The Sage Sayers

My guest today is marketer, builder, and innovator Simone Morellato, an Italian born technologist and marketer based in the Bay Area, California. Having long worked as a marketer for some of the world’s largest IT firms, Simone’s become expert at many things: communicating and demystifying tech for high-stakes audiences, launching beautiful products, and building high-performing global teams from the ground up.

He’s also learned to see where processes can get streamlined and as an inventive type, loves to build bots to help those moments. He’s built a handful or so including a bot to streamline repeated customer questions and requests, a resume bot to help job seekers, and one to help make great menu choices at restaurants.

In our interview, we hear more about Simone’s process, the delightful rabbit holes he finds himself in as he builds, and where he learned his love for creating beautiful things (his parents in Italy are shoe artisans). We also touch on ways to make our language bots work with us better, and I plan to bring Simone back to demonstrate with me ways to ask the bots better prompts.

You can find Simone on LinkedIn here. Reach out to me, your show host, for communications coaching and group coaching and training via my website or find me also on Linkedin. 

With some bias perhaps, I think Muskego Highschool’s varsity footballer here in Wisconsin, Nicholas McCullough’s, an impressive teen. He’s the youngest captain in the Muskego Warrior’s team  history. He coaches and mentors younger kids on leadership, and is ranked best in his state for his age and position.

The bias comes from him being my son and I’ve brought him to the Sage Sayers this week because he’s pulled off something big we can learn from as business communicators: an invitation (to which he committed) to play football for Harvard University and to study in 2025 quantitative economics.

 Nicholas got on the radar of all the Ivy’s, received an offer from Cornell University, and communicated with the nation’s best football coaches in person and via Twitter, driving his communications strategy independently  at age 17. (He started his campaign at age 15.)  I promise you’ll learn from him as I do. Listen in, and congratulations again, dear Nicholas.

Follow Nicholas via Twitter here

Listen to our feature on the gifts of Varsity Football (from the sidelines of the Muskego Warriors) here.  Reach out to me, your show host, for communications coaching and group coaching and training via my website or find me also on Linkedin. 

My guest this week is Kenza Fourati, a Tunisian fashion model in New York, U.S. who’s co-launched a shoe business that’s done very well, teaching she and her co-founders many lessons along the way. The business employs local Tunisian shoemakers, helping keep a craft alive, repurposes leather that would otherwise go to waste, and brings comfortable, stylish Mediterranean shoes to customers as far away as New Zealand.

Kenza’s idea came to her amidst pregnancy and motherhood, a perfect opportunity for deep thinking. She’d long wanted to do something good in the fashion industry, one she finds exploits models and factory workers. She also wanted to challenge others’ view on her Tunisian motherland, which many associated with dark things vs. hope, creativity, and beauty.

You can follow Kenza on LinkedIn here. Kenza’s shoe business, Osay, via their beautiful website. Reach out to me, your show host, for communications coaching and group coaching and training via my website or find me also on Linkedin. 

Hyacinth Tucker always loved people, enterprise, and community when growing up in Jamaica. Here in the states, she’s found a way to channel that love through her new venture, the Laundry Basket, an on-demand mobile laundry and dry cleaning delivery company in Maryland, U.S. In a short time, she’s scaled, gained a considerable client base, and gained a nod from Martha Stewart’s team for novel eco-friendly laundry solutions.

In our interview, we hear how Hyacinth built her brand the old-fashioned way: getting in front of people, going to events, saying hi and asking how she could help with their laundry needs. It’s work she loves because she’s bringing time affluence to many, even saving marriages.

Want to reach out to Hyacinth? Find her on LinkedIn. Reach out to me, your show host, for communications coaching and group coaching and training via my website or find me also on Linkedin. 

I'm still swooning over the delightful Chicagoans I met on a recent April visit. (They're the nicest and most open people ever!) In another ad-hoc interview, we learn from Gina Magro, a fashion model adorned in an $8.5k leather Carolina Herrera gown, on how to focus when on stage. She's also expert on seeming open, calming our mind, and showing neutral but warm facial expressions--all super helpful tactics for us as business presenters.

Discover Gina’s agency page here. Reach out to me, your show host, for communications coaching and group coaching via my website or find me also on Linkedin. I'm currently accepting corporate training engagements on active listening, storytelling, brevity, and building trust amidst low morale. 

My guest this week is product, strategy, and operations leader Nupur Thakur who has spent a greater part of her career ensuring that leaders and customers understand her technology well. In a lovely conversation from her Bay Area, SF base, she unpacks what’s helped her  understand her audience and how she breaks down and demystifies technical topics in ways where even the most impatient audiences really get it.

You can reach out to Nupur for speaking engagements or to connect via LinkedIn here. Reach out to me, your show host, for communications coaching and group coaching via my website or find me also on Linkedin. 

John Chang moved to the U.S. from a balmy part of China with one core goal: To perform violin for orchestras. His practicing’s intense and rigorous as are his auditions. We spoke a few days after auditioning for Chicago’s opera where he and other players must perform their excerpts to faceless judges separated from the musician by a black curtain.

Chang tells us of his early years in the U.S., settling in to a new land as a younger student and man, his love for the violin which brings him happiness and calm (he even plays for us some.) And he offers us as business communicators some hacks and tips for staying on course, even when our fear feels intense. Ways exist for us to talk ourselves down.

Want to work with me or join my podcast(s)? Write to me at [email protected] You can follow me also on LinkedIn and find details on my coaching and trainings via my website.  

North Carolina-based executive architect Abhijeet Patil has long led complex hybrid cloud initiatives for Fortune 500s and loved the challenge. A recent self-generated challenge to write in the public space—his “writing spree”— has helped him discover the joy, clarity, and courage that comes from expressing ourselves in the written word. He’s also learned that writing about India, his motherland, and the people he still cares about there brings geographies and hearts closer.

In our interview we hear of Abhijeet’s writing process. His first beautiful essay “About My Father!” chronicles the coaching and leadership his father provided him and took him one hour to write. We hear of his love for two lands: the U.S. and India—and how writing reminds him of what’s most important: family, authenticity, courage, kindness, and love.

Please follow Abhijeet and his writing via Medium, with About My Father here. Want to work with me or join my podcast(s)? Write to me at [email protected] You can follow me also on LinkedIn and find details on my coaching and trainings via my website.  

Jill Staudacher has spent the best part of her career in pharmaceutical sales; but since COVID she’s felt drawn additionally to alternative ways to heal—both herself, her family, and friends as well. In this timely interview, from my Muskego, Wisconsin base, Jill shares her journey into a powerful career selling excellent medicines to finding a growing interest in healing naturally, both remedies and through simple dietary changes. Profound shifts have happened, including improving the vitals and prospects for cancer sufferers.

We conducted this interview on International Women’s Day. So, entrepreneurship, sisterhood, solidarity, and why we must surround ourselves with those who care for and uplift us (as part of our mental and physical health) becomes an additional theme.

If you’d like to reach out to Jill for friendship or guidance, find her on Facebook via Refocus your Health. Want to work with me or join my podcast(s)? Write to me at [email protected] You can follow me also on LinkedIn and find details on my coaching and trainings via my website.  

If you’ve reworked your resume recently via Resume IO, Canva, or (my favorite platform: My Perfect Resume.com) you’ll see the creative challenge in describing our work efforts, skills, and triumphs within a few words. The summary section on Resume IO rations a cruel 200 characters. The work experience for each role? Three bullets, each worth 200 characters each. (That’s about 4 well-margined lines per role.) One recruiter told me they want to read a resume within one minute. Doable for the author? I say so. 

But how? We get creative. Stay open. And we trust that less becomes more. We know that the résumé’s a vessel to whet the readers’ appetite. We also learn how to remove the superfluous and retain the substance. Like one dear software developer explained our process as we refined his resume: we find the truth; remove the fluff, and then make the important stuff fit. 

That’s what we’re here to co-discover this week; ten quick editing tips to cull your word count and make the important and most defining moments for your personal brand fit. Read from my musing on Medium.

Want to work with me or join my podcast(s)? Write to me at [email protected] You can follow me also on LinkedIn and find details on my coaching and trainings via my website.