Walker Webcast: Acceleration Partners’ Robert Glazer Aligns Business Success and Personal Growth

Running a global partner marketing firm that has won accolades from household-name clients and numerous awards for company culture is only one of the ways in which Robert Glazer makes his mark. He’s also known as a bestselling author and speaker on topics ranging from personal growth to remote work. The host of the Elevate podcast series was this week’s guest on another online series devoted to business excellence and peak performance, the Walker Webcast. 

The Acceleration Partners founder and CEO began the “Friday Forward” series a few years ago as a means of sharing a leadership theme, quote and related tip/article around personal growth with his 40 employees. Team members found the content so inspiring that that they began sharing it with colleagues, friends and family. 

Today, “Friday Forward” reaches 200,000 subscribers in 60 countries per week and is also the basis of one of Glazer’s books. Notably absent from the newsletter are plugs for Acceleration Partners’ services. “A lot of people who get into content have ulterior motives,” Glazer told Walker & Dunlop CEO Willy Walker. 

Instead, Glazer puts a priority on giving his “Friday Forward” readers quality and adding value to the content.  He acknowledged, though, that indirectly it has brought new business to the company. 

However, a more direct approach to marketing is a must, and it’s an aspect of business development that isn’t always given its due. “If you’re doing great work, you’ve got to share that,” said Glazer. He recommended designating a team member to focus on outreach. 

He noted that among industries in the professional services arena, law firms have given themselves an edge by appointing chief marketing officers. In many other sectors, companies haven’t recognized the need yet. 

“The market is just changing way too fast to assume that what worked yesterday will work for you tomorrow,” Glazer said. 

One key to making a company culture work is establishing core values, and Glazer said he tends to gravitate toward people aligned with his own values. He advised the Webcast audience to not ignore early signs of a values mismatch. 

Glazer has presided over a remote working environment for the past 14 years, and in fact has written a book on successfully managing a remote-working scenario. Notwithstanding the success he and his team have achieved in a remote-work environment, Glazer acknowledged that the past 18 months have been “the hardest stretch” for him as a leader. The long-term stresses of the pandemic have required him to apply non-business principles to what he’d previously handled with strictly business-focused solutions. 

“Understanding mental health is almost a requirement for a leader today,” he told Walker. “It wasn’t a priority prior to March 2020.” 

Delta variant or no, a few large employers—mainly in financial services—have set expectations for employees to be back in the office post-Labor Day. They’ve matched those expectations with clear ground rules, a strategy Glazer said he respects, “because at least they’ve put a stake in the ground.” 

Too many other companies, he said, have yet to clearly map out their plans for bringing employees back to the office. “We are past the time to declare a strategy,” said Glazer. 

On-demand replays of the August 25 webcast are available by clicking here and through Walker & Dunlop’s Driven by Insight podcast series.