Loading summary
A
For many, the job market is really testing our resilience. It's really challenging us to persevere day after day, week after week, month after month. Our guest today has written a great blog series around Layoff to Launch, which gives some practical tools to those that may have unfortunately been laid off over the last few years and how they can rebrand themselves and get back into the marketplace. His newest company is a way to help those professional freelancers get plugged into those organizations to help you get shit done. It's this really creative way to have a bunch of individuals that are at the top of their craft that have experience in this. But perhaps you're a founder or a startup that can't necessarily carry the weight of having full time employees. Or perhaps you're an organization that has had to go through a number of layoffs in order to survive in this new market. But either way, you're still here, you're still around, and you still need to accomplish and you still need to get shit done. So how do you do that? The roster is a way to have that bench of people, that bench of professionals ready to go and you hire them when you need them. I hope what you hear today is an inspiration for what could be the next chapter. So if you are a founder or someone who's recently been laid off, get your pen and paper and let's listen to the conversation today with Steve Lomas. Welcome to the GSD Factor podcast. I'm your host, Misha Blaymire Farish, and today I'm excited to have Steve Lomas on the phone. Hi Steve, how are you?
B
Hey Misha, Good to be here. Thank you for having me.
A
Absolutely. Glad to have you. We're in our respective offices. Normally you and I are at our favorite coffee shop here in Nashville, but I'm excited for this conversation today. So Steve, Steve, share with our listeners a little bit about you and your story.
B
Sure. I've really been in media my whole career, which spans four decades. Hard for me to admit that out loud, but it's true. Started off in film and television naturally. Got into broadcast graphics, that led to computers and the desktop computing revolution. Just very curious person. So I'm always chasing everything and got into it, as I said, broadcast graphics, that led to game design and game creation, interactive television and ultimately the web. When that came around, doing web. And then I just kind of backed into marketing. And so for the last 20 going on 22 years here in Nashville, we've had our marketing company Mojo Media Pros, and then in the Last two years. A year and a half ago, we launched the Roster, which is our creative staffing company. And that's kind of where my, my heart and passion's at right now, growing that company.
A
And I'm so glad you brought up the Roster because that's really what I want to dive into today. As we do have so many entrepreneurs and founders of organizations listening to our show. I really want us to dive into what is the Roster, what is its mission and its vision and how are you helping organizations industry agnostically, but also size wise.
B
Yeah, so I mentioned it's a creative staffing company, but let me tell you what it's not. It's not a marketplace like Fiverr Upwork or whatnot. These platforms are amazing. You know, lots of great talent out there. I had a client the other day say, well, how are you different from those? I go, well, I'll tell you what, there's lots of great talent out there. You're welcome to go interview them. Dead silence for a moment. Right? You know, tens of thousands of talent out there and there's going to be some great people, there's going to be some mediocre people, whatever the whole gambit. What the Roster is, is we are a vetted community network. You know, I started with my network. You know, I've been, I personally have probably managed 1500 freelancers over my career in every discipline. And we started with that network and we sort of, if you think of that as a pebble dropped in a pond, the ripples are just like you might find on LinkedIn. The, you know, my friends, their friends, their friends and everybody who's working through the roster. And we have, you know, all the creative roles you expect for marketing. We also have dev, we have, you know, UX UI design, all these different roles. It's on our website, Roster agency. But, but all these people have either worked directly with us or have worked with somebody we know. And that's what's different. So when you say, I need a UX designer now, you can go out on one of these other platforms and try to find that person. Or you call us and go, look, we have three amazing UX designers all available right now. Let me tell you about, let's see if we can find the one that fits best. Oh, your healthcare. This person's done a lot of healthcare. Let's talk about, let's start with this person, see if that isn't right. Now, we don't usually. We started out just kind of positioning individuals, but we quickly realized there's not a whole much more effort for either the client or ourselves to position a whole team. And we, so we came up with this bench concept. And what the bench is is basically from the freelancer's point of view. I tell them, well, think of it this way. You're the preferred, preferred vendor in your role for this client. The client isn't committed to work with any of these people, although they've more or less said, yeah, we could use all these roles at one point or another. But we put together a collaboration space, we introduced the talent to them and now you have a bench. It's different, it's a team. As you get to know these people, they get to know you and your brand and you start to develop friendships. This is the way I've worked with Mojo for the last 20 plus years. You know, we would sign somebody say hey, we'd love to work with you. We do the initial paperwork, you know, what is that? W9 and independent contractor agreement, et cetera. Non disclosure. We done one and done. Now whenever we had a project we could reach out to that person and say, hey, we got this project. You are available. Yes or no if they are. Great, let's talk this tomorrow afternoon. I'll clue you in on what we're doing. And so now we're giving our clients and most, by the way, most agencies work that way with freelancers. That's how they manage their freelancers. They build up this pool of freelancers. What we're providing to our clients is, is the opportunity to have that pool their own personal team tailored, a bespoke team. And these are top people, right from all over the country, but have that team at their fingertips for free. They don't spend a dollar until they put any of those people to work. I don't know how you could. It's a, it's a win, win, you know, if and over the course of a year for less than a full time person, you can have a fractional marketing team or development team that just ready to go. Now there's a trade off, right? So I'll get to the end of this. But the trade off is that, you know, if you wait six weeks and you, you know, they may be doing something, you know, if they can help you, they will. But it's a great trade off. You know, it's like, it's, it's good for both sides. Everybody's looking for connections and work and you know, that's, that's us. Long winded answer.
A
But now, you know, I think it's Great. And I think. Let's talk about, you know, this market and how volatile it is and the, you know, we're seeing so much fluid in our marketplace. I think what the roster is doing is helping fill that void and fill that gap, not just for those organizations that may have gone through the mass rounds of layoffs, but also those individuals that were affected by the layoffs. So talk to us, Steve, about how, you know, what the roster is providing in this marketplace in this day and age right now, how it's helping both sides, both the organizations as well as the individuals.
B
Yeah, the layoffs were really heavy in 23. Right. And I don't know that it slowed down. It's just that it was more of the, you know, news cycle in 23. People were, you know, really talking about it, and it was hundreds of thousands of people across many large companies. You know, that's Philips, Salesforce, you know, Dell. I mean, just across the board. And so we. Especially at the beginning of this year, I was. I was receiving a lot of calls or emails or, you know, texts from friends saying, my friend so and so has just been laid off. You know, and sometimes they said, this is the third time I've been laid off in two years. You know, it's like there's something wrong with me and our model at the time for the roster, you know, and I've been real clear about this. We're 100% freelance. We're looking for professional freelancers, people who have made that decision to do that. It's a lifestyle decision. You know, it does. One of your attributes is confidence. It takes confidence to be a freelancer or to hang out a shingle. You have to have confidence in the fact that you can do the work. You also have to have some faith, you know, faith that you will be able to step up and, you know, as I would say, God, God will provide. But here's the thing. So we had all these in betweeners. My heart was going out to them. I've had jobs in the past. I've been laid off usually because nothing that I did wrong, just, you know, business changing whatnot. So I've written several articles about this over the past. One was called A Court of Many Strands, talking about diversifying your income stream so that you're not beholding to one one income stream like a W2 job. But in this case, this last year, I did a whole series called Layoff to launch the in betweeners guy. Because I always referred to the people who are between gigs, you know, as in Betweeners. And, and we're, we just really aren't set up to, to handle in betweeners. But I, my heart went up to him. So I decided, you know, I took a lot of calls. I heard myself saying a lot of the things over and over again. So I wrote that series. It's a blog series on the roster. And it really isn't a direct hit on like, you know, our talent, but my model and my mindset has evolved because I started realizing more and more these in betweeners are looking for either to be successful as a freelancer or a solopreneur or get hired. You know, in many cases it's just about survival. Like I'll do either, whatever, you know, we just, I just don't know yet. And so we wrote that series of articles and I think that's helped also kind of evolve my mindset that, you know, maybe we should entertain temp to hire, you know, and so I tested that out with some clients. They think it's a great idea. You know, it's like, try before you buy. And, and we've always asked our talent. You know, we have hundreds and hundreds of people now in the roster. I'm proud to say that, you know, are you open to that in case it comes up? So we already know the people who are open to it. So that was almost accidental that we asked that question, but here we are. So, yeah, I think that models have to change. Hiring models are changing. Companies are reluctant to bring on full time employees. If you've ever had a company with full time employees. I have. During the dot com bust, I was holding the bag on a lot of equipment, a lot of debt and a lot of employees and a lot of space. And I'll tell you, ultimately I had to dismantle that company. And it's a lot, you know, it's a lot more fun to build a company than it is to dismantle one, I can tell you that.
A
Let's dive into the layoff to launch. What are some of those key lessons and, or, you know, Steve's tips and tricks that you share in that blog?
B
Sure, I, I'll just bring it up here in the background here just to cover it. So, you know, the introduction just kind of talked about why I was doing this, which was, you know, just, these people need help. I think I have some things to share. So here it is. The first thing I dealt with was I called it, you know, day one triage. You know, there's this emotional mindset, like I just got laid off. If you're working W2 and someone just pulls the rug out from under you like that. You know, it's not just your income, sure, that's important, but it's so much more routine, like, ah, what do I have, when do I get up, where do I go? You know, you're self worth or your perception of self or however you want to put it all that's wrapped up in that. You know, I think it may be a little more for guys, but I'm sure, Misha, I don't know, I'm sure it is for women too, right? You talk a little bit about this kind of thing in your book. You know, having suddenly, you know, people attack you or you know, undermine, you know, your career in ways that you wouldn't have expected adults to behave. So, so there's that. Then I then from there I got into personal branding and we talk a lot about how do you manage your LinkedIn profile? And now this. There's a lot of this stuff out there. In some cases I curated things, but I think the purpose of this was in every one of these topics. I thought I had a little bit of a personal spin on something. You might not have thought of some strategies there. I do a whole session or blog post on resumes. And especially in this day and age of AI and AI resumes, can you use AI to help you with your resume? Are you being screened out by AI? What does it look? You know, so there's a lot of that that was pretty interesting. Talked about, you know, self promotion, which is the power plays, which is a little different than just personal branding. You know, it's like, how do you actually promote yourself? And then lastly, you know, I talked about ageism. You know, it's like if the older you get, and I'm telling you it starts at 40 or 35, you know, you start to nick away at that. And the further you get in your career, there's almost a parallel. You can, you, you start getting screened out, you start seeing things, you know, so I talk about what to avoid, how to deal with it, how to rise above that ageism. And you know, there's a parallel to that that I didn't write about, but I was just discussing this with a friend the other day. Once you throw at a shingle, if you have any kind of C level title in your resume, you're no longer available to anybody as anything but that. And so. Okay, and if you've been CEO, you're really not available to too many companies unless you happen to be a CEO of a company that they just understand and you're perfect fit. But it's a very narrow market. You can't just throw it a shingle, say I want to be a CEO. Right. Not very often, not very easily. And then lastly, if you've been a freelancer and you throw, you know, your own, you know, solopreneur entrepreneur kind of thing, if they think you're an entrepreneur, that's almost the kiss of death because they think you'll never be satisfied. Now this is just not true. I mean, I don't know. Have you run into that or seen that?
A
I have. As I talk to, as I in my coachings with a lot of individuals, especially those, you know, you and I both been laid off at times in our careers and reaching out and talking to those, they, yeah, there, there are certain roles or certain things that they've done that have kind of dis, you know, they're automatically dismissed, they're automatically disqualified. And I think that what I really appreciate about your different blog posts on this. Right, is you are making sure that they give themselves the time to process, you know, the emotion that has gone on. And then you're, you're encouraging them to take that time to build their own brand and tell their story and tell the why and then how to effectively start to communicate who they are and what they, the value that they bring. And. But yes, I think too many times organizations will just automatically disqualify individuals for either certain titles, certain roles, certain things that they've done. I also think it's very similar. I think that entrepreneurial, if you've done your own entrepreneurial journey and you have your own firm that gets disqualified, almost like 20 years ago, if you didn't have a college degree, you got to, you automatically got disqualified. And you know, the way that I personally overcame that 20 years ago was I had a recruiter and they, you know, they were my advocate, they were my ambassador and getting, you know, explaining to people my experience and who I was. And you know, I am, you know, very grateful to my recruiter for that. And I think that that's what the roster does such a great job of is being that ambassador for those individuals, for those freelancers and for, you know, also. But being that ambassador in reverse for those companies, those companies that do still need to get shit done, they still need to work, they still need to do all these things, but they may not have the means, have people on at a full time capacity. They can still have this bench waiting in the wings.
B
Yeah. And part of, or at least one of our key client areas I would say is funded startups. People that, you know, so they've got, oh, they just got their first round of funding or their early stage startups and they've got money but they need to, you know, I coach people, resist the urge to start hiring a lot of people because that's a quick way to burn through that money. And as I started to say earlier, having had a company with employees, there is nothing that has kept me up more at night than making sure that I can pay their salaries. I mean, you know, I don't pay myself to pay people, you know, at times when in the past and it's like, it's crazy but you know, you just. So nobody hires Willie. If they have a brain in their head, they're not going to just, you know, oh, we just need that person for three months. We'll make them a full time employee. Well, it takes a month to get them hired, a month to get them up to date and then just as they're starting to make some headway, you're going to lay them off again. It doesn't make sense. So that's the thing about these professional freelancers. You know, they accept the job. The moment they're on the call with you, they're adding value and you know, you give them the assignment, they can turn it around overnight. You didn't have to set them up with equipment, bandwidth, you know, it doesn't matter. They're just used to stepping in and adding value right away. That's a big thing. The other thing is, is that there's, you know, a lot of people will think, well, I'm startup, I'll, you know, the other side of hiring people is that, you know, a smart person, most people start companies are pretty smart and maybe they even know quite a bit about digital media and all this stuff and they go, I'll just do it myself. Not really thinking through the maintenance of doing it yourself, the opportunity cost of doing it yourself. And guess what? If you are a really good web designer, you'd be doing it web design. If you're a really good logo designer, you'd be doing logo design. If you were, you know, I, you know, not to pat myself on the back as as much as any person on this planet, I'm pretty good at everything, you know, you know what I'm saying? But I know I'm not the best at anything, you know, except that maybe, you know, pull assembling a team and being able to relate to all those People, because I've done all these roles at one time, video graphics, editing, you know, I've just done it all. It's like mostly growing up and through my career, I went to Art Center College design. I taught there for 12 years. You know, like I designed the first game with DreamWorks and I sat across the table with Steven Spielberg. I designed the first game. So I've done stuff. You know, you talk about getting stuff done. I've got done stuff, you know, but I still know that I'm not the best person for everything. You know, my job is to assemble that team for myself, my own company, and for our clients, and then coach on how to get there, you know, what's the next step. And I'm really good at that. That's probably my superpower, assembling teams to get stuff done that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
A
And what's great about that is you literally just defined our be influential attribute. So well done.
B
That's awesome.
A
Yeah. And I think what's important too, and you know, I think this is especially to the founders. And you and I are both, we both are mentors at Vanderbilt University is the one. Dre, as we are, you know, talking and mentoring these founders and the, you know, these startups and helping them through their, through their different phases of their businesses. I think what you said is key. Right. Even when you do get that first round of money or the seed money or that pitch competition money, it's not necessarily about, oh, I need to hire all these people, it's how do you effectively and intentionally use those dollars to continue to move the needle, to make progress. And I think when you have an organization like the roster, you have now been able to help them assemble that team in a very mindful and intentional way without having these stressors of having these full time employees.
B
Yeah. If I can share a quick case study. So one of our clients was one of our early bench clients and we put this bench together and they had a project in mind. And I knew they were meeting on, I think it was Tuesday morning. And I saw that the meeting was kicking off and the background, you know, stuff floats across your screen. And later the meeting was over and I saw another message float across my screen to the team saying, hey guys, I know we just got off that call. Can we jump right back on? Now in my mind I'm going something wrong. Is that good or bad news? I don't know, you know. Well, it turns out that our clients, you know, he's the director of marketing for that company. His. His boss was at a trade show and. And. And he was walking the floor, and he had this epiphany about, you know, this company's been around for eight years, still in startup mode in so many ways, but they have clients and revenue and profitable. And. And he just had this epiphany about, like, a different way to package their service. Just a different way. He started, you know, as he walked on the floor, bouncing it off a few people. People, I'd buy that right now. He goes, oh, my gosh. He calls in, he says, you know, I think he was speaking later that week. He says, look, I'm going to be speaking, presenting later this week. I want to share this. Can you help us get a. I need a landing page. I need people to be able to sign up for it and do, you know, talking points. And I also, you know, and social media, like, oh, so this is Tuesday. You're speaking Friday. We better be done Thursday. So what, we had a day and a half? Yeah, maybe two days. Well, because that bench was already in place, you know, our client was able to just say, jump back on the call. I said, we're still doing that, but put that on hold. This is hot. We have 48 hours. Let's get this done. Not only did they get it done at a very high level, the CEO was thrilled and, you know, shared that at the rest of the conference, you know, whether he was talking or just on the floor, I don't know. I can't remember which, to be honest. But by Monday, after the conference. So from Friday to Monday, had six new sales, six new clients. Now, I'm sure some of them were the ones he'd bumped into, but Here, go here, check it out. But it doesn't matter that, you know, my client said this is the most successful launch of a product we've ever had. And it was something they were planning on, had been kicking around, as I understand it. But they brought the whole thing up by two months because, you know, we're thinking about doing this, you know, went from that to we have it. You know, like, you start wanting to say that. And so that's the bench model working. How could you have assembled that team so quickly? They already had, fortunately just had their little orientation, first project call, so they already knew a lot about the company. Boom. Jumped right into it.
A
I'm so glad you shared that case study because that's the one that you shared with me over coffee recently. And it's truly the epitome of the bench model getting shit done And I love that because I think so many times there is that hot topic or that hot idea or that, hey, can we try this and see if it works? But sometimes having the right team there to be able to move that needle and make that progress, we don't, sometimes we don't have that. And I think this model just really supports that. And I'm so glad that you shared that story. So, Steve, as you, you know, talk to a lot of founders, you talk to a lot of, you know, individuals that you're coaching, organizations that you're working with. What is that GSD factor attribute that's kind of resonating the most in, in the market today? For you?
B
For me or for others? Both. Well, I, I, I think that the, you know, I, I loved all, all your attributes. I think they're great. The two, two of the ones was one of those curiosity or inquisitiveness. Yeah. So curiosity that's driven my whole career. You know, I've been a, in some ways you could think I've been a generalist. And if you look at, you know, as I outline what I've done, jumping from this to this to this, it was never felt that way. I was just kind of following my nose and, and I was so curious. You know, I, I taught myself how to code. You know, when I was in school, they didn't have computers. You know, computers started coming out. I thought, oh, gosh, I've kind of missed the window. So I taught myself to code, I taught that, I created products and I started, you know, so you just, that's curiosity. The other thing is perseverance. You know, you've probably heard this. You have, it takes 10,000 hours to learn anything. I know. That's absolutely true. You know, I've been an original beta tester back in the late 80s for just about every product that Adobe's ever come out with. I'm serious. You know, Photoshop, Illustrator, you know, premiere all these programs, but I've used them ever since. So I assure you I have a lot more than 10,000 hours into these programs, you know, and I'm still not as good as many of my friends. So there's this notion of, you know, perseverance in terms of learning something, Right. Ask a classical, you know, musician what it took to get there. Right? You know, but it's also perseverance in terms of your, your company or product. You know, every, you can't, you can't judge the future by a bad day or even a bad, a down quarter. So many Products don't make it in the long run for lack of. It usually boils down to lack of funding. But to get them there, the classic example of a well funded product that took forever. I'm going way back into, here's the Wayback machine. But Microsoft Excel, undoubtedly the kingpin of all spreadsheets, right? No problem. It wasn't like that. It started up being the, the, they also ran loser for like five or eight years. It was, you know, and, and Microsoft just, and they just had a terrible interface. They were going up against, I think it was VisiCalc at the time. This is early. And they were just a loser, loser, loser, loser. Until they finally, with enough, you know, effort and refinement and iteration and over and over and over again became the leader. Now, most of us don't have those kind of deep pockets, but it illustrates that if you really persevere and work at it and work at getting better, you know, every day, that's my job, you know, get better every day and see if you can help someone every day. You do that every day, you know, you're okay. But just knowing that every little incremental improvement to your business or to your career skills or to, you know, adding value to your employer, you know, you take that attitude and try to add value every day and get better, you know, that's where perseverance like pays off over the long haul.
A
Well, and I, what I like about perseverance and resiliency, right, is perseverance and resiliency require. They're a muscle, right? And you have to work it a little bit every day. Just like as, you know, as athletes, as you know, people at the top of their game, they are constantly working, doing, being diligent and doing intentional every single day. And so I think that, you know, working hard and I think the example that you shared is great because so many times, you know, the product that you come to market with is going to be a very different product than, you know, what is successful. And so I like to talk about failing fast and failing forward and learning and being inquisitive to say, let's try this better. What does this look like? What is, you know, how can we make things better? And I think when we are talking to those founders or those entrepreneurs, it's saying what your product looks like today may not be the product that takes off in the market down the road.
B
Sony started out making toasters, right? I mean, it's crazy. You think like how, but it's just what's working, what's Working for the market, product, market fit is the absolute death nail or success key. Either way, you know, if you don't get that right, your product's not going to work. Build it and they will come. Almost never makes any sense. So the only way you learn about that is just to talk to customers and keep hearing what they're needing and trying to adjust. And, you know, my epiphany earlier this year was this whole idea of, you know, back to the bench for a second was like, well, we were signing people up and doing a, you know, statement of work for every project. Well, we're wearing them out. You know, it's just like, this is crazy. You know, it made sense. You know, I've done a lot of enterprise development projects and whatnot, and so it kind of made sense at that level. But I realized, well, wait a minute, that you didn't run your marketing agency that way, so why are you making your clients jump through those hoops? So that was a big help. And the other thing, and I haven't thought about this, but, you know, we all talk about the understand the idea of an impulse buy. You know, Sony, by the way, set the bench. I don't think it's changed that much. They said 29.99 and below is an impulse buy. They said that like in the 80s and 90s, but it hasn't changed that much. Maybe it's 39, I don't know, but it's, you know, it's still pretty low. But it never occurred to me there's sort of an impulse buy as a CEO or as a project manager. Because if you're on a Wednesday and you're looking at your week, the rest of your week, and go, I got three important things to do. One of them only I can do, but maybe I can handle. Well, if it's going to take you three days or a week to get, you know, write up a creative brief and a statement of work and, you know, get the paperwork signed, forget it. I'm just going to stamp light and do it myself. And I was seeing that happening over and over. And I'm going like, okay, you got to give people that opportunity. As you, you said it well a moment ago, you know, that, that something comes up, you just don't know it. You go, oh, and you can react to it, you can manage it. This gives our clients another tool. Maybe they are the best person to do a lot of this stuff, and if they had all the time in the world, they could do it all. But nobody has that and so this model is flexible and it scales and retracts, breathes with your needs. That's what it's all about.
A
Amazing. All right, Steve, what are you powerfully choosing in 2024?
B
I think I let the cat out of the bag a little while ago. Sorry. Well, just, I feel like for me and my business, I need to get better every day. And then I try to wake up every single day. And this is not joke.
A
What.
B
How can I help others. And others as often are our. Our clients, but often it's other. Lots of people, you know, so, you know, I had an opportunity to go out to breakfast with a friend recently. He was just kind of like, I wouldn't say on the ropes, but a little frustrated. You know, he'd been, you know, he's an accomplished entrepreneur and, you know, he thought, well, maybe I'll just get a job and like, you know, think about the next, you know, companies had successful. He, you know, part of the stuff I've been sharing came up and I just, actually just released a blog post about that. It's on our site. It's called the glass jar. What? The glass jar metaphor. And if you know that metaphor, you know exactly what we're going with that. But it's. It was new to him and, you know, all I helped him, I just said here, I've been through this, you and I, I've been there, CEO, have my own. The only my thing is to throw out a new start a new company every time I need a job. You know, it's like, I don't know that that's the right thing to do it, but that's just how I'm wired. And so if I can help others to be successful with that, that's good.
A
Awesome. Well, Steve, thank you so much for being on the show today. It's been so much fun. And thank you for seeing a need in the market and starting up the roster. I think that it's such an incredible model that can help so many within our country and. But so many individuals that are those in betweeners. But I think it also is really helpful to those founders and those entrepreneurs. So thank you for helping in that way and thank you to our listeners for listening today. And don't forget to get shit done.
B
Thanks for listening to the GSD Factor podcast. If you like this episode, please rate and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform where you can also find previous episodes. Let's Also connect on LinkedIn and Instagram. If you're looking for more information on the GSD factor. Visit us@GSDFactor.com and always remember to GSD get shit done.
Episode Title: Powerfully Choosing Layoff to Launch with Steve Lomas
Date: November 7, 2024
Host: Misha Bleymaier-Farrish
Guest: Steve Lomas – Author, Entrepreneur, Technology Strategist, Creative Agency Founder
This episode of the GSD Factor Podcast features Steve Lomas, a seasoned media professional, entrepreneur, and founder of Mojo Media Pros and The Roster. The focus is on adapting to the volatile job market, especially in the wake of widespread layoffs, and the innovative solutions Steve has implemented through his creative staffing company. The conversation centers on resilience, reinvention, and the power of building flexible, expert teams—applicable to both those impacted by layoffs and to organizations seeking to “get shit done” with agility and efficiency.
[02:28]
[03:44]
[07:31]
[11:29]
“There’s a parallel… Once you throw out a shingle, if you have any kind of C-level title… you’re no longer available as anything but that. If they think you’re an entrepreneur, that’s almost the kiss of death.” (Steve, 13:52)
[16:46]
“The moment they’re on the call with you, they’re adding value… If you were a really good web designer, you’d be doing web design. My superpower is assembling teams to get stuff done that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.” (Steve, 18:03, 19:36)
[20:40]
[23:59]
[19:46], [27:56]
“What your product looks like today may not be the product that takes off in the market down the road." (Misha, 27:28)
[30:21]
This episode delivers valuable, actionable advice for professionals navigating layoffs and for founders seeking nimble growth. Steve Lomas’s “Layoff to Launch” approach centers on emotional resilience, brand reinvention, and leveraging curated professional networks to drive success. For organizations, the Roster’s bench model offers agile, top-tier talent exactly when needed, avoiding the risks and costs of traditional staffing. Key GSD Factor attributes—curiosity, perseverance, resilience—are shown to be critical at every stage.