After nearly two decades in Canadian digital retail, Johnny Russo has a theory about why some teams move fast and others don't: shared context. He breaks down how the right kind of collaboration lets a leader compress a complex ask into four words everyone understands, plus his take on six-month planning cycles, leadership energy management, and why Black Friday now functions as an extended budget cycle for an entire category.
Behind the Expert
Johnny Russo has spent nearly two decades building and running digital and commerce functions across Canada's biggest retailers. He started in journalism at Concordia University before pivoting into web marketing, then worked his way through Buffalo Jeans and the Paterson Group before a four-year stint running digital for Mark's, PartSource, and Sport Chek under Canadian Tire in Calgary — a $1.3 billion, 300-plus-store brand. From there he moved to L'Amour Group, leading digital transformation across a sleepwear and underwear-basics portfolio built on roughly 40 licenses, including Disney and Fruit of the Loom, spanning close to 28 Shopify storefronts — and remains the company's Chief Digital Officer today. Alongside that, he's built an entrepreneurial portfolio with his brother as CEO of non-alcoholic wine brand Zero Lush and master franchisee of Rush Cycle Canada (which appeared on Dragons' Den), plus a partnership in the agency High Voltage Digital. He's also the author of Mastering Mindful Leadership: 105 Ways to Become the Leader Your Employees Need You to Be.
The Quick Hits
- Shared context, built over years of working with the same people, compresses communication dramatically. Russo says a colleague of four or five years needed only three or four words to understand exactly what report he wanted — not the 17-minute back-and-forth it would take with someone new.
- That shared context is what lets the same core team move across his ventures — the marketing team he built at L'Amour now also serves Rush Cycle and Zero Lush through his agency, High Voltage Digital, because they already understand the brands and the business.
- His planning system is deliberately analog and runs on a fixed six-month cycle — vision board, two-year plan, and daily, weekly, and monthly goals, with unfinished tasks rolling into the next week rather than getting dropped. He estimates it keeps him 80–90% efficient, and he's never moved it to a digital tool.
- His self-described superpower is efficiency, built by proactively filling skill gaps years before he needed them — he spent a chunk of a year teaching himself P&L analysis on companies unrelated to his job, well before he was running P&Ls for multiple businesses of his own.
- "Mindful leadership" means tailoring communication to each person while holding the whole team accountable to shared core values — including a personal development plan that deliberately includes life goals, not just work competencies, because personal momentum feeds drive back into the job.
- Canadian brands are noticeably more risk-averse with marketing budget than their U.S. counterparts right now. A U.S. team asking to raise budget 25% against strong performance gets a fast yes; the same ask in Canada climbs an approval chain and meets skepticism, even from owners — by which point the opportunity can be gone.
- On AI: he treats it as a forcing function for rigor, not a replacement for expertise. He notices when a marketing presentation looks AI-generated, then asks enough follow-up questions to find out whether the person presenting it actually understands the content underneath.
Nearly two decades across Canada's biggest retailers
Russo's path into e-commerce was accidental. He studied journalism at Concordia University in Montreal, intending to be a newspaper writer, and moved to Ottawa chasing that opportunity. Within two weeks he needed rent money and took a marketing job instead — then spent his first two weeks there buying Seth Godin and Jay Conrad Levinson books, teaching himself marketing, branding, advertising, and business fundamentals from scratch. A call from Buffalo Jeans a few years later put him in charge of their e-commerce site, back when the term itself was still "web marketing."
From there, Canadian Tire recruited him to move to Calgary and run digital for Mark's and PartSource — a $1.3 billion brand with more than 300 stores — where he spent four years working inside a public company after prior stops at family businesses and private-equity-backed brands. A move back to Montreal for family reasons led to L'Amour Group, where he ran digital transformation across a sleepwear company and an underwear-basics company with roughly 40 combined licenses, from Disney to Fruit of the Loom, and close to 28 Shopify storefronts. He remains L'Amour's Chief Digital Officer today, even as his entrepreneurial ventures have expanded around it.
The four-word brief: what shared context actually buys you
Asked what lets him run three ventures and an agency at once, Russo pointed not to personal bandwidth but to team continuity. High Voltage Digital, the agency he's a partner in, employs many of the same people he worked with at L'Amour — so when that expertise is needed on Zero Lush or Rush Cycle, there's no ramp-up required.
Three ventures, one team: Zero Lush, Rush Cycle, and High Voltage Digital
Rather than starting brands from scratch, Russo and his brother set out to acquire ones already running. Zero Lush, a non-alcoholic wine brand originally operated out of Victoria, BC, produces five varietals across six SKUs — a red Tempranillo, a white built on Airén, plus rosé and sparkling versions — sold direct-to-consumer and through BC's high-end hotels, liquor stores, restaurants, and golf courses. He points to BC as the clear leader in Canada's non-alcoholic category, with roughly 20 non-alcoholic options on a typical menu versus about five in Ontario. Rush Cycle, the master franchise he and his brother own for Canada, appeared on Dragons' Den and is now looking for territory partners in Ontario and Western Canada. High Voltage Digital, the agency, runs offices in Europe and Canada and describes its current view of the Canadian consumer as "cautious" — even as U.S. business stays strong.
A six-month, deliberately analog planning system
Russo's productivity system runs on paper, on a six-month cycle, using Judy Machado-Duque's Life Purpose Playbook — a planner he was given permission to excerpt in his own book. It holds his vision board, life intentions, two-year plan, and daily, weekly, and monthly goals, all deliberately connected to each other.
He extends the same proactive-preparation logic to skill-building generally — describing how, roughly 15 years before he was responsible for running P&Ls across several of his own companies, he spent a chunk of a year teaching himself to read public companies' income statements, well before it was part of his job.
Mindful leadership: tailoring communication without lowering the bar
Russo's book grew out of a belief that leadership has to flex per person while holding a team to shared, non-negotiable core values. Part of that is a personal development plan he builds with every employee — one that deliberately includes life goals, not just the usual competency areas, on the logic that momentum outside work feeds drive back into it. The same philosophy extends to how he handles letting someone go.
Canada versus the U.S.: a cautious consumer, a cautious budget process
Russo sees the same caution on both sides of the border right now — Black Friday has stretched into a two-month event because consumers are budget-constrained, not just conditioned to wait for deals. But he sees a distinct difference in how quickly Canadian organizations move on a strong signal compared to their U.S. counterparts.
AI as a forcing function, not a shortcut
Russo's approach to AI, both with his teams and with agency clients, is to encourage broad experimentation while insisting a human stays accountable for the output. He compares full reliance on AI to a self-driving car: useful in the right context, not something he's ready to hand full control to.
He treats incoming client presentations the same way — quietly noting whether a deck looks AI-generated, then asking enough follow-up questions to find out whether the presenter genuinely understands the content, regardless of the answer. He also uses AI tools like Gemini to audit clients' own sites, and has surfaced years-old orphaned pages — content that's stronger than what's currently live but no longer reachable through navigation — as proof that AI crawling now exposes gaps brands used to be able to leave unaddressed.
Sound Bites
- “I got to Buffalo and I had a passion for retail — I loved apparel because I loved fashion, and this kind of combined technology into that. I said, I am e-commerce.”
- “I've been working with someone on email for about four or five years. All I needed to tell her was four words, and she understood I was asking for a report she was going to show — it wasn't a huge back-and-forth of 17 minutes.”
- “If I don't do all the things I need to do in a week, they go on to the next one. So 80 to 90% of the time, I'm pretty efficient. This is my go-to, and I have not switched digital.”
- “I've had to let people go in my career, and the vast majority of the time, I still talk to them. I still have lunch with them. I still recommend them. I keep that relationship going, because it was just the wrong fit at that time, and they weren't surprised.”
- “If a brand in the U.S. is going well and there's an ask for more budget — do you want to increase budget by 25% — the answer is yes. In Canada, there's trepidation. You've got to go up the chain, and even if you're talking to the owner, there's skepticism: can you guarantee this? By then, it's too late.”
- “It's a self-driving car example. Use it as a cheat sheet, but make sure you know your stuff — if something recommends marketing campaigns and you don't actually know how to run them, you're in trouble. The boss has to be there.”
The Chord take
The four-word brief and the six-month planner look like two different habits, but they're the same move applied in different directions. Shared context with a team means you no longer have to re-explain the ask from scratch every time — it collapses seventeen minutes into three or four words. A fixed personal planning cycle does the same thing to Russo's own decision-making: the next book, the next goal, the next quarter's priorities are already decided, so the mental overhead of deciding is spent once, not daily. Both are ways of pre-loading judgment so it doesn't have to be rebuilt under pressure. That's also what separates his use of AI from a shortcut. He's not asking whether a deck or a piece of content was AI-assisted — he's asking whether a real person still understands and can stand behind what it says, the same test he applies to a colleague who needs only a few words to execute correctly. Shared context and AI fluency both compress the surface-level work; neither one is a substitute for someone in the room who actually knows the material. The Canada-versus-U.S. budget gap is the same principle failing to show up: an approval chain without shared trust in the data takes long enough that the opportunity it was evaluating disappears before the decision does.
Put it to work
- 1Audit how long it takes your team to act on a routine, recurring ask. If it regularly takes a long explanation instead of a few words, that's a shared-context gap worth closing deliberately — through documentation, tenure, or cross-training — not just a communication-style problem.
- 2Build reusable frameworks or templates for your highest-frequency recurring decisions, the way Russo has a standing template for building a marketing budget. The goal isn't to skip thinking — it's to stop rebuilding the same structure from scratch every time.
- 3Adopt a fixed planning cadence with an explicit rule for unfinished tasks — Russo's rule is that anything not done in a week rolls into the next one, rather than quietly disappearing.
- 4Benchmark your budget-approval speed against how fast the opportunity you're evaluating actually moves. If a high-performing campaign needs a week of internal approval to get 25% more spend, price in how much of the opportunity window that costs you.
- 5Before treating an AI-drafted deliverable as finished, apply Russo's presentation test: ask enough follow-up questions to confirm the person presenting it — or you — actually understands the content, not just that it reads well.
- 6When building a leadership development plan for someone on your team, include explicit life goals alongside work competencies. The logic isn't sentimental — personal momentum outside work is a real input into drive and energy on the job.
Full transcriptShow ↓
Bryan Mahoney
Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Brilliant Commerce Podcast, where I get an opportunity to sit down with some of the brightest minds behind today's iconic — or, as I like to say, soon-to-be-iconic — brands. Today's guest is a very familiar face to me, and if I'm honest, we have a bit of unfinished business. Joining me today is Johnny Russo. Johnny, welcome to the pod.
Johnny Russo
Thanks for having me, Brian. Always a pleasure to see you again.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, so fellow Montrealer, let's get that out of the way right away — I don't know if we're allowed to talk about it, we're supposed to talk about commerce, but the hockey game last night, Montreal Canadiens, was pretty painful to watch. Are you still a Habs fan?
Johnny Russo
I'm a Devils fan — we traded a Habs fan reject in 1990 to the Devils, and I've been a Devils fan ever since.
Bryan Mahoney
You're a Devils fan, okay. Oh my god, okay, that's awesome — well, the next time the Devils are in town, I'll have to find a way to be in town together. I did a little bit of prep ahead of this, and I knew where you've been for the last five-plus years, but I had no idea just how far back your career went in Canadian retail. So if my notes are right here—
Johnny Russo
Thanks — I'm not gonna root for my Canadiens, though.
Bryan Mahoney
You spent nearly 20 years in the industry at some of Canada's biggest retailers — Mark's, Canadian Tire, L'Amour Group most recently, with some early stops at Buffalo Jeans and Bentley. So I think there's an awful lot we can unpack — not just how the landscape for retail and commerce in Canada has shifted, but what it's like to build a brand from the ground up. And these days you've seemingly kept exceptionally busy — you've gone out on your own, you're now CEO of Zero Lush, a non-alcoholic wine brand, you're also CEO of Rush Cycle, which I think is a spin studio in Canada, and then you went even further and became a partner in High Voltage Digital, an agency also helping brands. Did I get all that right?
Johnny Russo
You did, yeah — I also do some professional coaching on the side, and some coaching for the kids on the ice as well. It's a busy life, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
Bryan Mahoney
I love it. And you're an author now as well — Mastering Mindful Leadership, 105 Ways to Become the Leader Your Employees Need You to Be.
Johnny Russo
Yes — it's still a little uncomfortable for me to say 'author,' but yes, we can say that.
Bryan Mahoney
We'll definitely keep them busy. Well, those are my notes — there's obviously a lot between the lines there. So maybe take a couple of minutes and tell me your origin story. How did you get into retail 20 years ago?
Johnny Russo
Yeah, I kind of backed into it, I guess, like many people do. I wanted to be a writer — I'm from Montreal, graduated in journalism from Concordia University. I probably wanted to be a newspaper writer at the time — this is dating myself, but that's what it is. I graduated from Concordia and decided to move to Ottawa, thinking there was more opportunity there for an English-language journalist. Within two weeks I needed to pay the rent, so I got a marketing job — and after a couple of days I said, you know, I really like this. Within two weeks I'd started buying Seth Godin books and Jay Conrad Levinson's Guerrilla Marketing, and just started self-teaching myself everything on marketing, branding, advertising, PR, business, income statements — you name it. Probably should have gone to business school, I guess, but—
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Johnny Russo
—I did it on my own, and really fell in love with marketing. Within those two weeks I'd made a pivotal decision to go into marketing. Two years later I came back to Montreal and got a job with the Paterson Group, a huge group in Canada spanning cars to food to signage. A couple of years after that, I got a call from Buffalo Jeans asking me to come manage their e-commerce site — this is 15, 16 years ago, so e-commerce wasn't what it is now. It wasn't even called digital marketing — it was called web marketing at the time.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, those were the early innings. I remember it being, even before that, kind of catalog commerce — it looked like an e-commerce site, you could do everything right up until adding it to your cart and checking out.
Johnny Russo
Yeah. Honestly, the marketing you were doing was SEO, because it wasn't that big and there wasn't social media, or it was just starting out — it wasn't paid media like it is now. So it was really SEO-focused. But I got to Buffalo and I had a passion for retail — I loved apparel because I loved fashion, and this kind of combined technology into that. I said, I am e-commerce. So I made that pivot into marketing.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, yeah.
Johnny Russo
And then I said, here's the industry I want to be in, and found my niche in retail. That was another chasm in my career. The next one was when the Canadian Tire Group called and said, hey, we have an opportunity — in my head I'm thinking it's Toronto, and they said, we want you to move to Calgary to run digital at Mark's, PartSource, and Sport Chek. The focus was really Mark's and PartSource — Mark's is a $1.3 billion brand, 300-plus stores, an icon in Canada. So I moved to Calgary in 2016 and stayed four years. Loved the opportunity, loved everything there — Canadian Tire taught me so much. I'd worked for family businesses, private-equity-backed brands, and now I got the chance with a public company. Really enjoyed that time, and then had two small kids, so we came back to Montreal, and I got a job with a wholesaler that needed to transform its business digitally — they wanted consumer growth across multiple brands. It ended up being two mandates: one for a sleepwear company and one for an underwear-basics company, both with a huge license business, from Disney to Fruit of the Loom. I'm merging two companies right now, but you get the point — I got to work with 40 licenses, and both companies also diversified and developed their own brands. So if you—
Bryan Mahoney
I worked on one of those brands. Yeah.
Johnny Russo
Yes, you did. Yeah — if you saw my Shopify access, I have like 28 sites. It's wild, because I still help out in some ways. So that's kind of my story. And along the way, traveling a lot from Montreal to Calgary on planes, I didn't want to just waste it watching Netflix and Narcos. So I said, I'm going to watch two hours of Netflix and write for two hours — going back to that journalism instinct.
Bryan Mahoney
Yes.
Johnny Russo
I actually started writing about digital transformation, and about a month later thought, this is going to be obsolete by the time I publish it. But I had this passion for helping people and for leadership, so I decided to turn it into a leadership book, found an editor, and that editor led me to a Canadian publisher. Lo and behold, we published it a couple of years ago.
Bryan Mahoney
Good for you, I think that's amazing. A lot of these names — when I was running an agency in Montreal, we had the chance to work with several of them, and I look back on that time really fondly. Those brands continue to do a lot right. Those were exciting times. I'm curious about the plane thing — did you write first and reward yourself with Netflix, or were you disciplined enough to watch your two hours first and then bust out the laptop?
Johnny Russo
It's a great question — I think airlines are more lenient now, but at the time you couldn't have electronics on for a while. So I'd actually read for the first 20 minutes — reading a book sometimes leads me to notes, which I'd write in my notes app — and then I'd interchange an hour of writing with an hour of Netflix.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, yeah.
Johnny Russo
It was usually about a four-hour-15-minute flight, so that got me through it. It's very hard for me to write continuously for two or three hours straight — I need a break in between.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I think it's a matter of getting into the zone. I spend a lot of time on planes — I've been on 70 flights so far this year, with a couple of weeks left in December. What works for me is getting on the plane with a list of things I'm going to do, written down in notes — I'm going to get through these three things, and once I do, I give myself permission to either read or watch something. If I get sucked into watching right away, it's really hard to transition to something thoughtful afterward — I tell my daughter this all the time. So I'm curious, for someone who does as much as you do, what some of those little hacks are. If I looked you up on LinkedIn today, I'd see you're still Chief Digital Officer at L'Amour, but in reality, as you've just told us—
Johnny Russo
Yeah.
Bryan Mahoney
—you've gone more portfolio, working across all these different initiatives, most of which you're CEO of. Over your career, besides the read-then-watch hack, have you developed other productivity hacks that let you be effective across all these different initiatives?
Johnny Russo
Oh, my goodness. Yeah — can I reach for something?
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Johnny Russo
So, for people listening on Apple who might not have the video — this is the Life Purpose Playbook, a fantastic book by Judy Machado-Duque. She's Canadian, I believe she lives in the U.S. now, and she's actually featured in my book — I got permission to use a couple of her pages. It's a six-month planner, with a few blank pages I actually asked her to add more of.
Bryan Mahoney
Okay.
Johnny Russo
Steve Jobs and others would say, I don't want to waste time getting dressed — I have my black shirts and I wear the same thing. You've heard that about Zuckerberg too.
Bryan Mahoney
That's my travel uniform — I barely ever unpack, I don't even think about it anymore. I know exactly what's going in the suitcase no matter where I'm going.
Johnny Russo
I'm not quite like that — when we travel on vacation with the family, there's clothes everywhere, a different outfit for everything. But with books to read, I know my next seven or eight books — I have 30 books queued up for next year, and I go down the order. I have some leisure ones—
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Johnny Russo
—but mostly personal development, a lot of marketing, and I allow myself two sports books. This planner has my vision board, my life intention, my life purpose, my two-year plan, and my daily, weekly, and monthly goals — they're all connected. If I don't do everything I need to do in a week, it rolls onto the next one. So 80 to 90% of the time, I'm pretty efficient. I talk about this a bit in my book, but this is my go-to, and I haven't switched it to digital — I still do it on paper, and it lasts six months before I recreate it. Even the vision board doesn't change too often — I revisit it every six months. It runs January to June and July to December, and that keeps me focused.
Bryan Mahoney
I love that. I'm similar in that I have notebooks with me everywhere — I'm kind of analog that way, and I think better taking notes by hand. I'll eventually transcribe it digitally, but it's hard for me to go straight to that — I like to write it out, scratch it out, look at it again. That's super helpful. And it strikes me there's a lot of structure to how you're doing this — you're taking the thinking off the table for things like what's the next book you'll read, because you've already planned it out. Is that one of the things that lets you be creative — that you have these guardrails or constraints in place, and then within the lines, you're able to be creative across the whole portfolio?
Johnny Russo
Yeah, I think if I had a superpower, it's efficiency. Some people are very science-based and it comes naturally to them — that's not me. But certain things in business, digital, and leadership come naturally to me, and I tend to get to the bottom of a problem quicker than some people. I use all these tools, and I'm pretty self-aware about what I need to work on — it's helped me a lot over the years. For me, it's not about some end goal, it's how do I get better every year. For example — accounting wasn't my strong suit, so at one point I spent a few months of the year saying, I'm going to read up on accounting, learn about P&L statements, look at how public companies post them, and really study that. It wasn't part of my job at the time — maybe I'd spend an hour a month on it. Now I spend a lot more, but it helps — I'm talking about 15 years ago, but it helps me now, because I'm running P&Ls for several companies, including my own. So it's kind of natural — I don't get stuck, because I have frameworks and templates. If you say create a marketing budget, I have all the templates I need — I'm plugging in numbers and strategy and the pillars throughout. I bring that to the clients we work with too, to help them be more efficient.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah — efficiency, creativity, and the learning piece are huge for me too. Let's talk about some of those ventures. Thinking about your whole career arc, you're not someone afraid of making bets, whether that's getting on a plane and moving your life west to take on a role. And now, when I think about the bets, it looks like you've made three big ones — there's Zero Lush, which I want to learn more about, there's Rush Cycle, and there's High Voltage. On the surface these seem like different bets — is there a common thread that made it easy to say yes to all of them at once?
Johnny Russo
That's a great question, because that's what people ask — are you running three businesses? And I am, but the agency is really the pillar of it, because my team is there, and I can't do this alone, nor do I want to. For two of the businesses, my brother's a partner. On the agency side, I have two partners who had their own agency and understand how to build agencies. They tie in — a lot of the marketing for Rush Cycle, for example, goes through the agency, working with similar team members I worked with at L'Amour, because that brand's direct-to-consumer business is now with High Voltage too. Same team members, they understand the brands and the business — and that's how we move faster. I always use the analogy that it doesn't take a lot of words to explain what we want. I have a meeting later today focused on email and CRM, and I've been working with someone on email for about four or five years — all I needed to tell her was four words, and she understood I was asking for a report she was going to show. It wasn't a huge back-and-forth of 17 minutes — it was three words, and she understood what I was getting at. So they cross over that way. But yeah, Zero Lush — funny enough, I'm a big wine advocate.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Johnny Russo
I love wine, I love the wine industry, never worked in it, but I've always had a passion for it. We were looking for companies to acquire rather than start our own brand from scratch — that was a tenet of doing this entrepreneurial thing with my brother. We found this lovely brand, Zero Lush, operated out of Victoria, BC — the wines are from Spain, the red is a Tempranillo grape, the white is built on Airén. We have five varietals across six SKUs — a sparkling rosé in a normal bottle, a smaller 250 ml bottle, red, white, sparkling white, and both rosé and sparkling rosé. It's a real passion project for us.
Bryan Mahoney
Yep.
Johnny Russo
So far it's been organic — we have direct-to-consumer through our Shopify site, and we sell predominantly in BC through high-end hotels, liquor stores, high-end restaurants, and golf courses. There's a real market there — BC has probably been the leader in Canada for non-alcoholic options. If you look at a menu—
Bryan Mahoney
Yep, I can see that.
Johnny Russo
—in BC you'll see like 20 options of non-alcoholic beer or wine, and Ontario maybe five, and Quebec even less. So it's a matter of time before that grows — we're guiding our influencer strategy around who we're going to work with and partner with there. And then Rush Cycle — we own the master franchise, we didn't want to run studios ourselves, but running the master franchise and growing it across Canada is something we're very interested in. We were on Dragons' Den — filmed in May, actually on Mother's Day, broadcast in September — so there's some good hype coming out of that. We're looking for growth partners now, probably in Ontario and Western Canada. And then the agency — that's fun, we get to work with some amazing brands, with an office in Europe and an office in Canada. We do a lot of U.S. business, and right now U.S. business is strong. But if we're talking about the Canadian economy, I'd classify the Canadian consumer right now as cautious — that's the word we use internally. The U.S. trade looks good, Europe's pretty strong right now, but Canada's kind of cautious.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I don't know if you've seen some of the early Black Friday numbers for 2025, but I do think there was a cautiousness in the U.S. market too. It's interesting — I've been in commerce for 30 years, and now when I look at Black Friday, it's no longer this acute weekend event, it's a two-month-long event. I think the reason retailers keep going earlier and earlier—
Johnny Russo
Right.
Bryan Mahoney
—is that yes, we've conditioned the consumer to shop during that window, but they have fewer dollars — so they're cautious, or thoughtful, I'd say. There's a certain amount they're going to spend, and once those dollars are gone, they're gone — it doesn't matter how compelling the offer is or how much they love the brand, they're just not going to spend right now. I've spent a lot of time in Canada too, and I like the word cautious, but I've also seen it south of the border where I am now. I don't know if that's a similar pattern across the brands you're working with.
Johnny Russo
It's interesting — on the budget side, just to give an example: some of these sales are starting November 3rd now, starting so early. What we're seeing is that if a brand or team in the U.S. is going well, and there's an ask for more budget—
Bryan Mahoney
October 15th, I was starting to see some of these things — getting ahead of it.
Johnny Russo
—saying, hey, do you want to increase budget by 25% because we think we can more than exceed your goals, the answer is yes. In Canada, there's trepidation — you've got to go up the ladder, go up the chain, and even if you're talking to the owner directly, there's skepticism: can you guarantee this? All we can do is look at the data, but — yes, exactly.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, and that's too slow — by then those dollars might be gone. It's like, how do you have enough trust in the data, and how do you establish enough trust in the relationship — within the business, or with the customer — to say, we know this is the moment? It comes back to this notion of bets — how do you make that strategic bet when you've got—
Johnny Russo
It's too late. It's too late by then.
Bryan Mahoney
—that solid data and 20, 30 years of experience to know, intuitively, in your gut, this is the time, this is the moment we need to invest.
Johnny Russo
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Bryan Mahoney
Okay, I want to make sure we leave enough time to talk about the book, and leading across all of these organizations. I understand now why you say the agency is the pillar — it's got to be nice to have an agency that not only works across your own businesses, but gives you insight to help other businesses too, and probably affords you a ton of opportunity to lead. Maybe that's why you literally wrote the book on it — Mastering Mindful Leadership, 105 Ways to Become the Leader Your Employees Need You to Be. When you say mindful leadership, what do you actually mean in practice? Can you give an example or two of how that shows up across the portfolio of businesses you're leading?
Johnny Russo
Yeah — and by the way, this is the book, it's an easy read, you can get it on Amazon. Mindfulness to me is — there's this old-school approach to leadership, and if you look at sports coaching, it was very rough, very hard, very dictator-led, and it worked, for a time.
Bryan Mahoney
Awesome.
Johnny Russo
Then we had this wave — this is before COVID, not the COVID wave I'm talking about — of new voices needing to be heard: new leaders, women coming up in leadership, different ethnicities on your team, all of that to consider. There's a different approach for everybody, and I think that's what it comes down to — if you have a team of 20, you have certain core values the whole team must be accountable for, and you hold them accountable. That's how culture gets built. But you probably want to treat each person a bit differently in how you communicate and work with them. One of the things I do with employees is build a personal development plan, and everyone's is a bit different — usually four core areas to work on over the next 12 months, but I also want some life goals in there. If someone wants to get back into fitness because they're not happy with where they are, that's a big thing, because it leads to success, drive, and more energy for work and everything else. So it's all related. Mindfulness for me is making sure you understand how to get the best out of employees, but not stopping there — actually caring for them. That doesn't mean you're never going to let someone go, or that there's not a wrong fit sometimes. But you have to be mindful in how you do that too — I've heard some horror stories recently about people being let go by text, or without HR in the room. There's a right way and a right approach to it, and a lot of that comes down to how you actually communicate it.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I used to talk early in my career about the conflation of 'nice' and 'kind' — we're Canadian, and nice is kind of our brand, but sometimes when you're dealing with your team, being kind matters more, and being kind sometimes means saying the hard things and being really direct. If that means moving people on, or making sure they get the feedback they need to keep growing, it's not an easy thing to get right, especially early on, or the first time you're a manager.
Johnny Russo
100%. And I'll tell you, unfortunately, I've had to let people go in my career, and the vast majority of the time, I still talk to them. I still have lunch with them. I still recommend them. I might even work with them again. I keep that relationship going, because it was just the wrong fit at that time, and they knew it—
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Johnny Russo
—they weren't surprised by it, because we'd had conversations leading up to that. I make sure I stay in touch with a lot of them.
Bryan Mahoney
I think that's the key — not having people feel surprised. Sometimes it takes time, but it's nice to be able to look back and say, we went through a tough moment, but we're writing another chapter together, or there's a better fit for you elsewhere, and I'm happy to be a reference for you. That's one of those things that just comes with time and maturity. I do need to transition us to AI before we wrap up — the more things change, the more it feels like they aren't changing all that much. You talked about how, at the start of your career, marketing was really SEO. Now there's a lot of emphasis on optimizing content for agents — I'm seeing more and more traffic land on sites from searches initiated in something like ChatGPT rather than traditional SEO. So, a two-part question — how are you coaching your teams to use AI, and how are you consulting your clients to make the right investments right now?
Johnny Russo
On the team side, it's really: try as many tools as you can, run them against everything, and figure out which ones you want. We have more research-minded people, more content-minded people, more strategy-minded people, lead-gen folks — everyone's got their preferences, but the goal is just to try it and see how far it takes you. That said, there's still a human element in what we do, and there has to be. Media buying is one of those things where a lot of pundits say it'll be completely replaced by AI — maybe it will, maybe it won't. I don't know that it's a good thing, and I don't know that it's something to celebrate either, saying 'I'm running my business fully on AI.'
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Johnny Russo
I'm a big proponent of it, but at the end of the day, it's a self-driving car example — do you want a self-driving car all the time? I don't know.
Bryan Mahoney
Sometimes — if I need to get from Edmonton to Calgary, there's not a lot to see, so drive me. But if I'm driving up the coast, I want my hands on the wheel. I bring that back to commerce all the time — I don't want someone doing all of the shopping for me. I love getting to know new brands. I use this example a lot: when I order from a brand I love and the box arrives at my front door—
Johnny Russo
Yeah.
Bryan Mahoney
—I knock the Amazon boxes out of the way, because I don't even know what's in those, but I'm genuinely excited to tear open the box from the brand I love. That's a story as old as time, and I don't want it to go away. I think the same thing applies inside our own organizations — I want my team to use AI as a superpower, to do the thing we love and are great at even better, and to get rid of the routine work we don't need to be the ones doing. So maybe to tie a bow on this — given your experience, and given that your own learning style is somewhat analog — we're in this weird moment where AI is a huge opportunity, but for people earlier in their careers, it's also a source of anxiety. As a final thought, how do you think about your responsibility as a leader to make sure your team is learning the right way, using these tools the right way, and sharing that back with colleagues, so we move away from anxiety and lean into opportunity?
Johnny Russo
Yeah — even as students, it's easy to go to a search bar, ask ChatGPT for everything. But do you understand the content? I don't care how good you are with AI — if you're interviewing for something, you have to know your stuff. You can memorize all you want, but a good interviewer will read through it.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Johnny Russo
Same with a marketing presentation. I get a lot of marketing presentations, and what I do is spend a couple of minutes beforehand just noting to myself, is this AI or not? Honestly, I don't even know if I have a problem with it either way — it doesn't bother me in the end, I'll figure it out. But I'm going to ask questions and dig in, and I'll know right away whether the person knows their stuff or not, whether it's a vendor, a tech firm, whatever it is.
Bryan Mahoney
Yes.
Johnny Russo
So I'm cautious about that — use it as a cheat sheet, but make sure you know it. If something recommends marketing campaigns for a client on the agency side, and the team says sure, let's go, but doesn't actually know how to run those campaigns, you're in trouble. The boss has to be there. And on the client side, it forces you to actually be good, as a brand — Gemini, for example, I used it the other day looking at content for a brand, and it surfaced pages still published on the site but not reachable through the nav menu — content from six years ago that was honestly better than what's live now. AI is forcing everyone to be on their game, because—
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Johnny Russo
—it's going to crawl everything, and it's going to show you the good and the bad.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, it forces you to be on your game. I'll repeat what I said before — the more things change, the more they stay the same. You still have to know the content, still have to know your customer, still have to check your work, still have to have this insatiable appetite to learn — and it's never been easier to learn. But you have to be genuinely curious about the output, read through it, make sure there's no slop in it, make sure you can actually represent the work. These are incredibly powerful tools as thought partners, but I still want every person on my team to be the one doing the thinking. There's a pride of authorship — these are your ideas, you've checked the work, and you stand behind it. I give brands the same advice — your content is going to be out there and it is going to be found, and that's going to be a reflection of how customers and prospects think about you. It's not a competition over who can create the most content — everyone can create content now, it's never been easier. The question is how you make sure that content is genuinely resonant. That's always been the name of the game — sometimes it's just helpful to stop and remind people of that.
Johnny Russo
Yeah, an analogy for that is going on a date — if you're not good at conversation, use AI for some thought-starter questions. But don't use it for the actual answers of what you should say — you need both. I'm introverted, so I can come up with the questions using AI, but the other person wants to hear your story. Same in business—
Bryan Mahoney
Yes.
Johnny Russo
—use it as a starting point, but at the end of the day, if you're helping a brand, they want your input too. It's not just reading off the screen.
Bryan Mahoney
Yes — use the tools, but make sure you find the opportunity to tell your story. That's probably a great place for us to wrap up. Johnny, I sincerely appreciate you coming on the pod and telling us your story. I like that we didn't get too deep into marketing tactics, and instead talked about leadership, and how you can be efficient and successful leading across a number of exciting initiatives. Great to see you, thanks for the conversation — have a safe trip, and I'd love to have you back on soon.
Johnny Russo
We'll do it — I'm sure we'll meet up in Vegas like we do every year, at some point.
Bryan Mahoney
Yes, yes, I'll see you in Vegas.