Join us on this enlightening episode of the Beyond Page One podcast as we sit down with Clare  Sheerin, the managing director at Robertson LLP.

Clare shares invaluable insights into effective resource management during periods of significant growth and change. She discusses the strategic importance of planning and communication within an organization and how these elements contribute to successful outcomes.

Tune in to discover how strategic partnerships and a deep understanding of corporate social investments can transform business operations and community relations alike.

You can listen to this episode on the platforms you love:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1iUCl8zrSrr0Jh1JF8ppvX

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/clare-sheerin-talks-community-ties-and-strategic/id1734621258?i=1000657174423 

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS7U9adSWQs

• Clare emphasizes the importance of communication and planning for managing resources during periods of growth. She suggests adding resources gradually to align with growth targets. 
• Clare advises companies to collaborate closely with employees to identify meaningful community projects.
• When forming strategic partnerships, Clare mentions the necessity of aligning with business needs and ensuring that partnerships are mutually beneficial, particularly highlighting the integration with marketing and communications strategies.
• Clare notes a shift towards increased employee involvement in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, which can enhance the impact and relevance of these efforts.
• The trend in CSR is moving towards aligning initiatives closely with strategic business goals, ensuring that corporate social investments also meet concrete business needs.
• Clare discusses the challenge of measuring the impact of social investment programs. She highlights the importance of developing programs that can be quantitatively assessed to demonstrate their value to both the community and the company.
• Engaging employees at a local level and allowing them to lead initiatives ensures relevance and increases participation in CSR activities.
• For industries with traditionally lower levels of community engagement, Clare suggests enhancing brand awareness through CSR aligned with business development goals.
• Clare mentions exploring the use of AI in legal document review and content creation to improve efficiency and responsiveness in her work at Robertson LLP.
• Consistency and active participation in networking events are crucial. Clare advises using various platforms, including social events and LinkedIn, to maintain and expand professional networks.

Mickey (00:01.28)

Hello everyone. My name is Mickey. I’m your host of the Beyond Page One podcast where we dive deep into the world of entrepreneurship, and leadership, and kind of try to uncover what it is behind the cover of the book, so to speak. Today’s guest is Clare. She’s a marketing and corporate social investment professional with expertise in brand awareness, reputation management, and partnership development. She’s currently the managing director at Robertson LLP where she develops and executes annual and long-term business strategies, and she manages the resources and strategic partnerships there as well. Some of Clare’s other interests include various projects, including anniversary celebrations, flood relief efforts, and a milestone program for companies such as Altagas, Husky Energy, and Transatlantic Corporation. Her involvement showcases her commitment to corporate social responsibility and community engagement. I’m super excited to have you here, Clare.

Welcome and thank you for coming on.

Clare Sheerin (00:57.039)

Thank you. Well, thank you so much for having me. This was fantastic.

Mickey (01:01.632)

I’m just going to hop right into it. What are some strategies that you employ to ensure effective resource management within the organization, especially during periods of growth or change?

Clare Sheerin (01:14.863)

That is a very good question. That’s a big question. Thank you for getting that out of the way at the very beginning here. No, end of the day, it comes down to communication and your planning, right? So yes, growth is big and growth is fast typically. But when you do have an opportunity to plan for growth, if you can actually sit down with your team and work backwards being here’s where we want to be exactly. Here’s what we need resource-wise. This is what this looks like and then start adding those people to your team or adding the IT side to that, whatever it might be. Add them as you can when you can so that when you hit that growth mark, you’ve got everything lined up. That’s ideal. That’s very rare. Sometimes it’s just like, my goodness, what are we doing? We need to work backward and figure out what we’ve got going on. But it’s just communicating with the teams and figuring out what they need to do the job to the best of their ability and what you need to scale. So if you’re, say, growing on our side here, we’ve grown our real estate department exponentially in the last couple of years. And our biggest struggle resource-wise was human beings. So what we’ve started doing every year in the fall, when potentially we don’t need all of the human beings on the real estate side, we’ve still gone out and sourced additional human beings to do the work. So we may not have the work right now, but we’ve got them in place. So when the work comes, we can hit the ground running.

And it comes down to communications as far as I’m concerned with most things, but resource management and growth for sure.

Mickey (02:50.848)

Very cool. Okay, awesome. As someone who seems to be very deeply involved in increasing community brand awareness, what advice would you give to businesses looking to strengthen their ties with their local communities and organizations?

Clare Sheerin (03:04.591)

When you’re talking about any type of community alignment, it has to align with your business. I mean, you know, there’s so many companies where you go to an event and you’re like, why is there a logo here? Why are there people here? Like what, what is that story? Where is the tie-in? and I think it can go well or it can go poorly. So if you’re there as an individual, I’d say a fundraising event or at the unveiling of some building or whatever it might be and you cannot understand why that company is there and why their brand is there, that’s the issue. It’s either you can’t see it being aligned, it hasn’t been communicated properly, or they don’t know, quite frankly. The biggest thing I would say any organization can do is sit down with their leadership team, whoever owns the company, whatever that looks like, and figure out what makes sense, and what aligns. And then also, you can say that where sometimes organizations and sponsorships or donations, whatever it might be, align with the leadership, but it might not align with the employees.

And that’s another big gap, right? So it’s that having those conversations with employees as well, like what’s close to your heart, what makes sense, what do you see? You’re the ones in our operating areas. What does this look like for you? And, if you’re going to build a program out like that, it has to be everyone involved. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense. And I think you can have, well, not I think, I know you can do a lot more damage by pushing something out, a community partnership out externally and the general public your clients your stakeholders, or whoever your audience is for that particular partnership. And if they don’t get why, like you’ve missed the mark. You know, sometimes you see things, you see a logo somewhere or you see a company participating in an event. You’re like, that makes so much sense. This makes sense to me. That’s where you want to be. And unfortunately, these days you see a lot of, huh? I don’t get it. And then someone tells you the story and then you’re like, yeah, this makes sense. But, It’s got to be aligned otherwise don’t do it. Spend the money somewhere else. Spend it on actual brand marketing.

Mickey (05:15.52)

Yeah, great advice. Great advice. Sourcing strategic partnerships is key for driving growth and revenue as we both know. What criteria do you use to evaluate those potential partnerships and how do you ensure that it’s mutually beneficial?

Clare Sheerin (05:34.575)

It depends on the organization. If you’re looking at a large company, they’ve got their strategic plans out for three, or five years. They’ve got their pillars of giving. They’ve got their partnership criteria. If you’re looking at a smaller midsize, they don’t necessarily have those programs in place and those foundations there to make simple strategic choices.

So I would say, we’re the firm I work for right now, we are a boutique firm. So small, coming up to the mid-size space. And we don’t have that framework. Right now, what we do is very much, what are the business needs for us in the next 12 months, 24 months, say five years on the growth side? Who do we need to bring with us? What does that look like? Who do our partners need to be? What areas of the business are we trying to grow? And the same thing, if you’re even on the large corporate side, it’s always a business-facing decision on who you go after for partnerships. What makes sense in these different areas? If you’re trying to grow a certain area, you’re trying to shrink a certain area, that will drive who you’re looking for as partners. And realistically, they’ll align with everything else that’s going on with your marketing and communications because it’s all tied up so closely. Yeah, like they can’t be siloed and if they are, it just doesn’t work. It’s a lot of wasted money.

Mickey (06:51.744)

It all works together, yeah. Well, so you’re deeply involved in the corporate social investment part of the world. What trends do you foresee shaping the future of the industry and those initiatives?

Clare Sheerin (07:13.711)

I think the biggest thing that I’ve seen over the last 10 years has been employee involvement and employee buy-in. So I’ve been in this sector for 20 years now, which sounds terrifying, so maybe delete the 20-year part of that. When I started, it was really, so you can see the way that things are branded now in this area. It used to be called community investment and it was corporate giving and it was corporate social responsibility and then it was social impact. And then it just kind of, keeps on evolving to better reflect how corporations A, have to pitch it to shareholders, but also how they pitch it to their employees, right? The first big shift I saw was engaging the employees, like truly getting them on board. Cause those are your biggest champions for whatever it is that you’re doing that grassroots, let’s get it done. We can brand them, we can brand the project, whatever it might be.

Recently, I would say, again, the last 10 years or so has been, it’s very much tied back to business goals. So before, you’d have a bucket of money and you’d go spend it on everything that seemed nice and friendly and fluffy and like had a good message to it. And now there’s a combination of really meeting strategic business needs. So an example would be an energy company I was with that had a large budget, and a bunch was committed to research and development because there were provincial regulations that we had to meet. There was a bunch of employee giving, which was fantastic, but we also had other buckets where it was like, okay, sitting in budget meetings and everyone’s like, why do you have all this money to spend? Like, give it back. So try to make the business case go like this, what I can do over here does meet the needs on your side. So taking the initiative in a meeting with, you know, heavy oil folks and meeting with HR. I mean, okay, like what do you think the biggest gaps for you guys are in the next five, 10 years? What type of investments can we make on this site to meet those needs? Because it’s not just, you know, the fluffy put a t-shirt with a logo on it. It’s how do we legitimately meet the business needs? And so that has become such a larger piece of this type of work, especially on the corporate side where it’s not only the warm and fuzzies, it’s meeting business needs. And it’s a great story to tell internally because people will stop getting mad that you’re spending all this money on things when they feel like it should be going through their bonuses. And it’s, you know, people have always had a bit of an issue with, you know, why organizations spend money in these areas, whether it’s social investment, community investment, whatever you want to call it, being able to tie back that true business focus and you can measure it is a really big thing. That’s the biggest shift that I’ve seen in the last 20 years warm and fuzzy to hard corporate, here’s what.

Mickey (10:13.6)

How do you measure the tangible impact of the social investment programs on both the company and the community?

Clare Sheerin (10:23.023)

It depends on what’s going out the door. Ideally, an organization will spend money developing its programs in a way that they can be measured.

Clare Sheerin (10:38.607)

And it depends if it’s 100 % philanthropic, that’s just brand awareness. That’s just being a good corporate citizen. That’s just being a neighbor. And the way that’s measured is how your license to operate goes. Do you have the buy-in from the local communities where you’re operating? If you’re looking at larger investments, there are metrics there. Whereas in like, what were the impacts? So you were working very closely on that. Like what were the metrics for this event? Who was there? Why were there, what can we tie back directly to sales and XY type of area? There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for any of it. And that’s the most interesting part. And that’s why people who have been doing this for so long and have developed this into like true profession before it was always kind of off of the side of someone’s desk and corporate communications or marketing. But it’s become an actual career field for folks.

And that’s where the true measurement KPIs metrics are coming from, from these folks who have all of that experience on corporate support, especially from corporate comms and marketing.

Mickey (11:52.64)

So when talking about it, you mentioned this earlier and I want to dive into a little bit more, the fostering of employee engagement. So what strategies have you found effective for fostering those and creating participation in corporate social responsibility activities? How do you get people in it? 

Clare Sheerin (12:14.351)

It is really hard because you’ve got, you know, it depends on the size of the organization as well, right? If you’re looking at, I came up in very large organizations, you know, 5,000 plus employees, you know, across North America, Asia Pac, whatever. It’s all about how it ties back to them. So if you’ve got individuals, you’ve got sites and you’ve got individuals all over the country or North America, how does it tie back to them and being able to build your program out in a way that those sites and those individuals, those employees can get back in a way that is meaningful to them and their community. So there’s always, if you look at kind of the structure of this in a lot of organizations, it’s you’ve got corporate. So corporate does a lot of stuff on the marketing side. They’re very closely tied. It’s the big corporate investments. It usually is nationwide.

It meets a larger goal when you’re looking at, you know, the strategic planning for the organization. but you need to allocate funds specifically for different sites, right? People who live in say, Tabor, Alberta have a different attachment to organizations than folks who are in St. John’s Newfoundland. You can’t have a blanket, excuse me, a blanket approach to all of it. So number one is understanding who these people are, engaging them at the site level, and getting them to help. Being like, hey, we need help sourcing partnerships. Like what does your community need in general? Like how do we keep on earning our license to operate here? And then, you know, empowering them to find those partnerships. They have to go through all of the hoops and all the other things we have going on to prove stuff, but having them bring forward things that they genuinely want to get involved in or support is number one. We used to see, and we still see some places, but we used to see a lot of large corporate donations going out, sponsorships, whatever it might be. And the worst thing was when employees would sit there and you could hear them asking, we have no money this year, our bonuses were cut, we had unfortunate raises this year, why are we giving money to this? It doesn’t make sense to me.

Clare Sheerin (14:39.151)

So if you can engage them at their level, it helps.

Well, A, has the ownership because they were the ones to put it forward and they can’t just blame Big Corporate for it. But two tells that story and takes away that it builds a bridge between corporate and site is I guess the best way I could describe it. Just engaging folks at their level where you can, because we always have to earn our license to operate no matter what we do. Whether you’re in a law firm, whether you’re in oil and gas, or whether you’re in agriculture, you have to earn that wherever you are, even in the big city. So if you can earn that within the community and with the people that live there, that’s number one.

Mickey (15:20.768)

Yeah, all right then. What advice would you give to companies that are looking to establish and enhance their programs, especially those operating industries that have traditionally lower levels of community engagement? Because there are those industries.

Clare Sheerin (15:38.319)

Well, it’s interesting. So I’m Alberta-based and I’ve spent my career in utility, the energy sector, and ag. So agribusiness and they’re all over it. There’s never been an issue. I’m trying to explain why we need to do this. I think I’ve had a bit of a challenge on the legal side. So it’s less of we need a program, we need to earn a license to operate and it’s more of a how do we enhance our brand awareness and our marketing activities with philanthropic or corporate citizenship type work. Whether that’s going out to our partners that support us, we do a lot of referral work so business development like B2B is huge for us and it’s finding out what those organizations and our partners want to support, what that looks like in their area, and then figuring out how can we support that. So versus right now where I’m at, instead of building our program, it’s how do we support the programs of the folks who are supporting us already. It’s been a very interesting change of direction for me career-wise. I’m understanding that difference.

Mickey (17:07.086)

So it sounds like you take on multiple projects simultaneously. So how do you approach the challenge of that? And particularly when they involve diverse stakeholders and diverse objectives.

Clare Sheerin (17:08.207)

Well, of course. Who doesn’t?

Clare Sheerin (17:22.423)

priority priority priority priority. So I have a massive whiteboard. I can’t like this whiteboard behind me it goes the length of my office. It’s building out your priorities and going, okay, so say I’ve got seven major projects on right now. I’ve got, you know, 25 different stakeholders. What I enjoy doing is finding the stakeholders who can work together and support each other and then bucket those out separately. So it doesn’t have to be all of these different things at once. They can be. Yeah, bucketed in the line with each other. that’s the only way to do it. There are only so many hours in a day and we all know that teams are lean these days and it’s always doing more with less.

Mickey (18:20.896)

Yeah, I feel like that’s the approach in the world right now.

Clare Sheerin (18:24.335)

The magic, the magic of doing so much more with so much less is quite fascinating.

Mickey (18:28.)

Yeah, we’re just juggling balls all the time. What role do you see technology playing in shaping the future growth and success of Robertson LLP? And how are you going to leverage the technology and advancements in your strategic planning?

Clare Sheerin (18:32.559)

Yeah.

Clare Sheerin (18:48.271)

For us on the legal side, it’s quite the chat GPT AI writing has been quite a fascinating thing that’s come up for us. Very, very much so. I don’t have a lot of experience in it, to be honest. I’m still old school. I like to write everything myself and have other people review it. We’ve got folks on our team who are testing out different applications on that, whether it comes to reviewing contracts. I am always asking for articles and content on different areas that are timely that we can push out through our social channels and they’re testing them out. And it’s been really interesting watching them test out some topics and then I get what I need so much more quickly. I don’t have a good answer to that question because it’s not my world, but on the legal side very much the AI-generated content.

Mickey (19:44.544)

Fair. And what about like strategic, like internal marketing to grow your business? What kind of avenues are you exploring? Or have you done that have failed or have you done that work well?

Clare Sheerin (19:49.903)

My personal, I have a very tiny team over here and my personal favorites on the technology side are software that I can schedule things with. So I can sit there on the evenings and weekends and hammer out a whole bunch of content, get everything done, and then schedule it out for, you know, I try to do three or four months at a time being pushed out. Same thing with, if we’re trying to communicate with our partners, communicate with our, you know, previous clients, whatever it might be, again, like, you know,

Mailchimp and whatever else it is that you can schedule and send. It’s, I found such a huge difference in the last few years with how well these programs work, where you can just batch everything out and not batch everything out in a way that it’s not thoughtful, but do it all at once, schedule it, forget it, move on to the next.

Mickey (20:43.68)

Yeah. Do you do any sort of advertising for yourself?

Clare Sheerin (20:43.823)

Yeah.

Clare Sheerin (20:50.255)

We do. So obviously Google works on all our SEO, print ads, digital, big box ads, leaderboard ads, and whatnot. Working on some different geotech ads to be pushed out. Very much depending on the different events that we would sponsor, would attend, you can push out your geotech ad afterward, depending on who your audience is. And that’s been a really interesting shift. In a previous role, we did a lot with some sports teams in town. And it was, it was when this stuff started coming out years ago, I remember sitting with one of the large media companies in the country, and they’re telling you all the things you can do. And I sat there as a human, and I was so creeped out by it. I was like, this is horrifying. I don’t want to leave my house. But then as a marketer, I was like tell me more. my goodness, what else can we do? Like how can we drill this down? This is amazing. 

What we can do right now is incredible. And it just depends on it, it’s not for everyone, but you have to have a very specific goal in mind and a very specific target audience for that type of stuff. But it’s very, very cool.

Mickey (22:11.136)

That is very cool. Are you doing most of that internally with your team or do you? Yeah, wow, good for you.

Clare Sheerin (22:15.375)

Yeah. So internally and then partnerships with like, you know, the big media companies who will give you a package, and then you just kind of, here’s what I want to do. Here’s what this looks like. Here’s my monthly, whatever my budget. And they give you.

Mickey (22:28.)

Yeah, I have something on the call that we should talk about programmatic ads. I think you’ll enjoy it. We’ll talk about it later. But I have one more question here. yeah. As someone who navigates various industries and roles, what strategies have you found most effective in building a strong professional network fostering those meaningful connections, and continuing to see it?

Clare Sheerin (22:52.399)

Consistency. Like, just literally just doing it. I know that everyone hates the word networking. I don’t want to go to that event. I’m so tired and burnt out. I spend all day talking to people. You just have to be consistent. You have to make an effort to find out, figure out who you want to meet and who you want to reconnect with or who you want to, you know, continue connecting with, and make sure you’re at those events. Make sure that you’re sending a coffee note out. Make sure that you’re having that happy hour, consistency is key. I’m in Calgary here and Calgary is just a big small city, right? Where I don’t know how many, like 1.5 or 6 million. The Calgary core is everyone knows everyone. And if you’re not there, you’ll be forgotten about. So you need to make that effort. And whether it’s if you’re not someone who’s in a very social type of role, use LinkedIn. And use your friends. And be like, you work in this industry, I’m looking to meet a couple of people. Can we, can I take them out? It’s, yeah. totally. And it’s the funny thing is, if you ask someone, I would say 99 % of the time they’re happy too, they’re flattered. They’re like, my goodness, you want to learn about what I do and my experience? Yeah. And that’s my role. Anyone who reaches out, like I’ll give you 20 minutes. Like, let’s have a cup of coffee. Like let’s, let’s have a conversation.

Mickey (23:52.864)

I think people are scared to just take that first step of even asking.

Clare Sheerin (24:16.527)

It’s the one thing I’ve learned, especially generationally, folks who are kind of, I would say, in that late 20s, early 30s area, they’ve learned networking differently, and they’re much more reserved and don’t want to. So it’s very much a lead by example. Going, hey, I’m going to go do this. Would you like to come? I think it’s valuable for you because of XY Z, and then they get more comfortable, and they’re okay to do it on their own.

Mickey (24:49.888)

Yeah, I find the generational thing interesting. So I’m in my late twenties, but I like I love social events and I love networking and I’ve found it very difficult when building up, you know, sales teams and account management teams to find people that want to talk to people. It’s like we’re like, and I get it with COVID, especially everyone hid behind their computers. You know, you and I are hiding behind our computers right now having them podcast interview, right? It’s not in person and takes the human approach out of it a little bit.

Clare Sheerin (25:22.307)

It does. And if you, and as someone who, you know, so I’m in my early forties, so video calls and all the things and stuff that we like joked about growing up, eventually that’ll be, that’ll be the thing. I’ve always found, especially during COVID, I found it very hard because I worked on the community engagement side very closely, like up through COVID before I made the switch over here. I have a really hard time connecting over video. I have a really hard time.

Clare Sheerin (25:48.623)

I like having conversations, you know, I have friends and family who live all over the world and they’re like, hey, let’s have a video call. I’m like, you know what, can we just pick up the phone? I don’t feel the same connection via video. And I think some people do. And I think that’s incredible. And some of us just really struggle with that.

Mickey (26:07.296)

Yeah, it was funny. During COVID, I took a sales coach and he was giving me tips on how to close and how to just talk to people on camera. And he was like, you have to lean in and look into the camera. I was like, this is creepy. I’m in the person’s face. It was a weird world we were living in.

Clare Sheerin (26:23.151)

I get it.

Clare Sheerin (26:31.535)

And it’s funny because I’ve been in person in the office with Robertson since May 2021. So I went from working from home, whereas my job is very social, to being able to go home. And then everything’s video. And I was at home on video for a year and a half. And then all of a sudden got thrown back into the real world with humans. And we don’t do a lot of video here. So all of our meetings are in person.

so it was really weird getting used to being in person again. People would come to my office door and just start talking. I was like, I’m, I’m uncomfortable with this. I have to, I have to answer you right now. This is ridiculous. Like I need a minute to form my thoughts. Yeah. Like I need to read this three times and then they come and sit on your couch and you’re like, what’s wrong with you? This is so new to me. I throw that at people.

Mickey (27:07.552)

Yeah. I need to, I need a business day to get back to you.

Mickey (27:23.904)

Yeah, there are pros and cons to it because, when we saw a lot of business growth through COVID, it allowed me to talk to people that I normally wouldn’t, because they’ve accepted that this medium for communication is acceptable, right? So I can talk to someone in Vancouver or St. John’s or whatever, and they’re okay with it. Before COVID, it was like, no, I’m not hopping on a call, I’m not hopping on video. So it’s changed a lot for the better as well.

Clare Sheerin (27:55.663)

it has. I mean, it makes things so much easier daily to connect with people that you have to connect with, whether they’re at home or whatever it might be, or a different office or a different location. And it’s, yeah, like anything, right? It’s like networking, it’s practice. Now you’ve got folks that have to practice networking and like, I need to practice videoing.

Mickey (28:17.632)

Yeah, exactly. Awesome. I don’t have any more questions, Clare. Is there anything else that you want to share with us listeners or myself?

Clare Sheerin (28:26.351)

No, this was a pleasure. It’s always nice to share a little bit about the corporate social responsibility side of the world. It’s come more to light these days, everyone seeing the value of it, but it’s also, I don’t think a lot of folks appreciate all the nuances that go into it.

Mickey (28:44.96)

Awesome. Well, thank you for our listeners. If you guys have any questions or you know what you don’t want to pick my brain or Clare’s brain I’m gonna be posting this video and her LinkedIn and her socials will be tagged in it as well. So feel free to reach out and With that, I’ll end it. Thank you so much, Clare 

Clare Sheerin (29:02.511)

Awesome, thank you.