School districts aren’t always the easiest things to manage, pandemics aside, but when you need to keep kids safe while ensuring their education the job gets even trickier. Fortunately for Waverly Community Schools, their superintendent is a seasoned educator and administrator.

This week we sat down with Superintendent Kelly Blake who’s in her 34th year of educating. (33 of those years being spent in Waverly.) She talks about making game time decisions, getting students at-home internet access, and the impact COVID-19 has had on education at large.

112: Kelly Blake - Protecting Children and Their Education

Culture within a business reflects the company's values. However, with many changes occurring over the past few years, we have an opportunity to step back and reform our businesses to become the best they can be. This presents itself as pressuring our employees and clients to step out of their comfort zone, but how do you do this? 

We start with the hard questions. Challenge your employees and clients to think about the company's values alongside tangible goals. Does your business need a vision? How do you create a productive company culture? What does your company need to become the best it can be? We cover it all in this week’s episode.

Pressure Testing your Brand

Burnout often comes in waves — so to prepare, we need to have tools ready to counteract the feelings of stress and anxiety when they hit. Being overwhelmed and experiencing burnout is a toxic duo that weighs down all professionals from time to time. To cope, we often go on autopilot hoping we’ll overcome these stressors over a few weeks or months; but this isn’t an adequate long-term solution. These feelings surpass the general sense of busyness, and have the potential to spread into all areas of our lives. 

So, what can we do about it? Does anyone really know how to get out of a burnout cycle? Is there a solution in sight? We may not have a singular, magical answer, but we have some strategies for addressing general feelings of overwhelm. Join us as we discuss our own experiences with combatting burnout.

Burnout and Overwhelm

In our guest Amber Clark’s own words, she "sort of fell into" her career as neighborhoods and economic development director for Meridian Township – but since then, it has become her dream job. As a Mid-Michigan native, Amber understands her community at its core and has a passion for creating environmental and educational change. Initiating change in a community with existing, deep roots is far from easy; but with a little collaboration and patience, Amber has turned many of her dreams and aspirations into a reality, empowering neighborhoods in the township she calls home.  

What is economic development? Why is it important? And what barriers will this space need to overcome in the future? We discuss it all with Amber.

Amber Clark: Uplifting Neighborhoods Through Economic Development

Artificial intelligence carries a lot of controversy within the creative industry, and it's not going away any time soon. We already use many forms of AI within our own businesses to enhance our work, but is it a tool to further improve our work or a replacement for people altogether? 
Our solution (for right now, at least) is that AI needs boundaries. There is a side which benefits our clients and our quality of work, but if used poorly it can become unethical or dilute the quality of our work. The human experience is unique and cannot be replicated — still, with that in mind, it’s important to embrace the benefits this new technologies can provide. Join us as we discuss the types of AI, where we think it is headed in the creative industries, and what tasks we wish AI could handle in our daily lives.

Reframing Artificial Intelligence

Risk is a roller coaster, and we all have different tolerance levels. As entrepreneurs, we believe the more risk you take on, the better the rewards. But the flip side, of course, is the heightened consequences if the risk doesn’t pay off. 

The roller coaster of risk has many ups and downs, but it is ultimately your decision whether or not to get on the ride. The amount of risk you can take depends on a lot of factors but, if done thoughtfully and with the right amount of due diligence, risk can be a safe and necessary investment. 

This episode, we discuss what things we’re willing to take risks on, and which shouldn’t involve any risk whatsoever. We talk about how we navigate risk, and share our secrets for remaining willing to take chances and try new ideas. Join us.

Risk Tolerance: Roller Coasters and Business Ownership

Client feedback is a permanent aspect of the creative industry, due to the endless opinions associated with creative products. For us, client feedback is a daily occurance. It is how we move forward, finish products, and maintain relationships. 
Although client feedback may not always be positive, we see it as a mindset shift. Think of feedback as a puzzle piece: Once you find where it fits, the overall team output improves. Join us as we discuss the different types of feedback and how we implement it within our own businesses.

Using Client Feedback to Your Advantage

Long description: How often does it actually serve us to have our expectations set in stone? Even when the circumstances of a project change, the work still needs to be done. This is where “going with the flow” comes in. Instead of becoming mentally invested in things happening a certain way, it takes a lot less energy to focus on the things that can be controlled. 

Even when a process is rigid, adaptability still plays a major role in the end result. Sure, this mindset takes bravery and a dash of risk-tolerance, but you might find there’s an opportunity for more creativity when going with the flow. This week, we talk about letting go of strict expectations and seizing the unexpected opportunities that come our way.

Going with the Flow

As leaders, we can’t (and shouldn’t) do it all. Bringing your team into the decision-making process is important to the health and wellness of your organization. No part of the organization benefits from being overprotective of decision-making, and being excluded from this process limits a team's growth potential. All that said, putting this delegation into practice can feel overwhelming.


Preparing yourself and your team for a shift in the decision-making requires transparency and, overall, trust in your team. Trusting your team can cut down on decision fatigue and burnout, and results in better decision-making throughout the organization. This week, we talk about the strategies we’ve used to find the why and how of handing over decision-making tasks to our own teams.

Delegating Decision-Making: Why and How

The question of when to hire and when not to isn’t about neglecting your team’s capacity needs. Rather, it’s about taking a more meditative approach to the hiring process. Beyond determining if your business has the budget to hire and what the capacity needs of your team are, it’s important to consider if your organization needs to change and how it needs to change with the addition of a new hire.

Instead of immediately focusing on filling a role, waiting to hire allows you to let go of the expectations you had for the previous team member and their process and make space for the development of new relationships and ways of working. It also allows your team to stretch their skills (within reason) and gives them the chance to grow before you determine what skill sets your business is missing. This week, we talk about our thought process behind hiring and how we’ve navigated recent questions of expanding our own teams.

When To Hire — And When Not To

Talking about creativity and the creative process can be necessarily abstract, but it doesn't have to be. There is value to looking at creativity as an investment. Creativity takes a willingness to challenge yourself to break down what already exists and start from scratch. This process requires a lot of trust in yourself or your team, and that can feel uncomfortable at first. While creativity can feel like a gamble you don’t have time for, the pursuit of creativity can help you avoid falling into the trap of limiting yourself to the first answer you encounter when trying to problem-solve. 

As you become more comfortable navigating the creative process, it becomes easier to differentiate where you should be creative and where you should rely on a formula or a pre-existing procedure to help you reach your intended outcome. You won’t always have the capacity to explore beyond the first answer you receive when problem-solving, but you’ll have gained an understanding of what creativity and the creative process needs to look like in order for you and your team to be successful. This week, we talk about creativity and the processes we’ve found success in.

The Creative Process: How The Sausage Gets Made

Leadership can be as overwhelming as it is rewarding. To view leadership as a ladder to climb ignores the aspects of the job that are far from a reward. Whether it’s a plumbing issue at the office, concerns about this quarter’s budget, or a conflict between staff, when you’re in a leadership position, the tough decisions are yours to make.



In our case, we chucked out the idea of leadership being glamorous a long time ago.

This podcast is affectionately described as “real talk about leadership and sanity in the creative industry,” so it seemed long overdue to have another episode on the topic of leadership. This week, we talk about how we keep going when wading through the challenges of leading.

Leadership: Sometimes You’re Stuck With It

RFPs, or Requests for Proposals, are a common way of soliciting work in the creative industry — and they can be an equally challenging (and often painful) process for everyone involved. In a written description alone, it can be difficult for a buyer to clearly articulate what service or product they’re looking for in an RFP. This can leave folks in the creative industry pouring hours into a proposal that isn’t actually what the client needs, which is a lose-lose situation for everyone.

Personally, we think RFPs work best when treated like a job interview. Injecting a human-centric, communicative approach to the RFP process helps buyers find vendors who will be a good fit for their organization, and takes the hoop-jumping guesswork out of the process for the creatives in the vendor position. This week, we share strategies for making RFPs effective for both clients and vendors, what we think makes certain RFPs “junk,” and our best and worst experiences with responding to RFPs.

Junk RFPs: Navigating the ‘Request for Proposal’ Process

Life can feel like a mess even on good days. The personal responsibilities of life that bring us joy often start to feel overwhelming when the demands for our time and energy surpass what is possible for us to give. For many people, this is where shame and self-judgment kick in, because dealing with every layer of life all at once shouldn’t be that hard, right?

Oh, if only it were that simple. Despite our best efforts, sometimes life is a shitshow, but the mess is easier to wade through when you accept it for what it is. This week, we talk about giving ourselves more grace when it comes to our expectations for the balancing of life’s layers.

Shitcake: The Seven-Layer Cake of Our Lives

When thinking about habits that are time wasters, it’s easy to name things like scrolling TikTok or doing superficial “reorganizing” because those feel like conscious time wasters. It’s the unconscious time wasters that are much more insidious and hard to kick. Things like indecision, lack of planning, or even overplanning result in time wasted, whether we mean to or not.

Recognizing these things as time wasters allows us to start figuring out how to create new processes that better serve our productivity. By working to create new processes, we also give ourselves the chance to change the way we look at things previously labeled as time wasters that are actually worth our time, like a solid nap or connecting with others. This week, we consider what counts as a time waster, and what it looks like to stop defaulting to unhelpful habits and processes.

Time Wasters - What Habitual Parts of Your Day Need To Be Swept Aside?

When talking about quality and standards in the creative industry, it can be easy to miss the fact that producing work that’s “good enough” is often the result of a capacity issue. When firms have a limited budget or staff for a project, not every product can be made with expert care, so they have to settle for a deliverable that’s “good enough.” This can be a tricky cycle to get out of, as it affects every part of a business, from internal processes to the outward perception of the organization.

This is where creative tools like Canva or AI-generated work come in. These tools are intentionally intuitive so beginners can start building the muscles needed for high quality work, but when used as shortcuts to achieve “good enough” work, they stunt creative growth and quality. This week, we discuss breaking the “good enough” cycle, how to wield beginner-friendly tools effectively, and consider how much value is placed on quality in the creative industry.

Quality and Standards: What Does Quality Mean in the Industry Right Now?

When it comes to supporting clients whose mission, if accomplished, would make the world a better place, strategy has shifted over the years. The divisive nature of politics today requires much stricter demands for how we can effectively create tools for clients who do advocacy work. Now more than ever, the tools you create must lay the groundwork for your audience to understand an issue before you start advocating for change.  

This work demands more transparency and nuance than ever, but that’s not a bad thing. The struggle lies in the strategy needed to help clients walk the tightrope between advocacy and lobbying, and crafting messages that remain true to the client’s mission and spirit without opening them up to a maelstrom of vitriol. In this episode, we talk about the ways the culture surrounding advocacy work has changed over the years, and the ways we've adjusted our work to meet these demands.

Professional Advocacy – How Do Advocacy Organizations Avoid Polarizing Politics?

Hiring people who have skills that differ from your own adds additional challenges to the recruitment process. When a potential new hire’s skill set is outside of your wheelhouse, it’s essential to remember why you are hiring, and that diversifying the skills of your team is necessary for growth. It expands what you can offer your clients, and brings different thought processes to the table, strengthening your team’s ability to problem solve.

As for determining the quality of a potential new hire’s skillset, it comes down to establishing a hiring process that confirms the legitimacy of their skills and establishes their dependability as a team member. In this episode, we talk about the processes we’ve developed for hiring employees with skill sets different from our own, and why we’re not afraid to hire people who might just be smarter than us.

Hiring Employees With Experience Outside Your Realm

If you’ve got anxiety about reaching “midlife” or stumbling into the dreaded “midlife crisis,” just know that it’s not an inevitability. “Midlife” is a construct. By taking a proactive approach to life, you can avoid general monotony and the tired cliche of a “midlife rut.”

By embracing change and staying curious about new possibilities, you can avoid succumbing to that sense of stagnation many of us fear as we age. The experience and wisdom we’ve gained by reaching midlife means that, when confronting new challenges or considering reinvention, we have hard-won resources to pull from. In this episode, we talk about why we hate the phrase “midlife”, and the ways we try to pursue growth in the name of evolution and reinvention instead.

Evolution & Reinvention

We frequently talk about balance on the podcast and the truth is that something has to give when life becomes hectic. But don’t worry, we’ll return to the regularly scheduled programming in January. For now, we’re rebroadcasting some episodes that are hitting especially close to home right now. Enjoy Another Round – Ep. 164: Burnout and Overwhelm!



Burnout often comes in waves — so to prepare, we need to have tools ready to counteract the feelings of stress and anxiety when they hit. Being overwhelmed and experiencing burnout is a toxic duo that weighs down all professionals from time to time. To cope, we often go on autopilot hoping we’ll overcome these stressors over a few weeks or months; but this isn’t an adequate long-term solution. These feelings surpass the general sense of busyness, and have the potential to spread into all areas of our lives.

So, what can we do about it? Does anyone really know how to get out of a burnout cycle? Is there a solution in sight? We may not have a singular, magical answer, but we have some strategies for addressing general feelings of overwhelm. Join us as we discuss our own experiences with combating burnout.

Another Round – Burnout and Overwhelm

‘Tis the season for gratitude, but, in fact, it’s healthier to practice grateful thinking all year long. When we think about what’s missing, rather than what’s present, we invite anxiety, frustration, and bundles of other negative emotions to flood our minds. If you think about it, brains are like kindergarten classes: without some discipline, chaos will ensue and somebody is gonna end up in tears.

A daily gratitude practice, however simple, can significantly improve your outlook. Everyone’s practice looks different, whether it’s journaling or letter-writing or making mental notes on a morning walk.

Join us as we share what we’re thankful for, our own gratitude practices, and all the benefits that come from some good ol' fashioned grateful thinking.

Another Round – A Little Gratitude Goes a Long Way

For many entrepreneurs, the end of the year is a time for holiday get-togethers, meeting deadlines, and – the big one – goal setting. We take time to visualize where we see our organization in the coming year, in five years, or even a decade down the line. We carefully map out our business's progress and trajectory. But are we focusing on what’s most important?

While it's pretty clear how to identify these quantitative metrics (like finances or organizational growth), it’s less clear whether our goals are aligned with the top priorities in our lives. Don't be fooled: Goal setting is not a one-size-fits-all situation. At work and at home, the factors your competitors, neighbors and friends are focusing on this year shouldn't necessarily be your priorities. You’ve got to write your own path.

This episode, we discuss how we can complete a soul-searching audit to identify goals that are personally meaningful throughout the new year.

Another Round – The Most Important Things We Do Each Year

Last month, the Detroit Free Press’s editorial page editor ran a piece about moving the state capital to Detroit, deeming Lansing a “sad little town.” It caused quite the stir, to say the least. Lansing residents and Detroiters alike sounded off on social media, the comments sections grew tense, and water cooler conversation was fueled for days.

As buzz around the article grew, people in the Lansing community latched onto the phrase “sad little town” with a sense of tongue-in-cheek pride. Thus, an anonymous “Sad Little Town” account on Twitter/X popped up overnight, accompanied by a website with t-shirts and hats proudly displaying the phrase. Almost overnight, “sad little town” evolved from a phrase unfairly maligning Lansing to a rallying cry for unity. (Because who doesn’t love a good t-shirt?)

At this point, it’s no secret that Jen harnessed the team at Redhead to put together the materials and skills for this on-the-fly opportunity. But what can this endeavor teach us about making the most of a moment to help bring a community together? This week, Karen talks to Jen about the project, why they chose to remain anonymous at the start, and how an unkind jab was reclaimed as an inside joke, all for the benefit of our beloved city.

Case Study: Sad Little Town

Youth might be a limited period in life, but youthfulness is a mindset that transcends age. When it comes to opportunities for career growth or probleming-solving, qualities like open-mindedness and curiosity are critical for success. But what are those qualities if not the characteristics of a youthful mindset?

Maintaining a youthful mindset doesn’t mean rejecting maturity or experience. Instead, it’s all about balancing the wisdom gained through experiences with the enthusiasm and curiosity that’s encouraged in youth. In this episode, we discuss how adopting a youthful mindset in our careers allows us to approach our work with knowledge, experience, and perpetual curiosity.

Don't Confuse Youth with Being Youthful

Whether intentional or not, sometimes a client is disingenuous about the end goals of a project. For whatever reason, they are not upfront with their initial objective, and massage the creative process through nitpicking and endless revisions to achieve an end product that is decidedly different from what was agreed upon.

In situations like these, it’s the job of the creative to advocate for their team, and explain to the client why nitpicking creative or playing it safe doesn’t serve their audience, and doesn’t serve their message. This is a tricky situation to be in, and it takes experience to successfully explain to a stubborn client why being upfront allows you to build them the product they need. This week, we share our own experiences with the dreaded client “bait and switch”, and break down how we work towards a successful end goal when confronted with these situations.

Clients Who Bait and Switch

Founded by David Such and Larry Bass in 2008, ScrapFest is a Lansing art festival that brings together artists from around the country to compete in a scrap metal sculpture competition. Earlier this year, Karen’s media production company, Render Studios, premiered their debut ScrapFest documentary. The film highlights various artists and their sculptures from the previous year's festival, offering viewers an immersive exploration into the creative journey of participating artists.


For our second entry into our new case study series, we offer a deep dive into the documentary and its filmmaking process. This week, Karen shares what the creative process looks like for such an endeavor, why ScrapFest has a special place in Render’s heart, and the rich narrative potential inherent in documenting the stories of artists.

Case Study: ScrapFest Documentary

For better or worse, sometimes we are our job, or our brand, or our leadership role…you get the picture. When you’re in a situation where your job isn’t something you put down at the end of the day and walk away from, what does that mean in terms of work-life balance?

If you’re in a position where your job follows you into the other aspects of your life, it could be helpful to view your job not as your life, but rather as your lifestyle. In this episode, we talk about when wearing many hats at once means a traditional approach to work-life balance doesn’t make sense, and the benefits that come from viewing your work as a lifestyle, rather than just a job.

Is Your Job a Job or Is Your Job a Lifestyle?

Navigating the complexities of caregiving for aging parents is an endeavor fraught with uncertainty and emotion. It's a journey that often catches us off guard, forcing us to confront the profound responsibility of guiding our parents through end-of-life care.

In this episode, we delve into our personal experiences with aging parents, reflecting on the hurdles faced and lessons learned. From grappling with difficult medical decisions to finding the right support systems, we discuss the steps we wish we’d taken to prepare and share the candid realities of being members of the sandwich generation.

Have the Hard Conversations Before It’s Too Late

What do you do when you want to spread the word about free money for college to quite literally every graduating high school student in the state? A large-scale public awareness campaign with some pretty creative tactics, of course. This episode, we’re diving into a case study on The Michigan Achievement Scholarship campaign — a multi-modal marketing campaign complete with videos, billboards, mailers, social media, and more aimed at spreading the word about postsecondary education funding. 

The Michigan Achievement Scholarship is a new source of funding launched in 2023 designed to help recent graduates from high schools in Michigan pay for college or continuing education. Eligible students could receive financial aid to attend a college or university with the Michigan Achievement Scholarship, or for a career training program with the Michigan Achievement Skills Scholarship. Alongside the client leading this drive, Michigan College Access Network (MCAN), Redhead crafted a campaign that would drive audiences to take action, and Render produced some effective videos to drive these efforts. We discuss how strategic messaging, design, and videography converged to appeal to young audiences, simplify a somewhat-dense concept and make this campaign a success. 

Links:
The Michigan Achievement Scholarship
https://getmimoney.org/ 
Michigan College Access Network:

Case Study: The Michigan Achievement Scholarship for MCAN

Tight marketing budgets are a reality for many organizations, including nonprofits and advocacy groups. Clients like these operate with limited resources, yet they play a vital role in addressing societal issues, driving change, and raising awareness about important causes. Oftentimes, when nonprofits and advocacy organizations struggle with ineffective marketing strategies, their biggest hurdle is how they approach marketing, rather than the budget they have to do it.

For mission-based organizations, their marketing strategy is the connective tissue that furthers their efforts. Whether their goal is greater visibility, fundraising, coalition building, or volunteer recruiting, a strategic approach to communication is necessary for accomplishing their mission. In this episode, we talk about the common mistakes nonprofits and advocacy organizations make with their approach to marketing, and how they can develop an effective marketing strategy, even with financial constraints.

Why Your Budget Isn’t Big Enough: Advocacy Edition

Hi. Jen Estill and Karen Stefl here. In The Speak Easy Podcast, we share years of expertise in marketing, branding, video production, strategy—not to mention management, employee development, mentoring, sales, creativity, maintaining life balance, managing money, and.. you get the idea. It takes a lot to keep a couple of creative studios thriving. 

We developed this podcast after years of "how do you..." boss lady conversations. It was clear that if we were both in such similar places with regard to business growth, and personal growth, and work/life/motherhood/bossland balance, then other women may be, too. We'd been sharing confessions over cocktails for quite a while—solving problems, asking for advice, and whispering the secret fears and disappointments that successful women are never supposed to have. (You've had those, right? It's not just us?)

Thus, Speak Easy was born. Our goal and our promise is to speak with honesty about the challenges that experienced women in the creative industry face. To create a community where we can support one another and abandon the mantra that we put on a good face and make it look like we have it all together, even when we don't. You can expect honesty, complete vulnerability and even a good laugh.

And cocktails. You can expect cocktails.

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