This week we sit down with Keith Wilmot, former Global VP of Creativity and Innovation for The Coca-Cola Company. We discuss why everyone is creative, lessons learned from leading in both big and small companies, and what it means to be innovative.  Keith Wilmot has also served as CEO of GiANT Impact and is an expert on leadership, creativity, and culture.

Click here to access our Loan Pricing & Relationship Profitability Series

The views, information, or opinions expressed during this show are solely those of the participants involved and do not necessarily represent those of SouthState Bank and its employees. 

SouthState Bank, N.A. – Member FDIC

Intro: Helping community bankers grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is the Community Bank Podcast.

Erik Bagwell: Welcome to The Community Bank Podcast. I’m Erik Bagwell, Director of Sales and Marketing for the Correspondent Division at South State Bank. Joining me as always is Caleb Stevens. Caleb is a Business Development Officer and Producer of the podcast. Caleb, how are you?

Caleb Stevens: I’m doing well. Another good day in Atlanta good to be back on the show. We’re actually looking over I-285, as we speak looking down at the traffic.

Erik Bagwell: We are, we have somebody has hit a wall and The State Patrol and a fire truck are down there, and he is explaining to The State Patrolman why he hit the wall, so, typical day in Atlanta.

Caleb Stevens: If banking doesn’t work out, maybe you can join the local news channel reporting on the Atlanta traffic.

Erik Bagwell: Well, listen we got a great show today. Caleb sat down with Keith Wilmot. Caleb, tell us about Keith.

Caleb Stevens: Keith has done a lot of great things. He used to work with Coca-Cola. He was The Global Vice President of Creativity and Innovation, which is a really cool title, Global VP, Creativity, Innovation. He ran the Leadercast Conferences. So, many people will be familiar with that. It’s one of the biggest leadership events in the world. He now is working with a group that he founded called Ignitor Agency, where they’re trying to help companies hardwire creativity into their company’s culture, so really good discussion on all things leadership. We touch on creativity, and how a lot of people think creativity is, you get hit with a wind of inspiration, and it’s this thing that’s hard to figure out and manage, but he talks about why all companies need to be creative and how creativity really is about problem solving. So really good discussion and excited for folks to hear it.

Erik Bagwell: Yeah. Caleb was telling me a little bit about it and you guys are going to like this. We appreciate you all listening. Before we get to the interview though, Caleb, let’s talk about our loan pricing series real quick that we mentioned on some previous episodes.

Caleb Stevens: Yeah. Folks have maybe heard about it by now but want to just keep it in front of you. We created a resource for lenders and for people on the credit side of banking, five free videos to price, more profitable loans in 20212. So, if you’re looking inflation, what the fed is doing, the economy, and you’re wondering how are we going to strategically position our loan portfolio this year and price our credits in 2022, this is a series we made just for you. So, click the link in these show notes, we’ve provided. It’s right there, so just click that link in the show notes, or you can go to southstatecorrespondent.com/loanpricing. With that, here’s my discussion with Keith Wilmot. Well, Keith thanks for hopping on the podcast today. It’s great to see you. It’s been a while since we’ve reconnected. How are you?

Keith Wilmot: I am doing excellent. How are you?

Caleb Stevens: I am doing well. It’s good to be talking with you, today about leadership, culture, creativity. I know that’s something you’re really passionate about with your new Ignitor Agency. Give us just a quick flyover of your career for folks who are not familiar with you. You’ve had so many great experiences with big companies, small companies all across the board. So, tell us what you’ve been up to the last several decades.

Keith Wilmot: Yeah, thanks. I’ve been really privileged with diversity of roles and companies. I actually started my career at Ocean Spray Cranberries, fascinating business, it’s co-op and a great brand and a great business. Mostly through my career marketing and sales, when I got to Pfizer Consumer Healthcare, so brands like Listerine and Neosporin and Lubriderm, at the time we hired a new role that I’d never heard of. It was called a Chief Innovation Officer and I actually built a friendship with him and then ultimately joined his team as the Director of Innovation for Pfizer, and fell in love with the role of innovation and what it can do to a company and how it transforms both the people side of the business, but then also the metric side, new products, new ideas, and when those two things are combined, it really makes a business flourish.

In the process, we grew that with the help of marketing and the entire organization grew Pfizer dramatically in a short period and then was sold. In that transition, I was literally on my way to sign a contract with my mentor, Jeff, he started another company and, [inaudible 04:24] called and said, hey, we’ve got this role at Coca-Cola; we think you’re perfect for it. Would you come down and, and talk to us about it? I had the privilege of being The Global Vice President of Innovation and Creativity for that company; actually, created a concept called Ignitor inside the company and traveled to about 45 countries with Coke and some amazing stories and amazing impact.

Then left Coke and for the last eight years have been a CEO of two different companies. One was a leadership development organization called Giant Impact and had brands like Leadercast and Catalyst, and then left and was the CEO of a company called Scoop, and really personally why I did that was to build some operational chops, and really application of these things that I was teaching these big companies and applying it to smaller companies. I found in my journey that in a lot of ways, the small companies are trying to act big, and the big companies are trying to act small. So, it’s like trying to get them somewhere in the middle.

Caleb Stevens: Well, there’s not many folks that can say they were a global vice president at Coca-Cola, which you were over the innovation and strategy area. What were some of the biggest lessons you learned working for one of the greatest American brands out there?

Keith Wilmot: No doubt. Yeah. Its funny people will consider Coke and the first thing that comes to mind is obviously great products, but an incredible marketing machine, and they are. I think one of the things that was a big aha for me when I was there, and a big learning is the power of the distribution network that they had. Having traveled the world with them and one of the funniest and most crazy stories. We were doing a project in Morocco and we were in Marrakesh and we had a Saturday off, so we took a Jeep ride over the Atlas Mountains and that was epic alone. We kind of get to the base of the Sahara Desert and we get on horse back and camel and go hours into the Sahara Desert. We get off; the thing was to stay over, an evening with The Berber Tribe. They’re traveling nomads and they set up camp and they did this expedition for us. So, I get off my camel, I’m exhausted, I’m in the middle of The Sahara Desert, I’m not in Kansas anymore. I stick my head under the tent and walk in and the elder tribesman comes, and he actually hands me a Coca-Cola. I think the insight for me was my goodness. This truly is a global company that has the ability to get their product to the most remote parts of the world in a matter of no time. Really, the network is what makes Coke the most powerful thing as a global brand, the marketing is fantastic, but the ability to get their product anywhere in the world within arms reach in a matter of minutes is really what makes the business hum.

Caleb Stevens: How do you expense the mileage on a camel ride on your expense report?

Keith Wilmot: The accountants figured that one out. This was before Ben Laden was taken care of and I was more worried about my personal security at that point, but Coke was pretty serious about that as well, but it was incredible stories. Having been to, 45 countries, with that brand and that company, so much respect for the work that they do and the impact that they make beyond, that they sell a sugary soft drink. It’s an impressive organization.

Caleb Stevens: Well, one of the things that strikes me is how on top of the trends Coca-Cola is, even with the health craze and a lot of people are moving away from sugary drinks. It seems like Coke’s always one step ahead with having a great product to meet the needs of consumers and customers. Going back to the idea of big companies trying to think small, stay small, still have an entrepreneurial culture. That’s something that we’re striving for here at South State. What were some key things that they did to stay nimble and agile, even as they were a multinational company?

Keith Wilmot: Yeah. It’s in the people and you connect it to the work that we’re doing now with the Ignitor agency is, is it starts with people and it starts with the culture, and it starts with getting leaders comfortable with getting out of patterns that leaders can often get into. One of the most difficult things as an organization grows, so does process and control, and it’s important because you can’t have leaders making decisions that aren’t consistent with what the company’s needs are, but you need those leaders to be very comfortable with risk and being comfortable with thinking differently about solving different business challenges. A big part of our role at Coke with Ignitor and now with Ignitor Agency is helping leaders with the suite of behaviors, tools, and a process to get unstuck, and get out of what our rivers are thinking, because personal creativity, some of the barriers to that are your past experiences, the patterns that you get into as a leader, and if you don’t get out of those patterns and break, some of those past experiences, you start to hear things like, it always is done this way at this company.
Or it can’t be done this way at this company, because we’ve got these orthodoxies that can’t be broken. We help leaders’ kind of break out of those and we did it at Coke. Some of it was simple as like when I arrived at the scenic Coca-Cola, it was fairly, still formal. I wore jeans and I’m like, we’re the happiness factory. We sell sugar water. We shouldn’t be wearing suits to work every day. Some of it is cultural like that, and some of it are real like tools to help trick your brain out of rivers of thinking things like related worlds, random links and some cool tools that we designed when we were there, to get that culture of creativity and innovation flourishing at the company.

Caleb Stevens: When I interned for Chick-fil-A in their Marketing Department, this was seven, eight years ago. So, it’s been a while, but at the time, no facial hair, still had to wear a tie, but the one exception was in there, Innovation Center called The Hatch. I’m sure you’re very familiar and you’ve probably been there–

Caleb Stevens: Before, but there you could wear jeans. It was a lot more relaxed. I guess to your point, they wanted to help you break the unwritten rules of corporate culture to get your brain churning a little bit more.

Keith Wilmot: Yeah. We are really big believers, and we did this at Coke and it’s called a decentralized innovation strategy. Things like the hatch are really important, but you want that to bleed out into your organization, okay. We help companies and, what we did successfully at Coke was instead of having an Innovation Department, translate that into the role of everyone in the organization. So regardless of whether you sit in HR, Operations or Supply Chain or Finance or Marketing, or the Innovation Team, your role is to innovate, and how you define that is the most important thing. So, doing things in new ways to accomplish better results, being better problem solvers, being more agile and flexible, those are attributes of Ignitors and what we wanted to build in the organization.

Caleb Stevens: It kind of reminds me of what Seth Godin said one time that one of the biggest pitfalls companies fall into is the mentality of, well, that’s not my job. Customer service, that’s not my job, because that’s Customer Services Department. Innovation, that’s not my job because that’s the innovation department. What I hear you’re saying, and what you’re trying to do with your agency is we got to break down those walls of thinking and realize innovation applies to all of us.

Keith Wilmot: Hundred percent, and it’s inclusive. One of the things that we did interestingly with like pipeline development of companies, a lot of companies use stage gates processes to manage their innovation funnel and their flow of ideas through the system. We believe in a two-sided approach to innovation, always looking at both what the customer and the consumer are needing, but also the internal business requirements to make the idea valuable. So, far too often, we’d be a part of these brainstorming sessions where there’s a lot of post-it notes up on the wall, but none of them are executable because by the time they get into the stage gates process and the finance folks and the supply chain team and the operations team get involved in them, they get killed because they’re just not doable. We’ll get those folks involved earlier and have them a part of the early part of ideation and creativity, and that’s when the ideas become more sticky. So that whole decentralized approach to innovation helps companies do that. So, when we do projects and when we would do Ignitor work at Coke, we’d make sure that the bottlers were involved, and the operations team was involved earlier on because the ideas became much more sticky.

Caleb Stevens: So, let’s transition to the idea of leadership within big companies versus small companies, you’ve worked for both. Is it harder or is it different working for a big publicly traded company when you’ve got quarterly earnings and more pressure, more scrutiny. There’s Wall Street analysts who are following you like a Hawk. With a startup, maybe you’re the sole owner, or there’s a small group of people who it, you can be more nimble, you’re wearing more hats. What are some of the similarities or maybe differences that you’ve seen between the two? Then what are some of the common themes that regardless of what kind of company you’re in, what are some common leadership traits that you think have stood the test of time?

Keith Wilmot: Yeah. It’s a great question. Having been on both sides, you know the old adage, the grass is always greener on the other side. Well, it’s not, it’s as equally difficult to run a big organization, as it is a small. The complexities are different in some ways, in some ways, very similar. I can tell you as a brand manager in a previous life of a bigger organization I would tell people, yeah, I have no responsibility, but then now being the CEO of a small 15-million-dollar leadership development organization owning that P&L and owning the brand P&L were two very drastically different things. When I was on the brand side owning that P&L I wasn’t worried about cash flow. I wasn’t worried about payroll; I wasn’t worried about a lot of things that are a part of a P&L when you’re the CEO of a small company and you’re worried about lives and making sure that you’re making enough revenue and cash to cover payroll next month. That’s a different stress, it’s a different complexity and it’s a different operating

Caleb Stevens: You trade the analyst for the monthly payroll, making sure you can take care of your cost.

Keith Wilmot: Yeah. When Sally walks down the hall and you go, oh, we got to make sure we have enough cash to pay her next month. That’s a different type of type of stress, but different complexities. As I said before we started, a lot of times big companies are trying to act more nimble because as the company grows and scales, so does the need for process and control. As the company is small their biggest challenge of small companies is how do we scale this? How do we make this a scalable type of organization. As you scale, you need more processing control. So, I think it’s just a balance. I think the leaders that I’ve seen do the best type of work, they’re adaptable, they have whole brain problem solving skills. They’re creative and whole brain creative, and they’re able to look at creativity, not as artistic, but science behind it as well that it’s really accomplishing new things in better ways to achieve better results.

Then high levels of empathy, especially in today’s work environment and the new way of working environment is people are trying to figure out, all right, what’s flexible? How much time are we going to be spending in an office versus working at home? I think empathy is going to be one of the most valuable leadership traits, attributes, high levels of empathy, and I think that’s going to be needed motivate people. I found when you can show an employee or a team member, how their personal passion and purpose connect to their profession, that’s a winning model, because when you do that, what it does is it increases engagement and collaboration. It breaks my heart when I read insights around how people are disengaged with their work and the mental strain that it’s causing people and the anxieties and how anxieties are increasing at work and things like that. I feel like that’s a leadership challenge for us all. If you lead people in an organization, you’ve got to be thinking through empathy and how to make their role connect to their purpose, passion, and make it fun because if not we’re going to lose more people.

Caleb Stevens: I think one of the challenges going off of that is people make the assumption, well, Keith, that’s easy if you’re working in a nonprofit, because there’s this sort of altruistic charitable, I’m passionate about something making an impact and I can see directly how I’m changing lives in say a nonprofit. If I’m working for Coca-Cola and I’m providing beverages to people, or if I’m working for a bank, or if I’m working for any kind of company out there, how does that truly quote make an impact? Or how does my personal sense of meaning and purpose tie into that? How have you tried to help people connect the dots to something that maybe doesn’t have an explicitly missional feel to it, but yet it does make a difference and you are improving lives through how you show up, how you do your work. How do you help leaders connect the dots for the people they’re leading?

Keith Wilmot: Yeah. Some of it’s behavioral. So, we have a suite of behaviors that we use with Ignitor. I’ll give a couple examples of them. One of them is a behavioral called green housing, and it’s how you nurture, and protect new ideas, new concepts, it can go as far as people in your organization, how do you greenhouse people and what we’ve found in some great science and data to support it, that when leaders are using this behavior of green housing, often in team environments, they’re increasing the level of engagement because people want to be around people that greenhouse you. If you have a leader that’s constantly just kind of like no to new ideas. It becomes like, all right, now I’m starting to disconnect my passion and my purpose from this organization. Whereas when you have a leader, that’ll greenhouse stuff and they’re like, yeah, that’s great. Yes, and let’s do this, yes, and. That yes, and behavior can actually make people feel more connected to their role, whether it’s an operations manager or a marketing director or whatever they are in the organization. It’s a behavior that if you get really clever with it can, can increase people’s passion towards their work

Caleb Stevens: Versus deflate them, and they check out and say, well, they never listen to me. They’re never open to my ideas.

Keith Wilmot: It’s just a job, and I’m just here filling a space. What I’d really love to be doing is surfing. Well, let’s connect those two things. If you love to surf, and you’re an operating manager, make those things part of. By the way, there’s all this great new science to show that when people are exercising, the myelination in their brain expands and in that myelination their productivity and their creativity increase. Well, connect those two, build a relationship with your team members so that you can make those connections in such a way, and then greenhouse it. Now all of a sudden, you’ve got a more, highly engaged, more productive individual that is probably going to do a lot more for you.

Caleb Stevens: That’s great. Well, one of the most impactful leadership events I’ve ever been to was Leadercast. I went back in 2016 and I can still remember down to some of the key points I remember hearing, I know Andy Stanley spoke and he’s so clear and powerful. I remember a lot of things he said. Nick Saban spoke, I think Rorke Denver spoke, great lineup of speakers that year. What was that like getting to lead one of the premiere leadership events in the whole country?

Keith Wilmot: Yeah. Well, it’s humbling. When you’re back in the green room and you’ve got a Navy SEAL commander sitting at your right and I believe Stanley’s one of the most profound leadership coaches and people in the world. Honestly, he leads North Point Church, but he’s just such a student of leadership and he’s got such wisdom. So, you’ve got a commander there, sitting in front of you is one of the most successful coaches in the history of sports. It’s a bit of a humbling experience for sure. Some of the fun back scenes, I had the privilege of now building a friendship with Rorke Denver and actually the oar behind me is actually from him. We have a farm in East Georgia, and I had brought him out to the farm and his bride was with us, and my bride was with us, Jennifer, and he’s giving Jennifer, pistol shooting lessons. I’m walking away going, oh my goodness. I’m not even going to be able to get into a gun fight with my wife and win. So, I’m in real trouble now, but some fun kind of behind the scenes of Leadercast though.

Caleb Stevens: Yeah. I remember Nick Saban had some great insights. Andy Stanley, I think that year talked about how we say we follow people with integrity and it’s true to some degree that we do, but we really follow clarity. He says, above anything else, clarity is going to trump integrity. So as a leader, you want to have integrity of course, but really think through, are you casting a clear and compelling vision for your team? I mean, just stuff like that, that I’ll never forget.

Keith Wilmot: Yeah. In adding to with Rorke too, one of the first things he did was calm is contagious, and that was just such an easy thing to really kind of apply to really all aspects of your life. Even in some really cool insights, like see less to see more, he has this concept when you’re trying to solve a big problem, oftentimes you’ll look at the problem on a big landscape and really the easiest way to solve the issue or solve the challenge that you’re trying to solve is actually to look at it in smaller chunks. He equates it back to how you would class a mountain and looking for either an enemy or if you’re hunting an animal or whatever but seeing less to see more is actually a really interesting concept you’ve applied to business.

Caleb Stevens: We had Rorke speak at our annual conference a number of years ago and it was actually like right before I started here at the bank, it was about a month away from starting. He told everybody in the room, get your new hires, get your rookies in a gun fight early, because it gets them going.

Keith Wilmot: Not, not literally.

Caleb Stevens: Yeah, not literally. That’s right. We have to run this show with our compliance department, so yeah, not literal.

Keith Wilmot: That’s right. Not literally. I’m not talking literal gun fights.

Caleb Stevens: Not literal gun fight. Metaphorically, get them in something that you test their mettle early and my manager said, all right, Caleb, next month we’re throwing you into a gun fight and yeah.

Keith Wilmot: Yeah. I love it, lot of learning. When you think about what Rorke did, I mean from a leadership perspective these are teams that didn’t have the option to fail. Our failure is loss of revenue, potentially loss of employment, serious things there, but their loss is loss of life. I think they figured out a model that works. One of the interesting things I’ve heard on that is, when they look at leaders, they look at two indices, trust and performance, and they have this in their SEALS. So, they have this thing where, on the trust meter it’s, can I trust you with my wife? Can I trust you with my money? Then performance is obviously all of the performance indicator. What they’ll tell you is that they would rather have an individual with high trust, a bit less performance than high performance, low trust. I think there’s something in that as leaders and how we measure people and we’ll measure performance, but do we really measure their trustworthiness? We get into that a bit with Ignitor as well, and teaching leaders that trust is a really important part of team success and allowing for creativity and agility and innovation to flourish in an organization.

Caleb Stevens: Well, if there’s been any time recently, that’s tested leaders; I would say it’s been the last two years. What have you seen? How is the pandemic, things going on with the economy? How have you seen that test leaders the most and how have you seen some of the best leaders lead well through this season?

Keith Wilmot: Yeah. I mean, even Caleb what you had told me about at the beginning of the podcast about how you’ve guys have pivoted, I think that’s a really important word that has kind of differentiated companies that have done really well and have companies that have gotten kind of crushed by COVID is, companies that have figured out ways to pivot in new ways to accomplish better results. Who would’ve known three, four years ago that you’d be doing a podcast on culture and leadership in a bank and you’d did. If you look at the companies that have done really well through the pandemic, they have found ways to pivot, because there’s this concept called black swans, and they’re things that were not foreseeable, but they have major impact on your business or your life and your ability to respond to black swans as leaders, as an organization will ultimately determine whether you’re going to be successful or not successful when they hit. There’s a book, I think called Black Swan, but it’s like every history, every organization hits a few black swans in the course of their development and how they’re able to pivot and respond to those is most important.

Caleb Stevens: Anytime I hear black swan, I think of Chris Voss, the FBI host negotiator guy, he’s got The Black Swan Group. Talk about a genius, that guy’s got some great principles on negotiating, reading people’s mannerisms and there are a lot of business principles that apply from, funny enough being an FBI hostage negotiator. I’m sure he’s probably a Leadercast speaker, I would think in the past too.

Keith Wilmot: I’m sure he was at least thought of.

Caleb Stevens: Yeah. Well, tell us, you mentioned a couple times your Ignitor Agency, but tell us what you’re doing now, how you’re serving leaders and what your new agency is all about?

Keith Wilmot: Yeah. So, we’re called Ignitor and fortunately, Coke released the trademark and we have it now. Two of my ex-teammates that were a part of my team at Coke that would travel the world with me doing this work are now partners in the agency. We simply help companies and organizations hardwire creativity, agility, and innovation into daily practice. We do that through working directly with leaders and their performers and building kind of a decentralized approach to innovation in the organization and building champions that regardless of where they sit in the company really fully passionately believe that it is their role to innovate. We do that through a suite of behaviors, attributes tools, and a simple process. We work directly with those organizations to achieve those achieve those results. In it, what we find is it increases engagement. It increases productivity and certainly creativity in the organization. McKinsey did a recent study that backs a lot of our work up, McKinsey and Company. They looked at companies with embedded creativity strategies and training and capabilities perform, better in organic growth, net enterprise value, net future EBITDA performance, and they’ve made this direct correlation between creativity and top and bottom-line business performance. Certainly, we’ve been able to use that as a marketing tool for the importance of bringing in a team like Ignitor in your company.

Caleb Stevens: Yeah. I think there’s a big misconception out there that creativity is esoteric. You get hit with a wind of inspiration and you come up with these great ideas, and really creativity is more akin to almost like a professional sport. There’s a lot of discipline involved structure–

Keith Wilmot: I understand.

Caleb Stevens: Routine. So many people think creativity that’s like the guitar player or the singer, the painter, that kind of thing. I’m a banker. I’m not that creative, and I think what you’re saying is actually everybody’s got the ability to be creative. It depends on, are you intentional about it? How are you thinking about it? What are you putting in place to make sure that to your point, it’s hardwired into your organization?

Keith Wilmot: Yeah. Oftentimes I’ll be with a bunch of senior executives and I’ll ask the question, how many of you believe that you’re Uber creative and oftentimes you’ll get one or two that raise their hand, but often they’ll say, I don’t know if I’m Uber creative and then I say, well, how many of you believe you’re really good problem solvers? There’s almost a necessity to raise your hand as a senior executive. Of course, I’m a problem solver. Well, what’s the difference between creativity and problem solving, and then we get into this interesting conversation around language and definition, and to your point about the routines. One of our behaviors is a behavior called freshness. It’s the uniqueness and quality of stimulus that you bring into your daily creative process or your daily life as an executive, and that uniqueness of quality of stimulus will tend to indicate the quality of the ideas that come out. So, the more unique the freshness and how you get out of your rhythms, you’re more likely to be able to problem solve much more effectively. This isn’t whiteboard stuff. Accountants can be highly creative problem solvers. It’s got to be obviously ethical, but it’s really an important part of their role as an accountant is to problem solve and the uniqueness to quality of stimulus and freshness and green housing are all part of that as well.

Caleb Stevens: I think that probably pushes back a little bit on this notion of you’ve got to be at your desk all the time, 80 hours a week, grinding it out, getting stuff done, when really some of your best ideas come in the margins of life when you’re taking a walk, when you’re just out there musing. I would say that’s been true for me, when I have time, I think it’s Glen Jackson who we had on recently says a change of place, plus a change of pace equals a new perspective.

Keith Wilmot: Hundred percent.

Caleb Stevens: I think, that’s a huge thing that a lot of leaders probably pitfall we can fall into is we think, well, I just got to get stuff done, execute, execute, execute.

Keith Wilmot: I got to crunch. I got to crunch.

Caleb Stevens: There’s no margin for freshness, for ideas for green housing. Yeah.

Keith Wilmot: I just literally just posted something on LinkedIn today. It was an incredible visual, it showed two brains, both hemisphere and 20 minutes of quiet sitting at your desk versus 20 minutes of walking, the quiet sitting at your desk, only the left bottom centrical of the brain was kind of like fired up. The 20 minutes of walking was a whole brain fire up type of visual. It just showed you that when you get out and you get out of your perspective for just 20 minutes, what that can do to productivity and two sides of your hemisphere is firing and that’s where creativity best loads.

Caleb Stevens: Well, if folks want to learn more about what you’re doing, if they’re hearing this and saying, I need more creativity in my organization. How can they engage with you guys and learn more about what you’re doing?

Keith Wilmot: Yeah. So, we’re on LinkedIn, I’m on LinkedIn, certainly on Instagram and Facebook, just Keith Wilmot. Our agency is called ignitor Agency and we can be reached @www.ignitoragency.com. It’s under construction, but there’s a way to get in contact with us, so just be patient with us on that, but yeah. Reach out to me and anything, I can also be reached on my email at keith@ignitoragency. So, yeah, if anybody wants to chat, I love talking about creativity and innovation and would be more than happy to chat with anyone.

Caleb Stevens: I feel like we could go for another hour on this discussion, but this has been a great conversation. Keith, thank you for your time.

Keith Wilmot: Okay.

 

Recent Episodes

04/15/24

The Future Of Core Processing With Nymbus CEO Jeffery Kendall

Today Chris Nichols, our Director of Capital Markets, sits down with Nymbus CEO Jeffery Kendall. Chris and Jeffery talk about the future of core processing, payments, how banks should be thinking about their relationship with their core provider, and the new opportunities emerging for banks to offer more innovative products and solutions to their customers….

Listen Now about The Future Of Core Processing With Nymbus CEO Jeffery Kendall
04/08/24

The Future of Fintech & Community Banking with Scott Mills

Today we’ll be speaking with Scott Mills, president of the William Mills agency based in Atlanta. They specialize in helping fintechs connect with banks, and they work with a number of major bank technology providers. Scott talks about the future of fintech, where fintech partnerships often go wrong for community banks, and how to properly evaluate a…

Listen Now about The Future of Fintech & Community Banking with Scott Mills
04/01/24

The Biggest Challenges Facing Community Banks with Karl Nelson

Today we bring back Karl Nelson from KPN Consulting. Karl recaps the previous year in banking and discusses the biggest challenges facing community banks today. GET YOUR FREE ARC STEP-UP PLAYBOOK HERE The views, information, or opinions expressed during this show are solely those of the participants involved and do not necessarily represent those of…

Listen Now about The Biggest Challenges Facing Community Banks with Karl Nelson
03/25/24

Growing Your Leadership and Your Bank with Alex Judd

Today we bring back Alex Judd, Founder of Path for Growth, to discuss healthy leadership, growth, culture, and more. GET YOUR FREE ARC STEP-UP PLAYBOOK HERE The views, information, or opinions expressed during this show are solely those of the participants involved and do not necessarily represent those of SouthState Bank and its employees SouthState…

Listen Now about Growing Your Leadership and Your Bank with Alex Judd
03/18/24

The State of the Banking Industry with Nathan Stovall

Today we’re joined by Nathan Stovall, Director of Financial Institutions Research at S&P Global.  We discuss deposit trends, the outlook for commercial credit, and outlook for interest rates. GET YOUR FREE ARC STEP-UP PLAYBOOK HERE The views, information, or opinions expressed during this show are solely those of the participants involved and do not necessarily…

Listen Now about The State of the Banking Industry with Nathan Stovall
03/11/24

Why Community Banking Matters with Dan Robb, CEO of Jonesburg State Bank & Former ABA Chairman

Today we sit down with Dan Robb, CEO of Jonesburg State Bank and former chairman of the ABA.  We talk about Dan’s passion for the industry and the challenges and opportunities facing community banks today. GET YOUR FREE ARC STEP-UP PLAYBOOK HERE The views, information, or opinions expressed during this show are solely those of the…

Listen Now about Why Community Banking Matters with Dan Robb, CEO of Jonesburg State Bank & Former ABA Chairman