EW 023 – How a Crisis Ignited Bold Action and a Million-Dollar Turnaround – Winning with Kimberly Lyall, Crisis-Proof Leadership Speaker & Strategist, and Former CEO

Gordon Sheppard (00:01.464)
Kimberly, welcome to the show.

Kimberly Lyall (00:03.874)
Thank you for having me.

Gordon Sheppard (00:05.292)
Well, I feel really lucky to have you on, because I was fortunate enough to sit in the audience at one of your keynote addresses and watch you not only inspire me, but watch how the other people in the room reacted to you, not only during your talk, but also afterwards. The big impacts, those people that line up to get even more wisdom from you in the work that you're doing, strengthening leaders, the consulting work that you're doing, the way that you were able in that talk that I heard.

was able to simplify it down to things that I could take away and do. And I can't tell you, I thought about the word purpose since you spoke, and I know you eloquently sort of boil it down to that for me anyway. So thank you so much for, again, like I mentioned, the craft you put into making that happen, but also to inspire that room to be in there. so, and part of what I heard during that keynote was why I got in touch with you, which is this idea of taking, you know, one of the wins out of your career.

and getting a chance to share it here on the show. But anyway, so I feel lucky. The folks here that are listening or watching don't know who you are. So if you had a chance to introduce yourself, what would you say and let us know a little bit about you?

Kimberly Lyall (01:16.866)
Thank you. My name is Kimberly Lyall. I believe in people, in the potential that every one of us has to have impact on the world. And I think we're meant to. So in everything I do as a professional speaker, as a trainer, as a consultant, as a strategist, it's about helping people see the potential and the possibilities right in front of them, cutting through the noise, getting to that purpose, and then empowering them in a way that they didn't know was possible. Helping them see what I see when I look at them.

which is endless, infinite possibility. And so, yeah, I love to do that.

Gordon Sheppard (01:51.555)
And you're doing it over and over again, right? Your speaking is impacting people, your writing, you're getting information out there. How many different ways do you do this and what's the best way to get, like, if people need to know about you right up front, like how do they get in touch with you?

Kimberly Lyall (02:02.92)
for sure. I'm on LinkedIn, Kimberly Lyall. I'm on Facebook, Instagram. I have a website, kimberlyall.com. And yeah, I mean, I'd love to connect with people. Obviously, I am a professional speaker. So I do meet a lot of folks at conferences and events, but also a lot of companies and organizations hire me to come in and do one-on-one work with them. So it might be customized half-day session, full-day session, retreat, coaching with the executive directors or emerging leaders in the team.

Even some one-on-one coaching, I don't do as much of that, but a lot of it is really learning about what are the challenges, the pain points that people are dealing with, and then how do we help them see past that. And what's interesting about this work is you and I both know in organizations, there's always going to be challenges, right? There's always going to be things that are happening. That is the nature of being a leader, dealing with challenges and finding solutions. But so much of it goes back to mindset. So much of it...

is how do we approach the challenges that we're dealing with every day? And what I hear a lot from people right now is my team is exhausted. We feel like the change is relentless. It's constant. We can't get caught up. And so there's a lot of fatigue around that. You know, the world's had a lot of big things happen to us in the last decade or so that in a lot of ways, I think we've navigated them, but we actually haven't been able to unpack the impact that's had on people. So in terms

Gordon Sheppard (03:28.46)
No, and just got off doing an interview about a leader, he leads corporate retreats, high end around the world, and COVID hits, and they had to pivot to online. So that was a great story of resiliency through his experience of taking that online and doing murder mysteries, hiring actors, booking three...

Kimberly Lyall (03:48.598)
Okay, I want to him.

Gordon Sheppard (03:49.935)
booking 300 engagements that were just unbelievable on Zoom because it was the only alternative for that year and a half, 2020 on through. And so, but again, here we are again, if we say tariffs, if we say 2008, if we say, you know, turn of the century, like all these things that you're mentioning, you know, that you're experiencing firsthand, your work, people are sure, you know, that's happening to them for sure. And you can hear your firsthand experience. The nice thing is you've gone through the licks in your own life.

to help, you know what I mean? To be that person that can walk in to solve their trouble because part of what we're gonna be talking about here is a win that occurred that I heard you talk about from the stage, but also we're gonna get a chance to share it here on the show. So if you had to talk about one of your biggest wins, sort of from your own leadership history, what would that win be and how would you describe it?

Kimberly Lyall (04:17.12)
I have. Yeah.

Kimberly Lyall (04:34.882)
So the win in very short, succinct terms, I was a very young CEO of a nonprofit membership based organization. I became the CEO at age of 26. By the age of 28, I was riding high. I was figuring things out. had great plans, dreams of what I was going to do with this organization, a lot of work to get there. And one day I got a call from the bank and discovered that my finance manager had stolen a bunch of money.

And the end of it was we ended up bankrupt. We didn't file for bankruptcy, but literally we had no money in the bank. We had all sorts of bills due. She disappeared. Three weeks later, she took her own life, died by suicide. It was all front page news. And so here I am sitting with an organization that was a trusted, friendly organization that worked with 40 different communities.

And we've been gone, we've gone through the wringer in terms of our reputation. Now, you know, the perpetrator has died. This is tragic. You know, one mistake and this is the results. And so I have a traumatized board, a traumatized staff. I'm traumatized. The community's not sure what to make of this, us, and we had to figure out a way forward. you know, sometimes when you go through something so horrific,

you a crisis that really takes you to your knees, where you really truly start to lose everything and you question everything you thought you ever knew. You're in that moment where you're not prepared for this. Nobody ever is. Right? These horrible things that happen to us, we don't plan for them to happen to us, but sometimes they do. And so as a leader, we have to figure out what do I do next? And no one was prepared for this. And I asked the question.

Do we even try to bring this organization back? Do we even open our doors again? Because the model we've been operating under was not very sustainable in terms of financial sustainability prior to that. And it was going to be a lot of work to figure out how to move forward and to rebuild trust and to really, you know, become an organization that people could work with again. And so in that moment of asking, should we even move forward?

Kimberly Lyall (06:52.74)
I asked for some time to go to the people who we served, our members, our partners, and ask them, what do think of us? Should we do this? What is the value we bring you? What are we not doing that we should be doing? What would you be missing if we kept our doors shut? And that process allowed me to reconnect with the whole why, the purpose for the organization in the first place.

And that shift, that shift of knowledge and perspective and clarity around why we were even there was the turning point that drove every decision that came after that. And four years later, our auditor stood in front of our membership and said, this is the most incredible financial turnaround I've ever seen in my career. We went from being bankrupt to being highly successful, much better.

business-like operations than we'd had before, incredible trust, partnerships across the country. And so, you know, I look back at that moment as horrible and awful as it was. The experience of being forced to become clear on our purpose and use that as the guiding force in every decision moving forward is the biggest win of my career. And it's influenced everything I've done ever since.

Gordon Sheppard (08:16.578)
Remarkable, right? So we hear this young leader, rising to a prominent role at the age of 26, two years later, major crisis, you thought things were going along and then you had to go in and there's something about you in there that's part of this story for sure. I can't wait to dig into, that's interesting. We can't waste a good crisis, right? You can't, right? You gotta get in there and you found a way, I'm gonna say organically.

Kimberly Lyall (08:37.76)
Never. No.

Gordon Sheppard (08:42.958)
or whatever it was that you did. And then it emerged since then, because I know it was a huge success story coming out of there as well. Well, thank you for that great summary, because that really sets up what I call the anatomy of a win to examine it a little bit more. And this is where we take a look at the strategy, the work plan, the people, operations, and results that we're talking about in relation to this win. The strategy, if we look at the risk management in the strategy, that didn't exist for the scenario that you've described, right? Because there was somebody taking money out of your organization

and you just didn't know it was happening. Is that fair?

Kimberly Lyall (09:17.1)
It is fair. you know, it's interesting because what I learned in this situation is you think that you're going to see the trouble before it hits. Right. I mean, we all have done strategic planning and the SWOT analysis and the PESTEL analysis, all those things. But when somebody is determined to take advantage of you, they look at your world differently than you do. You know, for example, in the days after, when we realized, OK,

Here we are. She's gone. Our books don't make any sense. I had gone through an audit in this period of time and we had cleared it. I had actually flagged for the auditors. I have a feeling something's not right. Can you take a look? Can you really make sure nothing is amiss here? And they came back and said, everything's great. Well, we had two sets of books. We had the set that I saw and we had the real set. And so I only started to

piece things back together. I remember clearly one day standing in her office thinking, how am I going to make sense of, we don't even know who's been paid, who we owe money to. I literally walked out the back door, took a breath, walked back into our building as though I was intent on defrauding our organization.

And it's crazy because you suddenly see the loopholes very quickly. You see where the processes aren't as tight as they should be. You see where the systems aren't designed to truly protect the organization. In two days, we had figured everything out. So it is crazy, right? But

Gordon Sheppard (10:58.03)
Well, if you've got trust in your staff, right? So you're a young leader, you're doing your thing, you inherited the organization, you got into that role, and you think things are bumping along, especially for a couple of years, and then you hit this crisis moment, and then you go through the front page news of what it takes. I remember the resiliency that it takes to get through that sort of scrutiny by the community for a public-facing nonprofit scenario is unbelievable. So strategically, we talked about your strategy can't anticipate this type of deception.

But then your strategy evolved because you were able to have the humility to say, okay, we're gonna close in the doors, you were mentioning that, but we're not gonna close the doors. Let me do some work first. And then your strategy started to emerge or build. Is that fair from there?

Kimberly Lyall (11:43.646)
It is, yes. I mean, really what prompted that was I worked for a board of directors. And so typically in a situation like this, the board is the ultimate governance of the organization. And so we would have board meetings where we would try to figure out, OK, what do we do next? And again, none of us have navigated this before, right? Emergency loans, trying to figure out again, how do we even just keep the lights on? And the challenge was that it was such a tragedy in so many ways.

all the emotions that come with that, the anger, the frustration, the depression, the sadness were alive and thriving amongst all the board members as well as the staff. And, you know, once the person who stole the money was gone, there was not going to be a trial. There was not going to be any justice. Right. And so these board members were left with, we're responsible for this. We're responsible for this organization. We don't know what to do. We're volunteers and we're angry.

this has happened to us, again, justifiably. we would sit in board meetings and I'm looking for direction. I'm looking for, I need to know how to move forward and I wasn't getting it from the board because they just would go round and round in circles about what had happened. And so it was that that prompted me finally to say, you know what, let's be clear. I don't know if we should move forward. And it was, in a way, it was a very scary thing to say because I mean, hey, this is my job. This is the organization I've been entrusted with.

I have staff, you know, who depend on the paychecks. But at the same time, you know, we weren't moving forward and I knew how hard it was going to be. And so the strategy emerged in terms of me just thinking, I need to ask the people we serve, should we move forward? And the more I had those conversations, it was such, in a way, such an incredible experience. The first couple were really hard. You know, it's hard to go to your clients, your partners and say,

Do we bring any value to you? You does it matter if we shut our doors? Right? Nobody's ego wants to hear, actually, no. Right? But I had some really great conversations and I got to truly understand the people that we were there to serve, their needs, their dreams, their goals, why their business was investing in our organization or why their community was a member. And when you start to have those kinds of conversations, you just get so much clarity.

Kimberly Lyall (14:10.166)
you start to understand their why. And after a month of these conversations, I just, really knew at a fundamental level what we should be doing, not necessarily what we were doing, what we should be doing, what the need was now, who the people we were serving were now, what the future they were trying to create looked like so we could build. And the beautiful thing about something like that is it was literally like starting over from scratch.

You know, I shared with you in the speech, I remember clearly one day I'd gone to the board saying, this is what I've heard. This is what I think our mission should be. And, you know, we revised the mission vision values. Then I took that to the staff and I said, we're going to start from scratch. We're going to review every single program and service that we offer. Does it align with this new list of vision mission values? And if it does, how well does it align?

Is it an 80 % match? Is it a 50 % match? Is it a 30 % match? Because we only have so much capacity and assets right now. So we need to put our energy into what truly aligns well, 80, 70 or 80 % match. And if it's, if it's in that range, we'll take it forward. If it's in the 50 % range, maybe it's something that's still needed, but maybe we don't need to do it. Maybe we go to a partner organization, right? Or find some other way for this to happen that we're not responsible for it. And if it's less than 30%, why are we wasting time and energy on it?

That exercise was so powerful because it really showed us what was driving our activities, you know, in the nonprofit world and in the profit world as well. Sometimes we do things because they're really great moneymakers. And sometimes you have to say, is this really truly serving the people that I'm supposed to be serving? Right. So we got rid of some really good moneymakers, which was crazy.

You know, people are thinking, Kimberly, like you have a bankrupt organization and you are getting rid of a program that makes money. I had to if it didn't align with the new vision and mission for the organization. If it didn't serve the needs that our members and partners had so clearly outlined for us.

Gordon Sheppard (16:22.061)
That's really laying in the foundation for this win, right? So we go through this valley, very tough time. Then you emerge out and what a remarkable thing. You spoke to the people that you serve. So many people miss that mark. I've actually facilitated strategic planning sessions where the people in the room are not the right people to answer the needs of the strategic plan. But in fact, you did something that I think if everyone again.

stopped listening right here and just went and talked to their customers, private, not for profit, doesn't matter. Just go talk to who those people are and say, what do you need, what do you want? And just deal with that head on. What a gift. I mean, how lucky that we are again, getting a chance to learn from your leadership journey, your instinct too, as a young leader in the situation, you're 28-ish in there. You know what I mean? Like you're in that zone. You're like, but you've moved, there's something about you that moved through that to actually make a bold choice and then even bolder to live up.

to the vision and mission that you were able to sort of go through. That's pretty, that's so great. We could talk on and on about the strategic aspect of it. Every strategy needs a work plan. So we've gone through the valley. We've get through the lowest of the lows, all this emergency reaction, you're reactive, you're reactive. Now you're moving it into more of a proactive mode. Any highlights along the way? I know you mentioned that the conversations with the clients, that was certainly something along, if we're talking about a work plan, what does it take to make it work? You're meeting with the board, you know.

often enough to sort of keep them informed or move along with things. Any other highlights from kind of the work plan that made that strategy go forward?

Kimberly Lyall (17:52.054)
You know, it's hard to remember specific details because there was so much going on at that time. But what I do remember overwhelmingly was just the freedom we felt to take risks, which might sound kind of crazy because again, you know, we're in a really precarious situation just because we decided, OK, we're going to rebuild the organization. We have a lot of hard work to do to rebuild the organization. But honestly, when you've already lost everything, you do feel a bit more freedom of like, I may as well try it because, right, I've already had the worst happen.

And so with our team, once we had the clarity around this is what we're here to do, any opportunity that came forward went up against that vision, mission, values, and we created some really cool stuff that we wouldn't have done otherwise. in terms of when you let go of the things you've always depended on, the way you've always operated, when you let go of that, you open yourself up to be so nimble, so flexible, so...

aligned with your your why your purpose opportunities present themselves because you're ready for it. You know, you had a team that I just said, this is what we're here to do. We'll figure it out. We'll figure out the how. But let's be clear on the why. And so, you know, we were able to create new divisions, new services, form new partnerships, bring in new contracts that I don't think we actually could have done prior to that, because we didn't have the mindset.

to be able to do it. yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (19:24.632)
Yeah, that sort of status quo bump along, right? Where you kind of get a bit sort of sleepy in a sense, where it's just kind of, it's okay. But the crisis, not put to waste in this case, obviously, you sort of got in there, rolled up your sleeves and got this thing moving forward. And we've heard a bunch of sort of the why, very, very clear. We've heard a bit of the work plan along the way and those moments along the way and then what it led to. In the anatomy of went for me, the third step is people. So I really want to just take a second because you're a key driver here.

Kimberly Lyall (19:27.064)
Mm-hmm.

Gordon Sheppard (19:54.36)
And we can talk about a few others as well, what is it, what was happening for you in terms of the evolution of your kind of roles and responsibilities and your attitude? Because like you said, you were, you were upset as well. Like, you like there's a peak and valley aspect to what you're talking about. So how would you describe yourself and your attitude in this situation?

Kimberly Lyall (20:13.834)
Yeah, that was a tough one, I'll be honest, because up until that point, I'd worked so hard to become a trusted leader in the community, you know, for a lot of reasons. And this felt like such a tragic failure. I remember at the time my staff saying to me, this is not your fault. You know, this is not in the board. You know, as soon as I heard the news, as soon as I realized money had been stolen, I offered to resign.

And luckily my board immediately said, not a chance. We know this wasn't your fault, we need you. But you can't help but feel responsible. You're the boss, you're the leader, right? And so even though we were taken advantage by someone who was a very good con woman, it was hard for me and I just felt so responsible for fixing it. So once we decided to move forward, I just put everything I had into trying to fix it.

Actually, to a point of detriment, I basically had to deal with the trauma, but it was a delayed reaction. So was about a year and a half later when I finally hit the burnout and the post-traumatic stress disorder showed up. But during that time, we had a couple of mantras. One was business as usual. So we very much again needed to rebuild the trust in the community. And I wanted my team to know that they were supported.

I wanted them to appear confident as they were going out and doing what they needed to do. And so really I took it upon myself to be that sounding board, that support in office, a lot of focus on communication. You know, we really had to get good at communicating with each other. We would have our weekly, you know, check-in meetings and all those meetings started by again, reviewing the vision, mission and values before we even went to any discussion because everything stemmed from that. Right. Some people didn't stay with us.

You know, there were some staff that it just, what had happened and the transition we were making was too much. Understandable, understandable. They went on to something that was a little less stressful. But what I found was interesting is that as we went forward and we're building this organization that was really based in trust, our partners could trust us, our clients could trust us. We were focused on who we were and why and who we were serving. And that was our values 100%.

Kimberly Lyall (22:34.914)
we started attracting people who understood that. So they were coming in, they hadn't been through the crisis, but they understood it and they understood what we were building. And so that fresh energy helped a lot, right? Both the staff and the board. so, yeah, just, you know, in terms of people and my perspective, I just really want to take care of the organization and the people in it as much as possible until we were on, you know, stable ground again, I guess.

Gordon Sheppard (23:02.733)
Well, and lucky for everybody that you took it on your shoulders, not lucky for you from the self-care perspective. So we get to learn a couple things, right? So yes, you can be Herculean, I guess, for a little while, but that's not sustainable, as so many leaders know. So again, we can learn both sides of that in terms of can we, as leaders listen to this, listen to your great story, there's a bit of a piece of advice in there too of yes, you've got to be the one out there doing it, but in the meantime, there's a price to be paid.

And then where's that self-care piece for that long-term kind of outlook that so many leaders have to face down? Well, remarkable that you're able to do that. And there would have been some other key drivers in there. Did you have any support voices, side voices, people around you giving you a hand kind of thing, or staff, or some of these clients that you mentioned? Anybody else in there that we could highlight as a key person in this win along the way?

Kimberly Lyall (23:54.978)
There were a couple of board members that were fantastic. You know, my president and vice president, they understood it. They believed in me. I mean, I really have to say they truly believed in me and the amount of effort and time they put into our recovery so far above and beyond what a volunteer would expect to do. And I just remember feeling so grateful that I had people who were standing beside me like that. Right. my husband, you know,

That poor man went through the wringer. And I think that's important thing too. And I appreciate you asking the question Gord, because you don't do something like this alone. You really can't. And so when you as the leader are trying to be strong and that rock for the people who need you, having others who can provide that support for you is so critical, right?

Gordon Sheppard (24:48.855)
I think about my little dog, Freckles, when I was a manager. And if he could tell you the stories, right? When you think about that, the home base is a big part of it. It's always leadership is a 360 deal for sure. And again, we could have another full episode where we hear all your good thoughts on what that means. So we've gone through the strategy, the work plan, talked about people a little bit. Operationally, you had to start functioning differently. So operationally, you got hit where your vulnerabilities were exposed.

Kimberly Lyall (24:51.168)
Yeah. Yes.

Kimberly Lyall (25:08.994)
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Gordon Sheppard (25:15.181)
There's that aspect. So that certainly had to tighten and you've mentioned that already. You had to operate differently with the way that you interacted with your clients. So you started to actually change the communication style with them, started to listen to them, take from them in a sense. You had to change things around sort of the office, I'm sure, as you kind of went forward and implement this strategy and the why. Any highlights from the operational components that you remember along the way to get this win?

Kimberly Lyall (25:41.92)
You know, as you were talking, something that came to mind that again, sounds so counterintuitive, but I want to share is we gave more than we got. So, you know, a lot of times in business or in organizations, it is a transaction, right? People are purchasing services. And in our previous model, again, we'd had moneymakers where they had purchased services that had always kind of sat a little wrong with me where I thought, you know, this is actually something we should just

be doing anyhow. If you remember, this should be part of the value you get with us, not something you should have to purchase separately. So we went down that road. And again, it was so counterintuitive at the time because we were doing more with nothing, but it was aligned with the values and the mission that we had decided upon. That said, if I think of it this way, you know, in any relationship that you build,

real relationships truly meet the needs of both sides. Right? So we were approaching these people that had been our partners or had been our members. And we were looking at how do we build a relationship with you that isn't just on the surface level? Like how do we deliver for you in a way that shows we truly understand you and we truly care. So there are things that you cannot do on your own that as a collective we can do, then we should just be doing that.

And then we'll look at the other possibilities and opportunities over and above. having that mindset of just do the right thing for your partners and for your your clients. It opens so many doors, you know, even the thought of taking programs that we had done and saying, well, it's only a 50 % match. We should give this to somebody else. You know, and again, in the nonprofit world, there might be funding attached to that. But you quit.

the turf protection and you open your arms and you say, where do we have shared goals? Who is best suited for this work? How do we support each other in making sure that the communities we serve are successful? And that shift in our operations brought so much benefit back to us. I truly believe that that investment in the relationships that we had

Kimberly Lyall (28:03.38)
open the doors for the future partnerships that we built, for the future services that we offered. And you know, I shared in my speech, four years later, we were bringing in multi-million dollar contracts that we couldn't have done prior.

Gordon Sheppard (28:17.356)
because you laid the foundation in in a values driven way that you didn't even know how to do when you started as a leader. You didn't start there at 26 and go, this is how we're going to operate. It was the crisis that brought out the best in you as a leader and the best in the people that were involved to allow you to get to this really essentially very sophisticated way to do things. And it's funny, I say operations and some people get into the tactical.

Kimberly Lyall (28:21.815)
Yeah.

Kimberly Lyall (28:27.447)
No.

Gordon Sheppard (28:41.516)
you're completely resistant to the tactical. You're bringing us back to why, why, why, why, why. And that's wonderful, right? Because that's what the leader does. And that's what if leaders can do that and not get their sort of down in the trenches too far, but keep that why, keep that true North focus. You can hear clearly that screaming through in what you're saying. So strategy, work plan, people, operations, finally there's results, right? So we went through the valley and then we came up and we got this win. And the win didn't take place in like,

Kimberly Lyall (28:48.428)
Yes.

Gordon Sheppard (29:10.526)
a day or a month. The win took place over multi-year and how would you measure quantitatively and qualitatively some of the key results that came out of this win for what happened?

Kimberly Lyall (29:21.548)
Yes, I mean, first of all, the first win is that we did continue to exist, right? So that was, you know, if that had been the only win, I think that would probably have been enough for the story. But when I think about some of the things that we did, so I mentioned that we started a whole new division of the organization and we brought in some major partners where we were doing destination marketing on their behalf. For example, at the time, you know, the province had just introduced destination marketing fees.

that hotels could collect to market and promote their destination. And within the community I was in, the hoteliers there were just gonna start collecting this and were thinking of creating their own organization. I approached them and said, why don't you let us do that work for you? Why don't you contract us to do that work for you? We are experts in this, this is what we do. And instead of setting up something that might be competing or not necessarily aligned, let's do this work together.

And they did, and we signed a three-year contract that again was worth a lot of money to do that work. We had been in contract negotiations with the city. know, we had for a long time had operated visitor information centers for them, buildings that we owned, but they funded the services. And I'd gone to them and said, you know, they were looking at other vendors. And I said, you know what, put this to public tender, which again, you know, we were a sole source contract.

gutsy to say, I want this to go to public tender, but I needed them to clarify what they needed in terms of services, so that we could bid and prove our ability and our value. And by doing that, I was able to almost double the contract that we were getting from them. We looked at again, I said, the mindset of opportunities, right? Here's the thing, and I often say this in other speeches.

life is like a squiggly line. You know, we think opportunities are going to come to us in a box with our name on it with instructions when we have the finances and the time and the ability and the capacity to make things happen. Opportunities almost never happen that way. It's this hint of something that you see and you start to think, what could I do with this? Right? What could I do with this challenge and turn it into an opportunity? And so,

Kimberly Lyall (31:40.928)
Destination Canada at the time had come up with some new really new cool psychographic research They were looking for organizations across the country to train them in this I found out about it. We were the second Organization in the country to get this training and it was it was about marketing How do you market your destination and I looked at and I thought this is actually a great tool to develop a destination What if we were to do that use this tool flip it on its head and so

We looked at that at the same time there was an opportunity to get cluster development funding through a partnership with Community Futures. So we thought, well, hey, if we do cluster development, product development using this new research, innovative project, right? So we got partnered with Destination Canada, Travel Alberta, Community Futures. This was a $600,000 project and innovative, innovative. Nobody else in the country was doing this work the way we were. So again, it's just having this

clarity and you're right. I am staying very high level at purpose. But that's the point. I've always approached things with my team, no matter who I'm working with is let's be clear on the end goals. Let's be clear what we're trying to achieve. How we get there, we will figure out. You might figure out if it's your area of responsibility or expertise, something might come along like a tariff.

That's going to change how we get there, right? So we need to be nimble and flexible in the how. What is important is the goal, the why, the what. And so, you

Gordon Sheppard (33:14.633)
Remarkable, remarkable. It's so wonderful to hear even more details and the results in this win are bigger than you could have imagined, right? Especially when you're in the valley and then you come out and you see all these things. I know that you mentioned that sort of those efforts are now studied. I mean, it's just remarkable in terms of all those good things that came out of, you had to sort of the leader listening to this, learning from you with maybe one couple sentences.

Kimberly Lyall (33:23.896)
Mm-hmm.

Gordon Sheppard (33:42.091)
What would you sort of the main thing that you like to get through in a short answer just to sort of put a bookend on this conversation?

Kimberly Lyall (33:50.178)
Get clear on the why and let go of the fear. When you approach things from a place of surety about the why, not being afraid to take those risks, but just knowing that what you're doing matters to somebody, it is so important to let that drive you. Let go of holding on to old ways, let go of holding onto the turf. Just have confidence in the why, believe in it.

because when you let go of that fear, you will take the right risks, you will see the opportunities, you will find the right partners, and you will create something that's really truly incredible.

Gordon Sheppard (34:27.157)
From somebody who has been there, done that, I feel so lucky that you're sharing this story that so many people are gonna learn from. Kimberly, thank you for being on the show.

Kimberly Lyall (34:35.842)
Thank you so much for having me. You have a fantastic platform and I love it.

Gordon Sheppard (34:43.542)
Super cool.