『Work Smart, Not Hard: The 80/20 Reframe That Changed How She Runs Her Business | Cherry Lao』のカバーアート

Work Smart, Not Hard: The 80/20 Reframe That Changed How She Runs Her Business | Cherry Lao

Work Smart, Not Hard: The 80/20 Reframe That Changed How She Runs Her Business | Cherry Lao

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In this episode of Unconventional Wisdom About Conventional Wisdom, Kim Miller-Hershon sits down with Cherry Lao, founder and CEO of Citizen Best, a brand marketing agency that helps growing companies align how they show up with where the business is headed. Over the past several years, her team has worked with brands like Netflix, HBO Max, Mars, and TechCrunch, plus a run of fast-growing lifestyle and food-and-beverage companies, on the moments that actually move a business: a launch, a repositioning, or a stretch of growth the brand hasn't caught up to yet. Citizen Best partners with founders and marketing leaders navigating pivotal moments, where the collaborative process is the product and creative excellence is the baseline. Off the clock, Cherry is a devoted dancer (Cuban dance, reggaeton, whatever the Bay Area's rich dance community is teaching), and she finds the dance floor sparks creativity for her clients' work.In this conversation, Cherry challenges a piece of conventional wisdom she believed for years: hustle harder, work harder, and the trajectory only goes up. She was always the last one to leave the office, whether at a small agency, a big corporation, or her own co-working space with the building lights half out, quietly treating that as a badge of honor. What finally reframed it was motherhood. Two pregnancies taught her that her body allowed only a certain capacity, which forced the real question: if the day is shortened, what are the critical few things that actually move the business forward? She'd heard the "work smart, not hard" 80/20 wisdom forever, but being stubborn, she had to live it firsthand before it clicked.That opens into a rich thread on priorities and the tyranny of the calendar. Kim tells the story of a CPA client who showed up to a coaching call a month out from a filing deadline, drowning in work, and when Kim asked why she was even there, the honest answer was "because it was on my calendar." They name the hamster wheel of doing things simply because that's how things are, and the harder discipline of pausing to ask whether this is really how the week should be structured, especially when your own initiatives compete with the always-urgent client work. Kim extends it to the difficult-conversation version: we don't actually decide, we just procrastinate, and either have the conversation or consciously take it off the list, because keeping undone things there just feeds a negative self-talk reel that quietly undermines you.Cherry is candid that outsiders assume she has every aspect of business figured out, and the truth is there are always gaps. It took her until year 11 to confidently say she's the CEO of a company. The first half of the decade she stepped into ownership from her creative strength as an art and creative director, fluent in that language but facing a huge gap around finance, operations, and HR, the critical functions that exist even with a seven-person team. The through-line she's landed on is resilience: no matter your stage, you'll always not know something, you'll always get metaphorically punched in the face, and the work is learning how to keep getting up and pull yourself out of the dip.She and Kim bond over a shared leap of faith. Both are stepping out of their comfort zones, Kim prioritizing the podcast and social media around her January book, Cherry finally taking Citizen Best out of "best-kept secret" mode to create content, speak, and launch a product. The clarity work they do for clients (what's your story, what's unique about you) is exactly what took Cherry longest to do for herself, and once she had it, the desire to get out there unlocked, not for fame, but to share the impact of the work. They agree on the core bet: you don't know the outcome, but if you don't take the leap and start, it definitely won't work. Kim's parallel from writing her book lands it: what everyone sells as a marketing tool turned out to be her intellectual property and thought leadership, something bigger than her that needed to get into the world.Her biggest leadership challenge is building culture and camaraderie across a remote team split between the US and Bangkok, without a water cooler or a ping-pong table, and keeping the core values thriving. It sparks a warm exchange about wanting to feed and care for far-flung teams, and both women manifest a team retreat out loud, Cherry's in Thailand, Kim's in Europe with her Nigeria-based team. Her unconventional growth habit is simply to ask for help, delegate, and stop trying to know it all, leaning on both her team (who do many things better than she can) and the right business coach and network to lift her up so she can lift everyone else. Kim adds the delegation nuance she returns to often: when someone doesn't deliver, it's frequently a management error, not an employee one, because seeing a finished product for the first time at the deadline means you never set them up for success. The deeper leadership ...
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