Cold Open

SPEAKER_01 0:00

But the amount of work that's happening to make the city better and the amount of commitment that's happening to make it better, I think is really, really cool. But we just don't know about it. And the cool things that you're doing in your neighborhood and the cool things I'm doing in an adjacent neighborhood, how much better could we be if we collaborated, if we shared, and we're able to have a conversation about that first?

INTRO SONG 0:25

If you wanna hear about Saint Louis, tune into the Bucket List show weekly. Hear what Marissa and Luke say. It drops every Wednesday, got a dope new guest every single week. Buckle up for the ride. Who's it gonna be? Who's on the show today? They rep Saint Louis. What to do in the loo on a late night? I maybe what to do on a date night. Yeah. Bucket list as you covered, they know what's going on. What's going on? They'll give you. Hey, 18 different things to do on 19. If you need one more to choose, yeah. The city, city, city is a place we call home. A place we call home.

Sponsor: Royal Banks of Missouri

INTRO SONG 1:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

The STL Bucketlist show is brought to you by our presenting sponsor and the official banking partner of STL Bucket List, Royal Banks of Missouri. Royal Banks is a full-service, independent community bank, locally owned, locally run, and proudly investing in St. Louis since 1964. That's more than 60 years of taking care of the people and businesses who make this city special. From checking and savings to mortgages, business banking, and wealth management, you get real personalized service from neighbors who actually know your name. With 16 locations across St. Louis, St. Charles, Illinois, and Northeast Missouri, there's a branch right around the corner. Royal Banks of Missouri, proudly investing in our communities.

Meet Matt Homann and Filament

SPEAKER_02 1:39

St. Louis, welcome back to another episode of the STL Bucket List Show, highlighting the people, places, and events that make St. Louis special. We've been recording this podcast since March of 2022, and we've talked to entrepreneurs, movers, shakers, artists, athletes, nonprofits. We've talked to musicians. We've talked to so many different people in St. Louis that are making an impact. Today we're with Matt Homan, founder of, founder and CEO of Filament, another person that's in St. Louis making an impact. Before we get started, tell me what Filament is for the people that might just be hearing about it for the first time today.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

So we say that Filament helps smart people think together better. What that really means is we design, we facilitate, we host here in St. Louis meetings, retreats, conferences, off sites. We do a fair amount of work elsewhere as well. But the key is that we try to make meetings more effective. We ban PowerPoint slides. We have an artist who draws in every one. We make them more collaborative. And really we fundamentally want to do in the room together things people have to be together to do.

SPEAKER_02 2:36

One thing that with our company we're, you know, 12 to 15 people, give or take with contractors, is that shift from one to five was easy. From 10 to 15, the amount of meetings that I do, because I have direct with every single person, has been draining to me. And it's like the slides, the notes, the notes are in my Apple notes, they're in Google Notes, now they're transcribed on AI, and now they're all pulled in here. I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore. And that's the problem is like I'm trying to do less meetings or just do 15-minute meetings. And I'm trying to be more strategic about that. Like, where did you kind of come up with this idea? Was it something in your career that you did too many meetings?

Why Filament started: the room shapes the meeting

SPEAKER_01 3:12

You know, I was doing lots of facilitation. I had a company that drew pictures of hard to understand things. And we would find that the actual visualizing the work, drawing in front of the room really changed the way that people engaged with it. But every time I went to go do a meeting, the room kept us from doing something we wanted to do. We couldn't move tables, we couldn't put stuff on the walls. And so when I started filming, it was really in a response to the fact that how amazing would it be to have a space that was built the way that you wanted to do the meetings that also gave you the ability to change on the fly. It also gave us power in a different way because we were real in the space. I think you found that here than just being a facilitator who would show up in a hotel room. No one's ever had a breakthrough idea in a hotel ballroom, and no one has ever had a massive insight looking at a PowerPoint slide. And so the moment we started to own and kind of control the meetings that we designed and facilitated for others, it allowed us to really experiment and try new things.

SPEAKER_02 4:04

Yeah, that's amazing. In spaces, like even at the space we're at currently, we've tried different rooms. We've made the garage a meeting room. We had a consultant come in with sticky notes and we put them all over the office. And there's just, it's it's really the getting in person and actually solving issues. And actually, like you mentioned, like the amount of decks that we look at every single week are just exhausting.

SPEAKER_01 4:23

But and I think one of the challenges fundamentally is to realize when you're together, you want to be doing things together. The telling the weather reporting meeting isn't worth being in person to do. And it probably doesn't require there to be a meeting, right? In fact, no one turns on the weather to see what happened yesterday. Yet so often meetings we do are the ones that are here's what I've been doing, here's my outreach, here's my things that I've been accomplishing, not what I need help with. And so to the extent that you have people reporting on what they've done, that generally doesn't need to be together and use meeting time. The problems they want to solve moving forward to help them accomplish their goals, that's more important. Yeah. And if you start to think about that with the con the classic taking turns meeting, everyone gives their five-minute report, that isn't just an hour meeting with eight people. It's an eight-hour meeting. Yeah. Right? It's the hour that everyone uses. And so the moment you start thinking about doing something asynchronously, the moments you start bringing others in to potentially help make the room go the way it needs to do, and it turns you into a peer versus a leader, which is also important. And just getting people to say, We're together. What do I need help with versus what did I do in the past? Everything that's past tense can likely be an email, likely be on a notion page, could likely be in some sort of document. And then what you're using the time together for is the things that require mutual brain power versus one person talking at a time.

From recovering lawyer to meeting designer

SPEAKER_02 5:43

Exactly. So you were a lawyer, so you're used to meetings. And now I read something that you're a recovering lawyer. So what does that mean?

SPEAKER_01 5:50

Well, it means I don't practice anymore. Um I I don't know what step of my 12 steps of recovery from being a lawyer is. Uh lawyers are like, I didn't have a lot of meetings with lawyers other than the one-on-ones, right? Because lawyers generally are not as collaborative as some other professions. Yeah. But I was one of the first legal bloggers. So 25 years ago or more, I was writing a blog about innovation, creativity, client service, et cetera. And I started to realize two things. One is I would go to these conferences, I would go to the continuing legal education, and it was terrible. A lot of it still is. But I was sitting at a bar at about three in the morning, there was about 12 of us having this amazing conversation in Chicago years and years ago. The bar had been closed for two hours, but it was a conversation we were never, ever going to have. It was never going to be on a conference agenda. It was never going to be able to have three panelists showing their slides. And in that moment, I thought, wow, why can't we do this next year when it's still light outside? And so all of us agreed to stay a year later. We made an invitation-only event. We thought we'd have the same 12. We had almost 50 people show up, including people we would have never had the courage to invite ourselves who asked for invitations. And they were dying for this kind of collaborative experience where they could talk about the things that were important to them versus someone from a stage telling them what was important a year ago.

unknown 7:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

And in that moment, I was still practicing in Highland, Illinois, which is where my law practice was. And it was in that moment where someone said, Hey, this is great. Can you do this for my law firm? Someone else, can you do this for my company? I'm like, what do you mean do this? Like, oh, facilitate a meeting. And it was in that moment when I thought, oh, wow, there's a different path there. Uh thought it would be part-time for a long time, but it kind of pulled me into that path, and here I

Sponsor: SSM Health

SPEAKER_01 7:24

am.

SPEAKER_02 7:24

For over 150 years, SSM Health has been providing hope, healing, and opportunities to the St. Louis community. With over 40,000 employees across four states, they're not only delivering exceptional care, they're one of the region's largest employers, shaping the future of healthcare. We're proud to present SSM Health as the official healthcare partner of the STL bucket list show. If you've dreamed of a career where you're truly making a difference every day, SSM Health can help you take that to the next step. Learn more at their website in the link in the show notes.

Making in-person time count in a remote world

SPEAKER_02 7:53

Yeah. And now, you know, these meetings have becoming more and more beneficial with the rise of remote work, is being able to, like, let's say these groups only get together once a quarter. It's like that core that day matters. Oh, and tell me about that because that's probably shifted your business.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

I mean, it matters so much. It, it, it, we, we were doing more and more of that work. One of the things that we saw is that people would spend all of this time planning for everyone to be together, but the only non-structured together time was the dinners and happy hours. And the rest of it was presentations, and it was things we could have been done the week before on Teams or on Zoom. And so as you gather together, you start to think about the communication we have, the things that we'd like to solve for, uh, the ideas, right? There's something that happens when people are in small groups, even in a 15-person room. We might break out into three, four, or five-person breakout groups. It multiplies the number of ideas that get generated. It uh allows, it balances for introverts and extroverts in a better way. And it also, and we were talking about this a little bit before we joined the podcast, is that it turns leaders into peers in a way that is different. Because if they're in a small group as a CEO, they might ruin that group, but they aren't ruining every group. And then the teams come back and say, this is what we thought about, this is what we decided, these are the sit, these are the ideas that we have to share. And it really moves a room faster forward than the again, the one person talking or the here's what our financials were last

No screens, zero slides, on purpose

SPEAKER_01 9:21

year.

SPEAKER_02 9:21

Yep. So I want to talk more about no screen, zero slides on purpose because you mentioned like there's nothing we can gain from something that happened last month. It's what are we doing here? But like, what is the really the no screen, zero slides on and the on purpose is really what I'm more interested in.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

Well, I I'll I'll say this about PowerPoint. I have a reputation now here in town. People apologize when they invite me to a meeting that has slides, which I kind of appreciate. Like you're the no slides guy. You you can be good at slides. The problem is that when you saw a slide in a meeting, it's never the first slide a person has seen that day. And it's certainly not the first one they've seen that week. And so no matter how good your slide deck is, you're still communicating them in the exact same way they've seen nonstops from Monday through Friday from eight in the morning till five in the afternoon. And so I have this great deck of slides I show, but it's this 75th slide someone's seen that day. And so for part of us, the no slides is a novelty piece. Uh, and we draw. So we always have an artist in every session. So there is a visual artifact, but we'd rather instead of having the room's attention turn to the front of the room, to the person who's leading it, we want the room's attention to turn to one another. So when we talk about being on purpose, it's not just getting rid of slides, it is building really intentional, collaborative tools that allow people to communicate, to solve problems, to think about things in a different way. And we've learned that people's compulsion to follow directions overcomes a reluctance to share. And so you give a group of people a tool, a worksheet that's intentionally designed that is on topic for what they're talking about, and you give them an hour to talk about it, they'll fill it out. But the purpose of the filling it out for them is to guide their conversation in a way that a facilitator at every table might. But then we're now using AI to read everyone's terrible handwriting. And we now can synthesize in ways we weren't able to before. Here's all the ideas that emerge in a room of a hundred or two hundred or three hundred people, or even a 15-person leadership team. Here's where the themes emerged and showed up again and again across the course of a day, and then be able to give a client, and here's actionable steps that your people talked about and wanted you to take versus feeling like a consultant who's giving you prescriptive advice of what we believe you should do.

SPEAKER_02 11:25

And the stuff that they would have never discovered in a normal Monday check-in on Zoom.

Sharing the crazy ideas and the obvious ones

SPEAKER_02 11:30

Well, I think Yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

And one of the one of the pieces that we've learned is that people don't share their ideas at two ends of the spectrum. On the one hand, they don't share the ideas that feel crazy or out there for them because they're afraid they'll be judged. But on the other hand, and especially when there's a power imbalance between a leader and someone who's relatively new. Yep. But the other ideas that never seem to get shared are the obvious ones. Because if it's obvious to me, I assume it must be obvious to you if you're my boss. It must be obvious to others who've been here longer who I think are smarter than I am. And so finding ways not just to capture and share the outrageous ideas, but also the simple, the safe, the obvious ones. I'm shocked over and over and over again that it's the obvious ideas as defined by an individual that for everyone else are the breakthrough ones.

SPEAKER_02 12:14

So you've branded your own condition as idea surplus disorder. I think it's something that a lot of entrepreneurs face. I have new ideas all the time. And now that I have AI infused in everything, I'm able to like spin up more ideas faster. So now I can like talk to my agent and then it spins up like a doc and then I present it to the team. And they're like, dude, you can't present new ideas every single Monday, but that's just my disorder that I have. And I think you probably have the same. You've classified yourself as that. What does that actually mean? And is that a good or bad thing?

SPEAKER_01 12:40

It actually started as a joke because that it's it's not attention deficit disorder, though it might also be attention deficit disorder. Um the idea surplus disorder for me, it's just something that I am curious. And in our work in particular, we're constantly in rooms of really smart people solving their version of the same problem. And so again and again, we're immersed in ideas and insights and we're able to share them back. Uh, I don't really know that it's a disorder uh that an individual is afflicted by, but it can be very damaging to a team. Yeah. And so to your point, I'm the same way, like, ooh, what about this? The challenge that we've said we've seen, Luke, is that lots of times people will, leaders will share ideas like, ooh, wouldn't this be cool? But your team hears them as a decision. And so when they're exhausted, it's not so much, oh, that's a cool idea I want to think about too. It's the, oh my goodness, you have me now doing another thing without being intentional about taking the things away that you gave me last week. We started to believe that there's four kinds of conversations and meetings that dream, debate, decide, or do. And the moment you start to label them, say, hey, this is just a dreaming conversation, right? Then your team knows to come with ideas. Uh and be clear if you're debating, well, and come with the point of view. The decision is different. The decision is we're clear who the decider is and when we decide and what we're deciding about. And the doing is the rest of it. But until you started, until I personally as a leader started to say, hey, this is just a dreaming conversation, I would find that my team would get twisted in knots thinking that I had given them yet another initiative, yet another project. When I was like, ooh, that'd be kind of cool.

Sponsor: Swade Dispensary

SPEAKER_02 14:12

The STL bucket list show is proudly sponsored by Suede Dispensary with 11 Missouri area locations. Suede does so much for the St. Louis community. We've been working with this team for a couple of years back since Medical was here, and we're excited to support their new product launches, events, and community initiatives. We couldn't be happier to work with this premier cannabis brand, and we're excited for them to sponsor the show. Enjoy the rest of the podcast.

Why St. Louis needs more collaboration

SPEAKER_02 14:35

Yeah. No, that's amazing. So I was uh when we were catching up with Britney upstairs, she mentioned the St. Louis Business Journal article, and you mentioned, and I want to like talk a lot about St. Louis because you think that St. Louis needs more idea sharing and more collaboration. Help me put that into words for those that haven't read the article yet.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Well, I we've we're really fortunate to do lots of convening work. So a ton of our clients will say we've got to get a group of people together to talk about stuff. And most of the time, those convenings are again just people taking turns talking at the rest of the group.

SPEAKER_02 15:03

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

What we learned in the St. Louis work, and it was work convened by the RBC here in town, which is made up of the top hundred CEOs, is as we're thinking about downtown in particular, they brought us in to help guide a handful of sessions. And what we learned is there's lots of amazing things happening in St. Louis, but they're often happening in isolation. And so for people to not just say, hey, here's the work we're doing, but here's the help we need. And then to get everyone to say, like, oh, well, if you need this help, I can help with that. Because St. Louis is one of those odd cities is that we always think that we're well behind others. We have this kind of uh inferiority complex to pick a city, Nashville, Kansas City, Indianapolis, and the list goes on and on, Detroit even now. But the amount of work that's happening to make the city better and the amount of commitment that's happening to make it better, I think is really, really cool. But we just don't know about it. And the cool things that you're doing in your neighborhood and the cool things I'm doing in an adjacent neighborhood, how much better could we be if we collaborated, if we shared? And we're able to have a conversation about that versus let me give you my list of stuff. And now it's your turn to give me your list of stuff. The collaboration happens. People connect better when they think together, not just when they drink together. And too oftentimes the collaboration piece sits at the end of a day that in an informal setting that is that is built for extroverts, not introverts, versus it being the core of why we gather.

SPEAKER_02 16:28

And you're mentioning the happy hour culture. It's like, you know, the loud bar that you can't talk and you can't actually write notes, like you're not taking a note and you don't even even think about it the next day because you're just in a meeting at 8 a.m. the next morning. So I think it's being intentional and blocking

How Thinksgiving works and Favorite Moments

SPEAKER_02 16:41

out that time. But I want to shift to Thanksgiving. It's an event that's a flagship community event that you guys established as now an annual tradition. So when going through the event, just high level, STL nonprofits come to you, they submit challenges. They can't be about money. They have to be specific challenges that they're facing. You get business teams that work directly with them, draft that. So, like for those that haven't been, tell me, you know, what that is and the actual collaboration that gets in there because you're you're bringing two different types of people together and solving real issues in real time.

SPEAKER_01 17:12

Yeah, it's the thing I'm most proud of in all the stuff that we do at Filament is we started to realize early on that the challenges that nonprofits had and the challenges businesses had were almost exactly the same. They just were branded differently. They were called different things. And while the businesses would be focused on solving those challenges occasionally, the nonprofits oftentimes would let anything that was unrelated to fundraising and uh even short-term sustainability, those were the things that kind of like as one accumulates technical debt, right? And so the way that Thanksgiving works, and this is year seven for us, is that we work with nonprofits and they come up with a challenge. And again, they they can't be about money because otherwise every challenge would be about money. And so the challenges are strategic. They are around people or culture or branding, the kinds of things that nonprofits oftentimes put off to the side. And then we have a draft. And so we have business partners in town. Lots of the big companies submit teams. Many of them submit them for emerging professionals or young leaders, so they're not everyone. And the teams come in, and the nonprofit team and the business partner teams are both of about four or five people. But the business partners come in and they draft a challenge. So they see a challenge, a how might we sort of challenge. They pick a challenge, but they don't know the nonprofit it belongs to till after they pair. And then we teach those business partners how to run an innovation day. So we do workshops with them. So they're upskilling their people on how to use our tools and process and approach to really do any kind of challenge that they might have at the office. But then on the first Thursday of November in Cortex, the innovation district where we're headquartered, the business partner teams and the nonprofits gather. And so we'll have 30 to 40 different nonprofits all being served in a single day this year, all in these parallel rooms, all by these uh earnest and insightful and innovative business partners. And by the end of the day, and talk about being analog, it looks like a junior high science fair. We give everyone a poster to fill out, but it talks about the work they did, the next steps they'll take, uh, big insights they had. And what I love about it is we really focus on making the next steps small because we want them to be something they can actually do versus something that requires them to go raise a million dollars. But the business partners and the nonprofits both walk away from that session feeling like they're the winner, right? The nonprofit doesn't just get help from a business partner, but they get time set aside to think about the things that they may have been putting off. So oftentimes for the nonprofits, just the conversation is as valuable as the ideas. For sure. Because they'll bring a board member, a CEO, a team member close to the problem, a volunteer, that sort of thing. But the business partners not only feel like they've given back in a way, it's better than I think than stuffing backpacks for building bicycles. But the other thing that happens is that the business partners oftentimes and talking about their challenges and how they relate to what they're engaging with the nonprofit about, have insights of their own.

unknown 20:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

And so my favorite part is at the end you'd hear the nonprofits go, Oh, that was great, expected. But then you hear the business partners go, like, oh my goodness, we had a breakthrough idea on our own based upon this conversation. And so it's one of those kind of win-win-win, and everyone seems to love it.

SPEAKER_02 20:14

Yeah. So this event is November 5th at Cortex. Um, so that's a whole day event. But is there a specific Thanksgiving moment? I mean, you've been doing this now, you said seven years. This is your seventh year that you're doing it. Is there a specific moment breakthrough that really sticks with you that like keeps you motivated? Because at the end of the day, it's a huge thing to coordinate. I mean, you just talked to me yesterday, you guys were going through all this, and like it's a big project. And but there has to be some moments that happen each and every year. Is there one that sticks out to you specifically that that keeps you inspired?

SPEAKER_01 20:41

I there there's too many to choose from. And and and I say that with like immense gratitude that I can't pick just one. Uh, I have a goofy smile on my face the entire day walking around. I'm popping into the rooms, and just the I would say the gratitude that each side shows to the other throughout the day. We and we've had people say we've had a year of consulting, and our day at Thanksgiving was a better, we got more done with that than the year with a consultant. We've had people get rebranded completely, we've had people continue to work with their business partner for years after. That's cool. And so just when everyone walks away and we do a solution showcase where everyone gets to see all the work everyone else did at the end of the day that's open to the public, that is the moment where every year I'm like, we're exhausted. The team is just ready to all go to bed, but we pop a bottle of champagne after everyone's gone home and we just breathe in what we've done. And I will say my favorite part about Thanksgiving as a business owner is what it does for our team. Uh, it is a touch point for us every year. Uh, it allows us as a company to give back at a scale we could never do individually. And I know that it drives my team members to love all of the other hard work we do because there it's that payoff every year that really

Taking Thinksgiving beyond St. Louis

SPEAKER_01 21:59

matters.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

You you could build this model anywhere, and I know you do, but why does it stay so rooted in St. Louis? Like what is what does that whole thing mean to you? Because this model is could be everywhere. And I know it is at some points, but it seems like most of the work, you know, when it comes to your partners are here in St. Louis.

SPEAKER_01 22:14

On the on the Thanksgiving side, it's funny you asked that because we're trying to look at possible uh possible expansions.

SPEAKER_02 22:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

Uh we've got a a couple of our business partners who are saying, how can we take this to other locations of ours? So those conversations are underway. Um I'd love to see it in every city. Right. And if I were to ever sell filament, I would be hard pressed to let Thanksgiving go with it. Uh, because it is something that you see the impact, and it's a really unique model that we just haven't seen elsewhere in the country, and that isn't that is hard to do, but we a lot of the business modeling we've kind of figured out. So that's one the growth part is one thing we're really thinking about. Uh but even from Filament's perspective, every city has bad meetings. Uh, and one of our purposes is that we believe the world works better when people meet better. And so again, as we start to think about growth, we've we've we keep on making different mistakes. Thank goodness goodness we're not always making the same mistake. But I think we've now learned enough what it means to be a great facilitator, how the tools work that maybe next time we talk, we have a global expansion path mapped out.

SPEAKER_02 23:19

So I read something that you know you can't just you don't just let people rent your space for a normal meeting. It's not because in in turn you have all this nice space that would be great for meetings, but you decided that that is not your model. So why is that? Because it's so important to follow your process, or is it is because you have all these great rooms.

SPEAKER_01 23:37

I you know, I I don't want anyone to have a terrible meeting to fill them in unless it's our fault. Yeah. And we've have great space in Cortex. Before we were in Cortex, we were downtown, we had great space there, and it is a reflection of the kind of space we want to build a meeting around. So really comfortable space. The tables are small on purpose. We make it hard to plug in a laptop on purpose. And early on, we didn't have that rule, and we'd rent our space from time to time. But I net like it's one of the things that's really unique about us, it's that's a differentiator. And frankly, we make a lot more money when we facilitate a meeting than when we rent it to someone else. And so the idea of if you want to have the best meeting space in the Midwest, it comes with a best meeting facilitated by filament.

Rapid fire: St. Louis spots and meeting words

SPEAKER_01 24:21

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 24:22

I love that. So I want to do some rapid fire just to have a little bit of fun. So, what's a St. Louis spot that you love to send your out-of-town visitors when they come in town?

SPEAKER_01 24:29

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_02 24:30

You mentioned Highland, Illinois, so you're you're kind of a little bit outside.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

I grew up in Highland I grew up in Highland, live in New City now. Yeah. Uh if it is a like the things that they're most surprised about, City Museum is easy at the top of the list, uh, botanical garden, especially the Japanese garden there we love. Um Indosado, you know, and and any of his restaurants are so amazing. Nick's places are great. Uh, but we oftentimes love to also send them to our newest discovery, which might be one from last week or the week before, not just to say this is what's great about St. Louis all the time, but look at how much it's changing and how much it's improving. And then Forest Park just fits the we we won't have someone in town without taking them through Forest Park, and people's eyes just fall out of their heads how amazing that place is.

SPEAKER_02 25:11

Yeah, it's so cool. I love that you mentioned City Museum first and then kind of went down the line. But yeah, to your point, it's like, hey, like you were you came here 20 years ago. It's like, hey, let's go back to this neighborhood and like look at the Shaw neighborhood and how it's changed here, even though you know, like you could take them to all these key spots, the arch grounds, but most of your friends probably already came to the arch grounds the first time they came and saw you. And um so what is one word for a bad meeting? Is there a specific word that you would classify as a bad meeting?

SPEAKER_01 25:37

Performative.

SPEAKER_02 25:38

Okay. And then what about one word for a great meeting? Collaborative. Okay, great.

Sponsor: Upshot Coffee

SPEAKER_02 25:43

That's perfect. The STL bucket list show is fueled by Upshot Coffee. My friends at Upshot Coffee have some of the best beans in town. I got some of their new packaging here. Look at this bag. Look how big this is. Um, they have four St. Louis locations, their flagship in Coddleville, the break shop over by Lindenwood in St. Charles, their Clayton location called Hi-Fi, um, and then Flyby over in Tower Grove, their newest location. Um, and they also sell their coffee online everywhere. If you guys haven't added Upshot Coffee to your STL bucket list, it's time to try it. Some of the my favorite people in the industry and some of the best coffee in

Inspiring ideas

SPEAKER_02 26:18

the game. And then you are an idea guy, but I'm sure you also love to take inspiration and quote, steal ideas from other people. Are there are there certain ideas or things that people are doing with meetings across the nation that you're really inspired by right now?

SPEAKER_01 26:32

Yeah, there's some people who are really starting to rethink the conference model. Yeah. Which is cool. That's some that model looks pretty much the same in every event, every year. Yeah. Uh and and I am uh like I the newsletter that I write every week is called Idea Surplus Disorder. And there are anything I find that's cool that week lives in that newsletter. Yeah. So sometimes I have to apologize for being so long, but like, what that's my collection of cool ideas and place I can go back to again and again. I I will say the one thing that is really happening in meetings that has taken a long time to change is that as people now realize we learned during COVID that we can be terrible with PowerPoint on Zoom and Teams just like we can in person, there are a handful of entities and organizations that are really starting to think like, what is that moment in the room? And how do we make that the reason we come to the event because of the people we'll meet, not just because of the people we'll hear? And I'm really having fun following some of those trends and helping out and doing some of that stuff ourselves.

Matt’s bucket list: a South by Southwest for nonprofits

SPEAKER_02 27:28

Is there a certain, like you said, Thanksgiving is your your baby? And is there a certain thing that you haven't done yet that's on your bucket list? This is the bucket list show. And I'm not saying like travel and all that. Like, is there a certain meeting or conference that you still have to crack off your bucket, or maybe even a partner that you want to you can shout out some people you want to work with.

SPEAKER_01 27:45

It's funny, it's funny you say that. We've been having conversations. Explore STL. Yeah. Uh the folks at the convention center have become have clients and are friends of ours. Yeah. And the thing that I want to do, I have two bucket list items. The one is to build the turnkey thousand-person conference that they can sell. Yeah. And it's the best place to come for a the best meeting in St. Louis. So you've got to come to St. Louis to have this meeting. Make that a staple. And it's a turnkey, it makes it easy on the it makes it easy to plan, et cetera. So it doesn't look like all the other events in the convention center. The second thing, and I've not put this out in the universe much, but I'll do it here, is that Thanksgiving locally works really, really well. But what I would love is I would love for Thanksgiving to be St. Louis's South by Southwest. And so over the course of three or four days, national nonprofits from all over the country, if not the world, come here to St. Louis and are helped by the best innovation teams around the world. So all the consultancies send their best innovators and so on and so forth. And they do that full day in the same model as we do now. But then way to day and the day later, all of our local nonprofits are served by the senior leaders of the national nonprofits. So it kind of is a pay it forward and allows us to make this a place where people really rethink how services are delivered to people in need all around the country.

How to get involved

SPEAKER_02 29:03

Yeah, that's so cool. So for those of that want to get involved, is it still time for businesses to get involved? This is November 5th.

SPEAKER_01 29:09

Businesses Thanksgiving Day.com is a Thanksgiving website. Uh so click on the business partner link and a chance to add your information, what you're curious about.

SPEAKER_02 29:18

Yeah, we're super excited and grateful to have you on and and thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it. Thanks so much. See you guys next week.

SPEAKER_01 29:23

Bye.