A Child's Passion For Science And Solving Hard Problems With Tom Hileman
Science deals with analytical, critical thinking of synthesizing data and observing how things interact in order to solve hard problems. The same concepts apply in the world of digital solutions. Chad Burmeister's guest is Tom Hileman, founder and President of Hileman Group. In this conversation, Tom shares how his childhood passion for science and solving hard problems led him to the world of marketing. Join in the conversation as Tom shares experiences in his life that made him who he is today.
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Listen to the podcast here:
A Child's Passion For Science And Solving Hard Problems With Tom Hileman
I have with me someone who has been the founder and president of his company for many years. He serves big companies and healthcare systems. He helps them with marketing creativity, digital transformation, and all of those kinds of fabulous things. We're not going to focus on Tom's company. What we're going to do is focus on Tom, understand how he got to where he is, and what are the things that he has experienced in life that have caused him to be the person that he is. We're going to dig into that.
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Tom, welcome to the show.
Thanks. That's a very kind introduction, Chad. I appreciate it.
It's great to have you. Which part of the country are you located in?
I'm located in Cleveland, Ohio.
Therefore, the Cleveland Clinic. My aunt visited that hospital once and had a very good experience there.
Hard Problems: Work with a smart group of talented folks who are passionate about what you're doing and solving hard problems.
That's great to hear.
They are a customer of yours who said so. It's awesome. Rewind the tape a bit for my audience. We like to get to know Tom before he became the Tom now. That starts at age 5, 6, some of your first memories in life. What did you love? What were you passionate about? Do you know like, "I need to do that every day. That's what gives me a smile on my face?" What was that?
When I was young and all the way through my college, Science and nature were my passions. When I was 5 and 6 years old, I thought I wanted to grow up and be a scientist. A lot of people wanted to be different things, teachers and doctors, but not me. I view the world from the lens of Science and always have, even though I'm in the world of marketing now.
I like to call it the secret thread. You've got the secret blue thread through your entire life that says, "That's what I knew I meant to be someday or meant to focus on." Now, you're a marketer. Where do you think that overlaps between the Science of what you loved and what you're passionate about to what you're doing now?
When I look back on the arc of my career from Science into technology and marketing, it's always been about problem-solving. That's what the fundamental core of Science is, a hypothesis. You test something. You observe it and see what the outcome is, which is obviously very apropos in marketing as well. Throughout my life and career, I've always looked at the world through the lens of how a scientist does in terms of data, how things interact, and the forces that are at play. That works well in the world of business in terms of that highly analytic, critical thinking part of what being a scientist is, whatever ought to be in the world of technology, software development, and then into the world of digital marketing specifically, marketing and healthcare. I'm very much the Science of marketing. It's where I play.
Were you the kid in high school and college when you did your labs and you were like, "This is awesome. I get to mix a little bit of this and see what happens?" You enjoyed those.
A little bit. Scientists are typically two types. There's theoretical, the Einstein's of the world, and then there are the experimentalists, who do more of the laboratory work. I always enjoy laboratory work. It's more where I love being hands-on. I grew up in a rural area and working on a farm. The hands-on aspects of Science and some of the Engineering aspects of it always appealed to me.
That's awesome to think about it in that term because I think of the chemical piece and I was always like, "How does this little fluid mix with that one to create a gas?" It was always way over my head. I like the variation. My son is at the School of Mines. He is between Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. He very much thinks in a very different way than I do.
A very binary world, I'm sure, is the one that he lives in.
We've all gone through good times and tough times. You don't need to expose everything. Keep this at whatever level you wish. What was something that was like, "That was such a hard thing," but then looking ahead and now looking back on that thing where you say, "It was painful as it was but I'm the Tom that I am now because of that" Do you have one of those instances?
I do. There's a couple that ties together, Chad. I grew up in a very large family. My mom had eight brothers and sisters. My dad had five brothers and sisters. I have over 70 cousins. Family is very important to us, specifically multi-generation and my grandparents, my grandmother, precisely because I spent a lot of time when I was growing up. Unfortunately, both of them died from colon cancer. That death, when I was younger, impacted me in a couple of ways. One, it drove me to be an advocate around cancer research. We helped sponsor a cancer bike ride for the Cleveland Clinic called VeloSano. I've been doing that and working with that organization for years.
That service has been near and dear, but my grandmothers were two of the hardest working women I've ever met in my life. One lived on a farm and spent her entire life working from 4:30 AM to 10:30 PM forever. She never took a honeymoon until she was married ten years because it was on a dairy farm and they couldn't leave the farm. My other grandmother lived through World War II and would tell me stories of how she recycled cans for the war efforts. We own a gas station and they recycled tires for rubber to be used in the military operation. Losing them young was a pain point. Also, I've never met two harder working and genuine people than those two. I was fortunate to have them in my life when I could.
Your grandparents ended up becoming almost your parents. You look to them as your guide in life.
My parents would certainly. They're still alive and they were around it. I've worked in the summers. A lot of times, they put me out on the farm with one of my grandmothers to learn the value of work. My one grandma taught me how to drive. I was driving a truck around in the field when I was ten years old, picking up bales of hay. I have a great relationship with my parents, but in the summers, I got to spend a lot of time with both of my grandparents. It has been a big mark on me.
I went to the first inaugural Living A Better Story retreat with a group of twelve people. One of the things that one of the speakers said is, "It's our responsibility to make sure that values, financial, and all of the important things in life get passed down not just to our kids but to our kids' kids." When you were articulating your grandparents as an important role model in your life, I hadn't thought through the responsibility that I have, now that I have an 18-year-old and a 19-year-old. Once they have kids, it will be my responsibility to make sure that I am the grandparent that those kids’ kids can look up to and learn lessons in life from.
Hard Problems: The more time you spend with someone, the more you realize they're just a human being like you are.
There are a lot of perspectives there through different generations.
What gives you a spark and what drains you in your business, life, or wherever?
In business and in life, I love tough problems. I love to solve the thorniest and the hardest things. When I say I, I have my team working together. What juices me is working with a smart group of talented people who are passionate about what we're doing and solving hard problems. It's part of the Sciences that I am. I love solving those things and figuring them out as we go through them. What drains me is the counterpoint to that, which is when you're looking at things that are minutia or things that aren't important. I'm a Stephen Covey fan. When you're focusing on things that are urgent but not important, those kinds of things drain and annoy me to be candid.
You put times on your calendar for the important things, the Big Rocks conversation that I remember that black-and-white movie or it was still colored but barely.
Focus time, I call that. As a company, we try to block times in everyone's schedule where they can focus. Try to take the world away and focus on the work that you're doing. That's a very difficult proposition in the world of Coronavirus. The world is much different than we're all used to. I agree with time blocks. It's a big part of why you try to use it for productivity.
If you're ever solving a problem that requires a brand expert and when I say expert, I mean this person has worked with Tiger Woods. Tiger gave a quote and said, "When I'm crouching and I'm reading the putt, that's what this individual is actually like for the business world." He's that big of a personality. He helped Panera Bread, CVS Pharmacy, and Papa John's Pizza, major companies that needed to solidify their brand. If you ever run into a challenge where you can't quite put the finger on the entire corporate brand, let me know and I'll introduce you to this individual.
I appreciate that. It sounds like a fabulous individual.
If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing that would change everything for you, what would that be?
For me, time and space to think are the ultimate. When I have those, I'm way more productive, happy, and fulfilled. When the world seems like it's wall-to-wall meetings and videos, as you and I talked about where you don't have that time and space to think, if there was some invention that could help me create the time and space I needed, that's some of my choosing. I have to create that myself is the right answer. When I changed my schedule and my wife allows me to and then design it in such a way that I can get that time and space, it feels life-changing to me.
I think of the movie, The Matrix, when he's there and the bullets start coming up and he says, "Pause," and they stopped. You and I can't pause time to that effect. It happened in Star Wars too, The Mandalorian. I think it was her or somebody in that movie that caused something to stop. I was like, "Wait a second." In our lifetime, you can't make a half a second stop, but you can act if you stretched it out and said, "I've got a month. What am I going to put into that month?" The bullets come in. I paused the bullet and focus on the things I want to focus on. It's always amazing how you can shapeshift reality in those cases. Three years out, you reached back out and said, "It's been three years since I've talked on Chad's show." You were looking back and you said, "I had the most amazing three years of my life." What happened over those three years?
For me, life is about relationships, memories, events, or other things to happen. There are things we have in life and stuff. As a person, I'm not too materialistic. That isn't as important. I don't think about cars, boats, or things like that. I think about life and relationships. The ones that are important to me, if I were sitting here three years from now and we're having this conversation, it would be the quality of the relationships that I have in my life and how well I've done to enhance those and keep them where I want them to be. The Coronavirus taught me a lot about that because I've been separated from friends and family through this. I judge my life by the quality of the relationships and the people who are dear to me in that. That would be how I would look back.
Let me go a little off-script because you've got a scientific background when you're thinking through this. In some cases, I have a personal thing with a member of my family where it's been a very big divide, yet I still want a relationship with this person. We are at 180-degree different view of the world. How do you set that aside? It seems like if you try to seek to understand, I can't get it, she can't get me. How do you move forward? If you're focused on that, are there any secrets you can share with anybody?
I wish I had a secret. These are very politically charged times and that's interesting to me from a Science perspective. I'll give you an example, mask wearing. I have no idea why that's a politically charged issue. There's certainly no downside to wearing a mask, zero, maybe a little inconvenience for an enormous amount of upside in the midst of a pandemic. Everything has become so politically charged. Human beings are tribal. For tens of thousands of years or hundreds of thousands of years, depending upon your worldview, we've got together, sat around campfires, shared food, and told stories. A lot of our tribalism has become more now because the Coronavirus extended it because we're not together. The person that you were referencing there, like the more time you spend with someone, the more you realize they're just a human being like you are. With social media and some of the echo chambers we built in a lot around us, we've started to create these walls of like, "These people." When it's time, you say, "Those people or these people."
You have to call us slightly.
The answer to that is getting together and having honest conversations about why people feel the way they do. One of the things I don't see anymore in the rise of cable news as shown is having reasonable discussions. Reasonable people can disagree. You and I can have alternate viewpoints on tons of things, but that doesn't necessarily we think that each other are bad.
It's almost like a manager. You're not a bad person. It's the behavior that you carve out.
My belief is that, in general, in society, we don't do that anymore. We mock people's beliefs with their values as people. That's terribly unfortunate and short-sighted because everyone you interact with, you can learn something from. I don't understand when people shut the world down and narrow it down to only their worldview or echo. They lose so much context and what the flavor of life is. To answer your question, it’s spending time with people and have an open mind. Some people don't want to do that. I don't think you can open another person's mind, through kindness is probably the ultimate act of working through that.
That's one of the undercurrents that my goal for Living A Better Story is to help share people's stories and show everybody that I don't care if you have a D behind your name, R behind your name, an I, or any other letter. We're all from the same place. We were all built and created. Let's expose how we got to where we are and share our stories with the world. Hopefully, we'll see some goodness come out of these shows. Last question, what role does faith play in your journey, if it does?
I grew up in a very religious Catholic family. I was an altar boy. I went to Catholic school. Early in my life, those values were instilled in me. For the first 18 to 20 years of my life, that's a core part of who I was. Through my college experience, I fell away from the faith and the traditional way. Now, I still have my beliefs and I'm still grounded in a lot of those Christian fundamentals. I don't practice it in a way that a typical Catholic might. There was a strong upbringing in that. Over time, I've gone on my path with that. It's been a journey for me, for sure. The underpinnings of those still echo within my activities and behaviors.
I'm hearing that quite a lot. I'll be honest. I do not go to church every single Sunday. I tune in to a virtual Elevation Church or other ones where I get certain sermons that I listened to. Now, I am focused on creating a deeper relationship with the man upstairs, so to speak. In the second half of life, I'm intrigued to say, "What happens if you can go deeper but in a non-traditional way?" Instead of bringing people to the church, how do you bring God to the people? Church is even an interesting word and what religion has become. I'm following the path that's been put in front of me and going, "What do you want me to do?" That's why I'm here. I appreciate your perspective on that.
My son had a fire experience with an oil fire. He was cooking in the kitchen. It blew up in his face. A 2nd and 3rd-degree burn, face and hands. In those times, what do you do? You have to have faith. It's 4 or 5 weeks later, he's nearly all healed. He has got one glove on his left hand and that's almost healed. There were a couple of times throughout that ordeal where if you see his nose, you're like, "There's no way it's going to have reconstructive surgery and everything else," but we had the belief. There's no other description besides a miracle throughout that experience. We were very happy with that outcome.
This has been fabulous getting to know you, Tom. You're doing great work. If people want to reach you and they need to solve marketing problems, HilemanGroup.com. Getting to know the leader inside of the company is important in nowadays’ world. It seems that you've got a great head on your shoulders. You like to solve marketing problems. Reach out to HilemanGroup.com if you have any marketing challenges you're looking to solve.
Thank you, Chad. I appreciate it.
Thanks for being here, Tom. We'll catch you on the next one. Cheers.
Important Links:
Tom Hileman - LinkedIn
About Tom Hileman
I have spent the majority of my career specializing in marketing, information technology and science. In 2003, I realized I could successfully merge my passions for marketing, creativity and technology into a sustainable business. And Hileman Group was born.
Hileman Group, at its core, provides smart digital solutions in an increasingly complex world. Because every organization has a specific business need, we work with each client to understand their business while uncovering their key marketing objectives. Leveraging digital marketing solutions and technological tools, we then turn those objectives into actionable strategies that deliver real measurable results.
