Today we’d like to introduce you to Mylene Pollock and Lenora Rand.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Mylene and Lenora. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
We were sitting in a coffee shop downtown, and we started talking about what we were doing… and what we wanted to be doing. It ended up being one of those maybe-this-could-change-your-life conversations.
We’d both been working in big ad agencies, building brands and coming up with campaigns for some of the world’s biggest companies – brands like Hallmark and Kellogg’s, P&G, Allstate, IBM and Unilever (Dove). We’d had a lot of fun along the way, and we’d won awards, made a decent living, and by all measures, we were both content and successful.
But that day, we both ended up confessing how much we wished we could use our waking hours to do more good. We started thinking how great it would be if we could take our experience and expertise and put it to work for smaller, lesser-known businesses and nonprofits. We especially liked the idea of working with groups whose mission it was to have a positive impact in some small (or big) ways. We also wanted to work with more founder-led companies, because we’d seen how much passion, energy and decisiveness founders bring to the party.
And then it kind of hit us. We could! We just needed to take the leap and make it happen.
So we did. We opened our “doors” in the late spring of 2017 – called ourselves SmallGood. And almost before we had our website and business cards ready to go, we had clients. Amazing clients.
Clients like Andrew Parker, the co-founder of Nestidd, a social enterprise building homes for individuals with disabilities. And clients like Tara Dabney who helps run the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago, a nonprofit using the principles of Dr. Martin Luther King to end violence in neighborhoods like Austin, East Garfield Park, Back of the Yards. And LaManda Joy, who is launching a destination garden center – one that will teach, inspire and empower urban gardeners while also providing job-training and doing other social good. And A Giving Heart Foundation, funding research to help make open-heart surgery a thing of the past for babies and children. And KidSnips, who on top of helping Chicagoland kids look adorable, and having a First Haircut experience that helps busy parents capture a once-in-a-lifetime-moment, also trains all their stylists on how best to help kids with special needs. And when we were only a few months old, we even won a pitch to launch the McCormick Foundation’s Communities Matching Fund and created their 2017 fundraising campaign.
So, it’s been quite a journey, and it all started with a conversation in a coffee shop. I’m not sure what was in that coffee!
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Lenora and I came into this knowing about strategy, storytelling, branding and creativity – and about how to manage a team and work well with clients. We hadn’t done as much on the business side of running a business. Suddenly we were knee deep in legal contracts, estimates and invoicing and believe me; there were some nights when QuickBooks caused no small amount of frustration. Thank God for accountants who will promptly return phone calls.
And then, there are just the lessons you learn about being in a partnership. It’s a lot like a marriage – and we’ve had some honest conversations along the way. It’s the equivalent of how in a marriage one partner will leave the toilet seat up and it kind of drives the other partner crazy, and it’s not that the non-toilet-seat-closing person is doing anything wrong per se… it’s just that you wish they wouldn’t do things that way. But maybe that’s not the best example because, of course, leaving the toilet seat up is always wrong!
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about SmallGood – what should we know?
We’re a strategic and creative consultancy that specializes in helping companies and organizations increase their impact. We help brands define their brand narrative, brand idea, develop their identities, and create campaigns that communicate their stories – at the right time, in the right places. From messaging to branding, from selling products to fundraising, from social media to digital campaigns and more, we’re helping Chicagoland businesses grow their good.
We are proud of the results we’ve been getting for our clients. For example, last year the work we created for the McCormick Foundation’s holiday campaign helped them meet their stretch fundraising goal – and the whole project, from the brief to raising all the money, happened in a little over three months. We were nimble and produced some wonderful short digital films for the campaign on a small budget. These films made a huge impact – their engagement rates were at 7X industry norms. People don’t usually watch videos on social media for more than a few seconds, but lots of people viewed these all the way through – the whole 60 or 30 seconds. So that was really gratifying.
We’re also very proud of the way we work.
Some people describe us as smart, creative and scrappy. We’re passionate about doing work that’s insight-driven, thoughtful, and comes out of a real idea. But we’re super collaborative and definitely not divas. We believe great relationships create great work, so we try to act like the grownups we are and foster partnerships with clients that are transparent, respectful and caring.
Something pretty unique about SmallGood is that we’ve embraced a distributed model. And a flexible team – which means we work from everywhere and anywhere. Except for Lenora and myself, SmallGood is made up of proven independent contractors which allows us to build the perfect team for every client and every project. It also keeps flexibility high and overhead low – and avoids the whole “paying for people who just show up for meetings” problem that we’ve seen at some bigger agencies.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Well, we think the quality and diversity of the people we work with is one of the greatest factors in our success
Strategists, writers, designers, ops, and media-experts who bring rich and varied thoughtfulness to the party – and are truly great to work with. We’ve made a commitment to widen our circle and hire people who are working in new ways, people who don’t all have the same backgrounds or all look like us. We think this dedication to diversity also makes us better at what we do, because how can we create messages that speak to all of us when all our voices aren’t speaking?
And also, the quality of people we know who have been generous with advice. That’s one of the reasons we’re both committed to mentoring. It’s one of the ways we give back – by coaching and mentoring, especially younger women who want to work in advertising.
Contact Info:
- Website: wearesmallgood.com
- Phone: 312-656-6867
- Email: mylene@smallgood.com, lenora@smallgood.com
- Instagram: @wearesmallgood
- Facebook: @wearesmallgood
- Twitter: @wearesmallgood
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