Listen To Your Deeply Rooted Passions: Your Guide To Your Future With Clare Price

The passion you have burning in you today is deeply rooted in you since you were a child. Rich Blakeman’s guest today is Clare Price, the President of Octain Growth Systems. Clare shares her experience of how she wrote her first short story, “My Dog Nicky,” when she was five. Fast forward to the present, and she’s still very much in love with writing content for her business. For Clare, content directly relates to telling your brand story and connecting with the people who can use your services the most. Join in the conversation and re-discover the child in you!

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Listen to the podcast here:

Listen To Your Deeply Rooted Passions: Your Guide To Your Future With Clare Price

I have an unbelievably outstanding guest. I’m looking forward to our conversation. Rather than I tell you about her, I’ll let her tell you about herself. Clare, if you could talk about yourself, your name, the business that you run and anything that you want to say to introduce yourself to the show.

Thank you, Rich. It’s great to be here with everyone. I’m Clare Price, President of Octain Growth Systems. I work with businesses that want to increase profitability, productivity, and efficiency by developing a consistent, reputable system of revenue generation. We focus on six market accelerators to drive your business forward and that is product development, customer acquisition, messaging clarity, brand building, market expansion, and sales success.

That almost sounds like you’ve said that before.

Versions of. It’s changing.

I understand. Getting the words right, especially since for a good part of your business, you’re in words business, words matter. Let’s put you into your six-year-old self. Imagine that you’re heading into the summertime of your six-year-old self. What are the things that you remember being most excited about and enjoying doing the most when you were 6 or 7 years old?

I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel

I’ve been writing fiction and nonfiction since I was five years old. I wrote my first short story, My Dog Nicky when I was five. I still have a copy of that. I wrote my first little short play when I was eight. That was the indoor activity, and then my outdoor activities where I liked to lie under the tree and watch the creatures, birds, and different things that were all part of nature. I’ve always enjoyed spending time out in nature, that was a fun thing, and with my playmates. My other six-year-old fun thing to do was farm. We had a gigantic farm in our basement. I was born in Ohio. We had this huge farm setup. All of the creatures had names, and we told stories about them. It all related together.

You had a place to go to be yourself and be alone under your tree, and at the same time, you had a huge place to go and imagine. Then you had an outlet for all of this with a pencil or eventually a pen and a piece of paper to create stories. That’s amazing. What a complete story. Tell me how does that connect to what you love most about the Clare of now in your career. How did those two things come together?

It connected directly to my career because my first three jobs out of college were as a reporter. My first two were as a business reporter. I ended up being a stringer for the LA Business Journal in Los Angeles at one point. From that, I went to a several-year career as a tech journalist for InformationWeek magazine. That got me involved in the tech industry, which I have been involved with ever since first in my career as both a marketing professional and as a tech analyst. Now with Octain, part of our secret sauce is content development. I love to do content. That’s directly related to being able to tell your brand story, customer stories and relate to the people who can use your services the most.

You and I have had some customers and conversations about that. I now get a much better picture of when you said, “I’d love to get engaged in doing the content myself because I think that’s one of my secret sauce pieces of what I do best.” I didn’t know that it rooted back to 5, 6 and 7-year-old Clare. It’s unusual to find something that has that deep and that consistent roots. It’s a fantastic story.

Thank you. As you know well, because you also were engaged in this with what you do, everyone’s story is different. They’re all unique. They’re all fascinating, particularly when you uncover the details or the origin story, as I know you’re so good at doing.

I’m going to take the warm, cozy, comfortable, and all of the things that you felt great about growing up in Ohio and moving that into your career. I’m going to make it a little bit uncomfortable because part of that origin story has other aspects. Tell me about a painful memory that still hangs around with you.

The most difficult and painful memory that I had was losing my father when I was 25. I’m just getting started in my career. He was quite a strong businessman himself and was always wanting to promote me and helped me to have the confidence and go forward. He, unfortunately, died very quickly. He got colon cancer and died within eight months of being diagnosed. It was not a lingering illness, but it was quite a shock. I lost a lot of my confidence and a lot of my drive at that point that I’ve been able to get back. I’d have to relate it directly to the Lord and how he steps in when we lose our earthly father to support us as a heavenly father.

That’s the beginning of the way out. Are there other ways that memory and loss became a blessing for you later in your life?

Yes, I would have to say that I feel that it drove me to come into myself, come into my person, to be able to focus on using my time and my talents to do the most good and the most value in my career. That’s one of the things I love about owning my own business and having the ability to work directly with my clients is the ability to really make a difference in their businesses and sometimes in their lives.

I didn’t lose my dad until he was 94, but I lost my mom much earlier. I have a sense of not only what’s it like when you lose a guiding person in your life early and then the choices that you take either side of the coin, either you have to make or that you get to make, because of that circumstance and what do you do about it. I’ve seen people go many directions with that in terms of how they’ve reacted. Some have reacted well and some have had a lot more difficulty than others.

It did lead to a definite change in career for me because at the time, I went to UC Berkeley, and I was focusing on considering law school at the time. After my father’s death, I felt I couldn’t spend more time in school. I needed to get out, make my way, and help support my mom not just financially but emotionally. That made a change.

Now, what is it that energizes you the most? When you’re at your peak of energy and performance, what’s driving that energy? What’s inside that engine?

I would say it revolves around being around creative, optimistic, energetic people who are thinking outside the box, who are blue-sky thinkers. I love that energy that comes from being in a room with people that want to share ideas, big ideas, things that can change the world and can make a difference. That is energizing. For downtime, I would say it’s usually reading a good book, focusing on writers who are sharing good ideas. In my guilty pleasure time, I like to read mysteries. That’s something else I enjoy.

If I looked up, I’d find Stephen King, a Tom Wolfe, and an Ayn Rand that I read over and over.

Which Tom Wolfe?

I Am Charlotte Simmons, which is pseudo-written about a school right by you. It’s written about a woman at Duke, even though it doesn’t ever call Duke out. The book is about an experience of a woman at Duke. If you haven’t read it, you should read I am Charlotte Simmons. It’s a fascinating book. I have a shelf on which I keep 4 or 5 books that I read at least once every other year, if not every year because I like them so much. They’re reminder books for me, but they also escape. You talk about the kinds of people you like to be around that energize you and fill you. Let’s talk about you as one of those people. What would you like to accomplish in life? Something that if you accomplished it, it would change everything for you.

Deeply Rooted Passions: Faith is an amazing word because it permeates everything.

One of the main things that I want to do now, particularly in this time and place, is to be seen as a Christian marketplace leader, as a business owner who is a Christian in the marketplace whose business is being used to further the goodwill and the gospel. Part of that is developing my business system into a product, which is not ready yet. I’m hoping it will be in the next couple of years that other consultants can license to help them develop their consulting businesses that would deliver peace and prosperity for themselves, clients, and families.

It’s your way to give back.

Yes, I want to give back a lot. If I had my will and one of my dream goals is to become what is called a reverse tither, where you live on 10% of what you make, and you give away the other 90% to create a foundation or something of that sort. I'm not quite there, yet but I’m working on it.

The first thing to do is to be able to see it. The second thing to do is then to be able to make a plan and have steps towards it. Let’s put a visual picture around that together. Let’s say that it’s the middle of 2024, you and I just met. You said, “Rich, I had the three most incredible years of my life.” What happened during those three years that would cause you to have told me that?

The first thing is to finish a business book that I’ve been working on in 2020. I’m about 20% into the writing of it.

Congratulations on your new book.

It’s Execute To Win. It’s about bridging the gap between strategy and tactics so that business owners can execute on their vision.

What else have you done in the last three years that knocked it out of the park for you?

I now have consultants from coast to coast that is licensing my product and being able to use it to develop marketing consulting practices of their own that allow them to have that freedom and flexibility, but also a system that they can rely on that’s consistent, delivers good revenue for them, their businesses and their families.

What an accomplishment. It’s a legacy that you can leave behind. Is there anything else?

On a personal note, I would like to take a trip vacation. I don’t know if it’s a cruise or somehow to Alaska. That is one on my bucket list.

You’re going to have to take a plane first. It’s a long cruise from Raleigh to Alaska. I can see how that would be on the list. I’ve been to Alaska but not by cruise ship.

My mother did it about many years ago and she still hasn’t stopped talking about it. Whenever anything related to Alaska comes up, she remembers that wonderful cruise.

For my father’s 85th birthday, he had been to Alaska several times, hunting fishing with friends. My sister and I took him to Alaska for his 85th birthday, thinking that it would probably be his last trip to Alaska. We’re up there for about ten days. We went deep-sea fishing. We chartered a plane to fly around the peak of Denali to take photographs from above the peak. At 85, my father zipped himself into a dry suit, climbed into a whitewater raft, and paddled the river along through Denali National Park, right alongside everybody else. That’s part of the experience. It’s a huge wilderness place, but there are some magical places to be found inside of it.

I’ll tell you a funny story of what sparked the conversation about Alaska. One of my mom’s and my favorite TV shows is The Great Food Truck Race on the Food Network. In 2021, they are taking place in Alaska. We’ve been watching it week by week as the food trucks are being eliminated.

You painted this beautiful picture of the future. Let’s talk about the present. What is it that you’re tolerating in your business right now?

Administrative work is something that I put off. I’m terrible about doing it. I procrastinate, and sometimes it comes back to bite me. The worst thing, and thank goodness I found a wonderful resource to solve that problem, was accounting. I open QuickBooks and get hives. That’s how bad it is. I did find a great resource a couple of years ago to handle my bookkeeping, so that problem is solved. Now, it’s the rest of the administrative work. I carefully file them into different piles and then studiously ignore the piles.

Then magically, it disappears and it comes back finished, organized and done. You’re no longer under stress.

I’m going to get a virtual assistant. I haven’t yet, but that’s definitely in the queue for something I need to add to my business. I’ve used them in the past. I highly recommend them. I need to get that taken care of.

What bores you?

Nothing bores me. I find all of the things that I learn about interesting. This is off the subject of boredom, but how do I avoid boredom, is I get interested in the subject that somebody is talking to you about. I will give you two examples. My first example is with my cousin’s husband, who is a professor at the Georgia School. He was telling me about his research on zinc in mice. I don’t know anything about zinc in mice, but I learned about zinc in mice. The other great conversation of mine with someone was about beekeeping. I don’t think that you could be bored if you’re continually interested in learning new things.

If you were to name two things that are working and two things that are not working, what’s on the list?

The first thing that is working is this move to Raleigh, North Carolina, even that it was in the middle of a pandemic, which happened in July 2020. I love the community and the people here. I love the neighborhood. The culture, community and this way of life are just stimulating beyond belief for my creativity. I live out in a small town called Clayton. It’s out in the countryside. I can miss my turns because I enjoy nature so much. That comes back to the first question about loving nature when I was six. The other thing that I love is birdwatching around here. I put up bird feeders and get all kinds of different birds, from Pine Siskins to Cardinals, and a lot of different things. What’s not working? COVID is not working. I’m done with COVID. I am tired of the restrictions and the way that it’s keeping people apart, the difficulties that many people had had to go through both personally and professionally. I am done with that.

I can completely identify with your last emotion. I heard the emotion more than I heard the words. I get the emotion. I know the answer to this question from things you’ve already said and from conversations that you and I have had before, but I want you to help us put a wrapper on all of our conversations by wrapping your faith around all of it, to talk about what role your faith plays in all of this. How does it permeate what you do, who you are and how you act? Business life or anything you want to talk about.

That is an amazingly great word because it does permeate everything. I have to say from a faith journey story that I have always been a Christian. I was born in the church. I just was one of those people that it never occurred to me that this wasn’t the truth, that Jesus was not my Lord and my savior, and that he would not be with me. Then through my early career and my early working life, I got lost in the world system and achieving things for my own purpose, for my own goals, and chasing that elusive American dream that is sold to us. Through a series of different events, God had to bring me back to him.

I feel at this point that my faith journey is stepping into maturity. I joined a group of Christian business owners that is an amazing group. We meet once a month, and it’s focused on building a biblically-centered business and being a Christian marketplace leader. If I could leave this group of readers with one thought, it’s to look for that place of faith in your life. Celebrate it, embrace it, and see how that’s going to cause you to step out and make a difference in the world.

I’m glad to know you enunciate that in that way, use words that are meaningful to you, and yet practical that there’s nothing magical about it. It’s just practical. It’s who you are, how you act, how you run your business and how you are in your life. A lot of people think that it has to be magical or it’s not faith. In many cases, that’s the furthest from the truth. If it’s not genuinely who you are, then it’s something else, and you’re trying to fake your way through it. I couldn’t be happier that we’ve had the time to set aside to talk about these subjects and to interweave the various aspects of who Clare is and your business, aspirations, dreams, memories and how they’ve made you who you are. I feel like you’re a lifelong friend after this conversation. I appreciate you taking the time to join with us. I look forward to our journey together.

Thank you, Rich. It’s been a pleasure. I look forward to the next conversation we have as well.

Everybody, thank you for joining us. If we all have the opportunity to live the kind of better story that Clare has painted for us as to the better story she’s looking for herself, the world will be a much better place for our children and our grandchildren. Bye for now.

Bye.

Important Links:

• Octain Growth Systems

• I Am Charlotte Simmons

About Clare Price

Hello! I'm Clare Price, CEO of Octain Growth Systems, a global strategic planning consulting firm that works with B2B mid-market companies to improve profitability, productivity and operating efficiency through developing a consistent, repeatable system of revenue generation.

Our Octain Growth Systems drives growth in the digital age using six key market accelerators: product development, customer acquisition, brand visibility, message clarity, market expansion and sales closing.

1. Product development & launches; go to market strategies, product & market alignment, new market opportunities.
2. Customer acquisition and retention: demand and lead generation, customer targeting, personas, and buyers journeys.
3. Brand identity building for top of mind awareness across all channel and touch points.
4. Content marketing: thought leadership campaigns to develop authority in customer-facing channels.
5. Market expansion: market opportunities, identify market dynamics and shifts that change the game and disrupt established players; competitive analysis to leapfrog competition.
6. Sales & marketing alignment: ensure all marketing efforts and spend result in more closed deals and productive sales teams.