We are honored to welcome Nast Partners as a Sales Partner with PerceptionPredict.  Nast Partners has over 50 years of experience in Human Capital Management, Talent Optimization, Executive Coaching, Leadership Development, Talent Acquisition, Training, Talent Management, Executive Search, Talent Development, and Change Management. 

Mark had the opportunity to sit down with David and Christine to interview them in an effort to get to know them better.  

Question 1: What’s your impact on the world, problem you want to solve for your clients?

I would say we help companies predict performance; that can be performance of their people, performance of their operations, performance of the bottom line, the whole bit, and we use scientifically validated instruments in doing that. It's not a guessing game.

We're big on giving our clients results. We'll give them some pretty reports too, but we like to give results. That's what we're all about. Be it, small, mid-market, or enterprise, for the client and what they need. As we roll this into it, which we're actually really excited about as far as the accuracy and everything we can predict with sales, that's kind of cool. But we'd like to look at the entire company as a whole organism, and how all those parts work together.

For us, contribution is the most important thing to us individually as a couple and as a business. We look for opportunity to do that regardless of whether it's business or outside of work, and this is giving us another way to contribute to business, because of course, when you do that you're still impacting individuals and then that has a ripple effect beyond their work environment as well.

Question 2: What's a story you'd like to share about your business?
There's this one client that we work with that came to us. They're in the hospitality industry and their turnover was, I think, 56% when they started with us, and that was the focus. 11 months into it, when we look back at the data, we got it down under 30% and we saved them $1.8 million. What are you going to do with that money? Well, one of the reasons that people were leaving was pay, so we're going to redistribute that and give everybody a raise. We're going to buy some better equipment; we're going to improve some of the workspaces that they have. That was a big, big one, which was super fun.

"I (Dave) got my start as a musician. I even took two years off between high school and college to be a rock star and I had hair halfway down my back and I toured. If something interesting happened over at Royal Blue Records is the guys who owned it. Their big goal was to sell to one of the majors and they had seven acts and I was the only act making money for them. They came to me and said, ""What are you doing differently?"" It turns out I was a better businessman than I was a performer because they brought me in house, and I was able to turn operations around quite a bit.

They were in Walmart and every time they sold a disc at Walmart, they lost a dollar and I'm like, ""We're not doing that."" ""Yeah, but we're in Walmart."" I'm like, ""Who cares?"" I turned them around and got them to at least six figure profitability and we got them sold off to MCA, which became part of Universal and that was in my 20s. I still write and record songs over history and stuff, and nowadays, if I do something, I'll record it and give a disc to family and friends and say, ""Hey, here's this year's coaster put your drink on it."" It's still a refuse, a passion, a hobby, whatever you want to call, music is for me, but it's in its proper place now."

Question 3: What does your organization look like?
Just the two of us, and we're happy to keep it that way.

Question 4: Tell us the most gratifying experience you’ve had in business.
We were on site with one of our client CEOs, and there's all this data in the employee experience survey. He passes the first 18 pages and goes right to the comments section. And one of the comments was that they have no place to eat together. They eat at their desks, and if they really want to eat together, they'll go sit in the stairway and talk. These are military guys that have been in the Foxhole so sitting in a stairway is not horrible, but it's not awesome. The CEO saw that, he picked up the phone, he immediately called the office planner out there or whatever and he said, "Rearrange the spaces, get rid of that thing in the conference room, give those guys a lunch room." We go from saving this one client $1.8 million to these 30 guys getting a lunchroom, and that's stuff... That hit us in the heart pretty hard. That means a lot when we are seeing stuff like that. When we can help things like that happen for the individual employees as well as the business as a whole, that's the stuff.

Question 5: If you were driving on the Autobahn (no speed limit) how would you decide how fast to drive?
Christine: For me it's as fast as I feel comfortable and safe driving, because I have to trust the car and know the car. If I feel confident in the car, then that's my answer. That was my approach to go karting. Years ago, I worked in an office and they put a go kart place down the street. A group of us it was guys and me would go at lunchtime they had a lunchtime special, I don't even know what it was but you got a certain number of laps and we took our lunch and we did it once a month and it was awesome, and I was not in last place every time.

David: It depends on the car and its capabilities first and foremost, and then the secondary concern would be traffic. If I have a car with outstanding brakes, traffic matters less, but if there's not a lot of traffic on the road, and I've got something that's capable, the foot is staying on the floor until I hit the rev limiter, that's just how I roll. She's a really great go karter. In my experience, I was actually an amateur drag racer for years.  Atco Raceway is a few minutes from our house. I actually had the world record for two years. I had the fastest BMW down a quarter mile track for two years back in 2002 to 2004. I spent way too much money on that hobby.

Interested in learning more about David and Christine?  Visit http://www.nastpartners.com