectifies or exploits another group. It’s holding others to account when they refuse to fess up.

Empathy is often where justice starts. We can’t simply call for empathy and leave it there. Understanding the pain, joy, needs, and desires of others demands radical movement to correct and repair the broken systems, messages, and ideologies that so often harm our neighbors. Anything less is complicity.

I hope you had some rest over the holidays. Now it’s time to make some change in how we approach work, life, relationships, and civics. If you like this newsletter and know someone else who wants to read my ramblings, please share!

Momentum gained in hindsight

2020-12-31T00:00:00Z

At the risk of coming across a bit twee, I want to take a moment and condense my own thoughts on 2020 and hopes for the year to come. For posterity. And to thank each of you that read this newsletter for giving me space in your head and time in your no-doubt busy schedule. Like I did in the late 90s and early 00s, I mostly write these posts for myself, but your support in simply reading this is validating and encouraging to me. Thank you.

Twenty-twenty was the worst. I thought 2017 was a bad year for me, but 2020 took the whole cake, slammed it on the pavement, ran over it with a car, then remolded it into a cake-shape and threw it at passersby. I’m not one to wallow and am thankful I have a decently resilient disposition, but I, like so many, am ready to leave this year behind.

The problem is that the new year is an arbitrary signifier of change. New Year’s Day isn’t going to magically erase the problems we have. A day so many wait for as a figurative harbinger of progression is truly just another day. There’s a lot of wasted time waiting to begin moving forward. And maybe that’s a lesson to take to heart.

Forward motion takes a lot to get rolling. The literal realities of physics offer seeds of allegory for our life. It’s a hard slog to start moving forward, uphill, against the wind. But an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. This year brought an unbalanced force against a lot of us.

My friends in the service industry are hurting because there was no relief from risking their health every day just to pay their bills. Even worse, they saw their income dwindle as tips dried up from patrons. Restaurant, bar, and brewery owners in Texas, like many places, got little help to support their employees. I’m sad about the closures that have happened in Austin, but I ache for my friends in hospitality who continue to be overlooked and underappreciated.

In April or May (what is time?) my wife was let go from her full-time job, taking away our health insurance (which honestly wasn’t great, to begin with) along with her salary. At the same time, colleges and universities decided to stop spending money on marketing strategy. I’m happy that that is picking up, not only for my own livelihood but for the good of the industry at large.

But in having to stay home, to get creative, and to modify how we work, we’ve come out stronger and even a bit optimistic for the future. I think for all it’s hot garbage, 2020 has allowed me to set some focus on where I’m headed. And here I’ll plug my friend Seth Odell’s newsletter and his post about 10-year goals.

It’s time to start pushing again on the things we want to accomplish because it’ll take some time to build up enough inertia to counteract whatever the next unbalanced force ends up being. I’m still defining some of those things, but others are already starting to roll.

As we enter into a new year, let’s quiet the things that don’t matter and make time to be consistently moving forward the things that do. Let’s stop waiting to act; stop talking about what we’re going to do. Let’s place deeds before words.

I hope this holiday season has provided some rest and perspective for you. Thanks again for your support. I appreciate you.

A posture of hospitality

2020-12-15T00:00:00Z

This time of the year, my wife and I are usually planning Christmas festivities. We’ve been together long enough that we don’t feel the need to visit family each year. So we’ve carved out our own holiday rhythm of inviting friends over for a big Christmas Eve dinner on our back deck, and a smaller get together on Christmas Day, often with friends who don’t have anywhere else to be. This year, with a pandemic still raging fiercer each day, those traditions have been placed on pause, giving me a moment to consider the importance of hospitality.

The thing is, when I say hospitality, we immediately think of hotels or the food and beverage professions. I love these industries. The thing I miss the most from “the before times” is going to a favorite restaurant, sitting at the bar, and having a conversation with our favorite servers. When I traveled to San Diego for the better first half a year, one hotel I stayed at had put a name with my face after a few stays. For me, the unearned respect that flows from hospitality professionals is inspiring.

I think deep down, that’s what we all crave as people. We want to be seen, we want to be acknowledged, and we hope to be cared for, even just a little bit. I’ve tried to build these basic needs into how Bravery Media approaches its digital work in higher education. And I’ve found when we just reorient ourselves a little bit, we start to see things differently.

One of my favorite essays by C.S. Lewis gets to this. In “Meditation in a Toolshed” (The Coventry Evening Telegraph. July 17, 1945), Lewis is in a dark toolshed with a beam of sunlight shining through the door. There in the dark, he can see the beam, dust floating around in it. He then takes a step to his side to look along the shaft of light. It disappears, and he’s suddenly looking through the crack in the door at a world flooded with sunlight. The entirety of the outdoors is there, just one step to the side.

I’ve loved this essay for almost 20 years and yet still find myself doing these things. When we’re focused on what we want to order for dinner, do we remember that our favorite restaurant servers are struggling, perhaps even harder than we are? When we’re building websites, are we focused on how nice it looks at the expense of how quickly it’ll load for someone in a rural area with a slow Internet connection? When we pay a lot of money for a new LMS, are we thinking about how our students learn or about our business efficiencies?

This is the difference between looking at and looking along. In most cases, there are multiple ways to interpret a problem and solve it. But so often, our solutions don’t start with the very people affected. Or if they do, we’re on autopilot, letting our years of experience convince us that we already know what our friends, service staff, bartenders, retail workers, support staff, call center folks, and students need. We’re looking at a problem, we’re looking at the people affected, but until we take a step back from ourselves and step toward them to listen, we won’t truly understand how to help them.

Deep down, we just want to be respected by others. We want our time respected; we want our intelligence acknowledged. Our customers, community members, students, alumni… they all want the same thing. What would happen if we start with our audience members’ needs and build our strategies around those needs?

The more I think about higher education in the context of hospitality, the more I am convinced a posture of unearned respect and proactive care in institutional practice could change everything.

Some smaller institutions do parts of this well already. The small colleges where faculty can host students in their homes for meals during the term are a great example. And the best instructors are the ones who care about their students, their outcomes, and how best they learn. Hospitality and education go hand-in-hand if we just take one step to the side and look at it a bit differently.

This Christmas will be different for my wife and me, but I’ve realized that that hospitable side of me has to find a way out. If it isn’t through hosting friends and strangers for dinner, it’s through baking bread for someone. If it isn’t through meeting up for a beer, it comes out through random check-ins. And apparently, it manifests itself in how I think about the world.

Epilogue: I spent a long time thinking through this topic, writing and rewriting this post. My last post resonated with so many folks, I just wanted to expand on this idea of hospitality as a life practice. But I want to leave with one final thought.

One of the faith groups that we belonged to here in Austin for quite a while helped me re-orientate how I think about this topic, faith, and relationships. The quote is, “all people are inherently loveable and loved.” It’s a hard truth to internalize sometimes, but it’s profound in its simplicity. Whether you have a spiritual practice or not, I hope it resonates. This idea is the basis of social justice, societal contracts, and often the start of self-healing and forgiveness. When we can recognize that every person deserves kindness and respect as a default, simply because they share time and space with us, lots of things look different.

This is particularly hard in a politically vitriolic culture war. And I catch myself not living up to that ideal. But I’m going to keep at it, training myself to remember to leave space for other people, simply because they are here.

-JGG

Reckoning experience design in higher ed

2020-11-19T00:00:00Z

Today on Twitter, my friend Liz Gross shared a piece she wrote for Inside Higher Ed about (ostensibly) a specific TikTok meme that demonstrated what students really think about some colleges and universities. Toward the end of the piece, she writes,

Higher ed marketing leaders must recognize they no longer control their brand message (if they ever did).

Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching Mad Men again, but my mind immediately went to the classic adage, “If you don’t like what they’re saying, change the conversation.” The problem is, I think that’s happening in reverse. Higher ed generally does such a lazy job of marketing that it’s the audience who is changing the conversation. Here’s what I mean.

Colleges and universities are often so inwardly-focused when developing messaging that it comes off as disingenuous. The direct result is that students sniff out the inauthentic parts, find them lacking, share it with the world, and affect the opinions of prospects.

The self-publishing revolution that started in the late 90s/early aughts with blogging platforms and continues today with social media underscored the importance of resonant, authentic marketing for a lot of sectors. Higher ed is one that is affected more drastically by missteps simply because we fail to realize what the industry has come to be about.

This means that when we tell a story about how great our campus community is and how many educational experiences students have access to at our institution, we’d better be communicating the realities and not just what we think they are or want them to be. Aspirational marketing in higher ed works for student outcomes, but it can be harmful when used for a community or experience that doesn’t really exist.

Wait. Isn’t higher ed about education?

Yeah, definitely. Higher education is also a hospitality industry, a sales industry, and as much as faculty refuses to acknowledge it, becoming more of a commodity industry.

So think about this. The typical model of traditional undergraduate higher education has been:

Cultivate prospects -> Sell them on your brand -> Bring them to your campus -> House, feed, and provide services while they learn -> Conclude the engagement -> Hit them up for money based on an affinity you hoped was developed.

And the education side of it is, for sure, the core practice (read: product) that colleges and universities are built on. But we have to recognize a few things.

We are a hospitality industry that provides food service, lodging, and recreational programming that real people pay for. And hospitality is an active practice that must permeate every part of the experience. That means when students have to deal with grumpy registrars or a process that requires them to travel across campus to take care of something, their perception and experience are affected negatively. And experience dictates what your brand narrative is truly communicating.
Customer Experience (CX) is a required function of any service organization. A lot of institutions do a great job with admission reps and campus tour guides. That’s because they’re salespeople. They understand that the interactions prospects have with them are critical to their performance outcomes. The problem comes when students pass that matriculation mark and then have to deal with convoluted processes designed for staff convenience and comfort rather than the students’. From software (no one thinks Blackboard is intuitively designed, yet how many millions of dollars does higher ed dump into it?) to meal plan management to disjointed branding. All of these friction points add up to an overall experience. And again, experience dictates what your brand narrative is truly communicating.
Higher ed is not that special. In fact, the majority of institutions operate like any large, bureaucratically heavy organization. We could point to many reasons for this (an in-person conversation, maybe, if that’s ever a thing again). Still, the result of higher ed exceptionalism is the same as that of American exceptionalism: We become blind to the realities of what everyone else sees and convince ourselves that we’re in the right. But we’re wrong. And that affects what our students and staff experience. And experience dictates what your brand narrative is truly communicating.

The crux

To lay out the challenge differently, to effectively market a real, authentic, genuine brand, higher ed has a lot of internal work to do. We have to start thinking holistically about the student experience, the employee experience. There will always be outlier opinions that make their way to social media, but marketing something that isn’t real can be truly damaging.

Institutions don’t own their brand messaging until they truly own the experience they’re generating. The only way to know what that experience is is to listen to the folks experiencing it.

Experience design is the same anywhere. On the web, we call it User Experience; in sales, it’s called Customer Experience. They’re all connected, they all require research and listening for success, and they all have consequences.

My friend Ron Bronson has been working on a framework he’s calling Consequence Design, and I think it’s something essential. To (overly) simplify his work, Consequence Design encourages individuals to be open and transparent about their experiences and creations. It demands honesty in recognizing the micro-transgressions that are built into systems, interactions, and experiences. Because if we are sincere, we’ll recognize that the experiences created by higher ed, along with every other industry, exacerbate racial, wealth, and class disparities in our society.

Social media shakes out those disparities. When your students or customers have a platform to use, your brand had better be ready to face their criticism. What other skeletons are hidden? Colleges and universities can’t control the brand narrative until they control their own experiences. And they can’t control those experiences until they come to grips with all of the broken systems and processes built into American higher education.

I want to fix these things. I’ve always wanted to. But we need more than just me. We need an assembly of higher ed professionals committed to doing the work together. The industry needs HE pros who aren’t afraid to confront the ugly, back each other up, and work toward equitable solutions.

Thanks for reading this (long) newsletter! If you have friends or colleagues who enjoy it, I’d appreciate you passing it along to them. I’d also love to connect on LinkedIn or Twitter.

How fitness became important to me

2020-10-28T00:00:00Z

During the pandemic, I think we’ve all needed to find ways to stay mentally sharp and emotionally stable. My natural disposition is to be pretty level. It takes a lot for me to get pushed over the edge and feel truly depressed. I wrote about that a couple of posts back, too. And I’ve learned over the last two years that consistent exercise is the best balancer for my mood.

Shocker, right?

The thing is, I’ve never liked exercising. When I “played” baseball in high school (I was co-captain of the bench), conditioning was the worst. When we had to run a mile in 5th grade or junior high, I was always the last one. My best experience with fitness was my senior year of high school when I took a free weights class at the local community college to fulfill my PE credits.

Mostly I just had a fast metabolism that didn’t catch up with me until after college. I was always skinny, could eat anything, and didn’t think I needed to work out. It wasn’t until I was working stressful jobs and became sedentary in front of a computer that all of that caught up to me and I started gaining weight.

And when we moved to Austin, there was so much good food, a cocktail scene, and craft beer… but it still took six years for me to do anything about it. There were times I tried running, but I hate running. I’d take the pup out for a long walk when the weather was nice, but he’d get tired before I did. Soon, I just gave up.

In 2018 my wife found a trainer for me and he helped me shift my thinking about fitness. The way fitness is talked about in our society puts all the emphasis on weight loss and very little on actual health. Working with Colin helped me realize that building strength, improving how I move, and getting healthier were the things that would make the biggest difference to me in my daily life.

I started with training twice a week with him and an independent gym here in Austin. We did a lot of work with kettlebells, barbell deadlifts and back squats, dumbbell presses, mobility, balance, TRX, and cardio on the rower or Assault bike. We paid attention to my sleep and I started noticing how much better I performed when I got the right amount and quality of sleep. I noticed how that quality plummeted with late-night alcohol.

We also started paying attention to my diet. I thought I was decently aware of what and how much I ate but was surprised at just how many carbs were going into me, even “healthy” ones from fruit. So I started tweaking things, optimizing a bit here and there. Eating 2-3 eggs for breakfast instead of oatmeal or toast.

As I felt more in control of my diet and sleep, I gained more control over my training intensity and weight capacity. I got strong. Really. I heard from a mutual friend that Colin had described me as going from “typical tech dude to badass.” That felt good to hear. And I felt good. I was holding myself better, pushing myself harder in the gym. My clothes fit better. I slept really well.

The weird thing though. I never lost weight. I changed a lot physically but always hovered within 5lbs. And I kept bringing it up to Colin. He kept reinforcing that if I wanted to lose weight what I needed was a calorie deficit, but that health is the more important thing. I was losing fat and replacing it with muscle, but we had 35+ years of doing nothing to contend with.

I think through my training journey the most important result has been the shift in my thinking. My friend Rob (his newsletter is great) tweeted yesterday that he was feeling the weight of everything going on so he worked out and felt immediately better.

https://twitter.com/RCEngelsman/status/1321140288010833921

This probably rings true for a lot of people. Scientists and fitness experts talk about the endorphins that get released during exercise. I explain it to myself in simpler terms. When I have a truly good training session I am just too exhausted to deal with anything else. My mind is worked out, my body is useless, and I am totally spent. How is there room to worry about what’s going on anywhere else?

And I think these moments of self-centered exhaustion are important. Sure it may only last a few hours, but the lightness of being when you literally can’t is spectacular. Probably even healthy.

A couple of months ago my trainer decided to transition to being a digital designer and stop his training business. If I’m honest, financially it was good timing for me. A personal trainer isn’t cheap. But I found a lot of value in having his support and expertise. We spent the last 4 weeks of our time together talking through my goals. He taught me how to program my own workouts, what to look out for, how to measure my progress.

I never thought I’d be one of “those people” and I’m still a ways off from having a completely active lifestyle. But if I miss a workout for a few days, I feel it. I miss it. I want to get moving again. My mood suffers.

Two months on my own and I may not be getting three training sessions in every week, but I’m still getting stronger. I’m trying to be consistent. And I’m still getting after it.

🥖 Baking as personal therapy

2020-10-19T00:00:00Z

Almost five years ago I was working on a redesign of Abilene Christian University’s website. Bravery partnered with Helix Education to do a near-impossible 90-day redesign and build of ACU’s website in preparation for a planned online education expansion.

Why did I say yes? In fact, I initially said no.

My friend Seth Odell (👋🏼 hi Seth) sometimes calls me up and pitches a crazy idea to me knowing full well that I love a challenge and that if the price is right, I’ll probably say yes. This project was a decently large stretch, exacerbated by higher education’s proclivity for complicating everything, but with the right parameters, I thought we could pull it off. I also didn’t think the university would say yes after hearing what it would take both financially and restraint-wise.

Four months later and the scope had changed. We weren’t finished yet and things were really stressful on our end. When those times come around, I tend to develop what my wife calls “stress hobbies.” You’d probably call it procrastination but just go with me here.

When I was in grad school and writing my final thesis I thought it would be a great time to start researching genealogy as well. What better to do during a massive research project than another massive research project? Other stress hobbies have involved purchasing copious amounts of recording gear that now only gets used for podcasts, trying and failing to build guitar effects pedals, and now, baking.

Baking — and baking bread, specifically — is one of the most stabilizing activities I’ve found. During that web project, baking would allow me five minutes to decompress away from a screen and keyboard every half hour but still kept my mind engaged. There’s a lot of downtime when making bread and that helps me quiet my mind, focus on the task at hand, and anticipate the outcome.

The past nearly five years of baking have been a journey of trial, lots of error, immense learning, and joy. That moment you take the lid off of the dutch oven to see that you nailed the final proof and your boules or batards have sprung into bulbous perfection never gets old. And the satisfaction of high-quality butter melting into toasted crumb and topped by a fried egg with a perfectly silken runny yolk… things don’t get much better than that.

Baking as self-reflection

I’m a person that has to control what’s around me. And I’m a person who has been working to let some of that drive go. Baking naturally leavened bread causes me to face my own inadequacies, give up control to the yeasts and bacteria, and pay attention to what things I can actually control versus those that simply give the impression.

Jessica, my wife, can attest to how frustrated I get when a bake doesn’t quite go as planned. But even when my bake doesn’t hit all the marks I want it to, the house still smells amazing. And perhaps the best thing about bread, even if it’s flatter than you want, or a little burnt, or something else happens, it almost always tastes good.

For me, baking is an invitation to be less harsh toward myself and to others. It’s a reminder that there is always good mixed in with the meh or the bad or the disappointing. It’s a means to pause, note the feel of the dough, smell the fresh bake, and consider that there may be other options than getting angry.

I remember when I was a kid my parents would be gifted some godawful “friendship bread” or (sorry if this is you) bread machine rock. When I discovered craft beer I made correlations between homebrew and homemade bread. Neither was good nor should be shared with people you actually like. But then I started baking my own bread. And it was actually good. So, I started giving my spare loaf to friends or keeping an extra in the car in case I saw a person experiencing homelessness who could use something to eat.

The bond that gets established when you can share something that you’ve not only made with your own hands but is also nourishing to someone else is special. That sort of hospitality and care is, I believe, what we all desire if not full-out need as humans.

It’s also important to share the other benefits I’ve found from baking. If you check out my Instagram highlights I have stories on how to build a starter, how to bake sourdough, focaccia, and croissants. I’d also love to talk to you about baking, recommend some books, websites, and tools, or just bake for you if you ever find yourself in Austin, TX.

Please give me a shout.

Thanks for reading along. If you’re enjoying my newsletter, would you share it with a friend who also might enjoy it?

"Running" a small business during a pandemic.

2020-10-14T00:00:00Z

This month has been really difficult for me. Probably the most difficult of this entire pandemic season of work and life. And we’re only halfway through it. It feels as though everything that folks talked about being hard at the beginning of this has just come to a head.

I’m weary. The stress of working in an industry that has stopped spending money, losing the safety net of health insurance, having more work for less money, and a general feeling of going backward has finally worn me down after seven months. In situations like these, I try to find an escape route. My natural impulse is to try everything that I think could have a shot at changing my situation and see what sticks.

The thing is, there’s just so much uncertainty and so much stacked up against me. I think this is probably true for a lot of people. At the very least, the specter of a menacing unknown is relatable to all of us. I talk about a part of it in this episode of Thought Feeder.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0hy6R4jslF8gxwaoqLwJZa?si=J1jIeRqiSdK4GrL4amLtKA

It’s supremely frustrating to me that I could spend nearly 15 years doing product work of every sort and have it discounted because of the industry I’ve worked in.

The past two months have been rough with no significant work projects surfacing, so I’ve seriously considered winding out Bravery and going back in-house someplace. In reality, that place cannot be at a college or university. In general, they don’t pay enough, they don’t accommodate remote work, and I am deeply worried about the viability of most institutions after seeing their pandemic responses.

On the other side of the coin, tech doesn’t take higher ed as an industry seriously. Whether it’s because our practices are five years behind or there is a misunderstanding about how similar everyone’s marketing work is, my job applications for work I know I can do successfully have been dismissed without even a conversation.

But I’ve always been an entrepreneur. Since starting Bravery in 2012 I haven’t wanted to go back in-house. I still don’t. The comfort appeals to me, but not the monotony. And there aren’t enough brands or organizations that I feel deserve 100% of my professional time.

How do you handle things when patience turns to a sense of dread? I’ve had glimmers of hope come up only to be snuffed out. I’ve bid for great projects only to be told that my team is too small and our costs too high.

The schools spending money don’t understand what 5,700x ROI means. They don’t recognize the perception of waste when money goes into things like Plexiglas screens and not into improving the websites they paid half a million dollars for. They don’t recognize that their messaging and design are the same as their competitors because the majority of schools hire the same agencies to do their work.

If I take a step back, my internal conflict includes all of these things:

Work prospects that give me hope.
The impulse to not get my hopes up because history shows they rarely pan out. The majority of Bravery’s work has come through relationships.
Having to rely on others for things that I can control.
Others not being reliable and in turn taking that control from me.
Knowing with some learning and training I could do these things myself.
Having too much busywork just to pay bills that I don’t have the time to learn those new skills.
The memory of when this was easier and I had big, challenging work, and we were doing things that were successful.
Frustration at an industry that often navel-gazes itself into being ineffective.

These are things I’m working on balancing. Writing this helps me work through a lot of my worries (so thanks for reading this). Often times I think about the impulse to look strong and in control of my business versus the realities of how frustrating and challenging it is as a small business owner that in a constant two steps forward, one step back cycle.

In any case, I think more honesty, transparency, vulnerability is needed. And I hope it doesn’t come across and complaining or venting or me having a pity party. I don’t have a lot of answers on fixing this stuff other than to not bottle it up. I don’t often fall into depression; it takes a lot for me to get beaten down. I guess my threshold is 7 months in a pandemic these days.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate you.

Did you miss me?

2020-10-07T00:00:00Z

Hi there, once upon a time I had a newsletter on TinyLetter. Then I stopped writing it. Today, that changes.

New name, new platform (Substack is pretty rad), and hopefully a new commitment to keeping this thing regularly updated. Thanks for staying with me (though, you can unsubscribe if you’d like).

How’ve you been considering the world is significantly different than the last time I wrote to you? A quick update on me:

I’ve been baking a lot more. Like, a lot. My little Bakehat side-hustle got a boost from Eater Austin a while ago. I got a little bump in sales, but nothing too crazy.
We’ve been saving money not having bars and restaurants open. Unfortunately, Jess got laid off early during the pandemic. More fortunately she’s been able to work more hours with Stitch Fix.
Bravery’s work has been slow AF. I expected this as higher ed is supremely risk-averse when it comes to marketing. So despite this being a crucial time to optimize design, website CRO, etc., most institutions are blind to it. Frustrating.

Oh, and I started a podcast with Jon-Stephen Stansel. We’ve already racked up 26 live episodes, and I have at least 3 more due for editing and release. Thought Feeder is primarily focused on higher ed digital marketing and social media, but we’re trying to say the things that don’t get said in our industry. That might be professional suicide, but I’d rather go down trying to change things in an industry I love than waste my time propping up bad practice.

Some of my fave episodes

Ep. 26 — I talk about how I started Bravery Media as well as the challenges of fighting the public perception of higher ed work.
Ep. 22 — We’re joined by Andrew Cassel to talk about how video games and Twitch could be used in higher ed marketing and student retention. It’s a fun, uplifting conversation.
Ep. 18 — The formidable Mike Petroff discusses how to do product strategy in higher ed. I wish more people in the industry would listen to this episode.
Ep. 13 — Ella Dawson, author and social media manager (formerly of TED Talks, now at Meet Cute), discusses how being the voice behind the brand social account can take a toll on mental health.
Ep. 12 — My friend Ron Bronson talks about consequence design with us. I think this is an important subject for anyone doing work that applies to people… which is probably all of us.

And we have so many other good episodes with folks like Erin Supinka, Amanda Goetz, Erika Boltz, and Michael Green. And coming up soon we’ve got an episode with Jayde Powell and another with Steve App.

So how are you doing?

Is there anything I can do to help you personally or professionally? I feel lucky to have a personality that lets me not get overwhelmed by everything that’s going on. And I think that means I have a responsibility to help others out. Whether that’s a weekly check-in call or job advice, I’m here for you. Just let me know.

Till next time, I appreciate you.

JGG