Erica Keswin

F*ck Yeah! Celebrating the Small Wins with Black Sheep founder and CEO, Aimée Woodall

The Houston-based Black Sheep Agency is a creative and brand strategy firm that works with clients that are changing the world. That’s why founder and CEO, Aimée Woodall, feels it’s so important to celebrate tiny victories along the way. After all, changing the world means playing the long game. Especially when the pandemic has added so many obstacles. But it’s also added an opportunity for Aimée’s team to light the path for other companies attempting to navigate Covid times. Since the Black Sheep Agency was positioned to transition easily to #WFH due to a cultural foundation built on trust, vulnerability, and fluid communication, they barely skipped a beat when the pandemic struck. Seeing an opportunity to assist their clients with difficult transitions, Black Sheep created helpful resources based on their own successful internal transition. Listen to find out how Aimée and the Black Sheep team use staying nimble and responsive, celebrating the small stuff, and prioritizing vulnerability as strategies to maneuvering through a changing world.

Quotes

2:15 – “For me especially in business, and I think as a part of my soul and who I am—I’m just a connector. Connecting with people, and learning from them, and listening to them, and sharing real life and vulnerability is what feeds my soul and keeps me going.”

6:23 – “You know a lot of people fell into crisis whenever the pandemic hit because they weren’t set up for things like remote work. Or they weren’t using the right technology to have that kind of fluid communication that you need when you’re all working from home. And we were already in that groove. So our groove continued. And we were able to take the things that we were already doing and translate those things into some community conversations that would help other people.”

8:10 – “There are just a lot of really big variables right now, all at the same time, colliding against each other, and creating so much uncertainty for planning far out. So how do we become really good short-term planners and stay nimble and responsive to those things—is more important than ever.”

11:31 – “The most important thing…is making sure that everybody’s okay. Making sure that everyone is taken care of. And for every person that’s different. That’s not just a blanket approach…so personally at our agency, we’re doing lots of regular check-ins with one-on-one individuals to find out how they’re doing, how their families are doing, what they’re doing to keep a positive attitude and to take care of their mental health, and really to get through this, and then we respond to those things.”

34:11 – “Maybe that will be what comes out of all this that is good for society —is that we were over-scheduled and over-booked. And there was this thing called flex time before, but what did that really mean?…There’s an opportunity here to really redefine what flex time means and how we work. And we probably will still have to continue to schedule ourselves, but what if we scheduled ourselves with some of those things interwoven that make our work better and make us feel better as people? I’m excited about that.”