Podcast production · Personal brand

Tyler Chisholm / Collisions YYC

Personal Brand  ·  Podcast Production  ·  Event Planning  ·  Content Strategy  ·  Calgary, AB

2019 – 2026  ·  Seven years  ·  Monthly retainer

The client

Before he was a podcast host and a successful CEO, Tyler Chisholm was a farm kid from rural Quebec who trained to be a pilot, became a fitness instructor, and eventually founded clearmotive marketing group. He's relentless and curious. He's the kind of person who notices an opportunity, names it before anyone else does, and then finds someone to help him chase it.

In 2019, that opportunity had a name: Collisions YYC. His friend Kevin Crowe had a theory — that Calgary's business story was happening everywhere, quietly, and almost nobody was covering it. The city was in the middle of an identity shift, slowly shedding its oil-and-gas skin and emerging as something harder to categorize. Tyler, already the host of another podcast, They Just Get It, and a growing voice in the Calgary business scene, was the right person to tell it.

He just needed someone to help him build it.

The situation

Tyler's internal team at clearmotive is good at what they do. But what they do is serve clients — and a CEO's personal podcast is nobody's top priority when there's client work on the table. Tyler needed someone who could treat Collisions YYC like it was the only thing on their desk.

He hired me right before the show launched. Which meant I got to build it from nothing — and then grow alongside it for seven years.

What was at stake

Collisions YYC wasn't just a podcast. It was Tyler's public statement about what Calgary was becoming. If it launched inconsistently, faded into the background, or sounded like a hobby instead of a platform, it would undermine the brand he'd spent years building. Two episodes a week, for years, requires a machine. Without one, it doesn't happen.

The work

We started by figuring out what the show needed to be — not just what it was. In those first weeks I was at his office regularly, asking questions: What does success look like in a year? What does his audience actually want from this? How do we make sure every episode gets as much runway as possible from Tyler's guests' own networks?

From there, I built the machine. Content calendars. Show notes. Social graphics. Website copy. Audiograms, quote cards, carousels — every format we could find to squeeze value out of each episode. We experimented constantly and kept what landed. Over time, what started as me executing from a brief became me running the whole operation — posting without approval, managing relationships with sponsors, handling the newsletter, keeping four websites updated and ranking.

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We also ran the Red Express, an annual fundraiser in partnership with CUPS Calgary that raised $10,000+ every year for local families in need. I handled the promotion, the donation page, the graphics, the website updates and supported management of the CUPS relationship. That one felt personal every time.

A moment that mattered

When he asked me about the black square.

In the summer of 2020, Tyler called me. George Floyd had just been killed. The internet was filling up with black squares — a gesture of solidarity that had spread fast across social media, including from brands and executives who, by most accounts, had not spent much time actually platforming Black voices.

Tyler wanted to know what I thought. Should he post one?

I told him no. And here's why I said it the way I did.

Posting a black square, for Tyler, would have been taking up space in a conversation about race in America to essentially excuse himself from it. His leadership team was all white. If someone scrolled through his guest history, they'd see a lot of middle-aged white men. To post a square and say "we stand in solidarity" would have been performative at best and dishonest at worst — and Tyler is too smart to be dishonest.

He got it immediately. What he said back was better than the square: let's find more Black and racialized guests and give them the platform.

That's what we did. We moved quickly, we were intentional, and we made sure that from that point forward, if someone scrolled through Collisions YYC, they weren't seeing a sea of white, middle-aged men's faces staring back at them.

Why this matters for your brand

Any consultant can post on a schedule. Not every consultant will tell you when you're about to make a mistake and have the knowledge to redirect you toward something with actual impact. That call in 2020 is the clearest example I have of what brand stewardship actually means.

Another moment that mattered

The blog that became the book.

In 2024, I encouraged Tyler to start writing a monthly blog. He was curious. About leadership, about what makes people tick, about the role of curiosity itself as a professional skill. He'd been circling these ideas in conversations for years. I thought writing them down might be useful.

He started writing. And somewhere in those early posts, I noticed something: this wasn't merely blog content. This had the legs to become a business book.

The concept was there — curiosity as a leadership strength, not a soft skill. The voice was there. The stories were there. I kept nudging. We kept building. By the time we hit the 500-episode milestone for Collisions YYC, I had also planned the celebration event where he launched it: a 200-person evening at the Telus Convention Centre, complete with two live panels, interactive installations, and a room full of people who'd spent five years listening to Tyler tell Calgary's story back to itself.

The book — Curious as Hell — was published the same day on May 5, 2025. It's now the foundation of his entire next chapter: a new podcast, a coaching practice, a rebrand. It started with a nudge to write a blog.

What changed

The numbers tell part of it. Tyler's LinkedIn following tripled. His Instagram went from zero to 2,000+ active followers. His newsletter grew from zero to 2,000+ subscribers. The podcast racked up 534 episodes and ranked among Canada's top business podcasts. The Red Express raised more money every year than the year before.

But the part that doesn't fit in a chart is this: Tyler went from a CEO with a podcast to a recognizable Calgary voice with a book, a methodology, a community, and a clear direction for the next decade of his career. The pieces were always there. What they needed was someone to see them, name them, and help build the through-line.

That's what seven years of brand stewardship looks like.

The relationship

We are not the same person. Tyler is Type A, high-energy, and opinionated. I am the opposite of most of those things. There were early misses — moments where we miscommunicated, where I had to calibrate to his speed, where he had to trust that I knew what I was doing.

We found the rhythm. Within a year I was operating with full autonomy. I was posting without approval, making calls on his behalf, representing his voice in every piece of content we put out. We met weekly. We ran everything through Asana. We built the kind of shorthand that usually takes a lot longer than a year.

What made it work wasn't shared values or similar personalities. It was mutual respect for what the other person brought to the table, and a shared commitment to making the work good. Even when we disagreed (actually, especially when we disagreed) we never let it get in the way of the brand or the work.

What I'm most proud of, looking back, is that I was there on day one when nobody knew if Collisions YYC would land — and I was still there seven years later when Tyler launched a book at a 200-person event I planned, in a room full of people whose stories he'd been telling the whole time. That's a legacy.

Blah blah blah

- Tyler Chisholm, CEO of clearmotive marketing group

Ready to build something that lasts?

If you're a leader or brand that needs more than a content calendar — if you need someone who will show up like they give a damn and stay until the work is done — let's talk.