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Brian Wallace

• Website: nowsourcing.com
• Innovate Summit: theinnovatesummit.com
  
• LinkedIn: @nowsourcing

Brian Wallace doesn’t start with the pitch. He starts with the person. That’s been true for 19.5 years at NowSourcing — the visual storytelling and infographic agency he built from scratch into one of the most recognized in the industry. It was true during his half-decade on the South by Southwest advisory board, watching ideas become movements and strangers become collaborators. And it’s the thesis behind the Innovate Summit, the event he organizes around a simple, countercultural belief: that the most valuable thing you can walk away from any room with is one real relationship.

This conversation is wide-ranging in the best way. Brian talks about simplifying complex ideas, about what it means to be a super-connector in a world that’s forgotten how to connect, and about why he believes creativity is breathed into every single person — even the ones convinced they’re not creative.

In This Conversation, Brian Wallace Shares:

👉 The three-layer framework — emotion, storytelling, data — and why order matters more than people think

👉 Why leading with facts and features is the fastest way to lose someone before you’ve started

👉 What it actually looks like to be a super-connector, and why most people have the definition wrong

👉 The Innovate Summit’s “concierge of humanity” approach and what it could mean for people who hate networking

👉 Why he believes creativity is born into every person — and what to do when you’ve stopped believing that about yourself

👉 What “everyone is a media company” means for someone starting over in transition

👉 Why everything you want is on the other side of scary — and why that cliff is smaller than you think

Emotion, Storytelling, Data — In That Order

Brian has a three-layer framework. It’s deceptively simple. And once you hear it, you can’t stop noticing every time someone gets the order wrong.

The framework: emotion, storytelling, data. Lead with what makes someone feel something. Follow with the story that gives it shape. Land it with the facts that make it credible.

Most people do the opposite. They open with bullet points and features and credentials. They write the hundred-page report before anyone has decided they care.

Brian uses Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink to make the point. In the opening of that book, two groups examine ancient statues. An expert feels, in his gut, that they’re fake — he can’t even explain why. A prestigious research institute publishes a hundred-page authentication report saying they’re real. The expert was right.

“We pretend that we’re such sophisticated creatures, but really we’re not. People connect on emotion. If all I ever did was just spout a bunch of bullet points and heavy-handed sales tactics, would I be on your show right now?”

He’s not against data. He’s against leading with it before you’ve earned the right to be heard.

“When people bother to layer in the emotion and the story, they’re going to trust you. That’s why I like to invoke those three layers, in that order.”

It’s a framework built for the complexity of rebuilding something. When you’re in transition — when the old title is gone and you’re trying to explain what you do now — it’s easy to default to credentials. Brian’s argument is that the story comes first. Always.

“Don’t You Know How to Mingle?”

Brian tells a story. There’s a B2B tech conference, a beautiful open field, a perfect afternoon. He and a friend are deep in a real conversation — the kind where people cycle in and out naturally, where nobody’s checking their phone. And from across the way, a woman has been watching them.

She walks over.

“She says: ‘Don’t you know how to mingle?'”

What followed was a tour of the room — her pitching her startup at every conversation, collecting surface contact after surface contact, burning through the room like a campaign. Brian doesn’t remember her startup. He doesn’t remember her name. But his friend from that afternoon? He talks to him all the time.

That friend said something Brian still carries:

“The thing that I really want to get out of a conference is to just meet one cool person. Not meet a thousand leads and scan badges and get the highest stack of business cards. Just one really amazing quality person that I want to keep in touch with forever.”

That story is the origin of the Innovate Summit. One relationship that matters, and an entire event architecture built to make that possible — not once, but for everyone in the room.

The Concierge of Humanity

The conference industry, Brian argues, is broken. And it was already failing before the pandemic accelerated the collapse.

“People don’t want to partner with you. They don’t want to buy from you. They don’t even want to hear from you unless they know you, like you, and trust you.”

What he built with Innovate is the opposite of the badge-scan-and-swag-bag model. About half the population is introverted, Brian points out — and for most of them, a 500-person event ends the same way: back pressed against the wall, phone out, counting the minutes until it’s over.

So he hired people whose only job is what he calls being the concierge of humanity.

“They already know that you’re coming. They already know the other people in the room. And they’re like: here are the five people you should meet before you leave — and we’re going to introduce you.”

For an introvert, he says, that’s a God send. For an extrovert, it’s a way to aim all that energy at the right people instead of burning it on the room.

The goal is an event where everybody in it is the kind of person his friend was looking for that afternoon — not the famous speaker or the biggest sponsor or the award winner. Just a room full of people worth knowing.

“Why can’t everybody in the room be like that? It’s because people don’t want to try very hard.”

The Most Interesting Person in the Room

Brian has given a talk on this for seven years. The title: Try to Be the Most Interesting Person in the Room.

He’s clear that this isn’t about ego. It’s about showing up prepared to give something — not just to take. And it starts with a basic diagnostic most people fail:

“Hey Evan, how are you? How’s the weather? How was sports ball?”

These are conversation stoppers masquerading as conversation starters. The elevator pitch — what most people rehearse for events — is worse. Zig Ziglar said it decades ago, Brian points out:

“Nobody cares about anything that you’re talking about until you show that you care about that.”

What Brian does instead is go deep rather than wide. One real conversation beats twelve forgettable ones. He names curiosity as a practice — not a tactic — and talks about something he calls intimacy: the ability to unlock what’s actually inside someone.

He describes a call he had that morning. The person was in a corporate role, subdued, baseline energy. But somewhere in the conversation, Brian started asking about a previous startup that hadn’t worked out. You could hear the shift.

“By the end of the conversation, he was so excited — I was just drawing out some passion that he had left behind.”

That’s the work. Not mingling. Not pitching. Finding what’s left behind and helping someone remember it.

Everyone Is a Media Company

This is the thing Brian says in passing that stays the longest.

“Everybody, every brand is a media company.”

He means it practically: whether you’re building something intentionally or not, people are watching, evaluating, forming impressions. The question isn’t whether you have a presence — it’s whether you’re being thoughtful about it.

For the person in transition — the one who just left the role that gave them their platform and now feels invisible — this reframe matters. You don’t have to start from nothing. You already have a story, a voice, a set of ideas that shaped real people in real places. The work now is making that visible.

Brian is honest about his own inconsistency here. He doesn’t always do this well. But he points to something that worked: when Facebook Live launched, he went live every business day for a year.

“I just wanted to get better at speaking. So I could talk at a blinking light for hours on end about anything. It just never leaves you at this point.”

His advice for anyone starting over: “If you’re in transition — what are you waiting for? What if you reached out to everybody you’ve ever connected with? See how they’re doing.”

“Everything you want is on the other side of scary. You think you’re jumping off a cliff and you’re just at the side of a street — it’s something this big that you can go off of.”

Flourishing Is Showing Up with a Capital S

I asked Brian what flourishing means to him near the end of our conversation. He didn’t default to an easy answer.

“Flourishing is where you’re manifesting a lot of what you could be. The recapturing of a lot of unrealized potential.”

He went further:

“A lot of us don’t show up fully. If something is in a flourish, they’re going to show up a lot more matter of factly, a lot more intentionally, and just bring themselves to it.”

He talks about how he shows up — intense, Taurus-born, originally from New York — but with intention running through all of it. And he frames the question not as a personal achievement but as a responsibility:

“I just don’t believe in any other way to do it. Because who else is going to do it if you’re not?”

For the Leader in Transition

📌 Lead with emotion and story before you lead with credentials. The facts can wait until someone has decided they want to hear them.

📌 You don’t have to build a new network from scratch. You have equity with people already. Go back and find it.

📌 The first step out of isolation is a simple one: reach out. You don’t have to have everything figured out before you do.

📌 Your creativity wasn’t assigned by your job title. It was breathed into you. The guy in his basement whittling a canoe while insisting he’s “not creative” is everywhere.

📌 Everyone is a media company — including you. The platform you built over 15 or 20 years of ministry didn’t disappear when the role did.

Questions Worth Asking

• What are you over-explaining that you could instead just make someone feel?
• Who is one person from your previous season you’ve lost touch with who’s worth calling this week?
• What’s the thing you want that’s sitting on the other side of the scared feeling?
• What would it look like to show up fully — not with all the answers, but with all of yourself?