Intro

Scott Raven: Welcome to The Corvus Effect, where we explore what it takes to succeed professionally and truly enhance all parts of your life. I'm Scott Raven, Fractional COO and your host. Each episode we go behind the scenes with leaders who've mastered the delicate harmony of growing their professional endeavors while protecting what matters most. Ready to transform from Chief Everything Officer to achieving integration in all facets of your life? Let's soar!

What Brought Them Together

Scott Raven: And hello everyone. Welcome back to The Corvus Effect. I'm Scott, and today I am thrilled to welcome not one but two guests, Tanya and Tony Thorson, the husband-wife team behind B2A, Business to Anyone, and co-authors of Get Off Your (M)ass. Yes, there is an M in there.

Tanya brings 20 years of buyer insights into business growth with leadership positions at well-known brands such as Lane Bryant, Jockey, New Balance, L.L. Bean, and Chico's, just to name a few. She has evolved from merchant to P&L owner to go-to-market expert and founder of Strategics Consulting.

Tony, on the other hand, brings clarity to complexity as managing director of Litech US, a precision gauge manufacturer with roots in industrial sales and B2B strategy. He combines marketing strength with an engineering mindset. Together, their frameworks such as POISE, Mosaic Marketing, Mise-en-Place Marketing, and the Curiosity Creed were built not in theory but in practice through conversations over coffee and those "wait, what if" moments that wouldn't leave them alone.

So Tanya and Tony, welcome to the podcast.

Tony Thorson: Thank you. It's nice to be here. Appreciate you inviting us.

Scott Raven: You know what? The honor is always mine because I just have this place where I get good people to talk about wonderful things, and you have done wonderful things coming from opposite corners of the business world. Tanya in consumer brands, Tony in precision manufacturing, but it has brought you together to B2A and Get Off Your (M)ass.

I want to start with what brought you together around this shared vision that ultimately marketing had lost its nerve a little bit.

Tanya Thorson: Yeah, absolutely. I have been in retail apparel and consumer brand goods for 20 years, seeing both B2C and B2B in that lane. Most recently I took a startup position in B2B SaaS and cybersecurity. I was playing both sides of the lane. In the four years that I was in the SaaS startup company, I noticed some opportunities with principles that are used in a B2C environment.

We tested some of those principles like omnichannel, buyer-led instead of product-led. We focused on personas that fit within our ecosystem. We didn't do the spray and pray. In that time we were able to try some of these principles in the B2B SaaS world and we saw some remarkable results. Remarkable results in pipeline velocity tightening up by 50%.

It is something that I was seeing reflected in both lanes, if you will. That's where the conversation really started with Tony and I. I'm not certain that we need to just be in these independent lanes. I think there are things that are crossing over because of the human connection that people want today.

The B2A Philosophy: People Don't Transform at 8:59 AM

Scott Raven: Right. Tony, you are hearing this and you're looking at it from a different lens given your engineering and mainly B2B background. How did you see this as different than things that you had seen before, even things that maybe your peers were doing in your world?

Tony Thorson: Sure. Well, in B2B, we have automated so many things. Engineering firms sometimes look at things from a technical perspective and we lose some of the emotion. When I'm talking with Tanya every day, we're talking about these things.

Yes, we bring work home, which is a thing in our household. We just started finding synergies in between the B2B and B2C world, and everybody was talking in these two lanes, in these two boxes. We kind of figured out we're kind of doing the same thing.

People don't like, we like to say they don't check in at eight o'clock and become the purchasing manager and then become the parent at five o'clock at night. We're the same people. I just think, especially in today's world, people can appreciate even in the B2B world coming at it from a B2C perspective with more emotion and humanity.

Coffee Conversations and Beautiful Mind

Scott Raven: Absolutely. Now, you know, obviously you are what we'll call the anti-Severance if people are familiar with the TV show Severance, right? In terms of you get a switch from work life to home life and back and forth. Yours is not. Yours is full of coffee conversations and messy whiteboards. I'd love for you to help paint the picture for my listening audience what this looked like, what this felt like, what the collaboration discussions were like that ultimately has led to B2A.

Tony Thorson: Thanks Scott. I like the Severance reference. That's good. Actually, as we were writing the book, we were watching Severance and getting some of the ideas and thought that's pretty interesting. But in our household, think more like Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe who had all these going in all kinds of different directions. It's not like we had these conspiracy theories up on a whiteboard or anything.

It's just us talking back and forth in normal conversations. We started writing newsletters together on LinkedIn and this really progressed over time with a lot of these ideas that we'll get into. So little by little it's like we got enough information to write a book, I think, and we hope it's interesting. We think it's fun.

Working Together as Partners

Scott Raven: Now before we get into unpacking B2A, there are definitely two very strong schools of thought in terms of your professional endeavors with the people who are strong personal people in your life. Some people swear by it, some people say I will never do it. What made it work for the two of you?

Tanya Thorson: I would just say we complement each other, but we also have a point of view and we're great listeners. That was the way for us really to build this narrative out and to talk about it. It really took the handcuffs off of what B2C and B2B are today.

We just said, what is it? What really are we trying? What's the end goal? That's how I look at many things: what is our end goal and how do we work back? Quite honestly, the B2B playbook is dated, 10 to 15 years. We're seeing it, we're hearing about it. It's very fragmented, it's product-led, and we need to shake things up. That was our shakeup.

Tony Thorson: Yeah, technically for me, I come a little bit more from a sales world because in precision manufacturing, marketing can be a dirty word. What's that? We just have relationships. But Tanya and I, I never saw marketing as fluff. That's where I started out in college anyway.

When we have these conversations, we just really align. It's easy for us to write together. It's easy for us to talk together and we just weave life and business in together. We talk a lot about work-life balance, and I think so many people think that work is just the little tiny part. When you say work-life balance, people mostly think about the life part.

Scott Raven: Yeah. It's a big reason why here, within the Corvus realm, we explicitly state we don't believe in work-life balance. Work-life balance is a myth. We believe in work-life integration to get to work-life harmony.

Tony Thorson: A hundred percent. We're totally with you and I think it works really well for us because we're both interested and curious about learning about each other's worlds and all kinds of other people. It actually makes conversations more interesting. I think we're still together after 30 years, right?

Scott Raven: You know what? After 30 years, if you're still having interesting conversations, you've probably done it well, I'll put it that way. My wife and I just celebrated 16 and I'm still having interesting conversations and at times finding out how dumb I am.

Tony Thorson: Well that's... we do that every day.

Tanya Thorson: I love that.

The POISE Framework

Scott Raven: Anyway, let's go ahead and start to unpack B2A and your frameworks. You kind of alluded to it earlier that you said every decision is ultimately made by a person who doesn't transform at 8:59 AM, the Severance idea. One of the key elements to this is the POISE framework you have developed. I'll let you guys elaborate on what that framework is and why it's so important.

Tanya Thorson: Sure. Absolutely. Well, POISE stands for Personalization, Omnichannel, Innovation, Strategy, and Emotional Intelligence. I used this framework since the inception of me starting my career. When I go back and reflect, this is how I've always operated. So we created this name, POISE.

Quite honestly, we dropped it in an LLM, ChatGPT, and said what can this be? It really gave us something that is very supportive and sticky. We think of poise and that's really how we created the name. But it's a framework, and I hate to even use the word framework because I think it boxes us in, but I think it's really about thinking about the buyer, thinking about the consumer behavior, thinking about the ways of how you want to create an engagement, a connection with that end user versus it being stages or the number of leads we have at the top of the funnel.

It's a different approach. It's much more EQ-ish, but that EQ-ish emotional intelligence is so valuable in today's market. That's really to me the unlock of how do you continue to make the messaging and the emotion there and keep that emotion going. Personalization, omnichannel, innovation, strategy, and emotional intelligence all need to interweave. They're not really independent of each other. They can be, but they're all connected.

The Smudge Concept: Andy Warhol and Human Fingerprints

Scott Raven: Right. But you know, it's a case that they all are interlinked in some respect. You may focus on one element of it, but they're all interlinked at some point. This is the personification in a lot of cases of what you guys call the smudge concept, the human fingerprint in a machine-made or, in cases like AI, machine-driven world.

Why is that smudge concept so important? You alluded to it a little bit in terms of focusing on the EQ of the buyer. Why is that so important in a machine-driven world?

Tony Thorson: You know, in a machine-driven world, in an automated world, it's like the human fingerprint. If you look at the cover of our book, you see the red and black smudge across the front, and that's what that represents. It's the imperfect humanity within all the tech and the AI.

One of the ways that came to life was watching an Andy Warhol documentary. We're not Warhol experts by any means. But you know, he took an automated world and I think he saw something way back, way before, back in the 2001 Space Odyssey days. He saw Dave, right? If you remember the movie and the computer.

But anyway, in an automated world, he showed through his Campbell soup cans and his Brillo boxes and his Marilyn diptychs that the human smudge in each one, even though he had them in what he called his factory in New York, each one had a little silk screen smudge and gave it humanity, gave it something meaningful and something different.

I think in an AI world, the analogy being like we can automate and we can scale to the nth degree, but boy, that can really feel hollow and that can feel fake and not authentic without the human touch.

Queen Elizabeth, Taylor Swift, and Cultural Icons

Scott Raven: Yeah. Let's continue on this because your book has a lot of references to people across all different walks of life: Da Vinci, Taylor Swift, Queen Elizabeth II. I mean, we're talking about stuff that typically you don't associate with marketing. What are these icons teaching us that are applicable to this marketing concept of B2A in your humble opinion?

Tony Thorson: I was gonna say, we summed up a lot of the book with somebody that we thought was very unusual. Again, it's us talking, it's us reading, it's us watching documentaries. We were writing these ideas in the book and we thought, what? How do we end this book?

What person encapsulates the whole thing? Who carries themselves with poise? Who builds these relationships? Who's authentic? And we came up with Queen Elizabeth. I know some people will think Queen Elizabeth in a marketing book makes no sense. But like you said, we've told a lot of different stories.

If you read the book, it does make sense. But the way that she carried herself and all the different things that we talk about, it's not a how-to with 10 different steps on doing this for your campaign. It's really stories that we hope people can relate to and think about in their own lives and think, this story is analogous to something that I've felt, or something that I've seen, or something that I've experienced.

Hopefully we get people thinking.

Tanya Thorson: Exactly. We wanted to make a different book. We didn't want it to be the 10 tips and tricks on how to drive your go-to-market strategy, because quite frankly, there isn't one way today. It's messy. The buyer today is not top, middle, bottom. They don't think that way. They're not Tanya Thorson, a VP of marketing from eight to five. We're in and out from professional to personal, from top to middle to back to top.

We can't think of it just as one way of thinking. With it now being more buyer-focused, buyer-led today, it's all about what's in it for them. The reason we put a lot of these—Taylor Swift, Da Vinci, Saturday Night Live skits with Kate McKinnon—it's because they're relatable and they're memorable. That's how I remember things. It makes you then think differently and think about it. Not so much we're telling you what to do, it's here's this information, now how are you going to apply it to your team, to your business and work from that perspective.

Breaking the Funnel Paradigm

Scott Raven: You know, it's interesting because in today's age, and this is probably a gross overcharacterization, but I'll say it anyway. If I were talking to small to mid-size business owners, I would be hearing in terms of here is our funnel architecture, here are our email sequences. This is the result of our last A/B test, and here's what we're going to do with it.

Right. You guys are trying to break that paradigm down with a sledgehammer.

Tanya Thorson: Yeah. And all of those things that you said are still valuable in your go-to-market strategy. But the way we lead should be talking more about the end goals. Talking more about—and this is where I think marketing has really done themselves a disservice. We're known for this funnel. We're the connective tissue to the organization.

There's a chapter in the book called Cross-Functional Champion. We need to break those silos down and look at the through line. That through line is driving revenue, how we speak. Our meetings shouldn't be "we have 658 marketing leads." It should be "we are seeing our pipeline velocity tighten up that is showing us that we're delivering the right messaging to the right persona at the right time in the right place."

That's what's caught us in this situation where when things go south, it's "well, marketing's not doing anything that's driving the P&L." That is where we need to really change the mindset internally.

Tony Thorson: I think Tanya nailed it. Sorry. I think she nailed it in the book that by going to the cross-functional champion, it's something that both of us have always thought about working at smaller companies or larger companies. Yeah, you kind of start with a marketing message or a sales message, but you really have to be able to talk to finance and product and HR. To be a true cross-functional champion, you have to wear all different kinds of hats and hopefully you're part of that crew.

We call it the convergence crew that Tanya and I started. We're converging B2B and B2C into something B2A. That's kind of what you're doing in any corporation. Right. And if you find the old book, the Jim Collins book, The Right People on the Bus—

Scott Raven: Yep. Right people in the right seats on the bus. Agree.

Tony Thorson: I mean, that matters so much to breaking down and smashing the old ideas, right.

The Cross-Functional Champion

Scott Raven: Now, you know, you both have been around the block enough and with enough pedigree from enough companies that you understand what I'm gonna say next, which is to a degree, labels are important. Boundaries are important. Don't you dare tell me how to market, don't you tell me how to engineer, et cetera, right? How do you break these silos down without it becoming a complete break in culture? Because people feel threatened that you're coming into their Kool-Aid.

Tanya Thorson: Yeah, and you get the blame game, right? That's what ends up happening. I've been a cross-functional champion. I've been told that most of my career, and that's understanding your partners and what makes them tick and what they're looking for in terms of interest when you're speaking from a marketing perspective.

I see that as the unlock for it because we need to again be thinking through that. What are we doing? What is our end goal as an organization? What are our initiatives and how do we work backwards with that based on our departments, but knowing that we're in it together? I think it's really creating less of an inward look but more of an outward look, making it all about the buyer versus all about the product and creating an environment where you have this synergy because it's about listening and being heard and working together collectively on what the outcomes are.

The Resonance Mix and Authenticity

Scott Raven: Do you find? Yeah, please go ahead.

Tony Thorson: I was just gonna add to that, since we're talking about our book, it made me think of like breaking down, how do you connect with people? One of the ways that we talk about it is something we call the resonance mix. We talk about that in terms of branding and talking to customers, but that's also because internally you have to sell the message to everyone, right?

So internal communications is just as important as external. When you're talking about a resonance mix, which we boiled it down to, it's kind of simplified, but we like to think about it in terms of authenticity and relatability and then just kind of producing that message and amplifying it the correct way. We think if you can be relatable in your brand or with other people, coworkers breaking that, and you can be authentic and real, which I hope we come across as—

Scott Raven: Oh yeah, you do.

Tony Thorson: So good. Then you've already crossed half the battle off right there, right?

Scott Raven: Right? Okay. That's a good way to start.

Mosaic Marketing and Innovation

Scott Raven: Right. Do you guys find, and this could be isolated just to the two of you coming together on this book, that by cross-pollinating disciplines, you accelerate the I of POISE, you accelerate innovation and creativity?

Tanya Thorson: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it's looking for solutions to make things more productive, to make things more simplistic. Same thing as you apply the I to the buyer. If we can come together and build out a go-to-market strategy that is inclusive, it's gonna tighten up the sales cycle, it's gonna create more authentic messaging because you're talking about it together.

You're not looking at it from just the lens of marketing or just the lens of sales. It's really bringing the group together and building out what that looks like, and absolutely.

Tony Thorson: We can build a lot of innovation from something we like to call Mosaic Marketing. Which is based, like you've mentioned previously, about Leonardo da Vinci and the different innovation that he has from being an architect to being a painter and all different things.

When you're bringing people together, different fragments—that's our mosaic. Different ideas. You're building on a core and you're bringing in different ideas. At the same time, you gotta be careful with too many. It reminds me again of the Lego idea. With the Lego book where they were struggling because I think basically their higher-ups said, just do whatever you want.

Scott Raven: Right.

Tony Thorson: Until they came into a little more narrow and they all talked and figured out, it's like, oh, here's our goal. The creativity apparently exploded. Yeah. On the book that I wrote, but I think it's called Brick by Brick. Right. Yeah.

The Curiosity Creed Across Generations

Scott Raven: Yes. Yes. Yes, I agree. You know, part of what I hear in your story and that I know you carry this forward, not just with the professional life but the personal life into your family life, is the Curiosity Creed. I'd love for you to go a little bit further into how that curiosity scales, not just with what you guys are accomplishing both professionally and personally as a couple, but across the generations.

Tanya Thorson: I think, you know, we're not curious anymore. We don't ask questions. We've got all this software and all these data points, and we're running a thousand miles a minute, and we get to the dashboard and we pass it off and we're letting AI drive those decisions. To me it's pausing and asking those right questions.

Being curious, you know, if you're interested, you're gonna be interesting is what we say. I think I see us have, we've really lost that in our culture, our work culture, and even in some of our personal culture. We have, you know, four unique generations in the marketplace and we all think very differently. The younger generations, I think how they've grown up in work environment has become very transactional. I remember learning most of—most things that I learned were in person, being that sponge, absorbing, being able to ask those right questions.

I see us really just in a world right today where we need to really step back and use AI to help us get the information, but it's the outcomes that we really need to be focusing more on as a community and as a culture. And arriving at what those business outcomes might be that we can uncover for our buyers.

Scott Raven: Yep. I'll throw this one out for your next book. You know, I remember Tom Brokaw's sign-off from Nightly News and in his final passage, he says, it's not the answers that drive us, it's the questions.

Tony Thorson: Oh, thank you, Tom. Yes. That's a good one. That's so true. I love the curiosity creed that we talk about. You mentioned like talking about from generation to generation and when we're talking about the curiosity creed, we start back with the impressionists in France and Monet, and they asked a question: what if we painted what we saw?

I'm not an art history expert, but that's just an awesome way to think about it. To ask that question. So we take that all the way to our daughters. When we raise them to hopefully be interested—the juxtaposition of words that we use, it's very specific because we like to say, if you're interested, you're interesting because so many people today on their influencer Instagrams, whatever they think, look at me. Oh, aren't I interesting?

I think people are so much more fun to talk to if you're interested and ask them questions and you're curious about them. And that's where the real connection happens, I think.

AI, Critical Thinking, and Neuroplasticity

Scott Raven: Do you think that that is probably one of the biggest risks that we face, particularly founder-led businesses, small businesses in this AI age, that we're losing the ability to be curious and to allow ourselves to leverage our own imagination to drive our direction instead of allowing the wonderful technology that we have in today's day and age?

Tony Thorson: Yes, and I think it's coming. I think it's coming back because people have been teched out. You know, we're at a point now where it's so amazing what you can do. And yet you put in, if you put in garbage, you get garbage out. Right? And people that, of our generation, I'm hoping that younger people will learn critical thinking because if they don't, they're not gonna recognize what is right and what's wrong.

So I forget what the question was, but—

Scott Raven: No, no, no, no, no. I mean, you're spot on, right? You know, the younger generation, obviously they're coming up in age with onslaught of social media, being judged for lack of better term in terms of reactions and likes and comments, et cetera. But that portrays all the way down into the school system in terms of a lot of these schools these days are "get the grades so that you could advance," et cetera, right?

Are we losing the ability to shut that all off for a second and allow the neuroplasticity of the mind to really develop?

Tanya Thorson: Yeah. That's deep. That's pretty deep.

Scott Raven: I don't, I don't make questions easy on this podcast. Come on now.

Tony Thorson: That's good.

Tanya Thorson: Yeah.

Tony Thorson: Go ahead, Tanya.

Tanya Thorson: No, I think that what we're doing is we just want that grade or we just want that win and we're not thinking about how to get there. We're not making the time. We're not disciplining ourselves or giving ourselves the time to do that. I see it myself in many ways.

You know, it's just how do I get there? But we need to stop and pause and give ourselves that breath. And we're not. I think it's just because the world we're in, we're just chasing, we're running. And I think as you said, Tony, it's because we're just teched out. We're AI-ed out. You know, every day I wake up and I'm like, I feel sometimes I feel 10 steps behind because there's something new with AI.

Or something happening in the marketplace and you know, it's like, how do I catch up? And you know, there's this feeling of chasing.

Scott Raven: Yep.

Tony Thorson: Yeah, you're mistaking speed for substance, and we're just craving faster answers all the time. You don't want to sound like an old guy with your daughters or anything, but hopefully, I'd love to see them read two or three books over the summer right instead of just scrolling through Instagram constantly.

You learn a lot from that, but I think, you know what I mean? I think that brings a little bit of the critical thinking and the thought process back and brings humanity into the AI world. And I think that's gonna be a competitive advantage for young people. The people that can critically think, I think that's gonna mean a lot.

You've got a lot of data scientists out there who can analyze data, and they can tell you what to do based on that, but do they see the smudge? Do they see the little human element? Do they see, are they curious about trying something different? You know.

Hope for the Next Generation

Scott Raven: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting you bring up your daughters, right? Obviously you've raised them under your roof in terms of curiosity. They are now making their way in the professional world. I think they're both in marketing, if I remember our off-camera talk correctly.

What do you see in them that gives you hope for the upcoming generation?

Tanya Thorson: They're both very different but very similar. The psychology piece I see, the behavioral piece—my both of them are interested. Do think sometimes almost to a fault where it's just right, they're overthinking.

Scott Raven: Right.

Tanya Thorson: The other thing is we've taught them to look at things collectively, building an ecosystem, you know, building a community. Those are things that I see them doing and how that really helps build their own personal identity at the same time. Tony?

Tony Thorson: Well, I, you know, I've been watching and just finished up Andor, this Star Wars series, which is a pretty well-done show. I'm not, I try not to be too much of a Star Wars geek, but I can't help it.

Scott Raven: I was born the day that the original A New Hope was released theatrically. So I kind of was born into it.

Tony Thorson: While you were born? Yeah, I was seeing it seven or eight times in the theater. I'm still there with you, but you know, I see the automation and technology in that series. But I think that our daughters crave depth and humanity. And they have a curiosity, which I like, because I bring up Andor because it's really brought the human element back into the storytelling.

And in a highly tech world, you have two seasons of beautiful content, beautiful character development. And you know, to me, if our daughters crave that type of depth and integrity in building the content that they did in this series, then that's our kind, that's our rebellion. You know, I'm here for it. I'm with them on that.

The Rebellion: Get Off Your (M)ass

Scott Raven: Yeah, let's use that word rebellion as we pivot to the book. Get Off Your (M)ass and let me allow you to paint a picture in terms of if Get Off Your (M)ass creates the type of community and free thinking and adoption of B2A that you guys are hoping, what is the rebellious impact that you're going to create? What do you hope to see from this work?

Tony Thorson: For me, I wanna make millions feel like one. That's kind of one of the things that we talk about: personalization and getting off your mass. The idea was mass marketing is, like Tanya likes to say, it's spray and pray. Let's throw it against the wall. Hope it sticks. A lot of it will.

But that's why we came up with that title. It's like, we gotta get away from that. So it means two things, like get off—it's get off your ass and do something and be part of the world, but also stop with the mass marketing. So, you know, that's our rebellion and hopefully we're inspiring people a little bit to think about things differently.

Mise-en-Place Marketing

Tanya Thorson: But it means that they have to do more, you know, upfront work. The spray and pray is easy, you know. The personalization is not just keeping an email that's generic and just putting in their first name today. It's more about having your BDRs, having your teams do their homework before they go into a conversation with a potential opportunity, and that is upfront, harder and more work to do, but in the long term, it'll create those pipeline efficiencies.

It will create more authentic conversions that become your lifetime value customer. It will build credibility within the marketplace for your brand. And there will become this trust that you have, that they have for you as their brand. And those are things today that we're just praying for through the spray and pray.

Tony Thorson: Yeah, I like the way Tanya's putting that. It reminds me of one of the ideas that we came up with. Again, I guess we're going off movies a lot, but, you know, I think that's a relatable thing. We call it Mise-en-Place Marketing, which is a play on mise en place, which is framing everything properly with intention.

And building content in a certain way, but meticulously. That's where we talk about that with Steven Spielberg. We talk about that with The Bear and we relate it to a chef's mise en place. You know, Anthony Bourdain was big on that. He would always say, it's like, it's all about the prep. So like Tanya was saying, putting in the hard work that's the behind—

Tanya Thorson: The foundation.

Tony Thorson: So that's what we call the prep, yeah, the preparation.

All these different things that people don't see if you don't put in that work. And that's the grind. That's also the good stuff, right? Because, you know, people don't see that in the end product, but good marketers, smart people, they know that people were preparing and getting ready to pivot at any given moment, which we can do with AI now.

So 12 different scenarios and you're ready to go. You know, I mean, what was, who came up with that? We were talking about that, Tanya. When the guy was caught on a screen with his mistress—

Scott Raven: Oh, the Coldplay guy? Yeah.

Tony Thorson: They immediately came out with the Gwyneth Paltrow response.

Tanya Thorson: Yeah. Yes.

Tony Thorson: That was brilliant. I mean, that was a team that was ready to go and pivot for anything. So.

Tanya Thorson: Absolutely.

Legacy and Foundation for Their Daughters

Scott Raven: I agree. Speaking of being ready for anything, as we make our way to our traditional close on the podcast, we always do a tip of the cap to Randy Pausch's book The Last Lecture. And his final message was this was for my kids, right? So your two daughters have now listened to this podcast in its entirety.

They are focused on one of the final words that you've used today, which is foundation. How do you want them to think about the foundation that they have built for themselves and will continue to build for themselves in the spirit of what you guys are doing?

Tanya Thorson: That's a great question. And I say foundation when I look at both of our daughters is to be confident and comfortable within themselves, build that foundation of trust and giving them and making them feel like they have opportunities that are endless because of who they are and what they're able to give to the community, to their job, to themselves.

I think it's really important for them to have a solid foundation of that. And it's not easy today. We have so many things coming at us, and so I, we use, we talk Mel Robbins, the Let Them Theory. We talk about that a lot as a family because we all are letting all these things in our heads sometimes make up these stories.

And poor Tony is with three women and we know that women make up more things in their heads than men do, and 95% of them are not true. That being said, it's been, you know, it's been a great barometer for us and it's been a great way for us to really kind of reflect on who we are as an individual and continue to be confident and sound, and it's always about mind, body, and soul.

Scott Raven: Right, Tony, I'm sure I have at least one girl dad who is listening to this podcast who can relate, but would love to hear your perspective as well.

Tony Thorson: Oh, wow. It gets more fun, more interesting as they grow older. It just, it never ends. And in the most beautiful way, you know, hopefully they read our book. If you guys are watching this, our book, and they embrace the smudge. You know, that's what I want my daughters to do.

I think that we show a human element and some human struggle in the stories and I hope that they can embrace the creativity and the innovation in everything and be curious and, yeah, be human in today's world. I mean, that's gonna make you stand out.

How to Connect and Final Thoughts

Scott Raven: You know what? Be human. I love that. As a closing thought, how can people find your book? Learn more about B2A, get in contact with you guys if they want more information? Let my audience know the details.

Tanya Thorson: Absolutely. So the book is on Amazon. There's paperback and there's Kindle version.

Scott Raven: Mm-hmm.

Tanya Thorson: Both Tony and I are very active on LinkedIn, so feel free to message us. You can always reach out to me via email. It's tanyalynnthorson@gmail.com, and I believe that's on my LinkedIn page as well. I'm happy and would love the opportunities for people to ask more questions about business to anyone.

It's a philosophy, it's a belief that we see happening. It's happening and we don't even really know it. So it's almost like we're a little late with the book sometimes we say, but now I think it's really bringing it to the surface and getting people to think, is there really synergies between the two?

And we know that there's gonna be some confrontation, right? There are people who are very stuck in their ways.

Scott Raven: Or their ways give them comfort. Right. And you know what? We as humans, since we have been talking about the human condition, we crave comfort, but we don't grow with comfort.

Tony Thorson: I like that. That's really good. Yeah, I can be contacted in some of the same ways as Tanya, LinkedIn. Be honest with you, I'm the Pippen to her Jordan. So she's the one that you wanna talk to when it comes to real marketing.

Scott Raven: So, so long as you aren't Rodman, you're okay.

Tony Thorson: There might be a few around here, I dunno. Oh, I mean, around me.

Scott Raven: Exactly. Exactly. Well, we'll make sure to put all those contacts and links up in the show notes so that you all have access to them. Any final thoughts, Tanya and Tony, before we close this episode out?

Tanya Thorson: You know, I encourage people to read the book and just be open-minded about it. I think you're gonna have a lot of laughs. I see it as a coffee table book. You can come back and reference things. Some of my favorite, most memorable stories are in the book: Saturday Night Live skits, Jerry Maguire, which probably dates me.

But there's Taylor Swift in there. There's so many things that are going to be out of the normal conventional book, but will get you to think and think differently and hopefully find new paths and new avenues for your teams.

Scott Raven: I don't, I don't, I don't think you're gonna date yourself when people are thinking if this helps show them the money that they're gonna be okay with it.

Tony Thorson: Scott's thinking, I like that. Exactly. Like there's so many stories you can get from It's a Wonderful Life. That's an old movie too. Yeah. But we were very conscious of that. We're like, wow, we've got so many references. It's like, do we want to stay in this lane or that lane?

And so we tried to just broaden it as much as we possibly could, but that's it. It just fits so well with our relationship purpose and mission chapter. It's just like, yeah, we had to do it and we love the movie. We saw it together when it opened, so yeah.

Scott Raven: There you go. Well, this has been a lovely and wide-ranging experience full of getting me to think because I've been talking along and asking questions. So Tanya and Tony, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I appreciate you both.

Tony Thorson: Thanks. Thanks, guys. That was great to meet you.

Scott Raven: Yeah. To my listening audience, thank you for investing your time and presence and please feel free to make sure that you reach out to Tanya and Tony via the contact that we put up with this. As always, subscribe and leave us comments because we wanna make sure that these podcasts are doing what they're doing, which is creating real impact.

If you know people in your life who could use this episode, feel free to share. Until then, I'm Scott. We'll see you next time on The Corvus Effect. Take care.

Outro

Scott Raven: Thank you for joining me on The Corvus Effect. If today's conversation sparked ideas about how to free yourself from overwhelm, visit TheCorvusEffect.com for show notes, resources, and our free sixth dimensions assessment, showing you exactly where you're trapped and how to architect your freedom. While you're there, check out the Corvus Learning Platform, where we turn insights into implementation. If this episode helped you see a new path forward, please subscribe and share it with others who are ready to pursue their definition of professional freedom. Join me next time as we continue exploring how to enhance your life through what you do professionally. It's time to make that your reality!