THE EARLY LESSON
I learned that as a young saxophone player. A friend’s father listened to me play and said, “You know the notes. But I don’t feel the music.”
I have been finding that same gap ever since. In stories, brands, and rooms where everyone understands the work but no one can explain why it matters.
I see it in the boy learning what a man should be from a deck of Lotería cards. In the tamalera running pricing, credit, and distribution from her kitchen without ever calling it strategy. And in the leadership team that can explain what the company does but goes quiet when asked why anyone should care.
I help make it visible and useful. Sometimes through a story, sometimes through something I build, and sometimes through a decision a team is finally ready to make together.
This is the research. Everything I know about how meaning gets lost between people, I learned writing these down.
Book in progress
We learned the deck before we learned the words. El Valiente. El Borracho. El Catrín. Fifty-four pictures teaching us what a man was, and not one adult ever said it out loud, because they didn't have to. We were already holding the cards.
Seventeen chapters. I'm writing one at a time.
Essays
Business school would call her an informal micro-enterprise. She'd call it Tuesday.
Thirty years of pricing, distribution, inventory and customer retention, run out of a kitchen, without one word of the vocabulary. She knows whose cousin has the truck. She knows which neighbor puts up the flyer without being asked. Nobody taught her the term for that and she built it anyway.
I'm writing down what she already knows, in a voice that sounds like home.
In development
Most small nonprofits are one steady month away from planning instead of scrambling. The money is usually already in the donor list, leaking out the bottom, one lapsed monthly gift at a time.
Fewer months with fingers crossed. That's the whole product.
No launch sequence. No funnel. No five-part series on unlocking your potential. Just the thing I'm working out that week.
Sixth grade. The teacher asked, I forgot the word, and saxophone came out instead. I kept it. Then I spent every night practicing, getting every note right and still none of them feeling true. Until a friend's father listened to the whole thing and told me what was missing.
Born in Houston to Mexican immigrants. Grew up between two languages, both of them a little suspicious of me. Tejano bands, then the entertainment business, then marketing, then customer experience, then rooms where people say "community" and mean a column in a spreadsheet.
My culture has never fit in one box. Accordion, synth, cello, drum machine. My mother's tamales. My father's habit of helping strangers. The English I was told to speak and the Spanish I had to go back and find.
Today I'm Director of Customer Experience and Marketing at Goodwill of Colorado. Everything above is why I'm any good at it.
I take a small number of projects each year with teams trying to reach people they don't come from. If the meaning keeps changing somewhere between what your leadership means and what your customer hears, that's the work.
See how that works →Tell me what you're trying to decide and what's in the way. If I can help, I'll say so. If I can't, I'll tell you who can.
Or just write to me: guillermo@gsbconnect.com
