A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, Video Tells The Whole Story
Good storytelling becomes more impactful and relatable when presented through an efficient video platform. By using moving pictures and excellent sound work, viewers can digest its message a lot easier. This is the focus of Sati Hillyer's work as the CEO of OneMob, telling stories through mesmerizing and engaging videos. Joining Chad Burmeister, Sati explains how this profession made him appreciate even more the power of human connection and relationships, one of the main reasons that keep everyone alive. He talks about the importance of embracing one's uniqueness and becoming a gift to others even through the simplest works. Finally, Sati shares the role of faith in God in his life, touching both his spiritual and emotional sides, leading to a more positive mindset.
---
Listen to the podcast here:
A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, Video Tells The Whole Story
A Conversation With Sati Hillyer, CEO Of OneMob
I've got a great guest with me. Typically, someone like this would join my AI for Sales Podcast but he's going to share some personal insights into how he's gotten to be the person and CEO that he is and such. Sati Hillyer is the CEO and Founder of OneMob, which is a cool video platform. I met Sati at 1 or 2 AA-ISP events in the past and I know of him through Mario Martinez and company. They are huge fans of OneMob. Sati, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Chad. I’m glad to be here.
It's exciting to dig in. A lot of times, we meet people at events either online or in person. We shake their hand, and we don't get to know what's going on under the hood. I've found that these conversations can be quite interesting. With that, let's dig in a little bit. You've been with OneMob for a couple of years.
It's been quite a ride. Being in video sometimes, I tell the team there's never been a better time to be in video with everything that's going on. We started the company a couple of years ago before that I was at a company called Salesforce.com. I learned a lot around sales, CRM and enterprise motions. As you start to realize and what you alluded to in the beginning, you meet someone, and you realize that there's so much more about that person that you know and everyone has a story.
One of the things that's amazing about video is it is a great way to tell a story. It's engaging and captivating. When we were thinking about OneMob years ago, we were definitely ahead of our time. We thought, “Everyone's so comfortable using video in their personal life. Why are we not using this more in your business life?” It was our mission to make video simple and easy to use Snapchat or Instagram and be able to use it with your customers, prospects, employees. It’s definitely ahead of its time but now with everything that's been going on with a pandemic, and everything becoming more virtual and remote, you're seeing video finally becoming a first-class citizen in this business. We're grateful to have the opportunity to be part of it and to be able to share what we've learned and helped people on their journey.
I saw a cool post the other day on LinkedIn and it showed, “Here’s the picture of my life,” and it's this timeline and it says, “Here's what people know about my life,” which is 1% of the timeline. People can misconstrue what you represent, who you are, the products and services that you represent. When you bring video into the picture, I remember when we first rolled out video, Shawn Farshchi, the CIO at WebEx said, “The picture tells 1,000 words and the video tells the rest of the story.” They showed a picture of this guy with this woman holding a purse in the middle of the street. It looked like the guy was going to rob her. From that vantage point, you're like, “What's he doing? He's going to rob that poor lady.” They unfreeze the film and he pulls her out of the way of oncoming traffic because she's on the edge of the curb. It’s like, “I didn't see that. If I caught one picture in time, that doesn't tell the whole story.”
You're spot on. The way I've heard it is the video is the context. Especially now, when you think about selling and marketing, everyone's talking about how content is king. Context is queen. That's the one that moves the neck. We're also grateful to have a powerful spouse who keeps us moving in the right direction. For me, video has been a valuable way of communicating that story, setting context, adding a commentary and it doesn't have to be hard. Generally, everyone loves watching videos. That's why Netflix and these platforms continue to grow. There's been a lot of learnings along the way and that's one of the things that I get excited about.
It’s not being able to help people adopt new technology but to also help them think about the way they run their business, the way they might be thinking about how they're doing things and how it can become that much better when you start to add that human element back into the fold. That's the thing that we're starting to realize. We are definitely social by nature but when things happen like pandemics, etc., all of a sudden, it seems as if our whole world is falling apart. Sometimes when you go back to the basics, and you remember life is about relationships. If you can create a better bond with a person, you can have this win-win effect and video is an opportunity to help amplify that.
Let's get the audience to know who you are. Think back to when you're 5, 6, 7 years old. We all have some passion that we love to do whether it's sports, or whatever. What was your thing when you were younger?
Video Platform: Life is about relationships. If you can create a better bond with a person, you can have a win-win effect.
It's interesting because I have kids. My oldest is seven. I imagine how I was and I see things through him, so it's a nice way of relieving my story but about my early childhood and I definitely had this energetic flair. It was always about being around people socializing and there were a few things that I feel I've set the stage for where my future is gone. I've loved music, dancing and singing. I've always had this desire and I may still try to pursue it to be an actor.
When I think about my early days, it was always about telling a story showing and singing something being in front of a camera. It's interesting to see years later that I would create a video platform but that's been something that I've enjoyed doing. It's an authentic thing. You see someone tell a story, or play a song or share their art. You can see a bit of that person and that's been important to me growing up and that's what I'm seeing now happened too. When I see people use video, you see something about them that you would never have seen in an email or even would have heard on a phone. That's a cool thing to be part of.
If you want to get into the acting track, my good friend is doing a lot in Hollywood these days. I could let him know to be on the lookout for something that's cool.
I'm always open.
If you think about that passion, it makes sense. You're doing video now. That's the secret thread between then and now. What's interesting to me is, most people that I have on this show, and even the AI for Sale Show is that most people seem to be living what they thought they'd be living when they're younger. There's an obvious connection. Occasionally there isn't. You can sense it. You’re like, “I'm not exactly living what I dreamt that would be living.” When you can be in the lane living what you're meant to be doing, and making money at it and keeping the lights on it's fun when you can do it.
It's no longer work.
It's fun when you're in your lane. There are always a couple of blips in the road. I think of them as speed bumps. At the time we hit them we’re like, “This is a huge mountain that I'm living through.” Are there any of those speed bumps or painful memories that, “Looking back, it was good, but at the time, it was the worst thing that happened to me?”
It starts to foster some memories already when you think about a question like that. The saying is, “You can look at an obstacle or you can look at something as an obstacle as an opportunity.” That's something that I've constantly been reminding myself about. I grew up in Texas. When I was about seven, my parents separated and I was young enough to not be caught up in all the details, but I was old enough to know something was happening.
We moved to California and once you're in California, it was that classic single mom, me and my brother trying to figure out how to make it happen. There were these moments in time where I look back and I think, “I didn't have maybe that nuclear family but I also felt I had an opportunity to see how powerful a person can be, how much potential we have, and how our biggest limiting factor is ourselves.” As time progressed my mom remarried. My stepdad has become my real dad and became a foundation in my life.
There’s one thing that I always not necessarily see as a bump or a blip but I had situations in my past where I was a little too fearful where I might think, “I would love to pursue that, but it doesn't seem like it’s practical or the outcome is going to be there so let me try to take a different path. Let me try to play it safe.” Maybe I might be doing something that was foolish. What I realized, through those situations was, the world has a way of reorienting itself around what a person wants to do and what they want to become. Sometimes it's more about taking a minute to observe what's been happening and see if there's some connection there. What I find is all of those things that I've gone through in the past that have been hardships are all becoming part of my DNA. If anything, it's making me realize, without those series of events, maybe I would have gotten to a goal quicker or have something else that I loved even more.
What I'm realizing is it's given me more of an opportunity to appreciate what's happening, enjoy it and not be so fixated on, “Where am I going next?” There's always this conversation that people have internally around what they regret and worried about. I'm personally trying to be more focused on the moment. I feel like it's these series of events that I've gone through that I feel I've given me those gentle reminders. Some are not as gentle as others but it's now given me at least a better way of not living my life but even interacting with other people and helping them maybe get through some of their struggles.
Video Platform: As you get more perspective in life, you understand your situation more and realize which things are important and unimportant.
It reminds me of how Will Smith talked about jumping out of an airplane and leading up to it being fearful. He's like, “This is going to be terrible. I don't know what I'm going to do.” I'm sure it was a tethered one, where it's him in some person who's jumped 10,000 times before. He jumped and it was all fine. He was like, “Why did I worry about all that?” We do as humans. It's in our DNA and in our mindset that, “I need to be fearful. Can I keep food on my table?” It’s the fight or flight and all those things. To your point, that becomes part of your DNA later. If you can think, “In a year, in a month, or in a day, this problem that I'm going through will be gone.”
I’ve got to say that the one thing that has changed my life is remembering perspective. It's as you get more perspective. It's not that what we do is unimportant, but at the same time, understanding that it's not important it's an interesting mental shift and now all of a sudden, you're not as worked up so much. You still deal with challenges and stress, but I do a lot of various readings as well and the thread I keep continuing to see is what breaks people down isn’t what's happening outside. It's what's happening inside. Being able to have that awareness and sit with it and eventually being able to let it go or surrender to it is such a motivating and rewarding way to live.
Have you ever heard of Antarctic Mike?
I haven’t.
He raced a 100-mile ultra-marathon in Alaska and trained for it in a freezer. He speaks at regular sales events and he'll be this keynote kickoff speaker. He's done AA-ISP 2 or 3 times that's where I met him. The reason he does it is because his wife fell off a cliff in Boulder, Colorado before they got married. She's been in pain her whole life. She made it through, she looks fine now, but she'll go to the hospital every once in a while. He pushes himself and he still looks for opportunities to put himself in those fearful situations because he knows it's going to make them grow and he wants to get inside and live where she's at. It can be harder than the life that I'm living, so he looked for those opportunities to put himself in.
It's an equation. Stress plus rest equals growth. That's important, when you said that I was thinking about this other gentleman Wim Hof, who's The Iceman. People talk about him and he's known for sitting in ice lakes. So much of your own internal strength is that power is within you and the moment you start to think about the power that you have versus the forces that we oppose, it's transformative. I'm not there yet but I'd love to work toward those types of challenges eventually. I still don't enjoy a cold shower yet.
Were you at the outreach conference when he put the whole audience through a trance and they held their breath for 90 seconds?
I did not.
He prepped it for 30 minutes and you're breathing exercise. He’s like, “Hold your breath.” He goes, “We’ll go to 30 seconds.” We got to 30 and he's like, “We're going to keep going and now we're at 45. Stay still. Now we're at 60, 75 and now we're at 90.” The best I did as a kid was 62 seconds in a hot tub. You're sitting there and he goes, “Don't gasp. I want you to let out your air and slowly breathe it in.” It was like, “It was normal,” like I’m talking to you now. I didn't have a problem because it was set up properly. The mindset and the oxygenation. It was amazing.
I don't know if we'll go into it but what you said is so critical, which is a lot of what we can sometimes do by aligning ourselves with the right person. Many people can unlock your potential and sometimes it's about finding that right coach. I'm a huge advocate of connecting with people, mentors and coaches because our limitations sometimes can be so much more easily lifted if you have a great person next to you who can see some of those blind spots.
You're often only off by 1 or 2 degrees and a difference between one degree. We know a guy named Marjan Sen, who works a little bit with Tiger Woods on a PR side and he's had those conversations with Tiger where it's like, “The difference is this much.” I remember at Corporate Visions that we did a wordplay. You write it on the board, and it said, “Tiger at his peak time in life, he was four shots below the next guy and those four shots meant $20 million annually in difference in revenue.” It's amazing that you could be this far off but if you have an outside coach help you with the perspective, you're dead on. If you could wave the proverbial magic wand in your life that would change everything, this question always gets interesting comments. What would be that thing? What would change everything for you?
In terms of if I could have gone back into the past, would I have changed or now?
More like now. If you could change one thing about anything, what would you change?
Video Platform: It is a transformative moment when you start to think about the internal power versus external opposing forces.
It’s interesting because I’ve been thinking a lot about goals and things that I want to do. Before that, I was asking myself, “Where's the intention? Where is it coming from? What am I trying to do?” The one thing that I would love to do, change or improve for myself is probably my ability to be kinder and more forgiving. I find that I'm still human. I still find that certain things might rub me the wrong way. I'm trying to lead with that mindset. I'm grateful that I am able to do what I love and still have such a great time doing it. We hope that we always are able to create something that's successful not only for ourselves but also for the people we work with. The most important thing to me now is about what I can be doing so I can learn how to become more forgiving, kind, aware, and more open to the world around me.
Something that changed my perspective on this topic is that my son. Unlike your oldest, mine's a little bit further in the future. In his first year of college, he was cooking one of these home-cooked meals at his college in an apartment. He had a grease fire that jumped off the pan. Make sure your seven-year-old knows this, you don't put water on it and he did so it blew up in his face. He has 2nd and 3rd degree burns on his face and hands.
Imagine that call from your son. Luckily, there's an ER across the street, but then it was the burn center. Two months later, he went out skiing again. Fast forward the tape, good news, he's made it through and recovered. The reason I bring this up is because from a perspective, when I was going back and forth to the hospital 40 minutes away, I got off, and there were eighteen homeless people standing on the side of the road one day. It's cold. It’s minus seven degrees during this time.
We're all under the same sun. We're all humans. We're all brothers and sisters at the end of the day, if we believe that. I'm going to do anything for my son, I'll be there. I'd rather be in his spot. What if I could have that mindset with those eighteen homeless people standing on the corner, or anyone in life and have that, picture your son in that spot. When you approach them with a different level of, “What would I do for my son, if he's in a burn accident?” How would I want to treat somebody else in a similar situation or in whatever situation they're in? We don't know what's going on in other people's lives.
I'm realizing more and more that the love that a parent shows to a child is unconditional. That's amazing because that child feels it and it's invulnerable. It's invincible but the problem is, it's only for those certain few individuals in your life. As a result, everybody's doing the same thing with their group and it's a lot of isolation. What you said, which I completely agree is everyone has that divinity, beauty and potential.
It doesn't matter what you look at or where you're from. You have your personal beliefs that you own and that's okay. That's what makes the world beautiful.
One of the things that I appreciate is when you are around people who are so accepting because that's the hardest thing for people to do is to accept. Accept the similarities and differences and be able to be more like, “There's a set of different principles and values in this room and they're all valuable.” They all have worth. No one is better than the other. It's an understanding. To your point in that story, that's what I'm striving for.
It’s to be able to see anyone on the street and not let that 40 years of programming take me over and react, assume and become so biased or prejudiced. It's something that I tried to realize that look there's a lot of things that I need to unlearn and I'm trying to do that process. At the same time to not be so hard on myself but to realize, when you start to see the divinity and others, and you realize that, “It’s not about you and me liking the same things. It's about me respecting you and me having this love for you,” it becomes a beautiful thing.
The thing that I also feel is it starts to create more and more of it. You always hear about how people want joy. They're trying to create joy in their life. They feel the only joy they get is when they experience it. The best analogy is when you give someone a gift, you're so excited to see them open it. You realize, “That brought me joy.” The more you can create joy for others, yourself get so much joy, and now all of a sudden, what you've been missing in life has always been in front of you. I'm always trying to marry spirituality with logical thinking and they're not too far off but it's about unlearning some of these may be “misguided habits” and realizing that there's a lot of great things out there when you start to scratch the surface and peel back that onion.
It's interesting because I met a guy named Jason Doherty and he's the Founder of a school in Kenya. He moved from here. When he was nineteen, he was drinking too much. He ran into a tree, his leg popped out of his leg, and all kinds of wild stuff. He was like, “God, I'm going to do whatever it takes to make it right for the rest of my life.” He moved to Kenya years ago with his wife, opened a school, they now have 115 of these teenage girls that he's helping graduate and it cost $240 a month to put someone through it. It’s not a whole lot of money in the history of money. Now that ScaleX is going in the right direction, I'm focused on the philanthropic side.
Video Platform: Drop the ego, pride, and the rewards, then focus on what you can give to others.
Aligning with someone like Jason to say, “Let me help you with some social outreach or email automation. Maybe we could do a voicemail drop.” We're pointing it at TV shows, print media so it's not a one-to-one of, “Would you sponsor a girl for $240?” It's, “Let's talk about the Daraja School on 12News in Arizona in front of an audience of 400,000 or 1 million people.” To your point that feeling when you know you land someone on a show like that. Darrell Stinson of Second Chance Athletes was supposed to go to the NFL when he got hurt. Now, he helps other athletes because 99% of them don't make it but they're the same person that they were when they're an athlete they just don't know yet. Getting to align those things to help other people do what they want to do is a phenomenal gift.
Businesses for good and it's so important. Salesforce was one of the best pioneers. I'm always so in awe of Marc Benioff and his approach to integrating philanthropic efforts with businesses. We, ourselves are trying to continue to figure out how we can do that. One of the things that we did especially when COVID was taking off was, as we saw all these organizations having to make cuts and people losing their jobs and people that we were working with for years, saying, “I don't have a job anymore.” That is a hard thing for us to experience and one of the things that we did is we quickly created a platform called OneMob.com/free.
For anyone who's lost their job can sign up away, go to OneMob.com/free to get a free license, and it's their way of using our platform to do some video interviewing, send some video follow-ups video and video thank yous trying to get to the hiring manager. At least every week or so I'm getting another person saying, “Thanks for giving us this license. I finally got a job at this company, at that company.” It's not a lot, but it's something that we can do to help people on this journey and that's the right thing to do.
Every company out there, whether it's money, employee time, a product, or service, we can all give back. There's so much thing gained from that but it's our responsibility. We're all brothers and sisters, and we all want to help each other out. Otherwise, we're only as strong as our weakest link. What's the purpose of letting a group of individuals suffer while others are doing well? It's only going to make our whole community feel that much imbalanced. I resonate with what you had to say there.
Last We talked about the divine power we have in ourselves, spirituality and there's a lot of faith. It could be another term. What role does faith play in your life and the journey that you're on?
It's fascinating because I grew up with Indian parents that had been raised traditionally in this Indian religion called Sikhism, which is quite open. It's not a religion, where you have to follow this. I was born in an environment where there was a lot of conflict between Hindus and Muslims. For me, every religion has such beauty and a lot of the areas where things fall apart is the interpretation. As I got older, my mom put me through Catholic schools all my life, so I was pretty much raised Catholic and Christian.
The college I went to was Jesuit. I have a huge appreciation and respect for that learning and teaching as well. It's such a great example where you got the story of Jesus and everything that he's done. Even those few years of his life of how much of a big message it's made on the rest of the world and I still live my life through some of his teachings, or some of the other teachings I've been reading from other folks as well. For me, faith has become paramount, not because in the sense of, “I need to make sure I'm going to the church every weekend or going to the temple every weekend,” but more about, “How I show up every day?” The God outside is the same God inside. Am I synchronized? Am I doing the things that I should be doing that are helping to share that message? If I want my kids to become good people, they're not going to listen to what I say but they are most likely going to replicate and emulate what I do.
For me, it's a lot about my actions, my intentions coming from a place of giving, and thinking about what I can give before what I can gain. It’s being about openness and inclusion. It's been fascinating to see in the last couple of years how global this world has become and how it's going to continue to advance in that way. It's creating more meshing of cultures, religions, ideas and thoughts. To me, that's become probably the most powerful thing of the human species. It’s our ability to integrate. We don't always get it right but what we're realizing is, we are much more powerful together when we start to drop the ego, pride, rewards and focus on what we can give. That was a lesson that we saw with a lot of these spiritual leaders and that's something that I use as a template for my decision making.
I love the synchronized image that you shared. To your point, I don't go to church every Sunday, but I also have a connection and relationship that's there. Have you ever heard of this app called 75 HARD? It's a workout mental toughness app.
No.
A lot of CEOs at this one place that I went 10 out of 50 were doing it. I was like, “Let me sign up.” It’s 75 days two workouts a day 45 minutes each. You drink a gallon of water a day, you read ten pages in a book, and you can't drink alcohol for 75 days. A lot of people are like, “I can't do the last one.” It was amazing. I started on Q4 October 15, 2020 because it ended on New Year's. I’m like, “I can have a drink now.” Being in synchronicity with your mind, body, spirit, and all of it but it was lacking the one piece, which was spirituality.
I'm now going to go create an app. I want it to go viral and it’s basic. Pray at night and it doesn't have to be super sophisticated, and listen to what comes back because a lot of us get out of synchronicity by not listening for it but if you say, “God, what do you want my life to be like? What do you want me to do tomorrow? What do you want me next week?” When you can get in that level of attunement, it’s like, “Maybe I should be acting.” Whatever that is but asking and listening is pretty much the basic premise. I want to follow the 75 HARD concept. I've downloaded an app that's already out there. It's called Good Vibes and you could program it in, so it's the basic semblance of the app that’s already built. I need to put it out and list those 2 or 3 items that you do every day to get the synchronicity that you're talking about.
Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender
If I can help you on that venture, I'd love to because there's this spiritual aspect, mental, emotional and physical. I'm trying to wield them all together and I do think that physical movement, getting yourself going, is like what Tony Robbins used to say, “If you want to change your emotions, you’ve got to change your motion.” I totally believe in that as well but I do think that there's a lot of people out there who need guidance and who are looking for a playbook.
It sounds like this program that you mentioned is giving you a big part of that but you're right. You could call it praying, spirituality, or mindfulness. The terms, in my opinion, are irrespective. What's important is what you mentioned, which is, asking, pausing, observing and awareness. We don't give people enough time and education on the importance of processing what's going on inside of you. We think about, “My stomach hurts. We’ve got to go to the doctor.” The moment you feel grief, sadness, or anger, you find people, “That was interesting. That person said something, and it made me angry. Where did that come from? Let me unpack that.”
I'll leave this last piece. I've been fortunate to read some great books lately but this one book I've been reading is the game changer for me. It’s from an author named David Hawkins. He's no longer with us the books called Letting Go. He's got a ton of other books but it talks about how when we hit a situation, we're so instinctual to focus on the intellectual aspects of that situation. Logically, “How do I find a new job because I got laid off? How do I fix this issue with my wife because we're arguing?”
What we should be doing is looking at the emotional aspect of, “I lost my job. How do I feel about that? Am I okay with it? Am I going to be alright on Monday not having a place to go? What are those feelings?” The thing is, if you get a new job and you haven't figured out the emotional aspect, the next time you lose a job, it's going to come back again. This is why we spend so much time suffering for 10, 20, 50 years on the same problem because we never looked at the emotional aspect. I completely think what you're doing and what you're saying is the right approach because a lot of people are not trained this way, unfortunately. If it’s an area that we can start to put more attention to, we're going to see a much better outcome in terms of everything that's happening in our org in our world nowadays.
I remember a mindset event that Gerhard from Selling Power put on. He said that we have 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts a day and for most people, 2/3 of those are negative. By putting these up, “I’ve got a reminder. I’ve got to do this and workout for ten minutes or drink a gallon of water for the day.” You can shift the 2/3 negative to positive and completely turn your life around. I’m excited to see where that goes.
We have to turn off our injustice meter. We're constantly looking for injustice. Turn on our justice meter and see what happens.
I've been talking with Sati Hillyer from OneMob. This has been an awesome conversation. Thanks for being authentic. You're with a video company, so you probably teach people to have these kinds of open and honest conversations. If you're not familiar with OneMob, check it out at OneMob.com. It’s OneMob.com/free if you're unemployed. You can go in and leverage a license, hopefully, get back on your feet, and hopefully, this conversation has had an impact on you. Sati, thank you so much for joining. I appreciate you.
Thanks again, Chad.
Important Links:
Mario Martinez - LinkedIn
Shawn Farshchi - LinkedIn
About Sati Hillyer
Seasoned entrepreneur with startup and big company experience that can transform an idea into an established company. Specialties include salesforce.com, enterprise cloud computing, social collaboration, app/platform design, architecture & distribution, ISV and consulting alliances, vertical solutions, front/back office horizontal CRM extensions and getting stuff done (e.g. sales, marketing, customer service and operations).
