Bobby Lehew joins commonsku as Chief Content Officer!
We have some exciting news to share with the industry: Bobby Lehew is joining commonsku!
Bobby is coming on board as our Chief Content Officer. In this role, he’ll be in charge of our education and content platform. This touches everything from our conferences (skucon), podcast (skucast), online community, blog, speaking efforts, workshops, and commonsku university. World class education is important to our community, so we’re ecstatic to be doubling down in this area for 2017 and beyond.
For those of you who know him, Bobby brings an enormous amount of industry experience to the role. For the past 25 years, he worked at Robyn Promotions where he built the Oklahoma-based distributor into a leader in the company store program space. He has also spoken widely across the industry where he has consistently been rated one of the top speakers.
Bobby and commonsku go back to a time before commonsku even existed.
It was 2008. Bobby was preparing to speak at an industry show. He needed material for a presentation on social media. Somehow he’d come across a video that my distributorship, RIGHTSLEEVE, had produced about shady salespeople called Trunkslammers. A complete stranger to me, I agreed to let him use it but somehow he bungled up his tech, so the presentation didn’t work. He blamed me for taking down the video. Not true. Really. Despite the accusation, a fast friendship was formed based on our mutual curiosities about the promotional products industry.
A year later, I ran into Bobby at The PPAI Expo. Somehow we got speaking about systems and technology. I shared with him that RIGHTSLEEVE had built its own software to manage the entire sales and production workflow. Prone to hyperbole, his eyes widened, and he said: “that’s the smartest thing I’ve heard in a long time … have you thought about selling that to other distributors?”
I said the thought had not crossed our mind, but we weren’t going to rule anything out. Well, of course, we all know how that story turned out.
Since we started commonsku in 2011, Bobby has been a key spiritual partner on our journey. He has spoken at every skucon conference since its inception, we have presented numerous times together at PPAI, ASI, and regional association events, he has been a guest on our podcast (skucast), and he was an early collaborator with me (and others) at PromoKitchen, the industry non-profit focused on education and mentorship.
We knew from the very beginning that content, storytelling, emotional connection and thought leadership were going to be the key factors that separated us from others in the software space. While we are passionate software people, we also know that truly great software co-exists with empowering people to run better businesses. We are fervent believers in the entrepreneurial journey. And great entrepreneurship all starts with great education and content.
We’ve had a good start since we launched commonsku in 2011. With Bobby joining the team, the next chapter is ready to start.
If you’d like to shoot Bobby a note, post on his commonsku profile or shoot him a note (contact info here)
Onwards!
Mark and Catherine