1st of the Month Wrangle: How Direct-to-Consumer Thinking Can Shape Vacation Rental Marketing with Orlie Benjamin and Patti Ziegler

In this third episode of First of the Month Wrangle, presented by Lasoh, Alex & Annie are joined by Orlie Benjamin, Founder and CEO of Lasoh, and Patti Ziegler, Orlie’s longtime mentor and former leader at Scotts Miracle-Gro.

Before building Lasoh, Orlie worked with Patti across direct-to-consumer marketing, brand building, innovation, and partnerships. That experience shaped how she thinks about customer relationships, distribution, and the value of knowing the people behind each purchase.

That same thinking applies in vacation rentals. OTAs may help bring guests in, but operators still need a way to understand who those guests are, stay connected, and create reasons for them to book again.

Orlie and Patti also share the mentorship behind that journey, including what it means to take a chance on someone, recognize when a role is no longer the right fit, and support a person as they move toward something bigger.

Transcript

00:00 – Welcome to the First of the Month Wrangle

Alex: It’s the first of the month, which means it’s time for our First of the Month Wrangle, brought to you by Lasoh. Every month, we take one big idea shaping the vacation rental industry, and instead of just talking about it, we actually pull it apart — what’s working, what’s not, and what people aren’t saying out loud. And we’ve got Orlie Benjamin, CEO of Lasoh, here to help us do just that. Okay, Orlie, let’s wrangle it.

Alex: Welcome to Alex and Annie, the Real Women of Vacation Rentals. I’m Alex.

Annie: And I’m Annie. We’re back for our First of the Month Wrangle. We’ve got Orlie Benjamin, CEO of Lasoh, and a very special guest today — Patti Ziegler, Orlie’s mentor, who has a lot of great stories and insight from years of business experience. So great to see you both.

Patti Ziegler: Hi, I’m Patti Ziegler — thank you for having me. I’m super impressed you managed to fit “Wrangle” and “Lasoh” in one sentence, that’s a fabulous pun to kick things off with. I had the honor of working with Orlie before, when I was CMO at Scotts Miracle-Gro and Orlie was on my team. We worked together across marketing, direct-to-consumer, and innovation — it was a pretty fabulous moment in my career, and I know it led to her pivot, so it’s been really fun watching what she’s built. Thanks for having me today.

Annie: Thank you so much for being here — I’m sorry I missed the earlier calls, so I’m really excited to hear all of this. I’ve known Orlie for a little over two years now, and it’s been wonderful watching where she’s taken her business. I really want to unpack how you two met at Scotts and what that pivot looked like. Orlie, that was your last corporate role, right? Tell us a bit about that, and how you managed to keep Patty along for the ride afterward.

02:04 – Building From Zero to One at Scotts Miracle-Gro

Orlie Benjamin: Yes, Scotts Miracle-Gro was my last corporate role. There, I was exposed to things I’d never encountered before — I got the opportunity to build a brand from zero to one within the direct-to-consumer part of the organization, led by Patty. Once that project launched, I was pivoted into other innovation work — licensing, partnerships, and exposure to corporate venture capital, both completely new to me.

During that zero-to-one phase, I realized I’d only ever worked in large environments — big ships that are hard to steer. I got genuinely, maybe too excited about that zero-to-one phase — a little too committed, honestly. That was a real lightbulb moment for me. Combined with exposure to innovation and entrepreneurship more broadly, it became clear I wanted to bet on myself, and that’s when I pivoted to work at a startup out of Palo Alto.

Annie: Excellent — tell us a bit about the dynamic between the two of you and your roles.

03:21 – The Skunkworks Team Inside a Billion-Dollar Brand

Patti Ziegler: I’ll start and Orlie can pick up. This was during COVID, which was our biggest catalyst for change — but it was also the early days of direct-to-consumer for corporations generally. Amazon existed, sure, but consumers having direct relationships with manufacturers who’d traditionally sold exclusively through big retail channels — for us that meant Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Walmart — was still new territory.

It was time to figure out how we’d use Amazon and build our own direct-to-consumer business, mostly as a launchpad for innovation and new brands. Consumers coming of age at the time were showing very different buying behaviors and different ways of engaging with the category, so we put on our innovation hats and built multiple brands and product lines in parallel, testing across distribution channels to figure out what worked — and using it as a launchpad for things that might eventually scale into retail.

It was an exciting time — Scotts had also started a small venture arm, giving us access to a lot of interesting people, and we’d just begun licensing, which Orlie spearheaded, extending the brand into every meaningful channel for what was, at the time, tomorrow’s consumer — which is really today’s consumer experience. It was genuinely exciting as a professional to build that team. We were essentially the skunkworks of the marketing department, because these are billion-dollar brands — big ships that are hard to turn on a dime. So we got all the energy of “what if we tried this,” with the ability to fail fast or succeed fast. It was a great place to build a team, and a great place to work alongside some fabulous women like Orlie.

Annie: That’s very cool. I’ve worked at two publicly traded companies, and the frustration of being at a level where you can’t affect immediate change is real — mistakes just weren’t allowed. You’d pitch an idea and hear, “Great in theory, but that goes on next year’s roadmap, nine months out, we’ll revisit in six months, then it’ll be three months before we can act on it, and you’ll already be behind.” How did you navigate finding that balance — getting ideas out, executing them, and not getting frustrated whether they failed or even when they succeeded but got slowed down with a “let’s be more methodical” response?

06:07 – A Self-Funding Innovation Engine

Patti Ziegler: We were genuinely liberated by having a fabulous boss — our COO was focused on making sure we captured this emerging consumer and the data showing that the next generation of shoppers was going to behave differently. I also ran the digital business at the time, so we had room to experiment there. As luck would have it, the company also acquired another direct-to-consumer business, and that testing mentality and appetite for trying new things all came together at the right moment.

There were plenty of times someone would say, “That’s a good idea, but it’s not a hundred-million-dollar idea, so we can’t do it” — the bigger brands were looking for innovation that would scale in three to five years, an upgrade to an existing line. But we were allowed to say, “this reflects a genuinely new buying behavior, a new way people are doing things,” and just experiment. We had a self-funding mechanism, which was really unique at the time — once we covered our initial bet, anything on top of that got reinvested straight back into fueling more innovation. We had big wins, we had some not-so-good ones that quickly became learnings, and we pivoted and shut those down fast.

The biggest factor in all of it was having a really diverse skill set on that innovation team. Orlie’s background — she’s a lawyer, as you probably know — meant I suddenly had a lawyer on my team who was also incredibly business-minded, creative, and genuinely understood technology. We also had another woman who was purely creative, always wanting to build interesting things and forming great connections, and we had strong media partnerships, since we also managed the media budget — media partners who were themselves experimenting with new formats at the time, back when a lot of digital brands were just getting off the ground. So it was really opportunity and inspiration coming together, leading to innovation, and we did it all together.

Annie: I love that — it actually ties into our podcast’s intro song, about what happens when opportunity and inspiration meet, especially combined with innovation. And to make that happen, you need the right people at the table. Comparing it to short-term rentals — there are similarities and differences in how you looked at retail through Home Depot and Lowe’s versus how we think about Airbnb and the OTAs. When you started building more direct-to-consumer pathways, did that change your relationship with your retail partners? I ask because some OTAs in our space really don’t like it when operators lean into direct booking, while others understand it’s a balancing act where everyone serves a different part of the ecosystem.

09:37 – Managing Retail Relationships During the DTC Shift

Patti Ziegler: Back then, we were genuinely small fish — this is way back, when Amazon was just entering into bigger relationships with manufacturer-created products. Remember, we shipped big, heavy bags of product, so we weren’t exactly the first name anyone in direct-to-consumer was worried about as a threat.

We were also really deliberate about being transparent, and we approached it as an innovation engine — we were launching products retailers couldn’t afford to launch themselves, testing consumer acceptance they relied on us to validate. We’d literally bring retail partners our new launches and ask, “What do you think — could you see carrying this at scale, and what would the pricing model look like?” It was a genuinely open experiment. Shipping costs online were also a real barrier that kept retailers feeling secure — lawn and garden is fundamentally a retail-driven category, so we were never perceived as trying to eat their lunch.

Instead, we found our way in through a side door, because retailers were also looking to launch innovative products and build their own brand equity, and partnering with us on something that might one day become an exclusive for their stores was genuinely appealing — especially in live goods, where brands attached to plants were a fairly new concept at the time. It was exciting, but never perceived as a threat to their distribution model. The most important thing Orlie contributed was really getting to know these consumers — what they liked, what they bought — so we could build better downstream innovation for the bigger brands. It was a combination of consumer experience, an innovation playground, and genuine retail partnership that made it all work.

Annie: Orlie, how did you take all of that and apply it to building Lasoh?

11:52 – From B2B2C to Direct-to-Consumer Conviction

Orlie Benjamin: Since I’d worked primarily in direct-to-consumer businesses before Scotts, that was actually my first time working in consumer packaged goods. I’d always been trained to believe you should know your customer, build a relationship with them, and get them to come back — the equation we always talked about at Victoria’s Secret was: how many customers do you have, how many times a year do they transact, and how much do they spend each time? Multiply those three, and that’s revenue.

At Scotts, “customer” meant the retailer, and the actual end user of the product was their customer — that multi-stakeholder environment was genuinely foreign to me. What became clear is that I strongly prefer working direct-to-consumer over a B2B2C model with multiple stakeholders. That said, it exposed me to B2B2C in a valuable way — it validated my preference for DTC, but also taught me that B2B2C can be a great acquisition channel, and if you can build a pathway from B2B2C into direct-to-consumer, that’s a genuinely interesting strategy I’d never considered before, since I’d never worked outside pure DTC environments. Thinking about distribution differently opened my mind to new pathways to the end consumer, and I’m grateful for that.

13:37 – The Leadership and Mentorship Bond

Annie: One thing that’s really stood out in our conversations with you both is the leadership journey and the friendship and mentorship that came out of this relationship. Orlie, what did Patty give you from a leadership perspective that you hadn’t gotten in other roles — something that’s kept you two close to this day?

Orlie Benjamin: I think she saw that I was hungry to try new things and wasn’t afraid to take a chance on learning, and she gave me exposure to things I wouldn’t have gotten in a more structured environment, because we had the freedom to operate as this little skunkworks group. I got to work on zero-to-one brand building, then assess existing brands and whether they should continue, and then I was handed a whole new chapter around corporate venture capital and partnerships.

Having someone take a bet on you, when they can see you’re capable of something even before you know it yourself, is genuinely important — because before you take a bet on yourself, someone has to take a bet on you first. That’s how you learn to do it. I think anyone who eventually reaches the point of betting on themselves probably does so because someone bet on them first.

Patti Ziegler: That’s beautiful, Orlie. And for anyone listening who doesn’t already know — Orlie is wickedly smart. Betting on her was a pretty easy bet. She’s devoted, curious, and everything you want in your best business partners. She was a great partner for me.

Annie: Patty, was there something specific in Orlie that stood out to you — something that told you this is what she should be doing?

15:37 – What Made Orlie Stand Out

Patti Ziegler: It was really a partnership — Orlie bet on me too, and was there for me when I needed her. What was most interesting is that we recruited her specifically because she had DTC brand-building experience. When she joined, she looked at everything we were doing and really helped us take a strategic approach — strategy is choice, and she was instrumental in helping build out a genuinely young team, giving us the frameworks and processes to actually evaluate what success even meant.

She was a key leader in helping us figure out what direct-to-consumer could look like from a revenue standpoint. A lot of people fall in love with ideas — that’s actually my own strength, falling in love with an idea and having a decent sense of which ones might work — but Orlie was the one who’d say, “You can love that idea all you want, but it’s not making any money.” She brought a track record of understanding the actual mechanics of evaluating what would make it to the next stage.

And once I realized she was a lawyer, putting her into corporate venture was an easy call — she could speak so many languages across domains that it was a clear win. Scotts is a relatively flat organization, so she wasn’t meeting with junior staff — she was sitting with the CFO. Having someone with that range of vocabulary who could operate across so many domains was a huge asset. She was the pro brought in to help us grow up fast, and she did exactly that.

17:59 – Knowing When It Was Time to Leave

Annie: At some point, though, Orlie, you outgrew the role and it led to some frustration — ultimately, you left.

Patti Ziegler: She left us. [laughs]

Annie: We’re sharing this because, while it’s not specifically about vacation rentals, one of the throughlines on our show has always been about professional development and knowing when to make a change. That can be really hard. Orlie, what made you realize this wasn’t where you wanted to be anymore?

Orlie Benjamin: I got jealous of the founders — the ones pitching for corporate venture capital investment — and I wanted to be them. I would never have known that was even something I could pursue if I hadn’t been exposed to sitting on that side of the table. I’m not someone who gets jealous often; I usually believe we can all win together. But I wanted what they had, and that was the real lightbulb moment.

I don’t think I would have had the confidence to say, “I could do this too” without already having built something zero to one myself, combined with strong training in other environments. You can want what someone else has without feeling ready for it — but the combination of that experience plus genuinely wanting that path is what motivated me to actually go pursue it. The reality is employment is a partnership: the business needs certain work from you, and you get security, income, and benefits in return. I wanted to do different work than what the company needed from me at that point, and that meant it just wasn’t a fit anymore. I feel very lucky that even after no longer being a fit at that company, I’ve maintained genuinely good relationships with the people who took bets on me.

Annie: Patty, on that — as leaders, sometimes your own success is tied to a stellar employee, and you want them to stay. You made the call that it was actually better to let Orlie go. How did you come to terms with that, and end up on the other side cheering her on as a mentor?

20:43 – Letting Go of a Great Employee

Patti Ziegler: That’s more about the human side — watching someone grow frustrated as they try to pivot and change how they’re approaching things, and just knowing they’re going to fly, so you can’t be the one constantly asking them to change. At some point, asking Orlie to suppress one of her real strengths just to fit the role she was in would have taken away too much of who she was. That strength was simply better suited elsewhere. So it wasn’t that she couldn’t have thrived somewhere else at Scotts — it’s that the specific role she was in wasn’t right for her anymore, and you just know when that’s the right decision for the human involved.

Honestly, most of the time when I cry over someone leaving, it’s because I know they’re about to be really successful — and so far that’s held true. I’ve actually lost two people to your exact industry — one runs an Airbnb in Maine — and both of them are among the people I’ve been saddest to see go.

Annie: That’s pretty awesome. Orlie, you actually called Patty on the anniversary of the day she let you go, just to thank her. What had become clear to you by then?

22:00 – Discovering Ikigai

Orlie Benjamin: I was really reflecting on everything I’d learned at Scotts — the zero-to-one exposure, the exposure to venture capital and innovation — and how it helped me find something I genuinely care about. I later came across the Japanese concept of ikigai, or purpose: the intersection of something you love, something you’re good at, something you can get paid for, and something there’s demand for. When all four line up, that’s ikigai.

I basically discovered I loved something I never would have been exposed to otherwise, and that I was frustrated enough without it that I needed it in my life going forward. That’s a gift. I often say you win or you learn — sometimes both — and the only real failure is not learning something. Having the chance to be exposed to all those environments and come away understanding something I’m genuinely passionate about is a real gift. I don’t think many people end up passionate about their actual work, so I’m very grateful — it was exactly the right moment to be exposed to those things, learn from them, and move on to climb the next thing.

23:24 – Sponsor Message: Lasoh

Annie: You hear us talk about this all the time — everyone wants more revenue, less OTA reliance, and better guest experiences. But most property managers and hosts are still piecing that together manually, across multiple tools or no tools at all. That’s exactly why we like what Lasoh is doing — they’ve built the industry’s only AI-native guest marketing platform, helping operators increase revenue per stay, stays per guest, and booking conversion rates.

Instead of just capturing the booker’s info, you’re capturing data from every guest on the stay. Instead of sending generic messaging, you’re delivering personalized experiences. And instead of hoping guests come back, you’re building a system that turns one-time bookings into repeat guests. Knowing more about every guest — not just the person who booked — creates smarter opportunities for upsells, add-ons, and experiences that actually feel relevant, without the guest experience feeling overly salesy. It’s all powered by Lasoh’s smart marketing and guest portal products.

Lasoh is offering Alex and Annie listeners the chance to apply to be one of their 10 founding members and enjoy 20% off Lasoh products with the code ALEXANDANNIE. This offer is valid through September 30, 2026. Learn more at explore.Lasohh.io/alex-annie.

24:56 – What the Anniversary Call Meant to Patty

Annie: What did that call mean to you, Patty? A year later, how did it land?

Patti Ziegler: It knocked me off my feet. I remember thinking, “Orlie’s calling me? What’s going on?” I was genuinely taken aback — it was a real gift. We’re still close today because of her generosity and the way she carried herself. We already knew a fair amount about each other’s lives — I actually lived in the neighborhood she grew up in, so we had a lot in common. It was one of the nicest professional compliments I’ve ever received. She’s a pretty special person, and I think you two already know that. Realizing you had an impact on someone’s real life, not just their professional life, is genuinely meaningful.

Annie: We say this on the show all the time — it’s about connecting the dots, and you can only really connect them looking backward. That’s a Steve Jobs quote, but it’s rung true for both of us, and it sounds like it’s true in the stories you’re both sharing today too. That gratitude usually surfaces a bit further down the line, maybe a year or so out. I’ve had those moments myself, reaching back out to past employers just to say I’m genuinely grateful for that time, even when it was challenging while I was living through it — you learn something in every role. And as I’ve continued in my career, I’ve realized you learn to trust your gut more over time, and start really believing in your own decisions — but you can’t get there without going through it a few times first.

27:02 – “What Are You Doing? Go Be What You Want to Be.”

Patti Ziegler: That was the gift Orlie gave me too — she’d say, “What are you doing? You’re not happy, go do something else, go be what you want to be. What do you actually want to be?” She’s a great cheerleader for changing direction and understanding what that feels like. We actually reconnected just in the past couple of years, and that’s been our ongoing conversation — it’s been fun.

Annie: What are you doing now? What did she encourage you toward?

Patti Ziegler: She encouraged me, and I started out consulting — she convinced me I’d be a great consultant, and I ended up taking a longer-term assignment at another firm, still in marketing. Honestly, I sometimes wonder if I jumped too quickly. I’m still at a bit of a crossroads — you never know what’s next, and whenever I’m ready to figure that out, she’ll probably be my first call.

Annie: Now, with Lasoh — are you involved on that side at all, or do you two mostly talk about the crazy world of vacation rentals separately?

28:00 – Patty’s Role Today: Pitch Deck Coaching

Patti Ziegler: I’m less of an industry expert, but I’m really good at helping people perfect their pitch decks. When she’s putting together materials for her next funding round, I can ask her the kind of C-suite-level question that gets her ready. That’s been our most recent engagement related to Lasoh. Honestly, I’m just genuinely impressed she built something so cool and innovative — how it works across the whole funnel for a property manager is pretty clever.

Annie: You’ve had to learn a bit about our industry through this process. What skills from Scotts, or things Orlie’s learned along the way, do you think translate — beyond tapping you for pitch deck help?

28:53 – Thinking Across the Whole Funnel

Patti Ziegler: At Scotts, as a primarily retail organization, you sell to buyers, buyers stock shelves, and you run advertising to drive consumer pull-through. When we started this division, suddenly the whole sales funnel was something we had to think about end-to-end, and Orlie brought real expertise there — figuring out how to invest media dollars when DTC was also indirectly working in favor of our retail partners. We had to think about brand messaging at the top of the funnel and closing deals at the bottom simultaneously.

When Orlie and I would talk about your industry, I’d say, “Oh, that’s kind of like your Airbnb and Vrbo” — you’re investing there, maybe not directly in dollars but in margin, and that’s your top-of-funnel awareness play. But the piece that’s genuinely critical is the relationship and loyalty layer, which is where Lasoh has so many tools in its toolbox, converting at the bottom of the funnel. I think those lessons around media investment across a multi-channel brand — retail and DTC together — really shaped how Orlie’s thinking about her product now.

Annie: I love “alphabet soup” as a description of our industry — it’s exactly that, so many acronyms. Can you give an example of how vacation rental companies should think about that balance between retail play, loyalty play, and direct play?

31:08 – The Mousetrap Lesson: Fishing Where the Fish Are, Until You Run Out of Fish

Patti Ziegler: Sure — coming out of COVID, everyone had gotten really good at finding their consumers directly, since retail stores weren’t an option, so everything skewed bottom-of-funnel. We used to joke about “fishing where the fish are.” That drove great early KPIs. But eventually, people who wanted your product had already bought it, and you’d exhausted the pool of easy-to-find customers — so you had to invest back at the top of the funnel to create fresh awareness and push new people down.

A funny, unrelated example: one of our brands made mousetraps, and we discovered marina owners bought them in bulk. So we started marketing heavily to marina owners — but there just aren’t that many of them, and eventually I’d hit the same people three or four times with nothing left to sell them. You always have to remember the top of the funnel, whether you’re investing through partnerships or straight media dollars, and play both sides simultaneously.

One thing we did well at Scotts was staying strong in the middle — especially as a retail-distributed brand where our retail partners were also advertising us, we had to nail the consideration phase: creative, messaging, loyalty programming, playing up and down the funnel at once. Media channels also exploded during my career — from three TV stations to every possible TikTok ad — but we stayed disciplined about the funnel, got really strong in the middle, kept some investment at the top, and remembered not to keep fishing at the bottom forever. There just aren’t that many marina owners.

Annie: Well, if we ever get into the marina business, now we know.

33:52 – Reflections on Mentorship

Annie: I want to go back to mentorship — Alex and I talk about this a lot on the show, and we’ve had really different experiences coming up in the industry. I came up around women who’d been through the ’70s and had to claw their way through business as women in that era. Some of them carried a mindset of, “You need to do the same amount of work I did to get here, and I’m not going to make it any easier for you.” So I didn’t really have mentors, and I swore that if I ever got the chance to mentor someone, I’d absolutely be that person, because I knew what it was like to struggle without anyone to bounce ideas off of.

Alex had a great mentor in the owner of her former company, and he was pivotal in shaping how she looks at things. I found my own mentors a bit later in life. What has this mentor-mentee relationship meant to both of you? Orlie, I’ll start with you — has it built confidence, or something else?

35:22 – “Courage Is Contagious”

Orlie Benjamin: Someone who’s experienced and seen more can often see more in me than I can see in myself — going back to her taking a bet on me before I even knew to bet on myself. That’s genuinely important: confidence, courage. Alex is actually wearing a shirt right now that says “Courage is contagious.” Patty is a real trailblazer everywhere she’s worked, and having that to model myself after — plus the confidence of watching someone who’s already done the thing I want to do — genuinely changes your mindset about what’s possible.

So much of what we believe we can do is relative to our own reference points and what’s around us. Having someone expand that frame of reference is the first step toward even thinking bigger. Patty thinks big, and she absolutely imparted that on me — bigger than I would have found on my own.

Annie: Orlie, as a leader yourself now, what’s a lesson from Patty you carry forward in how you guide your team?

Orlie Benjamin: Do the right thing for the business in the most human way possible — because those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

36:41 – Keeping the Human Element in an AI-Driven Industry

Annie: That actually leads right into my next question — looking ahead at AI. I was listening to someone yesterday talk about running 100 properties with zero employees, everything automated, virtual assistants handling everything, and I thought — we’re in hospitality. How can you run a hospitality business with no humans in it? Finding that balance and preserving human connection is so important, and what you’re doing, Orlie, is using technology while keeping that human component intact. That’s a really important lesson — we can layer on all the technology we want, but at the end of the day, humans are the ones consuming and experiencing it.

Patty, I’ve noticed you smiling at a lot of what Orlie’s said today — it seems like it really resonates, like you feel you raised a good one here.

Patti Ziegler: All wonderful things to hear. I had mentors of all different stripes too — some not very helpful, some genuinely great — but the best ones were the people who believed in me the same way Orlie described. I remember telling my boss, “We need a direct-to-consumer business — we have to figure out how to sell on Amazon, it’s the future, I’m your digital person, we’ve got to figure this out.” And he essentially said, “Fine, go figure it out.” Having someone with enough faith in you to say that was genuinely pivotal — suddenly I was talking to people in the distribution center, when I’d always just been in marketing running media plans. That’s the gift Scotts gave me: the freedom to go figure things out, even if they wouldn’t hand you real money until you had a plan — but once you did, they’d bet on it.

I try to be that same person for people I mentor — asking, “How do you want to solve that problem, what do you want to do?” I can see Orlie’s carried that forward too. What you said, about doing right by the business in the most human way possible, was really insightful — leaning too far in either direction slows progress or creates a genuinely bad place to work. It’s a careful, important balance, and it was really nicely put.

39:25 – When You Take Care of the Business, the Business Takes Care of the People

Annie: One of my own mentors and former bosses used to say something very similar — when you take care of the business, the business takes care of the people. If you look out for the business, it’s able to support people in the ways they actually need, because it has the capacity to. That understanding builds real loyalty among employees, but it also helps people find genuine passion in the work, because they feel valued and protected. That’s not always easy to find if your company doesn’t give off that vibe. So, since you mentioned passion earlier — how do you go about finding passion in the work you do?

40:22 – Vacations as an Underappreciated Piece of Mental Health

Orlie Benjamin: I genuinely believe vacations are one of the most underappreciated aspects of mental health — I’ve said this before. Culturally in the U.S., we work 50 weeks a year and take two or three weeks off, usually broken up into fragmented chunks rather than together — we work in order to live, a little bit.

The time spent on vacation is incredibly precious. I go to Greece for at least two weeks every year, among other trips, because your body genuinely needs the first week just to uncoil before it can actually relax, and the second week is when you truly recalibrate into something that gives you extra spring for whatever comes next. I think there’s real purpose in the responsibility of making sure people who spend their hard-earned, hard-reserved time away are actually able to make the memories they’re there for — spending time with people they love, which is ultimately what life is about. I feel genuinely passionate about that.

Patti Ziegler: Orlie actually helped me figure out my own passion — developing young people. What I missed most after leaving Scotts was, “Where are my young people?” That’s where I got my real energy: helping people live out the best version of their career and figure out what’s next for them. I haven’t figured out how to turn that into a full-time role yet, but maybe one day. It’s been fun to mentor — actually, while we’ve been sitting here, I got a text from another woman Orlie and I both worked with, and I’ve really enjoyed watching two people from our old team have a big success just this past week. Getting to keep high-fiving people from your own journey is a really nice way to live.

For me, finding passion came down to solving real, big problems — I was given the opportunity from a young age, both in a family business and professionally, to believe that there’s no reason the hardest problem in front of you can’t be solved right now, with the people you have. So let’s give it a try, and if we learn something along the way, even better.

43:10 – Closing Thoughts

Annie: Wow — a lot of great nuggets and insight from both of you today. It’s genuinely fun watching these stories unfold over the years, and I know it means a lot to both of you. Thank you for coming on, Patty.

Patti Ziegler: Thank you — I’ve really enjoyed my time here. Thanks for having me, and Orlie, thank you for the honor of inviting me.

Orlie Benjamin: Thank you for coming.

Annie: And thank you both for being here — I think this is officially your fourth episode with us, Patty, so you’re definitely a regular contributor at this point, and we love it. If anyone wants to get in touch — Patty, I’ll start with you — what’s the best way to reach you?

43:52 – How to Connect

Patti Ziegler: Email is best — Patti.Ziegler@gmail.com.

Annie: And for Lasoh — Lasoh.io?

Orlie Benjamin: Yes, you can reach me by email at my first name, orlie@lasoh.io. I do check LinkedIn messages too.

Patti Ziegler: LinkedIn — see, that shows how old I am! Email’s just easier for me to keep up with; I forget to check LinkedIn all the time, but I’ll get better at it, all you listeners out there.

Annie: We’ll drop the emails and LinkedIn links in the show notes, in case it motivates you to go check it out. If anyone wants to get in touch with Annie and me, you can go to alexandanniepodcast.com. Until next time, thanks everybody.