CR Celona Uses His Faith In The Power Of Human Beings To Help People Start Their Own Movements For Giving Back To Society

Welcome to another episode of Action & Ambition with your host, Phillip Lanos. Today’s guest is CR Celona. Celona is the Founder/CEO of CLUSTER, a new on-demand social impact platform. It empowers Millennials and Gen Z to create, share, and scale the causes that matter most to them. CR  has 20 years of Digital Media Management experience with National Senior Agency + Client Relationships. Influencer Marketing Founder. He specialized in; Ad Sales, Lean Thinking, Business Development, Social Media, FTC/GDPR Compliance, SaaS Product Development, Scalable Growth, and Emerging Technologies.  You’re going to love this episode. Let’s get to it! What is CR About? (1:03) A large part of their mission is tied to the idea that people are powerful.  CR believes that the majority of people do not know how powerful they are. For example, CR says, imagine you are taking a selfie and you post that selfie you might get 100 followers and 10 interactions, and that would be an achievement.  Then say you post a selfie of you with a kitten you just rescued, something very human and you post that out to your friends, and suddenly you see 10x more followers, likes, and comments.  What you realize from that is social functionally is social but we need and seek human interactions.  We, as humans, seek positivity, and we also seek real things.  The irony of digital media is that it extracted the human from a lot of those behaviours and a lot of what we get from that is that these platforms are very insular in nature. Each person has functionally built their own micro-publishing platform. If everyone is powerful, which they are, a lot of us like giving back because the feeling of it is a quite powerful inside of us.  When you help someone else, you feel better about yourself.  CR thought what if there was a platform that allowed you to simplify giving back, utilizing your existing digital platform and an echo chamber for the things you care most about.  What if all of that gave you better engagement, more reach allows you to be discovered, and eventually, maybe that way of giving back that you love could be turned into a potential opportunity, future for income.  What does CR mean with our design is our culture? (29:01) There is a lot of ethos that we follow. CR’s company is fairly new for a lot of his teammates. For CR, however, it is familiar because he came up with the concept and built it.  Even though CR lost his father at a young age, he still felt lucky because his father recruited their CTO out of the CIA at the end of the cold war.  The CTO is currently CR’s uncle Stuart, and he was CR’s father’s business partner for the 15-20 years they were together where they did some amazing things.  They also had catastrophic failures and wild ideas, but whenever CR has called with them, they reflect on everything. It is like having a vision of his father’s life to CR.  When CR says or does certain things his uncle will call him up and say his dad used to do that, he’d ask if CR knew he did it and most of the time CR would say no.  Not everyone associates their family with their business, but CR has found it largely beneficial even though he is big on working with friends. People say do not make business personal, but CR finds that everything is personal regardless. He tries not to let things hurt or phase him, but life business is personal, and his missions are personal. CR believes managers make all of the difference, and he was lucky that early in his career, he had a highly reviewed automotive website that discovered him.  That was how CR got into technology. CR started as a street racer in New York, even though it was a lot of fun, CR says it is best to do racing on an actual racetrack.  Clusters of Change Clusters of Change provides mentorship and tools to inspire and help clusters, ecosystems, innovation agencies and governments employ new scalable models and become entrepreneur-driven entities that spur exponential growth. It's time to move away from 'clusters-as-usual' and join the movement for 'clusters-of-change'! Resources Connect with CR: LinkedIn Clusters of Change: Website Connect with Phillip: LinkedIn