How to Build Category-Defining Brands in Any Industry with Jim Donnelly

**Brad Weimert** (0:00)
I go, you go, you had 300,000-plus members before you sold it. That company ultimately rolled into Travelocity. Restore, you had 100-plus stores before raising 140 million. That grew to 225 Now you are the CEO of Humanaut. These are all wildly different business models. The number of people that switch categories, switch industries, switch verticals and fail far outweighs the number that successfully do it.

**Jim Donnelly** (0:24)
Yeah, Humanaut Clinic is a $10 million clinic, but it's an entirely different business. I've got a way of creating a brand. I've got a way of creating a business. I've got a way of creating a culture. And I think if you do those things well, you will have a good business, whether it's a travel company or a health optimization company or a real estate company.

**Brad Weimert** (0:43)
And part of my secret is just, Jim Donnelly, you have a kind of a wild entrepreneurial backdrop because you've done just a bizarre variety of things over the course of your life. When you compare growing an online community to a physical location, what were the differences? Which one do you think was harder?

**Jim Donnelly** (1:06)
Well, they have their own unique challenges. And I think for me, I've heard the arguments of being a real expert that you can go deep in a particular category. Maybe it's helpful, but I don't think of that like that as a CEO. I feel like I've got a philosophy.
I've got a way of creating a brand. I've got a way of creating a business. I've got a way of creating a culture. And I think if you do those things well, you will have a good business, whether it's a travel company or a health optimization company or a real estate company. Because there have been others that you didn't mention that were equally out there. But I will say this, there's been a little piece of all of those previous experiences that have been a part of Humanaut. For instance, we have a community of Humanaut. I go, you go.
Before Restore, I did a bunch of experiential retail things. Okay, there's retail. Citibank helped do the marketing for all of their online marketing efforts. Digital marketing, you're pulling pieces from each of them. But to me as a CEO, I don't think you have to be the subject matter expert that's done something for 20 years to be a good CEO. I think you got to know what you're good at. I think you got to then go find other people that are going to make up for your weaknesses. I think you got to do things you're passionate about. I think you got to do things you're good at, like I wouldn't be good at some things.
I think that the same kind of approach will generally get you good results independent of the category.

**Brad Weimert** (2:40)
I like that idea also.

**Jim Donnelly** (2:44)
People would dispute that.

**Brad Weimert** (2:45)
Right.

**Jim Donnelly** (2:46)
A lot of people would dispute.

**Brad Weimert** (2:47)
Well, that's precisely why I want to dig into it, because the number of people that switch categories, switch industries, switch verticals and fail, far outweighs the number that successfully do it. I love the idea of if you grow as a human and or a CEO, you should be compounding in life. You should be being able to pull experience from one to the next. But I think about it like transitive equations in math, where you get a math problem, and maybe it's the wrong expression for what I'm about to say, but that's okay.
You get a math problem when you're in middle school, and you've been practicing this one form of the math problem, and you get to the test, and it's a slightly different form. You're like, well, I know the principles, but this doesn't work the same way. That's how I think about, even if you have the underlying principles of business, or building a community, or building a client experience, building a digital ecosystem for a community versus a retail storefront, fundamentally, what do you think the big challenges are bridging that gap? But what do you think is different that you had to figure out?

**Jim Donnelly** (3:52)
I mean, they are different, but I like to focus on the similarities.
I've never done a brand that didn't have massive emotional resonance with the clients. I like to think of what are the commonalities of these things as opposed to the differences. I was incredibly passionate about travel. I was a military kid, traveled all over the world. I go, you go was at a time in my life where I was single. I was traveling like crazy. I loved it. And so I had the idea of I'm not going to work. I'm going to enhance the thing that I'm the most passionate about. A travel company that gets me to all these cool places. By the way, there's a lot of people like me.