Building Community and Connection in Business with Brooke Clark

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:17)
Welcome back to The Bliss Business Podcast, where we explore how empathy, connection, and purpose transform business and leadership. I'm Tullio, joined today by Mike. In a world full of noise, connection is a strategic edge. That edge often comes down to one simple but overlooked capability, visibility. When someone is seen, their voice matters. When people matter, communities form. Let's introduce our guest today, Mike.

**Mike Liwski** (0:52)
Tullio, I am so excited for our guest today. We've got none other than Brooke Clark. You might know her as the founder and CEO of Seat 1A Advisors. Thank you, Brooke, for being with us today. Now, she has spent two decades working behind the scenes as a talent strategist and a leadership advisor, and particularly in Utah's life sciences ecosystem. Now, her firm Seat 1A, which you may find that name interesting. Maybe we'll learn a little bit more about that later in the show.
Helps leaders treat visibility as a career asset. Now, guiding them really to their own impact, expanding their reach and opening doors to opportunity. Even before founding Seat 1A, Brooke held senior roles helping scale organizations and develop leaders often, like we said, behind the scenes. But today she's front and center as our guest. Today she works directly with executives and rising leaders to craft stories, strategy, and outreach so that really they're not just flying under the radar any longer. Brooke, we are so excited to have you on our show today. Welcome to our show.

**Brooke Clark** (2:08)
Thank you. Glad to be here.

**Mike Liwski** (2:13)
Oh, Tullio is on mute, so maybe I'll just ask the first question.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:16)
Let's fix that.

**Mike Liwski** (2:20)
I was like, Tullio, you're not going to be a very good host if you're on mute, Tullio.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:27)
Okay. Thanks for that wonderful introduction, Mike. Now, I was going to say, let's kick this off. Brooke, I love how you say visibility is a career asset. Why is visibility so deeply tied to connection and community in business? Maybe you can give us a little bit of background on how you got here, and in your journey as well. But why is that so important, the visibility in terms of connection and community in business?

**Brooke Clark** (2:55)
Yeah. Thank you.
I feel very strongly about this because I think that visibility is an opportunity for people to share what they've spent their careers learning, and they're able to share insight that maybe they wish they would have had as somebody who is coming up in business.
And so visibility, I don't see as self-promotion, by the way. I see it as looking within and saying, what are those valuable insights that if I could encapsulate my career into this, what can I share and how can I leave that as a legacy within my field and profession? So it's really a teaching and learning experience rather than, look at me, self-promotion.

**Mike Liwski** (3:44)
Right. Which someone could take it to mean that, but that makes so much sense, right? Because without being visible, who are you going to connect to, right? And how is your community going to be able to reflect and see you? So I'm curious to learn a little bit more about your journey. And then in this journey, Brooke, that you've had, was there a moment when you realized that helping leaders build that kind of visibility was really important? You're almost, I guess, more important than traditional leadership?

**Brooke Clark** (4:18)
Yeah. And I'm really proud of the career journey I've had so far. It's been a great experience. I actually got my start in PR. So I have a journalism degree with an emphasis on PR. And that's sort of what I pull from that when I think about visibility, when I think about being able to uncover a story behind the story within someone's own career journey and being able to help them figure out what value-add that could be to people that would want to hear their message. So that sort of journalism bug and PR bug got me early, and I still pull from that. I then spent 10 years as an agency recruiter for a boutique recruiting firm. I worked with a lot of people who had excellent careers and backgrounds and who I would proactively get in front of my clients, but who I needed to work with them to be able to tell their story in order for them to really shine in front of the clients that I was getting them in front of. Then after that, I worked in biotech and led a recruitment effort. I started at this very small biotech in Salt Lake City called Recursion, and I think I was employee 40 or something like that.