Kelsey Davis is founder and co-owner of CLLCTVE. Her company runs a digital platform connecting college creatives and companies, especially brands targeting consumers in Generation Z, people born from the mid-1990s to 2012.
CLLCTVE helps college students – videographers, graphic designers, writers, audio engineers, and so on – find free-lance work, experience, and income.
Davis is part of Gen Z. She grew up in suburban Atlanta and in 2019 earned her undergraduate degree in television, radio, and film from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. She also got a minor in innovation design and startups from the iSchool. Davis set up CLLCTVE so it would be ready for her to run full time right after graduation. While running her company, Davis earned her master’s in entrepreneurship from SU’s Whitman School, graduating last month.
She’s observed this about leadership: “Egotistical leaders close their ears to information and try to control the environment. Good leaders talk less, listen more.”
Tell me about starting CLLCTVE as an undergraduate.
It had come to the point where I thought I would have to drop out of school. I was working with brands like Land Rover, Conde Nast, Coca-Cola, Puma. I was flying to L.A. and New York City all the time.
My professors were like: Kelsey, we had midterms, and you weren't there.
I'm like: Sorry! Can I make it up?
They’d say no, and I had to evaluate what made more sense to pursue. That's where being an entrepreneur helped me: I don't think that it's necessarily a matter of choosing between path A and B.
A lot of people are in the position that I was in – or they want to be in the position to say: Hey, I'm doing what I love.
I also had the fortunate privilege to go to a school like Syracuse University, and I didn't want to drop out when I had my family and everybody supporting me.
CLLCTVE was the solution. It was the way to carve out a new lane.
What I started to do was hire friends who were in classes with me. I would tell my friend: Hey, I'll pay you X amount of dollars if you could finish editing this video or I'll pay you X amount of dollars if you can make this website.
That was how I started balancing everything. We became a collective of creatives who liked producing work for brands. For around three years, we were doing pop-up shops, events, workshops to engage Syracuse University students who were creatives. I met my business partner, Brendan O’Keeffe, who is a genius when it comes to database management and system architecture. He helped me understand how we could scale this.
There wasn’t a system or a platform to increase creatives’ visibility while in college. You have platforms like LinkedIn, but it doesn’t actually serve the freelance marketplace. You have spaces like Fiverr to find content creators, but all of that has to do with remote work. It’s not localized. We’re the safe space for finding content creators who are local. Let’s say you run a Syracuse website and want to find a videographer from Le Moyne College. We make the connection.
We decided to make it a technology company that we scale up to enhance student experience all across the country. My goal was to build CLLCTVE, get funded, and support a team financially before graduating from Newhouse and then run into this thing full time.
I got my master’s of entrepreneurship while building the company. It basically allowed me to buy time in a way that ensured I was able to strengthen my ability to lead the company forward, to scale the company, and to support the people who are building the company. I knew I couldn't ask something of Brendan and other people on my team if I couldn’t actually lead them forward.
So far, we've raised a little over $200,000 in pre-seed funding. We have a team of seven people. Right now it's a resource for a group of about 2,000 creatives. We're expecting that this summer we'll have 5,000 creatives on the platform. In a few months, Brendan and I are moving to Los Angeles to scale the product out there, but we are still going to have resources on the ground in Syracuse.
So, you’ll keep CLLCTVE based in Syracuse?
Yup. We made that decision super-proactively. Syracuse as a city had the resources, the systems, the environment to support us during our ideation phase. Everything from the Blackstone LaunchPad and The Tech Garden to people like the deputy mayor, Sharon Owens. They have been good supporters. It made sense for us to stay in Syracuse, to build this in Cuse. Over the next 10 years, people are going to wish that they invested in Syracuse five years ago. I love Cuse.
How do you make money with CLLCTVE?
We monetize it on the B2B side – companies pay us. We didn’t want creatives to pay to be able to find opportunities. We want to democratize the content landscape. It shouldn't matter if your parents make X amount of money to be able to get onto a platform. You should be seen based on your talent.
Tell me about growing up and early leadership roles.
Growing up, I was a stereotypical ADHD kid who could never really pay attention in class. What I didn't understand was how to channel all of this energy into something that was positive. Leadership classes and programs got me on a path to understand myself as an entrepreneur. I began to say: Hey, you're not just this troubled kid who's doing X, Y and Z. You're a kid who has a lot of energy and a lot of passion to change the world.
I joined student government in my freshman year of high school and that was a changing point. I went from being the kid who was in the principal's office every day and within a year I was class president. That was my introduction into leadership. Three out of four years in high school, I was class president.
I grew up in Chick-fil-A’s Leader Academy, which is a big thing in Atlanta. Also I’m a Posse Scholar. The Posse Foundation gives out full-tuition scholarships to students who identify as leaders from different urban communities who identify as leaders within their own cities. Syracuse University had a deal with the Posse Foundation and so I was the fourth posse to go to Syracuse University from Atlanta.
In your senior year of high school, you're meeting every week for two hours with 10 students who come from 10 different neighborhoods across the city of Atlanta. This program is training seniors in high school to come to a place like Syracuse University to start clubs, start programs, innovate, all that. I was super fortunate to be involved.
Then, my family was a big influence. My family’s great. My mom (Darlene Green) was born in 1962; my dad (Kelvin Davis) in ’66. They were born in the middle of the Civil Rights era. They grew up in a time where people of color, Black people, were getting to a point where they could vote.
My parents were the first people in their families to go to college. My parents never had the luxury of being able to think about being an entrepreneur, but they were able to provide a foundation for myself and my brother. That foundation gave me the luxury to say, Hey, go to Syracuse? Cool. Do you want to start this business. All right, cool. Find a way to make it work.
What advice would you give for effective leadership, especially for a person, like you, aspiring to lead a startup?
One thing I know ensured my success was having safe spaces to fail.
Some leaders become super egotistical. They get in your head, making it not safe to fail. It’s not necessarily out of spite, but out of fear of failing on stakeholders, out of fear of not closing deals, out of the fear of not meeting quarterly milestones, or whatever drives their fear. Because of that, they take control of situations or use their ego or authority to control and weaponize situations instead of listening to what people are saying. They need to practice humility.
You have to build a safe space, a safe community, safe structures to work through problems and risk being able to fail.
For me, fortunately, that was Syracuse University. That was the environment through the Blackstone LaunchPad and with people like Linda Dickerson Hartsock. I had an environment that allowed me to fail so that I could learn to do the next thing.
So many people don't pitch that idea at work, don't start that first company, don't do X, Y, and Z out of the fear of pushback or the fear of failure.
We grow through feedback – through growing pains. It's product development 101. To iterate a better product, we have to listen to our customers. They need to tell us what's going wrong with the beta version.
Egotistical leaders close their ears to information and try to control the environment.
Good leaders talk less, listen more. They hire people smarter than they are.
What qualities do you see in good leadership or in a leader you admire?
I wrote down a list. Do you mind if I read from the list?
Not at all. I like preparation.
For positive attributes, I wrote humility. Hunger for knowledge. Lifelong learners.
A focus on being community builders. What I mean by that is a lot of people like to step on platforms with a microphone and preach to the choir, but they don’t actually know who’s in the audience. They don’t understand the individuals who are in their constituency. They wouldn’t show up to support a person one-to-one. They want to be on a platform at a one-to-many level.
Then comes mindfulness and empathy.
A leader is someone who’s leading people forward. They’re not dragging people forward. Leaders who feel entitled drag people instead of motivating and empowering people to go forward.
Poor leaders use authority as a weapon if you will. They aren't soldiers in their own army. If you aren't going to put your own neck on the line for this company, you can't expect or require anybody else in your organization to either.
What do people need from their leaders?
We need clarity from our leaders. We see that now in the age of Covid more than ever. When things happen, when problems arise, whether you're talking about the United States of America or you're talking about within your own family or in any type of business, when chaos happens, true leaders are speaking with clarity.
Just because you're a mayor of a city, for example, doesn't mean that you're actually a good leader. It doesn't mean that you know the people in that city or that the people look to you and believe you can lead the way out.
We live in an age where everyone's speaking. Everyone has a platform and wants something to say. Which is great. But it causes so much more confusion.
So, yeah, people want clarity, direction, assurance from their leaders.
That goes to empathy. If you're a leader, you not only need to be clear in your communication or in expressing your vision, but then you need to give the assurance and the resources to move forward.
I'm going to use Covid as an example again. When you're leading a group of people, you could say, Hey, all right, we're going to go back to work. We're going to do X, Y, and Z, whatever. Cool. But what are we instituting? What systems are we creating? What resources will people have to go forward?
If you create a hopeless group of people who you're screaming at, but you’ve provided no resources to reach your objectives, you're just a dictator.
You were using Covid and mayors as examples, but do your ideas apply to leading a business?
Sure. A thousand percent.
Just because you're a CEO, does not mean that you know how to lead us through this time. Employees see that. That’s why it’s important for leaders, CEOs, and executives to be lifelong learners. That's why it's important to listen to people on your team. That's why it's important to listen to your customers because you need to be continually iterating yourself.
I think a lot of people go out and actively lead before they actively listen.
People will try to actively fix problems before they actively understand the range of solutions.
Instead of jumping up and trying to be the leader for the sake of being the leader, listen to the people you are going to be leading.
What do you wish you had known about running a company before you started yours?
Aw, man, everything. (Laughter)
I wish that I knew about the importance of prioritization.
I think that I would have wanted to know the importance of knowing what you don't know. When I started the company I understood what my strengths were, but I was not as aware of my weaknesses – technically, personally, whatever.
A lot of things could have been done quicker, more efficiently, if I had prioritized prioritization.
I like different authors that I try to parallel myself with when it comes to leadership. Two of them are John C. Maxwell and James Baldwin. I think people would not necessarily classify them similarly. For myself personally, I think I want my leadership to mimic them.
Maxwell has a strong foundation when it comes to leadership through a Christian context. Baldwin wrote novels like “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “Go Tell it on the Mountain.”
The weekly “CNY Conversation" features Q&A interviews about leadership, success, and innovation. The conversations are condensed and edited. To suggest a leader for a Conversation, contact Stan Linhorst at StanLinhorst@gmail.com. Last week featured Jennifer Savastino, co-owner of Gannon Pest Control and an officer in Syracuse Challenger Baseball.
"control" - Google News
June 16, 2020 at 04:20PM
https://ift.tt/3flO0UG
Kelsey Davis of CLLCTVE on leadership: Control ego, talk less, listen more - syracuse.com
"control" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3bY2j0m
https://ift.tt/2KQD83I
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Kelsey Davis of CLLCTVE on leadership: Control ego, talk less, listen more - syracuse.com"
Post a Comment