Lita Glassman, President, LSD The Agency on Lessons Learned and the Power of Sticking to the Basics.

Introduction to Lita and LSD Agency

Lita, thank you for joining me this morning. Thank you for having me. As always, I have so many questions and you've had a very interesting career, both on the industry side and then as an entrepreneur. Let's start, just so everybody kind of gets a sense of what LSD is all about. Maybe talk first about kind of the focus of your agency, and then I want to go all the way back and figure out how you got there, and then we'll end off maybe looking forward a little bit. So let's start with today. What does LSD do? Talk to me about the agency a bit.

Happily so. Lsd, the agency, is a full service strategic consulting communications agency. We've built a business model that is a little bit unique we are a little bit ad agency, we are a little bit consulting agency and we've brought it under one umbrella so that when we meet with clients, when we service clients, when we partner with clients, we are able to fill a longitudinal set of needs from developing strategy in the first instance, to using that strategy to create meaningful content and then, ideally, at the end of it, executing with excellence, which is part of our mantra. So we've developed the strategic side, the content development side, the creative side, all under one umbrella organization, and what that means is our clients have an opportunity to really partner with us in a very meaningful and deep way.

From Pharmacy School to Pharma

Let's go way back. How did you start your career? Where did you start your career? Let's talk about as you sort of came up through the industry.

So, first of all, this is my 40th anniversary working in the pharmaceutical industry in one way, shape or form, and that does age me, but that's okay. Happy anniversary.

Thank you. We have an odd trend on the show of having people around their anniversary. So happy anniversary.

Thank you, and people tell me my voice still sounds young, so I'm really happy about that. My career started way back when in pharmacy school, as I sat there and thought about what a wonderful education I was receiving to become a pharmacist and then was sorely disappointed in the practice side of it when it just wasn't an exciting ongoing learning experience, so I thought this isn't going to work. What other opportunities are there that could be linked to that sort of set of learnings?

And how quickly, just to jump in, how quickly once you started practicing, did that realization happen? Was that within the first year? Did you practice for a couple of years as a pharmacist? What was that runway look like?

I practiced zero years as a pharmacist. Back then we had to do practical training in the summertime.

Okay.

So between second and third year, and between third and fourth and even four months after your fourth year, you had to do practical training. And so with 12 months of during school practical training, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that this job was not for me. There was a mantra back in pharmacy school where our professors would talk about count poor lick stick bag tag and I thought, no, no, no, that's not going to work. So sometime in third year they were announcing that the PMAC program back in the day that's what it was called Pharmaceutical companies were searching for pharmacy students to take on summer internships. I thought, sure, let's see what that's all about.

Early Career at Janssen

And I ended up at a very unique company. Most of my colleagues that ended up in the pharma industry ended up in the chemistry side, in the labs manufacturing. There was one little little company called Janssen, which I heard of them before they changed. Yeah Well, janssen, my interest was commercialization, sales and marketing, and so I applied for a number of positions in a number of pharmaceutical companies, but my match was Janssen, because their need was a commercial individual and my need, my top choice, was a commercial position. So they matched us together and, lo and behold, got in my car, drove to Mississauga and what I was expecting was some of the other pharma companies I had seen in Canada Eli, lily, upjohn at the time these big manufacturing facilities and instead I walked into maybe a 500 square foot office building.

Wow.

And I thought this can't be. This is not a pharmaceutical company. But sure enough it was. It was the very early, early days of Janssen. There were maybe three or four people on the ground in the company. It was just a budding concern and they let me do everything. They said can you do this? Me do everything. They said can you do this? And I'd say, sure, I'll try. So they give me IMS books. I have to do all the analytics of the markets that we were going to go into and back then, if anybody's old enough to remember what the IMS books look like, they were mountainous books, huge, huge volumes of data from every product and therapeutic category. And then one day they said to me can you sell? I said I can certainly try. So they gave me two territories, one in Saskatchewan and one in Manitoba, and I think I was the original telemarketer in pharma where I was asked to sell an antihistamine on the phone to doctors. Wow, so I did.

Just to pause for a sec. So you know you've just come out of pharmacy school, yep, and now you're in. You know, the early days of Janssen sounds like doing a little bit of a lot of things, including like, hey, can you sell in here? You know, look through your IMS data and was there, other than, I guess, the science of it? Was there anything from pharmacy school that you were leveraging in those in those days? Or was it just your sort of natural aptitude and your curiosity, like there a connective tissue between what you were learning in pharmacy school and then this really sort of interesting, multidimensional, almost startup-y kind of feel over at Janssen?

To be honest, no, there was very, very little connection. I say that, though now I appreciate my pharmacy background a whole lot more than I did back then, when I was just learning how to do certain things in the business world. Today I use the science every day in one way, shape or form, as we work with medical teams, as we write content for symposia globally. I really do lean on my science background and my love of science. Back then I had so much more to learn on the business side than I did on the science side, but I would say the linkage was very loose. It certainly helped to sell something that you really understood well, yeah, but the linkages were very, very minimal back then. But the linkages were very, very minimal back then.

Interesting. Okay, so I've interrupted. You were one of the first telesales moving some antihistamine over the phone. In Saskatchewan is where we left off.

Yeah, my territory did pretty well actually, because people were very intrigued by this crazy woman phoning them and telling them about product features and benefits on the phone. Nobody had ever experienced it before. So it was quite a successful endeavor overall. And then I was asked if I could do market research and I said, sure, I would try. So I had the opportunity to go and interview key opinion leaders all through downtown core of Toronto for an antifungal agent, through downtown core of Toronto for an antifungal agent, learning as I went, building the plane as they fly it, as you say, and that also was a great learning experience. So I think I learned more in those four months because it was a summer program than I had in years at school because it was sincerely trial by fire. They asked me if I I could. I said I would try and off I went and did that.

Summer job then led to the career side of it. So I was asked if I wanted to join Johnson Johnson long term as part of their international MBA program, where they bring individuals in from all over the world, house them in their J&J complex and place you at different J&J companies. And this all happened in New Jersey and I did that for a year and then came back to Janssen here in Canada to head up their market research department, move to product management, product director, business unit director. And then that was the time that I left and went to another company called Amgen, also a startup company, with three or four people at the time.

Imagine starting at Amgen while it was also maybe had that startup feel. You've now got pharmacy experience under your belt. You've got your Janssen experience under your belt. You've now been to the J&J MBA In a few short years. It must have felt like you were starting from a really different place. As you jumped into Amgen, Did you enter that with a different degree of confidence, again, appreciating that it was some time ago. How did it feel making that move?

It felt great. I was really excited about not even so much Amgen, but at the time the concept of biologics was just being birthed, so Amgen was the leader in the biologics field and I was very intrigued by the concept of using human proteins to cure disease, and so I was very excited about that. Yes, of course you're entering at a different position, but I'll tell you, no job has ever been as challenging, either at Amgen or subsequently in my consulting career, than my very second job at Janssen, and I want to maybe go back to that for a second. Sure, I had been in market research, developed the market research department at Janssen. It was now becoming more of a normal company with departments and headcount and individuals being there.

But one day they had a big shuffle and they moved people around. They fired somebody out West, the sales manager from Ontario was moved out West and they had this opening for a sales management position. I was just getting ready to go out into the field as a sales rep to cover somebody's maternity leave. We've gone through all the training and instead of moving into that position as a sales rep, they asked me if I would take on the sales management position, which I said sure, but there was a couple of issues there. One was I actually had never carried the bag, so I was moving into a management position without ever having done the job.

Yeah.

The second issue was I was 23 years old and all of my sales reps were probably between 45 and 55 year old men.

Who had been doing this for a very long time and were very settled in their ways, I imagine.

Management Challenges and Gender Dynamics

Yeah. So it was a very interesting leap from where I was to what they put the job that they gave me, from where I was to what they put the job that they gave me. And I always, you know, in the back of my mind, I think, part of the courage I had to take on some of these challenges. And trust me, they were, they were challenges, and I would feel sick to my stomach Sometimes. I always used to say to myself worst case scenario I can always go be a pharmacist. Yeah, I do have my license, I do have my degree. Very worst case scenario I do have a fallback career, but I really like the opportunities here, so I'm just going to keep trying until I hit a wall. I'm still waiting to hit that wall, actually, and never had to go back to becoming a pharmacist behind the counter, but that was a really challenging time because not only are you learning a job, but you have to establish almost instant credibility with people that owe you nothing.

Yeah. And so I had to be very mindful and intentional in an approach without a hierarchy, with a great deal of humility, and what my approach was at the time was I would go and do ride alongs or work with, as they called them, and we'd switch rules for the day. I'd allow them to teach me how to sell, and then what I would do is I'd start with the best of the best in the territory, use their know-how and guidance to take to others in the territory and basically made it more like a. I was almost like an uber app, connecting the skills that were needed with skills that were had and just learned. That way, our territory, our district, did the best that year with three product launches, and I think it was more to do with creating a collaborative environment where we all succeeded together rather than any one person, me included, being a superstar increasingly senior positions.

To find yourself either working with, managing or managing through mainly older men was probably something that you bumped up against time and time again in those days. Is that a fair observation?

It is absolutely a fair observation, and I have to tell you that what gets you through some of that is you do have to have a good sense of humor, you have to have some thick skin, you have to have broad shoulders. In today's world, probably, there was a measure of harassment on a daily basis, if I use today's standards to measure. Um, back then it was pretty ongoing. It was not the norm to be respectful of women. It was not the norm to not make advances, if you will Like. I said, I've got age and wisdom under me now, but I was young and vulnerable, but I did have a sense of humor. I did hire some other young women, and your listeners may or may not like this, but at the time, this is when the whole concept of sexual harassment was becoming more apparent. Unfortunately, though, any woman that I knew back then who actually cried sexual harassment, she herself got fired.

Yeah.

So that was not a great time in the development of women, but the advice that I gave to young women as I was going through it myself we were all young together is, I said never find yourself alone, always, you know, move in packs of twos and threes, because there's safety in numbers. That's number one. Number two you don't get paid enough to put up with anybody's advances or I, I allowed to say horseshit. Well, I'm saying it. You're not allowed, you don't get paid nearly enough money to do that, because the examples are so many of what we saw. And third, develop a really good right hook. And I said you, you don't cry harassment and let them come at you with abuse, and then you have a rationale why.

So I said, just protect yourselves was my main message. Don't put yourself in a situation where you're going to be vulnerable. And if you find yourself in that position, do whatever it takes to protect yourself. I don't care who the person is, I don't care what position they have, I don't care how high up the ladder they are. You have every right to protect yourself. And it's unfortunate but it worked and that they had to deal with that in the first place, that I had to deal with that in the first place, but it worked to keep myself sane and safe and a sense of humor is really, really important, Like being able to move past things, laugh, laugh at people if you need to in some of those circumstances. But yeah, it was a very strange time.

How did those early experiences you know, especially around really quite challenging and damaging in a lot of cases, like gender dynamics how did those inform the way you led or sort of policies that you helped enact, or did they, or was the ground just shifting naturally? How did that inform your leadership style?

There's so many things that inform my leadership style. I'm a big believer in borrowing from the best of the best. I don't believe you have to create from a blank piece of paper all the time. So I watched around me, I interviewed very senior leaders about what made them great and I knew which ones I thought were great, and I used to ask them what makes you different than the next person, the next person? So many different mentors and when I say mentors I don't necessarily mean people I look up to. It means people that I've seen do some really dastardly things, and in fact I've thanked many of them for teaching me how to lead. What I didn't say out loud to them is how not to lead.

A thousand percent right Is that it's the signals of like I really respect and want to be like that person and I don't necessarily respect and don't want to be like that person and I don't necessarily respect and don't want to be like that person. And both of those are signals that inform the way you go.

So what I distinguished as being excellence in leadership versus complete opposite. I'll start with some of the opposite traits. When people lead with their ego, you can't have people follow you. When people lead out of fear of their own status and stature, people will not follow, and if they do, it's because they themselves are fearful People who change their tune depending on who is in the room. So they might one day support you 100%, and then their boss comes in and says something to the opposite effect of what you've been working on.

Leadership Style and Values

I've seen this time and again and they pull the rug from under you right in real time in front of their boss, because they don't want to be seen as being in a contradictory position with someone of power. So there's so many things that I watched evolve that I thought no, no, never. You always support your people. I always had this mantra of I never count how many people work for me. As I add people to LSD, all it means is now I have more people to work for myself, and so that's why I don't add too many people too quickly and we're growing very intentionally and thoughtfully, but not overnight, because it just means more people to work for If you are there for your people.

If you support them fully, if they know when to come to you for help versus not, you can create this ecosystem of trust and respect, and it really does cut both ways. I don't want people to think of bosses, I want them to think of together. We are in this for mutual benefit to the client or the colleagues on the external side of our walls. So those are just some of the distinguishing things of the good ones versus the less good ones. How's that?

That's fantastic, and you've just done a great job of transitioning the conversation over into the world of LSD. So let's actually talk for a second about that transition. So you ended your time at Amgen and started LSD around, I think, 2005?.

Yeah that would make sense. If you don't mind me asking what happened. What was the impetus? And maybe, as you were thinking about starting LSD, was it opportunistic, like somebody said hey, lita, we need a hand with something? Or did you see a gap in the market, or both? Was there a catalytic event that had you start the business? And then, what did you think you were trying to do with the business when you started it?

Those are all great questions. So I'll take just a quick step back and say I was the vice president of marketing and sales for Amgen Canada for about 10 years 14 years actually, to be exact and Amgen was undergoing global transformational change where they changed all the reporting structures so that the president of the company only had responsibility for commercial units and all the rest of the departments were reporting into global. It didn't make sense to have the general manager in Canada and me, the VP of marketing and sales, with eight direct reports and him with one, the gentleman that I worked for at Amgen. He and I had worked together for 20 years. I had the utmost respect for him. It was one of those situations of him or me and I said no, no, no, you built this from day one. It's time that I do something different.

So I actually had thought I was retiring. My children were 13 and 10 years old at the time. I thought what a perfect time to be more present for children. I never was a big fan of caring whether it was me or somebody else pushing the stroller when they're facing forward and they couldn't see me. But at the teenage years, where they needed a lot more parental guidance. I thought what a great opportunity for me to be more around and be more present and guide life for my children. And that lasted, you know, for a good two to three weeks for a good two to three weeks.

I was going to say if I could imagine a spectrum at one end of the spectrum is retiring and hanging out with my teenagers On the very far other end of the spectrum is. I think I'm going to start my own business.

So I actually didn't start my own business. My past and remaining clients started my business. So, like you said, they came to me and said Can you do this, can you do that? And so I started off as a hobby. I mean, I love what I do. My work has always been a hobby because I do love what I do. So it started off as a hobby. So it started off as a hobby more on the part-time basis and then it started to grow. I hired somebody to help, but I was still looking at it more, as you know, decent paying hobby.

And then there was a life event in our world where we went through sort of marital changes and so on and so forth and I I thought to myself you know, I think I can make this a real going concern and do something much bigger and better. I had one last big thing left in me, because I had already done the corporate pharmacy well and I couldn't move to the States and that was my limitation there. But I said I think I have one big thing left in me and that was when LSD the agency was born. I always had LSD consulting, which was just me on my own, more or less, and then LSD, the agency, was born six, seven years later, and that's when we put the business model in place of strategy, creative and execution.

Birth of LSD Agency

And so what were you seeing? I mean, what were you seeing? What were your signals that led you to have a fairly high degree of confidence that, hey, you know, like we can maybe do this at scale? Was it a specific need that you were fulfilling that you saw there was more of? Was it that you felt you were kind of like leaving opportunities on the table because clients were coming to ask you for more and you just didn't have the capacity or the capabilities to do that? Was it all of the above? What was it from a business standpoint that had you go? Hey, you know what? I think that there's more here.

Yeah, it's a really good question. It's twofold. Number one is, as we were doing, the consulting side of the business. Because we only had the consulting side, we would create with a client some really great strategic thinking and strategic plans, and then I had to take this great strategic plan and throw it over the fence and hand it over to an agency another agency to execute as against the strategic plan. So often you know our conclusion of you need a red square turned into a blue circle, once in the hands of another agency, and I thought they're missing the essence of the entire important strategy that we spent so much time putting together. And I thought you know what I'm just going to bring creative in-house, and the red square will remain the red square for eternity until we decide that a red square is no longer needed. And when we make a conscious decision through additional strategic levels of thinking, then we will make a change. Until then, the blue circle will not predominate. Yeah, yeah.

That was one impetus is that I was tired of seeing strategy bastardized, and at the core, I'm a strategist. I think strategy should be at the root of every decision, of every project, of every plan, of every decision ever made, and without that it's just throwing stuff against a wall and hoping the pretty ones stick. It's not going to work. The second reason why I decided to have a more dedicated organization towards pharma is when I sat on the corporate side, I was so often disappointed with the agencies that sat in front of me, and a couple of reasons for that.

Value Proposition and Client Relationships

Oftentimes, senior leaders from organizations would come in and sell you their goods in one way, shape or form, only to walk away and fill the days with a lot of junior people who neither had experience, strategic thinking or the abilities that were necessary to get the job on time with excellence and every time. So we decided when we built LSD we really only have senior people touching everything. We don't have juniors managing on their own. We don't have juniors doing a lot. I still touch every single project in one way, shape or form that comes in through the door. Now I don't do all the work, obviously, but I touch everything and that's what people want. They're paying an external agency because they have really bright people in these corporations, but they're paying an external agency to really become a partner. And so many agencies speak about, oh, I'm your partner, I'm your strategic partner. It's like no, you're not.

No, and then they, and then they just sort of deliver things that are not very strategic necessarily, or or charge in a way that's not very sort of partner-like, Right. How are you thriving in an environment where there is, I think, such price sensitivity and downward pressure? Is it because you have strategy in the DNA and that's just really, really differentiated? How are you managing that and are you even seeing that? Are you seeing a price sensitivity in 2025 that is different than a price sensitivity in 2019?

Those trends certainly are existing. Procurement does play a bigger and bigger role. But you have to find the lane where your differentiated value can come to the surface. So if somebody is simply looking to make a four-page brochure with content that's pretty nailed down because it's coming from global, but they want it to look a little bit, you know, differently from a color perspective or a layout perspective, because we've got to add French in for Canada et cetera. We're not necessarily the agency for that. We probably are outpriced relative to some other agencies who can pump that out and that's not where you're going to get the value.

So we don't sell that way. We also want to deliver value to our clients. So we're not apologetic about our prices because we know it comes with value that they can't get elsewhere in the same way. So we have to reframe the work so that if that pink brochure at the end of the day becomes 5% of the overall project, but the 95% is doing something very big behind it to then get to that pink brochure, then it becomes a very different value proposition and a very different discussion. So we deal with procurement, we deal with putting in MSAs and budgets and so on and so forth, but we have to differentiate ourselves in lanes of what we do and I guess some of the big differentiating factors are when we are touching multiple points within an organization. We bring such tremendous value even from a knowledge perspective. So an example is we have a client that we work on, multiple business units across multiple functions, across multiple regions. We probably have more institutional breadth of knowledge than even a lot of the people in the lanes, absolutely in those situations.

I've been in those situations, too, where you're talking to two different brand managers and you're the one sort of connecting the dots, because they're both looking at their own spots, right.

So how do you get procurement to see that it's not a dollar per hour issue only, it's what does that hour bring to the enterprise overall? And so we have had those discussions and people do understand. But you have to be able to really clearly define why, your why relative to others' whys. And there are going to be circumstances where we feel we are not bringing the best value for the buck to our clients and we would happily give them an opportunity to do something different or work with another partner on that front. We're not greedy that way at all.

Well, and also the example that you gave of the agency coming in and the senior partners do a great job in the room and then they sort of disappear a little bit and the juniors come in Six months later. When you ask the day-to-day clients with their experiences, they're not going to have fantastic things to say. So procurement doesn't operate in a vacuum. Procurement goes and talks to the key stakeholders and says how's Bell SD doing for you? And if you're delivering both strategically but also delivering consistently and to your point on time and expectations and all that kind of stuff, those day-to-day clients, those stakeholders, are going to say to procurement these guys are phenomenal, right. And then that's a knowing your lane. Being differentiated and having advocates is a fantastic recipe for being able to stick around.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And we do have some of the most senior leaders in big organizations as our biggest fans juniors as well because we make you know, we work with them to make them look good. So our job is to make our clients look good. That's the other thing I would recommend.

Core Philosophy: On Time With Excellence

If people are on the consulting side, lose your ego immediately. Even if you had the best idea, even if you did the best work and it was all you, you, you or your agency that did it step away. Step away and give all of that limelight to the client that hired you in the first instance to have those great ideas, to put the puck in the net for them, et cetera, et cetera. You have nothing to gain. You're not getting promoted at that, um, at that corporation, and if your leadership in your agency is smart, they will recognize how great you are. So lose your ego is one of my recommendations, not that you asked me, but would be something I would tell people who are going on to the agency side. And it's hard, especially if you come from a corporate environment where all that game playing was so necessary, to move to the next level.

It sounds like through the years you've been talking about a really long career of lots of firsts and growth and growing the agency. It feels like through all of that change, the things that you rely on and that have made you successful are really quite fundamental, kind of timeless make your client look good, deliver on time, listen more than you talk like building blocks right. Does that as you think about the future of LSD and do you tend to go back to those just foundational elements and say these building blocks are the things that's going to keep us going forward? Like it feels really kind of foundational.

It's actually so basic. I think you're nailing it on the head. Being successful is very basic. On the external side, towards a client. There's our mantra. We say it all the time to each other, every day, on time, every time with excellence period. There shouldn't be a single thing that goes out our door that doesn't hit that mark. And we say this. I say this to my team, my team says it back to me we're only as good as our last project.

You can spend 20 years building a reputation, lose it in 30 seconds, but on time every time with excellence. And to get there, sometimes you need to do it by relying on your colleagues. Sometimes you can get there on your own, doesn't really matter. We're in it together. To do on time every time with excellence If that's all they remember already we're ahead of everybody else.

On the inside, on the internal side, is just be a really good person. Really be a good person. Don't pretend to care. Care. People aren't stupid. People know when they're genuinely supported and cared for. They know that you are actually showing up and not giving lip service to their lives.

Everybody has their own journey and if you don't understand that, as a leader, as a boss, as somebody who's running a team, you're missing the point. You have to show up, you have to be a good person, you must care and they must know that you do. And what's really interesting is you can give the harshest feedback to an employee if you have to because things are going sideways. But if they know that you care deeply, they will listen, not with defensiveness, but with open ears and open heart, because they want to get better. So it's so important just to be a good person to the people that you surround yourself with and hope that they're good back to you. But it is. You've got to model that behavior first before you expect people to give it to you. And I mean it's life skills. Right, be a good parent, be a good boss, be trustworthy in your personal life, in your client life. Like there's no magic here. There really is no magic. The magic is showing up over and over and over again and not letting people down.

You just nailed that ending of our conversation. That's a fantastic, that's a fantastic spot to end. I mean, I think sometimes you get into market trends and technology and I completely agree. It is, I think, really fundamentally about people connecting with people and all the rest of it I think surrounds it. But if you're not starting with that, those foundational pieces, you got a much bigger hill to climb. I love chatting with you.

I really appreciate the time you've taken with us today, and I can't wait to see all that 2025 has in store for you and LSD.

Thank you so very much and it was just a pleasure to be here. Thank you so so much.