Everybody wants to work with creators. Fewer brands understand how to do it well.

Bree Flemings is the founder and CEO of Jem Social, a platform built to connect brands with creators and make those partnerships easier to manage.

In this episode of The Beyond Normal Podcast, Bree joins Kenny Groom to talk about her journey from DJ and content creator to building a technology company inside the growing creator economy.

Bree shares how losing more than $30,000 in DJ bookings during the pandemic pushed her deeper into content creation and helped her recognize how resilient the creator business could be. That experience eventually led her from building a local DJ booking service to creating a marketplace connecting brands and creators.

The conversation gets into one of the biggest problems Bree sees today: brands want creator partnerships, but many still don't have the strategy or education needed to make them work.

Kenny and Bree discuss why follower count isn't everything, the opportunity in working with smaller creators, how brands should think about creator ROI, and why content creation and influencer marketing aren't necessarily the same thing.

Bree also gets candid about building Jem Social. She explains why finding paying customers was harder than building the original technology, how the company continued adjusting its strategy, and why founders can hurt themselves by trying to solve too many problems at once.

Her advice for builders is simple: solve one problem first.

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In this episode of the Beyond Normal Podcast, Kenny Groom sits down with Shari “Sunni” Faircloth, founder and creative director of Sunni Aesthetics, to talk about creativity, authenticity, and building a brand that feels like you.

Sunni shares how working behind the scenes in Atlanta’s film industry shaped her approach to storytelling. She explains why the story behind a brand matters, how small visual details influence the way people experience a business, and why founders do not need a massive budget to create something memorable.

The conversation also explores why creatives struggle to price their work, how one strong idea can become an entire content ecosystem, and why AI should be used as a resource instead of a replacement for original thought.

If you are building a brand in a time when everything is starting to look and sound the same, this episode will challenge you to return to what makes your story yours.

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In this episode of the Beyond Normal Podcast, Kenny Groom sits down with Mbere Monjok, Technical Program Manager at Google, to talk about building real value in this new AI wave.

Mbere shares the biggest mistake she sees founders make: leading with "we're AI-powered" instead of the problem they actually solve. She digs into where AI is delivering real ROI right now (turning unstructured, messy data into dashboards and decisions), why founders should treat AI as a thinking partner rather than just an input-output tool, and what trustworthy AI actually requires when the tech gets things wrong.

The conversation also covers opportunity for Black founders in this moment, why distribution can outperform product, and why founders should choose quality over speed for the long game.

If you're a founder trying to figure out what's signal and what's noise in AI right now, this episode will hit home.

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