The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast: Recent Episodes
Converge & Rob Kischuk
Conversations with Leaders and Founders of Marketing Agencies, sharing wisdom on how they built their company, lessons they wish they knew when they started, and marketing and agency strategies for the months and years ahead.
Alane Boyd is the Co-founder of Biggest Goal (formerly BGBO Co & Workday Ninja), which helps businesses streamline operations and scale through AI solutions and automation. An AI and automation expert and serial entrepreneur, Alane brings over two decades of experience in the tech industry, having built and exited multiple SaaS companies, including growing one into an eight-figure enterprise. She is also a sought-after keynote speaker, author, and podcast host focused on helping leaders leverage technology to reclaim time and achieve sustainable growth.
Ted DeBettencourt is Co-founder of Juvo Leads, a human-powered chat service company that helps law firms, home services, digital agencies, and local businesses convert leads through meaningful interactions. Under Ted’s leadership, the company evolved from a chat service into a comprehensive platform that integrates chat, call tracking, form tracking, and SMS, consistently driving up to 50% more leads for their customers. With a JD and MBA from Case Western Reserve University, Ted is known for his expertise in high-performance marketing, legal, and service-based industries, and his hands-on approach to client engagement.
Hikari Senju is the Founder and CEO of Omneky, a San Francisco-based company leveraging AI to generate, analyze, and optimize personalized advertising creatives at scale. Under his leadership, Omneky has pioneered advancements in AI-driven advertising, building on Hikari's expertise in computer science and AI technologies gained from Harvard University. A renowned Japanese-American entrepreneur, he co‑founded QuickHelp, an on‑demand tutoring app later acquired by Yup Technologies, where he served as Head of Growth. Hikari’s leadership at Omneky has earned him numerous recognitions, including being named “One of the Most Visionary Business Leaders to Watch in 2024” by Enterprise World.
Jacqueline Basulto is the Founder and CEO of SeedX, an eight-figure digital marketing and business consultancy that has helped its clients generate over $1 billion in revenue. With over eight years of industry experience, Jacqueline has been instrumental in shaping SeedX's success, driving initiatives from sales to fostering a vibrant company culture. A Columbia University graduate, she began her entrepreneurial journey during her senior year, leveraging freelance digital marketing work and co-founding a tutoring company, which laid the groundwork for SeedX. Jacqueline’s achievements earned her a spot on Forbes' 2021 30 Under 30 in marketing and advertising.
Gilad Bechar is the Founder and CEO of Moburst, a global mobile-first digital marketing agency established in 2013 to address the inefficiencies in mobile app marketing. Under his leadership, Moburst has expanded internationally, collaborating with major brands like Google, Samsung, and Uber, and has been recognized as one of Adweek’s fastest-growing agencies from 2022 to 2024. Before founding Moburst, Bechar held senior marketing roles at companies such as CallApp and Mobilano and served as a mentor at Microsoft Accelerator. He also contributed to academia as the Mobile Marketing Academic Director at Tel Aviv University, sharing his expertise with aspiring marketers.
Chris Shihadeh is the President of Skylab Digital, a performance marketing agency specializing in media buying and lead generation within the Medicare and insurance sectors. With over two decades of experience in digital marketing, Chris has helped scale numerous brands using data-driven strategies and proprietary tech platforms. Under his leadership, Skylab Digital has become a recognized leader in the digital advertising industry, generating over 7,500 inbound calls for major insurance companies.
Veronica Clerkin is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner at AMZG Agency, a boutique, women-owned marketing and public relations firm. With over two decades of experience in the New York City media and advertising industry, she has held leadership roles at top organizations, including CBS, Fortune, and InStyle. Veronica is known for her strategic thinking, creative leadership, and commitment to supporting women-led brands. Her agency thrives on authentic client relationships, transparency, and delivering measurable results across social media, PR, and paid media.
Andy Crestodina is the CMO and Co-founder at Orbit Media Studios, an award-winning digital agency specializing in web design and development since 2001. With over two decades of experience, he has provided digital marketing guidance to more than a thousand businesses. Andy is also the author of Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing, now in its seventh edition. Beyond his writing, he is a top-rated keynote speaker, delivering up to 100 presentations annually at major marketing conferences.
Nick Musica is the Founder and CEO of Optics In LLC, a digital agency specializing in SEO strategy and execution for small businesses across various sectors, including finance and technology. With nearly two decades of in-house SEO leadership, Nick has driven impactful organic growth at companies such as High Point Insurance and Rocket Lawyer, significantly enhancing their online visibility. Now based in San Diego, he and his team offer a comprehensive suite of services, including SEO optimization, in-depth audits, link acquisition, long-form content creation, SEO coaching, and search engine marketing.
Cody C. Jensen is the CEO and Founder of Searchbloom, an award-winning search engine marketing firm specializing in local, national, and e-commerce SEO. Cody began his career at Google and later advanced through renowned digital marketing agencies, identifying a need for ethical, transparent strategies focused on ROI. Under his leadership, Searchbloom has built a reputation for delivering measurable results and maintaining a transparent, partner-centric approach. The agency’s commitment to excellence has earned numerous accolades, including recognition as one of Utah's fastest-growing companies by MountainWest Capital Network's Utah 100 in 2020.
Stewart Cohen is the Director and Photographer at SCPictures, a full-service production company catering to the advertising and marketing world. With a passion for the power of images and video in shaping brand identity, Stewart is known for capturing genuine moments from the viewer's perspective. Originally from Montreal, he pursued a career in photography and film after studying at the University of Texas in Austin. In 2019, Stewart expanded his creative reach by acquiring SuperStock, a media licensing house managing 25 million still and video assets, where he currently serves as CEO and Managing Partner.
Irina Papuc is Co-founder and Managing Partner of Galactic Fed, a growth marketing agency specializing in strategic growth solutions for companies of all sizes. A CERN physics researcher turned digital marketer, Irina co-founded Galactic Fed to bring a scientific approach to the marketing agency world. With a passion for fostering a remote-first company culture that values independent thought, she has been instrumental in expanding the agency to a team of 120 members. Irina previously led SEO operations at Toptal and is the President and Co-founder of Galactic Good Foundation, which provides free digital marketing services to 501(c)(3) nonprofits.
Biz Hennigan is a Partner and General Manager at Superdigital, a creative agency known for shaping brand identities and producing engaging content for notable clients like Microsoft Xbox. With over 15 years of experience, Biz has leveraged her deep understanding of consumer behavior to achieve significant growth for Superdigital, including leading the agency's efforts in managing Xbox's global TikTok channel. She is known for her unique “anti-agency” approach, which focuses on strategic insight, agile creativity, and exceptional client service.
Tim Kelsey is the Managing Director of Pronto Marketing, a web development and marketing agency specializing in building, supporting, and promoting WordPress websites for small businesses. Over his 14-year tenure at Pronto, he has grown from an entry-level role in SEO to now overseeing a diverse team of over 90 members spanning Central and South America and Southeast Asia. With experience in customer service, strategic planning, and executive leadership, Tim leads with a strong focus on company culture and a commitment to empowering team success.
Marcel Petitpas is the CEO and Co-founder of Parakeeto, a consultancy dedicated to optimizing agency profitability. With roles such as Head Strategic Coach at Dan Martell and former COO at Gold Front, he leverages his experience as a strategic coach and consultant to aid agencies and SaaS in operational and profitability optimization. As a sought-after thought leader and host of the Agency Profit Podcast, Marcel shares actionable insights on service business mastery.
Leeann Leahy is the CEO of The VIA Agency, an independent creative agency based in Portland, Maine. With a background in account planning and strategy, Leeann transitioned into agency leadership, championing creativity, fun, and strategic thinking in her approach to advertising. Her commitment to innovation and employee engagement has propelled VIA to the forefront of the creative agency landscape. Recognized for fostering a vibrant culture, driving brand value, and nurturing talents, the agency has earned numerous accolades, including Ad Age's Best Place to Work and 2019 Small Agency of the Year.
Jason Therrien is the Founder and CEO of thunder::tech, an integrated marketing agency specializing in digital marketing, brand strategy, and advertising. Since 1997, he has been an entrepreneurial force in the Great Lakes region, creating impact as an investor, board member, and civic volunteer. His dedication to problem-solving and value-driven relationships has led thunder::tech to thrive for over 25 years. A proud John Carroll University graduate, Jason is a sought-after speaker on marketing trends and an active community volunteer serving on the boards of multiple nonprofits.
Sharon Toerek is the Owner and Founder of Toerek Law, where she dedicates her practice to advising independent marketing and creative services agencies on protecting and monetizing their intellectual capital. A marketing law attorney with extensive experience in copyright, trademark, and content protection, Sharon offers strategic counsel on licensing, brand protection, social media, and advertising compliance.
She is a sought-after speaker at top industry events, including INBOUND, Content Marketing World, and MAGNET Global Agency Network, empowering professionals to recognize legal risks and uphold their rights. Recognized for her contributions, Sharon was inducted into The American Advertising Federation (AAF) Cleveland Hall of Fame in 2019, cementing her legacy as a trailblazer in legal advocacy and community leadership.
Jason Mitchell is the CEO and Co-founder of Movement Strategy, a forward-thinking social media marketing agency that began in his college dorm room. With expertise in emerging technologies and social platform trends, Jason guides his agency in leading social-centric branding initiatives for high-profile clients such as Netflix, Amazon, and Warner Brothers. Standout projects include branding for Yellowjackets and The Boys for Amazon Studios and the innovative launch of Looney Tunes on TikTok. Jason’s thought leadership extends to writing for prestigious publications such as Adweek and Ad Age, and he has been recognized as a top Metaverse advertising agency leader by Business Insider.
Luke Komiskey is the Founder and CEO of DataDrive, a consulting firm specializing in managed analytic services. With over a decade of experience, Luke has played a pivotal role in making data analytics more accessible to various businesses.
Under his leadership, DataDrive has evolved into a global team of professionals supporting over 150 organizations, including healthcare, public education, manufacturing, and software. Luke’s approach emphasizes transforming data into actionable insights, helping organizations make faster and more informed decisions. His passion for simplifying complex data challenges has been central to DataDrive’s mission of fostering a data-informed society.
Jon Tsourakis is the Co-owner, President, and Chief Revenue Officer at Oyova, an agency offering integrated digital solutions such as app development, web design, and marketing to create efficient processes for company growth. Jon is a serial entrepreneur and marketing strategist whose continual study of brand identity, business communications, buyer behavior, sales conversion, and various digital marketing techniques keeps him astute to industry standards. His resumé includes executive positions with digital agencies including Innersight dZine Studio, REVOLT, and the Digital Mastermind Group, and his sales and leadership expertise led him to roles as Marketing Director and President for Astrum and CentralComp, respectively.
Matthew Connor, Founder and CEO of CyberLynx, began his programming career at 12 years old while working as a coder for his father’s company. His passion led him to develop his own company, which focuses on offering premium IT services and protecting growing businesses from ransomware. CyberLynx, previously known as Your IT Department, continues to provide cybersecurity and professional IT and support services for expanding companies.
In February 2023, Matthew launched The Cyber Business Podcast, where he features founders and entrepreneurs sharing inspiring stories. Matthew is on a mission to assist business leaders in increasing their profitability using cutting-edge technology. He served in the US Army for 17 years as a human intelligence officer and received his bachelor’s in business administration and management from the University of Maryland Global Campus.
Kevin Hourigan is the President of Spinutech, a full-service website design and digital marketing agency dedicated to developing customized and data-driven digital marketing solutions. Before merging his business with his current business partner, Kevin founded Bayshore Solutions, which he operated for over two decades. He’s been an active YPO member for over 12 years and serves as its Digital Marketing and Media Network Forum Officer.
In 2023, Kevin launched The Growth Fire Podcast, a business growth-focused medium where top business leaders share their experiences and insights. When Kevin is not leading his digital agency, he spends his time boating, skiing, golfing, and enjoying other outdoor activities.
Jon Morris is the Founder and CEO of Ramsay Innovations, which helps businesses quickly scale through financial education and strategic funds allocations. In September, Jon founded Fiscal Advocate, which specializes in helping marketing communication firms manage their finances, gain business insights, and grow revenue. Before joining Ramsay Innovations, Jon founded Rise Interactive, a full-service internet marketing agency — growing it from a $10,000 bootstrap business to one of the largest independent digital agencies. Jon is also an Advisor for Fiscal Advocate and was previously an Advisory Board Member at Pixability.
Jon Tsourakis is the Co-owner, President, and Chief Revenue Officer at Oyova, an agency offering integrated digital solutions such as app development, web design, and marketing to create efficient processes for company growth. Jon is a serial entrepreneur and marketing strategist whose continual study of brand identity, business communications, buyer behavior, sales conversion, and various digital marketing techniques keeps him astute to industry standards. His resumé includes executive positions with digital agencies including Innersight dZine Studio, REVOLT, and the Digital Mastermind Group, and his sales and leadership expertise led him to roles as Marketing Director and President for Astrum and CentralComp, respectively.
Vic Drabicky is the Founder and CEO of January Digital, a digital marketing agency and consulting firm focused on luxury, retail, and beauty. January Digital is dedicated to comprehensive digital planning and execution, encompassing paid search, paid social, programmatic media buying, and SEO. With a wealth of industry experience exceeding two decades, Vic has previously worked with renowned brands such as Nike, Neiman Marcus, Staples, and Michael Kors.
Michael Boychuk is the CCO and Co-founder of Little Hands of Stone, a creative agency and Ad Age Small Agency Newcomer of 2020. Michael has nearly 30 years of industry experience, working for notable firms like WongDoody, SK+G Advertising, and Leo Burnett. Before LHoS, Michael helped build Amazon’s D1 internal creative agency as the North American Executive Creative Director. He leveraged his talents and leadership expertise to spearhead four Super Bowl campaigns and the rebranding that shifted Amazon’s identity toward the globally-recognized standalone smile. Michael also helped launch Amazon’s first Prime Day global campaign — the largest annual worldwide retail event.
Matt McCain is a Co-founder of Little Hands of Stone, an award-winning creative agency based in Seattle. Matt’s career began with WongDoody, where he spent 16 years and eventually became the Creative Director of the copywriting team. Before founding LHoS, Matt worked as a freelancer, offering his talents and expertise as a creative director and copywriter for prominent companies including REI, Hub Strategy & Communication, and Amazon.
Rob Kischuk is the Founder and CEO of Bellwood Labs, an on-demand software solution that helps companies develop software from concept to final product. In addition to his development skills, Rob is also a team and relationship builder. He was inspired to start Bellwood Labs to fill the gap between businesses' challenges, objectives, and software products. Rob is a three-time founder and CEO of software tools designed for marketers, including Converge and PerfectPost, and is a mentor at Techstars, a company helping startups with technology, scaling, and product management and strategy. He’s also shared his marketing and leadership skills as a member of Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association’s board of directors.
Joe Soltis, CEO, ChoiceLocal (Cleveland, OH)
Joe Soltis is CEO at ChoiceLocal, which Joe describes as “the top performing franchise growth engine” with a “money back guarantee.” The agency offers a wide scope of services for franchisors and franchisees of over 50 brands, enabling them to provide “Fortune 500 level customer service, results, strategy, and ROI on the franchisee level” for a “small and medium size business price.”
Large clients might be parent companies of franchise systems, franchisors owning 20 or more franchise systems where each system may have from 20 to 200 franchisees – and up to as many as 6,000 internal franchise units. Small franchise systems may have 10 units. For these smaller clients, the agency facilitates franchise development, consumer, new customer, location, company, and digital talent recruitment marketing.
Joe says hiring is a challenge, especially in the franchise space. The agency needs to understand its client’s hiring needs, the kind of candidates it desires, and the historical hire rates to know the number of applicants to target . . . then reverse engineer the hire rate/cost per quality candidate by channel and implement the most effective marketing strategy to ensure future growth. Joe says they use the same channels as they do for consumer marketing (in a different order), plus some that are recruitment specific.
Joe notes that franchise operations need to beware . . . a lot of agencies will lock clients into proprietary technology solutions . . . that don’t fit. ChoiceLocal strives to find the right tools for each client to build a “win-win” ecosystem where franchisor, franchisee, and the agency all win. He says it’s important that the tool providers are companies sensitive to client needs, adaptable to a changing market, and willing to invest in “making sure that you can use their tool to provide the best in the world customer service to your end customers.”
Joe started his career working his way up for 10 years in a company that grew to serve Fortune 500 companies. At a time of great personal loss, he changed the direction of his life. In his words,
I always said I wanted to be successful so that I could help people, and that day it changed to “I don’t want to just build something; I want to help people and I want to do it now. I don’t want to be successful so that I can help people later. I want to do it now.”
Joe started ChoiceLocal with the mission “to help others” – the agency’s franchisor and franchisee partners, agency teammates (to make their dreams and aspirations reality), and people in the community.
Joe structured the agency with the goal of having employees work their 40-hours, then “unplug and leave work at work.” With a teammate Net Promoter Score in the 70s (far exceeding the “good” score, which is in the 30s), the agency has been a Top Workplace in Northeast Ohio for the past five years.
When Covid struck, the agency created a ChoiceLocal Economic Stimulus Package to help its customers “grow through the downturn,” an initiative that Joe estimates saved 30 franchisees from going out of business.
Giving back to the community is “baked into” the agency’s DNA, with 10% of profits dedicated to helping “kids in need.” Joe says the agency’s “big hairy audacious goal is to help 10,000 kids a year.” As of this interview, the agency had already helped 6,000 kids in 2022 through such things as meal programs, partnering with Habitat for Humanity to provide a home for an in-need family, and through team members’ personal volunteer work in the community. Joe says the next thing after achieving this goal would be to “raise the goal.”
Recently, the agency spun off a dental franchise, Broadview Dental Group, which Joe targets to be “the largest provider of dental care in the United States within 10 years.” Expectations are that dentists following this franchise system “can have 4.5 times the profit of a typical dental practice and only have to work three days a week to do it.” In this franchise system, a dentist maintains 100% of the business’s equity and, on retirement, can sell the franchise.
Joe can be reached on his agency’s website at choicelocal.com, by following ChoiceLocal on social media channels @ChoiceLocal, by following Joe on Twitter @helpothersjoe, or by connecting with him on LinkedIn.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Joe Soltis, CEO at ChoiceLocal based in Cleveland, Ohio. Welcome to the podcast, Joe.
JOE: Rob, great to be with you today.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about ChoiceLocal? What is the firm’s specialty? What is your superpower? What are you known for? Hit us with it.
JOE: We’re the top performing franchise growth engine. We work exclusively with franchisors and franchisees, and the reason we do that is we want to give Fortune 500 level customer service, results, strategy, and ROI, but we want to be able to do it when you look on the franchisee level at a small and medium size business price while delivering that.
When we do that, we offer a money back guarantee. We’re the first and only franchise marketing agency to offer that money back guarantee. We work with 50+ brands. We’re one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S., members of the IFA, the whole nine yards.
ROB: Wow, congratulations. There’s a certain clarity to that that is certainly appreciated. Let’s peel it back just a layer. When we think about franchise, I think some of us think about restaurants, but there are franchises of all stripes. There is plumbing. There are franchise marketing agencies, for that matter. So what does a typical customer look like? Is there a particular range of franchises, of locations? Because you could have two or two thousand. What’s a typical engagement look like?
JOE: We work with some franchise systems that are owned by what we would call a platform, like a parent company that owns franchise systems. There are some franchisors that we work with that actually own 20+ franchise systems, and within each of those franchise systems there can range anywhere between 20 franchisees on the small side and 200 on the large side. So, we’re talking within these companies 2,000-unit franchise operations, and some franchise systems that we work with even have 6,000+ franchise units within them.
Also, on the other end of the spectrum, there are franchise systems that we work with that are 10-unit franchise systems. We power them on franchise development, we power them on consumer marketing and new customer marketing for their franchisees as well as their company and locations, and we also power their talent recruitment through digital marketing to drive highly qualified applicants. Staffing is obviously a huge challenge in today’s world, and particularly within the franchising space.
ROB: That’s a little bit of a wider scope of services than I think we often hear in local marketing, especially once you get into the recruitment side. So that’s interesting. Is it the same channels for getting customers in and getting employees in? Is it different? What’s the mix of touchpoints there?
JOE: It is the same channels, used in a different order, plus there are additional channels that are recruiting specific. Obviously, there’s different job boards that are highly important in the recruiting space, and then there’s also a whole host of digital channels that can be activated, from geotargeted Google Ads to Facebook advertising. Each of them has their strengths and their weaknesses.
Our job within these franchise systems is to understand what their hiring needs are, who they’re looking to hire, what their historical hire rates are so we know how many applicants we need to drive, and then we can also reverse engineer the hire rate by channel, and then we can from there figure out their cost per quality applicant by channel and then develop a marketing mix that’s going to allow them to continue to grow.
ROB: There’s a lot going on there. Over time we’ve seen different platforms that have tried to jump to the forefront to help, I think, organizations like ChoiceLocal, handle marketing for multilocation, for franchises. What’s the state of the tool ecosystem for this? Has any tool that tries to help with this problem and actually create a library of content to push out to different locations worked? Or has it not worked and you end up building some of those solutions yourselves? How do you look at dozens of locations, different local needs, some shared content, that sort of thing?
JOE: There are a lot of agencies that will come in and sell franchise systems, their own proprietary tech in order to bring that about. What we’ve generally found is when these marketing agencies bring in their proprietary tech, it’s more in the agency’s interest and less in the interest of the franchisor and the franchisee. Essentially, it’s “Here, take this marketing solution. Take our proprietary tech, and then it’s impossible for you to leave us.” That’s how they set that up, and it can create some difficulty and a lot of angst within these different franchise systems.
When working in the franchising space, what you need to do is build a win-win ecosystem where the franchisor wins, the franchisee wins, and as a byproduct of that, as the agency you win as well. There’s a whole host of various tools in this, from Rallio to WebPunch to SOCi. There’s a lot of others. Yext. These are all various powerful tools that can be used and deployed. There’s other powerful tools in the call tracking space, too. You have companies like CallRail who do a really strong job with this, with call analytics and those types of things.
The job of the agency is to find the right tools that are right for that franchise system while also using their agency buying power to leverage economies of scale and do what’s in the best interest of their client partners.
ROB: If I hear you correctly, there’s not a one-size-fits-all best franchise management tool. It is a little bit of a best of breed, it’s a what are the needs of your particular brand/set of stores, that kind of thing. Sometimes it is Yext, maybe sometimes you bring CallRail to the table. You’re the experts, and you’re prescribing the menu that you recommend.
JOE: Yeah, that is right. One thing, too, as you follow these companies – depending on how much they’re investing in R&D, how much they’re willing to listen to their customer, how much they’re willing to allow their agency partners to fuel their product roadmap and guide their product roadmap – that’s really how you’re going to pick your partners, in large part. There’s a lot of these SaaS companies that are not very customer service minded. They’re more like “Get in, sign up for a product, and then leave us alone” kind of deal, and as an agency, that’s not the kind of partner you’re looking for. You’re looking for ones that will invest in making sure that you can use their tool to provide the best in the world customer service to your end customers.
Why I say that is that’s something to look out for in the beginning. And the other reason I say that is the companies that are willing to invest in their customer service also tend to invest in their product development, and you’ll notice there’s ebbs and flows of who’s good and who’s bad when they do this. And things change, so you’ve got to find a partner that’s always looking to change and adapt with the market as it changes and evolves.
ROB: It’s interesting how the cast of characters has changed. When I google for this problem space, Hootsuite is out there, Content and Sprout are out there contending for just a small slice of that franchise deal. But you know they’re chasing every other vertical in social as well. I can certainly appreciate – we’re in Atlanta; CallRail is a neighbor company here. Do you know their roots a little bit? It’s an interesting background on them.
JOE: It’s a really neat company.
ROB: The founder started off with a site to help people with BMWs that were out of warranty to find a local repair shop. My understanding is if you have a BMW that’s out of warranty, you need a local repair shop. That’s what I’ve heard. So, he started off doing lead gen for these local shops and then built call tracking to help prove the value of his BMWershops.com website, and ended up building CallRail from it.
JOE: What’s neat about CallRail, too, is they really have come in – there’s a lot of companies that historically have played in that place, and they really trounced them. Some of their advanced features and some of their call analytics, listening to calls, transcribing calls, turning them into qualified leads, or basically saying what’s a qualified lead, what’s a hot lead, what’s not a lead, and how they built some of that technology – it’s pretty cool stuff.
ROB: Yeah, there’s a tremendous customer focus there. I do want to shift gears for a moment; I want to get to the origin story of ChoiceLocal. What led you to create this firm? What led you to this point of focus, of all the areas you could have focused on helping and niches you could have served?
JOE: I served at a company that served multibillion dollar companies. I was a Vice President of Operations of Product Development there. We served Fortune 500 companies – FedEx, CBS, other multibillion dollar publicly traded companies. That’s where I spent my day and that’s who I served. We built a team of 180 full-time digital marketers.
Kind of a neat story. Started as employee #8, within a few years worked my way up to VP of Ops and Product Development and did that. It was cool. I learned a lot and I had some really great mentors while I was there. The owners there have done some really amazing things outside of agency, just building multimillion dollar companies and multibillion dollar companies and taking some of them public, like NCS Healthcare and others.
So, I learned a ton while I was there over that 10-year period. Then in 2012, we had a pregnancy. Went into an ultrasound room with my wife and there was no heartbeat. So we lost our son, Ben, pretty late in the pregnancy. I always said I wanted to be successful so that I could help people, and that day it changed to “I don’t want to just build something; I want to help people and I want to do it now. I don’t want to be successful so that I can help people later. I want to do it now.”
That’s actually how ChoiceLocal got started. In its simple form, our mission always has been – our mission and our core values were written prior to even having a business plan – our mission is help others. We help our partners succeed, our franchisor and franchisee partners, help their dreams and aspirations become a reality.
We help our teammates’ dreams and aspirations become a reality. We’ve been a Top Workplace in Northeast Ohio five years running. We have a teammate Net Promoter Score in the 70s, which is unheard of high. You ask people, “What is a good employee Net Promoter Score?”, the answer is 30. We’re hanging out in the 70s. So, we really work to live that mission and really care about others.
Working in the agency space, a lot of agencies will bring in talent, they will work them like crazy for like five years until they burn out, and then they leave and they go in-house. Having experienced that and have friends who’ve experienced that in other companies, I wanted to do something fundamentally different. That’s why we founded ChoiceLocal and built it the way that we have.
But our mission of help others is also giving back. We take 10% of the profits out of the company and we use it to help kids in need. Our big hairy audacious goal is to help 10,000 kids a year. We created the Benjamin Isaac Foundation, named after our son, Ben. We just gave a home to a single mother with three kids. Her name is Brie; she’s got three beautiful boys. We just had their house dedication two weekends ago, and that was through Habitat for Humanity. We were the sole sponsor for the home. Got to meet her beautiful boys. We helped them move in, had the housewarming and a dedication. It was so cool. It’s just so cool.
We do tons of other stuff like that. So far this year – it’s now June, and we are at a little over 6,000 kids that we’ve helped through various charities that we partner with.
ROB: Well, 4,000 more to go and then another goal.
JOE: Yes, raise the goal.
ROB: There’s a depth in that origin story. I think something that is interesting to think through – when you have a team, when you’re giving to causes, how do you connect the day-to-day of what the team is doing to the causes that the company is giving to and really ensure that there’s an authentic connection there? I think it can be very disconnected sometimes. Here’s the owner, here’s the team, we’re building this stuff, some money got shot out over here – to a good cause, but maybe it doesn’t feel relevant to the day-to-day. So how do you think about connecting the team to the cause?
JOE: That’s a great question. It’s a really great question. The first thing is we hire for people that have the core values that we have. Family, giving, integrity in all things. There’s certain ways that you can interview people to make sure that they have those. And if you actually study some of the psychology behind it, if you study various hiring techniques that are used in books like Topgrading and WHO and those types of things, there’s ways you can interview for those core values and competencies to screen people out that don’t have that.
So, you’re hiring people that believe what you believe and then you’re coming into a culture that celebrates those core values and celebrates those things. For example, we have a team meeting every single month where we update on everything that’s happening in the agency, what’s going on with business strategy. We’re transparent on financials and performance and all of those things so everybody can see what’s going on.
We have a part where we talk about help others and core values. In core values, people nominate teammates and they celebrate how they live those core values out, and we tell those stories. A lot of those core values are how we help our partners and internally, but it’s also how we give back. And then we tie in our financial performance. We then say, “Because we were able to do this, we were able to give Brie and her three boys this gift.” We make it very personal.
Along those lines, we also have quarterly volunteering. We try to get every teammate to volunteer once a quarter so they can see, feel, and touch the work they’re doing. My personal favorite is when we go to the Boys and Girls Club of America. Those kids need love, they need support, they need good mentors, and when you go there, you feel fantastic afterwards because you’ve been able to deliver some of that for them. So that’s really powerful.
And then we also do this BHAG walkthrough. BHAG stands for big hairy audacious goal. We have this roadmap, and then we say, “Here’s three kids that were helped because of this. Here’s 1,600 kids that were fed for a year in a place of education.” We did this charity giveaway through our annual thing at the International Franchise Association called the ChoiceLocal 10k Charity Giveaway. People enter a drawing giveaway.
There’s a really cool story – there’s a woman who served as a board member of the International Franchise Association; today she owns about 20 Taco Johns franchises. Very successful businesswomen. She picked the Great Harvest Heartland as her charity, and she ended up winning. What I found out after she won is that as a kid, she was so poor that she needed to go to the foodbank to eat. So, it was a very personal gift for her.
That’s the type of stuff that really hits home, when you always tie it to that personal story. And then when you say, “Because you were able to do this specifically,” and you name the person, “it allowed us to be able to do this.”
Sorry, I’m passionate about this – the last thing I’ll add to it is helping the business owner. This particular franchisee is having a really hard time and they’re on the verge of going out of business. We had a good amount of this through COVID. We announced the ChoiceLocal Economic Stimulus Package for our customers. We have this whole “grow through the downturn” quarterly priority and theme. We saved probably 30 franchisees from going out of business during COVID, and that was really cool. We celebrated each one of those as a company during the team meetings and made a really big deal out of it, because it’s a huge deal. They put their life savings into the business. Together, we helped save their business. That’s flipping awesome. It’s really cool.
ROB: What an opportunity. I hear a certain proximity that you’re referring to within the team. Is all of your team right there, one office, one team? Is that your world, or are people in different places?
JOE: It used to be that way, pre-COVID. We were in the office three days a week, and Monday/Friday work from home. COVID hit and we went 100% remote. Then we had highest teammate Net Promoter Score ever, highest client Net Promoter Score ever, highest revenue ever by far, highest profit dollars. We’re like, this is working really well. So we surveyed our team and said, “What do you guys want to do?” and everybody said basically, work from home, come into the office once. So, we instituted that.
What we then found is about 10-15% of our staff in a given week would come into the office, and they’d come in on different days, and when they came in there was like 3% of our staff there. It felt a little lonely, and some people like that connectedness. So I just met with our leadership team on this this past week; we’re probably going to be instituting now – we do a lot of stuff on Slack. I know a lot of companies do.
Basically, we’re going to have ChoiceLocal In-Office Day. It’s going to be completely optional, but everybody that’s going to go is going to go into Slack, fill out this poll, and RSVP and say “Hey, I’m going to be in the office this day” and try to get other teammates to come in. And then they’re going to have a group of probably 30-40% of the company in on that individual day, and they can hang out together.
Plus we do all the fun stuff. We have team meets once a month. Those are in person. About half the company comes to those; the rest are virtual. We bring in catered food. We’re in Cleveland, so we’re going to watch a Cleveland Guardians, which used to be the Cleveland Indians, game.
ROB: Yeah, that’s an adjustment there as well.
JOE: Stuff like that. We do Topgolf. We do a big Christmas party every year. Stuff like that. It’s fun. It’s so fun.
ROB: It sounds like an adjustment, but it sounds like listening to the team, it sounds like adjusting well. When I think about folks I’ve known in the agency world in Cleveland, there’s no shortage of opportunity to lose your team to the revolving door of brands. That seems like it’s probably the way of life there – not to mention the regional opportunities with vendors. It really does take some work to keep them on the agency side, I think.
JOE: Historically, at my prior agency that was definitely a continual challenge. We launched ChoiceLocal with the mission of help others, with the goal – we’re not perfect at this; I don’t want to sugarcoat it – but with the goal of being a fast-paced, high energy environment, but you work 40 hours, then you unplug and you leave work at work. We were able to build our systems so that’s possible.
We historically have had almost no turnover. Now, with that said, this year during COVID, our turnover rate has spiked a bit, but it’s nothing like I was ever used to. In a year we would have maybe, out of 100 people, like 1 to 2 people leave that we didn’t want to leave. Historically. This year that number is probably up to like 4 out of 100.
ROB: Yeah, that’s turnover, but it’s not a high turnover rate. It is managing what it is. It sounds like you have learned a lot along the way. As you think about lessons you’ve learned building ChoiceLocal, are there particular things you think of that you would wish to go back and tell yourself to do differently if you were able to?
JOE: There’s a whole host of things. One of the things I have as an advantage is I was a political science major, and I learned absolutely nothing in college that is useful to me today. [laughs]
ROB: A beginner’s mindset is what you’re saying. [laughs]
JOE: Yeah, exactly. There’s this book called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, and there’s so much truth to that. I was raised treat others the way you want to be treated, and that’s how I’ve always operated. I’ve always brought that to what I do because I thought it’s the right thing to do. But I’ve actually found it’s an amazingly sound business strategy.
What I’m going to say now may be a little bit controversial, but there’s so much stuff that you learn in business school, like when you’re getting your MBA and those types of things, and so much of that you need to throw out and ignore because it’s trash. For example, you’re a service-based business, so a person is not a commodity. A person is not a tool to be used. A person is not a KPI. They are a person with dignity, a person who has a family, a person who deserves to be cared about, loved, and appreciated. If you just do that and focus on that first, the business results tend to take care of themselves.
But at the same point, KPIs are important. Accountability is important. Ensuring that you have that is critical. Knowing that you hire right for core values first and for performance second, but also critically important – all of that integrates really well, and those are really important things.
The last thing, from a mistake that I made, that I’ll say is there’s a book called Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Else Smarter, and basically the premise of the book – and this happens for a lot of folks in agencies, particularly in leadership positions – how did you get successful? You got successful by busting your butt and being pretty smart about the way you do things. That’s how you were successful.
The weakness that comes with that is as you get a bigger team, you need to shut up, you need to ask questions, and you need to be humble. That’s the next level. And that book, for me, as I was evolving and growing as a leader, taught me those skills. It played a really important role, and now it’s something I believe in so strongly. I met with a future VP of our organization who’s probably going to get promoted to a VP very, very shortly, and I said, “Read this book. Take it to heart and do it.” Then I said, “Here’s all the stupid things that I did, and here’s how this book helped me.”
ROB: You start to pull apart some pieces, many questions come to mind. I start to think about – clearly, when you talk about future VP, there’s some planning there. There’s still some awareness of individuals in your organization, even though at 100 people, it starts to get hard to know everyone. Especially when some people aren’t even coming in one day a week, possibly. It’s an interesting mix. I think this probably had to be intentional for you as well – building up the leadership team.
What are the pieces you’ve put in place at different stages in the business to build around you to be your best, but also to help the company be its best, maybe where you aren’t?
JOE: Hire generous people, people that love helping other people be successful. If you have people on your leadership team that don’t believe that, don’t have them on your leadership team. And if you don’t believe that, work on it. [laughs] It’s so critical. You need to hire generous people, surround yourself with generous people.
It’s funny; I was like, we’re the world’s best at marketing for franchise systems, world’s best at franchise development, consumer marketing for franchising; we’re the world’s best at recruiting for franchise systems. Why don’t we just own a franchise system?
So, we launched a separate franchise system, hired a guy who led another franchise system to $750 million in network revenue to be the CEO of it. And he believes what we believe. What attracted him to us first and foremost – and he’s got an amazing track record in franchising – was our values. He’s a generous person. He believes in integrity. He believes in accountability and performance at the same time. So, you’ve got to find people that believe that and have those competencies.
The other thing I’ll say is it’s important, if you’re hiring somebody to lead a business, that they understand that business. You can do it and you can be successful if you don’t understand it inside and out, but it’s way harder. If you can find people with the right values but also who have worked at different levels in that industry over the course of their career, they can understand the strengths and weaknesses of various decisions, and when you make a decision, how it affects people in different parts of the organization or what you’re actually asking and what it entails to make it happen. Which tends to result in better decisions being made, better business performance, less mistakes. Those are the types of things that you really look for.
ROB: What franchise business have you got yourself into, then, now?
JOE: The name of it is Broadview Dental Group. Our vision is to be the largest provider of dental care in the United States within 10 years. We have some aggressive plans, but I am very confident that we’re going to be able to pull it off.
ROB: And I’ve heard that some different models of roll-up franchise operating groups – I’ve heard they’re taking the dental world kind of by storm. The independent dentist is starting to dry up a little bit. Are you seeing that? Is that part of the move?
JOE: Yes, it is, and it’s sad. What’s ended up happening – there actually is one other franchise system in the dental space. I wouldn’t call it a real franchise system. That sounds arrogant. I don’t mean it that way. But if you look at how franchise systems typically operate, where they basically have some sort of buy-in and then some sort of royalty, it’s set up very different with the buy-in being extremely, extremely, extremely high. It’s different.
But if you look at most of them, they’re called DSOs or DPOs, and what they basically do is a dentist is like “Hey, I want to get my practice to the next level.” Then these DSOs or DPOs, which are typically funded by venture capital – this isn’t always the case, but typically with venture capital, they care about one thing, which is maximizing shareholder wealth. They’ll say, “Okay, you want to take your business to the next level? Sign here. We get 70% equity in your business up to 90% over time, and we can fire you if we want to, and we’ll help get your business to the next level.”
When you’re a dentist and you’re passionate about helping others and you’re passionate about your practice and your trade, you basically just need a really good business mentor, and most dentists really haven’t had it. So what we’re doing is giving them 100% equity in their own business, a way to get to the point where they can have 4.5 times the profit of a typical dental practice and only have to work three days a week to do it, and all they need to do is follow our system. And they own 100% of their business. They can sell it when they want to, and when they sell it, they’ll sell it for a higher multiple because guess what? In franchising, when you sell your business when you’re ready to retire, it’s worth more because it’s a franchise system and it’s proven. There’s less risk involved.
ROB: Right, it’s not (Your Name) Dentistry. It is part of an umbrella. There’s brand equity there, there’s a system. They don’t have to figure it all out. One of my college roommates, his dad was in the dental world, and when you mentioned the high fee to buy in – he always told me dentists like to buy expensive things, so I guess the franchise must be one of those things, just priced for the market, I suppose.
When we look ahead to what’s next for ChoiceLocal, what’s next for marketing in the franchising world, Joe, what are you seeing? What are you excited about for the firm, for what is going to be necessary for your clients to continue as the marketing world evolves? What are you seeing?
JOE: There’s so much exciting growth ahead. One of the things that I love about being an agency that focuses on ROI and provable results is every time there’s an economic downturn, it’s good for the agency growth and it’s good for your customers. What happens is when there’s an economic recession, which I believe we’re headed into – we have horrible inflation and there’s certain policies that have to be implemented to bring it under control, and the result of that is going to be a recession.
What happens in those cases is companies tend to pull back in marketing. But if you’re driving marketing where for every dollar they spend, you’re giving them $18 in new customer revenue, it’s stupid not to spend that. You can grow through the downturn. You can take market share. Imagine putting a dollar in the stock market and getting $18 back within a year. It’s a brilliant investment. It’s a simple investment.
So, what’s going to end up happening is that’s going to accelerate growth within agencies that are ROI-focused as this economic recession hits, and for however long it hits for. That’s exciting.
But what I’m also excited about in the newer leading-edge things within agencies is the ability for big data backed with artificial intelligence to transform marketing, to transform business, and frankly to transform medicine. I was talking with the COO of ChoiceLocal, who serves a role with Broadview as well, and we’re like, who ever thought that two internet marketers would fundamentally change healthcare and dental care in the U.S.? You’d be like, “Explain that.”
It’s the same thing you do in marketing with big data. If you have a massive amount of data in a HIPAA compliant way, you can anonymize it, data mine it, and find correlations and causations and literally, with that type of patient data pool, you can change medicine. Similarly, you can do the same thing with marketing, where you can data mine, you can find ways to micro-target ideal customers based on who current ideal customers are – and you may not even know what some of those things are – and then you can target them and measure the performance and lift. That’s crazy cool stuff.
And that’s the newer leading-edge stuff that’s really exciting, particularly when you’re dealing with franchise systems and the volume that’s behind that.
ROB: Right. You’ve got volume there, you’ve got a growing scale in the business. To think about leveraging it for more than just “Hey, we’re bigger” – lots of interesting things there. Joe, when people want to find and connect with you and with ChoiceLocal, where should they go to find you?
JOE: They can go to choicelocal.com. Everything is there. They can follow ChoiceLocal on pretty much every social media channel that exists @ChoiceLocal. So they can do that. They can follow me personally on Twitter @helpothersjoe or connect with me on LinkedIn. I try to post a lot of content there that’s specific to purpose-driven business, which is a huge passion of mine, as well as franchising and marketing as well. So yeah, @helpothersjoe on Twitter is for me personally.
ROB: That’s excellent. Joe, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for sharing your experiences. Congratulations on what you’ve built so far and why you’re building it. I think everyone listening has enjoyed the depth in the origin of the business and the intentionality as you build it.
JOE: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for all you’ve done and thanks for having me on today. It really is a great pleasure. Really appreciate you.
ROB: All right, appreciate you. Take care. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Rafi Arbel, President, Market JD (Chicago, IL)
Rafi Arbel is President at Market JD, an internet-based advertising that focuses its work on “increasing visibility” for small law firms specializing in personal injury and workers’ compensation cases. With the kind of clientele the agency serves, the written content has to be extremely precise and accurate. That’s why the firm currently employs 3 attorneys. Rafi is one of them.
The agency provides websites, search engine optimization, pay-per-click, reputation management, and content production. The work split is about 65% to 70% personal injury and 55% (overlapping) worker’s compensation legal firms.
Rafi says, “Everybody can build a website and everybody can claim they do SEO or pay-per-click well.” Because this work is so labor-intensive and the details are numerous and critical, Rafi believes that those “who do it well” are not only those with knowledge, but those who have built a process to ensure consistent, high-quality outcomes. People have to know what they are doing, set an end objective, figure out the tasks to get it done, assess and respond to feedback, and do it “consistently over and over again.
Because Rafi practiced law for 6 years, he has represented people. Following a passion for selling and “engaging people,” he worked for Thompson Reuters and spent a number of years selling for Findlaw and Westlaw. Then, he went back for his MBA and again, and decided to change course, this time to become an entrepreneur. With this varied background and because he has been promoting small law firms for over 20 years, he understands what lawyers do, “how they do it, and how to position them.”
In this interview, Rafi notes how SEO has changed over the years, that searching for broadhead terms, “Chicago injury lawyer” or “Nevada workers’ compensation lawyer” renders a lot of paid ads at the top of the page so that even if a firm organically appears below that in the map section or even below that, the likelihood that SEO will produce much traffic is negligible. Or the firm’s won’t show well because Google’s Local Service ads take up the top of the page, followed by Google Ads below that. A big portion of the top of the screen gets taken up by all those paid ads . . . especially on mobile. So, broadhead SEO is not of great benefit to lawyers.
What does work are longtail searches. Rafi says the great race now is to “capture the longtail searches’ to find “the corners that the big guys don’t see.”
As an example, Rafi talks about a Nevada client . . . a personal injury lawyer who, unlike his big competitors, does not have$40,000 or $50,000 a month to spend on SEO. What the attorney does have is a lot of experience representing people who have suffered sepsis and whose doctors failed to treat it correctly. Medical malpractice? Not many Nevada lawyers work in that area. By building comprehensive content to cover sepsis and medical malpractice, Market JD is carving out a unique niche for the lawyer’s business and building a moat around the lawyer’s business as well. Few competitors in that specific area will be willing to invest the resources to match this project.
Rafi says the best way to contact him is to call him at: 312.970.9353 or email him at rafi@marketjd.com. (Market JD like Juris Doctor)
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Rafi Arbel, President at Market JD based in Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to the podcast, Rafi.
RAFI: Thank you, Rob. Nice to be here.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us a little bit about Market JD, and what is the company’s superpower? What is your specialty?
RAFI: Market JD is an internet-based advertising firm. We only work for small law firms. People think that we work for lawyers; it’s much narrower than that. We really don’t work for the big firms. They have their own marketing needs that are very different. We really focus on small law firms. We do everything that they need online to increase their visibility, which means we do websites, we do search engine optimization, pay-per-click, some reputation management, and of course, the content production.
Your question was what is our superpower. What I have learned over the years is that everybody can build a website and everybody can claim they do SEO or pay-per-click well. What differentiates those who do it well from those who don’t is not just knowledge, but process. Because each of these things is so labor-intensive, and because there are so many details that have to get done right, you have to build a process behind every one of them. The process should really dictate the outcome.
If you are making sure all of your t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted, then you should get a consistent, high-quality product every time, assuming you know what you’re doing. Over the years we’ve gotten feedback, like everybody else, of what works and what doesn’t work, and where Google has rewarded us and where Google hasn’t rewarded us. We’ve taken those lessons, and those have affected what we want in the sites and what we don’t want, and how our sites need to be built and the content that we need to create. Then we convert those objectives into tangible tasks that can be assigned to every person in the process.
So, our superpower is our ability to take an end objective, figure out how to get it done, and then do it consistently over and over again.
ROB: Got it. You mentioned smaller law firms. Are there any particular practice areas or geographies that you focus on? Are there any that you do not do from a practice area or geographic area?
RAFI: Historically, we’ve focused primarily on workers’ compensation and personal injury law firms. I’d say 65% to 70% is personal injury, and probably overlapping, I’d say 55% workers’ comp, because some firms do both. But we have criminal law firms, divorce law firms, business law firms. Really, generally speaking, it’s a business-to-consumer law firm – those people who don’t just have a few big business clients that they get all their recurring work from. These are people that help the individual consumer, that constantly need a new flow of cases coming in. Those are the people that need us most.
It’s not that we can’t help those that just need a law firm brochure, but what we’re really good at is improving somebody’s visibility, not just creating a brochure. We might be overkill if all you want is something that validates your existence.
ROB: As a consumer, when you mention some of those practice areas, it certainly rings to me – my perception would be that that’s largely a reflection of the marketing budget of the different types of law firms. In other words, I certainly see a lot more personal injury and workers’ comp advertising than I see let’s say business law. Is that some of the alignment between your focus and the market?
RAFI: Absolutely. Although I do find it a little – I don’t understand why some of the other practice areas don’t spend more. Yes, it is true that the potential payout for a personal injury lawyer is much greater. But what I will say is that I think the estate planners and a lot of the transactional attorneys that have the potential – or even maybe especially the civil litigation lawyers, they have potential to make a huge amount of money from a civil litigation case. If they’re representing the manufacturer that bet the business on litigation, the attorney’s fees can easily be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So why those attorneys don’t want to spend a few grand a month to promote themselves is beyond me. But that’s beyond probably the scope of this conversation. At the end of the day, it’s really the personal injury lawyers who are spending and who are programmed and understand the need to spend to bring in a constant flow of high value cases.
ROB: As someone representing smaller firms in this space, how do you think about tactically going to war and finding the client for some of these firms? I don’t even know, and you might know, what the national advertising budget is for some of the national firms, but it’s got to be quite something to go up against. How do you think about giving your client the edge and the best bang for their buck on somebody who can spend almost unlimited amounts of money on out-of-home advertising, on SEO, on pay-per-click, on all of your keywords?
RAFI: That’s a really good question. We get this from time to time from personal injury or workers’ compensation lawyers who say just that. They say, “Look, in my marketplace there are four big competitors and they’re spending enormous money. They’ve got a 10-year lead on me. There’s no way I can compete, is there?” The truth is, they can compete. But we have to be careful in what we promote.
Oftentimes when you start to dig a little deeper into their practice areas, you find that not all personal injury lawyers and not all workers’ compensation lawyers focus on the same things. For example, I have a client in Reno who has never really done any significant online advertising. He doesn’t have much of a presence now, and he doesn’t have an enormous budget to compete against the huge Nevada advertisers. And there are certainly people paying $40,000 or $50,000 a month on SEO.
So, he asked me what we can do, and we had a conversation about the nature of his practice. It turns out that in Nevada, not many lawyers want medical malpractice cases. It turns out also that this particular lawyer had a lot of experience representing people who came down with sepsis where the doctors didn’t treat it correctly. That’s a very niche field. This is something he was very good at, had a lot of experience in, and very few people did, and cases that he wanted to attract.
So, we decided to build out, and we’re in the process of finishing, a lot of content around sepsis and medical malpractice. And even if others come in to compete, they’re certainly not going to invest the same resources into that field as he will. We’ve already started to see some success with that, and leads are starting to come in the door.
It’s that sort of focus on the client, the real micro focus on what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis. You have to understand their practice. I’m also a licensed lawyer in the state of Illinois, so I understand their practice in ways that somebody who’s not a lawyer may not understand.
ROB: That experience you have as a lawyer, your licensing as a lawyer, is that what has kept your focus on law? Have you ever been tempted to – there’s other local advertisers, whether it’s air conditioning, basements, plumbers, etc., who have I think similar battles. What has kept you in the legal lane?
RAFI: That’s a really good question. The truth is that I don’t bring a distinct competitive advantage outside of the law. If I were to go sell to a plastic surgeon – and they certainly have a lot of money to spend on their advertising – or sell to HVAC guys or plumbers or any of them, I don’t bring with me any inherent competitive advantages that my clients don’t have. Obviously, I know the technical end of it, and we have the coders and the designers and everything else, but so does everybody else.
Only in the law do I really bring something that few other people, few other agencies have, and that’s an intimate knowledge of what they do, because I’ve been doing it for 20+ years. Because I’m a lawyer and I’ve represented people, I really understand what they do, how they do it, and how to position them. So yes, while it is tempting, and maybe I could make more money if I did websites for people other than lawyers, it’s just not my comfort zone. I really understand the law so well that it doesn’t make sense to do much else.
ROB: Rafi, to understand a little bit – it’s not entirely a typical path. Most people don’t go to law school to start a digital agency. What is the origin story of Market JD? What took you out of the day to day practice of law? What made you want to learn and build a team around you that understands things like SEO and SEM and everything else you have to do to make things work?
RAFI: That’s a really interesting question. I didn’t go directly from the practice of law into running an agency. I practiced law for about six years, and then I had a real desire to sell. I’ve always loved working with people, and I just love the selling process and I love engaging people. So, I took a job with Thompson Reuters and I sold for FindLaw and Westlaw for a number of years.
Then I decided to go back and get my MBA, and then when I got my MBA, I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and it was at that time that I started Market JD. We do largely the same things that my former employer does, FindLaw. We do the same sort of things that they do; we just like to think we do it better.
ROB: Got it. So somewhere along the way, between some growing coincidence, between having practiced yourself, between competing in the market, you saw a set of ingredients, you made a little bit of a bet on yourself – and then who were your next coupe of hires? Who are the first couple of people that an attorney goes out and hires to build a firm like this?
RAFI: I think if I could do it over again, the one thing that I would do differently is I would’ve hired more people quicker. I was a little too conservative in who I hired in the initial years, and potentially didn’t grow as fast as I could’ve if I had hired more staff. I think I wasn’t as confident as I am now in my ability to succeed. I was always worried that I would run out of money, and it never happened. I had more clients than I had necessarily people to do the work. So, I certainly would’ve hired people quicker.
I think what happened was it was a lot of on-the-job training. I hired people as I saw the need. I knew I couldn’t design, and I knew nothing about design, and I knew nothing about coding. So I surrounded myself with the best people I can and the people I need to get the job done. It was need-based hiring.
ROB: Got it. That certainly becomes an interesting path. In terms of running out of money, I have done that; I don’t recommend it. It’s not the most fun. We did make all the money back and then some, so it’s okay.
When you look at yourself now – you said you’ve learned a little bit about hiring more. Obviously, you can’t hire unlimited, so how do you think about, now, with experience in mind, when is the right time to hire?
RAFI: I think that story has changed as the labor market has changed. At this point, where I find great talent in an area that I know I’m going to need, I hire for that even if I don’t necessarily have enough work to fill that person’s plate. It just so happens that when you hire great people, you find work to give them, and it’s often profitable work because when they’re good, it enhances your service and you tend to sell more of the things that you can do better.
I think the question you asked me was, how do I know who to hire. I’m always looking. We recently hired a Head of SEO. I wasn’t initially planning on hiring her, but I did find an article that she had written, and I thought it was so well done and it was so technically complete that I reached out to her and I asked her if she’d be willing to do some consulting. One thing led to another, and she’s now our Head of SEO.
So, it’s more about availability than it is about necessarily our needs. It’s becoming very hard to find the right people, and I know I’m not the only employer to say that.
ROB: For sure. It’s hard to find the right people. It’s hard to find sometimes the sorts of versatile people who can and will wear multiple hats. I think that’s interesting; you’ve probably had some choices as you’ve grown. SEO probably has not been a choice. You’ve probably had to do that for a very long time. How have you considered, though, which service areas you should engage in? Are there some that you haven’t? Are you in television? Are you in out-of-home? How deep do you go in social? How do you think about those kinds of decisions?
RAFI: The traditional media is not something I had experience in or knowledge in. I’ve thought many times about doing it, because oftentimes the people who sell traditional media add digital services to their menu of choices. So I’ve often thought of adding traditional media to my set of choices, but I haven’t, largely because it’s out of my comfort zone. I would have to bring in people, and I would be doing it just for the sake of growing.
I have enough troubles in my life without taking on something that I don’t know particularly well, so I’ve chosen just to be a digital agency and do that better than my competitors. And I think it’s that laser focus and doing one thing well that’s been a great recipe for us. It’s worked for us.
ROB: Sure. There’s a certain discipline to knowing what segment you play in. I’m sure many firms have started in the legal world, and many of them really have that appetite to go as far upmarket as they can, as fast as possible. They want to buy the side of every bus, the front of every billboard, all of those things. How do you think about what firm size is too big for Market JD right now? How do you think about that decision?
RAFI: When it comes to digital advertising, I don’t think there is a firm that’s too big for us in our space. It’s when they have needs beyond that. Now, certainly we have partners we can bring in, but I don’t pretend to claim that they’re part of the Market JD business. They’re just our partners if they need them.
But when it comes to digital advertising, this is what we do best. If the largest PI firm in America came to us, I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t help them with their needs. We represent people, or we do the digital advertising for solo practitioners, and we do it for 75-people personal injury firms, and everything in between.
ROB: That’s certainly a range. Once you have 75 attorneys, I don’t want to pay those bills, I know that. That’s a sizable firm there.
You mentioned a little bit about perhaps a desire to have hired a little quicker. As you think about other lessons you may have learned while building the firm, what might something else be that you wish you’d done differently if you could rewind the clock a little bit?
RAFI: Yeah, definitely hiring quicker. Most certainly it would be also doing more internet marketing for Market JD. It was always ironic, I thought, that I’m selling lawyers internet marketing, but I’m not promoting my own wares on the internet. We ignored it because I had such a nice base of connections from my years working as a lawyer and my years selling as a salesman at Thompson Reuters. I had such a great base of people to call on that I really didn’t need to do a lot of internet advertising.
In hindsight, I think that was a mistake. I probably would’ve more aggressively done it, and that’s what we’re just beginning to do now. But you know what? In some regards, I always thought it was better to have fewer clients and do a better job for fewer clients than it is to grow as fast as I can and see the quality diminish. I’ve seen too many of my competitors with fantastic salesforces, far better than anything I have, that win the business but don’t have the resources to put into each client, and the mistakes that they made were just embarrassing.
I never wanted to be that guy, so I never wanted to grow any faster than I had the capacity to do a great job for them.
ROB: Your team is so focused. When you’re out there marketing for these firms, you know who their ideal customer is; you’re thinking about how to reach them, and to a certain extent, it sounds like you’re intuitively selling to people you know, to people you know that you know, some referrals.
What did it look like? Did you all actually sit down and formulate a picture of your customer and their journey separate from their customers and their journey? Or how did you get clarity on the target you are marketing to as a firm, how you reach them, and how you separate that from the everyday of working with all these other firms, knowing you’re trying to reach an individual consumer?
RAFI: I think for every small business, to a large extent the direction of the business is set by the needs of the clients. So, if you listen to what the clients say and you really don’t just hear the words, but take it to heart, then their needs will dictate the services that you provide.
We don’t just sell technical expertise or a set of tools or any particular solution. What we’re really trying to communicate to the lawyers we sell to is, tell us what your issues are, tell us what your end objectives are, and then let us work backwards and figure out the best way to address those and achieve those ends. I think if you listen to the client, they’ll help you. They’ll direct the solution because your solution will be based on their needs and their objectives.
ROB: Rafi, now that you’re at the level you’re at, now that you’re looking ahead a little bit, what’s coming up for Market JD and the type of work that you do that’s exciting? What’s the next frontier, maybe the next place you think you might hire for that you don’t know yet you’re going to hire for?
RAFI: I think we’re just in the initial stages of really expanding and taking what we do best, but doing it in a bigger way, hiring many more SEO content writers who can really focus in on longtail search.
What’s happening in SEO is that when you run a search for the broadhead terms – “Chicago injury lawyer” or “Nevada workers’ compensation lawyer” – the search results are so dominated by paid ads at the top that even if you appear organically in the map section or beneath that, the probability of you getting much traffic or cases from appearing well there isn’t too great because you’ve got Google Local Service ads at the top and then you have Google Ads below it. It really takes up a significant portion of the top of the screen, especially on mobile. The SEO isn’t going to be of great benefit to the lawyers.
But those same ads don’t always appear on the longtail searches, and there are so many of those longtail searches. So the great race right now – it’s no secret, but the great race is to capture the longtail searches, and the better we are at that, the better off our clients are going to be in the end, the more benefit we’re going to bring them. That’s the race these days, the longtail searches.
ROB: That would seem to also align with maybe the capacity of the big firms that target those searches as well. There’s some stuff that’s longtail, they’re not going to have keywords targeted against it, they’re not going to be SEOing for it either. But you mentioned some of those niches that are special to the firm, that is an individual strength, particular types of cases, that then become the opportunity.
RAFI: That’s exactly right. The corners that the big guys don’t see.
ROB: Are you the only attorney in the firm at this point?
RAFI: No. Actually, there are – let me see, three of us that I can think of right away. I’ve got to think through it, but we have at least three attorneys here, and two of them are editors. We’re very careful about what we write about on the law. We don’t ever want to misrepresent or get something wrong on the law, so I thought it would be a great idea to hire lawyers as editors. So two of my editors are in fact lawyers.
ROB: Certainly, you get into some of these compliance areas, it certainly makes sense to have some expertise there. I think we’ve heard this a few times on the podcast – when it comes around the medical space, there’s a similar level of depth, attention, compliance, and danger that leads to specialization and helps keep any little upstart two-person shop in town from coming after you too hard.
RAFI: That’s right. Really, for me, if I was just a general web shop, I could practice law and do better financially than I could if I were just selling to the local businesses. But it’s really the deep specialty that we have that allows us to serve the personal injury and workers’ comp lawyers in ways others can’t.
ROB: Very interesting. We’ve been hiring in a bunch of states; I’ve learned a lot about workers’ comp that I didn’t want to know, but you might know better than that. [laughs] We use a PEO; we had the privilege of buying our own policy from the state of Ohio because they don’t like the PEO’s policy. Something new in every state. That’s you and your clients to figure out for the most part, I think. Unless there’s any other states you know we should really put our heads on the swivel for, because I’d be curious.
RAFI: This is for your own company?
ROB: Yeah. Are there any other states with really weird workers’ comp regimes? Because Ohio seems unique in its specialness.
RAFI: [laughs] Most states have their own peculiarities, and it’s often changing, so I can’t claim I know every state’s. But yes, it’s definitely an area where there are differences between the states.
ROB: Fascinating. A very interesting area, and it keeps some lawyers employed, for sure. Rafi, when people want to find you and find out more about Market JD, where should they go to find and connect with you?
RAFI: The easiest way is pick up the phone and call me, (312) 970-9353, or they can email me at rafi@marketjd.com. That’s Market JD like Juris Doctor.
ROB: Excellent. Good to have that. I encourage folks to find and connect with Rafi if you need some of their help. Other than that, Rafi, thank you so much for joining the podcast, for sharing your journey. We’re very grateful. Thank you.
RAFI: Rob, thanks for having me. I appreciate being on.
ROB: Excellent. Be well.
RAFI: You too.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director, Citizen Group (San Francisco, CA)
Inspired by Marc Gobé’s book, Citizen Brand: 10 Commandments for Transforming Brand Culture in a Consumer Democracy, Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director at Citizen Group, started his agency in 2006 to work with entities committed to meaningful and measurable pro-social impact. His agency’s proposition is that organizations build brand value when they “walk their talk” and operate in ways that enhance society for their employees, shareholders, and consumers. Robin notes that the rise of social media has created a window on organizational operations . . . companies have a harder time projecting a “corporate mirage” that “everything is okay” when people can now see what is going on, assess practices, and ask the tougher questions. Clients today include for-profit companies, nonprofit organizations, municipalities, cities, and trade associations.
Working with Amnesty International and other NGOs while he was at Chiat/Day early in his career, Robin became aware of two operational economies: “the Moneyball ad world, where money is thrown around (half a million for a 30-second spot)” and the $15k budget for creating a nonprofit PSA environment. Gobé’s book identifies the trend toward citizen branding as a convergence between these two economies.
At his agency’s inception, Robin worked with Walmart’s sustainability effort and explored how big-box retail stores needed to change their operational practices to support sustainability, creating “a race to the top for brands to reutilize, recycle, (and produce) less waste” and a model for future initiatives with other organizations. Brands get a lift from doing the right thing, he says, both for society and for the environment.
In his early adulthood, Robin says he didn’t know that people had human rights. He says the 30 articulated in the United Nation’s post World War II Universal Declaration of Human Rights made a big impact on him.
Citizen Group is involved in a diverse range of projects. It is working with:
- Sports apparel retailer Lids on a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiative (They Gave Us Game) to recognize and honor early Black sports leagues.
- A group called Leading Age on the Keep Leading Life campaign to showcase the variety of caregiving and expert services available to people who are aging.
With close friend Jordan Harris, Robin shares a concern about the need to promote electric vehicles. Citizen Group commissioned a study to investigate the feasibility of shading California’s 4,000 mile aqueduct system with solar canopies to reduce evaporation, conserve water, reduce algal growth, and generate power. Annual water savings for a complete end-to-end system were estimated at 63 billion with the solar array along the aqueduct system’s existing utility corridors rather than taking up working land. A spinoff company, Solar AquaGrid, will be working Audubon Society to study environmental impacts and with the state and irrigation districts to plan the first demonstration project, and break ground on the pilot (proof-of-concept) project this fall.
Robin can be found on his agency’s website at citizengroup.com.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director at Citizen Group based in San Francisco, California, with some other fascinating interests as well. Welcome to the podcast, Robin.
ROBIN: Good to be here, Rob. Thank you.
ROB: Excellent to have you. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Citizen Group, and what is the firm’s superpower? What are you all known for? What do you do well?
ROBIN: Well, I started Citizen Group in 2006, and it was really inspired by a book of the same name called Citizen Brand. This is where I can give a shout-out to an author by the name of Marc Gobé. I was really moved by the book, written in about 2003. The thesis of the book is: sooner or later, all brands will have to behave as citizen brands.
That really caught me because it was like the spear in the chest moment in terms of the societal challenges we face and the responsibility brands and corporations and civil society have. It also predated, presaged, the rise of social media that has made the rise of citizen brands possible. We expect more from the brands we purchase and are loyal to. If they’re not walking their talk, it can be a liability versus when they can really take the initiative and operate in a way that enhances society for their employees, for their shareholders, for their consumers. Then that builds brand value. That was the proposition.
So I started Citizen Brand, and we’ve been working since that time with a variety of entities, for-profit companies, nonprofit orgs, municipalities, cities, sometimes, trade associations. But what they all have in common is some commitment to have pro-social impact that is meaningful and measurable.
ROB: Let’s pull into that a little bit. Give us maybe an example, if you can, of a client, of the sort of work you’ve done together, of what this looks like in action.
ROBIN: Well, in the early going, roundabout 2005-2006, I had the opportunity to work with Walmart’s sustainability effort. Those were two words that didn’t necessarily go together at the time. It raised a lot of legitimate skepticism. But in fact, under the tenure of their CEO at the time, Lee Scott, they really saw the future as it pertains to big box retail and how they would have to change their practices, be it in terms of packaging, creating a packaging scorecard – they created more of a race to the top for brands to reutilize, recycle, less waste. And many other initiatives. In fact, they formed 13 sustainability committees in their transportation, their energy, their seafood.
That’s been the model. I’ve also done a lot of work with what is now called the Great Sports Alliance, but it started with the nonprofit NRDC and the interest on the part of professional sports – the venues, the arenas, the teams – adopting sustainable practices, again, throughout their supply chain. Energy, waste, water, transportation, how they procure goods. That story needs to radiate through their internal supply chain to their external stakeholders to their consumers.
So having meaningful initiatives that then you can start to develop stories that really show the impact and the lift that brands can get from doing the right thing – that’s the common denominator. And those were two stories, ongoing, that started around the time we started Citizen.
ROB: That’s early, and I feel like some of that has not even arrived yet. Something I feel like we’re starting to hear a little bit about is measuring the environmental impact of a business and the different layers of measurement. You’re probably the expert on this and not me, but some people will say, “All of our power consumption is green energy.” It’s like, okay, but – you mentioned the supply chain, you mentioned suppliers, you mentioned up and down the organization.
So outside of the stick that may be coming on that, whether it’s in public markets or whether it’s regulatory, how do you get businesses to think about the carrot when in their own initial reaction they might say, “We do the right things here,” and it’s true in maybe the first or second order effects, but when you get to the third order effects, there’s a lot more to work on?
ROBIN: No doubt there is. And it can be challenging. But creating an initiative that you can build the sociopolitical will for, and then building on that, creates the momentum. Creating a coalition of the willing that this is the trajectory that the company or the organization wants to take is fundamental. And it’s not just environmental, by the way; it’s social impact, fundamentally.
ROB: Yeah, which now we have acronyms around, again. But there’s a material difference, I think, between – you can check a box, you can have an ESG statement, you can have committees. It’s something else entirely, I think, to not just have a committee and to actually execute. How do you think about ensuring that those committees, that those initiatives have meat to them and are not just window dressing or greenwashing or whatever else we want to call it?
ROBIN: So much of it is susceptible to greenwashing, and perception is a whole other thing in reality between half-empty and half-full. Walmart took a lot of spears early on, but people have seen the credibility that has come from meaningful adoption of practices. And it’s happening across the corporate world, albeit not fast enough.
I’ll give you a case in point. There was a vote taken yesterday on compulsory board diversity – in other words, more women, more people of color on boards – struck down because, ironically, it was perceived as discriminatory. [laughs] Here in California, where we lead, we’ve gone in recent years from like 17% to some 30% women on corporate boards. That’s a good gain, but it ain’t anywhere near 50%.
We’re a country that doesn’t like regulation. It’s something I struggle with a lot because we can talk a good game about law and order, but law and order requires rules of the road, and it requires a well-governed society to be a healthy, functional society. In the meantime, corporations run the roost. The common good is crippled under the weight of corporate good, which quickly can curdle into corporate bad. I’m talking about Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Tobacco, Big Plastic – something I’m very concerned about. That implicates Big Beverage, the Coca-Colas of the world, the plastic, the fossil fuel industry, that has a responsibility to take care of the crap they put out there. Not to mention the downstream health effects.
So, you need to look at it all, and we don’t have claim to the answers writ large, but we take on initiatives where there’s bounds and outcomes that we can point to.
ROB: Right. Sounds like you’ve got a lot of work to do, is what it sounds like.
ROBIN: There’s no shortage of work for all of us to do.
ROB: That’s right.
ROBIN: I guess it may sound kind of schoolmarm-ish, but I really believe that – we talk about the experience economy and this and that economy; what we need right now is the responsibility economy. It’s time for grownups to be grown up.
ROB: Robin, you did mention the genesis of the firm. Let’s talk for a moment, though, about the pre-genesis of the firm. How did you decide to start in the first place? You’ve mentioned the inspiration, you’ve mentioned the book, but what made you jump off the cliff and start Citizen Group in the first place, coming from where you were? It’s not always the easiest way to live.
ROBIN: No, it was a reckoning, but it was a convergence that I’m really grateful for. My story was I came up as a copywriter, a writer. Came out of journalism, music. Went into advertising and had the privilege to work at some excellent shops – Hal Riney here in San Francisco and Chiat\Day. As a writer and creative director, learning the potency of storytelling, visually and verbally, in short form commercials, and even pre-internet, before we had branded content – but it was still getting you to read the printed page, telling a story on television.
I had done a lot of work since the 1980s when I was in New York at Chiat\Day with Amnesty International, a leading human rights organization. I got exposed to Amnesty’s work because of the rock events they were putting on at the time – the likes of Springsteen and Sting and Peter Gabriel doing world tours, promoting this concept of human rights. As a twenty-something, I didn’t know from human rights that we have human rights, and there’s 30 of them that are articulated in the International (sic., Universal) Declaration of Human Rights created after World War II. It really struck me.
I continued to do work on behalf of Amnesty and other NGOs, and I realized that two economies were operating. There was the Moneyball ad world, where money is thrown around. Half a million for a 30-second spot was not an uncommon thing at that time. And you might have $15k to put against creating a PSA on behalf of a nonprofit org. Really two different economies. And what was more important just didn’t follow in terms of where we place our value.
The Citizen Brand book really said there’s a convergence going on here. Like I said, I had no idea that a few years later, the rise of social media would accelerate it to such a degree that companies had to walk their talk. They couldn’t simply put on a corporate mirage and pretend everything was okay; people were going to look more closely at their practices and interrogate, in a healthy way. And that created the impetus for what we see more of today.
ROB: You’ve been doing this thing for a little while. What are some of the lessons you’ve learned in the process of building the firm? What are some things you might go back and tell yourself to do differently if you had that chance to talk to yourself?
ROBIN: Lessons learned. I might’ve applied more focus to social impact earlier, even though I’ve been doing it for a while now. I think about years – I won’t say wasted. They were not wasted. Great experiences, and learning the craft of advertising is part of my skillset. But having the lightbulb go off sooner in terms of applying more of my working years to making a difference in terms of social outcome is something that if I could rewind the clock, I would put more years in that quadrant than the fun and games I had when I was youthful and indiscreet. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] You wouldn’t have been as youthful and indiscreet if you had done otherwise. But I hear you. There’s those corners we turn where we realize in some way or another – we get more serious; we discover a path that we can run well on, and we certainly wish we had found it sooner, had started that impact sooner, because we get so much better as we keep going. So I completely understand that.
As we mentioned at the top, you are a man of many talents and many thoughts and many ideas. Something that I wasn’t really aware of that you mentioned was the Solar AquaGrid. Tell us about that. I don’t think those words naturally go together in most people’s minds, so unpack this for us. What’s going on here? It’s intriguing but momentarily confusing, and I think it’ll all make sense through your words.
ROBIN: Yeah. One of my closest friends and dearest collaborators, Jordan Harris, we’ve done a lot of work together for Rock the Boat and other social causes in relation to promoting the rise of EVs, the EV revolution. It was his genesis – we both travel up and down the state, from Northern California to Southern California, seeing these open aqueducts that convey our water, and year on year, the increasing drought we have here in California.
It got him scratching his head because he lives part of his time in France, where the canals are tree-shaded. They’re tree-lined and shaded canals, whereas here our canals are open and exposed, and we couldn’t help but think: how much water are we losing each year in terms of evaporative loss? Because heat rises.
ROB: How much?
ROBIN: Well, we commissioned a study. We started a project first at Citizen to commission a study. We sought out the best researchers we could find, and they’re based in UC Merced, which is the home of University of California- UC Solar and UC Water. We commissioned a study that said up to 63 billion gallons of water could be saved annually if all 4,000 miles of California’s canal system, aqueduct system, were covered with solar canopies.
And many other compounding advantages, because when you cover the canals, you’re producing obviously clean energy, renewable energy that can be used locally by the communities. We’re going to need a lot more renewable energy on tap if we are going to shift towards an EV-driven economy. And then there’s the avoided land costs, because rather than taking working lands, farmlands, to put solar farms, solar arrays, why not have these existing aqueducts, these existing utility corridors do double duty for us?
The more we got into it, we discovered that there can be reduced maintenance costs because the solar shade over the open canals, the open rivers, reduces aquatic weed growth. So there’s less dredging up of the algae underneath. And it has waterfall implications, rather than dumping more chemicals into the water.
Long story not so short, one thing led to another and we started to examine holistically all of the potential advantages of such deployments. We developed a company, a spinoff that is called Solar AquaGrid, where we’re consulting with the state and working directly with irrigation districts – most notably with Turlock Irrigation District in the Central Valley – planning the first demonstration project. We were successful in getting state funds to do pilot. So we expect to break ground in the fall.
I’m quite excited about that because now we can really put these premises to the test. The whole idea is to study in order to scale, because you only gain the advantages of this idea, a big idea, a rather obvious idea – we weren’t the first to come up with it – but now we’re on a path where we are very fortunate to be able to study and build on the findings.
ROB: California is a big state, lots of people, lots of opinions; are there any particular groups you’re concerned about having concerns about this? Are there impacts on wildlife? Are there impacts on other things that people would worry about? It probably can be mitigated, probably a net positive, but what’s the group that’s going to fret about these?
ROBIN: We talk about that a lot. We are inviting naysayers to come with their questions because the whole purpose is to interrogate this proposition and learn, where are there holes? We want to be mindful not to replace one problem and create others. That’s not our intention. We set Solar AquaGrid up as a for-benefit company that is predicated on public, private, academic cooperation.
To that end, you raised the issue of wildlife; we have enlisted Audubon Society as a research partner because we do want to learn, what are the effects, the unforeseen potential consequences of covering large swaths of the canal? So we’re going to learn all this. If you want to do another podcast in about – call it 24 or 36 months, we’ll have more to talk about.
ROB: That’ll be fascinating. The next thing that comes to my mind also is, you talked about France, you talked about their waterways. You get into some interesting questions. They have waterways. They’re tree-shaded, so you could cover them with solar panels, but the trees are going to make not as much solar. Is it potentially beneficial enough to where you take down trees to put the solar over it? Because the trees are there, they keep it shaded somewhat, but it’s still uncovered. It’s still evaporative.
ROBIN: Beautiful. There’s beauty in complexity. These are the questions in terms of net positives and net losses regarding, in that case, biodiversity.
By the way, we here in the U.S. are not the first to deploy solar arrays over canals. It was first done in Gujrat, India, where there are projects we’ve actually gone to school on and have learned from those past deployments – both what to do and what not to do.
ROB: That’s fascinating. We have a business partner whose primary office is directly in Gujrat, so I am familiar with it. I have looked at it. In their case, they chose to set up there because what I’ve learned is that India’s all one time zone, and Gujrat is the farthest west you can get, just about, so you get the best overlap with the U.S. if you’re there. So that was interesting. We ended up alongside an outsource team, and then we started asking why they were there, and that turns out to be the why.
ROBIN: I did not know that. That’s cool.
ROB: I imagine the same thing applies to – I think China’s also on one time, so who knows where that leads. But speaking to your journey, speaking to Citizen Group, speaking to the type of work that you do – we’ve talked about some things already that you’re looking forward to, but what’s coming up for Citizen Group? What’s coming up for the type of work you do that is exciting for you? What else is next, beyond what we’ve already spoken about?
ROBIN: It’s the range of projects, the diversity of them, that makes it fun. Challenging and fun. There’s so many ways to make impact, and there’s new ideas to think about every day. But one of the projects that has been exciting this spring is in the area of – it goes by another acronym, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.
The sports apparel retailer Lids has developed an initiative to recognize and honor the history of the early Black leagues: the Negro Baseball League, the original Harlem Globetrotters, what was called the Black Fives; before there was the NBA, there were the Black Fives. These were leagues and teams in the era of racial segregation. These are the players that invented the modern game. In fact, the name of the campaign that we’ve developed is called “They Gave Us Game.”
It’s been a blast because I’m a sports fan, particularly basketball, and going back, the whole tree of influences in terms of – much like music, how every generation is influenced by the generation previous, and how the moves and skills developed in one era that proved successful and now you can see in the game of our players today. That’s been fun. So they’ve come up with this apparel collection called They Gave Us Game.
We’ve also been working in the area of services for those among us who are aging. Which is all of us, right? But there are more Americans that are living longer, and as a result, there’s more services available that most of us don’t necessarily recognize the variety of caregiving and expert services. So we’ve been working with a group called Leading Age to create a campaign called Keep Leading Life that showcases the range of services available to people.
ROB: Got it. We’ll look forward to those things as well. Robin, when people want to find and connect with you and Citizen Group, where should they go to find you?
ROBIN: We have a website. It’s called citizengroup.com.
ROB: That’s a good website. That’s easy to remember. Very appropriate. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, for all the work you’re doing for all of us, and for sharing a little bit about it along the way. Grateful to hear your journey.
ROBIN: Thanks for your interest. It was fun talking to you.
ROB: Excellent. Have a wonderful day. Take care.
ROBIN: Take care. Thanks.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Susan Britton, Owner/ Principal Creative Director, Britton Marketing & Design Group (Fort Wayne, IN) Susan Britton is Owner and Principal Creative Director at Britton Marketing & Design Group, a branding boutique agency that focuses on strategy, design, and helping its color-trended consumer goods clients better brand and market themselves. Sue started her career at Vera Bradley and rode a 9-year growth boom where things changed so rapidly the company had to reinvent itself every six months. (Revenues increased from $10 million to $400 million.) She left Vera Bradley on such good terms that they provided her with furniture for her new company and stayed on as clients with Britton doing catalogs and marketing for them for the next 10 years until Vera Bradley went public.
Sixteen years after she left her position at Vera Bradley, Sue says the experience “gave us a wonderful foundation to work with companies that are focused on home and colors, or fashion” – Britton’s niche market. She believes that brands “really take off” when a brand is distinctly “nuanced” in a way that shows the brand is special and the agency builds a “very highly descriptive visual expression” reinforcing the brand identity and couples that with a “strong strategy.” Done right, the created assets can be amortized over time, broadly used, and will promote a “more devoted following.”
As an example of a typical client, Sue talks about working with a number of paint companies, the importance of tracking color trends and building brand uniqueness, and the challenge of reaching out to “the do-it-yourselfers and the do-it-for-mes and then the pros.”
Some changes Sue has seen over the years are “a reluctance to invest in creative because it’s changing so quickly,” the need for lots of online (and often transitory) creative assets, and the flux of brands vacillating between bringing their creative work inhouse . . . and seeking an external agency. Sue’s agency has deleted some staff positions over the years and today outsources to partner vendors such less-frequently used services as building website backends or videography.
Sue is a strong believer in work-life balance. Before Covid, her agency interviewed people to discover what they valued . . . and came back with these results: “Their family, whatever that looked like. Their community. Their spirituality, whatever that looked like, or wellness. And then their environment.” She says, “They’ve circled the wagons around their family in a really, really big way.” She describes this as “the new American middle.”
Sue can be reached on her agency’s website at: bmdg.com (for Britton Marketing & Design Group), send an email off the site, or email Sue directly at: sue@bmdg.com
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Susan Britton, Owner and Principal Creative Director at Britton Marketing & Design Group based in my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast, Susan.
SUE: Thank you, Rob. You can just call me Sue, that’s fine.
ROB: We’ll go with Sue. Yeah, it’s excellent to have you here. I want all the Fort Wayne stories that the audience might not want to hear. But why don’t we start off first with a little bit of introduction to Britton Marketing & Design Group, and what is the firm’s superpower?
SUE: Well, we’re in Fort Wayne, Indiana because my education happened when I went to work for Vera Bradley, which is located – their headquarters are here in Fort Wayne. I joined Vera Bradley when they were about $10 million, and nine years later they were about $400 million. We tried everything, we experienced everything, and growing at that fast rate, we were reinventing every six months what we were doing. So that was a real privilege, and like I said, a great education.
Then I jumped off after about 10 years, and owner/founder Barbara Bradley Baekgaard and her partner, Pat, were really supportive when I left. They gave me furniture from the merchandising department and helped me get set up because they appreciated that they were female entrepreneurs and I wanted to be one again as well.
Then we continued to work with Vera Bradley, doing their catalogs and some marketing for the next 10 years until they went public. It really gave us a wonderful foundation to work with companies that are focused on home and colors, or fashion. We worked with Peter Millar as well for a few years, getting them on the map.
So really, our superpower, I would say, is design. It sounds very typical, but I think it’s sometimes underappreciated. I guess it’s hard to define sometimes, but when you have a brand that is really nuanced, when you have a very highly descriptive visual expression of what that brand is coupled with a really strong strategy, that’s when it operates on all cylinders and when we’ve seen brands really take off. I think people talk about it a lot in this industry – the form and function, the art and science – but it has always been true and will continue to be true.
ROB: I assume on Day 1, you were the one designer. Is that the case?
SUE: Yes. [laughs] I was sitting there looking out the window on a rainy day, at my desk. I had two other family members involved with me, and we were like, “Oh my gosh, what did we just do?” But the work followed, and we worked really hard. It all worked out. We’re here 16 years later and still figuring out marketing in the world today, which has gotten very complicated as well.
ROB: I was going to ask, because design in and of itself can be a little bit tricky to define, but then the definition has even probably changed on you. How has the nature of the work you do, the services, the deliverables – what has shifted in those 16 years?
SUE: I think it’s how fast everything – the kind of creative assets that people need constantly, day in and day out online – in the past, when we started out, it was print. Catalog work, and you would do two-week photoshoots. Well, that has really changed because of the tentative nature of the imagery that people need and the quantity of it. But I think what happens today is it’s easier to rely more on the science, which is more memorable – how many click-throughs – as we look at the success of an email campaign or whatever, a social media campaign.
I’ve seen a transition for a couple of things. One, a reluctance to invest in creative because it’s changing so quickly. But when they don’t do that, then you could put anybody’s logo on a picture on Instagram, like fashion or even home goods. It really needs to be nuanced in a way that you know when you look at it that that is a special brand. And it takes a little investment to do that, but there is a way that it can be done where you’re really creating assets that are amortized over a certain period of time and used in every area. I see when companies do that, they really have a more devoted following. People respond so well to the uniqueness that that brand represents.
Secondly, I think I’ve seen a change where in order to save costs many brands will bring their creative in-house, and that can be very successful, too, if they find the right people. It can also be easily unsuccessful just because of the complacency or the repetitive nature of the work. Focusing on one brand, day in and day out, I think sometimes people lose a little bit of edge. But not necessarily.
ROB: There’s definitely a lot to consider there. The pendulum of in-house versus – not outsourced, but out of house, working with a creative services firm. That pendulum seems to swing both industry-wide and then some clients really swing that pendulum back and forth as well.
You certainly mentioned Vera Bradley as a foundational client; what does your mix of clients look like? Are there typical industries, other key clients you’re able to talk about that you’ve snapped up since then?
SUE: Yeah, what’s happened since then is we really have honed our expertise in mostly color-trended consumer goods – I can say primarily purchased by women, but sometimes not. We’ve really worked into a lot of different paint company work. When you think about paint, it’s kind of like chemicals in a bucket. It’s really all marketing to talk about what’s special about that particular brand of paint and to do it in a lifestyle way, but sometimes with humor. It’s very color-oriented, so we’re always working on trends, looking at trends, trying to look ahead to what’s coming up that the consumer is looking forward to seeing.
Also, we asked ourselves when we were getting into especially the home goods market, what makes us successful in Fort Wayne with these kinds of customers, the color trending customers, home group customers? We saw that it was like the everyday person. It’s you and me, and so many percent of their consumers were everyday people. It wasn’t the super high end or super low commodity end. It’s really right there in the middle. So we’ve done a lot of research on that and have built an expertise around that particular consumer. That helps us work with these different companies.
ROB: Paint’s a really interesting one because nobody looks at your wall and can tell what kind of paint you have, and you probably don’t know either. There’s not a lot of word-of-mouth there, I don’t think. Any paint could be any color. But you have an industry buyer – we’ve had somebody helping paint our house; I don’t even know what they’re picking. They know, absolutely, what they’re picking for us, and then there’s “What do I pick up when I wander down the aisle at Home Depot or Lowe’s?” It’s anybody, for sure.
SUE: Right. And then they also have their pros that they’re trying to respond to. They have the do-it-yourselfers and the do-it-for-mes and then the pros.
ROB: Yeah, that’s what I’m getting at with the pro that we work with. I don’t know what they’re picking. I don’t ask for anything. They tell me where to go pick my colors. They say, “Go to this store and pick a color.” And I listen and I do it.
SUE: Right. They have undue influence. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] You got ahead of us on the origin story and where the firm came from, and you mentioned, of course, that you are still the principal creative director, but I’m sure you don’t do it all now. What did it look like to bring in let’s say the second design creative, and what did it take to get over the hump of you not doing it and letting them do the work?
SUE: It’s probably a variety of things, but I think what’s really important is to not only mentor but provide room for mistakes. We had a saying early on; we bring in interns and grow our own. We would bring someone in and explain the level of quality that our clients expect and then coach them on how to get there and make sure they were getting there. Then they would embrace it. And we really provided a non-threatening environment where people could really grow, we could really mentor them, and give them their own work to own and really work at.
That’s really what they’re doing today. Some people that are here have been here over 10 years, and probably the last group we hired has been for 7 years. So we’re probably getting ready to add another couple. But I think the important thing is respecting your team and allowing them to be different from you, but just making sure that the expectations are really clear and the goals of the company are clear too.
But we also wanted to create an environment where they could have a life beyond work. I think we’ve all worked places where we just worked way too many hours and we couldn’t have a personal life. Even before COVID, which I think has really brought that whole situation to light, we wanted to create an environment where family also comes first. So, if you’re taking care of the people that are working for you, they’re your human resources, and respecting them as much as you respect the work I think has been really key to our success and to having a well-oiled machine where everybody has been here a while and keeps it all humming.
ROB: Do you think that sort of autonomy is partly – you mentioned people who’ve been there 7 years, 9 years – do you feel like there’s a degree of autonomy where they get to do the work they would do even if they were out on their own, without the headache of being out on their own? Is that some of the mix? What’s some of the secret sauce on that kind of longevity?
SUE: I think it’s very close to what you said. I think it’s a way that they feel ownership in the work that they’re doing, and as a team, we might group critique something so that it’s not really threatening, but we’re always looking at improvements so that they can grow into their work and they can own it, and I don’t have to look over their shoulder. Because I don’t think people really like that. Especially creative people. They have their own expression within a certain frame and having them hone that and be able to do that I think is what creatives really want to do.
ROB: Certainly, with the amount of time you’ve had the firm up and running, I’m sure you’ve had to make some choices of where to grow and maybe some service offerings and lines of business that you’ve perhaps decided intentionally to not add. What are some things that maybe you have chosen to not do, maybe you keep partnering on them, maybe you refer them, maybe you say you don’t do that? Have there been decisions like that along the way?
SUE: Oh yeah, for sure. We used to have a videographer on staff and some photography, and we decided a few years ago that our expertise is a branding boutique agency where we’re helping our clients brand themselves better and have a better marketing strategy and better nuanced creative. So we have partners that we use for website backend building or videography or some even just video editing, those kinds of services. We don’t always need them consistently, or even photographers, because for every particular job you want to customize the right vendor to that particular project. They all have different levels of need, from high quality to a lower quality maybe, depending on budgets. It’s nice to be flexible and then just plug in and play with those other vendors as needed.
ROB: Got it. That makes sense. There’s an element even where maybe you have enough work to keep a videographer busy, but you really need half or a quarter or a tenth of 10 different videographers rather than ten-tenths of the same person.
SUE: Yeah, exactly. That’s definitely true.
ROB: Sue, as you reflect on the journey so far, what are some of the lessons you’ve learned in building the business – things you might go back and tell yourself to do differently if you were starting over?
SUE: That’s a good question. I think building an expertise is so important. I learned that from a fellow that was helping with us, consulting with us on our business a few years ago, and it’s the best thing that we’ve ever done because it helps us focus on what we’re really good at, what we have the right to win, and not try to be everything to everyone. I’m sure many agencies go through that, because you really do want to reach. You want to do something new and exciting. And sometimes that’s fine, if it’s not too far from your expertise, to stretch. But sometimes if you overreach, you get yourself in a difficult position. That’s not really good for you and not good for your client, and it’s not good for your team. So, I think really understanding what you’re good at and owning that is key.
In the past, we may have hired people that we thought, “Oh, we’re going to build this whole department,” but that really wasn’t going to happen. One thing is, people didn’t always trust you to be able to do it. They would look at what you were traditionally good at and they would not trust that you could go that far the other direction. So, I do think you have to really focus.
ROB: I can see that. It definitely helps you know how to talk to your clients as well, rather than being everything to anyone. But it’s hard to get that conviction.
You mentioned in some notes as we were getting this scheduled something about the “new American middle.” Tell me about the new American middle. What is that, and what is that expertise? How does that play into the firm?
SUE: As we all know, marketing is really about values. If you’re in lifestyle marketing, it’s really about values, and it’s a pretty complicated, noisy world. You’re not going to get a chance to remember much about a brand with everything going so quickly, so it’s really important that when you’re marketing, you’re really connecting and resonating with your consumers’ values.
As we looked at, again, who we were in Fort Wayne, why anybody should work with us, the kind of projects that are a good fit and companies that we could align with, it came back to that everyday person. As we dug in and we did a lot of research, we did some primary research, it was really illuminating to us that – and this was before COVID – we realized that the world had become less certain, and while maybe in the ’90s or some of the more consumer-driven decades, things had really changed.
When we interviewed people, the most important thing to them was their family, whatever that looked like. Their community. Their spirituality, whatever that looked like, or wellness. And then their environment. Those are the things everyone was really concerned about. They’ve circled the wagons around their family in a really, really big way.
For example, if you’re featuring maybe a woman with a handbag and that’s the product, so many companies feature it as a product on a person. But if you would reflect them doing things with their family, they may relate to that photo more quickly on a social media post than a single one. It’s just an idea of blending and taking your brand and looking at, with your competition also, what are the values that you compete over? What are the values you share? And what is the open space that they’re not owning?
Many brands are not owning family. If, for example, when you do your research, it pops up as a top important consumer value to those customers, then you can really reflect that through your digital expressions and your copy, etc., if that makes sense.
ROB: Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned also – we talked a little bit about family. I understand that family’s also important to how you operate the firm. How have you thought about setting up the work environment, setting up the work, setting up roles in a way that is compatible with families, in a way that maybe other services firms have a hard time with?
SUE: I think one thing we do is, for example, with the creative team, we have three different creative directors so that when we’re working with a client, usually there’s one that’s assigned, but they help each other out. So if one’s going to be out for a week, they’ll double up a little bit and do some handoffs just to get by through that week. And they know each other well enough that they can do that smoothly. In the past, I would say it was not the case.
Early on, we had creative directors that were very specific about their work, which was great, but they didn’t really overlap. But I think as we’ve worked into trying to be more flexible in our schedules, we’ve overlapped with each other so that we can help each other out when the other person’s not in, and also, again, the work from home has really helped. I think it’s helped many companies realize that, oh, we didn’t lose productivity, and oh, this gives us more flexibility to have more work-life balance, and we haven’t seen a drop in productivity. I think that’s been of the nicer outcomes of COVID.
ROB: How are you handling work from home? Is everybody home? Is there still an office? Do people come in anywhere at any particular time? How are you thinking through that?
SUE: We feel like for our culture, to maintain a good culture, it’s still good to have a building and a place where we can be. So we work two days a week in the office and three days a week from home. But sometimes people don’t work in the office for the work because they may have a project that they really want to concentrate on, they don’t want the distraction of office. But I think naturally now, the days in office become more meeting-oriented days. It’s naturally flowed that way, and then the other days are more work days. I feel like it’s been less distracting than when we were in every day.
ROB: So, it adds a little bit of predictability, less Swiss cheese on people’s schedules of meeting, work, meeting, work, meeting, work. But it also sounds like it’s a little bit more of a norm rather than a rule in terms of how many days in the office per week.
SUE: Yeah, we don’t really use rules here in that fashion. [laughs] We’re all here on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, try to get in. And people do. And I think people do like that balance because it orients you to be here and to be able to have meetings together and see each other, and then it’s balancing to be able to work from home the other three.
ROB: That’s good. It’s always interesting to hear the different ways that people are handling this. But I do think there’s value – if you’re going to still hire people and have people in a certain geography, it seems like being in the office sometimes matters. Otherwise, why not just hire somebody somewhere else? Which then you’re also competing with everybody everywhere else for talent.
SUE: Right. I think that’s so true. It is really interesting to us how everybody’s handling this whole thing and how it’s evolving. It is true you can hire people remotely anywhere these days, and that’s a good thing. It can be good and bad. I don’t think we would be opposed to hiring somebody out of Fort Wayne, but it does sometimes get more challenging when you’re trying to put everything up on a board. I mean, you can Zoom some of that.
I think everybody’s making it work, but there is a camaraderie. Actually, we do have someone who works out of Fort Wayne at this point and comes in every other week for a couple of days. That’s great because you still get to see them. But everybody will handle it differently, I’m sure.
ROB: Yeah. It’s very, very interesting. I have a friend who just took over as president of an existing agency, and she lives in Atlanta, and the agency is in Knoxville. I think she’s going to be up there every other week. It really depends on the age and stage of life. I think her children are grown, college-bound. Flexing life here and there is a better fit for different people at different times. But I think picking a lane – you’ve picked a lane for your team, and you let them know what the expectation is – that really helps versus what we see in the news where Apple’s still trying to get their people to go to the office, but every time they try to get them to go to the office, they complain, a couple of people quit. It becomes this whole fits and starts, and “what are we doing here?”
We ended up hiring primarily – during COVID was a lot of our growth, so we ended up being a distributed team without trying. We have folks everywhere from Florida to Georgia to California to now Canada. You know what lane you’re in. You pick it, and people who will gravitate towards that will be your tribe, I think.
SUE: I think so, too. It’s really how you treat each other and how the culture is developed and how you respect each other. That’s where people want to work. Location almost doesn’t matter anymore. Many of our vendors are all over the U.S. We work with companies for photography, all over. Also video, also web development. You just try to pick the best vendors that you work well with, that you understand their quality level or their style.
ROB: Yeah. Sue, when you look ahead, when you’re looking at the future of Britton Marketing & Design, you’re looking at the future of marketing and design in general, what gets you excited? What should we be looking for? What’s coming up? What’s going to be our exciting future?
SUE: I think for us, we still just love telling a great story about a great brand that people have worked hard to develop and have put their heart and passion into. That’ll just never get old, looking at someone’s journey of developing an idea and then making it work. That is still really possible in the U.S., and I think that’s always an exciting thing for us: to take that beautiful idea, brand that they’ve developed, and then really illuminate it. Give them a nuanced creative that shows it for what it really is, the heart and soul of somebody’s idea, and then really laying that over a really wonderful marketing matrix where you’ve looked at the most inexpensive yet most effective way for them to go to market, and then how they reach the people who would really like this, who they can really respond to, to make their quality of life better.
Also, the conscientious capitalism piece of it. What are people doing? How are they giving back? How are we as a community helping each other grow and be successful? I think whatever form that takes, it’s always still going to be a really exciting journey from a marketing standpoint. So many people think of marketing and think, “Oh, they’re just trying to sell me something.” No, that’s not what we do. That’s not what we get up for. It’s really a lot more layered than that.
ROB: Yeah, you loop it all the way back to the paint conversation. I feel like when I see paint advertising, a lot of it is about creating ideas of what’s possible, it’s about how you make people feel, it’s about a combination of pride and hospitality. And maybe I’m making some of that up, but I think about it more on those levels. I’m not looking for a material datasheet comparing one paint to another. Maybe somebody in an industrial application is, but when I’m thinking about my home, my office, you’re not showing me a picture of a bucket most of the time.
SUE: Right. It’s really your interaction with that brand – how does that brand make you feel about the products they have, the color ranges they have, the names? We had a project with Benjamin Moore years ago where we named a whole set of paint colors, and that was super fun for the team. They really loved that. Like some people will only buy paint that’s the name of a food, like whipped cream or chocolate or something like that. It’s funny what influences people.
ROB: How did you come up with these names? Did you do research with consumers on their responses to these names? How did you get to the answer on that one?
SUE: It was kind of a high-end line of paints that had different layers of pigments in them. The team would get together and – yeah, they didn’t really research. They just knew what the goal of the name should be in terms of a style, in terms of what they needed to imbue. So, they would come up with a range of names, a couple of names for each color, and then the company would look at them and pick them.
Since then, we’ve worked with other paint companies – some of the very prominent, and they don’t like us to talk about it too much because they like us to just be quiet about it. And that’s okay, because we do a lot of work with them. But it really is about the paint names; it’s about how you talk about the paint, like you said, envisioning their new space or home and how it makes their home better. Paint is difficult for people to choose, so making it easy for people to select paints and pre-curating some for them is all really important.
ROB: And I understand them wanting to take the center stage. That’s what every client wants. That’s what most people want. They want to be in the Story Brand metaphor. In the Hero’s Journey, they want to be the hero and they want you to be the guide, that you help them be the hero. That’s what we end up being there for when we’re on the services side, I think, so it’s hard to even market ourselves and show other potential clients how we can also be a good guide for them rather than using another client’s story to be the hero.
SUE: That’s really true. It’s funny; we really feel very successful at helping other brands illuminate what they are and what they do, and it has always been a struggle for us to do a good job of that about ourselves. I think we’re a little humble, too. Midwest, you know.
ROB: That’s right. There is that Midwestern humility. Sue, when people want to find and connect with you and with Britton Marketing & Design Group, where should they go to track you down?
SUE: They can go to our website, which is just bmdg.com, as in Britton Marketing & Design Group. They can send an informational email to us and we’ll call them back. Or they can just email me as well, which is sue@bmdg.com.
ROB: Excellent. Was it difficult getting a four-letter dot-com domain?
SUE: We were surprised that it was not. That’s why we snagged it.
ROB: [laughs] Well, excellent. Sue, thank you so much for coming on, for sharing your journey. Congratulations on everything you have done, and we look forward to seeing so much more ahead.
SUE: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for your time and for the conversation. I think we can all help each other by having these kinds of conversations. We all learn from everything we hear and read, right?
ROB: So much, Sue. Thank you. Be well.
SUE: Thank you so much.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Amanda Parker, President and Owner, Collective Alternative (Indianapolis, IN) Amanda Parker is President and Owner at Collective Alternative, a full-service agency that focuses on growing small, mostly local businesses. She started her agency 14 years ago to bring together her background in strategy and development, experience as the Vice President of Marketing for a homebuilder, and passion for Mom-and-Pops, new home construction, and small, home-service businesses. Typical agency clients might include a local plumber trying to compete with bigger plumbing competition.
In this interview, Amanda explains there are a number of differences for successfully working with small businesses as opposed to mega-brand clients. Marketers typically work fast. With small businesses, she has found that it is important to slow down, communicate with the client, and let them know what the agency is trying to accomplish, the end goal/objective, and the benefit of the end goal. They require a lot more “hand-holding” through the process, she explains, and they can’t “afford to waste a single dollar.”
Amanda feels it is also critical to “protect” these smaller clients, to watch both the market and the economy. She also believes an “it’s just business” approach does not work. Larger companies have the resources and resilience to “experiment” with marketing strategies. With smaller companies, errors bleed through to the bottom line and can affect an organization’s survival. With smaller companies,
It is so personal. It doesn’t get any more personal for a small business owner. They have sunk everything into it. They’re working 12-16 hour days. All they want to do is provide for their family, send their daughter to dance class, send their kid to college, whatever it is. It’s personal.
Amanda says she is quite cognizant of her personal weaknesses. In building her agency, she focuses on hiring people who can bring complementary strengths, identifies potential areas of growth, supports continuing education efforts, and brings in experts to help her team “accelerate” their careers.
Some of the agency’s local clients go national. One client they are currently working with provides rehabilitative and mental health care for first responders (fire and police). The client will soon launch a national first responder mental health platform called Shield, which excites Amanda because it facilitates open discussions of mental health.
Amanda can be reached on her agency’s website at: collectivealternative.com or thecaway.com, or by email at: amanda@thecaway.com.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Amanda Parker, President and Owner at Collective Alternative based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast, Amanda.
AMANDA: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Very excited to be here.
ROB: Absolutely. Great to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Collective Alternative, and what distinguishes the firm? What is your superpower?
AMANDA: Oh, our superpower. Our firm is unique in we focus on small business. My background with agencies and things like that, I was on the larger accounts, but I really fell in love with the mom n’ pops, the small businesses of the country, and wanted to give them an opportunity to compete and gain some market share. So, we really focus on those mom n’ pop businesses.
I love home services. When I did work on the client-side, I was the Vice President of Marketing for a homebuilder, and I fell in love with it. It got in my blood. So, we love home services and new home construction and all of that. But I just love my small business clients and to see their growth. It’s just amazing.
ROB: That’s excellent. Those businesses, you say small; are they largely local? Are some of them national in scope? Is it heavy into services? Are you helping the local plumber go up against the big guys, or what are the industry specialties?
AMANDA: The majority of our clients are local. We are definitely helping that local plumber go up against the big guys. Even the bigger guy in the area, right? Which I just love. But we do have some clients that are national, or they’ve started local and they’ve grown nationally. We have one client that started here in Indiana, and they provide rehabilitative care, mental health care, all of that kind of thing for first responders – for fire and police. And they are growing on a national scale, especially with a new product they’re taking to market this month. So, it’s really cool to see that growth and be a part of it.
ROB: That’s really exciting to be able to help with that. What is it that you think changed as the firm grows that makes it maybe a different firm specialty? How do you define small as in small business, and what is it that really makes the scope of what they need a great fit for you?
AMANDA: My background is strategy and development, so I really focused on when you’re a small business, you cannot afford to waste a single dollar. I really focus on the strategy behind everything that we do. We don’t throw things at the wall to see what sticks. We are very focused, hone in on – we may do some A/B testing, but for the most part it’s planned out. We know what the payoff is going to be. We know we’re going to deliver the right ROI for our clients, and we really focus in on that strategy to make sure that every dollar they give to us is working for them and paying off.
ROB: There’s definitely a certain pressure. They don’t have a lot of extra dollars for experimental budgets when you’re talking about a small business. And I can imagine there’s probably a range of services you can engage in. How far across the range are you going? You can do anything from SEO, you can do SEM, you can do paid organic social, you can do media, TV, billboards, out-of-home. How far does the rabbit hole go with these clients?
AMANDA: We’re actually a full-service firm, so we do everything that they need. One issue that I always heard from my small business clients was they felt like they had to repeat their initiatives over and over again to a number of different marketing partners. At one point they’re talking to a PR person; then they’re talking to a digital firm; then they’re talking to an SEO firm. It was just all over the place, and they never felt like they had the unity, so they couldn’t tell if their dollars were really working for them or not.
I brought all of those different expertises in-house with different people leading those different areas, and now everything is under one roof and we all collaborate and talk together. So, they don’t have to repeat and they can really see the benefit of it.
ROB: Some services, it’s pretty straightforward; you can show somebody “You’re a plumber, we ran this ad, we tracked the phone numbers, here’s your calls.” Maybe if they’re really detailed, they can see what they got from that. How do you look at something that can be a little bit of a longer term investment?
Let’s say you’re looking at – whether it’s an awareness campaign on a digital billboard, whether it’s maybe something where the outcome – sometimes it’s not 100% certain how well you can do in SEO and what keywords you can optimize for. How do you think about helping them through that process of investing over time? The outcome is a little bit unknown, but directionally, you know because it rhymes with plenty of other clients that you’ve seen.
AMANDA: I think it’s more a matter of educating them and almost holding their hand through the process so they understand what it is that we’re trying to accomplish, they know what the end goal or objective is, and they know what the benefit of that end goal is. A lot of times as marketers, I feel like we go so fast – and we know it, and we know the acronyms and everything else, so we just keep going and going and going, and we don’t slow down enough to communicate to the client and let them know, “Okay, here’s what this means for you, and here’s why I’m doing it, and here’s what I’m hoping to see out of it or I expect to see out of it, and here’s what that means.” So just really overcommunicating that.
ROB: Got it. I can certainly see that. And then there’s I think also a challenge, then, of equipping more and more of your team to walk clients on that journey. How do you help give your team the playbook that is needed so that – you can’t hold everybody’s hand anymore, right?
AMANDA: I can’t. But I want to. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] All these nice little small businesses. They need somebody to hang out with them and help them and hug them, yes.
AMANDA: Yes. I so want to, but I can’t. So, it’s really making sure that my team understands our culture, understands our mission. And if they do and they believe in it and they buy into it, then I know that they will continue to communicate that and advocate for the client. And that’s what I’ve seen. It really comes down to educating the team on what our mission is and then making sure that they believe it in their soul and then get out there and do it.
ROB: Excellent. You mentioned a little bit of your past life and some of the work you’d done for clients before, but that’s still a long distance from actually starting your own agency. So, what was it that pushed you across that boundary and led you to start your own firm?
AMANDA: I constantly heard that I was too vested in my clients and that “it’s not personal, it’s just business.” That kept me up at night. I struggled with that so much because, for a small business, you’d better believe it’s personal. It is so personal. It doesn’t get any more personal for a small business owner. They have sunk everything into it. They’re working 12-16 hour days. All they want to do is provide for their family, send their daughter to dance class, send their kid to college, whatever it is. It’s personal.
I could not get that to settle with my soul, so I remember coming home one day and I told my husband, “Yeah, I’m done. I’m going to do this on my own and I’m going to make it personal.” And our tagline is “Making business personal.” He was like, “Okay, girl, go for it.” And that was 14 years ago.
ROB: Wow, so 14 years. What have been some of the step functions, the inflection points on the journey? Whether it’s key hires, whether it’s service areas, whether it’s a certain degree of scale or things that you don’t do anymore that you used to, what have been some of those key points in the business?
AMANDA: I feel like I have had this rollercoaster journey as a business owner. I’m sure a lot of business owners feel that way, but I have made some doozy mistakes where you hire the wrong person and they don’t buy into the mission, but you just liked them so much, or you felt they had such potential but they don’t want to realize it. I don't know. So, some bad hires along the way. But I’ve had some really great hires.
I created a leadership team around me of some magnificent, magnificently talented people, and they are just incredible. I am so blessed to have them. As you know, this industry changes on a dime. Today it’s one thing, tomorrow it’s another. You have to stay up on that. So, making sure that we hire people who want to change with that and want to realize what’s new – I mean, five years ago what was TikTok? Come on. It’s just really making sure that we’re staying on top of things, that we know what’s coming, that we’re watching the market, we’re watching the economy. We have to protect our clients in ways that other firms don’t.
ROB: Have you found some local business clients for whom TikTok makes good sense and resonates well? What have you seen there?
AMANDA: It’s funny; because they’re home services – and I will say, in Indiana compared to maybe where you are or California, we seem to be a little bit behind some of the coasts. Several of my clients, their big thing this year was getting on Instagram. It is what it is. And now I’m trying to talk to them about influencers and “let’s get in with an influencer, let’s do an influencer campaign.” It’s harder for them to understand what that is or see the benefit of that, but they’re coming around.
We’re doing some cool experimental things for them to see what that looks like. I know it’s their trust in me that’s pushing that, which I appreciate beyond words. But they’re getting there. [laughs] That’s all I can say.
ROB: Sure. And I wonder also, not so much even for anything to reflect on you or your clients, but also as I think about the intersection of the businesses that you work with, simply put, the TikTok feed is not really optimized for local. That’s not an axis that it tends to revolve around, so I could see it being a tricky investment just from that part alone. The dynamic isn’t getting followed. The dynamic is showing up in the algorithmic feed and blowing up there. And TikTok would rather have somebody telling a joke or doing a dance or falling on their face or cute animals than “Here’s how you prepare for freezing your pipes in the winter, and here’s my dance for doing that.” It’s a different thing.
AMANDA: [laughs] Yep, exactly.
ROB: You mentioned, and I’ll pull on it a little bit – we don’t always get a chance to talk through the thinking that goes into exec team, who’s on that boat, what roles, what structure. How have you evolved and emerged and thought about this executive team around you and who’s on it?
AMANDA: I think pretty uniquely in the fact that I have tried to be very self-aware of my weaknesses. My skillset does not include design. It does not include website creation or even brand management, for that matter. So, I knew early on I need very strong people with me on that side that can see the strategy in that and really support me there.
So having a creative director, a VP of Creative, was really important. She was my first hire, and she is still with me today. I have a designer that has been with me for 12 years. It’s treating them like family, but filling in where I know that I am weak and I need to surround myself with strong talent. I think that has been so beneficial for me because then we’ve grown together. We can collaborate together, and together we do some really amazing things.
ROB: It’s interesting when you have someone involved who excels in an area that you need them. You need them to be stronger there. How do you think about continuing to develop those team members in areas where you’re not more of an expert? There are places where you have your expertise and it’s your job to equip and cast vision, and then there’s stuff that you don’t know how to do, and that’s why people are there. How do you help your team grow with the firm?
AMANDA: They still want to grow. They want to accelerate their career, they want to learn other things. We do a lot of training. We do a lot of bringing experts in. If they want to go to a conference or something like that, all of that is on the table. We do a lot of sharing newsletters, articles, videos. We do a lot of that back and forth so we all have that knowledge base, but they’re still learning. And then it’s constantly giving them a challenge. “Here’s an area of growth that I see,” and getting them to realize that, see that, and then jump in and participate in it.
ROB: It’s always an interesting challenge, especially when you get outside of your wheelhouse a little bit, so I do appreciate that thinking.
As you reflect on the journey of the firm, Amanda, what are some things you think about? What have you learned along the way? What would you go back and tell yourself “Don’t do that, do it this way” if you could? Reflect on those things you might’ve done differently if you were starting from zero.
AMANDA: Oh, my goodness, that list is lengthy. There have been a couple times that we were primed to grow, we knew we needed help – this is where I learned this lesson – and instead of hiring for culture or fit that way, we hired doers that could just support the work and do the work. It just didn’t work out. It was a huge influx of people all of a sudden that we weren’t ready for. We didn’t train them appropriately. We did not set them up for success. That was a big lesson for me to learn, that I had hired the wrong way.
I always try to leave people better than I found them, and I know those people I did not set up for success, and that was really tough for me. It was tough for me to get over that and move on to, “Okay, I had perhaps a negative impact on their life. I still need to take care of my clients and continue to build, so I need to reset. What does that look like so I don’t do that again?” That’s tough. It’s tough as a business owner to know that you have that kind of impact.
ROB: Yeah. But it’s personal. You said it from the start. That part of the business is personal for you as well, so it’s consistent. It pulls through. Even the wrong decisions aren’t just like, “Oh, forget that person, they should’ve known better.” You see that in business, and some people operate that way, and that’s personal. That gets taken very differently, personally. It’s a different lane.
AMANDA: It really does. It’s kept me up at night. And then there’s those things that if I could go back and tell this person “I’m sorry, I didn’t know what I should have known” or “I hadn’t learned that lesson” – you want to, and then at the same time, you’re the boss, so you’re always going to be the bad guy. [laughs] I mean, where’s the line, right?
ROB: Yep. We’re in an interesting spot, an interesting turning point. We’re coming into the summer of 2022. Everybody’s done their different versions of office and no office, “how is my team structured, where is my team?” How are you thinking about the location and gathering of your team in-person as we’re going through 2022?
AMANDA: That’s funny. When COVID came – and that was another lesson in and of itself – but when COVID came on, I was watching the news. I sent all my team home early. Before the mandate even rolled out, I had sent them to work from home.
In the middle of May, my leadership team called me and said, “We’re going back to the office with or without you.” And that was May of 2020. I was like, “Um, there’s still a mandate.” I’m trying to talk through it, and they’re like, “No. We need to collaborate. This is what we do for our clients. We’re going back to the office June 1. You do whatever you need to do to make sure that happens, but we’re going back to the office.”
It just so happened to roll with the timeline; they had lifted some restrictions at that point, so we could. And we’ve been in the office since June 1st of 2020. We’ve been very fortunate with – we try to stay healthy. If somebody’s sick, stay home, that kind of thing. But yeah, they want to be here. They want to collaborate. So that’s where we are.
ROB: It sounds like you didn’t have to pull them into it. Did you have anybody who tried to move somewhere or tried to go remote first? Or that just wasn’t your lane?
AMANDA: We did lose two people. One person had to move to Texas to take care of her family, and then another person was just not comfortable coming into the office and she actually quit. That was unfortunate, because we liked both of them, but this is where we do our best work, and we have to perform for those clients.
ROB: I’m sure you’ve had to, whether it was those folks and you had to backfill them or new roles you’ve had to hire – have you found that there are people who are ready to be in an office? That’s a lane you’ve chosen and they’re like, “These are my people, I want to be in an office too”? How are you seeing this from a recruiting advantage perspective?
AMANDA: That’s funny; I was just on an interview yesterday and she said she’s worked from home since 2018, and she wants back in an office so bad that she’s changed her career path and is moving over to marketing so she can go back in an office. It’s out there. People want to be back to work. They want to be back in an office. I think you have a mix. There are still some people that are enjoying the work remote. But for the most part, I’ve seen, and we’ve heard in our interviews, people are ready. They are ready to come back in.
ROB: I think a lot of people really want clarity, too. They want to know what the plan is instead of being in permanent limbo. You see some of the tech companies are back and forth, and people don’t quite know. There’s people who moved to Idaho from Silicon Valley. They’re building a house there. They’re not going back.
AMANDA: Yeah, exactly.
ROB: But where you’re in limbo or it’s like now you’re going back – infamously, this past week, a VP of I think machine learning at Apple just said, “No, I’m not coming back to the office. I don’t want to do that. I will take a job somewhere else.” Now, them announcing that loudly is probably a good way to get some recruiting calls as well. But I think people want to know, and when it shifts, I think that’s when the moment of truth happens.
We have hired all over the place, so we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. We did most of our growth during COVID. We’ve found ourselves in making a different choice. But our choice is still that we’re going to get together several times a year in a different place, and we’re still going to get on planes and spend time with sufficiently large clients. I think people still kind of know that. They want to be in a lane where they value getting together sometimes, but they want to be at home.
I think the clarity of letting people know, as well as the proof – people can see the proof. They can see the proof on your LinkedIn. Where are your people? If all of your people are in one place, they’re going to take that message. If people are all over the place, they’re going to feel safe being somewhere else. We just hired somebody in Canada, which is a whole other interesting thing. We’ll enjoy getting to know her.
AMANDA: I love the fact that remote opens up so much opportunity for people, and they can change to a different company or they can change to a different career path or whatever. I think that is perfect. But my team loves being together, loves to collaborate together. It’s the culture we’ve built, so we’re all here in Indiana and going to stay put.
ROB: I’m glad it’s working for you. As you’re looking forward to the future of marketing, the future of services you provide, the future of your clients, what’s coming up for Collective Alternative that you’re excited about, for clients, for the overall trends in marketing in general?
AMANDA: That’s a great question. We have right now – and I mentioned it a little bit earlier – one client that is launching a new platform. It’s called Shield, and it is a mental health platform for first responders, police and fire. I love the fact that we get to be very real and talk about how challenging their job is and how they do have those same needs that other people do. We get to talk about mental health openly.
It’s so taboo, especially in that field, so if we can start to penetrate that and really start to show that even anonymously, they can take these assessments and see where they’re at, gauge what is going on, and they can self-assess – then maybe that helps them, or maybe that tells them, “Oh, I do drink a little bit too much. Maybe I should reach out and get some help with that.” Or “Maybe I should cut that.” Whatever it is so that they can be healthier, be better, and be better representatives of the community. So, it still has that community tie, but it’s on a national scale. I’m really excited about that.
As far as trends, like I mentioned, the influencer thing. We’ve got a couple influencer campaigns going on, one with a remodeling client of ours. He’s all for it, so we’re talking about lifestyle and remodeling trends, and it’s been a lot of fun. Just doing some of those things to really set our clients apart and speak more to who they are and showcase that – I love it. I love it every day.
ROB: That’s exciting. There’s a lot of good things coming up. I think it’s a really opportune time to engage people in some change that they’re seeking in their lives. I think people have realized – kind of like where they choose to work. They’re in whatever rut they’ve been in, but there’s some energy to do something different as other parts of their lives change. That’s very exciting and very timely.
Amanda, when people want to find and connect with you, with Collective Alternative, where should they go to track you down?
AMANDA: They can visit our website, collectivealternative.com, or thecaway.com, or they can reach out by email, amanda@thecaway.com. Give me a call, you name it. There’s a number of ways; you can find me all over the web.
ROB: There it is. Excellent. And you can find you in your office as well.
AMANDA: Right.
ROB: [laughs] Thank you so much, Amanda. It’s been good to learn about you, to learn about Collective Alternative. Thank you for sharing your story and your journey with the audience. Really appreciate it.
AMANDA: Thank you for having me. It was so fun.
ROB: Thank you. Take care.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Kevin Roy, Co-founder of GreenBananaSEO based in Beverly, Massachusetts Kevin Roy is the Co-founder of GreenBananaSEO, a full-stack digital ad agency, best known for search engine optimization but also providing paid media, Google AdWords, Facebook, and programmatic display services. Over the years the team has developed a number of internal systems to keep up with the work, including 24x7 online ordering system that funnels agency orders to his team and creates a workflow. Kevin says the agency always has more web development work than it can “keep up with” but over the past 15 years, it has always been a “loss leader.”
The agency’s motto is “Page 1 or you don’t pay.” Kevin explains that the agency does not guarantee the agency’s services will get a client on Page 1. It’s about whether the client pays.
Unless we get our clients on Page 1 for the keywords that they pick, they don’t pay us. If we don’t get them ranked, they don’t pay us. If we get them ranked and lose their rankings, they don’t pay us. We have to get them ranked and keep them ranked
Part of the “secret sauce” of the agency’s success is a comprehensive understanding of Google’s webmaster tools and its ever-changing rules. Websites are optimized “based on a few very important factors.” The agency has an 80-step process, which is frequently updated to adapt to Google’s policy changes. As a recent example of a new Google requirement, Kevin cites desktop viewability. The agency has integrated this requirement into the websites it manages and tested the sites to ensure they meet “all those metrics.”
Kevin warns against using “tricks” to “game the system” to get a site ranked. He says, “Google is always going to be bigger and have more resources” and will eventually figure out the “game.” “That’s not a position you want to put your client in,” he says. He believes it is more important to “just try to provide quality and relevance” and then adds, “It does take people a little longer to get ranked when you follow the rules, but it also is harder to lose your ranking when you do.”
When Kevin decided to start his agency, he offered to build websites and run SEO for three successful businesspeople on two conditions: that they not tell anyone that he “did it for free” and that, if they were happy with his work, they would recommend him. The strategy worked. Today, the agency is 100% referral and “business just keeps coming in.”
At the beginning of client engagement, GreenBananaSEO provides a free website audit and recommendations based on what it perceives to be a client’s problem. Kevin says the agency is a “digital executioner” with an SEO division and a paid media division (focused on key performance indexes/conversions). He says the agency does “almost everything on a screen that’s paid” including OTT (over-the-top) television, programmatic, geofencing, geotargeting, and addressable media. No billboards. No direct mail. “It’s all paid media,” he explains, and the agency is “hired by people to make their messaging and their branding work.”
Kevin can be reached on his personal page at: ijustmetkevin.com.or on his agency website at: greenbananaseo.com.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and my guest today is Kevin Roy, Co-founder of GreenBananaSEO based in Beverly, Massachusetts. Welcome to the podcast, Kevin.
KEVIN: Hey, thanks for having me.
ROB: Great to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about GreenBanana and what you specialize in?
KEVIN: We don’t sell bananas. GreenBananaSEO is a full-stack digital ad agency, and we’re primarily known for our search engine optimization, but we also have a significant portion of our clients run paid media, Google AdWords, Facebook, programmatic display.
One of the reasons that a lot of people know us for search engine optimization is our mottol, which is “Page 1 or you don’t pay.” So unless we get our clients on Page 1 for the keywords that they pick, they don’t pay us. If we don’t get them ranked, they don’t pay us. If we get them ranked and lose their rankings, they don’t pay us. We have to get them ranked and keep them ranked.
And the big secret is there’s no secret. You just do what you’re supposed to do. Google publishes their webmaster tools. They’re not fun to read. [laughs] We read them and we optimize people’s sites based on a few very important factors that I could always touch on later. But you don’t try to game the system. You just try to provide quality and relevance, and you magically rank.
ROB: How do you think about socializing that knowledge across your team? Some people who are there might have an intrinsic knowledge of what it takes, they’ve digested the notes on what Google likes, what Google doesn’t like. But somebody new comes in or somebody’s new to the industry – how do you think about putting them on the path of not looking for tricks and of doing the right thing?
KEVIN: That’s a great question. We have a process. We have an 80-step process and we teach our members to follow that process. But we also have a hierarchy of SEO director-level knowledge that are always going and looking for the latest changes that Google has published that they made and how we have to adapt our process to that.
Something that just came out recently was desktop viewability. It’s something that Google is amping people for if they don’t have the right desktop viewability, so we have to make that part of it, go in and test that, make sure their site is hitting all those metrics and adapting the site to that.
ROB: That makes sense. SEO has a long history, and it’s been through – you’re making reference to tips and tricks, and there were all these conversations about “secrets.” There were tools people would provide that would tell you these secrets. Did you always come at it from the non-secrets angle, or was that an evolution and there were some tricks that once were kind of helpful, but have really attenuated as Google has evolved its algorithm?
KEVIN: The thing that’s always stuck in the back of my mind is how massive Google is. There are tricks and things that you can do to game the system and try to get the site ranked, but Google is always going to be bigger and have more resources, and they are ultimately going to figure that out, and that’s not a position you want to put your client in. I always say, it’s not if you get caught, it’s when you get caught. So if you decide that’s the game you want to play, then buckle up. Maybe that’s something you want to do, but that’s not what we do.
It does take people a little longer to get ranked when you follow the rules, but it also is harder to lose your ranking when you do. It’s a lot more beneficial. And our clients are real businesses that are really trying to promote their work, and they can’t afford to get caught for something we did.
ROB: Page 1, that’s a great target. Are there ever keywords I would want to target where you would look at me as a client and say, “You know, I get it, but that’s a no. We can’t guarantee that”? Is there a target that’s too high?
KEVIN: There are two parts to that answer. Number one, we don’t guarantee ranking. We guarantee that if we can’t get you there, you don’t pay us. So when people call and say, “Hey, GreenBanana, we need to get on Page 1 in a month for these keyword phrases,” I’m like, “Great. We have an AdWords campaign for that. I can guarantee you’ll get on Page 1 with a Google AdWords campaign because we’re going to bid higher than your competitors for that.”
But there are certain things Google takes into consideration, like domain authority, how long the site has been living, how much content is on the site, and that a lot plays into how successful we think we’re going to be before we start the campaign. So if you started a brand new dating website today and said, “I want to get on Page 1 for dating,” I would say, “Okay, it’s going to take us about 18 months to get you ranked. This is what it’s going to cost when we do get you ranked. Sign this contract.” And you’ll probably say, “I can’t afford this.” [laughs] Because eHarmony and Match.com and Plenty of Fish and those people have teams and teams of SEO people.
So yes, we can do it, but a lot of times if it’s a super broad term that is hyper, hyper-competitive, like – everyone calls us for mesothelioma. SEOs have been working on that for 15 years, so we have 14½ years of catch-up to do. It’s going to be expensive.
ROB: That all makes sense. Where did this whole thing come from, Kevin? What made you decide to start GreenBanana?
KEVIN: I used to be the web director for a company called eRoom Technology that ended up getting bought by EMC. It’s a workspace collaboration, kind of like – I don’t know if you use Basecamp or Teams.
ROB: I know all the stuff. ClickUp and so many things now.
KEVIN: Yeah, all those collaboration spaces. The company got bought out, and I had a team of people under me, and next thing you know I was doing about two hours’ worth of work doing web edit updates and going to the gym for the rest of the time and realizing my job was not going to last long. When my boss got let go, I went off and decided to start my own company.
I got a good severance package, and I went around and found three people in the area that were really good, that I thought were successful businesspeople, and I said, “I’m going to build you a website for free. I’m going to do your SEO. You’re not going to tell anybody that I did it for free, and if you’re happy with it, you can recommend me.” That’s legitimately how the business started.
ROB: Wow.
KEVIN: Two of them worked out. One of them, that company either moved – I can’t even remember what happened. But two of them recommended me, and that started the spiral. To this day, I spend my time – we don’t have an outreach program. We don’t even do our own SEO. If you look at our SEO, it could be a lot better. I know the audience can’t see this, but the left-hand side of this sheet, there’s 30 RFPs that I had to write last week, and we’re 100% referral.
We just try to help people. We’ll do free audits for people and say, “This is what we think you should do. Your problem may not be able to be solved by SEO” – for example, if it’s a product that no one’s ever heard of before, SEO Is not what you want. It’s going to be programmatic or social to get in front of people that might like your product. So we spend our days doing that, and miraculously, business just keeps coming in. It’s been like that for 15 years.
ROB: When you mention RFP, is that an expression of interest from a client who needs a proposal, or more of a formal RFP, competitive…?
KEVIN: That’s a good question. I don’t write RFPs. Actually, I did. I wrote two and spent weeks doing them and no one ever called me back, so I don’t write RFPs. [laughs] People calling us and asking for quotes, that’s what I call RFPs.
ROB: Understood. So, you’re turning around a proposal, someone says, “What does this look like?”, you do a little bit of discovery, “I want to rank for this, I want to rank for that,” you turn it around and tell them, “This is what it looks like.”
KEVIN: Yeah. We do an audit and then come and tell them, “Hey, is SEO the right thing for you? If it is, we’ll help you pick some keyword phrases.” Then we send it to them, there’s usually a little back and forth, and then we decide if we want to move forward or not.
ROB: You just mentioned programmatic. I know earlier you mentioned not just SEO, but paid search, and then you mentioned social, which I didn’t hear you mention earlier. Scope of services is always an interesting conversation. Where do you draw the line? Are you doing paid social? Do you do organic social? Where do you say yes, where do you say no?
KEVIN: It’s all paid media. We do almost everything on a screen that’s paid, like OTT, which is connected to television, programmatic, geofencing, geotargeting, addressable. What we don’t do is anything print. We don’t do billboards. We don’t do direct mail. People hire us because we’re digital executioners. We don’t even do – if someone calls and says, “I want the sexiest branding of anybody,” that’s not what we do. We’re hired by people to make their messaging and their branding work.
We have an SEO division and we have a paid media division. The paid media team is solely focused on KPI or key performance indexes or conversions. When someone comes to work for GreenBanana as our paid media side, especially if they’re from another agency, I tell them, if you’re really, really good at this job, you can sell reporting for maybe two to three months. But you can sell conversions and leads forever. So everything that you’re doing, you should absolutely figure out in the very beginning. We don’t start a campaign until we figure out what the goal of the client is, and then you take the media that you’re serving and drive it to that goal and try to maximize it.
Sometimes social, like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, will outperform Google AdWords, or programmatic will outperform Twitter. A lot of our clients will come to us with, “Hey, I want to spend $5,000 in social and $2,500 in AdWords,” and we find out after running a campaign for 30 to 60 days, “You know what? AdWords is getting you double the amount of leads for the budget. We recommend you switch and pull your money from social into that.” And they always say yes, because the client doesn’t care who we’re giving money to; they just care about the success of the company.
So that’s how we do that. Our account execs are really well-versed in every single medium, and they’re medium agnostic. They don’t care if budget gets pulled from one medium to another, even if it affects our margin at GreenBanana, because our job is to get the campaigns to be most successful. Those are the clients that increase budget, that stay with us forever.
We have a plumber that has been with us for 13 of our 15 years, and they went from spending $750 a month to $40,000 a month over that long period of time because the campaigns that we’re working on are producing results.
ROB: Right. It’s an engine for their business now and would be a fairly terrifying thing to switch out, I think. Also hard to get too different – even if they wanted to test out a competitive firm, it’s a little hard because then you’re bidding on some of the same stuff, I would think.
KEVIN: Oh yeah, that’s a great point. You can’t run two Google campaigns because if you have two firms running two Google campaigns, Google’s only going to show one, and the one that’s showing is going to actually be more expensive than the one that isn’t. You just outbid yourself. So if you’re a company ever trying to pit one agency against the other, don’t have them run the same medium. Don’t have them both run Facebook or both run AdWords. It’s a terrible idea.
ROB: That sounds like a good way to spend $80,000 a month instead.
KEVIN: It’s a good way to blow a lot of money, yeah.
ROB: You mentioned you had this initial flywheel in the firm, three test subjects and some referrals, and still growing and spinning it by referrals. What was the moment – your title is co-founder, so where else did this start, and when did it start to expand beyond the co-founder territory?
KEVIN: It got to a point where I was – we do web development in-house. We never talk about it because we have more than we can keep up with, and for some reason, in 15 years it’s never been profitable. It’s always this loss leader. So I was doing a lot of web development, and I was outsourcing the stuff that I couldn’t keep up with. The outsource company that was local called me and said, “We can’t keep up with the demand that you’re sending us. Here’s a guy we recommend you send some of this stuff to.” His name is Mark, and he’s my business partner now. He and I really hit it off, and I said, “Let’s just get in this together because we have complementary skillsets.” So that was the co-founder piece.
When it went beyond it, we didn’t have any money when we started. We didn’t have any private equity. No angel investors. We would save a little and then hire an employee, and save a little and hire an employee. If you look at the trajectory of GreenBanana, we’ve always grown, but it’s been a slow, steady organic growth to where we are right now. There are companies that have surpassed us that haven’t done that, and you could argue that’s a great way to do it, just got a big influx of cash and hired a team. But we said, no, we’re just going to keep reinvesting the money we make and build and grow and learn.
As we grow, we build. We have internal systems that we’ve built because we have a lot of other agencies that are clients of ours. We built an online ordering system so at midnight, an agency can put in all the orders and have it funnel to my team and create a workflow. But that didn’t happen overnight. It took us a year and a half to build it.
ROB: Right. You mentioned this commitment to steady growth. It can be tempting to push the fast-forward button. How, over this time, have you resisted the temptation to – whether it’s to take a buyout and take some growth there, whether it’s to take in some money and boost some hires – how have you been thinking about that as you proceed and stuck to the path of building growth organically?
KEVIN: That’s a great question. In the beginning, no one was coming and asking us, “Here’s a bunch of money to go do something.” So that was easy. We did have some periods that we got a lot more customers than we could handle and we made mistakes. So that also made us nervous, and making sure that if someone just handed us a blank check, we probably wouldn’t know what to do with it. If the opportunity came where someone said, “Here’s a bunch of money and here’s the 10 agencies that we’ve grown exactly like yours,” that would be a lot more attractive.
Now that we’re at the revenue that we’re at, we’re actually getting people that are asking us for that. But we haven’t gotten anything attractive enough to have us say, “We’ll give up half the business for that.” That’s actually the answer. The answer is nothing’s been attractive enough.
ROB: That seems to be the case in services in general. I hear, at least, quite often that you’re measuring the value of the business based on EBITDA, based on your actual earnings, and maybe you can back out some expenses that have been loaded onto the business, that kind of thing. But really, if you’re healthy on EBITDA, then the business needs some cash to grow and some cash to distribute, and what’s the hurry on the sale? The terms aren’t usually enough to make you say, “I couldn’t make that much profit in three years.”
KEVIN: Right. Exactly. That seems to be what’s happening. Also, I don’t think digital’s going away. I do think that certain mediums may come and go, but we’re medium agnostic, so if Facebook blows up next month, it’s going to stink, but we can shuffle.
ROB: As you reflect on this journey so far – I guess you’re about 12 to 13 years in – what are some things you’ve learned on this journey that you wish you could go back and tell yourself to do differently? It sounds like you wouldn’t tell yourself to go take a check and get bought out, but I imagine there are some things you would consider doing differently along the way.
KEVIN: I think a lot of it is psychological for me. If I could go back and say to 12 or 13 years ago Kevin, I’d say part of being an entrepreneur is there’s a lot of times where you’re taking three steps forward and two steps back. But the two steps back are never that bad. I’ve spent countless sleepless nights thinking of the worst thing that could possibly happen, and it’s never happened. Not even kind of happened. It’s legitimately never happened.
So, if I could go back, I’d say stop worrying about that and focus on all the positive things because that thing’s never going to happen. And if it repeatedly hasn’t happened in 13 years, it’s not a coincidence. So I think that’s something I wish I knew a long time ago. But it’s also something that I continue to wrestle with because it’s kind of burned in the back of your brain.
ROB: Absolutely. I needed that reminder from some other entrepreneurs yesterday. You have that moment, you have that day, where something small bad does happen. We had a job offer out that I was really excited about, and the last eight offers we put out were all accepted, and this person said no. I was like, oh man, that was not the answer I wanted.
But same thing – you lose a client, but along the way, you’ve planted those seeds so that six months from now, you’re going to say, “That was a speedbump. That was not the end of the world.” We grew from there. A lot of folks said their experience has been they hired somebody better right after they got a no. It’s that long perspective, and I think planting the seeds and knowing you’ve done the work along the way.
KEVIN: Right. There’s a great quote – I don’t even know who said it, but you don’t find a way to go around the problem; you find a way to go through it. It seems to work out. We had an employee that stole almost a quarter of our business, left with that, and we made it back in a year. It’s honestly the best thing that’s ever happened. So things like that, at the time, horrible. And then I wouldn’t change a thing now.
ROB: [laughs] You might give them 50 cents to go do it.
KEVIN: Seriously, yeah.
ROB: They took maybe some customers that were more challenging to manage or maybe more loyal to a person than to the process. There’s a lot to think about there.
KEVIN: Yeah, and it makes you sit and evaluate and say, “What things do I have to do and what do I need and what are the things that are necessary?”, and you end up becoming better. That’s what entrepreneurs do. People that aren’t entrepreneurs don’t understand it because those people are the ones that won’t take that risk and say, “I’ve got to go. I can’t do this. I can’t handle this stress.” The entrepreneurs say, “I’ve got to figure out how to deal with it, because this is it.”
ROB: Right. Kevin, as you look ahead to GreenBanana, the future of GreenBanana and the practice areas you’re in – you mentioned maybe some channels go away, maybe there are some ways you’re thinking about shifting the practice – what does the future look like? What are you excited about?
KEVIN: I’m excited about – technology is increasing. Whether you find this good or bad, creepy or not, the amount of data you have on client behavior is only getting better and enabling us to be more accurate in helping our clients hit their conversions. So that evolution is really exciting.
With the products that we have, like Google launching GA4 – they already launched it, but GA4 is better than Universal Analytics in how you can see data. Those things inside the products are great, and there’s also all these other new products that are really exciting.
I’m personally really excited about decentralized finance and crypto. We’re trying to figure out a way to accept crypto payments. It’s a pain in the butt to figure it out, but little things like that are fun for me, and I think as long as you’re excited about learning about new tech, there’s always going to be a business for a digital agency.
ROB: That’s interesting on the accepting crypto side. Even for existing financial applications – we had a client who wanted to pay us their discovery budget on I think Venmo, and getting a business account up and running on these services from a KYC perspective, instead of a personal account – half the time it’s like they never even thought about it. There’s a lot ahead of us on that front, I think.
KEVIN: Yeah. That’s the part we’re having trouble with. If you want to send me crypto to my crypto personal wallet, it’s easy. We can do it literally right now. But getting it into the business, getting it into QuickBooks, getting it to my accountants – I was like, whatever. Future Kevin will work on that. [laughs]
ROB: Is there any particular business that you’re seeing, some type of business that is perhaps most open to paying in crypto? What’s that look like?
KEVIN: None of the current businesses we’re working with – I won’t say none of them, but most of them wouldn’t consider it. It’s just something I’m personally interested in and I think it’s going to happen.
ROB: Absolutely. A lot of these things took some time, and then it’s daily happenings. Pulling a little deeper into the topic, what are you seeing in defi and crypto? What direction excites you the most? Sometimes we’re placing bets; sometimes we’re just thinking about placing emotional bets with where we place our attention. What’s drawing you as the most tangible next few things that are going to happen?
KEVIN: I’m invested in crypto. The things that have done the best for me are Bitcoin and Ethereum. I do read some other defi newsletters, but full disclosure, none of them have done great. But I haven’t really gone crazy into it. I spend most of my time on my company rather than researching that. I think the ease of transaction and the transparency of the transaction is so important, and I think that is what is going to – once people start to get more comfortable with decentralized finance, the ability to send money back and forth where there’s a trackable ledger of it, I think that is really going to change business.
I mean, for us to get a check from someone, for us to send money back and forth, for us to do an ETH transaction, it’s our billing department on a phone call with someone, it’s back and forth, it’s waiting for 24 hours. Wallet to wallet is a QR code and a button, and it’s there, and the ledger’s there. I really think that’s going to start to change the world if people can let go of the fact that they’re not comfortable with it.
ROB: There’s a lot there and there’s a lot to learn from all at the same time. Some of this stuff is kind of hard, some of the fees are kind of high, but you also see – I was just out at South by Southwest in Austin, and one of the most visible activations there was for an NFT collection called Doodles. They’d let you in the activation with your SXSW badge, but they’d let you in the VIP line if you could prove that you were a holder of a Doodles NFT. Which is about 12 ETH, so it’s…
KEVIN: Yeah, that’s a lot of money.
ROB: Absolutely. Looking at that, someone was like, “Could you just buy it and sell it?” I said, it depends on whether the thing’s been pumped by the conference. If it’s pumped by the conference, you’re going to lose 2 ETH just because you bought it at a spiky time. That’s bad news.
KEVIN: I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the value of an NFT because it’s a picture on a screen that everybody can take. I know you pay and it’s yours, but you and I could take screenshots of each other right now. It’s hard to tell who owns it.
ROB: In this case they actually were validating ownership against the blockchain. To get in, they were actually authenticating the ownership. But definitely hard right now.
KEVIN: Exactly. It’s a currency that’s validated, but it’s like, what’s the value of having that picture other than getting an entrance? I understand that piece of it, but sticking it on your computer and saying “I own this,” like the picture behind me – it’s not really worth anything. I’m still trying to wrap my head around NFTs, and that’s my fault because I know that they’re really taking off.
ROB: There’s a lot to go there. Even in the judgment of art. I can buy art at IKEA or I can buy art at Sotheby’s, and those are two very different things. But I can buy art at IKEA that probably looks like something I could buy at Sotheby’s. The value there is subjective, and where it lands, who knows?
KEVIN: Yeah, exactly. I heard this really interesting podcast about a guy that was spending – he’s a wine collector, and some of those bottles of wine are hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he said, “I drank one and it really wasn’t that good.” [laughs] “You can get a comparable wine for $28.”
ROB: Absolutely, or $3 at Trader Joe’s, right?
KEVIN: It’s like, is that $400,000 better than the $3 one? [laughs] Or is it 15 times better?
ROB: Kevin, when people want to find and connect with you and with GreenBanana, where should they go to find you?
KEVIN: I used to lose my business card all the time, so I bought ijustmetkevin.com.
ROB: Nice.
KEVIN: That’ll take you to my page. Or you can just go to greenbananaseo.com
ROB: That is excellent. Kevin, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for sharing your experience, your knowledge, things you’ve learned. I think we’re all better for it. Thank you very much.
KEVIN: I appreciate your time. This was wonderful. Thank you.
ROB: Best wishes to you and the team. Take care.
KEVIN: Thanks. Take care.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Mardis & Phnam Bagley, Creative Directors & Founding Partners, Nonfiction Design (San Francisco, CA)
Mardis and Phnam Bagley are Creative Directors and Founding Partners at Nonfiction Design, a company that started originally as an industrial design firm but morphed into a future-focused studio. The studio works with startups, Fortune 500 companies, and governments to solve huge, complex problems and “change the world for the better.”
Phnam says all of their clients are long term and come to them “to solve huge problems about the future of education . . . living on Mars . . . food . . . neuroscience.”. The studio strategizes with a lot of these leaders in innovation, technology, and science to help them get their products “into the hands of people that need them.” The studio pushes clients “into extremes” to solve technical, experiential, and design problems “through ergonomics, through human factors, through thinking about behavior change.”
Mardis explains one of the challenges of this work – that people have to “fight the biases of the past.” A recent project was with Movida, the School of Lifelong Learning, which wanted to rethink the future of education. Nonfiction set up two teams, one that dug into white papers from the past, and the other, a group of creatives unexposed to this data, that freely brainstormed the future of education. In the end, both groups came to the same conclusion . . . but the creatives had actionable solutions for moving forward.
What did this exploratory discover about education? In this interview, Phnam outlines a few conclusions – one, that children would benefit from letting them “be and stay absurd.” She says, “Not everything in life needs to make sense, needs to be efficient.” She adds that life would be better if we sometimes spent time “doing things that don’t make any sense.” She believes today’s society schedules too much of children’s time. Teens, especially, need “time to rest physically, to rest the brain, to talk to other people, and to be bored” in order to grow to be healthy adults.
Mardis says, “Developing a solution that’s completely individual to the client’s needs is really, really important to how we conduct business and how we keep satisfied clients.” With an eye to the future, the studio has started working on a “more circular economy model,” where design not only takes into consideration recycling, but also repair and remanufacturing.
The Nonfiction Studio team is diverse . . . from “many different cultures, many different countries.” Mardis, with a background in industrial engineering and branding, says they don’t look much at résumés or portfolios. Phnam, an industrial engineer with a master’s degree in (aero)space architecture, says the studio hires people “because they have something very interesting, and most likely that thing has to do with their past – what kind of career they’ve been through, what kind of country they come from, what kind of past they’ve had.”
The husband-wife team presented “Designing the Future of Everything” at South by Southwest 2022 two times due to demand. Mardis, Phnam, and Nonfiction are available on Twitter and post future of design videos on Instagram.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Mardis and Phnam Bagley, Creative Directors and Founding Partners at Nonfiction Design based in San Francisco, California.
We have a special two-guest episode because we had two speakers and they like to spend time with each other. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Nonfiction Design, and what is your superpower?
PHNAM: Sure. Phnam here. I’m the wife of the Bagley duo. Nonfiction is a design firm based in San Francisco. Originally it was started as an industrial design firm because that’s both of our backgrounds, and it turned into this future-focused studio where companies from startups all the way to Fortune 500 companies to governments come to us to solve huge problems about the future.
When we say huge problems, we’re talking about education, we’re talking about living on Mars, we’re talking about future of food, and we’re talking about neuroscience. This is what we do.
ROB: That sounds like a wide range of things to solve. How do you go about knowing how to solve all these things?
PHNAM: We are an extremely curious group of people. There is not one subject in the world that we don’t want to tackle because, in the end, what we want to do is change the world for the better. Impact is really at the core of everything that we do, whether it’s thinking about the future of future humans or what we need today in the medical industry. That’s what drives us. That gives us the motivation to work and make other people’s lives better.
But also creating the foundation of a future that we want to live in, because when you look at the news, for example, a lot of things are not going according to plan. And I believe, and we believe, that designers have the power to change that. That’s why we started this company.
ROB: Is there an example, maybe, of a future that you have had to recently think through? And what did you think about it?
MARDIS: Hi, this is Mardis Bagley. Great question. I think one of the things we like to do is shake up the status quo. When we’re thinking about futures, we often have to fight the biases of the past. Stepping out of this entrenched thinking. One of the projects we worked on recently is called Movida, the School of Lifelong Learning. Thinking and rethinking education is a very, very complex problem.
One of the things we did right off is we said that we don’t want to step too deep into research and repeat all the past, or even bias ourselves in thinking about the opportunity of the future. So, as we do this, we’re a number of creatives from all over the planet; we’re a very diverse studio of men, women, many different cultures, many different countries. But we all have some sort of experience. We have a certain amount of intuition. We all have been through school on many different levels. How do we redesign education in the way we think?
What we did is we started designing it straight out of the gate. We pushed research to the side, which sounds kind of crazy. We totally avoided research in redesigning this school and this education system, and we came up with these really unique ideas about how to approach school and expand the minds of young children in a way that spoke to their wellbeing. It spoke to future generations. When we’re talking about designing education, we can’t design education for jobs that we don’t yet know what they’re going to be or the technologies that are going to empower them using the thinking of education that is well over 100 years old in the process.
While we’re doing this wild ride of creativity and exploration on one side, we had a secondary research track talking to leaders in education from MIT and Stanford. But we never let them talk to our creatives on the other side. We let them have independent paths as they explored forward.
What happened is after a few months, we ended up at the same exact location in terms of knowledge, in terms of understanding education, and how to break the norms – except for we were reading whitepapers that are decades old on one side, and on the other side is purely months of creativity. We got to the same exact location except for the creatives came out with solutions that are actionable, solutions that are ready to change young people’s lives.
ROB: It might have even been hard to get to those solutions starting from the whitepapers, right? You started from another place and maybe even went some places you would never go. Part of brainstorming sometimes is proposing the impossible, the inappropriate, the unacceptable, but then bringing it back in bounds. So, what’s a solution that we didn’t know to a problem?
PHNAM: Letting children be and stay absurd. The fact that not everything in life needs to make sense, needs to be efficient, and sometimes spend your time doing things that don’t make any sense. That’s part of being a child. So, reintroducing that in the way you interact with yourself, you interact with others, and you interact with the architecture of a school – that’s what we wanted to bring in there. There are certain aspects of the school that don’t really have a means. So that’s very much part of it.
Another thing is that when you look at the schedule of children today, it’s a lot of going to school and going to after-school, activity, activity, activity. Their schedule is packed, and their parents are just driving them from one place to another. Really spending the time to rest physically, to rest the brain, to talk to other people, and to be bored – that’s very much part of human evolution. It’s a need that we have that we’ve taken away with all the screens and all the activity. We want to integrate it back into the lives of the kids so they grow up to be healthy adults.
ROB: Are they allowed to be lazy at the same time, or can they do that at different times? Because structured lazy time seems like it would still be kind of in the pattern, but somebody’s going to go crazy thinking about letting each kid be lazy when they want to. How do you pull it off?
PHNAM: Laziness is something that we know of. We call it laziness, but really it has a lot to do with physiological changes – in teenagers, for example. When you grow, you actually need to sleep more. You actually have to rest more. We’ve been forcing a schedule that’s extremely unnatural onto growing young adults, and that’s not really working. What that does is teaches humans to learn how to read their own body and to give their body what they need. That’s very much part of growing up and learning about the world.
ROB: I think adults could learn that, too. We still need to learn how to accept that permission.
I’ve done the audience a disservice; I’ve failed to mention why you have a loud fan club behind you. The reason is that we are live at South by Southwest at the interactive portion of the conference, primarily, this big old festival of people getting together in Austin, Texas for the first time in three years. You both are here to present a session. You presented it twice. What people don’t know if they have an event is you sign up for the session, and if it gets a lot of popularity, they schedule you for it again. So, you presented this twice because probably some combination of reputation, a good sizzling headline and summary, a following, and all these things.
Your session was “Designing the Future of Everything.” What content, what frameworks, what ways of thinking – or was it more examples? What did you share with the audience? What did you want them to take away?
MARDIS: I would say that at the foundation of our company, we like to say we turn science fiction into reality for a better future. If you step back and start to ask yourself what does that really mean, we as a company, Nonfiction, work with a lot of leaders in innovation and technology, technologists themselves, scientists. Oftentimes these technologies have a hard time getting out of the laboratory. They have a hard time getting into consumers’ hands, into the hands of people that need them. We come in and make these technologies available to people through ergonomics, through human factors, through thinking about behavior change.
Very much so, as the title suggests, we do it for everything from medical devices to consumer devices. We work in aerospace and we work on-planet and off-planet. Recently, we’re happy to say that we won first place in the Deep Space Food Challenge with NASA as well as the Canadian Space Agency.
ROB: Congratulations.
MARDIS: Yeah, that’s very exciting. We’re building things that will hopefully leave planet and make future astronauts’ lives better as they travel two and a half, three years into space to Mars.
ROB: What’s needed differently on that three-year journey? What did you have to design for in that context?
MARDIS: I’ll let my partner, the outer space architect, answer that one.
ROB: I like that job title, too. Wow.
PHNAM: Yeah. I actually went to school for that. It surprises a lot of people. 15 years ago, I got a master’s degree in space architecture from the University of Houston. Back then, space architecture was very based on systems engineering, like what volume is necessary to help astronauts survive in space? But when you look at space today in 2022 with the SpaceX and Blue Origins of the world, it becomes clear that people like us are going to be part of the space industry in the future, whether as tourists or as people going to work up there.
The reason why it’s so important for designers and architects and creatives to be part of all of this is because we understand humans. We know how to ask the right questions and to turn these answers into solutions that actually mean something to humans. So far, we’ve been designing space interiors very much like spaces for survival. When you look up the ISS right now, it’s not really a place you want to hang out in.
So really thinking about making space more human is one of the models that we go after. We want to invite more designers, more architects, more creatives, more artists to really help us with that change. It does take a lot of disciplines to design for space because not everything works the same way. Here on Earth, opening a door is like you put your hand on it, you turn the knob and you’re done. Up in space you have to hold on to something else; otherwise you’re going to be pushed back. You have to think about food the same way – eating – what can be sent there, what can be safe to eat, what can protect you from cosmic radiation and things like that.
What is the long-term effect of microgravity on your body? There’s been the famous twin project, Mark and Scott Kelly. One of the twins went up to space and one stayed on Earth, and we saw the difference physiologically and psychologically, what’s been happening between the two. So, based on that type of knowledge, how do we design better interiors and better products and better medical support for us to see ourselves in space?
ROB: That seems like it must’ve had so many constraints to it, but also some constraints that maybe weren’t actual – that you were told were constraints but weren’t. What did you find was a constraint that helped you be creative and get to an unexpected solution? And what was something you were told you couldn’t do that you found out you actually could? Was there anything like that?
PHNAM: We believe that without constraint you can’t design. You’re just going to come up with something that –
ROB: “Let’s just put a five-bedroom house in space and call it good, we’re all happy,” right? It doesn’t work that way.
PHNAM: The constraint is space, of course. If it doesn’t fit in the payload area of a rocket, as of today we can’t bring it up. One thing that’s very different between designing for space and designing for Earth is weight. When we design something for Earth, weight is limited by shipping. In space, weight is money. I think it was in 1981, bringing a kilogram of mass up in low Earth orbit was like $81,000 or something. Now it’s less than $2,000, depending on what it is. So yeah, we have to think about things like this even before we design anything.
ROB: Let’s rewind a little bit. Where did this whole thing start? What made you all decide to bring Nonfiction Design into existence rather than just having a job?
MARDIS: Well, Nonfiction has been around for six years. Phnam and I have been in the industrial design industry for well over 16 years now. I’ve had a previous career in branding, and Phnam in aerospace as well. But what really brought it into existence is we were contracting, working in many different agencies over the years – all the big names you might recognize. We felt like there was a culture, there was a style of working that maybe could be refined. And I’m probably being kind. [laughs] We just felt like we could do it better, or at least let’s say different. We felt so compelled to give it a try.
Some of the things that we wanted to fight against is we didn’t see enough diversity or inclusion. I mentioned that earlier. We have a very diverse crew, and that’s part of our secret sauce – listening to everybody, being very inclusive. But also breaking away from the norms of what we call industrial design now. It’s not just shape development or form development. That is part of it, making beautiful things, but we’re well beyond that. We’re into user interactions. We’re into designing for impact.
We put a lot of things on the planet. Our efforts put a lot of things in people’s hands, and many of them go to the landfill. It’s a very linear model. We’ve started doing a more circular economy model where we think about designing not only for recycling, but for repair and remanufacturing. We’re thinking about our impact and we’re thinking about that lifecycle of a product along the way, and how can we do less negative impact and more positive impact? Positive impact would be impacting the planet in maybe an upcycling way or a regenerative way, but also impacting people’s lives along the way.
ROB: How much of what you do is somebody coming to you knowing they want that whole package, and how much of it is them coming to you having seen something you did and they want one thing, and you have to bring them into the bigger picture?
PHNAM: A lot of our clients today come to us with a question. They’re like, “How do we solve this endemic problem?” Then we strategize together on how to solve that problem, whether it’s a hardware solution or a software solution or whatever. Then from there, we build this relationship. Every client we have is a long-term relationship. We push them into extremes.
One extreme is hypercreativity. They came to us as a design studio because they want us to show them what they can’t get themselves, number one. Number two is that we as a design firm are extremely technical. We’re not afraid of going very deep into the mechanical engineering, electrical, firmware, all that stuff because it’s necessary. We need to be part of the process. So really solving the technical problem at the same time as solving the experiential and the design problem is what we do well.
As we do that, we take the hand of the clients and show them how it’s done. We don’t have a recipe that we apply to all projects. That’s actually a question we get asked all the time, “What is your process?” We probably have a different process for every single client we have.
ROB: Wow.
PHNAM: Because each of the clients has very specific needs in time and space and in industry, so we have to craft something very specific to each of them.
ROB: I heard you say that a little bit when you were talking about not wanting to look at the whitepapers when you’re designing a solution. It’s not your process is always to put blinders on and not look at what’s out there, but sometimes it is, and it depends somewhat on the solution.
It’s also an interesting positioning because a lot of creative services firms are out there – it’s almost like if you need some more of this work than you have capacity for, then go call these people. “I need somebody to do a little bit more paid marketing than I can do internally.” You all are positioned in a way where they probably don’t have the technical knowledge, and they are literally saying, “We don’t know what we don’t know. Please help us.”
How do you communicate that when everybody wants to put a services firm into a category? How do you help people find you when they don’t know the category they’re looking for, maybe? Or is there a word of like five companies like you, and everyone else is somewhere else, that they’re looking for?
PHNAM: It’s funny because I can’t really think of any company that does the things that we do at the level that we do it. That’s why we started this company: we saw that hole and we were like, “We can be that.”
MARDIS: Yeah. Getting back to the question you were asking earlier of – do we guide our clients or do they come to us with a very specific ask. I think we like to assist our clients in dreaming. Dreaming of something bigger than themselves. We have to shoot for the stars to land on the moon, right? Let’s go really far and allow them to dream, and then we’re really good at fulfilling that dream. We have a lot of resources in-house, but we also have really good partnerships. Developing a solution that’s completely individual to the client’s needs is really, really important to how we conduct business and how we keep satisfied clients.
ROB: How do you think about what to partner on versus what to cultivate as your own capability? What’s something you know you send out of house because it’s not your lane, but you need a steady partner for that kind of capability?
PHNAM: I think it depends on the scale of things. If you need just a little bit of touch-up on mechanical engineering, we can probably do this in-house. But if you need a whole program developing new mechanism and new testing and all of that, or very specialized knowledge in acoustics, for example, that’s when we tap into our network.
Another network that we have is in material science. None of us are material scientists, but we work a lot with materials. But when it comes to the science of it, the scalability of it, and the transparency behind the sustainable decisions that we make, we actually go to see scientists or a specialist of that kind. Over the years, throughout our career, we have built this amazing network of people who can pretty much answer everything we want. And if they don’t know it, they will know someone who knows. That’s very helpful.
ROB: That makes sense. Sometimes the fastest way to the solution is just saying out loud that you don’t know and throwing it out into the world and somebody points you there. But when you’re struggling, you’re like, “How are we going to do this?” You don’t know how you’re going to do it and you feel trapped.
PHNAM: Not knowing is actually where you have to start, in our book. If you start a project and you know exactly what you’re going to do for the rest of the project, you’re probably going to do what someone else has already done. But if you don’t know, or if you’re in a very uncomfortable space where you’re like, “Oh my God, this project is so big, I don’t know where to start” – that’s a good sign.
ROB: You mentioned you all have been in this business for six years. What are some things you’ve learned in that time that you wish you could go back and tell yourself? A lesson or two, maybe “rethink this” or do it a little differently?
PHNAM: I can give you one quick answer. Business development is extremely difficult to find externally. We’ve had people who helped us and it was not very successful. We realized two or three years ago that Mardis and I are actually much better at it than people who have that on their business cards, for our particular company, because we have the vision. We know what our company should be doing and what it should not be doing, and we know how to speak about it with passion.
We can also modify our spiel to be a little bit more business-oriented, to be a little bit more design-oriented or future-oriented. That connects a lot better with the audience that we’re going after. We don’t sound like salespeople. We really go deep in conversations with potential clients very quickly, and I think they see that authenticity and they’re willing to go deeper with us immediately.
ROB: There’s a credibility in your experience. There’s the founder authority in knowing the heart of the business. What do you think, Mardis? What would you say you might do differently?
MARDIS: I do think Phnam nailed it. That would be by far the biggest thing.
ROB: How do you think about growth, then? Do you feel like you grow by scaling your influence together and larger engagements? Do you think there’s a place where you find a “mini Mardis” or a “mini Phnam” to come in, somebody who actually does have – I mean, that intersection. I’ve seen folks say it before. It’s like, learn how to build something, learn how to sell something, and you’ll be unstoppable. You all are in that “technical but sellable” lane. So how do you scale, or do you want to?
MARDIS: I don’t think either Phnam or I could handle a mini Mardis or a mini Phnam. Let’s just be outright about that. [laughs] Again, respect to so many other talented people that might come to work for us.
We love diversity. We love having clients of all different sizes, different shapes, as we’ve mentioned, in different verticals. This is all really fun and exciting to us. We take knowledge and apply one aspect from one category to another all the time. In a funny way, we kind of ebb and flow with the clients, and we select them as they come.
PHNAM: And I think it’s kind of like the same way we hire people. We could hire people who think like us and act like us, have the same hard skills as us, and just apply them. But what we look for is people who think differently but have the same drive as us. The way we choose concepts to go forward with is not. “What do I like as the founder of Nonfiction?”, because that’s pretty limited after a while. What we look for is, “What is going to blow our minds so it can blow the client’s mind, so then it can blow the user’s mind?” We always go for that.
And then, once we’ve made that decision, we turn very quickly into “let’s prototype it, let’s test it” mode. Every time we’re uncomfortable with a solution, that’s usually the nugget of something extraordinary. We design the future. The future is not here yet. If we’re comfortable with everything that we do, we’re not doing our job. We need to make ourselves uncomfortable within our team first, welcome our clients to do it, so the rest of the world can do it too.
ROB: Is there any signal that you might be just slightly too far in the future? Obviously, 20 years out might be too soon for a lot of things. How do you know when you need to pull it back just a couple of notches? How do you get there?
PHNAM: Nonfiction at its core is the merging of five different disciplines. It’s business, technology, science, art, and design. When you practice all of this, specifically business, you always have to make sure that whatever decision you make makes sense from the business perspective. If I’m coming out with a product in two years and the people who we’re designing for can only afford $300, I cannot come up with a concept that’s going to cost $2,000.
So, we have to make decisions like that, check in often, and make sure that what we come up with makes sense, because in the end we are not here just to come up with concepts. Honestly, anybody can come up with concepts. Even non-designers. But the magic is how do you turn a concept into something that’s real, into something that’s attainable, into something that has the potential to change people’s lives?
That’s why we call our company Nonfiction. Science fiction has been around for a very long time. We all want it. But who is going to turn that into the real thing? It’s going to be people like us.
ROB: That’s a great positioning: to build near science fiction, but call it nonfiction to make it concrete. It’s an excellent place to be.
You mentioned hiring for diversity. If you look in the creative services world, I think diversity is often achieved, but perhaps it’s achieved by optimizing for some people in some roles, some people in some other roles. You have 90% of this role are guys, 90% of this role are women. All your ethnic diversity is over here, all these people are white Americans. How do you think about diversity in roles and hiring for people in positions that are harder to find diversity in?
MARDIS: I do think that we’re very lucky that we’re a small enough team where we don’t have the large diversity challenges. Not to say that it doesn’t exist, but we do challenge our team members to adapt different skillsets, to step outside their comfort zone, to think about it in a different way.
PHNAM: Another thing is that we’re not doing diversity for the sake of checking some boxes. It actually came very naturally. We don’t hire people just because they’re not white men. That’s weird. We hire people because they have something very interesting, and most likely that thing has to do with their past – what kind of career they’ve been through, what kind of country they come from, what kind of past they’ve had.
When we interview people, really what we want to hear is what kind of crazy stories they have to tell us. Do they have a sense of humor? Are they able to tell stories that I’ve never heard before? And then the skills are just going to come, because everything we do is for the first time anyway. As long as you have the bare minimum, you can figure it out.
MARDIS: I’d say when we do hire people – it’s funny; we have a joke around the office. We don’t really look at resumes or portfolios that much. We look at them a little bit, but really it’s a conversation. Talking to people, understanding what they’re about, who they are, their personality. This is a great way to filter through people that will work in a smaller team and won’t work in a smaller team. You don’t always have that ability when you’re in a really large organization. You’re being filtered by AI or some sort of online tool long before it gets to a human, and the human has all the different constraints.
With us, we have great conversations. We go out for cocktails. It makes sense. We’re doing a lot of filtering long before we’ve got them in the office.
ROB: It’s very interesting. It makes sense. Even if you go back to what you’re talking about with the lifelong learning school, that’s going to get to the right solution when you talk about everybody’s experience in school – what baggage do they feel like they’re carrying from that? What do they wish school had done for them? You can get a diverse set of experiences in a lot of ways there. So I can certainly see how that would come in handy.
Mardis, Phnam, when people want to find you, when they want to find Nonfiction Design, how should they find and connect with you?
PHNAM: We’re actually very active online. On Twitter, you can follow both Mardis and me and Nonfiction.
Our Instagram is quite active as well. We post our video series on it. We have a video series on future of design. Basically, it’s years of experience that Mardis and I have accumulated over time – we’re just sharing that very transparently with everyone, and we’re doing it in layman’s terms. You can be a child, you can be someone who has nothing to do with design, you can be an engineer, you can be the head of a company – it doesn’t matter. You can connect with us as designers, not as Nonfiction, as just plain designers. We share our methodologies. We share our way of thinking, and we share our vision of what the future of many industries is.
ROB: I encourage people to go check all of that out. I love how you’ve open-sourced a lot of that. People are so scared about what they share, but there’s the total package that you all have put together that delivers for clients, but there’s little seeds of thinking that still help other people. They’re not going to go steal your lunch money.
Mardis, Phnam, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for meeting up. Congratulations on the encore session here at SXSW, and I wish you all excellent travels back to San Francisco.
MARDIS: Excellent. Thank you. It’s been our pleasure.
PHNAM: Thank you for inviting us.
ROB: Thank you. Take care.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Josh Goldblum, Founder and CEO, Blue Cadet (Philadelphia, PA and New York City, NY)
Josh Goldblum is Founder and CEO at Blue Cadet, an experience design studio with around 30 employees in Philadelphia and 15 in New York. Twenty-odd years ago, Josh worked in-house at the Smithsonian Institution, producing digital products and integrating technology into physical environments. Unfulfilled because big projects only came around every few years, Josh left and freelanced for a number of museums, doing single-touch Flash design and development. As his on-man Blue Cadet operation became a growing team, projects expanded to encompass touch tables, touch walls, and projection; technology evolved and became increasingly more sophisticated; and the organization’s internal systems had to be more formalized to meet the needs of the larger business. Today’s experience technology is far more powerful, interesting, and relevant than that in the past. Flash has been replaced by Real Engine, Unity, and JavaScript. The Blue Cadet studio continues to design large-touch surfaces and build immersive experiences but now works with augmented reality, haptics (touch-related communication), and using technology and digital products to make cultural content in physical spaces more immersive, engaging, and “magical.”
Although much of the firm’s work is for museums, it has recently expanded to provide these immersive services for executive briefing centers and such brands as Nike and Google. Josh says it’s important that the studio creates a “content experience that’s not just decorative, but actually tells a story that feels true to the space.”
In working with clients, Josh finds it helpful to carve out a little paid research at the beginning of a project to prepare an ideation spread where the studio can research client needs and present ideas. At the end of this initial period, the client can either work with Blue Cadet or take the ideas Blue Cadet developed and work with another studio. Josh says, “It’s better to carve off a little space to redirect (the project) than to get into that death march of implementing something that’s just not going to be that great.” That time upfront also helps Blue Cadet discover what it is that a client really wants, whether they can provide what the client wants, whether they want to do the project, and whether the parties can develop a solid working relationship.
Josh participated in a panel session discussion of Trends and Challenges for Experiential Culture at the 2022 South by Southwest Interactive Festival. He says he is most active on LinkedIn, where he shares a lot of concept prototype material. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined live today at South by Southwest Interactive Festival by Josh Goldblum, Founder and CEO at Blue Cadet based in Philadelphia and New York. Welcome to the podcast, Josh.
JOSH: Thanks for having me.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Blue Cadet and what is your superpower? What is your calling card? What do people come to you for?
JOSH: Blue Cadet is an experience design studio. Most of us are based in Philadelphia. There’s about 30 in Philadelphia, another 15 up in New York, and then actually, when I say “us” based in Philadelphia, we just moved out to LA. So my family moved to LA. We’re the only ones out there.
We’re mostly known for experience design in the cultural space, and also really a lot of technology in physical space. Twenty-odd years ago, I was inhouse at Smithsonian doing digital product work, but also integrated technology into physical environments. So we’ve been in that experience design space, figuring out how you marry technology into public spaces, how you take cultural content and make it interesting. That’s what we’ve been doing, and we do it across physical space; we also do it across digital products.
ROB: Got it. It rings of museums or themed places, but I can also imagine a building that wants to have something and not just be a hollow shell. What does a typical space look like for you?
JOSH: We do a lot of work in the museum space, like the traditional museum space. All the big museums are generally our clients. We’ve worked with a lot of them. Everything from like science centers to history museums to art museums. We did a Van Gogh projected experience with the Art Institute of Chicago way before they were doing all these projections.
ROB: All the immersive experiences.
JOSH: Yeah, we’ve been doing that for a long time. But then recently we’ve been moving more into brand work. We’ve been doing some work with Nike, which has been really exciting. We’ve done work with Google. trying to take a lot of that museum flair, which is an obsession with content and making sure that what we’re saying is true, and trying to figure out what’s interesting about a brand and giving it that treatment where you’re elevating the personalities, elevating the science. You’re making something that’s smart but also engaging.
ROB: Where are they doing those things?
JOSH: These are executive briefing centers, sometimes. These are museums or brands. Some of these are online. And then we started doing a little bit of work for real estate companies, just trying to – it’s not for me. [laughs] Just to activate some of their public spaces as well. Again, trying to bring in content experience that’s not just decorative, but actually tells a story that feels true to the space.
ROB: When I think about this space, I start off thinking about the sleepy old kiosk that became a touchscreen and the keyboard is broken. Did it start there and proceed from there?
JOSH: Yeah, I would say when we started out – Blue Cadet was my freelance handle. I was at the Smithsonian; I did a pretty cool project there that got a lot of attention. The Smithsonian being what it is, they only had big projects every few years. I was getting kind of bored, so I left and I started going around museum to museum. I was essentially picking up jobs doing Flash design and development. When we first started out, it was a lot of those single touchscreens and those things that were kind of cheap. No one was going to lose their job if we really screwed up.
But we overdelivered. We did really great stuff, and we grew on the backs of those reputations and then started doing touch tables and touch walls and projection mapping. These days, we still do a lot of large touch surfaces and things like that, but a lot more thinking about the technologies that are more interesting or relevant. Now we’re doing a lot more with AR, things that are haptics, camera vision. Also just trying to figure out how to make an environment more engaging and magical.
ROB: Some of the advantage, even, of the march of technology is that probably some of those early Flash things you were doing were still rather expensive and still took a big commitment. I think some of this has allowed the technology to come down into simpler spaces. My team’s done really simple electron-based kiosks with a little bit of sound, a little bit of animation, and it makes it more available to more places.
JOSH: Yeah. It’s interesting because Flash was an amazing tool. Flash really allowed you to do a lot of very, very cool things. When Steve Jobs killed Flash, essentially – which he pretty much singlehandedly did – there was actually a little bit of a lull in experience design where the tools had to catch up. But now you see things like Real Engine, Unity – but even what you can do with JavaScript. You can do everything that you used to be able to do in Flash now to the nth degree. And it’s much better. Flash probably should’ve died.
ROB: How often does as client come to you with an idea of what they want? How often do they come to you with a topic – “Here’s this topic, here’s what we want to show people; surprise us”? Or is it more “We have an idea and a direction”? Do you know how much space you’re dealing with? It seems like there’s a lot of variables in there.
JOSH: A lot of times if we’re dealing with a museum client, they might have a big exhibit or something like that. Or even a brand, they have their stories, they know what they want to convey, they have the space. But then they come to us and they’re like, “How do we tell the story? How do we do this?” A lot of times even if they come in with very, very fully baked ideas, we’ll roll it way back into strategy and be like, let’s create a little bit of space to figure out what you can do with contemporary technology, with contemporary tools. What can you do to make sure that content or experience really shines in a way that’s not been done in the same way with different content six months before?
ROB: It sounds like it’s really a consultative opportunity, right? To show them – maybe they start somewhere, but sometimes they don’t know what they don’t know, in a very good way. You have a broader span of the industry. That’s why they come to you. You bring some extra ideas to the plate.
JOSH: Yeah. And usually what we do – we’ve been doing these things called ideation spreads. Sometimes someone will come to us with a pretty big budget and we’ll be like “Hey, instead of having to sign the SOW for this real big thing, give us 10% of it and give us three weeks, and let us do a bunch of sprints where we reconceptualize it and see if we land in a better place.”
Sometimes it’s better, particularly if you get a brief that you’re like, “This is not going to end well. This is not something we want to be working on for the next six months.” It’s better to carve off a little space to redirect it than to get into that death march of implementing something that’s just not going to be that great.
ROB: Right. Do you ever engage in that competitive sales process where you’re competing over the big pie and you take the little pie? Does that happen?
JOSH: Absolutely. I would say particularly as we were earning our market position and earning our reputation, we weren’t always the safe choice. We were always known for doing the creative thing and for doing something cool and new, but there were a lot of people who had done it a million times. And it was riskier for them to work with us. So that was a great way. We’d come in and do these ideation spreads and say, “Look, you don’t have to trust us with this giant thing. Bring us in here and let’s see if we can set the vision. You’re not even obligated to work with us after that.”
ROB: Right, “You own the work, go ahead and take it.” I think every creative firm benefits when they find ways essentially to get paid for discovery instead of trying to do all this guesswork upfront. But there’s always the tension between “How much are we spending on this?” versus “How likely are we to get the work?” Nobody wants to be in that tension. So, the 10% strategy there makes a lot of sense.
JOSH: Also, I’d much rather do that than do spec on RFPs. You don’t know anything about the client and really what they want. You don’t really know what the problem set is. So if you’re doing spec on an RFP, you’re really just shooting in the dark. Whereas if you carve out a little bit of space where you can actually collaborate with a client, you usually come up with better creative; you’re actually solving the problem. But then also, you get to build that relationship and the rapport, and that’s usually what carries you forward. Or you sit there and you’re like, “Okay, there’s not great relationship or rapport here.”
ROB: You can dodge a bullet.
JOSH: Yeah, you can be like, “Okay, you really did want that thing. God love ya, go on with it.”
ROB: We talked a little bit about the origin story, about you going around to museums. When did you realize it was a thing and you said, “You know what, this is my job now”? What was the inflection point?
JOSH: For a while, Blue Cadet was just my freelance handle. I was living in D.C. because I was still at the Smithsonian and I was picking up odd jobs. It was fun. I enjoyed it. The projects I’d get weren’t huge budgets, but I was actually making way more money than I was at the Smithsonian.
But I finally got a project – a couple friends and I got this grant to do an interactive documentary, like a Flash-based documentary on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This was something where we came up with the idea, we went to a foundation, and we were like “Hey, can you pay us some money to put this thing together?” The timeline was such, the budget was such that I kind of had to hire a team. We had videographers, we had professional sound people. We were basically following this high school class – it was the only high school class to reopen after Hurricane Katrina. We were down there basically weeks after the hurricane. It was decimated.
But when I was on that project – it was called Yearbook 2006 – I was like, oh man, if I bring in other people, it works way better. I was still doing the stuff that was too expensive to outsource, but I outsourced some other things and it ended up being really successful. It became really popular. I was like, okay, I want to start a studio. So that was the first point where I wanted to do a studio.
Then that same team, we got another project the year after that for the Pulitzer Center and we ended up winning a News and Documentary Emmy, which was a pretty big deal at the time. We beat Wolf Blitzer or something. That put us on the map, and that snowballed to where we started getting a lot of work, and I was able to start building the team from there.
ROB: It seems like something in that documentary space – of all the things you can fractionalize and take some people, do a project, get done with it, it seems like something in that video space, people are kind of used to it. That’s the drill; that’s what you do. You film something, then you move on to the next thing.
JOSH: Yeah. Basically what happened was I was living in D.C. but I was from Philadelphia; I was turning 30. I was like, okay, I’m getting to an age where maybe I’m ready to settle down a little bit. I didn’t really want to settle down in D.C. So I moved up to Philly and I made my first hire. It was someone straight out of college. She actually still works for me, 15 years later.
ROB: Wow.
JOSH: But that was the thing. We were hiring junior people and training them up, and then we grew very linearly, 20% year over year. There were weird inflection points along the way, but yeah, that’s how we got to where we are now.
ROB: What’s a weird inflection point?
JOSH: As you’re growing a studio, there are always these different points where the wheels get real shaky and the systems that were working fine in this phase don’t really work as well in the next phase. There’s a point where you have to get really professional about bill pay, about HR, benefits. You just have to start layering in a lot of systems at various points. And those are the points where you start getting more professional and you start having to have an org chart. You can’t just have a bunch of super creative people scrambling around all over the place.
ROB: How have you digested that change? Is it something that comes well to you? Is there somebody, or many people, maybe a role that’s been integral to making the jumps?
JOSH: Yeah, my partner Troy. We both worked as new media specialists at the Smithsonian. He was like my sixth hire or something like that at Blue Cadet. He was living in Denver quite happily, and I sort of dragged him across country to move to Philadelphia and start things. But I love Troy. I’m one of these people who can talk a really good game and I can set a vision or get really excited about the idea and what this thing can be. Troy’s the kind of guy who can sit down and actually make it happen. He can actually do it. So, he’s invaluable.
Over the years, we’ve been very selective. I spend a lot of time recruiting the people that I want into the team. Very few people necessarily applied to Blue Cadet, particularly at the leadership level. I always sought out people that I thought would really fit into the studio and scale out our capabilities.
ROB: That’s a great opportunity, because those strategic roles are also the ones where you could actually justify bringing a recruiter to, which you can’t always do in the services world. But to find those people and recruit them in . . . .
JOSH: I never used a recruiter. Where you find the best people is just like here at SXSW, you’re meeting people. Or you meet clients. One of the people I recruited to Blue Cadet, who actually left to take over digital at the Obama Library, was client side, and she left midway through the project and everyone was like, “Oh my God, this place is going to fall apart without her. She is so instrumental to the studio.” This was a studio I was working with, and I was like, “That sucks; the project’s going to go sideways.” But then I was like, “I’m going to poach her at some point. I’m going to get her on my team.” And she was fantastic. So, I’m always looking for people that I’m like, “Wow, that person’s way smarter than me or better that me at these things.”
ROB: That’s excellent, especially when you know the capabilities you don’t quite need yet, or you don’t need another person in that capability yet, and you can keep your head on the swivel, keep the mental library going of who’s next. It’s a fun journey to have that wish list and then fulfill on it.
JOSH: Yeah.
ROB: So, you’re here and you have a session coming up. It is “Trends and Challenges for Experiential Culture.” What are you looking for people to get out of that?
JOSH: Obviously, I’ve been speaking about experience design for a very, very long time. I was talking about how things were getting completely disrupted with physical space pre-pandemic. I was talking about Meow Wolf and Museum of Ice Cream and the changing face of retail and also some of the things that were happening with museums, and this was like 2018-2019. I was like, man, stuff’s really going to change. I saw the trends, I saw this stuff happening.
And then obviously the pandemic has accelerated everything. Who knows where the chips are going to fall, but one of the things we’re seeing is a lot of people wanting to get back into physical space. Places like SXSW are now filling up again. People want to be around each other. But what are the spaces that bring out the best in us? How could those spaces operate to create better connections between people? That’s the sort of thing we’re really interested in.
And then also, how do you discard the old stuff that doesn’t work anymore? Honestly, I love museums but I also kind of hate them. Also, I know for my kids, they’re not dying to go to the old-fashioned museum and read a bunch of wall labels. They’re really interested in culture because they’re my children, our children, but they want to consume it differently. And I want to make sure that they’re consuming culture in a way that feels good to them, that’s enjoyable and interesting to them.
ROB: What do you think they’re going to want? Where is it headed?
JOSH: It’s so funny; my kids like Roblox, they like all those things. I’ve taken them to a million museums. I’ve taken my son to Epcot and Disney and all the different – sometimes the things they like are the cheesy, colorful, fun Museum of Ice Cream rip-offs. But also, they would eat candy all day if I let them do that, too. So, it’s figuring out, okay, what are the things that have a personality, that are fun, that are interesting, that are enjoyable, but also are not just mind-numbing or consumptive?
ROB: Right. Even some of the newish stuff – I’m sure you’ll see a lot of it around here at SXSW; there’s different activations. There’s some integration of different assets, even into the little doodles activation over here that’s NFTs plus an actual physical space. How do you think about the difference between using a technology for the sake of the technology and using it because it’s actually right for the environment?
JOSH: I actually really like the doodles space. I thought they did a really nice job. I think part of it is a lot of times I talk to these museums and I’m like, “You should be looking more to that marketing. You should be taking a lot more inspiration from them,” because they move really fast, they put these things together really quick, they’re not super, super precious, they don’t expect it to be up in 5 years, let alone 10 years, let alone 2 weeks, and they’re able to take more risks. Because it’s sort of a one-and-done, they don’t have to make sure that it feels the same 10 years from now.
Obviously, that marketing is a very different business model than a museum, but I think there are things that can be borrowed. And personally, I think even that doodles exhibit – there were a lot of nods to themed entertainment. There was a lot of stenography, there was a lot of sculptural pieces. There were some really nice light applications of technology. I thought it was really successful. I would like to see museums looking more like that.
ROB: Got it. I think there’s times when we’ve probably all seen AR for AR’s sake, VR for VR’s sake. How do you filter “This is a good place for VR, this is not”? Or “It could be done this way but not that one”?
JOSH: I used to take a much harder line on this in the past. Honestly, some of these things, you look at some of these AR experiences and you’re like, what’s the point? It’s not doing anything except demonstrating the technology. It’s like, okay, if you’ve never seen AR, awesome. That’s really awesome. But if you have seen AR, you don’t care. Same with some of these projection experiences. It’s like, if you’re never been in a giant room filled with Christie projectors, it’s really exciting to be at the Van Gogh and see all this stuff. But then you go back and it’s the same thing, but with Klimt or Picasso or Monet; it’s like, “I’ve seen it.”
So, I think part of it is I’m actually okay with technology for technology’s sake where it serves a spectacle, where you’ve never seen it before. It makes people excited and engaged. I think where it gets old is where it’s already been done before. You’re not even doing that. You’re just being lazy.
The thing I always look at, too, is either you’ve got to really, really be serving that content in a way that’s compelling and really getting people into it – and sometimes that is spectacle. Spectacle gets people excited. It gets them interested. But if you fail at the spectacle and then you don’t provide the content, it’s just a wasted experience.
ROB: It seems like you’re very adjacent to not only event marketing, but also perhaps even to entertainment, theme park, that kind of thing. How do you decide where you go and where you don’t go in those markets, and where you compete and where you choose to stay in your lane?
JOSH: It’s funny; I used to be very selective about the types of clients I would take on. I was like, “I’m not working with brands. I’m working with museums and nonprofits and higher ed. That’s my tribe.” The thing I realized is sometimes your tribe is not aligned to a sector. It’s really just a way of being. There are people at Nike that have way, way more in common with me and how I see technology, how I see content, how I see culture than people at some of these museums. Some of the people in these museums are very, very retrograde, and they’re like, “No, we need a clean white room with a painting and 7,000 words of text. Bring your seven-year-old in here and they’re going to read my dissertation.”
I have less in common with them than somebody who’s at a brand, whether it’s a technology brand or materials brand or someone selling shoes, that wants to tell this story in an interesting way or find something interesting to elevate out of it.
ROB: The brands change, too. That’s part of it. Once you’re in the game for a while, the brands change. The legend of what Nike is has shifted several times at different inflection points. Shoe Dogs, one moment in time. I interned once upon a time at Chick-fil-A’s headquarters. Chick-fil-A’s museum was a little room with a trophy case and a fake vault, and they’ve expanded what that experience is. So, I think the brands change too, and who they are and what they need might be different from the thing you used to react to.
JOSH: Yeah, 100%. Often it’s just who’s there and who’s championing the brand, who wants to tell that story, and how they want to tell it. The thing is, there’s so many projects at Nike that Blue Cadet should have no part in, but the projects we are working with them are very Blue Cadet-like projects. There’s a lot of interesting content, stories. We did one for the LeBron James Innovation Center. It’s all about how they use data to inform how they work with athletes, and that’s really cool. That’s really exciting and something that my team is very, very well-positioned to execute on.
ROB: Your session also ties into trends a lot. What’s next? What’s something you think you’re going to end up doing soon at Blue Cadet that you haven’t done before?
JOSH: I’ve actually been spending a lot of time looking at Web3 and NFTs and things like that. I think beyond the hype, there’s something really interesting stuff there. I think there’s something very interesting about digital ownership. I think there’s something very interesting about bringing things from the physical world in the digital world, bringing things from the digital world into the physical world. I think NFTs help with that. I think there’s some really exciting things happening there.
Personally, I think it’s a really exciting time to be in experience design because frankly, COVID screwed everything up. Everyone’s rethinking things. Like, “Do I shake someone’s hand? Do I give them a hug? Do I wear a mask here, do I not wear a mask here?” All the social norms, the way we behaved in physical spaces, have changed. So, now’s a really interesting time to direct some innovation and say, okay, now that we’re rethinking this, let’s put some design thinking to it and figure out how to make these spaces better.
ROB: Right. Some people shut everything down for two years, some people built nothing for two years, some people rebuilt everything during those two years. Some stuff was pulled forward, some stuff is waiting in the wings. It’s very lumpy.
JOSH: Yeah, absolutely. I think what’ll be really interesting is we don’t really know. We’ve all been in this one state and now we’re entering into another, hopefully, and we’re not quite sure how the chips will fall. We don’t know what the new behaviors are going to be. It’d be really interesting to see, as you revisit the conference that you went to for 10 years or the restaurant you used to go to every week, as you start going back into those things, does it feel the same? Does it still work the same way? Does it still affect you the same way? I don’t know. Does it feel great to go back to a movie theater? Maybe, maybe not.
ROB: I haven’t tried yet.
JOSH: Honestly, I was one of those people like “Ah screw it, I don’t need it.” Then I took my kids to see the new Spider-Man and I was like, wait a second. This is actually really nice. It was actually quite enjoyable.
ROB: It was probably fairly uncrowded too, which helps. [laughs]
JOSH: It was pretty uncrowded, yeah. [laughs]
ROB: For me, same thing. We have kids, so me not going to the movies is more about me having kids and not going to the movies as much as I did when we were just a couple with time on our hands and it’s like “It’s Tuesday, what do we do? Let’s go see a movie and get home at 11:00. Fine.” Different seasons.
JOSH: Yeah.
ROB: Are there any sort of behaviors that were adopted experientially during COVID that you think are going to stick? There’s interesting things – I think about some escape rooms did versions of escape rooms where they would do it for you over Zoom. And they’re still doing it I guess, but I don’t know. Are there weird things that people did that you think might stick around?
JOSH: I mean, I think remote work is not going anywhere.
ROB: You’re betting on it.
JOSH: Yeah, I’m living in California and my studio is entirely on the East Coast. We started hiring people out of market, which we never did before. We have people who moved into the Hudson River Valley or out in the Poconos, moving away from the city, away from our offices. And it hasn’t been affecting the work. So, I think that’s going to be really interesting.
I think also how we’re thinking about the studios themselves – we have this beautiful, beautiful office in Philadelphia and New York with lots of desks, but we’re like, do we all need these desks if we’re not going to be there every day? Can we optimize this for prototyping spaces? We build a lot of things in physical space, lots of hardware in the office. We need that. That’s part of our process. But it’s like, do we need all these desks?
ROB: Do you find you’re still pulling people together to actually get hands on with the experience? You can do a lot of the design in your own place, but there’s a point where it still has to get physical and maybe that’s a good time to convene the team anyhow to build rapport?
JOSH: Yeah, absolutely. And honestly, I love it. It’s great to bring people together in physical space. But when there’s a reason. Let’s bring them in physical space to prototype, but we don’t have to bring them into shared space just for another meeting. That’s not worth it. [laughs] That stuff can go to Zoom.
ROB: Josh, all very interesting stuff. When people want to connect with you and with Blue Cadet, where should they go to find you?
JOSH: I’m probably most active on LinkedIn. Just look me up on LinkedIn. I actually spend a lot of time sharing a lot of prototypes.
ROB: I was going to say, you probably share some cool stuff.
JOSH: I share some really cool stuff. I at one point realized that the Blue Cadet internal Slack where we’re just sharing prototypes and process stuff was way more interesting than anything I was sharing on social media, so I was like, I’m just going to share that stuff. The Blue Cadet Slack is way more interesting than any social feed I follow. So, I share the stuff I’m allowed to share off that.
ROB: That turns out to be great marketing on LinkedIn, too. Some stuff people won’t connect with, some stuff probably goes to the moon, and then people are like, “Who did that?” “Blue Cadet did that.” “Hey, I need that.” I don’t know if it’s scalable, but it also doesn’t have to. I don’t know how many days a week you’re LinkedIn posting, but it’s one or two or three days a week.
JOSH: Yeah. The LinkedIn posts I’m putting up are early prototypes. They’re super messy. It’s a lot of cardboard and projection and things taped together. But usually then there’s some really interesting technology in there, and I feel like it’s an easier way to see how this actually gets made.
ROB: Excellent. Josh, thank you so much for meeting up, for coming on the podcast.
JOSH: Absolutely.
ROB: Wish you the best on your talk in a couple of days as well.
JOSH: Hope you make it out there. It’d be great.
ROB: Thanks so much.
JOSH: Thanks for having me.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Jennifer Brown of Jennifer Brown Consulting based out of New York, NY
Jennifer Brown founded her namesake Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion consulting agency 20 years ago. The agency develops top-down DEI strategies and training programs for medium-size to large companies; sets up effective, well-aligned affinity groups within those companies; and promotes inclusive leadership through educational initiatives. Jennifer is a frequent keynote speaker, both virtually and live. She presented Beyond Diversity: Building A More Inclusive World at the 2022 South by Southwest Conference and followed that with a book signing of her third book, Beyond Diversity: 12 Non-Obvious Ways to Build a More Inclusive World, which she co-authored with Rohit Bhargava. Jennifer is the bestselling author of Inclusion: Diversity, The New Workplace & The Will to Change (2017) and How to Be an Inclusive Leader: Your Role in Creating Cultures of Belonging Where Everyone Can Thrive (2019). The second edition of the 2019 book will be released in October 2022.
Jennifer says there was “a huge wake-up call in spring/summer of 2020” after the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent and still-ongoing social movement for cultural change. Jennifer feels that today’s workplace is “not built by and for so many of us if we . . . don’t fit a certain demographic.”
Jennifer explains the importance of this “sea change”: “If people feel welcomed, valued, respected, and heard, and a deep sense of belonging and being treated equitably . . . they do better work . . . and they stay longer.”
Jennifer says she is a “member of the LGBTQ+ community” who has “been out for nearly 25 years.” She believes half of her cohorts “are still closeted in the workplace,” but that, finally, people are no longer talking about “why” inclusion is important, but “how” to make it happen. She believes companies will be challenged in setting up equitable workplaces as they rebuild “post-Covid,” particularly with managing blended teams of hybrid (virtual and in-person) employees.
Jennifer warns that managers need to be vigilant in supportinging inclusivity. “Harassment has gone up in the virtual workplace,” she says. Why? “There are no witnesses,” she explains. People are “cut off from information” and don’t know their options on how to escalate a complaint and whether they can trust their employer to handle the issue.
Jennifer Brown Consulting facilitates the establishment of corporate affinity groups, which are often comprised of people who tend to be “overlooked in the talent pipeline because of bias” in hiring practice, promotion, advancement, and talent reviews.” Even smaller and medium-sized companies are adopting affinity groups to serve as workplace “sources of intelligence about cultural experience,” tap into what is working and what is not, and provide support and “community” to employees who may have, in the past, felt “marginalized.”
Jennifer can be reached on Instagram, @JenniferBrownSpeaks; on Twitter, @JenniferBrown, on LinkedIn, and on her agency website at: jenniferbrownconsulting.com, where those interested in DEI information can find the agency’s DEI foundations program.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk. I am joined live at South by Southwest by Jennifer Brown of Jennifer Brown Consulting based out of New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Jennifer.
JENNIFER: Thank you, Rob.
ROB: So good to have you on here. Why don’t you start out by telling us about the firm, about Jennifer Brown Consulting? What is your calling card?
JENNIFER: The firm I founded 20 years ago. It’s a DEI strategy and training company. We work with companies, medium-size and large typically, to help them build their diversity, equity, & inclusion strategy from the top down and help also set up what’s called affinity groups and make sure they’re effective and well-aligned. We also do a lot of education around inclusive leadership.
I have an amazing group of consultants who are, at any given time, working on client projects. And then I do a lot of keynoting – virtual, but now increasingly in person, I’m glad to say . . . as we come out of this into a new variant, I just read yesterday. [laughs]
ROB: Last night, yes.
JENNIFER: But anyway, I also love writing books. I just co-authored my third book with Rohit Bhargava, Beyond Diversity, and then I have a second edition of How to Be an Inclusive Leader, which was my book from 2019. I have a second edition of that coming out in October of 2022, which I’m really excited about.
ROB: Congratulations on the book. Rohit was a guest three years ago, the last time we were recording live at SXSW, and then we all skipped a couple of years because of that COVID thing we were just talking about.
As you’re engaging with these firms – you mentioned medium and larger firms – at what point are they coming to you these days? What do they know? What are they doing right? What are the blind spots?
JENNIFER: There was a huge wake-up call in spring/summer of 2020 on multiple levels. I think the big one for us, obviously, was George Floyd murder and the social movement that occurred and is still occurring. A massive shift in attention and prioritization of the fact that the workplace as it is currently is not built by and for so many of us, if we basically don’t fit a certain demographic.
Finally – we’ve been talking about this for many, many years – finally there was attention and resources available. For the last couple of years, our firm has doubled in size and number of companies, and we’ve been incredibly busy. We were ready for this. This is the conversation we’ve been having for many years. I’m a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and I’ve been out for nearly 25 years – I’m dating myself.
ROB: Early.
JENNIFER: Early, early, when we were still arguing for domestic partner benefits with big companies. Those were the early days of my own activism. Then we grew Jennifer Brown Consulting to be a full-service DEI firm.
So, they come to us now and say, “Okay, Jennifer, we get it. We know that it’s important. But we don’t know how to tackle this, and we don’t know how to equip our leaders with the skills and also to awaken their motivation to care about this.” But really, Rob, I’m so excited that it’s not a “why” conversation; it’s a “how” conversation now. We all are a little bit worried that the urgency is flagging as the world continues to be so chaotic and business priorities shift around, so we’re trying to really make sure the burning platform of this remains on fire in people’s minds. We know it’s on fire, but it’s easy to move on and say, “We got this. We’re doing enough.” But I can tell you no company is doing enough.
ROB: Right. You have two lanes. A lot of companies are going to install somebody with a title in DEI at some level, and then there’s actually integrating it into the cadence of the firm. How do you make sure it sticks? How do you keep it from regressing to “business as usual” plus somebody with a title?
JENNIFER: I think the way we speak about why this is urgent really matters, and how it can drive business. It drives innovation. Literally, if people feel welcomed, valued, respected, and heard, and a deep sense of belonging and being treated equitably – which means those day-to-day support mechanisms, resources, pay equity, all that good stuff – they do better work. And they stay longer.
We’re in the midst of a talent crisis. Literally, it is the Great Resignation, and I can tell you from my point of view, it has a lot of reasons, but one of the big reasons is toxic workplaces – workplaces that feel like “I go through my day and I don’t see anyone that looks like me. I don’t feel trusted or trusting of others. I have one foot out the door for something better.” So, culture can be a differentiator, and belonging can and should be a differentiator to keep great talent.
But I can tell you, the workplace needs to be overhauled to be a welcoming place for so many of us. I mean, just LGBT people, half of us are still closeted in the workplace. That is a statistic from 2019. And even in the virtual world, I wonder how it’s changed; I don’t know. But we are not bringing our full selves to work. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of all the identities that aren’t bringing their full selves.
ROB: For sure. There’s part of me that says, what company wouldn’t be welcoming in some way? But that’s the tip of the spear of the question, I am sure.
You mentioned even the structure of the workplace. As we’re resetting and coming back and a lot of companies have been virtual, what opportunities to set up an equitable workplace can companies do as they’re rebuilding what it means to be in an office from scratch, what their work expectations are from scratch? What are the opportunity points? What can they do today that would’ve been hard for them to do two, three years ago, and now it’s like “No, don’t do this again when you come back”?
JENNIFER: Well, let’s see. So many things. We went to an open office plan for a while. That was the thing. But now data has shown that actually, that’s really hard for people to be productive in. Also, the physical office was not a comfortable place. So, virtualizing ourselves actually opened up a sense of safety for a lot of people who found the physical workplace unsafe.
I think we have to carry that with us and remember that that is a critical thing to leverage. But then new diversity dimensions are opening up, like who’s on site? Who’s able to get face time? Who’s able to get on somebody’s calendar or bump into somebody? There’s the haves and have-nots that’s opened up. In some companies, the virtual employees are the haves, actually, that are getting the flexible arrangement, and then the people who have to come into the office – but you can actually see it in the reverse, who has access to leadership. If leadership’s in the office, that could benefit you.
It really depends on the company. I tell managers, we have to up our inclusivity vigilance. When we are managing blended teams, hybrid and in-person, we’ve got to ensure inclusion constantly and be checking in with people who are virtual because we may not know they are on the bubble in terms of their own engagement and loyalty. And what we don’t know can really hurt us, and often when it comes to diversity dimensions, what you don’t know can make the difference between keeping that person and having them leave and being surprised.
So virtually, we just have to be checking in, asking how people are. The most powerful question is something like “Do you feel included and valued in the way that we’re working right now? Is this working for you? Do you feel you can thrive? Do you feel there are barriers? What can I do as your colleague, as your leader, as your manager, to address any barriers that you’re experiencing so that you can do your best work?
I think asking that often will build the trust and tell us what we need to know so we can architect a better situation for people.
ROB: This is the second conversation I’ve had this week where what you’re describing sounds like being a good manager.
JENNIFER: Doesn’t it? Strange, that. [laughs]
ROB: It doesn’t sound like anything to do in some ways with particular topics of diversity, equity, inclusion, while at the same time I think what’s underpinning there is there’s an assumption of commonality that allows people to get by without managing well. Is that fair to say?
JENNIFER: Yes, fair to say. Intersectionality speaks to all the different diversity dimensions that live in a human being. And there’s multiple things going on. I’m a parent. I identify as queer. I’m caregiving. I’m wrestling with mental health challenges. I’m Latinx. All of those things have an impact on our belonging. In most organizations, there’s some angst and some difficulty there because, like I said earlier, workplaces are biased. Period.
Any one of those things or a combination of those things may be going on for someone. They may be hearing microaggressions. They may be being harassed virtually. Unfortunately, I hate to say this – harassment has gone up in the virtual workplace.
ROB: Wow.
JENNIFER: There are no witnesses. Think about this. There’s a lack of understanding of how to escalate a complaint and whether you trust your company enough to handle the complaint. When we virtualize employees, they’re cut off from information, often, that may have been available and they would’ve known what sort of avenues exist. I found this harassment data really disturbing, honestly.
Anyway, there’s a lot of risks. Like I said, as a manager and a leader, to have somebody’s identities in mind and be able to anticipate, “What’s going on for this person? How can I get them to trust me enough to share with me so that I can help?” – and even if that means suggesting that somebody go to HR, suggesting that somebody seek out the EAP for mental health support. I mean, just connecting the dots is so much of our job these days, and it’s been made more difficult when we’re out of the loop with each other. That’s a dangerous place to be.
ROB: Absolutely. You mentioned affinity groups as a key component. What does that look like, building from scratch? How do you get from zero to something there?
JENNIFER: It’s funny; back in the day, only large companies had affinity groups, and they’re like the LGBT Network, the Women’s Network, the Black Network, the Asian-American Network, Disabilities, Veterans. In big companies, there’s a lot. But since two years ago and everything crescendoing, even the smaller and medium-size companies now have affinity groups, and they understand that these groups are literally sources of intelligence about cultural experience in our workplace – what’s going well, what’s going wrong, what needs to be supported, resourced, which talent exists. Sometimes people in affinity groups are the ones that are overlooked in the talent pipeline because of bias in our hiring, promotion, advancement, talent reviews.
So, affinity groups are really important mechanisms to enable people to find community, especially virtually, to share what’s going on and not feel so alone, to strategize about how to be heard in a workplace that is maybe not conscious of its own bias, and then also provide that identity intelligence to the employer to say, “Hey, this community is feeling this now.”
For example, Stop Asian Hate wasn’t just in 2020. It’s actually been increasing and getting worse over this last year and the year before. And yet employers aren’t prioritizing it. If it weren’t for the affinity groups that are keeping it top of mind and saying, “Hey, this is a problem” – our employees are bringing this into the workplace every day and walking around with this, if they’re commuting or in their communities or in their families. People are afraid, and they expect their employer to address it and to know that it’s happening and to say, “What can we, the employer, do to support you, to raise awareness, and to make a statement?”
Honestly, employers also, by the way, need to be making statements about a variety of social issues right now. Otherwise, silence – look what happened to Disney not saying anything about the Don’t Say Gay activities in Florida. Their employees have been so upset and writing letters to the CEO and agitating, and finally the CEO wrote a memo and it just broke yesterday on Twitter. But it took a long time, and it shouldn’t take a long time. Companies should have their employees’ backs. Period.
ROB: And then it’s even harder when you do actually say something – the rubric against which it is measured at that point is so much harder.
JENNIFER: Oh yeah. There’s a lot of issues, granted. But this is the world we live in. Certainly, I hear from leaders, “Jennifer, where does it stop?” I’m like, “This is your new normal. It doesn’t stop. But by the way, this is an opportunity to connect with your employees on a deep” – when I feel seen and heard and valued, this is what it means. If my CEO is silent on a harmful bill to me and my community, I am out the door. I can’t describe – it’s like a visceral thing. Like “I can’t work here anymore. This company doesn’t see me, doesn’t care about what’s happening to people that identify like I do.”
Employees are finding their voice in a way that I have been waiting for for a really long time. So really, the problem is leadership is really behind. They don’t have the competency. They’re not able to pivot quickly. They’re like, “I can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.” I’m like, no, this needs to be your new leadership skill. You have to be able to know, to be scanning your environment all the time and saying “What do I need to make sure our employees know that we’re not okay with?” That needs to be the first thing you wake up thinking about every day.
ROB: This sounds like it ties into some of the dimensions of the book, so let’s go over that direction for a moment. Talk about the book, how it came to be – the book is Beyond Diversity with you and Rohid. How did this happen, and what should we know about it? You had a session here talking about the book. What should people know?
JENNIFER: Yeah, we did. It was so great. It came out of a five-day Beyond Diversity Summit, literally, with 200 speakers. Rohid approached me. I was one of those folks part of organizing it, and he’s like, “This needs to be a book.” I was like, “Oh no, 200 speakers, hours and hours of footage. How do we boil this down into a book? It’s terrifying. My team will never forgive me.” However, we said yes, let’s do it.
We organized all of this footage into 12 themes, and those are the chapters. They’re not identity themes. We could’ve gone that way. We could’ve done “This is the chapter on LGBTQ+. This is the chapter on Asian-Americans and AAPI folks.” Instead, we did education, media, workplace, storytelling, government, family. It was so cool to take all of that wisdom from a wide array of diverse storytellers in every way and figure out, where do we tell this story, that story, that story?
I loved the challenge of that. I think also, “beyond diversity” to me perhaps means, yes, identity diversity, but let’s look at how this plays out in these domains of life that really touch our lives every single day. We can all relate to education. We can all relate to what’s happening in media. I hope the book reaches people who have dismissed this topic maybe in the past, but they pick it up and they’re like, “Oh, this book makes sense to me. This is relevant to my life holistically.” And it’s such a positive book. It’s not a “shame and blame” book. It is full of celebrations of where innovation is occurring and how exciting it is and how it’s going to better our world.
I think it’s a really different kind of book, and I hope it finds all kinds of audiences. I think it should be in curriculum in schools. Professors should be assigning it. My parents, in their eighties, tell me it’s the best book I’ve ever written. They love it. They’re reading it and they’re able to understand it.
ROB: It is very, very approachable in the structure. It’s just made so that you can come in, engage with it at whatever depth you want to – not that you want to treat it like a dictionary and shop by topic, or an encyclopedia, but there is that ability. There’s skimmability. There’s summary. But that facilitates approaching it easily, but also the education context. You open it up, and it’s credible – this book was made by people who were making a business book, not just like “my opinion and here you go.” It wasn’t a memoir.
JENNIFER: Yes, exactly. We actually really intentionally decentered ourselves. Even though we were writing the book, we gathered this big writing team also. So all of their hands are on the writing. And then we hired also inclusivity readers, otherwise known as sensitivity readers, because Rohit and I and the other writers knew we would still not perceive the correct language, for example. They went through the book and gave us tons of feedback. It was just a wonderful learning experience.
But the book literally is all about different storytellers – unusual, unexpected, nonobvious storytellers. I hear myself talk all day, but I want their voice to be out there, and I think we were both in service of that.
ROB: It is excellent. You get in deep, and then there’s the contributor list – obviously voluminous, for sure.
JENNIFER: Yes.
ROB: Jennifer, let’s rewind a little bit. Let’s talk about where Jennifer Brown Consulting came from. What made you decide that you should not have a job with somebody else and you should build something, and who knows where it goes? Especially with the past couple of years with that growth now. But where did it start?
JENNIFER: It started because being in the LGBTQ+ community in my early days, really way back, I was an opera singer.
ROB: Wow.
JENNIFER: I came to New York to make it, and then my voice kept getting injured and I had to get vocal surgery several times to repair it, but it would never – I realized my instrument just wouldn’t ever do what it needed to do, and I would have to reinvent.
I found my way to – I like to think of it now as a different stage, literally. I’m a keynoter now. I’m able to use my love of the stage – which I’ve been on stage since I was five; I grew up in a really musical family, and we are like the Von Trapp Family Singers. [laughs]
ROB: Yeah, it came to my mind as soon as you said it. [laughs]
JENNIFER: I was that kid. So I seek the stage. I love it. I crave it. I enjoy it. I’m comfortable on it. I think it’s the best medium for me. Anyway, though, as a closeted person who was trying to find my voice, I found in those early days all of these amazing companies in New York – IBM, Deloitte, Proctor and Gamble – I didn’t even know this world existed, but it was the world of corporations that were leading-edge in terms of LGBTQ equality. They were all starting to vie for us as talent and then also trying to vie for us as customers.
I had a front seat years ago on those early battles for domestic partner benefits, for adding sexual orientation and gender identity to the non-discrimination policies and the language of the company. Their statements used to not include that. I hope people are hearing this and being like, “Wow, I’ve always taken that for granted, and I didn’t know there was a time that wasn’t there.” But I can tell you, there was a time.
And those were really exciting days. I feel like I cut my teeth on – the way that LGBTQ employees shifted companies was super powerful for me to see and be a part of because I think it clicked that I could be a voice for change, and that change would actually happen in this massive entity with just my voice, or just the voice of a community. We were very strategic in the way we approached it. We argued the case around talent retention and recruitment. We argued the business case for customers.
It trained me to think about how large institutions change and why they change, and because of what, and how to be an irritant in the system but to be strategic and grounded in their “care abouts” where it’s a win-win. That is something I’ve carried with me as we built Jennifer Brown Consulting, and I would subsequently leave corporate America. I was an employee, like you say, and I was like, “This is not creative enough for me. I don’t have enough agency. I can’t have a boss. I have to start my own firm.”
Very quickly, when I put my shingle out – I’m kind of a natural marketer – it became much bigger than I could manage. I started to hire people. I started to send people in instead of me and started to scale my company. In fact, one of my first hires was a COO, and I really dug deep to pay somebody six figures to build my entire backend because I knew – I was like, I don’t know how to do this. And I don’t want to. I need to be out there, doing what I do best in my zone of genius, which was evangelizing for the idea of the firm and also putting forth not just me, but all these talented consultants that I was able to attract and send in on our behalf to the clients that I had procured.
It worked really well. I always felt it was important to work on the business, not in the business. So from the very beginning days, I was like, how does this scale? And then how do I find my way into my best role? And I’m there now.
ROB: How many people did you have when you hired your COO, and were they somebody that had done that job before?
JENNIFER: Like three people. And yes, they had scaled my friend’s firm, a marketing agency. They had allowed her and enabled her to focus on the creative. Founders are often not the backend people. We’re the salespeople. We get the attention. We know how to do that.
So, he had done that, and I took the plunge and said, “Please, get everybody paid on time. Do job descriptions. Help me figure out who’s my first, second, and third hire. Who should that be? Help me run my finances responsibility. Get us a bookkeeper and do QuickBooks and set up…” – whatever, there’s just so much you have to think about. I never regretted it. Subsequently, I’ve gone through four or five COOs over 20 years.
ROB: But the role is necessary.
JENNIFER: Yep, and I really recommend it. If you think you’ve got a tiger by the tail, like I thought I did – and I had no idea what that really would feel like until 2020 – but up until that time, I was evangelizing this idea that belonging is important for all of these dimensions. Better products, better services, better customer relationships, better design. More retention.
Losing people is so expensive for companies, and they don’t see it as that. It’s sort of this invisible cost of attrition. I mean, now they know. But I think it’s been happening for years because many of us have been bailing out and becoming entrepreneurs because we literally were like, “I can’t stand another day here.” Anyway, it’s a big wakeup call and I’m here for it.
ROB: Absolutely. I hear you on the COO side. Our sixth employee was an operations role, and she’s moved up to COO. It was terrifying. I started off thinking I wanted just a junior project manager / order-taker / “do stuff for me,” and then I was persuaded by some advisors to spend the money. But it was terrifying.
JENNIFER: How’s she doing and feeling?
ROB: She’s moved up. It’s great. It’s a relief because I’m out here talking to people, and things still happen back home on the home front.
JENNIFER: I want to share – maybe this will be interesting for your audience – my name is on the name of the consulting business, right? It’s Jennifer Brown Consulting. We refer to ourselves as JBC. But we have transcended that question I always get, which is “Don’t people expect you?” They don’t, actually. They know about me, but they don’t expect me to be on the calls. We’ve scaled ourselves to such a level that the team is completely empowered and completely the star of the show, and I’m not involved unless there’s a keynote that’s needed and wanted or an executive session. I’m off writing the books that hopefully draw attention to us.
It’s just an interesting thing I know founders wrestle with and thought leader-driven brands. It’s this interesting question that always comes up. But I think we’ve done it really well. I think the secret is it’s always been my plan and it’s always been my expectation. I have said very clearly, it’s not about me. I’m not even the most practiced expert in my company, and I never have been.
My consultants are incredible, and they will solve problems differently than I will in any client engagement. They are bringing their own 30 years of looking at these things, and they have different identities than I do, and they have that lived experience that they can bring. So, it’s worked really well, and it’s enabled me to pull out of the day to day and speak and write, which I do think is what I have been, all these years, preparing to do.
ROB: Was it easier or harder, those first couple of engagements when you were tagging someone else in?
JENNIFER: I remember. If I’m on the phone, if I’m involved, how can somebody feel that they’re in charge of the gig? The client is always going to be looking to me as the authority, and I don’t want to be looked at as the authority. I had to be really careful in the early days of this transition of what I was a part of – that they even met me. I minimized that. [laughs] I was like, “Nope, you don’t need to talk to me. Thanks for the inquiry. I’m introducing you right away to my team. They will take care of you.”
We still actually do this because stuff still finds its way to me. But we’re very strict, and we have protocols that we follow. I never break those because it’s super important for me that my team can take care of whatever you need. I’m almost like a consultant now. The team is in charge and knows what to bring me and when that’s needed. Also, for me and my wants and needs, I don’t want to be in the day-to-day client work anymore, and I haven’t wanted to be for many years. That’s not what brings me fulfillment.
So, I think for founders, commit to and dig deep to seek – know what you don’t want to do, but what you want your firm to still do. That’s so important. Just pay attention to that and then dig deep financially and wherever else you have to dig to staff around the work you want the group to do as a delivery but is not work you directly want to be involved in. And then make sure you’re not sending mixed messages and that you’re truly empowering the people you’ve hired to go and be brilliant.
ROB: I hear you talking about handing over two separate sets of responsibilities at least, which are doubly nerve-wracking. You’re talking about handing over the delivery of the work, but you’re also talking about handing over the selling of the work.
JENNIFER: Yeah. We’re interesting because our folks don’t do business development. I have been in the space for so long that our amazing marketing team who helps me get the word out – we provide so much value. We have so many opportunities to read our thought leadership, join our calls, be a part of our JBC community, that we get a lot of inbound.
One of the things I’ve learned is you cannot force people to be salespeople if that is not what they do. I understood my role very early on. I’m here to build the house that people can live in and make sure the bills are paid and whatever, taking care of the container and making sure there’s enough opportunity coming in for people to focus on being the subject matter expert and delivering the work and taking care of the relationship.
We have a sales team, but they field a lot. They really more operate as “Now we have an opportunity; what is the scope? What is the statement of work? How do we price it? Who do we put on it? What’s the team going to be that delivers it?” That is what happens after we receive an interest or a lead. It was the way I got around sales, honestly, because the only kind of sales I’m really comfortable with is this back-door way of putting myself in conversations, adding value, moderating panels endlessly – which is what I did for years, just going to conferences and being in the room, speaking up and offering to be helpful.
And over time, now it’s like, “We’ve wanted to work with you and your team for years. We finally have the budget!” But years and years and years of people watching us grow, and now it’s amazing to get these calls from people that saw me speak 10 years ago or were in the room.
ROB: You can’t be transactional about that. That’s playing the long game.
JENNIFER: It’s reputation, it’s trust, and it’s generosity. We’ve been so, so generous. That’s my MO. I see myself as part of the field. I think of it as we are a field of practitioners, and even if we’re competitors, we’re not. We all stay in touch with each other. When we hang out, other heads of firms, it’s like this amazing, really rich conversation because it’s a moment. This is purpose work. And people will find the firms that they feel the most comfort with for what they need. But honestly, it’s co-opetition. I’ve heard that word, and I think that really speaks to that, at the end of the day, we’re part of a movement and advocacy and whoever does the work, we deeply care that the work is done.
ROB: Absolutely. I can see clearly that you deeply care and you have a team that does. Jennifer, when people want to find you and JBC, where should they go to find you?
JENNIFER: Thanks for asking. Amazon has all my books, and then on Instagram, I’m @JenniferBrownSpeaks. I’m on LinkedIn. Twitter, I’m @JenniferBrown. Yes, I was on Twitter many, many, many years ago.
ROB: Well played.
JENNIFER: Well played. [laughs] And then jenniferbrownconsulting.com is our website. I just want to say if you’re a new practitioner or an aspiring DEI professional, you should really check out our online courses. We’re building our foundations program and rolling that out. It’s just a wonderful six-week “get yourself grounded and work on your personal diversity story.”
ROB: That even scales down to some people who maybe aren’t midmarket enough to pay for you. Excellent.
JENNIFER: Exactly. You understand.
ROB: I do understand.
JENNIFER: Thank you.
ROB: Jennifer, thank you so much for meeting up and coming on the podcast and helping us learn well in your expertise.
JENNIFER: It’s a pleasure.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Shep Ogden, CEO and Co-founder, Offbeat Media Group (Atlanta, GA)
Shep Ogden is CEO and Co-founder of Offbeat Media Group, an agency that helps “some of the biggest brands in the world figure out how to use TikTok, Web3, and meme marketing to reach Gen Z customers. Originally, the college friends who started the agency owned and operated an Instagram account, Humor, which drew four million followers . . . and a lot of interest from brands that wanted to partner with the account.
The agency moved from working with memes to working with influencers, and from there, to developing virtual influencers. Today, the agency’s clients are typically the 10% of businesses that “are constantly looking for that new thing.”
When the partners realized the Humor account did not have an associated “face,” they decided to build one virtually. For the past few years, Offbeat has been working to establish “virtual influencers” to serve as identities behind “faceless” accounts. Virtual influencer development is what the agency is best known for today “and its clients are typically the 10% of businesses that “are constantly looking for that new thing.”
Shep says that today’s photorealistic virtual influencers “don’t look 100% real yet” and the technology to perfect them is extremely expensive. The other end of the spectrum, cartoony caricatures, does not work as well as stylized animated characters that “are not meant to trick you,” but to serve as characters “to tell a story” using “humanized responses and emotions.” The first of seven stylized virtual influencers the agency is creating for Nexus, named “Zero,” launched on Twitter in February and has drawn the interest of major investors.
The agency’s content studio creates a constant stream of content on the internet (mostly on places like TikTok and Snapchat) with close to a dozen shows that reach hundreds of millions of people monthly. By building virtual influencers and developing an NFT (nonfungible token) project for themselves, then iterating, testing, and innovating to improve their “product,” the agency demonstrates that it “gets” the new technology. The shows are monetized when platform partners direct ads their known audiences and share the revenues with Offbeat. The agency plans to sell NFTs to crowdsource virtual influencers’ story development, help “build community,” and further monetize the agency’s work.
Shep talked about the intersection of the virtual influencer industry, Web3, digital ownership, and NFTs at the 2022 South by Southwest Conference. After his presentation, “The Future of Influence Doesn’t Involve Humans,” he brought Nexus’s Zero up on stage, on screen, to converse, unscripted, with entrepreneur Mark Cuban.
Shep says the goals for his presentation were to:
- introduce the virtual influencer industry,
- establish Web3 for the audience,
- discuss how these two intersect,
- explain the agency’s work and the thought behind the Nexus universe growing around Zero, and
- show the stuff in action.
Shep can be found on LinkedIn as Shep Ogden. Offbeat Media Group is also on LinkedIn. The Offbeat-owned website, VirtualHumans.org, serves as the industry-leading website on virtual influencers. For those interested in the development of Zero, follow @ZeroFromNexus on Twitter.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today live at South by Southwest, interactive, by Shep Ogden, CEO and Co-founder of Offbeat Media Group based in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to the podcast, Shep.
SHEP: Awesome, Rob. Thanks so much for having me. I’m having a blast.
ROB: It’s good to have you here. It’s always fun to have these people we know in Atlanta – we know each other, but we’re in Austin and getting together to talk. It’s all well, good, and fun, but why don’t you start off by telling us about Offbeat Media Group and what is your superpower? What’s your calling card?
SHEP: Our superpower has changed over the last few years. It’s been a really fun experience. I’d like to back up and give you the quick origin story. We started this business while we were in college. We owned and operated an account called Humor on Instagram with about four million followers. It was a really large meme and viral community, basically. It was something that we started for fun and then it turned into something that brands really wanted to partner with us on.
The next thing you know, we’re helping some of the biggest brands in the world figure out how to reach Gen Z and how to do meme marketing and how to tap into an account like Humor, but also hundreds of others and then thousands of others.
That led to us working with a ton of influencers, moving from just meme accounts to influencers, which then led to this whole new crazy idea, which I think is our superpower, of virtual influencers – taking this concept of an account like Humor that has millions of followers but doesn’t have a face attached to it and thinking about that, but doing it with a virtual face. Building an account, building a personality, building something that someone wants to follow, but giving an identity behind it – that’s the idea of a virtual influencer, and we’ve been doing that for the last few years. It’s definitely what we’re known for most now.
ROB: It might sound a little bit out there to the audience; is this an influencer who is obviously not real? Or do they appear real? How does that happen?
SHEP: That’s a great question. Sometimes it’s both. There’s photorealistic virtual influencers that look pretty real. They don’t look 100% real yet. There are ways to make it look 100% real, but it’s very, very expensive. What we like to do, and what we’ve seen work much, much better with the audience across the board is more of a stylized animated character.
We recently launched Zero for Nexus on Twitter, who you saw, I know. He’s a stylized character. While he has very humanlike responses and emotions, and when he talks to people you get that human feeling from him, you also know instantly that he’s not meant to be real. He’s not meant to trick you. He’s just here as a character to tell a story. I think that’s what works really well in this space.
ROB: And it sort of helps you get past the uncanny valley problem when they look stylized versus real. How do you go about thinking about who this character is, though? I suppose every influencer to an extent has to decide who their persona is, but you’re writing a script from nothing. Or is it rooted in something real?
SHEP: That’s a great question. With Zero, it’s not rooted really in anything real, but the way we counteract that and think about that is we’re including the community. A real influencer has a real backstory and has a real life, and you can’t really change their backstory, change their life. They are who they are. But with a virtual influencer, we’re writing lore for Zero. Who is Zero? What’s his background?
But we’re including the community that follows him now. The thousands of people following him and engaging with his content are helping us make this decision. We can do a top-level, “Hey, is it A, B, or C? What do you like better?” and then someone on our team will go deep into that concept and bring it to life when our community says, “We really like this direction.” We crowdsource it. We crowdsource the storytelling of these type of characters, which I think also gives the fans more satisfaction seeing them brought to life.
ROB: You mentioned hundreds and thousands of these accounts before on more of the Humor and accounts like that, the non-influencer side. How many influencers are you running? How many do you want to run?
SHEP: Virtual influencers?
ROB: Yep.
SHEP: Right now, we’re running one. We launched in February, Zero. We did a lot of tests over the last few years of different types, like we talked about photorealistic, we talked about some more cartoony, but stylized is what we landed on. We built some really cool tech over the last 12 months that allows us to power these influencers in real time where you could have a conversation with them on video, and there’s no animator needed. It’s all happening from our studio in Atlanta.
So, we have Zero from Nexus and that’s our main one right now. Zero is part of the Nexus universe. Our approach towards an entertainment brand. We plan on fully decentralizing. I mentioned our community, community involvement, community governance, and helping us make decisions. We actually do plan on giving NFTs to the community, one day possibly a token where people can have ownership as well as governance of this overarching community.
Over the next 18 months in this entertainment brand, we plan on launching six more. So, there’ll be seven different virtual influencers or virtual creators within it that are engaging with each other, interacting with each other, and then telling a story is the biggest thing.
ROB: When you talk about a universe like this, you talk about an entertainment brand, what would be a parallel of something that’s already established that people might think about? Is this like a Fortnite ecosystem? Is this like a Roblox? What level does that brand rise to? Or is it like a sub-brand within Disney and you might have multiple of these universes?
SHEP: That. That’s spot on, that last one. The way we look at it is Offbeat Media Group as a company, we do have different arms for our business. We talked a bit about helping brands figure out TikTok and Web3 and memes. That’s our agency. We have a content studio that we haven’t talked a ton about, but we create a ton of content across the internet. We have nearly a dozen shows across the internet that reach hundreds of millions of people every month.
But with the Nexus universe, we built really cool tech to power that. That’s our first jump into building out this entertainment brand. We think about that as something like the Marvel Universe. That would be someone we really look up to. We can tell a story for decades to come and we can include the audience in helping us make some of the bigger decisions within that story.
But what’s really unique about it is because we have this tech that allows people to interact with our characters in real time on a Zoom call or on Twitch, they can do that with these characters. If you think about Marvel Universe and Captain America or Thor or someone like that, you’re not going to get content from Thor, but once every two years, once they release a movie. He’s not on social media. He’s not on Twitch. You can’t hop on a podcast with him. Maybe the actor, but not actually Thor, the character, because that would cost a ton of money for Marvel Universe to have Thor always on.
So that’s our concept. We can tell the story, a cinematic story, just as you would see with something like that, but you can also get day-to-day interaction with our characters.
ROB: You mentioned the agency off to the side; I know a lot of your vision is pulling forward on what you’re doing with this universe, but I think it might be easy for someone listening to actually underestimate that you have a substantive business. You’ve built a real deal agency and business underneath all of this. Someone might wonder, you’re building this science experiment; how do you pay the bills? What’s the day-to-day of what makes things operate well that allows you to also invest in the future?
SHEP: That’s a great question. You’re spot on. Our agency does really well. It’s growing. We have an awesome general manager, Michael Heaven, who has really taken charge and leadership of it. He came from one of the fastest-growing agencies of the last decade, was employee #7 at Social Chain, went to about 700, and then left and came and joined us after opening quite a few offices for them.
The way we look at it is – I’ll say first off, I’m in one of the few roles where being a 26-year-old CEO is a positive. People come to us and say, “Yeah, this guy probably gets it. He probably understands memes. He probably understands TikTok and is pretty much a pro.” Now, over the last couple years, we’ve been doing virtual influencers and we’ve been looking at NFTs and whatnot. Same thing there. People are like, “Okay, they probably get it. They’re a pretty young and innovative team.”
But then we’re also showcasing to people that we do get it. We’re building virtual influencers for ourselves. We’re building an NFT project for ourselves. We’re creating content nonstop on the internet, like I mentioned earlier, with the content studio. Both of those fuel interest in what we’re doing. We’re not your typical agency that just does services for others; we’re iterating, we’re testing, we’re innovating every single day, like “How do we do this better for ourselves?”
Then once we build that playbook for ourselves, we have a team that’s ready to take that playbook and do it for brands. So that’s why we have both of these. In the day-to-day, we’re innovating on content that we can do internally. Once we find something’s working, we ship it over to the agency and we’re like, “Hey, no one else is doing this yet, but we just had it work really, really well for us. Let’s roll this out.”
ROB: How much of the media that you produce ends up being something that you can integrate a client/a brand into versus how much of it is a proof of capability that serves as marketing? Do you bring the brands into some of these, your Humor channels, and some of that? Or is it all “We saw that you could do this, now please do this for us but under our umbrella”?
SHEP: It depends on the asset. With Humor, on Instagram, the one with about four million followers, we integrate brands into that all the time. We create memes, we partner with comedians, we partner with viral influencers, and we can take their branded content or we can make a branded meme and integrate it into this community really, really easily.
With the shows – I mentioned we have about a dozen shows – most of those are on places like TikTok and Snapchat. We don’t integrate brands into those. The way that works is we are partnered with the platform, so we’re making money from programmatic advertising. When someone’s watching our show, Snapchat knows the audience watching the show. They’re running ads, and then we have a rev share deal with them. So, we don’t have to go sell ads for that stuff.
We’re not really trying to turn into a production company for brands. Most of the stuff we’re producing is either lightweight or partnered with an influencer. And then on the virtual influencer front, first and foremost, we’re building a community. We expect that community to be a part of what we’re doing. We plan on selling them NFTs. We plan on giving them governance of what we’re building. We can monetize it through content.
But with Zero and the virtual influencers, that is a perfect branded integration play, too. We’ve done a great job with his lore, where he’s got a portal in his universe that he can send things through one day, but things can already be sent to him. For example, Samsung sent him their new most recent phone, and it’s now his new most favorite thing. He’s constantly hopping on a selfie video, and it’s always with a Samsung. That’s a way that we split how we think about branded versus not.
ROB: How did they find you? Or how did you find them? This is an experiment for a brand.
SHEP: Yeah. I was talking to somebody yesterday and they talked about how brands are typically in a 70%, 20%, 10% kind of mindset where that 10% is the ones that are constantly looking for that new thing. We usually work with those 10%.
We own and operate a website called VirtualHumans.org. It is the industry-leading website about all things virtual influencers. There’s nothing else out there like it. Three years ago, two and a half years ago, when we got really excited about this space, we saw that everyone was writing about it from a journalist standpoint, but there was nowhere to actually learn about the industry. There was always the same one, two, three virtual influencers mentioned, yet here we are finding 50, finding 60. It’s like, why can’t I find anywhere to actually learn about this industry? How are the players in it? What are they doing? How are they doing it?
So, we build that website for the industry, and that has connected us with major investors, major brands, major partners, every team in the space. Anyone interested in the space typically comes to us, inbound, wanting to network.
ROB: There’s a recurring theme here. We see you continue to build a platform that proves what you’re able to do, that people want to be a part of, whether that’s on some of the meme accounts, whether that’s on Virtual Humans, now with Zero. Where did that disposition towards building content platforms come from? You guys started when you were in school. Were you in film? Were you in some sort of creative endeavor? Was it just a natural, organic “this is where social is now” and who you are demographically?
SHEP: I think it was fun for all of us. Bailey, Christopher, and myself are the main three day-to-day partners. We also have Kevin Planovosky, who’s an advisor of ours and an early partner. All of us went to the University of Georgia. But specifically, Bailey, Christopher, and I all had our own Instagram accounts that weren’t ourselves. Christopher ran a social media app for a while that had hundreds of thousands of users, and then when that ended up not working out, he pivoted to social media accounts and had tens of thousands of followers.
I had this idea that you could – I owned a lot of states on Instagram, like Alabama, West Virginia, Iowa, South Carolina, and then cities and some countries, even. People just started following them, and it gave me authority because I owned the state username. It was almost as if I was the state. So, it gave me a lot of authority. I just thought it was really cool and I was learning really quickly how to gain tens and then hundreds of thousands of followers, and then met Bailey, who was doing the same thing. He was making memes. He was just posting memes and making memes.
We were like, man, we think we could make money doing this, like real money. That’s when we all partnered up with some experiments, and the next you know, it actually turned into a real business. Something that started as something cool to us.
ROB: It’s lightning in a bottle with some people. Kevin’s a former guest on the podcast as well. Recorded that one live and in person at the Vert Office. That was pretty fun.
Did any or all of you come from any entrepreneurial background? Was there a seed planted early for you?
SHEP: Yeah, great question. Bailey has such a unique story. I wish he was here to tell it. Really, his origin story was he wanted to get a truck when he was 16 and he wanted a nice one, and his parents told him they’d pay for half of it. But if he wanted a nice one, he was going to have to figure out how to make the other half. He was 14-15 years old with no real money, and he started flipping cards or flipping sunglasses or something on eBay, and then heard about this guy in high school making real money, thousands of dollars, with Twitter accounts.
So, he went and used all of his money from selling sunglasses and flipping other items to buy a couple really big Twitter accounts and start monetizing that. Next thing you know – he didn’t realize he was becoming an entrepreneur, but he did. It just snowballed from when he was 14 years old up to moving into memes and all across the board. So, he had a really cool story.
I think Christopher found himself in a somewhat similar boat, really just wanting to build something special.
And then my background is my family was a family of small-town entrepreneurs. My dad is probably the biggest hustler I know. I grew up and we owned small rentals, a car wash, a little shop, all the kinds of things like that in a small town of 10,000 people. I loved talking about business with him, and I’m 7-8 years old. I’m like, “How’d work go today?” and I’m asking him all about it.
I think that set my foundation really, really strong. I knew I didn’t have to go and work for The Man. That’s how I learned it from my dad. He gave me a story where he went and worked for a year or two at a factory, basically, and his dad, who was also an entrepreneur, told him, “You’re wasting your time.” Which I don’t think is necessarily a fair characterization, but he left and he went and started his own business and he was much better off for that. So that really inspired me. I always knew that I could do that as well, like it was a possibility. I got to see that firsthand as a possibility. And then I studied entrepreneurship nonstop for most of my high school and college career and then jumped in.
ROB: It’s three very different paths, and of course, Bailey’s reminds me – quite often, the entrepreneurs are the folks that were flipping candy or sunglasses or you name it in high school, and they end up starting something later.
I would be remiss if we didn’t talk about the session that you’ve been here at SXSW to present. Did it yesterday, had a special guest up on stage with you. The session was “The Future of Influence Doesn’t Involve Humans.” What should people who weren’t there know about it?
SHEP: I’ll say first off, I think we chose a little clickbait-y title to get people in there. Yes, while we were showing a virtual human, which technically isn’t a real human, there was a massive team working on that of all humans. So yeah, we had Mark Cuban join us. It was a really great experience. We got to really talk about the virtual influencer industry, talk about this new world of Web3 and digital ownership and NFTs and how this stuff’s going to intersect and tie into virtual influencers and how we think about using that ideology. Web3 ideology is a tool to let this community actually have ownership and governance of the virtual influencers we’re building.
And then after we explained what this stuff was – we gave a quick definition of a virtual influencer, but it is a first-person identity built on the internet for the sake of influence. Could be for a friend, could be for yourself, could be an artist, whatever it is, but it is a first-person computer-generated character that thinks and acts as if they’re their own person. That’s a virtual influencer.
Once we got through that, we’ve got to actually bring Zero up on stage, onscreen, and have him start talking to Mark Cuban and talking to us and engaging with the audience. That was I think one of the coolest experiences we’ve had as a company so far because so much of what we’ve been working on, like this idea that you can build an influencer that can engage with the world, was shown yesterday.
I think the most unique thing about it was that nothing was pre-scripted. For anyone listening, typically to do what we did yesterday, to have a fully animated character engaging with someone and actually have it look real, you have a team of animators that are doing it in postproduction. They’re keyframe animating this stuff. But all of our stuff, all the tools that we’ve built, do all of it in real time. So yes, we have someone to motion capture, but that output looks crystal clear.
ROB: Yeah, it was crisp. It worked. The technology worked. I was hoping you didn’t have to reboot Zero at any point. But I think had some doubts when you started doing the session, and when you’re interacting over Zoom with this character. I think people still felt like it might have been scripted, but you shared with me you didn’t even know what he was going to say and how he was going to introduce himself. Little worrisome even there, little fake robot voice just to creep everybody out.
SHEP: Yeah, he came in – Zero’s on Twitter as @ZeroFromNexus and everyone keeps calling him an AI. So sometimes when he joins in on a Zoom, he loves messing with everyone and pretending to be a robot, and then he says, “I’m just kidding!” and he starts talking to you like a normal person. I think the crowd loved that.
But yeah, we planned a lot of the conversation prior that we’d be having with Mark and talking about the industry, and then we planned to have Zero give us a tour of his bunker, but that was all free-flowing conversation. There was nothing scripted. I think even Mark was like, “How much of this is preplanned?” It’s like, zero. He starts asking Zero questions, and Zero’s just responding off the cuff. He just had all of it off the top of his head.
ROB: It sounds a little bit like improv, really. You know the beats maybe that you might go through in a given skit. You might’ve talked some topics, you might’ve done some practice, but you didn’t practice what you were going to say; you just know the plot points you’re going to follow.
SHEP: Exactly. The way we typically plan conversations like that – if we’re giving a presentation, that’s one thing; we’ll know almost to a ‘T’ what we’re going to say. Christopher, who was part of the SXSW pitch yesterday for us, knew exactly what he was going to say.
For something like this, we had high-level goals. We had talking points under each goal, but goal #1, establish the virtual influencer industry to the audience. Goal #2, establish Web3 to the audience. And then goal #3, start telling them how these two intersect; goal #4, start talking about how we’re doing that and how we think about it with the Nexus universe we’re building with Zero. And then goal #5, actually show the stuff in action. So, we had high-level, “Cool, we’ve got an hour; we’re going to show this stuff.” Mark Cuban is an investor of ours, and he has a really impressive knowledge of exactly what we’re doing, so he was able to go off and riff on it with this as well.
ROB: Yeah, he probably gives ideas from the stage sometimes where someone’s taking a note and being like, “Let’s put that in the mix too.”
SHEP: Definitely.
ROB: While this entire technical demo was going on – we’re trying to picture what’s going on behind the scenes – you have a whole studio set up in Atlanta that you’ve alluded to. I’m trying to draw metaphors. Actually, is there a way people can see the session yesterday or something like it, some reasonable recording of something like that to get a taste? Where can they go see something like that to start to understand what the experience is like?
SHEP: We’re going to be on Twitch soon with Zero from Nexus. But right now, Twitter. If you look up @ZeroFromNexus, spelled how it sounds –
ROB: With a ‘Z,’ not with an ‘X’ if you’re feeling strange or fancy.
SHEP: Right. You can see all of his content that he posts right now. And all of his stuff is done in real time. Because it’s posted on Twitter, we do have an editor that can cut pieces off and whatnot, but the actual content production takes as long as that clip takes. We’re able to move cameras around in real time. We click a button, the camera’s in a different spot. We’re able to teleport him around. We’re able to move him all around the bunker. He lives in a bunker. [laughs]
ROB: For now.
SHEP: Yeah, for now. But we’re able to do all of that in real time. I think his Twitter is probably the best case to see that right now.
ROB: Who all is involved today? Is there a voice actor? Is there a body actor? Are they the same person? Virtual cameraman? Is somebody pushing magic buttons for teleporting? Who’s involved in making a Zero moment right now?
SHEP: There’s a voice actor that’s also the motion capture artist. And then we have our head of content, who’s also helping go deep in the content we’re producing. We have our tech director, which is typically the one processing those buttons like, “Cool, we’re about to teleport, we’re about to get a new camera scene.” So yeah, it’s a pretty lean team of about three fully focused on character, and then we have a couple more in the studio, typically, that are supporting and working on things. To have one of these characters up and running, though, it takes two to three people.
ROB: It’s amazingly in real time. I could almost picture different places – I imagine a lot of people would want to use this – you could imagine having an Instagram live with Gollum from Lord of the Rings. You could do that, right? Maybe not on the rendering technology right now; maybe that level of realism isn’t quite real time. But it’s within reach. You can get there from here.
SHEP: Yeah, we could. Right now, even. It all comes down to – the system we’ve built can render at that high level. Photorealistic humans isn’t there, but something like a very high-end character rendered in real time, absolutely. You break that uncanniness because it’s not a human. Once it’s a human, that stuff gets hard.
But yeah, that’s spot on. Gollum we could bring to life. Instagram Live is kind of complicated because you have to do it from a phone, but you could bring it alive on Twitch. You bring it alive on anything from a computer that can do live. We could have a very high-end character engaging and talking to you. Maybe giving his backstory or going deeper into the lore of Lord of the Rings, in the Gollum example. Going deeper into that lore and almost giving you his personal experience. That’s definitely possible with this technology.
ROB: That’s fascinating. I do want to see it, but I also want to pull forward to where you’re thinking some of this stuff goes in terms of the Web3 technology. I think some of it was alluded to during the session yesterday, this idea of even potentially establishing a DAO, these digital autonomous organizations, around a character or even parts of the universe governance to make decisions. How wide of decisions do you think you’ll let people make for these characters and this universe?
SHEP: That’s a really interesting question. We think about this a lot, because there’s been nothing out there long enough to really see what the right answer is. The way we’re thinking about it is at Offbeat, we’re the creative lead. We went down the rabbit hole of like “What if we gave full control to the community out the gate?”, but there’s a lot of examples where that hasn’t necessarily been the best thing for the long term of the IP. Lots of times the community will do what’s coolest or funniest or whatever it is right now, today, and then they might saturate the brand or make the wrong decision for the brand in the long term.
So, the way we view it is we have a really, really creative team, and we can come up with concepts before we completely flesh them out and build them out. Then we can include the audience on helping us make decisions. This is where it starts. We want the audience to make sure that they’re included in all the decisions we’re making about the universe we’re building. They’ll have to own an NFT for the community to actually have that governance and help us make those decisions. But in the future, it could move to be full DAO-driven, where maybe we have a creative council at the top of the DAO that almost has a final say-so, but everyone on that council is voted for by the DAO and then they’re making all the decisions, where maybe 51% can vote and say “Okay, great, this is Zero’s new background. This is the content we’re producing this month. This is the next character we’re launching. This is what they look like.”
Right now, it’s going to be very – what’s that “Bandersnatch” off of Netflix? It was like “choose your own adventure.”
ROB: Yeah, that was a Black Mirror offshoot.
SHEP: Yeah. I don’t like referring to us as Black Mirror, now that I think about it. [laughs] But it is very “choose your own adventure” right now. They’re part of the adventure we’re building. But in the future, it might be “build your own adventure from scratch.” Like, “Here, community, what do you want from scratch?” It’s definitely possible.
ROB: Right. There’s different variations. There’s an idea where you could have the contract govern what kind of decisions can be made and all sorts of different directions like that. Interestingly, I think there’s a long-term alignment. I guess an absolutist might say, “Give us full control,” but there’s an alignment where, I assume, when you’re thinking about these tokens, they’re going to be re-sellable. You’re going to get a slice of every transaction when it’s resold. So your interest is still to align to an audience that wants to own and increase the value.
SHEP: Yeah, spot on. The one thing I’ll say is a lot of people that own these might not be IP experts. I have been chatting with a lot of IP experts that are from the world of Disney, from the world of Marvel, from the world of Star Wars, that helped build these brands and manage this decade-long or multi-decade-long IP and how they think about expanding and monetizing it. They’re worried about some of these brands.
I own a Mutant Ape from the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which is a big NFT community. We were talking about that because every single person that owns a Mutant or a Bored Ape owns the full IP rights to do whatever they want with it. So now there are so many companies and so many individuals creating content with that IP.
It’s just going to be really interesting over the next seven years. Does that saturate it? Does it keep that pristine, exclusive feel if everyone’s creating content around it with totally different narratives that have nothing to do with each other? Or does it just become almost like an avatar? Which is still cool and still valuable, but it might not become an entertainment brand.
Pirates of the Caribbean is a great example. It was Disney’s biggest hit for about a decade. Now it’s nothing. They’re not producing anything new. It was their biggest hit and every couple of the years, new Pirates of the Caribbean something, over and over and over and over, and it got saturated really quickly. That’s what we’re really cautious of. As we think about building a lot of these characters with similar style for our universe, we want to include the community in it, but if everyone could do exactly what we were doing, then it would be everywhere and it might be too saturated and people would find it less cool.
ROB: Do you see a case to be able to turn an Ape into a model in the Nexus universe? Do you see that possibility of “Verify your NFT, we’ll spin up a model, you dial the knobs on how it moves, how it talks”?
SHEP: Probably not for the Nexus universe, but the tech’s there. We might bring a Bored Ape into the Nexus universe that’s interacting, but I don’t think it’ll be just for anyone to join us. We’re looking at building out our own avatars for the Nexus universe that have our own aesthetic. So not only do you own an NFT that helps give you governance, but then also you’re following these characters like Zero, and you’re engaging with these characters, and now we’re saying, “Hey, here’s an avatar that has similar aesthetics that you can own and control.”
We could include them in our overarching lore, or in their day-to-day, they could use this as their own avatar, their own V-tuber. They could join in a Zoom call and instead of being themselves, they’re their avatar. That’s what we’re looking at.
ROB: Very interesting. Definitely plenty to watch in this area. Shep, when people want to keep an eye on what you all are doing, obviously they could follow thousands of Instagram accounts, but where should they go for the center of gravity – for Offbeat, maybe for Virtual Humans? Where are the coordinates?
SHEP: I’ll say three areas. And like you said, it seems to change, but add myself on LinkedIn, Shep Ogden. I post a lot about what we’re doing on LinkedIn. Or Offbeat’s LinkedIn is another good source that really talks about it. VirtualHumans.org is not necessarily always about us; it’s actually usually not about us, but it’s about the industry as a whole. So, people really curious about the industry should be on the news later, they should be following the website. Third, if you’re really curious about how we’re bringing Zero to life, @ZeroFromNexus on Twitter is definitely the place to be.
ROB: Fantastic and fascinating. Thank you for narrating us through the intersection of the future, but grounded in stuff that’s valuable right now. I think that’s a really fascinating place to live in this Web3 world where some stuff feels kind of out there, and you’re bringing it to reality and making a real business of it. Congratulations on everything. We’ll keep an eye on it.
SHEP: Thanks so much, Rob.
ROB: Enjoy.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Minal Bopaiah, Founder and Principal Consultant, Brevity & Wit (Silver Spring, MD)
Minal Bopaiah is Founder and Principal Consultant at Brevity & Wit, a strategy and design firm dedicated to “designing a more equitable world.” The original focus of Minal’s agency was on graphic design. Today, the agency provides full-scale, full-service, human-centered graphic design; strategic marketing and communications; and the application of behavioral change science and organizational development to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Typical clients are mid-size companies of 200 to 3,000 employees, but Brevity & Wit has also engaged with public media work, non-profits, and tech and government agencies. At South by Southwest 2022, Minal presented “All About Equity: Future-Proof Your Organization” with the intention of moving people to ask for observable behaviors that support diversity, equity, and inclusion (which Minal refers to as “DEI work”). Accessibility is another issue, addressed as needed. Minal is the author of Equity: How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives, which, as of the date of this publication, has excellent reviews and 100% FIVE STAR RATINGS on Amazon. In this interview, Minal explores equity issues. She says, “Time is our most finite resource. We all only get 24 hours in a day, 168 in a week.” The system is designed for people who “don’t have any caretaking responsibilities.” Most women have about 20 hours of unpaid labor at home,” and a “culture of overwork” is the reason women are less frequently in leadership positions. When Minal recruits consultants, she strives to disrupt this system by making it “possible for them to earn what they need to live in 20 billable hours a week.” Instead of paying 30% of billable hours to consultants, the agency pays from 60% to 80%. Minal says, “The margins are small,” but, “the point of Brevity & Wit is to get money in the pockets of people of color and people from marginalized identity.” She believes this model is more trust-based, transparent, and partnership-focused than the traditional employment model, where employers “own” employees. Transforming organizations starts with a “power analysis” and an assessment of leadership engagement. Understanding how organizations work, how power works in organizations, and organizational life cycles is critical to restructuring workplaces to be more inclusive and equitable. Minal is available on her agency’s website at brevityandwit.com and as Minal Bopaiah on internet platforms. Her book, Equity: How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives can be found in major bookstores, at theequitybook.com, and on Amazon.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am live at South by Southwest 2022 – yes, conferences are a thing again – and I am joined today by Minal Bopaiah, Founder and Principal Consultant at Brevity & Wit based in Silver Spring, Maryland. Welcome to the podcast, Minal.
MINAL: Thank you, Rob. Thank you for having me.
ROB: It’s a pleasure to meet you here. We are live in the middle of the Four Seasons in Austin, so we have a lively crowd around us. But that kind of adds to the festivity; we can prove we’re actually somewhere in person. Minal, you are here speaking this week, which is extra exciting, but why don’t you start off and give us the picture of Brevity & Wit? What is the organization, what is your calling card?
MINAL: Sure, I’d be happy to. Brevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm dedicated to designing a more equitable world. We do that through a number of services, from full-scale, full-service graphic design to strategic marketing and communications to organization design. That’s the more intensive DEI work – DEI meaning diversity, equity, and inclusion. We also add accessibility at points.
We have a really unique approach that combines human-centered design, behavior change science, and organizational development. So really understanding how organizations work, how power works in organizations, the life cycle of an organization, and then working to make sure that we can transform those organizations into more equitable and inclusive workplaces.
ROB: If there’s a typical client, is there a typical size, scale, industry? Who knocks on your door?
MINAL: Right now our typical client is medium-sized companies, so about 200 to maybe 3,000 employees. We do a lot of work in public media, but we also work with nonprofits. We’ve worked with tech agencies. We’re starting to work with some government agencies. It can really vary in terms of the industry.
ROB: Some of the organizations this size are going to be growing, but a lot of them seem like they might be a little bit more mature and established, at which point, if there’s work to do, there’s probably a lot of work to do. And whereas they might have come to you at one point just to say “Help us with this messaging we’re trying to get out in a certain area,” when you really get to organizational design, you’re saying “How do you be the message you’re trying to put out there and not just buy it sometimes?” What does that look like when you’re coming into an established organization?
MINAL: The first thing if we’re really talking about organization design is being able to identify power, like do a power analysis. What we find is in organizations you really have to start with leadership. If leadership is not engaged and fully bought in, it doesn’t work.
What often happens – in the post-George Floyd world, a lot of people started doing all-staff trainings. Those are usually counterproductive because it’s very easy for staff to get on board with the principles of DEI, but leadership needs a hot minute. They’re like, “Wait a minute, if this is how we’re supposed to be, how do we do accountability? How do we do performance management? You’re saying that everything I’ve been taught is not right; how do I unlearn that and learn new behaviors?” So, they need a minute to catch up.
If you don’t do that, what happens is staff is fully on board with an all-staff, and then you find out that they feel that the leadership is not living up to their end, and they think it’s a bait and switch. So, we want to really start with leadership, especially when we’re working with seasoned organizations that have an established culture.
ROB: Sure. Especially because even if someone’s onboard, when you talk about accountability, when you talk about performance management, your low and middle managers are taking their cues from the organization as a whole anyhow. If they need to do something different, they don’t have the tools to do it. What needs to change? What are people not aware of when it comes to those topics – accountability, performance management, and so on?
MINAL: There’s a whole thing. There’s everything from how to run an inclusive meeting – which is not that hard; it just means you need to spend 10 minutes prepping, understand what the purpose of the meeting is, make room for everybody to look at the agenda, make room for everybody to talk and reflect and contribute, and then be clear about action items.
ROB: That just sounds like a good meeting.
MINAL: Yeah, right? If everybody just did that, workplaces would improve. So, it can be something as basic as that to understanding how we embed this in performance management and tie salary and bonuses to it.
And it depends where we’re working. Really, the first part is to understand the problem we’re solving for. There are a lot of initials in DEI. Diversity, equity, and inclusion. Do you have a diversity problem where you need to recruit more diverse talent? Do you have an inclusion problem where you’re able to get people with different backgrounds through the door, but they don’t stick because they don’t feel included or feel they don’t belong? Or do you have an equity problem where maybe you’re able to get a lot of diverse talent and they stick, but you look at your proper management and it all looks the same? So, there’s no real pathway for promotion for people who have different strengths.
ROB: Right. Even to break that down, I feel like we might need to start every conversation there because people don’t know the problem they’re trying to solve, and they think they’re trying to solve a problem that starts with appointing a person to watch over it. And maybe it’s good to have someone who thinks more deeply about it. I guess that’s an interesting question. Are organizations better served having an officer who is looking at DEI, or is that a copout sometimes?
MINAL: It depends how you’re doing it. One, it’s always great to have somebody held accountable for a business function. But if you don’t give that person a budget or the power to do what they need to do, then it’s – sorry, I’m not supposed to curse. I’m going to stop. This is hard for a New Yorker like me to not swear. [laughs] But it’s not a real job, then, right? If you don’t have any resources behind it.
It’s fine if you want to have somebody who is manning the shop, so to speak, but you really want some heft behind it, and that heft is going to come from the CEO.
ROB: Absolutely. This kind of thing has to start there. I had a little debate – we had a little book club and we were reading this book about engineering leadership. Someone made the assumption that the author was a guy, and it was not. I joked with our COO – I’m kind of telling on my team, and I probably shouldn’t do that on a podcast.
MINAL: No. [laughs]
ROB: But these folks mean well; we didn’t bash anybody over the head about it, but I kind of riffed with her. I joked and I said, “Camille? Is that a guy?” [laughs] We kind of laughed about it, and I think the point was made. I asked our COO, “Would you rather I said it or you said it?” She’s like, “I saw your eyes light up, so I knew you were going to talk about.” I just felt like it helps to come from the top, and maybe even to not put – I mean, anybody can say it, but to not put her in the position of having to be the one that said it felt helpful, is all I can say.
MINAL: Yeah. Really, when we say it needs to start with the top, what we mean is that the CEO or the head of the company has to be fully bought-in. But the skills to do the work should be distributed across the company. Because we’re on a podcast, just looking at you, when a white guy says something like that, the messenger matters in these messages. It means a lot. That’s like an act of true allyship, when somebody who doesn’t have any skin in the game is willing to say, “No, I’m going to put some skin in the game for this because it matters.” As opposed to if I were to say that, it might look like I’m taking it personally.
ROB: Right.
MINAL: Which doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be able to, but…
ROB: Yeah, the inference from that is a topic all unto itself, but you have to deal with that any time you’re making a comment, so it’s a big deal.
MINAL: That’s sort of the politics of work, right? The messenger matters. And this is why we say that talking about identity matters, because if I’m in a leadership position, how people perceive me affects how I lead. So, if I’m not aware of my identity and not aware of the unconscious biases people might have based on my identity, I won’t be able to subvert those unconscious biases.
I don’t talk about it because I think we should reinforce biases; I talk about it because the more you’re aware of how people may be perceiving you, the more power you have and the more choice you have in how to play that situation to be effective.
ROB: That makes sense. Let’s look back at Brevity & Wit. Where did this firm come from? What made you decide that this needed to exist, that you were going to start it? How did it come to pass?
MINAL: I had the name for many, many years, and I think I always wanted to start it. I think I’m naturally – my father really encouraged me to have an original mind. That makes me a bad employee, I think, in a lot of ways. [laughs] It’s good to be a founder if you have an original mind, and you are a bad entry-level employee if you have an original mind.
ROB: The unemployable factor, yes.
MINAL: Yeah. So, I think that was part of it. But honestly, I couldn’t start it for a number of years because I was single. I was living in New York and then Boston and D.C., because if you’re single, first of all, living in a city helps. Secondly, if you’re a person of color, being able to get access to the sort of foods or culture that I would feel are home for me only happens in cities.
Being single in those environments, the cost of living really impeded my ability to start it. We don’t have any VC funding. It was totally scrappy and just me starting it. But what changed is that I got married, and when I got married, I was able to get on my husband’s health insurance, and there was a second income. It wasn’t much – my husband’s a firefighter and paramedic; he’s never made that much money. He’s not independently wealthy or anything. But it was the three-month buffer I needed to go from zero to being in the black and being able to support myself. That was impossible when I was single.
ROB: Wow. So that became that moment. Was the focus always in this direction from the start? What was the founding thesis of the firm, and what were some evolution steps along the way?
MINAL: The focus originally was on graphic design and communications, but then my last job before I started it was doing marketing for a DEI firm called Cook Ross, which is a pretty big firm. That’s where I met my mentor, Johnnetta Cole, who wrote the foreword for my book. Dr. Cole is just a luminary in the DEI space. She and I have been working on a book.
Basically, I just sat at her feet for like a year and a half and wrote everything she told me to write and asked every question I had and learned everything I could about DEI. She was really eager for me to move into the field more intentionally and more directly. I was already sort of doing it in the design and marketing and comms arena, like how you do those jobs with a DEI lens, but through that apprenticeship underneath her, I was able to move into this more directly.
ROB: That’s excellent. You’ve been able to grow it, build it. Have you found it natural to recruit additional people into the firm? The right people know your focus when you meet them? Is it pretty natural?
MINAL: Yes and no. It’s really interesting because what I think I’m good at is I can spot talent. But we are very scrappy. We have a very interesting structure. Everybody’s a 1099 right now because I didn’t know how to make it work. But the point of Brevity & Wit is to get money in the pockets of people of color and people from marginalized identity. While most firms might give 30% of the billable rate to the consultant, we give anywhere from 60% to 80%, so our margins are small. Our ability to salary is poor.
But what that means is that people who might already be seasoned and be able to consult will get a lot more, and I’m handling marketing and business development. But what that also means is that I have a high tolerance for risk in entrepreneurship; a lot of other people who I think are exceptional talent do not. The diversity angle for me is having those conversations to help them understand a different model, understanding they’ll never be as comfortable as I am in terms of risk, but I can get them to a point that there’s so much trust that they can enter into this.
But it has been sometimes a long courtship to get people to join us who I know would be good, and I know they would love it, if they could just allow themselves to imagine a world where they’re not relying on a salary and then getting squeezed out in terms of productivity. One of the problems right now in our world is that – I’m going to say something heavy. Just stick with me.
ROB: I’m here.
MINAL: The legacy of slavery in our workplaces is this idea that companies think that if they pay somebody a salary, they own them.
ROB: Right.
MINAL: A more integrity-filled way of looking at it would be to say if you pay somebody a salary, you are renting their time and talent for 40 hours a week, no more, no less. I don’t care what level they are, whether they’re exempt or non-exempt. The reason I say that is because time is our most finite resource. We all only get 24 hours in a day, 168 in a week. Most women have about 20 hours of unpaid labor at home that they don’t get paid for.
There’s a Harvard Business Review study of why women aren’t in leadership, and the reason is the culture of overwork. Because only men who either don’t have any caretaking responsibilities or have wives who take care of that – or if they’re gay and they have a partner that takes care of it – can overwork. The whole system is designed for them. So. when I’m recruiting people, I’m trying to say, “Listen, that’s the system we’re trying to disrupt.”
So not only do we give our people 60% to 80%, we also try to make it possible for them to earn what they need to live in 20 billable hours a week.
ROB: Wow. Do some people just choose 20 with you?
MINAL: Yeah.
ROB: Does anybody choose more than 40? Is that something somebody can choose with you?
MINAL: They could. They might be working with other agencies as well, so they might be doing that. I don’t encourage that, and that’s also why we pay a higher rate. I was like, if we’re going to cap this at 20, then you need to make 60% to 80% in order to make what you live. Then the assumption is that there’s maybe 5 to 10 hours a week of stuff you can’t charge clients for, and then if you decide to be a community member, you’re also going to give back to the Brevity & Wit community a ratio of like 1:5. So for every 5 billable hours, you would give an hour back to the community or something like that. That’s like a 35-hour week right there.
There’s a substantial amount of work, but that was the equation that needed to shift in my head if we really wanted to run an equitable startup.
ROB: Right. In that case, there’s no ownership vibe when everybody’s on that – it’s freely engaged on both sides.
MINAL: Yeah, it’s a partnership model. It’s very transparent, it’s very trust-based. It is very much like “You win when I win, I win when you win.”
ROB: You mentioned the book; I do want to go there. A book is a labor and a labor of love, and your book is Equity: How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives. I’m sure the book is aligned to who you are and what we’re talking about in a large way, but tell us about the book and the path of that story.
MINAL: The book started actually because of my husband. This guy that I married to start my business is a firefighter and paramedic, which we joke is the opposite of what I do. If you could imagine the opposite. [laughs]
ROB: You’re both helping people. Just the skillset is very different.
MINAL: Yeah. I come home with my ideas for DEI and he’s like, “That won’t work with my people.” He told me this story once of a conference where these three firefighter captains went to a diversity conference out of state, and the facilitator used the word “LGBTQ.” One of the captains was like, “What does ‘Q’ stand for?” The facilitator said, “Queer.” The captain was like, “Are you kidding me? I literally got called onto the carpet at the firehouse for using that word with somebody.”
I’m sure the facilitator explained how queer had been reclaimed by the LGBTQ community. Fell on deaf ears. This captain returned from a three-day conference on diversity and inclusion and his takeaway to the firehouse was “Guys, we can say ‘queer’ again.” [laughs]
ROB: Oh no. [laughs]
MINAL: Like, no! I always laugh at that story because, one, I can empathize with the firefighter captain because the world is shifting goalposts while he’s literally putting out fires. [laughs] He’s like, “What are you talking about?” And then I also laugh because I fear for DEI professionals like myself because I’m like, is this what people are taking away from our three-hour workshops? That’s their takeaway?
So, I was like, how do we make this more pragmatic and practical? The book was really born of that. How do we take this out of academic jargon? How do we take this out of theory and operationalize it and make it as pragmatic and practical as possible?
ROB: I would imagine, then, there’s layers to it. You could probably iterate through this topic five different times with an organization and get a little bit better each time.
MINAL: Yeah.
ROB: And then you’re here; you’re speaking at South by Southwest. You’ve spoken today. You’re on a panel discussion, is that right?
MINAL: No, it was just me. Solo.
ROB: You mentioned a panel earlier, so I thought that was the deal. All you. So, the session: “All About Equity: Future-Proof Your Organization.” What do you hope people took away from that other than words they can use in their workplace or not?
MINAL: I hope that people took away that we really need to move to asking for observable behaviors. This cannot stay in the realm of theory and trying to motivate people to just do better. We need to get clear about what our asks are in companies, and in doing that we create a new culture. We’ve got to be willing to question everything we’ve been taught and then be like, how would we do this in a way that actually is fair to everyone?
ROB: What does that look like in practice? Is this going to a KPI process? Are we measuring these things? What does it look like?
MINAL: I have a consultant who loves KPIs. You would love her. She loves KPIs. I think eventually it becomes measurable, but I think it’s very, very concrete. If we were to go back to that firefighter example, the ask is not “Let’s sit and have a one-hour conversation about gender fluidity.” I mean, I’m down for that. I’ll do that right now over wine. My husband will not, even though he did all the housework and ran all the errands while I wrote the book. So, what am I arguing with him, right?
But if you say to a bunch of firefighters, “Listen, the standard of professionalism is that when you’re out treating a patient, you need to ask what their pronouns are and you need to use whatever they say” – that’s an inarguable, observable behavior that you can see and track, and because you’ve made it departmental policy, you get social reinforcement. That’s what I’m saying. It’s got to move away from “Do you understand all these terms?” to “What is it you want me to do?”
The reason I say that is because right now, DEI is a little bit, in my opinion, of implying that you almost have to be a medical doctor in order to be a healthy individual. The level of knowledge that’s needed is at an academic level that doesn’t include everybody. So how do we make this a healthy behavior that people can engage in, even if they haven’t gone to graduate school?
ROB: Right, and you’re equipping people with clarity of expectation. People need that in a job anyhow. You can’t say “Do better,” but you can coach, counsel, and hold accountable on “Did you or did you not do this?” There’s eventual conversations. You can get the conversations around organizational fit around those expectations, and that rolls right back into what we were talking about with the meeting structure. It’s setting a standard, holding it. That is effective management, and the organization chooses what those behaviors are. You’re giving people some ideas of what those can actually be that are the next step.
MINAL: Exactly. See, you get it.
ROB: I get it. I need to get more. This is, of course, the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. A lot of our listeners, a lot of our guests are people who run creative organizations. Something I would observe from where I sit is that there are let’s say stereotypes within different roles. An organization might achieve some overall appearance of diversity while each department – let’s say the account team, a bunch of guys are developers, a bunch of account people are women, a lot of the people who actually handle doing what they say they’re going to do can be women.
How should an organization think about not just being inclusive as a whole and equitable and diverse as a whole, but within those little sub-areas where it’s easy to be very homogeneous, how do people think about behaviors and actions they could do in those areas to get to a better place?
MINAL: One, it’s important to be mindful of your size. The very big organizations – DEI started in the Fortune 500s. When you have 50,000 employees, you can make the case that every department should be diverse amongst all of these lines because they’re big enough departments. If you’re a company of 200 and you have a team of five developers, this becomes a more difficult equation.
Then it may not be about getting the exact percentages right, but it is looking at the process to get in the door, first of all. Is that even equitable? There’s lots of research that shows that having an ethnic-sounding name like mine doesn’t lead to a callback. But if I were to change my name and have exactly the same résumé, I would get more callbacks. There’s those things.
Then it’s also looking at the culture and training the team in terms of “Do you know how to be inclusive of people who are different? Do you know what that means? It might take more time to build trust, and you might have to do it more intentionally.”
And then it’s also looking at doing very targeted recruitment, because often in a lot of these fields that you mention, like web development, accounting, so on and so forth, there are groups that are trying to get people who have historically been left out of these professions in the door. If a company forms partnerships with those groups, then when they have a job posting, they can reach out with those groups. But it needs to be not just transactional, where you’re trying to get something; you’ve got to give, too.
ROB: It sounds like the organizations that are the best at that are also going to be holding a high trust with who they’re presenting as a candidate. Not just can they be recruited – can they be retained, can they grow in their role and within the organization? They’re going to want to know the receipts on that, not just “Will you hire this person because you need somebody right now?”
MINAL: The thing that people from marginalized identities hate being is a token, or your PR cover. And don’t think we can’t sniff that out within five seconds. It amazes me how much people try. I was like, we have this figured out. [laughs]
ROB: “This is awkward. I’ll tell you what I see here.”
MINAL: Yeah.
ROB: Makes sense. [laughs] Well, what’s coming up? You mentioned another book.
MINAL: Yes, I’m working on a book with my mentor, Johnnetta Cole, that is still in development. And then Brevity & Wit is doing some amazing, amazing things. We are working with public media. We’re going to be at the Public Media Marketing and Development Conference in Chicago in July. And our team – we have such phenomenal people. We are doing an online workshop on April 14th, and you can go to bitly.com/brevityandwit if you want to sign up. It is on digital blackface and racism in emojis.
ROB: Okay.
MINAL: So, if you’re a marketer and you’re using emojis or you’re a social media marketer and you’re responding with – is it “JIFs” or “GIFs”? I never know.
ROB: Depends on who you ask.
MINAL: If you’re using that stuff, there is a digital blackface that is emerging in our culture that people need to be made aware of and be able to observe and be able to make different choices. Our creative director is leading a workshop on that.
ROB: You’re going to help people read the room on their emojis. There’s probably 10 different ways to do that wrong. I’m glad we don’t do this, because thinking about how to do that right is kind of terrifying to me. Whether you’re using the Simpsons yellow emoji or whether you’re very pale or very not pale.
MINAL: That is one of the slides, the Simpson yellow. [laughs]
ROB: It’s funny we started there; it’s funny that it’s still there.
MINAL: Yeah, because everybody’s like, “Oh, it’s neutral.” I was like, then why is a poo brown? It’s not neutral. It’s code for white.
ROB: I think about it even when I’m choosing my Slack emoji and my default skin tone. I’m like, am I choosing the right one? Can I just get a camera to color match me so I can not . . .
MINAL: And Acacia is going to lead people through that, like how do you become more observant of that? And we’re not saying you can’t use something like an emoji that’s a different color, or more accurately a JIF/GIF or whatever we call it. But it’s being more mindful of “What is the context in which I’m using this?” Is it in any way mimicking the blackface minstrelsy that we used to see?
ROB: If it’s here to entertain us, it’s not respectful.
MINAL: Yeah, if it’s dehumanizing in any way.
ROB: Absolutely. Wow. Minal, it’s a lot of think about. Is there anything you wish I would’ve asked you that I didn’t get to in this conversation?
MINAL: Oh wow. I could talk about this stuff all day. I can’t think of anything off the top of my head. It’s a pleasure to talk to somebody who has such a genuine and authentic interest in this work.
ROB: Yeah. Hopefully someone can ask some more questions from this. In the show notes, we’ll get that bitly link to what you’ve got coming up. I think we can get that out in time. That’ll be an exciting next step for people. I would encourage folks to check out the book and check out Brevity & Wit. Where should people find you when they want to connect with you?
MINAL: Brevity & Wit is brevityandwit.com. The book is available in all major bookstores. You can also go to theequitybook.com. And I am the only Minal Bopaiah on the internet. [laughs]
ROB: That’s wonderful.
MINAL: Take a gander at spelling my name and you’ll probably land up on me. [laughs]
ROB: That’s good. I can’t even claim to be the only Rob Kischuk on the internet. You’ve got the Google result of one?
MINAL: Yeah.
ROB: That is excellent. Grateful you could join us. Minal Bopaiah, Brevity & Wit, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I hope people continue to check you out and learn and engage and get better, but in measurable and specific and direct ways, and not this idealism. It’s both.
MINAL: Practical idealism.
ROB: Appreciate it. Thank you so much.
MINAL: Thank you, Rob. Thank you so much.
ROB: Be well.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Mike Maynard, Managing Director and CEO, Napier Group (Chichester, England) Mike Maynard is Managing Director and CEO at Napier Group, an agency focused on marketing technical products to technical audiences. Clients include major companies selling semiconductors, industrial automation systems, cellular communications infrastructure, complex software, and even a baggage-handling system manufacturer. The customer “audience” for these products is “super-targeted, super technical, and . . . demanding.”
A disillusioned engineer who loved talking tech, Mike stopped designing products and re-engineered himself as a tech salesman. In 2008, he bought out the tech-focused marketing agency his company had been using – two weeks before the dot com crash. With ALL of his money invested in the agency, Mike had no choice but to make the venture succeed. Today, the agency is a mix of geeks – engineers or technical journalists who understand the technology – and marketing experts. Based in Chichester, England, the agency works with a good number of American companies to target their American customers . . . and is in the process of adding a U.S. office.
Some of Napier’s clients have products with fairly quick purchase/sales cycles. Others, such as the airport baggage handling system manufacturer, may have cycles ranging from seven to twenty years. When the sales cycle is long, a client is not “trying to think about closing a sale all the time.” Multi-year sales cycles require marketing to build relationships and rapport. The objective is to keep the product long-term on the minds of “future” customers by helping them stay apprised of industry trends and leading-edge developments.
Mike explains that, when a product is technical, “people shortlist a very small number of suppliers.” While the customer journey for a consumer product is usually short and straightforward, marketing technical products takes a “very long time,” “involves different stages of research,” and “requires “very different information.” Mike says you have to understand your customers, what they need, and the information they need; “take this really complicated thing and then narrow it down to clear reasons why somebody should consider the product;” “keep talking to the client over a long period of time because of the long sales cycle”; and make their decision and customer journey as easy as possible.
In this interview, Mike discusses TURTL, an in-Beta, analytics-rich, flipbook style content platform that tracks audience engagement – whether a document is opened, how long a reader looks at it, and how far through the information the reader gets – which allows document owners to optimize their content, enrich relevant and eliminate irrelevant information, and customize the material to the needs of individual prospects.
Instead of following “vanity metrics” (click-through rates, numbers of clicks), TURTL helps answer the questions, “What does your audience care about? What do you need to give them more of? What do you need to stop talking about? How can you optimize your campaigns?” Mike says, “It’s a phenomenal superpower,” being able to “learn from the behavior of your audience” particularly when you’ve got the long, complex documents typical in tech industries.
Mike can be reached at his agency’s website: napierb2b.com, on LinkedIn (Mike Maynard at Napier), or by email at: mike@napierb2b.com.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Mike Maynard, Managing Director and CEO at Napier Group based in Chichester, England. Welcome to the podcast, Mike.
MIKE: Thanks for having me on the podcast, Rob. Appreciate it.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start us off with an introduction to Napier Group? What is the firm’s expertise?
MIKE: Basically, what the firm does is we get geeks and techies excited. Our business is helping people market in the B2B technology space. It’s all about selling technical products to a technical audience that’s making a technical decision.
ROB: Got it. How technical are we talking here? Is it gadgets, is it software, or is it heavy-duty engineer cloud platform kind of software developer stuff?
MIKE: It’s pretty geeky stuff, Rob. To give you an idea of some of our clients, we work with one of the leading semiconductor companies in the world. We work with companies that sell industrial automation systems. We work with people selling cellular communications infrastructure. We even work with the world’s largest manufacturer of baggage handling systems.
ROB: It sounds like these are not Super Bowl ads, right? This sounds like pretty targeted audiences.
MIKE: These are super-targeted, super technical, and generally speaking pretty demanding audiences, yeah. It’s definitely not Super Bowl ads.
ROB: It seems like whether you’re talking about semiconductors, whether you’re talking about communications, this is pretty technical stuff. I’m imagining you’re largely a firm of marketers; how do you equip your team to be prepared to speak this language? Are they reformed geeks, or what is the secret here?
MIKE: I’m not sure I’m reformed, but I certainly am a geek. I started my career as an electronics engineer and spent years in design and then in technical support for semiconductor companies. So I’m certainly very technical. And actually, just over half the agency is very technical, typically coming from either an engineering or a technical journalism background.
So how do we equip people? The answer is we mix together people who understand the technology with people who are really good at marketing, and that’s how we get the results.
ROB: Got it. I am also a computer engineer by education, but now wear all the hats, much as you do in some seasons, I am sure. How, then, do you think about how to reach the audience, where to reach the audience? How do you find these very specific buyers? And these also sound like probably longer purchase cycles while we’re at it.
MIKE: Yeah, two very insightful questions, Rob. Talking about the purchase cycles, we do have a range of purchase cycles. With some of our clients’ products, we can actually get fairly quick turnarounds, and indeed, a couple of our clients actually sell online, so they will be able to sell particularly things like development kits (the things to start a development process going) online fairly quickly, although there’ll then be a development cycle involved for the engineers.
But if you look at, for example, selling a baggage handling system into an airport, if you want to sell a baggage handling system, someone’s really got to be building an airport terminal to buy a baggage handling system. They need somewhere to put it. Actually, you look at those sales cycles, the fastest turnaround they can get is typically about 7 years, and the sales cycle goes up to 20 years for these systems.
It really is a case of not trying to think about closing a sale all the time. With a multi-year sales cycle, that’s ridiculous. It’s about building that relationship, that rapport through marketing, and basically staying top-of-mind, staying the product that the customers want to choose.
ROB: How do you stay top-of-mind for seven years?
MIKE: The answer is you have to do interesting stuff. It’s really simple. In all our industries, if you look at it, there are people buying who are making very technical decisions over a long sales cycle. What these guys and girls want to do is understand what’s going on in the market, because they may go for a long period of time without making any specific purchasing decision. If you could be helping them, educating them, telling them about the trends, and hopefully introducing developments that actually are leading the industry, then you’re going to get them engaged. It’s about presenting that kind of information in a compelling way that really gets the techies excited. It’s about helping them as well as marketing to them.
ROB: I’d imagine at least you have plenty of time to pull together a case study. It’s not a quick turnaround, necessarily.
MIKE: The problem is everybody wants case studies, and case studies are notoriously difficult to get done. We’re forever trying to get case studies. Actually, the case studies are one of the fastest things that happen because typically they happen once a sale is completed and you’ve had a product, for example, go into production. Then you can turn around the case study really quickly. So you wait for it for a really long time – it’s like being a kid waiting for Christmas. You think it’s forever till it’s going to happen. You know that the client’s got this amazing project they’re working on, and then finally you get the opportunity, and suddenly Christmas is there and it’s amazing, and you get a fantastic case study.
ROB: Yeah, that sounds like Christmas all over again. If we rewind the clock a little bit, what led you into this business? How did this whole thing get started?
MIKE: It’s a very unplanned story. I used to be an engineer, and I was designing electronic systems. I designed everything from systems that could engrave printing rollers using big industrial lasers through to recording for music studios. Then I decided I wasn’t very good at the engineering part. I actually quite liked talking about the technology, so I went into technical sales.
In the UK at the time, you used to get a company car, a car provided by the company, if you were in marketing. I kind of liked the idea of moving into marketing because my car was getting old, so I moved into marketing because of that and spent a few years in marketing, running European marketing for a semiconductor company.
Then I went on a course. It was a residential management course, and there were a few glasses of wine on the last night, and we got into talking about what people’s ambitions were. Someone said to me, “You should run your own business, Mike.” I think they were really polite and they were saying, “Oh, my God, I would hate to be your manager, Mike,” but they presented it in this lovely way of . . . “You should run your own business.”
About two months later, my main contact at the agency I was using said, “The two founders are looking to retire and sell the business, and I think you should buy it.” I thought, how hard can it be to run an agency? I’ve done marketing. An agency’s got to be basically the same as being on the client side. Let’s just try it. And then I learnt.
ROB: Purchasing a business can take on a few different forms. What did the purchase process and structure look like for you? I imagine there’s enough distance between here and there that you can probably talk a little bit about it.
MIKE: The approach actually was really simple. There were some technical issues; obviously, companies structure very differently. In the UK, you can have a partnership or you can have a limited liability company or you can have a listed company. At the time, the current company was a partnership. I basically bought the assets, put it into a limited liability company because I had no money, and certainly after the purchase, I had no money. I never really added up how much debt I’d run up because I think I would’ve never done it if I’d realized that. But it was a relatively straightforward process. Frankly, buying businesses is nowhere near as difficult as it sounds.
But I do have one great bit of advice for buying businesses. If you’re going to buy an agency that is 100% focused on technology clients, buying that agency about two weeks before the dot-com crash is a really, really bad idea. That’s my advice to anyone: get your timing right. That’s probably a bigger challenge than actually the whole process of buying a business.
ROB: Yes, timing would seem to matter a great deal there. But perhaps then also part of going through that season has probably helped along the way. How did you make it through the downturn, the dot-com crash? That’s certainly a baptism by fire, if you will, into the privileges of business ownership.
MIKE: That’s a great question. I think making it through was not really the problem, because I’d taken all the money I had, I put it into the business – there was no option. I had to make it succeed. I think a lot of agency owners will relate to this with COVID and typically having to leave the office, work from home – you get through that. I think the biggest problem is how that impacts you in the longer term.
For me, after buying the agency, it really made me overly cautious. We were always wanting to have cash in the bank. We always wanted to be safe. We wanted to have runway. We didn’t go out and invest as much as we should. We didn’t actually take advantage of the cycles when there were upcycles. It really had a long-term impact on me.
Agency owners who’ve been through COVID, a lot of agency owners have really struggled; the one thing I’d say is these exceptional situations are exceptional. And yes, there’ll be problems. There’ll be bumps on the road. It won’t be an easy route. But I think as we come out of this horrible pandemic, we’ve got to look back to building our confidence as agency owners and being prepared to go back to taking the risks you were taking before the pandemic.
ROB: How did that experience, and maybe the learning from that dot-com crash, affect your reaction to however much 2008 impacted you, and then what sort of footing were you on heading into COVID? You saw it. You clearly saw, “Here we go again”; how did your mind and your attitude react differently in that case?
MIKE: That’s a great question because I think the two are very different. 2008 obviously had a big impact on us, again, being a technology agency with a big tech downturn. But we were still running the business very conservatively. We were still, in my opinion, being a little bit overly cautious. We had cash, we were safe, we got through the downturn, and it was okay.
By the time we get to the pandemic and COVID, we changed our philosophy. We were investing more. We’re still running the business with cash in the bank rather than running it on an overdraft, so to some extent keeping safe. But honestly, for us – and we were lucky in the business we’re in. There are other agencies that have been hit far harder. For us, we came through COVID and it was like, actually, the impact to the business was pretty small. I mean, yes, we had to move everybody, make them remote, we had to do that in virtually no time, we had to deal with communications issues. We had all these problems. But basically, the money kept coming in, and that was great. Some of the clients cut back, but nobody really pulled out. It was actually so much easier having been through financially what were far worse downturns.
ROB: Yeah. Some of these products you’re talking about – I think any marketer, any client, any seller, any buyer is expecting the entire conversation to last longer than any downturn, so I can see how that makes sense.
I am curious as I think about it – most of what you’re talking about, these things sound like they are more sold than bought, if you will. They’re things where, as a marketer, you’re not just trying to get somebody to check out and buy a bunch of things to outfit all their cellphone towers for their entire country network buildout. In some ways you’re equipping and supporting a salesforce, I would imagine. So. what are the channels that you’re reaching, and how do you come alongside when the actual purchase is probably with a human and maybe an RFP and a whole bunch of other things?
MIKE: That’s a great question. If you look at the research with these highly involved decisions – and I know LinkedIn has published something recently about financial purchases – actually, people shortlist a very small number of suppliers. Typically a couple of suppliers. What you have to do is really understand the customer journey. People talk about the customer journey, and you can look at a customer journey for a consumer product; it’s very short, and it’s probably not that involved.
A customer journey for the kind of products we’re taking, it takes a very long time. It involves different stages of research. They need very different content, very different information. It’s about really getting into the head of those customers, understanding what they’re doing, understanding what they’re going through, what they need, and then delivering the right information.
I can’t change our clients’ products, and I can’t make our client always have the best product in the world. But what I can do is present the product in the best light, and I can make it as easy as possible for the customer to choose our client’s product. A lot of it is about removing these roadblocks that make it difficult to choose and just making that journey as smooth as possible.
ROB: It’s such an interesting journey along that way. You did mention, as we were getting you lined up to be on the podcast, you’re going to be at the B2B Expo in Los Angeles at the start of April. How does that fit into your mix of operating the firm? And that’s a little bit of a journey for you.
MIKE: Because we’re in technology, most of our clients are American, or certainly most of our revenue comes from clients that are ultimately headquartered in the States. Silicon Valley is a big area for us, but also we have some industrial technology companies we work with who are based in the States. So, we’ve always got a lot of our business from the States.
At the moment, we’re looking for creative things to do. We’ve recently signed a partnership with a content platform called TURTL. We’re looking to promote that as well, both in Europe and in the U.S. And then lastly – and this is news that very few people know outside of the company – we actually have someone who’s moving out to the States in the next week or two to begin opening a presence in the U.S. We’re already working for American companies to target some of their American customers, and now we’re building that out. That’s the next stage.
All of these things came together, along, frankly, with a 50% grant from the UK government to go to the show. So it made a lot of sense to go and see if it works. It’s very much an experiment for us. It could be a complete disaster, but I think like every marketing tactic, if you don’t try it, how do you know whether it works?
ROB: Sure. That’s actually a topic that’s been very near and dear to us as well. When you talk about these conferences, the decision of how much to experiment versus how much to commit – when you come to thinking about going to a conference like that, how do you think about what an experiment looks like versus a strong conviction that it’s the right place? What do those different investments look like?
MIKE: That’s a great question. I think you look firstly at the cost in terms of money, and then secondly at the cost in terms of time. For us, we’ve got a number of clients in the States, and I can combine a meeting with probably three of those clients as well as the event. I can actually get these client meetings that I’d probably want to fly to the States for anyway included. That makes it very much more compelling. There’s not much for time cost involved. As I say, we’ve signed this new technology partnership; we really want to promote that. We think there’s a lot of opportunity. The company is UK-based. It’s just launching and trying to build in the States.
Again, it’s perfect timing. You look at everything and you go, “Does my gut feel that the amount I’m investing is a small amount compared to the potential return? Yeah, I need one client from this show and I’m gold.” That’s a relatively small investment. If I don’t get anybody, it’s not the end of the world. I’ve had some great client meetings, I’ve learnt a lot about the market, I’ve been able to go to the States in front of some American clients and some prospects. It almost feels like it’s a “can’t-lose,” even though we’re doing the tradeshow route – which, particularly after COVID, feels a little bit risky.
ROB: Right, it’s a little bit of an experiment for everyone, but it’s definitely a good perspective to think about needing one good client to rationalize the entire endeavor.
It sounds like TURTL is strategic to you. Tell a little bit more about what that does. What does it do, how does it work, how does it help you?
MIKE: We’ve recently signed up with the guys. They have a technology to present information in somewhat like a flipbook style. You go online, you read the information, and you can delve down into the topics that interest you. On the face of it, that’s kind of like a number of other technologies, but what TURTL does is provides phenomenal analytics to the marketers. Typically, in our world, it’s all PDF. All the datasheets, manuals, instructions, brochures, everything is PDF. You send someone a PDF. Did they open it? I don’t know. Did they read the first page? I don’t know. Did they get to the end? I don’t know.
With a TURTL document, you get information on which pages they looked at, how long they looked at it, where they delved down for deeper information. Hopefully the TURTL guys won’t mind me saying this – the technology for presentation is good, it’s really good, but it’s not world-changing. The technology behind the analytics, though, for my clients is amazing because they’re producing massive books of information, and they have no idea whether anybody reads some of those pages. Now they know, and that’s so powerful. They can optimize the content.
And of course, within TURTL, like many of these other platforms, you can customize the content as well. You can work on the pages that people, your audience, care about, and you can also make sure you filter out the ones that are irrelevant to each prospect.
To me – and maybe this is more of a trend than just about TURTL – we’ve gone away from analytics being, “What’s your click-through rate? How many clicks did you get?” Everyone has realized that’s kind of vanity metrics, and now I think analytics are “What does your audience care about? What do you need to give them more of? What do you need to stop talking about? How can you optimize your campaigns?” That’s something that, to me, TURTL will give our clients, and it’s a phenomenal superpower.
ROB: It reminds me a little bit of DocSend, but for a different industry. Do you know DocSend?
MIKE: Yeah, DocSend.
ROB: I googled them again just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, and they’re all about investors and investing and those pitch decks that you send to investors. But it’s the same need and the same problem. It helps me picture – the displaying of the document, that’s table stakes. It’s necessary. It’s what the product has to do. You can’t do anything if you don’t do that. But it’s the insights it can give you that really – you know where you’re wasting your time, where you’re not. There’s a lot going on there, what content is communicating and maybe what isn’t. Or even with client needs, right?
MIKE: Absolutely. It lets you really understand what matters to the audience. You could do that on an individual level and that’s kind of cool, but it’s that aggregate level. We produced a general TURTL document from one of our previous PDFs, did a little bit of promotion over email, and 70% of people flipped all the way to the end. We were like, 70% going to the end? I wouldn’t have bet that on PDF. And okay, some of it is a new format, some of it is exciting. Then we look at it and it’s like, page seven – nobody liked that. Why do we talk about this stuff? Nobody cares. The next thing we’re going to do is take out page seven, and suddenly that document becomes even more engaging to the audience.
So, you can really learn from the behavior of your audience, and that to me is really powerful, particularly when you’ve got long and complex documents, which a lot of our clients have.
ROB: Mike, we talked a little bit about the past of the firm, but as you reflect – we’ve already shared some lessons, but what are some of the key lessons you feel like you have learned in building and operating the business and things you might suggest to yourself to do a little bit differently if you had the chance to go back and tell yourself?
MIKE: Wow, that’s a great question. I think looking back – I actually talked with one of my other directors, who has been with me for the whole journey, from buying the agency all the way through to today, and we said we lacked confidence. Quite often, if you don’t come from an agency background, you’re not used to what agencies do at different sizes. You think big agencies are some sort of unbelievable, amazing organization that you can’t touch.
To me, we lacked confidence to go pitch for some of the big businesses. When we look at where we do our best job, where we deliver the best value, actually a lot of the time that’s with our biggest clients. Not with the small companies, but with the really biggest clients. So, I think it’s about being confident in your offering and what you’re doing and really being prepared to put yourself out there.
ROB: I can almost see once you have that confidence, you think about “who is not your customer” more clearly, but also probably it creates an interesting perspective on what industries you see emerging and who would be a good customer. What have you seen coming to market that you would not have predicted, but you look at it and say “Hey, that’s actually a great prospect for us”? What types of things have surprised you?
MIKE: That’s really interesting. I think certainly the comment about being prepared to be clear about who’s not your customer is really important. We’ve turned down quite a few clients – probably more clients than we’ve actually pitched, over the last six months.
In terms of the markets that are interesting, I think actually if you look at your business, what you need to do as an agency owner is see what you’re good at and then see what’s one step away. As you want to grow and expand out, you need to look at where you are one step away.
A lot of what we do is around quite complex software, so we’re really good at helping software companies sell a complex product. There are lots of areas in business where software is really taking over, whether that be in terms of advertising technology or whether it’s in terms of purchasing or whether it’s in terms of understanding maintenance in a plant. All of those are a slightly step away from what we were doing originally, but actually we’re really good at that stuff because we understand how to take this really complicated thing and then narrow it down to clear reasons why somebody should consider the product, and then keep talking to that person over a long period of time, because there’s a long sales cycle.
ROB: In software, do you end up with anything that’s a much shorter purchase cycle maybe than some of the complex hardware? Or do you find software with longer implementation cycles, more considered purchases, is a better fit?
MIKE: If I’m to be honest – and this comes back to the fact that as you grow your agency, you’ve got to be confident about where it’s not a good fit – if it’s more of an impulse buy, it’s a very short sales cycle, why do you need us? We’re really good at taking this technical information and communicating it over a long period of time. That’s what works really well. Why would you get us if it’s a software where you just need to run Google Ads and people buy it?
So, I think it’s probably not the right fit for us. It’s not somewhere we’d go, and it’s certainly not somewhere we’re chasing. We’re definitely chasing the complex enterprise kind of software businesses because that’s where we’re successful. That’s where we add value.
ROB: There’s certainly a buzz phrase circling in the software world of product-led growth. Everybody talks about PLG this and PLG that. Is that not at all relevant to some of these more enterprise solutions? Or are there ways it’s creeping its way in that are worth discussing?
MIKE: I think in terms of product-led growth, it’s difficult. The enterprise software companies are trying to be more agile. They’re trying to look more like almost the prosumer-type companies. But it is a different sale, because what you’re doing is selling something that’s going to handle a very large proportion of activities. It’s a very complex project. It’s got a lot of different processes inside it. If I’m the enterprise buying that, I kind of want to know that if it works today, it’s going to work tomorrow and it’s going to keep going. Stability is actually a real benefit.
So, I think we are going to see the software engineering market fragment, and there’s definitely the less involved purchases in software that are fantastic. You look at it in marketing, it could be anything from tools to create banner ads to some of the tools to view websites on different platforms. They’re actually quite low engagement processes, and there’s relatively low switching costs. They don’t matter. I think there’ll always be software like that, and that’s great because you get very fast innovation. You get new players in the market.
At the other end, you’ve got something like a marketing automation platform, and there, it’s not the platform that’s complicated; it’s the data and getting your CRM data, getting things synced up, getting history, being able to get things to work based upon behavior. And honestly, if you buy a marketing automation system and it looks completely different in a year’s time, that’s a huge risk for anybody.
So, I think different things need different approaches, and we’re definitely into the complex product where a certain degree of stability is absolutely important. It’s vital for the customer.
ROB: Certainly makes sense. Mike, when people want to find and connect with you and Napier Group, where should they go to find you?
MIKE: We’ve obviously got a website, napierb2b.com. People can go there. People can go on LinkedIn and find me; I’m Mike Maynard at Napier. I’m the only Mike Maynard at Napier, so that should be fairly easy. But frankly, I just love talking to people, so if anyone wants to email me, I think most agency owners will work out my email address; it’s mike@napierb2b.com. Just send me an email. I’d love to hear from you.
ROB: That is excellent. Mike, thank you so much for coming on, for sharing your expertise and your experience. We are all better for it, and I wish you the best.
MIKE: No problem. Thanks for having me on the podcast, Rob.
ROB: Thank you very much. Take care.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Annie Scranton, Founder and President, Pace PR (New York, NY)
Annie Scranton is Founder and President at Pace PR, a media relations shop that partners with its clients to discern and achieve goals through getting its clients “featured in the media.” Annie believes that traditional media (television) is still strong and its real-time immediacy “brings credibility to a person or a brand” in a way that “holds a lot of meaning and is different from a newspaper article or a digital article or a podcast.”
Pace PR works with a wide variety of clientele, but its three “pillars” are business (B2B, tech startups, corporate clients, climate sustainability initiatives), lifestyle (nutritionists, authors, fitness instructors, products, and brands), and thought leadership (political pundits, financial analysts, attorneys).
Annie says her firm selects clients they find interesting and exciting . . . ones that will interest the media and have something “meaningful to say.” Clients need to “have a presence and be compelling,” to be able to explain their thoughts in a way that audiences can understand, and to provide “takeaways” for viewers. The agency “preps” clients by providing media training.
In pitching, timing is important . . . media is more interested in working with clients who can speak to current relevant issues. Credentials are also important. “Did the client work in the industry under discussion? What was their exact area of expertise? How did they touch the current topic that (the agency is) pitching them on?” Get to the point as quickly as possible and clearly state the payoff so producers can easily formulate the case for doing the story. Annie says producers get hundreds of pitches in their inbox and delete 99% of them.
In this podcast, Annie provides some basic interview tips. “First,” she says, “Do no harm.” Answer the questions the interviewer asks in a way that is “as concise and clear as possible.” Annie says it takes a certain level of skill to be able to bring in your own message in a way that is “natural and organic” and not too “transactional.” If it’s not going to “flow,” Annie advises holding back and waiting for the next time, giving a great interview, and “playing the longer game,” knowing that, if they like you, they’ll invite you back.
in 2021, after 11 years in business, Pace PR brought in a consultant to finally put some structure in place: “an operating plan, an organizational chart, and a lot of other tools.” Result? More growth and a better workflow.
Annie can be reached on her agency’s website, pacepublicrelations.com or on Twitter @anniescranton.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Annie Scranton, Founder and President at Pace PR, based in New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Annie.
ANNIE: Thanks for having me.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. Please start us off with a rundown of Pace PR. What is the firm’s superpower?
ANNIE: Our superpower is getting our clients on TV and featured in the media. There’s a lot more that we do, obviously, and that goes into it, but at our core, Pace Public Relations is a media relations shop. We partner with our clients to figure out what their goals are, and then we help them achieve those goals by securing really meaningful, great placements in the media.
ROB: I’m sure a lot of people really want that. What does a typical client look like for you? Is there a particular stage of firm, size of firm, industry? You name it.
ANNIE: We’re pretty wide-ranging and generalist and agnostic when it comes to the industry that our clients are in, but we do have three main divisions. We have B2B division, where we have everything from tech startups to corporate clients to climate sustainability initiatives and projects; we have a robust lifestyle division, so we have nutritionists, authors, fitness instructors, and products and brands; and then our third division is thought leadership. That’s a lot of our political pundits and financial analysts, attorneys, folks that really have a vested interest in opining on cable news about whatever the topic du jour may be.
ROB: Some of these are some pretty big placements, I would imagine. In client selection, how much of it is people who are interesting innately, how much of it is preparing them, and how much of it is just finding the area where they’re more interesting?
ANNIE: I think there’s got to be an innate interest at least somewhat. It doesn’t have to be a passion project or something that I personally necessarily follow, but I have to feel interested and excited when I’m talking to a prospective client because without feeling excited and having that interest, it’s not going to come off as genuine when we’re pitching to the media. So definitely vested interest is important.
But also, we have to make sure that we feel like the media is going to be interested as well. It could be the most interesting thing ever, but if it doesn’t fit into the news cycle or, as you were saying, maybe they haven’t secured funding and they’re super, super small . . . timing is important. We want to make sure that when we’re talking about that sort of preparation, our clients are coming to us with an already established presence and a lot going on themselves where we can feel comfortable and confident that we’re pitching a product or an organization or a CEO or a company that has something meaningful to say.
And then we do a lot of work with our clients to get them prepped and media-ready by doing media training as well.
ROB: That’s a whole topic we could go down right there on the media training side. I’m recalling some conversations I’ve had on the topic. But let’s pull in for a moment on what makes people interesting. How do you think about understanding and figuring out – obviously, there can be some subjectiveness to “This person is interesting,” but how do you think of scaling up the idea of “Is this person interesting and who are they interesting to in the media world?”
ANNIE: I think interesting is a little bit individualistic, but for me, doing a lot of TV bookings for our clients, they have to certainly have a presence and be compelling just in the tonality of their voice, and be able to explain what they’re saying in a way that’s going to be digestible and make sense and have some takeaways for the viewer at home.
Something that’s really important is to make sure they have the goods to back it up. Did they work specifically in the industry that they are discussing? What was their exact area of expertise? How did they touch the current topic that we’re pitching them on? Then we put our pitches together where we are highlighting our client’s expertise so that way, when a producer is looking at it, they say, “Oh okay, this guest would be really great to have on air because of this specific background that they have.”
ROB: Media training is such a deep and interesting topic. I’ve had a couple of times where, for whatever reason, I ended up on CNBC and I had to phone a friend and figure out what the heck I was going to do with this and how to do it well.
There’s an interesting balance. Depending on who you listen to, some people are going to talk about knowing what you want to say, and then sometimes you can very clearly tell when someone is on television and they’re trying a little bit too hard to touch on their three talking points or something like that. How do you think about striking the right balance of being prepared and knowing your message, but then delivering it in a way that isn’t forced, inauthentic, or just tone-deaf?
ANNIE: In my opinion, I think first do no harm. What I mean by that is if you are fortunate enough to get booked on CNBC or a major TV network, answer the questions that are asked of you. I think weaving in your own specific messaging point is a skillset. It’s something that may take time for some to be able to do where it feels really natural and organic.
But if it doesn’t flow off your tongue in a really germane and relevant way, my advice would be to wait for the next time you’re on air, because first and foremost you want to develop a relationship with that producer, with that anchor, with that network. If you are too transactional on the first interview, they’re going to see right through that and you’re never going to get invited back on. So in my opinion, it’s better to really give them a great interview and realize that there’s a long game here. It’s not just for a one-off interview.
ROB: That’s so important to remember. I think it can feel like you’re playing in the Super Bowl or something when you get that TV placement, and you feel like you have to win it all at once. You make a great point; so much of business is the long game, and I think it’s illuminating to people that media is not different in that regard, and you really can do this a lot if you serve the audience well and make the host’s job easy.
ANNIE: You totally can. I think it’s also on the publicist or on your comms team to strike that balance for you. It’s very rare that you’re going to look up and see what would in effect be a commercial for a company or a product or a brand. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the CEO or the founder is talking about a news story that is relatable within their industry, within their area of expertise. But a publicist should be able to ask the producer, “Hey, at the end of the segment, can we have one question where we ask about the initiative that my client is offering?” or something along those lines.
Generally speaking, they’ll play ball with you – and if they don’t, that’s when the publicist needs to go back to the client and say, “Listen, I really advise that you do this interview because it will lead to other opportunities in the future.”
ROB: You certainly speak with a lot of expertise, so let’s uncover some of the background here. What led to you starting Pace PR in the first place? What’s the origin story?
ANNIE: I was 28 and working at CNBC for Donny Deutsch’s show, and it got cancelled. I found myself suddenly without a job because everyone on the show got laid off. So I sent an email to everyone in my orbit and said, “I lost my job today and I need a job. If you hear of anything, let me know.”
I got an email back that really changed the course of my life forever; it was from a publicist who I had worked closely with and developed a relationship with booking his clients on Donny’s show. He emailed me and said, “I don’t think you have any formal PR training, but I have a client. He’s a broker. He just wrote a book on the market. If you know anybody on any show at CNBC that would have him on, I’ll pay you $500 bucks.” I sent it to my friend who was working on the one o’clock hour and she’s like, “Oh, he looks great. Can he come on tomorrow?” And that was my lightbulb moment. That’s what spurred everything to happen.
ROB: For sure. I of course skimmed through your LinkedIn before we hopped on here, and you can see the DNA of some of your career, and probably number one, I would imagine part of your eye for talent comes from being on the other side. Do you feel that the people you’re booking with know that you have that background? Or is it more evident to them by how you probably approach the entire process with an empathy for their job and what they’re looking for?
ANNIE: A lot of them do, because a lot of them I’m still friends with or have a relationship with. But I do think the way I construct my pitches, the way my staff does by me teaching them, is to really cut right to it, for lack of a better phrase. Producers are getting pitched hundreds of pitches every single day. Every single day, they’re getting hundreds of pitches to their inbox, and they delete 99% of them.
So, it’s really important to reference what is happening in the news today. You don’t need a long preamble; you don’t need to say, “Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which was supposed to encompass X, Y, and Z…” No, just say “Biden’s plan got shot down. If you want commentary on if it’s going to resurrect itself or where they go from here, here is the expert. Here is what they say. Here’s why you should book them.” Just make it as concise and clear as possible. I think if you do that, it’s evident that you have an understanding of how TV news works.
ROB: You make it sound so easy – and of course, I couldn’t come up with that pitch very quickly at all. But that’s why you are the professional. It’s worth highlighting – I feel like it’s pretty common to see a lone gun solo artist or a superman or superwoman with a couple of assistants, but you have managed to scale up the firm a little bit more. Not everybody has your experience booking; not everybody has that network.
How have you gone about equipping new waves of your team to grow and scale and replicate an experience that – maybe you’re able to hire a bunch of people who used to book for shows, but I imagine that’s not everyone on your team.
ANNIE: No, definitely not. A couple people, but not everyone. In early days, certainly pre-pandemic, I had a very small office for a number of years, and my more junior team members would sit right next to me and I would try as much as I could to use opportunities as teaching moments, as I’m putting together a pitch. I also was very much a part of the editing process and trying to have them understand how to get right to the point as quickly as possible while also clearly stating the payoff. Why should the person on the receiving end care about what you’re sending? That’s not easy to learn because most people, I think, think of good writing as long writing and having a lot of flowery explanations. But when you’re pitching for TV, it’s really different than that.
Now we’re at a stage of the company where we can invest in our staff in other ways, through writing courses or webinars or seminars that they may want to attend. But we just try to have a lot of visibility in terms of our pitch writing just so that the junior staff can see how we’re doing it and then learn from that experience.
ROB: I see. I can certainly see some proximity, some room for coaching, probably some roleplay, even, in there. Have you ever had younger staff write some pitches and have someone respond in more of a roleplay mode? Is that common?
ANNIE: I guess I do that when I’m editing and writing back to them, because oftentimes I will say, “What are you trying to sell me on here?” Sometimes we have complex, complicated clients, and it can be really hard to say succinctly in the approximation of 20 seconds what point it is you’re trying to get across.
So yes, because when we used to work together in a small office, I would say, “Hey, Natalie, why should the producer care about this?” or “Hey, why should the viewer at home really care about this topic or this idea?” I think just making it as real as possible was helpful in those ways. So I guess so. I guess roleplaying in that way.
ROB: It’s interesting because there’s a direction – as I was saying with the talking points – there’s a point to where I think some coaching makes you sound really overly robotic, and it’s almost like there’s the other side of the mountain where you’re talking about getting more concise, more human, more to the point. Maybe there’s some New York in there, but there’s a lot of media in New York, so I’m sure a lot of media talk is “Get to the point. We’re busy here. We are inundated with pitches.”
ANNIE: Yeah. You’ll see even, if you start developing relationships with specific producers, a lot of times producers will email me one sentence. They’re not worrying about capitalization and punctuation. If you work in cable news, you’re producing every single day. It’s a talking art, it’s not a written art. Most of the times, the way they’re communicating with the executive producer or the senior producer where they’re pitching a story or they’re pitching a guest is when they’re having their meetings, so they’re actually verbalizing the pitch and the guest they’re getting. So they need to be able to take from the written pitch and use that language to formulate in words how they’re making their case for why they should book this guest or why they should do this story. It’s something that people may not have a knowledge base on if you haven’t worked in TV, but that is how it works.
ROB: It’s such an interesting look behind the curtain. Annie, when you think about the journey so far in building Pace PR, what have you learned lesson-wise that you might wish to go back and tell yourself to do a little differently, or things you’re doing differently now?
ANNIE: This past year, in 2021, we started working with a consultant for the first time in 11 years of business, who helped me develop an operating plan and an organizational chart and a lot of other tools. We sort of joke around saying that we grew up this year at Pace PR. We could’ve done that earlier, for sure. I think I held on to that startup scrappy mentality for a little too long. It didn’t hurt us, but I think it impeded our growth, because since we’ve invested in some of this work, we’ve all noticed not only more growth, but also I think an ease within the workflow in the company.
So. I would say to think even bigger earlier on than I was. I mean, on the one hand, I’ve always grown slowly and methodically. Most startups, the reason they fail the first year is because they spend too much money, they grow too quickly. So there definitely is that balance. But I think I would’ve put on my business hat a little bit sooner in the duration of the company.
ROB: Yeah. Did you start the firm by yourself?
ANNIE: I did. I started it by myself and kind of just asked for help. I knew an attorney who I used to book on TV, so he incorporated the company. I asked a friend, “Do you have an accountant?” and they introduced me to my current accountant. A lot of it was trial by fire, and when I started it was just me, so obviously I didn’t have to worry about staff and a million other things. I could take risks and do things a little bit haphazardly and it was okay.
ROB: Right. Some people have that partner, that co-founder, someone who comes in operationally minded, and sometimes, as you’ve done, you get by on the strength of your strengths. I think it was probably a year and a half ago I hired a coach to come in and help me figure out some of these things, and it felt too early. I thought, “This is a big investment; should I really be spending this money?” But I haven’t talked to a lot of people who hired a credible consultant or coach and regretted it.
ANNIE: Yeah. At least where we are in the business, it just got me thinking differently. When you live and breathe your business and you started it and it’s your baby, it’s very hard to see the forest through the trees. It’s like you only know one way of doing things. So when you get that outside perspective, at least for me, it has been illuminating. I do think the timing is important, but it’s never too soon to at least start thinking about that and thinking about what the future will hold and how to scale and how you might see a growth path forward.
ROB: What are some of the scale points that may have gotten in the way?
ANNIE: Staffing has always been – not an issue, but it’s something that’s so critical to a small business. And I think time management, meaning all of us, from myself all the way on down, are very involved in the client work, in the client-facing aspect and the media pitching aspect, so it doesn’t leave a lot of time or room to think about the business and growing and scaling the business. It’s something that I’ve been fortunate (knock wood) where year over year, the company has grown. It’s not to say I haven’t put time and energy into thinking about how to grow; I have. But I have not ever been systematic and really intentional about it until this past year.
I will say it’s still not easy to carve out time in your day when you really don’t have it, but I’ve been doing whatever I can to make the room and the space for that because it’s really important.
ROB: It’s one level to think about the simple tasks that you can delegate, the lawyers, the bookkeepers, that sort of thing, but it’s another thing entirely to really think about working on the business, on equipping things for growth. It’s a different mindset, so I certainly appreciate that.
ANNIE: Yeah, and if you don’t have training in it or you didn’t go to business school – I had never read a business book. It’s hard to know what some processes can be or ways in which to scale. You may be somebody who has a ton of ideas, but then it’s really challenging to put those ideas into practice.
Somebody gave me the advice that as the owner of a company or someone in leadership, you should spend your time doing the things that only you can do, the things that you’re really good at. I didn’t excel at figuring out how to take my ideas and then implement them into different growth / revenue streams, but hiring and working with this consultant has absolutely been helpful in that way. I would recommend it to anyone.
ROB: That’s great to hear and great to understand. One of the ways I believe that you have chosen to scale the business is with different offices, different cities. How did you think about the right time and the right way to do that? That seems like a big step.
ANNIE: Yeah. Some of it was a situation where someone wanted to move and came to me and said, “What do you think if we opened up an office in D.C. or LA?”, etc. Certainly, in this period of remote work, that’s a lot easier. I think maybe a lot of businesses are having different office locations because people are living and working in different areas.
But I would say for us, just thinking about the pillars of our company, which is business, lifestyle, and thought leadership, politics is a big part of that thought leadership – so having a presence in D.C. is important. It’s important to get out there for meeting media and it’s important for attending events that are going to be useful for new client acquisition or for strengthening relationships with the media.
And then we have a member of our team out in LA, and that’s really the hub of where a lot of lifestyle business is done. I think it’s also important to have somebody there to have their finger on the pulse of what the trends are, what people are talking about – especially in that lifestyle space. That is important when you’re having conversations with prospective clients, to say, “Oh yeah, I have heard of this.” When you have that intimate knowledge, it gives you that leg up when you’re vying for the business.
ROB: As soon as you said D.C. and LA. I was thinking about your pillars. It sprang immediately to mind with lifestyle, with thought leadership, absolutely. It does feel like it can be a little bit of chicken and egg in that case, though, right? How do you decide, is the thought leadership pulling you to D.C., or is it a bet based on what you’re seeing? It seems like there’s a bit of a risk and sequencing challenge there. Did it feel like a risk going into those markets, or did you feel like you had the evidence that made it inevitable?
ANNIE: I think it’s always a risk, because who knows how things are going to turn out? But like when you’re saying the chicken or the egg, I feel like that is the perpetual mind state that I’m in. Less so with opening an office, because there are ways to do that where you don’t have to have a ton of overhead to do that. So low risk on the financial side.
But where I still see myself in that kind of scenario is thinking about hiring. We try to be prudent and hire when we have more clients that require more staffing to service those clients, but in PR, despite the fact that we have very longstanding and great client retention, it still is cyclical. We have a lot of clients that come to us on a project basis, or at the end of their first contract, they may need to shift funds to another area of their marketing budget. So it is a little bit always of that balancing act. All I can say is doing this for nearly 12 years, I think there’s that bit of intuition, which is what I’ve come to rely on.
ROB: Absolutely. Annie, as you’re looking ahead for the future of Pace PR, for the future of the particular industry that you’re in, what are you excited about? What’s changing, what’s not changing?
ANNIE: I am excited about all of the many different media properties that are popping up or that are becoming more robust. I have CNN on in my office and they’re promoting CNN Plus. In instances like that, for publicists, it’s exciting because there’s going to be so many more opportunities for clients to get them exposure. Somewhat challenging to keep up on it all, but it’s a good challenge to have and I’m excited about that.
However, the cornerstone of our business is traditional media, and a lot of people out there will say traditional media is dead, TV news is not going to hold the same weight as it once did. I disagree with that. I think at least in our lifetime, TV is still going to be a really important medium. Even amongst the younger generations, people, especially in big moments, want to turn on the TV. They want to see in real time what is happening. And even if they don’t, getting those clips from a CNN or a CNBC legitimizes and brings credibility to a person or a brand in a way that I think is very different and holds a lot of meaning and is different from a newspaper article or a digital article or a podcast or something like that.
ROB: How do you read when a media outlet starts to turn the corner? Because I distinctly recall I would start seeing these random video clips showing up in my Twitter feed of business news, and I’d sit here and say, “What in the heck is Cheddar?” And all of a sudden Cheddar’s on my TV. It has crossed a little bit from being an upstart to also kind of a traditional outlet. How do you feel out – and maybe it is intuition – when things start to cross the boundary?
ANNIE: I think it’s a question that’s kind of impossible to have an exact answer to because it’s a bit of a science, but I would say for us, something as simple as in the early days, when we would email a client with a request to appear on Cheddar TV, they would always say “What’s Cheddar?” And now, we don’t get that question anymore. How does that happen? Probably by a million little things happening all at once and over a sustained period of time.
But for me, it’s less about maybe the name recognition, but what’s really important is that the quality of the reporting and the interviews is very high from the early days. Cheddar always did great interviews, very professional all the way around and really well thought out. My clients always left feeling happy and like it was a good investment of their time, because even if they didn’t have a ton of eyeballs watching that segment at that exact moment, as I said, having that clip and having it be well-produced and it looked good and it was a well thought out interview – that helps them in their own marketing materials to share that clip or to put it on their website or put it on their social media.
ROB: Makes sense. There is some wizardry to it still. I appreciate it. That’s why we need you. That’s why you’re there. Annie, when people want to find you and find Pace PR, how should they find and connect with you?
ANNIE: I would love to hear from anyone listening. You can go to our website, pacepublicrelations.com. Or you can find me on Twitter @anniescranton. Shoot me a message and I’d love to connect.
ROB: Sounds great. Annie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing from your deep expertise in this media world.
ANNIE: I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me.
ROB: Thank you very much. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Emily Heck, Owner and Founder, Evergreen Strategic Communications (Indianapolis, IN) Emily Heck, Owner and Founder at Evergreen Strategic Communications, started her agency in the fall of 2019. With no job in sight and no career plans, she started meeting with people, chatting over coffee, and trying to figure out her next chapter. Emily picked up some freelance marketing projects from a former co-worker and networked more intensely. Her business, helping nonprofits and small businesses organize their marketing, establish processes and systems, and more efficiently engage their audiences, grew.
Although in-person networking dropped off during the pandemic, Emily is now finding contacts she did not see during the “isolation time” of Covid eager to meet and “catch up” and more interested in re-connecting face to face. Potential clients are responding to her cold-call invitations to explore partnership opportunities a lot more quickly and with a lot less requisite “relationship building” than before the pandemic.
In this interview, Emily talks about the importance of LinkedIn, “the place for silent scrollers,” for building connections. She says people may scroll through your feeds and read them, but do so with no likes, shares, or comments. Think nothing is happening? Emily says she often gets comments when she meets with people six months later, “I’ve really liked your content.” It‘s important to “keep posting.”
Emily says small business owners and nonprofits have the same marketing struggles and are “behind” the big companies on lead generation emails, getting conversions on emails and social media, and on figuring out how to “pump that up.” “Getting there” requires guiding clients to build marketing model proficiency and effectiveness and scaling larger company processes down to something that works to help “small” grow.
When Emily first started working with clients, she spent a lot of time figuring out their processes, the location of their social media account login information, and establishing what they were trying to achieve through their marketing. Client websites, often a “mess,” may fail to “tell their story well.” “You can’t really be effective in your marketing if you don’t have a good base of organization,” Emily explains. So, she cleans up client websites and SEO first, as a base to “push everyone back to” from emails and social media efforts.”
Email has changed a lot. Today, Emily says, “You’ve got to have some personality in your emails.” She recommends “changing the sender name from the organization name to a person’s name” to improve open rates.
Emily can be contacted on her agency’s website at: evergreenstrategic.org, or on LinkedIn as Emily Hack in Indianapolis.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Emily Heck, Owner and Founder at Evergreen Strategic Communications based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast, Emily.
EMILY: Thank you very much. I’m so excited to be here.
ROB: Good to have you here and talk some Indiana connections here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Evergreen, and what is your specialty?
EMILY: Evergreen started in the fall of 2019. I started my own business right before the pandemic; I’m not sure if that’s smart or adventurous or whatever word you want to fill in, but it is our origin story. We focus on nonprofits and small businesses, which may seem like two very different clients or types of clients, but they have the same marketing struggles. We help nonprofits and small businesses get their marketing organized, get processes in place, systems in place, and then work to help start engaging their audiences more efficiently.
ROB: Got it. Is that organization the common struggle of where they’re starting from?
EMILY: Oh yeah. That is 90% of what I see. It’s interesting; when I started my business, you’re so excited, there’s so much energy, and it’s like, “I’m going to do social media for small business” or “I’m going to do email and marketing for small business,” and I found I was spending a lot of time figuring out their processes, figuring out where the login information was for their social media accounts. I spent a great deal of time doing that because you can’t really be effective in your marketing if you don’t have a good base of organization.
ROB: I’ve certainly seen that. They may have worked with somebody; that person disappeared into the wilderness or just wasn’t very good or whatever, and they were the only person that knew the logins. Do you end up starting from scratch? Are you trying to figure out how to recover those logins sometimes? Even that part, what are you scrapping together?
EMILY: A lot of times I try to scrap it together, as you said, and find those logins. Just recently, last summer, I went through an appeal process with Facebook to get access to a client’s business suite. So I’ll go that route if I need to. A lot of times it’s just an email to an old coworker or something like that, trying to find those logins, but sometimes you have to get out the heavy-hitter techniques and tactics to get access to stuff.
ROB: I’m sure, Emily, sometimes you start with a client and they want to do one specific thing; sometimes they want to do everything. How do you help them come to the conclusion of how to do what is the right thing, what is the right thing to do first, and what’s the right thing to do next?
EMILY: This is a tough conversation that I have quite a bit. I do have a lot of clients that come to me and say, “We want an email newsletter” or “We want a blog started.” It’s more about “Okay, but what are you trying to achieve with this?” I take a step back; let’s have that conversation, let’s talk about what you’re trying to engage with your audience. And a lot of times the business owner or the nonprofit executive director is right. They know their business and their organization better than I do at that point in time.
So, the project usually evolves from what they originally thought. Maybe they were thinking a traditional-style email newsletter, and I start to throw out some ideas – because email’s changed a lot. Even I would say just in the past two or three years, how you’re communicating on email has changed so much, and they may not be up-to-date on those new strategies and tactics. That’s probably the second most common conversation I’m having behind “Where are your logins and what are your processes?” [laughs]
ROB: How would you characterize some of that transition on the email side? Because there’s certainly this historic idea of “Let’s get a good template, let’s curate some content, let me dump something in there that I think makes sense, and maybe I’m going to try to close some business too.” How does that evolve into what works in 2022?
EMILY: What I’m experiencing with a lot of my clients and a lot of the emails I’m sending out is you’ve got to have some personality in your emails. Gone are the days of just throwing together some content, a blog preview or something like that. You’ve got to have some personality. I have several newsletters that I’m making come from a specific person within the organization – just as simple as changing the sender name from the organization name to a person’s name has helped open rates. It seems so simple, but when you’re flying through, trying to get that monthly email out, it’s easy to forget.
I’m always talking to my clients about “Let’s add some personality in this. What are things that you can really connect with your audiences through on your email?” People don’t want to see this endless scroll of boring content. [laughs]
ROB: Boring content, company names. When I think about getting a bunch of stuff in Gmail across a bunch of different accounts – and I have the tabs; I don’t know how many people have the different tabs set up for the updates and the transactions. I don’t remember what all the things are. But it’s almost like when you get to the tab where the newsletters tend to sit, when you get over to that updates tab, there’s a certain curiosity to a person, a human, versus a company there. It’s almost intriguing on its own versus organization name and “Here’s my receipt from this other thing.”
EMILY: Oh yeah, it’s a total marketing trick when you really think about it. We’re tricking you into opening it. [laughs] Which you could argue is marketing in general. But yeah, you are intrigued by it. I want to take it a step further that it’s not a trick of “This is the same old newsletter that we’ve been sending you for the past five years, just we put a different sender name on it.” Let’s also take the content and make it more appealing for the reader so it isn’t an endless scroll.
ROB: That certainly makes plenty of sense there. Emily, you walked us through part of the journey. You mentioned in the tail end of 2019, you started the firm. But what led up to that? What led you to take that particular plunge to say it was time to start your own business, and what led you into that?
EMILY: I was working for an organization, and I’d only been working there for about two years, so I wasn’t looking to leave when I departed in fall of ’19. But I got into a very toxic situation that was not good for my mental health, physical health. I was deteriorating as a professional because of it. I left without a job lined up. I just went in and resigned one day because I knew this wasn’t the future that I wanted.
I reached out to a colleague who had actually left a few months prior to myself and said, “Hey, do you have any projects?” I knew she was freelancing. And she did, and the rest is history. I started with a couple projects and then picked up a couple clients and really started to network within my communities. The snowball just kept getting bigger as it started rolling. An interesting ride. There’s a huge conversation right now on a societal level about the Great Resignation, and I feel like I was a couple years ahead of that. So, I totally identify with those individuals that are departing their jobs; that’s what I did two years ago.
ROB: Sure. Even then, it’s an interesting shift, because you mentioned networking. In late 2019, you had one form of networking for a few months, and then that changed. What did networking look like? Was there a pause in networking in early 2020, a regearing, or just a dramatic shift in what that needed to look like?
EMILY: Oh yeah. It’s funny; probably about a month ago, I had coffee with the person that I had coffee with in March of 2020. He was the last person that I had coffee with right before everything shut down. It was kind of crazy – this was in December of 2021. We had gone two years without seeing each other.
When I quit my job and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I was setting up coffee appointments and networking with people. It was interesting. It was a little bit of a slower process because you go and just chit-chat and have coffee, whatever. And now I’m experiencing where I’m emailing people, I’m reaching out to them, total cold calling, or cold emailing if you will, and I’m getting responses back quicker. So, I think there’s definitely been this shift in networking for sure.
ROB: Is that for connecting in person now, or is that connecting digitally? Is the coffee meeting back, in your view? How is it spinning?
EMILY: I’m picking up more coffee dates. I’m reaching out to people. Indiana just went through a little bit of a surge – a pretty significant surge – so everything’s been virtual lately. But yeah, some people want to do virtual coffee chats, some people want to do in-person. I’ve actually experienced more of just emailing someone or sending a LinkedIn message and saying, “Hey, this is what I offer. I think there could be a partnership here,” and they want to chat – which would never happen before. You had to work on building that relationship. So, it’s definitely shifted.
ROB: Yeah, there seems to be, kind of like your newsletters, a human connection desire that’s going on. It’s been a discipline that we started since the beginning of the year. Every week, I’m contacting five people I haven’t seen in a while and saying, “Let’s do coffee, let’s do lunch, let’s do whatever.” The hit rate is tremendous because all of the meetings and recurring events we used to go to, none of the organizations feel confident having them. I was kind of a chicken – not chicken. My level of caution was I met people for outside lunch during COVID. Until I got my shot and my booster, I was an outside lunch, outside coffee – I was that person. Now I’ll meet anybody anywhere. Some people won’t. I respect what anybody wants to choose to do, because it’s a hard time to know what to do. But the hit rate on in-person meetings has really been amazing to me.
EMILY: Yeah. Do you find people are just wanting to chit-chat and catch up? Or is it more business-related? Because a lot of mine have been catching up because I haven’t seen these people for two-plus years.
ROB: That’s right. I think those people probably might’ve seen on – the other secret weapon to me is LinkedIn. It’s a real secret if we’re talking about it on the podcast, right? [laughs]
EMILY: Right. [laughs]
ROB: But, basically, every once in a while, saying something about what we’re doing. I’ll see people in person – I saw people at football games in the fall and they’re like, “Oh, I’ve been following everything you’ve been doing for the past two years.” I’m like, we haven’t talked. I posted on LinkedIn and you never ‘liked’ it. I don’t say this to them, but they never engaged with it at all. But they’ve been reading my biography through LinkedIn.
The people that I meet, most of the time it’s chit-chatty, but I will also say that it tends to echo. Somebody I had lunch with a month ago last week says, “Hey, here’s this person you really should talk to.” So it comes back around in that very open-handed, low expectation kind of way. That’s what I’m seeing, I think.
EMILY: Yeah, that’s what I’ve experienced. It’s funny that you bring up LinkedIn because just recently I came across – it may’ve been on Instagram or something that said, “LinkedIn is the place for silent scrollers.” You will have so many people who will scroll right past your stuff, read it, but not engage with it. They’re not liking it, they’re not sharing it or commenting or whatever. But then you will hear six months later, “Oh, I’ve really liked your content lately.” The purpose was to keep posting, even if you’re not getting engagement. So, it’s funny that you bring that up too, because that’s the second time I’ve heard that recently.
ROB: I don’t have the discipline on LinkedIn that I do on my in-person meetings, so I wish I could tell you I found something worthwhile to publish every week, but I have to work on my personal content calendar there.
EMILY: Yeah, it is definitely tough.
ROB: Emily, as you’ve looked at how you’ve built things so far over the past couple years, what are some lessons that you have learned? If you could rewind two years, what would you tell yourself?
EMILY: I’d probably tell myself to slow down. This is really hard – whether you’re going out on your own in marketing or whatever your field is, your first thing is “I have to start figuring out how to make money. I’ve got to get money in the door. I’ve got to get clients. I’ve got to get work.” I wish I would’ve told myself to slow down a little bit because that would come – and set things up the right way.
I’m in Year 2 of business, and I’m going back and having to re-set up some structures within my business that I probably should’ve been doing 18 months ago. That’s been the biggest thing for me. It’s hard. I started a business, and however many months later, a pandemic hit – and at the same time, I was also pregnant with my first child, so I went on maternity leave during that first year of business. I really wish I would’ve slowed down and not been in such a hurry.
Even now, a couple years in, I’m like, okay, slow down. If I get a “no” from a client proposal or whatever, it’s not the end of the world. Slow down. Be really purposeful. Be really mindful in what you’re doing.
ROB: I can’t imagine trying to plan parental leave into that early moment of a business. How did you think about doing right by your clients but also giving yourself that time to enjoy a season of life that is unique and needs to be embraced?
EMILY: I mentioned earlier my colleague that was also a freelancer. She and I work together a lot. I always tell people who are going out on their own, find a partner. You don’t have to go into business together, but find someone to partner with on client projects, because business ownership is a lonely world, and it’s good when you have someone you can collaborate with. So, I had someone that was picking up some of the work I was doing.
The other thing was it was a weird time. My daughter was born in July of 2020. In 2022, July 2020 still seems like early COVID days. I was actually itching to get back to work because I was tired of sitting in the house. [laughs] It’ll be interesting, as our family grows, what my approach to leave is next time, because I’m actually already thinking about it. How can I put structures in place now that I can have a full leave next time? But yeah, it was a weird year. Baby, new business, pandemic. I don’t tell anyone, “Use this as an example of how to start a business.” [laughs]
ROB: No, it rarely turns out that way, especially on this podcast. Many, many accidental entrepreneurs in different ways.
As you think about the clients you work with, the small businesses, the nonprofits, we’ve talked a little bit about email and how that is changing; when people have to make the choice of what to activate first, what are some of the other things you see them needing to activate first that might not be what they expected in terms of how they need to be marketing?
EMILY: Website is a really big thing. A lot of times people are thinking social media, email, website in that order, but I like to focus on the website first because that’s your homebase. That’s where you can push everyone back to from your emails, from your social media. We need to get that cleaned up and really telling your story well. Some people, their website’s a mess because – kind of like I was a couple years ago – you’re just trying to throw something together so that you can get out there and get your name out there. So, it’s about going back and really looking at it.
The other reason that I really want to look at websites is for SEO purposes. I think SEO was really big there in the early 2010s or so, and everyone was talking about SEO. Then it died off a little bit and no one was talking about it, and it seems to be a real buzzy word right now, about how to get your organic content situated correctly so that you can be ranking high on Google and you’re providing good content. That’s what I tell my small business owners especially: making sure your content is optimized appropriately and written appropriately is free. You’re not having to create paid ads for it. That’s probably the other thing. Social media is actually the last thing I look at.
ROB: And then organic and paid social, those are two different conversations as well, right?
EMILY: Oh yeah. With these clients especially, organic is where we’ve got to start, and then we work up to paid. It’s so hard. Every social media channel is so full, so it takes time, but we can get there.
ROB: Some people would also, I think, feel the same way about content they put on their website. How do you help someone think about putting out content that is actually meaningfully different and doesn’t feel like it’s the same as anyone else? If there’s a context of maybe a specific small business client that helps tell the story, maybe that’s a lens we can look through here.
EMILY: I have a client here in Indianapolis that is a small plumbing company. They’re very unique in that they’ve been around for 100 years, they’re family-owned. When we’re creating content for them, first of all, plumbing content is not necessarily always the most interesting thing in your newsfeed, and it doesn’t change. Pipes freezing – you have the same five tips about how to avoid pipes freezing.
For them, it’s “Let’s just get the content out there.” I know that every other plumbing company in town is putting something out right now in the winter about pipes freezing or preparing your home for winter or something like that, but we need to get our content out there. We need to be a part of the conversation. And it makes their current customers feel good. They feel really good about it and engage with it because it’s like, “Oh, my guy, the guy that I recommend for plumbing services, is out there. I’m not always hearing about Competitor A and what they’re saying.”
It’s a delicate walk. Sometimes, as the marketing consultant, I feel like I’m doing the same content that everyone else is doing, but in a lot of these small business cases, you’ve just got to get your name out there and in the mix.
ROB: Right. It almost seems like for them – you kind of alluded to it – it’s about the relationship they already had with the client. It’s about the work they already did. Hopefully, they did their homework and got the client’s email address while they were out doing some plumbing work, and then that seasonal tip of how to not freeze your pipes is a little bit of caring, almost. It’s maybe not original, but you’re showing up, and it’s a good reason to be in the inbox. Nobody’s super mad about “I’m reminded for the third time about how to not have my pipes freeze,” because that’s a legit problem that is expensive.
EMILY: Right. It’s also going back to being organized. We’ve got that data organized so that we can reach whatever customer we need to so when there’s a big winter storm barreling down on Indianapolis, we can get that email out, “Hey, here’s things to think about with this winter storm.” It’s a welcome addition to their inbox because it’s timely and it’s for them. To your point, that’s exactly right.
ROB: Emily, when we’re talking about somebody’s website content, when we’re talking about having them talk about what they’re doing in a way that speaks to their customer, a lot of times they’ve probably already tried. They already tried to write their website content, and they just couldn’t find the right thing to say and the right story. How do you help someone communicate what they might not know how to communicate, but they almost feel it more than they know how to write it?
EMILY: It’s funny; I was having this conversation with a copywriter yesterday, and we were both talking about how we have struggled to write for our own websites. Which is why I’m hiring her to write some new pages for me, because I am stuck. Obviously, I’m a consultant, so I’m always going to say, “Hire a consultant,” but I think that shows the value of a consultant, to have someone come in with an outside perspective and really be able to put your story down on paper and make sense of it.
I love the clients when I’m their target audience, a 30-something young mother or whatever, because I can bring in that perspective of “That wouldn’t resonate with me as your audience member” or “Yes, that would resonate with me.” Like I said, I’m always going to be on Team Consultant because I am a consultant. But I think it’s important to know that even marketing professionals struggle with it. We struggle with telling our own story and have to get outside help. So, I wouldn’t expect a small business or a nonprofit to be any different.
ROB: I’m glad it’s not just me, because we looked at our website content and in a moment of desperation, I said, “I need to invest in our future, and I’m going to invest in having someone else do this.” They went out and talked to a few of our clients, and they told things back to us that sounded true but I could never have given the words. So I will advocate for Team Consultant here as well. I went through a StoryBrand process in our case, which was also interesting. I don’t know if I would’ve done that – I don’t know. I just know that hearing something back truthful felt a lot better than trying to make up words myself.
EMILY: Yeah, it’s a good level set for you. It can provide more perspectives and it gives you a good level set, and not only is it someone else translating your story – do we have time to do that? I mean, we’re so busy as business owners. If one more thing is off our plate, go for it.
ROB: Right, and it’s a good reason to think a lot about profitability, around margins, because that creates the ability to invest into the future, the ability to have some reserves to hire people. There’s a lot of moving parts there.
When you look forward, when you’re looking at what’s next for Evergreen, when you’re looking at what’s next for marketing for your clients, what’s coming up that you’re excited about? Where is this going?
EMILY: Evergreen, I am hoping to still grow and provide more support to nonprofits and small businesses – which I realize is a non-answer answer. But 2022 is going to be really the first year that hopefully nothing crazy is happening. I mean, first year of business was pandemic and baby; second year of business was still pandemic and it just seemed like crazy, crazy stuff going on. So 2022 is really going to be about finding level ground and finding a solid footing within the business. It’s been exciting here; even since the beginning of the year, things are happening and things are coming together. I’m doing some awesome projects with some pretty cool clients, so that’s really exciting.
As far as clients, what I’m seeing and what I’m talking to them a lot about is trying to get more proficient and effective in our current marketing models. I’m talking a lot with clients – now, keep in mind these are small businesses and nonprofits, so they’re a couple of years behind – we’re talking about lead generation emails and how to get conversions on emails. We’re talking about how to do that on social media and really start to pump that up.
Like I said, these are small nonprofits and small businesses, but they are starting – I think in the big organizations, a lot of marketing ideas and processes start there, and then nonprofits and small businesses are maybe a little bit behind and start to figure it out. I’m really excited because I’m seeing that stuff start to bubble up and happen. A lot of my job right now is trying to figure out how to bring it down to a smaller size for them. It’s easy when you have a 10- or 12-person marketing department to do a lot of lead generation and conversions and things like that, but we’ve got to figure out how to bring this down to a smaller scale.
ROB: It definitely makes sense. The clients that you’re talking about don’t always have that margin for the experimental budget that some of the other brands will have, so being able to distill something that’s actually going to work and deliver, or have a good chance of it – it’s great that people have you thinking about that for them.
Emily, when people want to find you and Evergreen, where should they go to find and connect with you?
EMILY: My website is evergreenstrategic.org, where you can learn a little bit about my agency. And I’m a big LinkedIn-er, so find me on LinkedIn, Emily Hack in Indianapolis, Indiana, and connect. I’d love to chat on message about marketing or anything else going on in the world. So yeah, I can be found there.
ROB: That’s great. Emily, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for sharing your own journey and expertise. Very grateful for it, and good to meet you.
EMILY: Thank you. I had a great time.
ROB: All right, be well. Thank you. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Robin Blanchette, CEO and Founder, Norton Creative (Houston, TX) Robin Blanchette is CEO and Founder at Norton Creative, an agency focused “narrow and deep” on restaurant and hospitality branding. Their primary client base includes multi-unit operators, mid-size and larger chains, and franchises. They also work with independents . . . but never with conflicting brands or direct competitors in the same time frame.
Over the eight years of its existence, the agency has worked with over 150 different restaurant brands, developing strategies, doing creative work, finding whitespace, differentiating positions, and designing brand standards that allow room for franchisees to “own their businesses” while maintaining what Robin calls “brand purity.” Clients have included Buffalo Wild Wings, TGIFridays, Bob Evans Farms, Mellow Mushroom, Friendly’s, Fuddruckers, Sonic, and Luby’s . . . .
Robin started her career on the client side and said that the agencies she worked with “didn’t get it.” She makes sure that the creative her agency produces not only works on the marketing side . . . but addresses questions such as: “What is your business problem you’re trying to solve?” “What is your objective?” and translates the creative solution into business results in terms of sales, traffic, and profitability.
Norton Creatives architecture and interiors team helps develop brand architectures that will be scalable to two or more locations so that a single site operation can seamlessly “grow.” When the creative team designs menus, the layout is engineered for profitability. The firm also provides carry-out packaging design and merchandising services, which have increased in importance during the pandemic.
In this interview, Robin talks about the challenges restaurants face . . . and what successful restaurants have done to succeed over the past couple of years. She reminds us that restaurants have very tight margins and notes that the number of restaurants in the US is down 100,000 from pre-pandemic days. Those that have succeeded are those that are willing to do “whatever it takes.” In particular, Robin says many have developed new ways to deliver to their customers, reduced the number of selections on their menus, and gotten more efficient in their operations.
Robin can be reached on her agency’s website at https://norton-creative.com/, on LinkedIn, and on Instagram.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Robin Blanchette, CEO, and Founder at Norton Creative based in Houston, Texas. Welcome to the podcast, Robin.
ROBIN: Thank you for having me, Rob. This is great.
ROB: Great to have you here. Why don’t you give us a focus in on the superpowers of Norton Creative? I think you have a pretty distinctive story for us.
ROBIN: Absolutely. We say we go narrow and deep. We’re focused really only on the restaurant and hospitality industries. We do creative work, find whitespace, differentiating positions, ways to bring the brand to life in this industry. We’re experts in hospitality.
To be honest, I just have to say that this industry versus any other industry is really one of service, and that’s what we love about it. It’s really about the people. I mean, you could see through the pandemic, the restaurant owners/operators, independent chains, they all rolled up their sleeves. They’re completely open and humbled to be in an environment to serve people, and that’s what we do at Norton. That’s why we focus solely on this industry.
ROB: It’s fascinating. I’ve known some very small agencies that try to focus in on very mom n’ pop restaurants. You see really small clients – and sometimes they have bigger restaurants, too. Where is your sweet spot? Are you working with local, single location? Are you looking mostly at multi-location or franchise or chain? How does that fit your mix?
ROBIN: We really are in both, but I will say our primary client is multi-unit operators, mid-size and larger chains. We do independents. We have an architecture and interiors team, so anything the guest really sees from a restaurant perspective is what we focus on. Architecture and interiors, we do large chains, but we also do a lot of independents. Chefs that have been maybe working for a brand and then they want to create their own brand. We’ve got a client that wanted to start a cookie shop, and we created a cookie shop. She’s got one location; she started as a virtual brand and she was like, “Now I want to open an actual, four-walls place.”
So, most of our clients are large chains and mid-size chains, but I will say we’re a creative group of people, and if you know creative design type folks, they want some really unique and independent stuff to do. So we like to balance it out for them, for the team, because they like to do unique, niche-y kind of stuff too. You know what I mean?
ROB: Absolutely. To that point a little bit, when you’re talking about a restaurant that is investing in architecture and design, it’s still somebody thinking a little bit bigger than someone who took over a lease, someone else moved out, they’re moving in, they want to sell their mom’s favorite sandwich. I mean, maybe there’s a good place for it, but I hear you talking about investing in a brand architecture that might be able to scale out two more locations, even if someone’s starting with one.
ROBIN: Absolutely. I think right now, too, certainly during the pandemic and what we’re thinking of as post-pandemic – let’s put out the positive vibes there that this is post-pandemic – there’s a lot of folks that are looking to take their one-unit, two-unit, three-unit and franchise. There’s a lot of franchise development agreements happening right now. We work with a regional chain out of Houston called Shipley Do-Nuts, and if you’re a Texan, you know very well what that brand’s all about because you’re born and raised with it. But they’re franchising rapidly across the country.
To be able to get brand standards and get your box right, get things lined up so a potential franchisee, or even a potential buyer for that matter, can look at it and go, “Yeah, I can expand this, it’s obvious” – Wahlburgers is one of our clients based out of Austin, and they’re doing the same thing. It’s like, let’s create a brand position, a story of your standards so that we can now execute this in multiple ways across the world and across the U.S.
ROB: Franchisees seem like a particular challenge. A lot of times you’ll see some really well-run restaurants, even gas stations, tend to not be franchised. So how do you think about the design of the brand, the design of the collateral in a way that is easier for a franchisee to succeed? That seems like quite a challenge.
ROBIN: I think some of it has to do with development agreements and how the franchisor decides to set up the boundaries and rules and how they also might hold franchisees accountable for those. From a franchisee perspective, there does have to be space – I worked for Applebee’s corporate for many years, and we had an incredible group of franchisees and business owners that owned lots of different chains, lots of different restaurants, and we would have local walls that they could interchange their own local flair, if you will. So, there are ways for franchisees to make it their own, but you’re buying the sign and paying royalties towards that brand.
For us, when we create pieces or brand standards, there has to be some sort of give and take there for a franchisee. It’s their business, it’s their livelihood, it’s their company. My philosophy is around brand purity. I believe that individual brands should take up their own space – not that nobody has a competitor, but in terms of creating a brand from scratch or even trying to differentiate one – look, there’s lots of wing places in this world, but Buffalo Wild Wings are the only people that do it their way. They’re the only one that focuses on a gathering place for sports and the best wings, or whatever. So I think about it as brand purity, and franchisees think of it that way too. That’s why they’re buying in.
ROB: Yeah, Buffalo Wild Wings you mentioned is a client of yours, I believe.
ROBIN: Yeah.
ROB: It is a fascinating thing; there’s kind of a hole in the market to an extent. You say, what is the national sports bar chain that is actually going to deliver on something you expect to receive from it? It’s not quite there. We have a couple local chains; some of them die, some of them come, some of them go. And then there is the big yellow and black sign that you can see from the highway.
I think it’s interesting to turn a corner here and talk about the origin story of Norton Creative. You mentioned your own background on the brand side. I think it’s very credible. What led you to move from the corporate side and the brand side and take some risks by starting your own shop?
ROBIN: It’s very scary. [laughs] I’ll say that. It was a very scary proposition. I joke when people are starting their own restaurant brands or whatever; I’m like, I was googling how to start a company. I’m not going to lie about that. That’s the God’s honest truth. “What forms do I need to fill out?” or whatever.
But the impetus for it was – if you’ve spent any time at all on the client side – I hired all the big agencies and many small agencies. I’ve gone through the formal pitch processes that take months and I’ve hired somebody out of the blue. I’ve been on that side primarily. So I really knew what was missing, I think. That was part of it. Gosh, I had great agencies and really talented creative people, and certainly all the major consulting companies, too, come in, like the big decks from the Big Three or whatever.
What’s missing is I could never find anybody that could solve my creative conundrum out of the gate. They didn’t really get it on the agency side. Now that I’m on the other side, we work really hard to get it, like “What is your business problem you’re trying to solve?” Not just your marketing problem, not just your creative problem, but what’s your objective? We come back to that every time. And every agency I ever had would bring beautiful work, but it didn’t actually go to work. I hear other people say that all the time, like “Our creative works,” but ours really is about sales, traffic, and profitability.
It’s even hard to train creatives a lot of times in that, but think about it; when we’re doing a menu design, we do not do menu design without engineering, which is profitability work. Where do the items go? Where does the eye go for the guest? Where’s the heat of the person? We do all of the backend stuff on that because I don’t want to design a menu, roll it out, and then your best-in-the-world item fails because we’ve shoved it someplace.
That’s a long way of answering your question in that we really understand, I really understood, what was missing. We have a tendency to say things like, look, I am not going to give you a 100-page deck to answer a very short question of “What are we best in the world at?” Let’s write a paragraph. It’s born out of some sort of truth, right? If we’re going to have to explain this to the guest for two hours, it’s never going to work. What is it in its most simple form? What’s your brand about?
I think what has made a difference – we’ve been around eight years now. Somebody told me when I first started Norton, “It’s like owning a boat. The best day is the day you get it and the day you sell it.” [laughs] The in between is all the work. It’s just hard work. And that’s where we are now. We’re in the middle of the work. And it was born out of “We get you because we’ve been there. We understand.”
ROB: You have a very deep experience in the industry. How do you go about taking somebody who may be very talented, and they may have even delivered a very good quality of work across a range of industries – how do you bring them into the restaurant world? How do you build that into culture, build that into training, build that into process?
ROBIN: First of all, we’ve all eaten at restaurants, so it’s not a stretch to be like, “Do you know what it’s like to be a restaurant guest and read a menu?” That’s the first point of contact for the most part. So that's not a hard hurdle to overcome. It’s not like I’m teaching somebody about the pipeline across Alaska or something. It’s not something hard to teach. People get it, and they get the restaurant experience.
In terms of the underneath of it all, some of it’s just teaching and getting in there, being thrown in and saying, “Look, here’s how we engineer our menu. Here’s how we build a box to make the customer journey be the best. Here’s how we create stories.” Some of it is just teaching, and we really do like to hire more junior folks and train them into the industry. Again, I’m really focused on our leaders. In the restaurant industry, we talk about “train the trainer.” We train the trainer a lot here, and we use a lot of the way that restaurant operators train somebody who is a 16-year-old host and how they greet the guests and how a server might greet somebody, how a kitchen might move quickly but still provide quality food. We use those same fundamentals for what we do every day. I don’t want a piece of work that goes out that is not the best it can be. We’ve got expo. If you’ve ever worked in a restaurant, you know what expo is. You’re checking the plate before it goes to the guest.
So, we have folks in place that get it, and we also hire a lot of people who’ve been on the other side. There used to be a thing where it was like in-house creatives are maybe not that great. They haven’t worked across a variety of industries of whatever. But in-house creatives on the restaurant side get it. They know they’ve got to turn it quick. There’s somebody standing over their shoulder saying “Make that blue, make that purple” or whatever. They understand the language, too. So, we hire people like that as well.
ROB: Got it. You mentioned packaging; are you also even in packaging design and takeout? Has that been part of your world for the past couple of years especially?
ROBIN: Oh my gosh, yes, and long before that, you can imagine. One of the very first projects that I worked on when I was at Applebee’s was creating Carside To Go. You might remember it back in the late ’90s, when that all started for some of the bigger casual dining chains. All the pitfalls that go into that are the same ones we have today, which is like the guest doesn’t want to get out of their car, and how are we going to be of service to them? So yeah, we do full to-go packaging. Again, it’s built out of the brand.
With Buffalo Wild Wings, we’re super flexible. They have a lead creative agency, which is the Martin Agency, which we’re huge fans of – huge fans – and we do all of the menu and merchandising work for them. So we all work together. When it comes to things like packaging, we’re working on packaging along with other folks, many times, working with operations, working cross-functionally with either other agencies or also working within the organization cross-functionally. Lots of different teams. We’re not just working with the marketing teams; we’re working with the development teams and real estate teams, things like that.
ROB: Right. A challenge that strikes me – I think this is a challenge brand side as well – when you talk about something like package design, that’s kind of an intermittent need. Same thing with internal architecture. Some people – maybe you’ll tell me differently – don’t tweak their menu that often. So how do you juggle having these capabilities that are not a persistent need, but it’s a recurring one? It’s kind of that challenging “usually but not always” need. How do you juggle some of those specialties?
ROBIN: First of all, the way we’re set up, we certainly have retained clients that we work on stuff every single day. We’re in and out all year long, and those are transformational partnerships where we are in it. Everything they need, they call us. And then we also do a lot of project work. When somebody has a need – when Smoothie King needs menu design and engineering work and profitability work, or Red Lobster – we just finished doing some work for Red Lobster – they will call us and say, “We need this work. We’re not ready yet” – especially right now in the middle of the pandemic, the government shut down our industry, in effect, in 2020.
What’s happening right now in the industry is we have lots of folks that are calling and saying, “Hey, look, I’m not ready yet for the full package of services because I just can’t. We had 50 people in our marketing department; now we have three. We can’t do it yet, but hey, can you do this for us right now? Can you build this campaign? Can you do this for the next six months?” or whatever. And of course we can. Again, we’re of service. We’d like the transformational partnership because obviously – and you understand – when you have those retained relationships, you can really add more value long term, and certainly it helps from a resourcing perspective internally and the P&L. But from just how we can handle the intermittent needs, we do. We just say yes.
ROB: What are you seeing when it comes to – some places have probably reopened pretty well, but some places have probably reopened hoping that they’re going to be able to keep doing exactly what they did before. What are you seeing change in the actual function of restaurants, the marketing, the design? There’s obviously this mobile and pickup version of things, but are people going to be able to relaunch these big box, large format restaurants with crowds? How are they having to adapt their space for the new reality?
ROBIN: Fortunately and unfortunately, we’ve got hundreds of thousands fewer restaurants than we did before the pandemic. You’ll have to check me on the number, but I think it’s 100,000 fewer restaurants in the United States from before the pandemic. For the restaurants remaining, the ones that fought, rolled up their sleeves, did their best to try to survive – PPP and ERC and all the ways in which – those chains are I would say healthier than ever. They reduced menu skus in terms of number of items, because menus were getting really big. It’s hard to delete stuff because you’re like, “Ah, I have that one guest that likes that item.” It’s like, well, let’s figure it out.
So, menus got smaller. Restaurants had to be much more efficient in terms of how they were utilizing their supply chain. Obviously there are labor issues and all of these things. I would say from my purview, restaurants are more efficient than they were before, and there’s people hungry for eating out. They’re hungry for entertainment. My husband went to a car show/boat show thing this weekend and he’s like, “It was like a mob scene.” People are like, “We’ll take whatever, just to walk around and find something to do.”
But people are back in restaurants again, and they’re saying, “We want that.” In terms of the large chains, I think it’s gotten some guests back. People are spending maybe a little less money. They’re saying, “Maybe I was eating at the high-end fine dining before; now, you know what? I’m good. I would love to eat at TGI Friday’s. I miss my potato skins.”
ROB: It certainly makes sense. I’ve seen all over the map – one of our favorite pre-pandemic places, I think they still don’t know what they want to be post-COVID. Their dining room is in a state of disarray, and they’re like, “You can take your food and sit outside and eat it if you want, but we don’t even know what to do with our dining room.” They used to have an ice cream scooper, and they just dumped it. I don’t know if they know what they want to be when they’re done. But you see these brand transformations where their delivery was actually really, really good. And I’ve never seen them do free delivery, and they really nailed it. I’ve been surprised by what it can be.
We’re in Atlanta; you’re in Houston. These are larger footprints. This is not New York City where you go pick up something around the corner or some guy walks something up to your door. 10 minutes is 5 miles.
ROBIN: Right. Add traffic. But I will say the restaurants that are killing it right now are the ones that were like, “We’re going to do whatever it takes. We’re going to figure this out. What do people need? What am I going to do?” There was a whole period of time with lots of phone calls around self-delivery versus the third-party delivery folks. The third-party delivery folks were taking most of the margin in restaurants, and margins are very lean.
I don’t know what the general public thinks, but I will say that restaurants are not just printing money out there. It’s a hard business. It’s hard work, and the people are caring and of service. They want to provide the way in which – like my local restaurant, like what you’re talking about, did everything they possibly could do. I’m like, I can’t believe this bag of food showed up at my front door hot in five minutes. This is crazy. Way to go, guys.
But yeah, lots of weird things that happen, but it was really born out of the grit of the industry. Think about things like virtual brands that are working out of kitchens. People are taking those down day parts and they’re using them to try to make profit to keep those teams going. They’re paying people by day.
I think the biggest thing, Rob, that I was just thinking about is some of it – the brands that are the big chains that really have the dollars to be able to invest in technology – and I know you guys operate in this space – you can see the difference, the folks that have made the shift to these really turnkey technology platforms and point of sale platforms. The ones that can’t do it, I think they’re struggling more.
ROB: Yeah. It’s still definitely shifting. One of your friends, the Buffalo Wild Wings folks – I went to online order the other day and they said, “Do you want to order from our kitchen?” It’s only pickup and delivery. It’s not even a ghost kitchen. They’re putting it front and center to people and saying, “Look, we’re here too. This is a pickup spot and it’s a place that’s closer to you when you want delivery.” I don’t know – maybe you helped them architect that. But it was evident to me, “Wait, this is closer to me. They’ll probably get me my food faster and warmer.”
We’re just down the road from our friends at Chick-fil-A’s headquarters, and what they’re doing with their drive-thrus is herculean. Whereas I’ll go to Burger King and their drive-thru is closed or it’s taking half an hour. I go to Chick-fil-A, they’re cranking through 50 cars in 5 minutes, and I don’t even know –
ROBIN: If I could pick up my prescriptions from Chick-fil-A, I would. [laughs] They are gold standard, man. Gold standard. You’re absolutely right. Their speed of service – but they figured it out. That’s what I’m saying. Just think about it. You’ve got all this dead space, and you’ve got cooks in the kitchen, and you have this time. If you’re Friday’s or Applebee’s or Chili’s, there’s a dead time where nobody’s eating. What are you going to do with that? Let’s be more efficient. Let’s figure out how to be of service more. I appreciate that.
ROB: It is that commitment. I’m sure you’ve done this as a firm; it’s that commitment to figuring it out. We had a local megachurch here that, in April of 2020, said, “We are closed through the end of the year.” The clarity of vision involved in that – you’re telling everyone, “We’re going to figure it out. We’re not waiting around. We’re not waiting for this thing to be over. We’re going to lean straight into it and do what it takes to get through and emerge on the other side who we need to be, with whatever changed.”
ROBIN: I saw that with restaurants, too.
ROB: Robin, as you reflect on the growth of the firm so far, what are some lessons you’ve learned that you would want to go back and tell yourself as you’re heading out of the brand world and the brand side and you’re going to build your own firm to serve them? What would you tell yourself? Lessons learned.
ROBIN: Oh man, lessons learned. Oh gosh. I’ve got to say this out loud? I would have been more confident about my own abilities and the abilities of our team from the get-go. And when I say that, we always did great work from the beginning, and always had really big clients from the beginning. What is it, the cobbler’s kids have no shoes? [laughs]
We did not market ourselves. We didn’t talk about the great things we did. We said, “We’re not ego-driven, we’re not about awards,” all the things we would say. “We’re not about getting awards. We just do the good work, we’re super humble, we’re scrappy, we fly under the radar.” Those are all the things that we’d say about ourselves, but at the same time, the humility in it is totally our personality. That’s just how we are. But we should be standing up and saying, “Oh my gosh, look at our great work. We are so proud of it.” You can say that and still be humble about what you do and not have this big fat ego about things. I would say I would’ve done that earlier.
Coming out of the pandemic, we started doing that. We’re like, oh my gosh, we’ve touched over 150 different restaurant brands in eight years. There’s no agency that can say that. We’ve touched so many of them and loved them, to be honest, and built real, meaningful relationships with people that we care and cherish. I wish we would’ve waved our Norton flag from the beginning. Better late than never, but now’s the time for us to say, we’re proud of what we do. We’re proud of our industry. We think they’re amazing people.
I’m telling you, even going back to the conferences, the restaurant and hospitality focused, the keynote speakers – it’s all changed. People are like, “We’re so grateful for our teams. They’re leading from a place of optimism and hope and empathy” – things that I didn’t really hear 20 years ago. It was all about the almighty dollar. Now we’re all very Simon Sinek, Adam Grant, hope and optimism focused. I think it’s what we’ve been through. That’s what I’d tell myself.
ROB: It’s an interesting journey there. One challenge I can imagine is the perception of conflict and conflicting clients. These people have chicken, these people have pizza, those people have chicken, those people have pizza, they have sandwiches. How do you address the challenge of conflict, both the actual concerns of it as well as the perception? I think that’s a common thing to many people, but maybe especially in the low-margin restaurant world.
ROBIN: I think the perception is changing in the agency world a little bit. I certainly, when I hired McCann back in the day for their amazing TV and creative work – love those people – that was a really important thing to me that we made sure there was no creative conflicts in their agency. I did think that at the time as a client and as a CMO. I did think, “Do I really care about that?” [laughs] I really just want the best creative minds, and surely they’re not taking work from one team and giving it to another.
And that really is true. They’re not doing that. At least in my view, no agency is doing that. We certainly don’t do it. We do conflicting work sometimes, but for the most part all of our retained clients, there’s no conflict. And we try to keep it that way. Any sort of transformational partnership that I think of, long-term relationship – like Fogo de Chao is one of our big clients who we love. They’re amazing. Look at them for leadership in the restaurant industry. They’re just amazing. We’re not going to take on another Brazilian steakhouse, for instance. We’re just not going to do that. We’re very focused on what we can try to solve for them.
So, the retained relationships, we keep that very, very clean. In terms of the project work, it comes in and out anyway. We would rethink that, probably, if they were going to become a long-term partner. But we’re pretty careful about that. We’re never working on conflicting brands or direct competitors at the same time, ever. That’s a hard no.
ROB: Yeah, I can certainly see how Brazilian steakhouse is a niche; it’s hard to define – perhaps you can, but it’s hard to define separate experiences in that world. It also strikes me that that’s a place where hospitality has really lived at a chain level for a long time. The real hospitality in the hospitality industry can be missing quite often.
What I see across a lot of your brands that you work with is I don’t necessarily even think about them on a list. I think about them as the place that you go to that is – you mentioned Applebee’s, but then you mentioned something like Fogo de Chao, you mentioned something like Macaroni Grill. It’s not the fifth version of that thing; it’s almost the only version of what it is, and what I think of when I go there. It sounds like that’s what you’re aiming for – helping them be the only thing of their kind. A Buffalo Wild Wings is the experience that it is, and it’s not one of your top five chicken wings sports bar places.
ROBIN: Right. I think that’s important for any brand, including Norton. That’s why we say narrow and deep. Be who you are. Be comfortable in your own skin. We play the “what if?” game a lot. This brand’s known for potato skins; what if they did this?
You know, in this service business, now that I’m on the outside of it, the idea really is to provide what we in Texas and Louisiana call “lagniappe,” which is the added value, the special thing, the thing that maybe nobody has thought of to be helpful. How are we going to present menus that’s something that’s different than everyone else, or whatever. For all of the brands that we work on, what are they best in the world at? That comes down to something as simple as what’s on their menu. What are they best in the world at? Even if it’s not a profitable item, what can they be known for?
All of us as people and as brands deserve that. You’ve heard that term, probably, and used it in your lifetime, about “death by a thousand cuts.” I think there are so many brands that you get different leadership teams that come in, different people, everybody’s got a new idea, and then you get off task. Next thing you know, you don’t even recognize your own brand. So, we work on that.
ROB: Really, really fascinating firm, fascinating work. Great progress, Robin. Obviously, you’re working with household names, and ones that have pushed through the pandemic. When people want to connect with you, Robin, and want to connect with Norton, where should they go to find you?
ROBIN: Obviously, our website is an easy way. Certainly LinkedIn. We’re Norton Creative. I always say you can call me. You can reach out to me in any form or fashion. It’s all out there. We certainly have a marketing director, Jesse Dickerson, who is managing all of the day-to-day business development and activities. Now we aren’t the cobbler’s kid who has no shoes; we are trying to do a little bit better at talking about what we do. So certainly website and Instagram, LinkedIn. We’re all out there.
ROB: Wonderful. Robin, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing. We are glad to hear your story and your expertise. Thank you so much.
ROBIN: Thank you.
ROB: Be well. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
David Finberg, CEO, Peaks Digital Marketing (Denver, CO) David Finberg is CEO at Peaks Digital Marketing, an SEO and lead generation firm that focuses on a comprehensive, aggressive approach to “addressing all seven areas of an SEO campaign to get ROI rolling as early as possible.” Clients range from small, local businesses to major enterprises. Today’s solutions must be comprehensive.
Peaks Digital’s fractionalized team operates as a cohesive unit and integrates multiple areas of expertise with its clients’ teams . . . filling in the “gaps” and providing support in areas that will most impact its clients’ campaigns. Highly agile, the team can address page speed, backlinks, content, reputation, user experience, and technical site auditing in a customized way that can truly “move the needle.” Newly built or restructured websites typically rank in an exponentially shorter timeframe than might be expected, and sometimes in as little as three months.
Clients work with Peaks Digital on a month-to-month basis . . . which reduces client risk and barriers to entry. Peaks Digital focuses on relationships, educating, and empowering clients. “The proof is in the pudding,” David says. Clients who see results . . . stay.
In this interview, David discusses some website “quick fixes.”
- Analyze your sitemap/URL roster for relevance, consistency, and functionality.
- Do a comprehensive content inventory/audit, especially of your older content. Do you have pages written years ago that have never generated any traffic?
- Review your Google Analytics.
- Which pages have the most hits?
- What are the topics, pages, questions, and queries on those pages?
- What is the market doing on your site?
- Examine content that may appear to be impactful, its analytics, and its search data. Does it even rank? If not, remove it, repurpose it, or rewrite it.
David recommends that companies “no index” those pages that have low quality or thin content. Otherwise, Google will downgrade your site
Years ago, David was tempted to chase “shinier things,” like Facebook. Mentors asked him, “How much money have you made off Facebook?” (None), then asked him, “How much money have you made off SEO?” (A lot . . . and growing.)” Their advice? “Double down on what’s working.”
He did.
David can be reached on Instagram at: @Davidafinberg, on his agency’s website at: peaksdigitalmarketing.com, or on a variety of social platforms.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by David Finberg, CEO at Peaks Digital Marketing based in Denver, Colorado. Welcome to the podcast.
DAVID: Hey, Rob. Thanks so much for having me on the show. I’m excited to be here.
ROB: David, it’s great to have you here. Why don’t you give us an introduction to Peaks Digital Marketing? What are your superpowers?
DAVID: That’s a great way to lead in. Peaks Digital, we’re an SEO and lead generation firm based out of Denver. We work with anyone from local business all the way up to enterprise, and we’ve really developed this claim to fame or system around providing great backlinks, great content, and really addressing all seven areas of an SEO campaign to get ROI rolling as early as possible.
We do things a little differently in terms of the way that we approach campaigns. It’s a lot more aggressive. We really map out a lot of the strategy and high-level, low-hanging fruit and also more aggressive opportunities, and take it from a more comprehensive approach. It’s not just about one thing anymore – your content or your page speed. It’s about having great reputation, great backlinks, great user experience. It’s all these things. So we really like to take a more comprehensive approach. The great thing is the strategies work all the way up to enterprise, all the way down to local mom n’ pop.
We’ve got a fractionalized team here and an award-winning staff and process that goes into these campaigns. While we do offer more of the same kind of generalized experience everyone knows, like keywords and backlinks and title tags are important, we tend to take a more in-depth approach and treat it from a much more data-driven, ROI-based perspective.
Our superpower is really coming in, getting a campaign kicked off, and getting them ranked in an exponentially shorter timeframe. Most companies say, “Hey, it’s a year, it’s going to be 12 months or 13-14 months.” We can come in and, especially if we built the website, there have been instances where we’ve been able to rank websites in as little as 3 months. You don’t need to hire anyone. This isn’t some big pitch. But it’s really designed to be a comprehensive experience where you’re not only getting someone who knows backlinks and outreach and web development; you’re getting the content team, the analytics team, people that are going to help you with reputation management, your Google business – really looking at every area and leaving no stone unturned, and doing so in a fast way that’ll generate some results earlier on than the traditional expectations.
ROB: When you talk about really being able to come in and make a difference quickly, that points me to the idea that there may be some things that are relatively low-hanging, relatively simple, that I might be doing severely wrong, left to my own devices. What am I doing wrong that is fixable quickly with the right expertise and the right team around it?
DAVID: That’s a great question. One of the big, high-level, punchy items – I don’t want to call it punchy, but high-impact items, is doing a content audit on your site. So often, we’re dealing with multiple webmasters, multiple people, or maybe just multiple iterations of the site, and the business is evolving and changing and growing. So just like with your business, your SEO is going to evolve and change and grow. It’s really important to take comprehensive inventory of your content on your website.
One of the places that we like to start is looking through your sitemap and looking through your URL roster. Sitemap basically just tells you what URLs you have on your site. You may find that you have things like thank you pages or blog posts that were written four years ago by a contractor that never really went anywhere in Google search, never generated any traffic.
What I suggest is you should highly consider going through your Google Analytics, looking at the pages that have the most hits and writing some qualitative data about those topics, pages, questions, queries that you’re seeing on those pages. What is the market actually doing on your site? And then audit some of your older content. Google grades your site – think of it like a school project. There might be multiple components. There’s a research phase. It’s not just about the best pieces of content; actually, your worst pieces of content can grade you down.
You could have 10 amazing pages that are A+, 10/10 content, and then you might have 2 or 3 pages that are considered what we call “thin” content or low value, low impact content. A thank you page is a pretty cut-and-dried example. Very little content on the page. There’s nothing you can really rank a thank you page for. People aren’t going to be coming in off of your thank you page. So, it’s really important to what we call “no index” that page, or have Google basically ignore some of these pages that arguably could be seen as low quality or thin content.
So, you’re going through and auditing that, and then on the other end, taking a look at content that may appear to be impactful, but looking through analytics and looking through the search data to say, “Is this even ranking?” And if it’s not, that’s probably a good indicator that that content doesn’t deserve to be on the site anymore and could be redirected, deleted, or repurposed/rewritten.
Starting there is a really great spot. If you can take your site from a C to a B to an A in terms of content quality, it can have some exponential effects across your entire site as opposed to just improving one page at a time. This can actually have a much more impactful, exponential approach without necessarily having to invest lots and lots of time inventing new content.
ROB: To draw a bit of a metaphor, it sounds almost like you’re describing an overgrown yard at a house. It’s just been left there, nobody’s really done anything. People are there looking for something – maybe it’s the front door – but they can’t find it, or they’re not finding it well enough. You paint it up, you make it look good, you trim some bushes, you prune some things, you highlight the good things, and then you’re at a better place, it sounds like.
DAVID: 100%. I love that analogy. It’s certainly the truth for most people’s sites. There’s probably some spring cleaning you need to do. Let’s get these edges hedged up and work through ways to improve the overall presentation of the site when someone comes in. Pretty succinct and concise example. I love that. I may take a note out of that. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] At least if somebody likes gardening and has an overgrown yard from time to time, perhaps so.
David, tell me, what is the origin story of Peaks Digital Marketing? Where did the firm come from?
DAVID: It was almost out of necessity. I started making websites when I was 9 or 10 years old – Angelfire, GeoCities. These are dial-up era free websites that you could have, kind of like a Myspace or a Facebook, but they were an actual website you would type in. So, I always had this desire to create content and then be able to structure that content in a more technical way, and a way that someone could interact with, like a website.
Really, my love of computers and journey started with my dad. In the early ’90s, he had a 90 megahertz NEC computer. For those of you that know computers, that’s basically like a hundredth of the speed of what a computer is now. I learned a lot on that computer, and it really paved the way for a skillset that I would end up honing in later.
I had a pretty different journey than most people. I actually started my career out of high school as a Mercedes mechanic and really learned the technical components of how to work on cars and the electrics and things, and then over time I got back into computers. Prior to starting Peaks, I worked at a startup doing SEO; same kind of project management, high-level SEO, some content is really how I got my foot in the door. We had a great business.
To keep the story short, the business wasn’t being managed properly. It was a bunch of younger guys who were getting their feet wet in entrepreneurship and didn’t necessarily have the coaches and the skillsets to be able to have a sustainable company. We got really spread out. We were doing municipal financing over here and launching affiliate websites over here and then doing Facebook ads over here. It just wasn’t concise.
Looking back at the data and at that experience, the SEO worked really well. Policies changed. The way that you do SEO completely changed from that point in time. When we started Peaks, I really had to reinvent that. The process was like, okay, this works. The company disbanded. We were making money, but the money was going to people’s moms’ rents. One of my good mentors told me, “How you show up one way is how you show up every way.” So, if there are things happening on one end of the business, you shouldn’t be surprised if other things, like the money, isn’t being managed and the process isn’t being managed and everything’s not being managed.
It was a great learning experience. I walked away with some practical skillsets and opportunities and really had to start over. I said, well, if I’m going to start over – it was me and one other guy running the SEO department at this company of 10 people. It’s like, I could probably do this on my own. It was not a grand story; I moved in with my folks, which I thought I wasn’t going to have to do. I was 26, 28 years old, having to move back in with my folks. They were not very happy that I took a risky move in entrepreneurship that didn’t work out. It’s like, “Go to college, finish your degree, go do these other things.”
I thought, well, I’ve just got to pick something. One thing that I always go back to is computers. I actually took a job, another Mercedes job, which I thought I’d never have to do. Moved out to Boulder, Colorado, where my cousin lived. He’s an entrepreneur and was like, “Come out here, get off the beltway.” I was living in Virginia/Washington D.C. area. Just wasn’t getting the traction in that part of the world.
The writing was on the wall. I was applying to jobs, wasn’t in a great mindset, wasn’t in a great environment being back at home, not having my space. It was just a difficult time. I said, “Okay, how do I make this a win? Let’s start this company and start building out the framework of what I feel like the previous company I worked at could’ve been. If no one else is going to give me an opportunity, I’ll make an opportunity for myself.” So, it involved taking that step back and going back to the world that I didn’t think I was going to need to go back to, which in this case was the mechanic world.
During my off time, I would literally build the website. I hired someone to do the logo. I just kept investing, and over time, you get a client and you start expanding. To me, that’s where I say it came out of necessity. There’s a timing of my life and a season of my life that was coming to an end, and it was embracing this new dream, this new opportunity, this new season of life. It was super uncertain, but that’s how most great things start. They start in a garage or they start in an auto shop or whatever the case may be. Everyone’s journey is a little different, but that’s what mine looked like.
ROB: Around that time, if somebody was looking at the marketing world, I think for most people, SEO wouldn’t have been where they would’ve started. They would’ve started with – I don’t know whether it was particular organic social channels at the time, whether it was some paid social – it was something, and it was probably wasn’t SEO. I think I would say a lot of the parlor tricks that made SEO rise in the prior decade had begun to go away and it became this more disciplined and steady practice. What made you start there instead of chasing the shinier things?
DAVID: That’s an interesting question. I had temptations, even after I started Peaks. I was like, “I’m going to start doing Facebook!” I had a really great set of mentors and they were like, “How much money have you made off Facebook?” I was like, “Well, none.” “Okay, how much money have you made off SEO?” “Oh, a lot, growing.” “So why would you switch that up? Double down on what’s working.”
Part of it was at a more subconscious level, was this a right fit? It wasn’t always clear. SEO isn’t sexy. It’s kind of like accounting; you need it. It’s not like social, where it’s fun and it’s creative. It’s more like research. I was thinking, and I had some talks with different people in my life, and everyone was telling me, “Pick something. You just need to pick something.” I looked back to my childhood; I loved making websites. I looked at what I was great at when I was studying in college and in school; writing was always my passion, telling stories or performing research, putting a story together.
That’s where I said SEO actually is a pretty good fit for that. You don’t have to necessarily be a programmer, which is what I was studying in school, to be a hacker – a certified hacker; I’m not a hacker by any means. Depends on your definition of hacker. I think everyone’s a little bit of a hacker. Not like a computer, break into someone’s website. I was actually studying to go work at the NSA or somewhere that was more of a white hat place, not something that does bad things. But it was really like, I don’t feel like I’m a 10/10 on coding. Could I be? Sure. But I’m a little bit more of a hybrid – a little bit of creative, a little bit of technical. A little bit of writing or a little bit of web design and then the technical behind that.
That’s where it really clicked, and it was like, I do just need to choose this. Let’s start this. People need this. Every business needs this. It’s crazy; the SEO market is so saturated. There’s an agency on every corner. But very few people are investing the time in the innovation side of it. And to your point, a lot of those parlor tricks stopped working. Panda update came out and it was no longer about backlinks and keywords in your titles and image optimization. It was about the quality and the experience and what users are actually doing on your site, to make sure that people actually like the sites that are being promoted, and all these different variables. It seemed like Mount Everest. It was like, wow, I’m not going to be able to climb this pretty easily.
Really just approaching it step by step, it was like, let’s reinvent the link component. Let’s reinvent the way that we address content to make sure that it has the right expertise, authoritativeness, trust, research, and maybe some original analysis, factual – how do we create the highest quality? We want to be the Mercedes-Benz, essentially, of SEO. So how do we find these levers to pull and present to people?
That’s really where the journey progressed. Imagine having a baby. It was like, all right, I’ve got to really commit to this. In order to be on Page 1, you have to be in the top 10% of sites. Only 10 sites make it to Page 1, so 90% of websites aren’t going to be on Page 1. How do we approach this from a more data-driven angle and start looking at the market? Once I made that commitment like, “Okay, this is a good skillset fit; I feel like I’ve got a good balance here of technical versus creative,” now it’s “How do we quantify this and make this into a scalable, repeatable product that people, no matter what industry they’re in, can benefit from?”
That was the next season of entrepreneurship, which is like “Oh my God, how am I going to do this?” [laughs] Definitely looking at the writing on the wall was the big commitment that I had to make to myself: not only is this going to be difficult, it’s going to take a lot more time. I wasn’t getting traction. The first year, I tried to give up a few times. I was applying for jobs. I’m like, “I’m not making enough money.” It was tough. Those first three years were really tough.
But then once you reap the rewards of planting those seeds and harvesting what you’ve invested and you start to see it work for other people, the reward and benefit from that and finding that purpose – like, I can be of service. I’m finding my purpose. My purpose is to help other people succeed in an area that maybe seems like gambling. It’s one of those scary things like accounting where if you mess it up, you can be in big trouble, and you don’t always want to deal with it. And it’s not that sexy. But on the other end, how to make it fun and innovative – we create different content programs and ways to plan out articles and map out articles to make it fun and enjoyable and still innovative at the same time.
ROB: I do appreciate that advice you received from your mentors around looking at how you were already making money and not trying to get too creative. I know we all want to be creative, but I think also sometimes – everyone tells you, “You should do social media” and you’re like, “Oh, I should do social media,” and then you peel back and say, “What am I strong at? Where am I succeeding?”
You mentioned something earlier that I do want to come back to. You mentioned something about having a fractional or fractionalized team. Tell me about that. What does that mean to you? What does that look like?
DAVID: To recap, having that fractionalized team is really where most businesses need to be. It allows you to be more agile and focus on all seven of those core areas that you need for SEO as opposed to more of a Gantt chart where it’s just waterfalling down. You really need to have – whether it’s your page speed, your backlinks, your content, your reputation, technical auditing of your site – all these different components are what move the needle.
We saw this market offering, this gap in the market where most people know that they need a web developer, but can they keep that web developer busy all the time? Instead of going and hiring all these people and paying benefits and having multiple staff on salary or as a contractor that don’t play nice together and don’t coordinate together, how about we just bring it all under one roof, customize the package to their needs – some people already have a web developer and don’t necessarily need to double down on that. But maybe they don’t have a content person or they don’t have a reputation management campaign running or anything like that.
There is no cookie-cutter approach, but typically you need multiple areas of expertise. I’m a big believer of if you get the right people in the right seats focused on the right tasks, and they’re all experts within their field, that is really what we set out to deliver to the market. Not a jack of all trades, master of none; it’s the exact opposite. You get a team full of experts that are going to come and work as a cohesive unit and integrate into your team to get you support in the areas that are going to impact your campaign the most.
On the other end, the other differentiator – and a lot of people do this now, but it’s month to month – reduce the amount of barriers to entry and risks for people. I don’t know if anyone here listening has ever been burned by SEO. I get calls every single day talking about, “Hey, we paid this person for 12 months or 16 months and it just didn’t work out.” We say the proof’s in the pudding. We don’t want to have to lock you in. If you’re seeing the results, you’re going to want to stay, and we’re here to invest in that relationship and frontload that work.
So, thinking about it from a business perspective, you can’t be that much different on the outside than – people know about our process, but it’s like, “You’re just another SEO company.” What makes us different? To us, it’s really focusing on the relationship. If you were selling a relative of yours SEO, would you be locking them in for 12 months, or would you keep it flexible? Would you educate them through the process and empower them, or make them feel small?
I don’t know if you ever watch SNL, but they had this guy Nick Burns, the company computer guy, and he would just totally sh*t on people, basically – excuse my language; I don’t know if we’re allowed to curse here. He’s like, “You don’t know how to do this? Move. I’m the wizard.” It was very disempowering for a client. Our goal is to never make our clients feel small. Doesn’t matter if we’re the best at SEO; it’s really about the communication, expectations, positioning of the product, and follow-through and follow-up. We’re not perfect. If something goes wrong, let’s call that client and make them a priority, make that face-to-face connection, and then fix it.
Unfortunately, in this industry, there’s a lot of bad press around SEO. It’s like, “They sold me this thing and it didn’t work” or “Every time I call them, they never call me back” or “They send me these reports and I have no idea what I’m looking at, no one walks through it with me.” There’s all these different emotional touchpoints, just like you have in your markets and just like you have in your areas of expertise. As a smaller company, you can be more agile and cater to the culture and the process around those pain points.
I tell my team all the time, there are plenty of companies that have crappy SEO. They just have really great follow-through and communication, and that’s why people spend a year with them. Imagine if you marry that communication angle with the technical component; people will never want to leave, and you’re not locking them in, so there’s no pressure. Then it’s really fostering that relationship and going through some wins together and all that kind of thing.
ROB: It’s really critical. Someone who is hiring an outside firm to do almost anything core to their business – and in particular, I would say marketing – they’re making a bet that’s not always easy, and they’re making a bet that they expect to pay off. If they spend a year and get nothing, it’s a year of their business and a year of their life, potentially, that doesn’t move as fast as they want it to. It’s so key to instill that in the team and how they interact and how they communicate. That makes a great deal of sense.
DAVID: Yeah, it’s not rocket science. It’s just things that can be hard to do at times, especially when you have Google algorithms and other things that are going to make the day-to-day more of – “Whoa, I’ve got to focus on this algorithm.” It’s like, no, let’s actually just communicate what we’re doing today and start there, and then we can come back and spend the 20 hours and grind or laser-focus on this thing until it’s zapped.
But communication has really been the cornerstone of our success, and the other is empowering that client, not making them feel small. Which can be frustrating for both ends if someone doesn’t know what they’re doing and they’ve made that bet and they’re like, “I can’t tell if I’m winning or losing.” It’s important to have – at the casino, they have the guy that tells you how to play the game and whether it’s a good hit or whether it’s right. I’m not a huge gambler, but it’s interesting.
ROB: [laughs] I wonder about that, because in the casino they’re telling you how to lose money over the long term. You’re never going to get ahead. But something like marketing is not a zero sum game, and there’s room for everyone to get ahead. I appreciate the thought you put into your clients, into instilling that empathy into your team, and the technical expertise of not selling – we don’t have to sell magic beans in SEO anymore, and I certainly appreciate that with you and what you’re doing, David.
When people want to get in touch with you and with Peaks Digital Marketing, where should they go to find you?
DAVID: Check us out on Instagram. @Davidafinberg is my personal Instagram handle. We’re doing lots of tips, tricks, things like that. And then if you want a free audit or you just want to check us out on the web, peaksdigitalmarketing.com. Hit the contact page, get a free audit or read some articles, things like that. But yeah, Instagram @davidafinberg, peaksdigitalmarketing.com, and then you can check us out on social as well. There’s some other platforms if you prefer.
ROB: Excellent. Thank you, David, for coming on the podcast. Best wishes to you and the team. Thank you for sharing from your experience and wisdom.
DAVID: My pleasure. Thanks again. I really appreciate the time today.
ROB: All right, take care. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Erica Salm Rench, Chief Operating Officer, Rasa.io (New Orleans, LA)
Erica Salm Rench is Chief Operating Officer at Rasa.io, a company that supports marketers, business owners, and large associations by applying AI to generate automated, smart, personalized email newsletters. Rasa’s mission? T0 better inform the world through relevant content.
Clients import their subscribers. Rasa plugs in subscribers’ super-relevant content – their own blogs, their own LinkedIn company page, their Facebook page, their Twitter profile – plus relevant external sources. From this rich pool of content, Rasa automatically selects which stories go to which subscribers . . . and refines that selection process as the system learns more about the individual subscribers.
Articles are first selected from sources a client trusts for content, then filtered by trusted keyword and topic. Through an editorial review window, the client can scan the engine-selected articles and deselect those that s/he does not want the AI to “potentially select for one of (its) subscribers.” Using much of publishers’ original metadata/article descriptions eliminates the need to rewrite introductory material or reformat content, saving time and a lot of headaches.
From the Rasa dashboard, a client can see in aggregate its audiences’ interests . . . across any period of time and range of articles and then drill down to see the click-responses of an individual. Rasa provides a way for clients to pull those insights into their own corporate systems.
A couple of years ago, Rasa launched a self-service model that allows companies to try the platform and “DIY the newsletter themselves.” In addition to large and small companies, Rasa works with largescale association organizations that often rely on events as important revenue streams. These need focused personalized email communications to optimize member engagement.
Erica can be reached on her company’s website at https://rasa.io/ or by sending an email to hello@rasa.io or erica@rasa.io
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Erica Salm Rench, Chief Operating Officer at Rasa.io based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Welcome to the podcast, Erica.
ERICA: Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.
ROB: It’s excellent to have you here. Why don’t you give us a glimpse into the superpowers of Rasa.io? What do you all do?
ERICA: Sure thing. At Rasa.io, we do AI for smart email newsletter generation. In the same way that, for better or worse, your social media feeds know what content to recommend to you based on your prior engagement, we recommend relevant stories to you in your emails.
We work with organizations large and small – anyone who needs a newsletter, which is pretty much anyone. They import their subscribers, start to plug in content sources that are super relevant to your subscribers – their own blogs, their own LinkedIn company page, their Facebook page, their Twitter profile. They plug all those things in along with some relevant external sources – maybe Harvard Business Review produces great business content that’s relevant to their space. That content starts flowing in, forms a rich content pool, and then from there we automatically choose which stories go to which subscribers and we get smarter as we learn more about those subscribers.
It's not only personalized, really engaging content, a great way to engage with the organization’s brand, but it’s also automated, so it saves people a ton of time on the newsletter process. Newsletters can be a really unsexy task, so it makes that unsexy task a lot faster. [laughs]
ROB: I’m sure this exists on an entire spectrum. A lot of AI type work reminds me of self-driving cars and that sort of thing. There’s sort of a ramp-up of trust. First of all, getting somewhere is a lot of work. Writing a newsletter is a lot of work, to the point where people don’t want to do it. You might not walk somewhere that you drive, but you might not trust the self-driving car to get you all the way there. What is this on-ramp for a marketer or maybe a business owner to grow with trust in this system that’s going to send I-don’t-know-what to my customers? What’s it going to say to them? How do you build trust, and what’s that ramp look like?
ERICA: That is such a great question, and we get it a lot. AI is one of those things that you get out of it what you put into it. It’s the same with newsletters. It’s the same with a chatbot. The chatbot is only going to be as good as the training that’s put into it, and it’s the same with newsletters.
Essentially, the first level of trusting that the newsletter is going to be great is the fact that you get to put in your own sources. The AI is not going to go out and do a Google search query to find articles. It’s going to first draw from sources that you’ve said, “These sources produce content trusted to this space.” So that’s one thing.
Furthermore, you can take each of those sources and filter them down by trusted keyword and topic. To use the HBR example again, you might say, “I really like Harvard Business Review as a source, but only if HBR hits on the topic of marketing,” for example. From there, we’re pulling in the most relevant articles from your relevant sources.
After that point, you also can include an editorial review window where you can just scan the articles that have come in from the engine and deselect anything that you don’t want the AI to potentially select for one of your subscribers. So, there are lots of levels of control. The AI is selecting stories, but only from the list of stories that you’ve said, “These are okay for my subscribers.”
ROB: I see. At times am I picking the articles? Or have I done that just by picking the keywords and everything else? Can I mess with the newsletter before I send it just to make sure I like the articles that are in there?
ERICA: Absolutely, and most people do. Maybe you have 50 articles coming in from your preapproved sources; you might deselect a few of those that aren’t perfectly on brand. Or some people do reverse-engineer it and say, “These are 50 great articles, but I’m going to choose the 5 that I want everyone to get.” So, you can override the AI in that way. We don’t recommend it, but you certainly can use the system to your benefit because the curation aspect of our system is also really powerful.
ROB: Got it. Talk to me about the copy a little bit. What goes into the newsletter to describe the articles? If I’m fearing the Terminator and the machines taking over the world –
ERICA: [laughs] Killer robots, right?
ROB: Yeah, I’m afraid of the article summaries too, and the headlines. How does that part get decided? What’s going to show up in the newsletter, what’s going to get clipped, what’s going to be linked out afterwards, that sort of thing?
ERICA: That’s another great question. We look to the publisher. We’re going to take in the publisher’s metadata or their published description of the article. In a lot of cases, that is a rich description that the blog publisher writes themselves, or sometimes by default it might be the first couple sentences of that blog. It’s going to be the publisher’s title that they assign, and it’s going to be the publisher’s primary image that comes along with that blog.
We’re going to pull in all of that great data, and, obviously, the publisher is going to want their article to look great, so we’re pulling from data that is really carefully thought of. And you can make tweaks to that if you want. You can impact the description of the article and have it be your own commentary on the article if you want, but you certainly don’t have to. So, it eliminates a lot of the newsletter production time that goes into rewriting article descriptions and resizing images and redoing a lot of the data that already can be done for you.
ROB: Not that we want to play around with the product all day, but I kind of do – when we get into the user, the recipient, clicking on the article, do we know what they clicked on? Do we even get a sense of how much they read it? Are we launching the article in a way where we can track what they do with it?
ERICA: To a certain extent you can do that within the dashboard, and then we also have an open API and several integrations that allow you to draw those insights into your own systems. What we’re doing with each article when it comes into the system is using natural language processing to “read” it and conceptualize it and say, “Okay, this Harvard Business Review article is about marketing and SEO and brand management.” So then when Erica or Rob engages with that article, we know that Erica and Rob are interested in those topics.
From there, in the Rasa dashboard, you can see on the aggregate what your audience is interested in across many, many, many different articles, across whatever time period you want. Then if you want those insights on the individuals, you can look up the individual and see what they’re clicking on. But if you want to say bring those insights into your own CRM, you could fire off a campaign based on everyone who’s interested in marketing.
ROB: Got it. Let’s get into the origin story a little bit. How did you come to be involved in Rasa, and where did the platform come from?
ERICA: There’s definitely a story around that. When I was in business school about 10 years ago – I can’t believe it’s been that long – Amith Nagarajan, who is the Chairman of Rasa, came to speak to one of my business school classes, but about his former company. So, I actually had engaged with him and talked to him about working for his former company called Aptify, a really popular association management system among many, many huge, largescale associations out there.
I still had school to do; I had another job that I had to finish out. So that opportunity didn’t quite work out and the timing wasn’t great, but then about four or five years later, he was spinning up this exciting Rasa opportunity, and he engaged me and talked to me about the potential of getting involved in email. For me, I was actually working at a digital agency at the time. I worked in a kind of agency that probably a lot of your listeners are working at, where we did everything online – SEO, front- and backend web dev, paid online ads. We did everything online. But the one thing that we didn’t touch was email because email is so hard to do in a quality way and at scale.
That’s why I thought to myself, “Oh, this Rasa.io thing, there’s some meat to this, because if you can do email at scale and personalize it without a ton of effort, there aren’t many people doing that.”
ROB: What role did you come into the business in, and what does the journey up to COO look like?
ERICA: I came in in more of a customer success and marketing capacity, and then as we grew, I really focused in on that customer success and helping our enterprise-scale customers succeed. We put in a lot of time in those campaigns. Something that’s interesting about AI tools is that, like you mentioned earlier, you really get out of them what you put in. We wanted our early customers to do exceptionally well, and I worked with my team on that.
As we grew the business, I evolved eventually into more of a business development role, and then more recently even more of a leadership role, and that’s what brought me to COO.
ROB: As you’re unlocking the COO role, what are you learning about the business and how to make it function well that might’ve been harder to see from elsewhere in the organization?
ERICA: Oh gosh, that’s such a great question. In my prior marketing agency role, I worked much closer with the developers. When I first started at Rasa, I didn’t work as closely with the developers and the engineers, and now, in this evolution to COO, I’m working again closely with developers and engineers, which has been really great. It’s allowed me to connect the dots – when I’m talking to a prospect or when I’m supporting one of my team members talking to a prospect who’s interested in the tool, there’s more of now, in my head, a direct connection with “Oh, let’s go talk to these folks who can directly impact the development of the product.” Being able to more easily connect those dots for me has been great.
And then of course all the financial stuff. It’s what I went to school for, so now I’m doing the nitty-gritty of the numbers. [laughs]
ROB: Sure. To pull on a little bit of a thread, since you are a product company, a lot of our guests are certainly on the services side; they talk about the pride of bootstrapping. That’s mostly the option you have as a services company. It’s not like a lot of agencies are – there’s some interesting stuff going on in funding and acquisitions, but mostly not the case. How are you and Rasa.io thinking about funding growth in the business? Do you have investors? Will you have more investors? How does that look?
ERICA: We are privately funded. We had the resources we needed to get off the ground, and now an exciting engine for growth is a self-service model that we launched a couple of years back which allows folks to come in, try the platform, DIY the newsletter themselves. So that’s another revenue stream for us, and then we also have the largescale association organizations that we work. The revenue from those has really fueled our growth as well.
ROB: That’s such an interesting market, those associations. I’m sure they’ve all needed email; now they just might not have as many events to talk about as they used to.
ERICA: Yeah. If you’re familiar at all with the space, you know that the events for associations are really important revenue streams, so they’ve had to look to outside tools, to digital tools like email, like personalized Rasa.io emails, to make sure that member engagement is still optimized.
ROB: What are you seeing from that vantage point? I know I certainly greatly valued our local marketing association, some of those meetings, some of those speakers, some of those conferences. They seem to be coming back slower than almost anything else out there. What are you seeing from your vantage point in when these associations are firing up? How many of them are doing events, how many of them are not doing events? What’s the trendline looking like?
ERICA: That’s a great question. The majority of the organizations that we work with who did virtual events in 2020 are now either doing hybrid or entirely in-person events for late 2021 and now 2022. Obviously, with the ascent of first Delta, then Omicron, there was a lot of uncertainty, so I think that’s why people still hung on to the dual virtual and in-person. We did also see that doing both is really hard. It’s like running two entirely separate conferences at the same time. I think the evolution is slowly but surely back to in-person events for folks that those were important revenue streams and tools for member engagement.
ROB: It’s been interesting. I’m in a dues-based membership organization where I think they feel the pressure to keep some sort of event going to drive value for members. They were doing hybrid for a while, and then they stopped. We have a distributed team, so some of my distributed team wasn’t getting their content anymore. I asked them why they killed the virtual option and they said that people were not showing up in person at all, and they were just coming in – if it was a two-hour event, they’d pop in for 30 minutes and disappear. So, it’s interesting seeing some of the hybrid stuff go further back than I ever thought it would, and go away in some cases where I thought we would continue to have an online option.
ERICA: Right. Yeah, they’re not just making their revenue from people paying fees to come join a conference, but they’re also making a lot of money from people like myself and other vendors who are interested in working with their members. Doing that virtually is much harder than having vendors come in person and share their services and have a booth. So yeah, I think there’s a lot of reason to eventually migrate back to in-person for the big associations.
ROB: Erica, with some time on the product side, with some time on the agency side, now with an ever-rising level of responsibility, if you were to go back into the agency world, what are some tools and some lessons that you would bring to bear in running a services organization, knowing what you know now?
ERICA: Oh gosh, that is such a good question. This is going to sound – this is very biased, but I would include something like a Rasa newsletter in all of our online packages because there just wasn’t a tool to do email well back in the day when we were developing our packages for clients.
I would also have wanted to be one of the earlier adopters of lots of those integration connectors. We use Zapier at Rasa. There was just a lot we did – we processized things really well at my agency, but I think that if we knew more about Zapier earlier on, or an Integrate leader or all those awesome connecting tools, our processes would have been so much tighter than they even were. So yeah, I think that would’ve been a major game-changer for us too.
ROB: Do you think that’s been more a matter of timing, or was some of that also being in more of a product mindset and maybe more of the team is more technical in a software company versus an agency?
ERICA: That’s a good question. I think it was both. I think it was a matter of timing because we developed a lot of our processes before tools like that were more mainstream. And I think you make a good point; even though we did have a bunch of developers on the team and we did have a bunch of technical analysts and technical SEO folks, we did still have a lot of content and graphic design and creatives who might not have been as comfortable with the integrator tools. But I think once those integrations are set up, then it becomes looped. Then anyone can use them.
ROB: Talent is always hard – you’ve mentioned working with developers in both roles. Competition for developer talent may be among the hardest of jobs to find people for, to keep people for. How do you think about creating an environment and a pattern of success for talent in general and software developers specifically? Because I have been one, and we’re a bit of a different breed.
ERICA: It’s so hard. We try to be really purpose-focused at Rasa. We try to really focus on our greater mission of better informing the world through relevant content. When people are rallied around that, it becomes much more exciting than getting emails out the door. So, we try to align our values to that greater purpose. We try to align a lot of the decisions we make to that greater purpose. It allows everyone a really good framework with which to make big decisions. I think that’s definitely helped at Rasa. We have a really good average employee tenure.
ROB: Very interesting. Email has been such an interesting channel over time. I think it falls in and out of fashion almost seasonally like the color white. It’s really something. Where do you think we are in the ebb and flow of email? What do you think it is that keeps us coming back to email?
ERICA: Oh, that’s such a good question. Email is not the fancy new car. It is not the Tesla of the digital marketing world by any means. But time and time again, it shows up as one of the top channels for encouraging transactions, for driving people to a website. Landing in people’s inboxes is a completely separate conversation, but your chances of landing in someone’s primary inbox as an email versus catching a glimpse of their eyes on a social media channel when you’re not doing paid is still much greater. For better or worse, people are glued to their inboxes. They wake up with their email, they go to bed with their email. We know that from the data. So even though it’s a dinosaur, it still is effective. [laughs]
ROB: It’s a really helpful dinosaur.
ERICA: It’s a helpful dinosaur, yes.
ROB: You probably think almost equal parts about artificial intelligence and email. Those are two very interesting things to pair together. Where do you see this kind of technology expanding? You’ve got this Rasa core of applying AI content to email, but where does it start to go next? What’s coming up?
ERICA: I don’t know so much if it’s next or just the way I’ve seen AI influence marketers’ lives. Even if it’s not the predictive piece of it – that’s not as tangible in terms of making people’s lives better – the automation that’s inherent in AI has made so many marketers’ lives better. Of course, there’s the Rasa tool, but then in terms of social media tools, back in the day we used Hootsuite to schedule our posts, but now there are so many intelligent social tools out there that recycle posts and also generate the snippet to social media. That’s just a little bit smarter than what I was doing five years ago.
And then there are tools like MarketMuse that do really great semantic optimization. Back in the day, SEO was a lot of keyword stuffing, and now there are tools out there that help you intelligently write content so that the search engines will identify it as authoritative, trustworthy, you look like the expert. It’s making things a little bit smarter. Nothing I’ve noticed has blown away the marketing world yet, but it’s these incremental adjustments that AI has helped with that have made things faster and smarter.
ROB: I’m so glad you mentioned MarketMuse. It was on the tip of my brain, and Aki from MarketMuse is a previous guest on the podcast. He came in to talk about it.
ERICA: Cool. I just did a webinar with Jeff Coyle over there.
ROB: I met Jeff first, actually. Jeff was the person people pointed me to, and then that led us to also having Aki on the podcast.
ERICA: Awesome.
ROB: I’m glad we closed the loop on that. Number one, I couldn’t remember it; number two, if they were your mortal enemy, I didn’t want to bring it up, perhaps. [laughs]
ERICA: Oh, no, not at all. We have an awesome tech exchange with them. We use their tool for our content and they use our tool for their newsletter.
ROB: Definitely have used their tool as well. You mentioned some tools to bubble up and bounce social content. Is there anything that’s most effective for you in that mindset? Any tools you’d recommend?
ERICA: Yeah. We use MeetEdgar, we use MarketMuse. Oh, I don’t know how much AI they’re using, but we use SEMrush too, for just looking at general search volume, keyword ranking. For anyone who hasn’t really done a lot of SEO or diving into the SEO world, I love SEMrush. It’s a great place to start with your keyword strategy.
Other tools – oh, for you, I’m actually curious if you’ve heard of – there’s an AI tool that’s on the tip of my tongue, but it’s for audio. They ingest your audio, they read the file, and then you can type edits. What is it called? It’s totally escaping me right now.
ROB: I do think I have seen that. I do not recall off the top of my head. We keep an eye on it. We put transcripts of every episode on the page with our episodes, but we actually looked at a bunch of AI tools for it, and when we first started, the quality just wasn’t there.
ERICA: It wasn’t there yet. Got it.
ROB: I haven’t reevaluated that recently; we have a phenomenal transcriber who hopefully will hear this. I don’t talk to her enough, but I hope she’ll be encouraged, because she’s just remarkable. Hopefully, she’ll be encouraged here, but we have a great human who transcribes.
ERICA: A great human. That’s so good.
ROB: And some things are really, really hard for AI – something like Rasa.io, the computer might not transcribe correctly, or something like MarketMuse. And then you get into SEMrush and you just totally blow their minds. They just don’t know what to do. But it’s all getting better. It’s going to get there.
ERICA: It’s getting better, right. It’s nothing like blowing people out of the water yet. I thought of the name of it. It’s called Descript. Have you heard of it?
ROB: Yeah, that’s right. The letter “D,” is that right?
ERICA: Yep. So, you have the same experience; there are a lot of tools out there that might not be complete game-changers yet, but just making people’s lives a little bit easier right now. And soon I’m sure there will be game-changers.
ROB: Absolutely. Erica, when people want to get in touch with you and with Rasa.io, where should they go? Although I think I tipped your hand on the second part.
ERICA: You can feel free to reach out to hello@rasa.io. You’re welcome to email me directly; I’m just erica@rasa.io. I’m always happy to answer people’s questions or direct them to folks that can do a better job than I can. [laughs]
ROB: This is great, Erica. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for helping us understand this topic.
ERICA: Sure thing.
ROB: We’ve got to keep on figuring it out, and you’re helping us. Congratulations on all that you all are doing at Rasa. I wish you the best.
ERICA: Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate the time.
ROB: All right, be well. Thank you. Bye.
ERICA: Thank you.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Flynn Zaiger, CEO, Online Optimism (New Orleans, LA; Washington, D.C.; and Atlanta, GA) Flynn Zaiger, CEO at Online Optimism, started his agency on a laptop in 2012 by reaching out and offering SEO services to the 6 companies where he had interned while he was in college. Today, his remote, across the country staff of 23 supports businesses with “everything they do online” – social, search, SEO, SEM, and website design. Clients are small- to medium-sized businesses (5 to 500 employees) that are either startups looking to rapidly expand or more traditional family businesses, that, in the process of being passed down to the next generation, are looking to expand.
The agency strives to contribute to the communities surrounding its three offices. A cadre of interns maintains a networking calendar, tracking the activities of fifty chambers of commerce. The intern program, built internally from the ground up, is the source of many of the agency’s new hires.
In this interview, Flynn discusses some of the key strategies he has used to build Online Optimism. He recommends that anyone starting a business:
- Figure out the revenue streams that are available immediately.
- Set a good safety net of six months to allow you time to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
- Recognize that, as your agency grows, you will not continue doing all those things you love . . . you will be managing other people who are doing those things.
- Understand the importance of knowing how to manage people.
- Build processes so new staff can get “up to speed” quickly.
- Never burn bridges.
Flynn hired a business developer as the agency’s seventh or eighth employee. He says it is important to work closely with new sales staff, not to expect sales in the first three months (because that’s how long it takes to train and understand the proposals), and to build a solid sales process to facilitate onboarding. He did not have processes in place for the first five years and admits, “It was a mess.”
The agency’s language around the sales process is pretty traditional. The language around marketing activities . . . not so much. Flynn and his early staff had no prior agency experience, so they built and “named” things with their own terms. No “agency of record” here . . . it’s a “partnership.” Flynn finds it interesting that other agencies are dropping agency of record accounts and hourly billing in favor of project-based billing and flat rates. He says, “That’s what we did in 2012 because that’s what I made up when I was coming up with how we structured our pricing.”
The agency is not organized in the traditional way, either – there a no account managers. Flynn explains, “Every one of our employees is both doing services and handling account executive stuff.” He says this is a challenge for his employees (they have to be good technically and also skilled at customer/account management), less efficient than an agency where functions are more “separate,” but far better for clients who can directly contact the person who will fix their problems. Flynn says, “People want to feel like there’s humans behind it.” He continues, “People want to know who they’re working with. They want to feel that human connection in the business relationship. That’s helped us grow.”
Flynn can be reached on his agency’s website at: https://www.onlineoptimism.com/
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Flynn Zaiger, CEO at Online Optimism with offices in New Orleans, D.C., and Atlanta. Welcome to the podcast, Flynn.
FLYNN: Great to be here, Rob. Excited to be with you and talk.
ROB: It’s good to have you here. Why don’t you give us an introduction to Online Optimism? What do people know as your expertise?
FLYNN: I started Online Optimism in 2012. It felt like this internet thing was going to be pretty big. I seem to have lucked out on that guess. It was just myself and a laptop. I had graduated college, and 10 years later we have 23 employees, we have offices in three states, we have remote staff across the country, and we help businesses with everything they do online – social, search, SEO, SEM, website design. We usually say if it touches a screen, we can help you market it better.
ROB: Got it. Did you start with such a wide aperture and then expand on the types of clients you could serve? Or did you start in one of those more core areas and grow it from there and add capabilities?
FLYNN: When I was just starting, I always felt that I was pretty good at SEO. I had a sense that SEO is really a game where you don’t know the rules and you’re just guessing what Google wants. So, I started a digital marketing agency, telling people that I was great at SEO, and they’d say, “Wonderful. I have a Facebook page that needs to be managed.” I was like, “Okay, that’s close enough. I’ll just do some social media on the side.” [laughs] Then I’d be like, “Yeah, but I really want more SEO,” and they’d be like, “That’s so great. We need a website.” So, I would learn to build websites.
I think that’s what you do when you’re starting out: you expand and see what works and what doesn’t. Now we do everything digitally. At one point we even did events. When we were starting in New Orleans, I threw a second-line parade. We threw a block party and a barbeque. As someone who started an internet marketing company, I should not be the person running a block party. But it went pretty well for a year or two.
Then we decided it wasn’t for us and we still focus on these main services where we feel people are constantly investing. We do social; we’re not on any specific network. The networks are going to change, but at this point, people are going to be found on social media, they’re going to be found on search, and we help them appear in both places.
ROB: Social has certainly emerged, at least many people’s expectations, much more around consistency than around creating huge spikes of activity, so that probably lends itself to some sense of normalcy.
Flynn, paint for us a picture – is there any typical client, a typical vertical, a typical size, a typical buyer profile? Who comes to you most regularly that you can serve well?
FLYNN: We work great with what we consider small- to medium-size businesses. It tends to be anywhere from 5 to 500 employees. Above that, usually you have a bigger in-house marketing team; below 5, you’re usually not ready to work with an agency like us. We’ve found a niche with two things. One is with startups who are looking to expand rapidly, so they need quick testing and making sure that social strategies are working and social content is working before scaling it up.
Our other expertise is these more traditional companies who have been around for 15-20 years. We do really well with family-run businesses where the son or daughter is taking over the business. This company has been successful for a few decades, they have great word-of-mouth, and you log onto their website and it’s built on GeoCities or something, there’s GIF animations all around, there’s music playing. These are businesses that have done well enough, and now they go to the next generation, and these are people in their twenties, thirties, and they’re tired of running a family business. They want to grow and be more successful. That’s when they usually bring us in, and we have a first meeting where we all make fun of their family’s website and how terrible it is, and then we help them. They still run the day-to-day, but they trust that we’re a digital agency that knows the business and has that sort of relationship.
We still try to meet face to face with people – obviously more pre-COVID than now – but we really believe in the power of a handshake. One of our values is “Screens will not replace handshakes,” and I still think, especially in the digital world where SEO/SEM can be sketchy, people want to know who they’re working with. They want to feel that human connection in the business relationship. That’s helped us grow.
ROB: That leads me into something that was perhaps a little bit self-evident – having offices in three places, is that largely centered on that ability to be close to a customer, to go shake their hands? You’re cultivating relationships in those places and nearby?
FLYNN: Absolutely. We started off just in New Orleans, and we had ideas always to grow beyond. We started getting more national clients around the country, but a lot of those relationships were based off of connections that we made in person. Then COVID happened, and all of a sudden everyone was reconsidering what they wanted to do, some of my staff was moving, and we couldn’t meet anyone in person.
As a digital marketing agency, for the first time, we were on a level playing field with everyone who was down the street from bigger companies. D.C. and Atlanta are much bigger regions; they’re much bigger economic centers than New Orleans. Not that New Orleans is tiny. It’s a very large port city. It has a lot of deals there. But Atlanta and D.C. are much bigger. We had staff who wanted to go to these cities. They were willing to put in the time and investment to do the work of starting an office there. That’s going to networking events, helping to recruit interns, going to colleges to recruit more staff, and really trying to make a name for ourselves, producing resources in each city.
One thing we do is keep a networking calendar. We mostly do this internally because we have interns that will help us track 50 different chamber calendars and pull them together. We try to make sure we’re actually contributing to these cities, each in their own way, rather than just having an office that happens to be located in them.
ROB: I hear you saying there’s a set of capabilities you expect from an office. There is a local engagement, there is an outreach on the business side, there is a recruiting component. A lot of a services business, a lot of an agency, is sales and talent. If you can do those and manage the accounts you have well and grow them, that’s a pretty good formula. Do you have somebody who then runs each office? Or how have you structured that part?
FLYNN: Yeah, that’s pretty much how it’s going so far. We’ll send someone who leads the thing, and then we try to have exactly what you said: one salesperson, business development. Our team is really good at digital marketing, so our salespeople have never really had to do much outbound. We certainly go to networking events, but we’re not pushing sales. They’re usually busy enough with the leads coming in, and it’s mostly qualifying and creating proposals that are custom-crafted. So, it’s a salesperson and then usually an account executive or two that can handle the different work in the cities.
I will say this is something that we’ve only been doing for about a year and a half now, so we’re still learning and still building out these channels. I think, long term, what we see is that each office will kind of function together, but they’re going to help us by if one city has a downturn, which unfortunately will inevitably happen, the other cities can pull up the slack.
And honestly, this was a lot because our main headquarters is in New Orleans. There’s Mardi Gras and the whole city shuts down for a week. We needed people to work that week for our national clients. [laughs] So now we added Atlanta and D.C., who are thankfully sober and not at parades for that Wednesday through Tuesday. That helps keep the business going.
ROB: [laughs] And you cut the other people off of Slack that week. I understand.
FLYNN: Yeah. [laughs]
ROB: It’s interesting; that story is still largely unwritten, then. Over the past year and a half, here in Atlanta, I’ve been very engaged in the marketing community. Most of the events, most of the local engagements that we used to do before COVID are not back yet for the most part. But on the flipside, I might say that most clients are more eager to meet in person than at any time in the two years before COVID. It’s an interesting split of where the opportunity is and where maybe it will be.
FLYNN: Yeah, I completely agree. I’ve been seeing that especially in 2021, since the summer hit. There was a small decline from Omicron, but not as much as I think you’d expect. A lot of business leaders, business owners hit the summer, they said, “It’s been a year” and – you can’t just be done with a pandemic. My partner works in medicine and she’s very much working in very intense situations this week, actually, which is wild to do that and then I’m sitting in a coworking space. With a mask, but still. It’s such a weird environment that we’re both in at the time.
But I agree. We still meet people outdoors as best we can. We’ve all upgraded our winter coats on our team. [laughs] But it is certainly something where people want to meet in person. This is where you’re seeing those conversations all around the world right now, which is most leaders feel that they want to see people back in the office, and they can’t really give good reasons. There’s collaboration and brainstorming, and to be frank, I would love to be able to turn around and ask a question instead of asking someone if they’re free to have a Slack huddle and dealing with that. It’d be so convenient to just be able to turn around – and I haven’t been able to do that in two years – and ask people. I miss that.
But we try to prioritize our individual staff’s feelings and comfort. I think that’s more important than anything. So, we’re letting everyone do whatever they want, essentially, and trying to be the most supportive environment we can.
ROB: That makes a ton of sense, and there’s a lot to learn there. You mentioned some of the early engagements you did with clients. It seemed like a natural evolution of the services. But what led you to take the jump in the first place and decide, “I’ve had jobs, but I don’t want to have a job anymore. I want to make my own job. I want to build my own business”? What was that transition that led to the start of Online Optimism?
FLYNN: One of the first things we always tell people, especially our entrants when they’re job searching, is never burn bridges. It’s been 10 years and I feel like I can say I didn’t particularly love the job I had after college. I was pretty good at it, but it was a very corporate environment. They had those motivational “Teamwork” and “Hang in There” posters. I was like, “Haha, very ironic decorations” on Day 1, and they were like, “These are serious. These are our values.” I was like, great. It was just very corporate, so I didn’t love it, but I was good at it.
I reached out to all the people I worked for in college. I’d done six internships. They were like, “If you had your own thing, we could probably hire you and keep you afloat.” So, I got lucky. After 10 years, I’ve learned I know what I know, but more importantly, I know what I don’t know. But when you’re 22 and you’re like, “I could start a company,” you really have no clue how little you know. Someone should’ve shaken me and been like, “Flynn, what are you doing? There’s no plan. You have a domain, but you don’t know how to” – there was no plan.
But I got lucky. The companies that I worked for trusted me because I’d done work for them, so I got like two clients from them. Then the company I was working for out of college, I increased their sales online by like 800% or something like that. So they became Client #3. So, I had three clients on Day 1, which was great because I didn’t sign Client 4 until Month 7 or 8 because it took me seven or eight months to figure out how to actually meet someone and convince them to trust us with their internet presence.
That was the most helpful thing, I think. If you are starting a business, you have to figure out what revenue streams you have immediately and then set a good safety net of six months. It’s going to take that for you to learn what’s working and what’s not and figure it out. You have to be ready to – it helped that I was in New Orleans with three roommates, so my rent was $400 a month. That’s also the key. If you want to be an entrepreneur, I highly recommend $400 a month rent. That’s the way to go. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] Where can you find that now, I wonder? Maybe nowhere, I don’t know.
FLYNN: Not New Orleans, actually, now. I think you’ve got to go somewhere else.
ROB: It makes sense not to burn bridges. I’ve certainly had interesting experiences where I’ve had former clients and coworkers who couldn’t talk to each other, and I’ve always enjoyed being Switzerland. I’ll talk to both of them and I’ll be doing business with both of them concurrently while they keep talking trash about each other like a divorced couple. I don’t even know. But that’s certainly a good option.
As you started to build, how did you think about who you brought on the team, when? What were the next couple of roles? What were some of the inflection points in hiring, where you maybe had to make a hire you weren’t sure of? From a necessity perspective, not the person.
FLYNN: Hiring is the most important and hardest thing about running a business. We always drill that into people’s minds. Our interview process should be careful because it is incredibly difficult to terminate someone if you make the wrong choice or train them to get them up to speed.
When I started off, in the services that I wasn’t the greatest at, I added on additional staff in different digital marketing services so I had more time to bring in clients. We actually didn’t bring in biz dev for a while. They were Hire 7 or 8. So my first three or four were designers and strategists and people to do account work. Biz dev was a major jump. One thing that we waited way too long for was operations. I was running an 11-12 person company and still basically running – if we were a normal company, that might’ve been okay, but we were always employee-first. That meant every weekend, I would go to Costco and get like $400 worth of snacks for the office and come back. We were on the second floor of a building. It was a three-hour Costco run, which is such a waste of my time as CEO that I would do every week.
Sometimes it’s hard to convince yourself that your time is valuable, and that’s really what I think about when we hire. Once you or someone else on your team becomes more valuable – that’s what we always tell the staff. You should be working yourself out of your job. Whatever you’re doing today, if you can teach it to someone else so you can do more important things, that is the most valuable thing you could do.
I know a lot of times employees think “I want to keep this process just me so there’s more job security,” but I’ve always felt like if you have a good environment and they see that you’re able to teach this to someone else, that makes you way more valuable to the company, because then you could help them scale up much quicker. I always try to teach that to our Optimists.
ROB: Those sound like some brutal Costco runs. There’s an element where, when you’re doing that Costco run, it can feel – and I’m sure it’s even felt by your team – that you are, to an extent, intentionally serving them in that. I’m sure they can see that and appreciate that. But it probably needs to have its limits also. There’s a point where you’re serving them less by serving the business less by doing this other thing more.
We had a team retreat back in December, and I spent an hour making people steaks. I wouldn’t take it back for the world, but I’m not going to do that every day, either. It’s an interesting balance of when and how you make those choices to serve.
FLYNN: I’m going to make sure my team doesn’t find out that other people are making steaks, because I got the Costco pizza. [laughs] I was like, “Y’all should be excited. This is great, came super quickly.” If they knew that some other people were making steaks, they would’ve gone for my head, I think.
ROB: Do you like Costco pizza?
FLYNN: [laughs] I do. I have the taste of someone who enjoyed the apartment where he paid $400 a month in rent. I haven’t quite outgrown that yet.
ROB: This is the privilege of the owner and the founder. We are completely distributed. We do team retreats right now twice a year. We’re doing leadership retreats twice a year offset from those. But these are people I see twice a year, so if they get Costco pizza from you once every month or so and I get them steaks once a year, I think we’re square. It’s my own selfishness. I wanted to buy nice steaks and cook them and eat them, and if I make some for other people, and they feel served as well, then we all win.
FLYNN: I’m going to bring you in for when my team hears this podcast so you can negotiate with them over whether they’re getting a fair deal or not. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] I’ll go up to D.C. and we’ll see what we can do with that. Flynn, when you reflect on building Online Optimism so far, what are some lessons you wish you could take back to your past self and learn a little bit sooner if you could help it?
FLYNN: Like I said, staffing at the beginning is a crazy difficult thing to learn. I had never managed anyone in school or in any jobs, and that’s really the first thing I would’ve told 22-year-old Flynn. If you are successful in this business, you don’t do anything that you do today. All that digital marketing stuff that you love? You’re not typing posts, you’re not making ads, you’re not building websites. You are managing people who do that. That is such a change in mindset.
I wish I had taken that more seriously at the beginning and learned more – even in college, when I did group projects. People hate group projects, but they are the best. They are so like real life, it is wild. You’re going to be with people who you don’t trust. You’re going to be working kind of with each other, but someone’s not going to keep up the slack. What I would do is reach out to my professor and be like, “I’d like to do this by myself,” which was a good way to get a good grade but a bad way to learn how to manage other individuals.
So, I would definitely tell myself, you have to learn how to manage people. You’re only as successful as your team. From Day 1, that ability to think outside myself – and whenever I do a task, what I’m really good at now is we do a task and we think immediately, “How could this be done by someone else? Let’s write up the process. Let’s have this ready to go,” whereas we didn’t do that the first five years. Every time someone came onto the team, it was a whole process to teach them. It was a mess.
So, I think helping yourself manage people is key and also building processes so more people can join and do it.
ROB: Right on. It’s interesting; you mentioned that you feel like you brought on biz dev a little bit late, around Employee #8, but I would say in a different lens, I have seen 80-person agencies where the sales were still very much founder-led, maybe even to the point where they promoted someone else almost to a partner to get that level of authenticity in their sales.
What do you think allowed you, and how did you equip someone – it may have seemed soon for you, but you equipped someone eight people in to not completely fall on the ground selling. What do you think allowed you to sell without being founder-led in that sales motion?
FLYNN: I think the answer is that we spent a lot of time together that first year. We even did that with later sales staff. We don’t expect them to make sales their first three months anymore. We even build that into their prospective commission structure, based off of them not making a sale in the first months, just because we know that’s how long it takes to train and go through our proposals, and they sit in a ton of meetings to learn how we talk about things.
I would also say the other thing is when we first built a lot of our sales process, the first individual who was doing it for us had actually gone to a much more traditional company where they did a whole month of sales school, and honestly that helped us a lot. I had no idea how to teach someone how to do sales, so we hired someone who had had that training.
That was the one thing where – now we hire people who just have a college education because we have more processes in place, but that did help a bit. Even now, a lot of the language we use is still pretty official on the sales side, whereas all the processes we have for marketing, we tend to have different language. We never say “agency of record” at all at Optimism because we made up our own term for it, because none of us had any experience in agencies. Whereas the sales side, it’s all like “discoveries and intros and cold calls,” and we use very much the language of the industry, which is interesting for us.
ROB: What do you call the AOR relationship?
FLYNN: We just call it a partnership. [laughs] It is odd, and I know this gets me into trouble – we pretty much run an ad agency, but we built it from scratch, which is good and bad. I went to an Ad Age event and they were talking about this revolutionary new thing, which was like “As opposed to agency of record accounts and hourly billing, everyone’s doing project-based billing now and flat rates so you know how much things cost.” I was like, oh, that’s what we did in 2012 because that’s what I made up when I was coming up with how we structure our pricing.
It’s been fascinating to see. We sometimes will meet people who run more traditional agencies – we don’t have traffic managers at our agency, and until maybe two years ago I didn’t realize that was a job. Which isn’t a great thing to hear a CEO say, but it was built into other processes. I will say now that we’re at 23, we’ve talked to enough people and have enough staff that have come in that we’re trying to fill these gaps that bigger agencies have and we understand why.
But there are still some things we do that are unique. We don’t have employees who just do account executive work at our agency. Every one of our employees is both doing services and handling account executive stuff – which honestly is a major selling point for us, but it is tricky for staff because they need to be good at Google Ads and get their certifications and also not mind dealing with the client that calls in during the day with a question.
ROB: It’s a tricky dichotomy. On the one hand, a lot of people gravitate towards 100% either of those responsibilities within another agency. They’ll be 100% client-serving or 100% AM. That hybrid role, when you can find it, it’s very authentic to you. But when you’re looking for someone to hire in, a lot of times they’ve gravitated further in one direction or the other, I would expect, than you might want them to be for you.
FLYNN: You’re absolutely right. I don’t want to say that it’s a benefit for our staff. I’m not sure. But it is certainly a sales point for us. A lot of complaints from people who transferred from other agencies to us is that they are tired of talking to an account executive who knows enough, but they’re like, “Hey, why is this Facebook ad structured like this? Shouldn’t the top of the funnel marketing have this creative?” and the account executive is like, “Good question. I’ll get back to you.” Most of our clients, you don’t have to deal with that unless it’s a very, very specific technical question, because they’re talking to the person who made the ad.
But it is stressful and our team does manage fewer accounts at a time because we don’t have those efficiencies that a more separated agency has.
ROB: I definitely appreciate the opportunity to – you don’t want to reinvent language; you don’t want to invent your own language from scratch for some of these things. But on the one hand, I would posit that agency of record, unless as client has a need to award such a relationship and their boss told them they have to, mostly seems a little bit selfish for the agency to claim that mantle. Almost like you’re taking something from the client. And “traffic manager” sounds like kind of a boring job. Maybe someone who’s in their prime would really enjoy it, but I feel like there’s a more robust cohort of responsibilities that is a more fulfilling role and less of a middleperson, if you will.
FLYNN: I’ll leave you on the line for getting the hate mail from the traffic managers on Twitter. [laughs] But I do agree. I think that because we started off small and have added positions as we’ve grown, the major difference is that only like one person on my team has worked for more than two years at any other agency. We recruit so many people for our internship program and we’ve built this from scratch. It’s been an opportunity to really build things as we see them and as we want them.
It does mean that a lot of our processes are very different, but at this point, a lot of the bigger and better agencies are really open about their processes. So, whenever we do have questions about like “How does HR staff work?” or “What benefits do people want?”, there’s a ton of research online. We’re pretty receptive to even our staff sending us information about other company benefits to see if we can match it and things like that.
ROB: That makes a ton of sense. Flynn, as you look forward, what are you excited about that’s coming up for Online Optimism or maybe even for the types of services that clients are going to be needing? What’s next?
FLYNN: We love what’s happening in social right now. I think it’s been a fascinating turn from these really professionally produced videos – and I don’t even know if this is good for agencies or good for Online Optimism – to being more authentic, individual experiences. You see that on the content that’s trending on TikTok and Snapchat now; while highly produced videos do well, sometimes it’s just a funny idea, something catchy, even for brands. People want to feel like there’s humans behind it.
I think you see that in the brands commenting on each other’s posts on TikTok. People are excited. I actually feel like the people behind the brands are eventually going to catch on and start making names for themselves. Like, sure, you like Wendy’s Twitter account and that’s great, but there’s not a Wendy back there. There’s some probably bored stand-up comic in New York City and that’s their job. I know there’s going to be legal papers in the way, but I do think these social media superstars will start becoming famous in their own right rather than for brands. It’s cool that Duolingo has that mascot that does weird stuff, but that’s not Duolingo as a brand. That’s some social media director who pitched that idea, somehow got it approved, and now everyone’s trying to duplicate it. So that’s cool.
We’re always looking more, like everyone else, at the Metaverse, seeing what’s happening there, seeing all these bigger companies invest in it. I do have our design team working on messing around more in 3D space and doing VR/AR. We’re still looking cautiously towards it, but at this point, you have Microsoft, you have Meta or Facebook or whatever they want to call themselves, you have all these companies throwing tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars and staff at it. So, we’re trying to get our team ready for whatever is next.
I don’t think we’re a couple months away from every mom n’ pop shop having a second location on Meta Boulevard or whatever, but I do think the bigger organizations are going to have a presence, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more medium-sized companies get into that space soon. We want to be ready for when that happens. That’s at least what we’re looking at internally on our side.
ROB: That is an interesting highlight to contemplate. I think we have been without, to an extent, as many experimental channels as there were for a while. There were a lot and everything was emergent and new, and maybe TikTok is still experimental for some, but for some brands, they’ve certainly operationalized it as well. But to highlight Meta, Metaverse, that world, maybe even some of the crypto and NFT world as the experimental opportunities – it’s an interesting place to play for sure.
FLYNN: It’s been fascinating to see. We’re taking it seriously because all these bigger companies are. But you make a great point that these more experimental networks are usually the ones who bring new mediums. You can’t look at TikTok and not remember Vine. And I personally think 2013-2014, when Vine and Tumblr were where the entirety of internet culture was coming from – that was our peak. It’s been downhill since then. That was the best the internet will ever be. [laughs]
That’s the question: Can these more organic decentralized networks exist and grow? I know that’s what everyone wants to say but look where the money’s going. It’s going to Microsoft and Meta, and who knows what Apple’s building with their headset. And these are the same companies and the same VCs that built the internet that we have now. It’s nice to think there’s going to be really cool, interesting ideas that will give more freedom to the internet, but they have a lot of 1,000-pound gorillas and billion- or trillion-dollar companies to overcome.
ROB: It’s a lot to navigate and it makes a lot of sense. Flynn, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for sharing the journey of Online Optimism. I will look forward to finding some of your people here in Atlanta. Come on down sometime. I wish you all the best.
FLYNN: Yeah, we’re great at Happy Hour. Let us know. Thanks for having me, Rob.
ROB: [laughs] All right. Be well. Take care.
FLYNN: Take care.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Erik Jensen (Salt Lake City, UT), Co-Owner and Chief Strategy Officer, Predictive ROI (La Crosse, WI)
Erik Jensen is Co-Owner and Chief Strategy Officer at Predictive ROI, a remote-first firm that helps “agencies, coaches, and consultants plant their flags of authority and monetize that position.”
In this interview, Erik addresses the difficulties service businesses may encounter in developing a “position of thought leadership”:
- Poor discovery and development processes.
- Failure to treat themselves as a client.
- Failure to understand “what it means to plant their flag.”
When agencies try to be everything to everyone, their messages will be inconsistent and unfocused. True thought leaders do not have messages that lack clarity and strength.
Erik emphasizes that it is dangerous for an agency to assume it knows why a particular potential client approaches the agency for help. Customers may come because:
- They know you, don’t understand their problem, and are looking for a safe sounding board.
- A client gave them a referral – but the client may be sending “bad fits.”
- They saw your marketing efforts/work and have “nothing better to do” than to ask to see if you can solve their problem.
Saying “yes” to work that is not in your sweet spot often means the work will take more effort and fail to be profitable. That’s why, Erik says, it is important for agencies “niche down” to a well-defined target market . . . and to niche down fast.
There are a number of ways to find this “ideal” market . . . SWOT analysis, an addressable audience audit, an assessment of past client successes and profitability . . . but Erik recommends asking three questions:
- What’s your superpower? What are you really good at? What do you love to do?
- Who do you love to do that work for, and why do you care about serving that audience?
- Will you be able to make a great case study off of that client? You want the opportunity to do great work that you can leverage into future work.
If an agency serves multiple industries, Erik says, they’re like the legs of a stool . . . not stable and not comfortable. He provides a solution: “Find a common problem that all of those industries share that you’re really good at solving. That’s the top of the stool.”
Erik believes the case study question is pivotal in supporting agency success and that it facilitates agency growth by:
- Filtering and focusing business development efforts at the very beginning so that you only take on those clients for whom you expect your efforts will provide excellent results.
- Forcing you to document your work to build a “body of evidence.”
- Providing social proof from past clients that says, “We’re great, and we don’t have to say it about ourselves. Here’s what other people say about us.”
Erik also provides a detailed overview of how to effectively bring on a business partner.
Predictive ROI offers a free book on niching down, leveraging authority into a monetization stream, building great content, and clarifying purpose at predictiveroi.com/free-book. Erik can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook, and his agency’s website at: predictiveroi.com. He invites people to join the agency’s free weekly Q&A sessions, where 10 minutes of teaching are followed by an open-forum business problem discussion.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Erik Jensen, Co-Owner and Chief Strategy Officer at Predictive ROI, a remote-first firm – but he’s based in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Welcome to the podcast, Erik.
ERIK: Hey, Rob. Thanks for having me on the show. Actually, the agency is based in La Crosse. I am way over in Salt Lake City, Utah. So, we’ve got folks all over the place, which is actually kind of fun. For anybody that does or runs a remote company, you know what I’m talking about. For people that don’t, that maybe gives them heart palpitations. But it works well for our team.
ROB: That’s pretty great. I’m sure they would like to come visit you. We did a family road trip out to Salt Lake City and back in summer of 2020.
ERIK: There you go.
ROB: We had some fun. We saw the great outdoors as a family but spent the better part of a month on the other side over in Midway.
ERIK: Oh, fantastic.
ROB: Love the area.
ERIK: Yeah, there’s some really cool things. I’m actually a native of Minnesota, so I’m a Minnesota boy, and I spent a lot of time living in Wisconsin as well, where I met my business partner, Steven. But yeah, it’s been awesome moving out this direction and seeing all of the amazing things. It’s just crazy. There’s state and national parks everywhere. You throw a rock and you hit one.
ROB: Yeah. But there’s no humidity to be found.
ERIK: No, which is amazing again. I think I still brag about the fact that there are no mosquitoes here to all of my friends and family that still live back in the Midwest.
ROB: [laughs] You’re not making any friends there, but we’ll make some friends real soon. Erik, when you think about Predictive ROI, how would you hone in on the superpower of the firm? Where’s the strength of the business?
ERIK: We help agencies, coaches, and consultants plant their flags of authority and monetize that position. That’s what we do.
ROB: Dig into that a little bit. Tell us some more.
ERIK: What happens most of the time when someone attempts to go through that process of developing a position of thought leadership, they have really poor processes in place. Everything takes a lot more effort, a lot more time, and a lot more energy. They struggle sometimes with the cobbler’s kids, so they don’t actually do their own stuff. They don’t treat themselves as a client in a lot of ways. And for many of them, they don’t really understand what it means to plant their flag. They kind of throw spaghetti at the wall and hope that something sticks, and what ends up happening is they try to be everything to everybody, which leads to a really inconsistent message, and not a great way to be seen as a thought leader or to hold that position.
ROB: You’ve certainly planted your flag, so that’s a good starting point. That’s the opposite of the cobbler’s children. That’s good.
ERIK: This is true. We put a lot of effort into our own stuff or try to – although I’m not going to say we don’t struggle with that too, just like everybody else.
ROB: That’s right. Sometimes you do need that voice outside of yourself to really help discover that journey. Help crystallize this picture for us, apart from yourself, apart from Predictive ROI; what does this look like? Maybe there’s a good example of a firm that you’ve worked with, what they found their authority was, and what it looks like to project that out into the market.
ERIK: I’m going to use Agency Management Institute as an example because that’s a pertinent example for anybody within the agency space. Agency Management Institute is run by a fellow named Drew McLellan. Drew has done a phenomenal job of staking his claim within that agency space to be a guide, to be helpful.
His stance, his flag, is that most agency owners are accidental business owners. They were really good practitioners; they eventually got asked to do some work, and they’re like, “Yeah, I could do that.” And then they got asked a little bit more because they did a really good job, because they’re good at what they do, and before long they go, “You know what? I can totally do this. I can run my own agency.” So, they put out a shingle, and they don’t realize that being a practitioner and being a business owner is different.
ROB: Sure, and there are plenty of scaling hazards along that way. But along with that, I think, coming from an individual practitioner perspective, you know that people ask you to do something; you don’t always know why. Often, it’s because they know you and they know what you do, and they know what they want out of that. How do you start to turn the ship and help someone who just stumbled into this business to realize – I think there’s an element of why the customer is coming to you that is necessary to figure out where to find more of them. How do you start to flip that conversation?
ERIK: Customers can come to you for a variety of reasons, and it’s dangerous to make assumptions about why they’re there. A customer might come to you because they know you, and they don’t really know the problem they’re dealing with. So, you’re a safe place to be able to talk to them and guide them on where they may need some help or some advice or some work done.
The other possibility is that you’re getting them from referral sources because you’ve done a really good job. Again, depending on if you’ve actually planted your flag or niched down, the story that’s being told might be vastly different.
For instance, we get asked all the time, “Hey, do you know somebody that does this?” Yeah, we do. But we only recommend people that have been really clear that that is the problem they solve. But oftentimes people will get recommended just in the general sense of, “Oh, you’re struggling with that? I work with this marketing agency and they might do something like that. How about I introduce you?” What we’ve done is made it so that our referrals are uncertain about what we do, so they might be sending us bad fits, and they may not realize it. They may think they’re doing us a favor.
The other option is that someone comes into our ecosystem because of our own marketing efforts or because they’ve heard of us somehow through sales efforts, etc., and they have a problem and they want someone to solve it, and they’ve got nothing better to do than to ask. Why would they not ask? The challenge comes in when we say yes to all of those things. When we say yes to all of those things, we’ve made the decision to take on work that is likely not our sweet spot. We’ve decided to take on work that is probably not going to be profitable, and we’ve decided to take on work that is going to take more effort than if we were to stay in our sweet spot.
ROB: What does the journey look like? Sometimes we intuitively know our sweet spot, and if somebody says it back to us eventually, it’ll sound right. But sometimes we don’t know how to say it. How do you help people uncover what they should tell someone else their sweet spot is that’s actually going to make sense, going to fit, going to be the right engagement, going to be profitable, going to be the business that they can actually build and scale?
ERIK: There’s a lot of different ways to go about this. There’s one that I prefer. When it comes to finding a niche or a target market, there are lots of folks who will do a SWOT analysis. They’re going to do an addressable audience audit. They’re going to go and look at past clients and see what it is they’ve done really well. They’re going to see which clients are profitable and all that. I love those. Those are great opportunities to be able to educate yourself.
The problem I see most often is that at the end of getting all that information gathered, someone is still sitting there going, “I could go 18 different directions. I could still serve all these different audiences in all these different ways with all these different pain points.” Yes, you should do that information gathering, but I would recommend asking a couple of questions instead.
Number one is: What’s your superpower? What are you really good at? What do you love to do? Number two is: Who do you love to do that work for, that you actually care about doing that work for? That’s your “why” in many instances. I was going to use a more adult term for how to look at it, but I want to make sure that this remains friendly for everybody. [laughs] Anyway, I would approach: What am I really awesome at? Who, and why do I care about serving that particular audience?
Then the third question which I think is really important is: Am I going to be able to make a great case study off of that client? If the answer is no, then you’re probably not going to be doing great work and you’re not going to be able to leverage that work into future work. It should act as a really great filter of “Can I make a case study from this client?” If you can do that, for most people, that clarifies a lot of where their niche and where their flag needs to be.
There are some other analogies which I can also recommend. One is if you serve multiple industries, each one of those industries is like the leg of a stool. But it doesn’t have a top, so sitting on that stool is going to be pretty uncomfortable. Really what you have is a series of sticks. What you want to do if you serve multiple industries is find a common problem that all of those industries share that you’re really good at solving. That’s the top of the stool. That’s what you actually sit on. If you have one and not the other, it doesn’t really serve you to be able to narrow down who it is you’re serving and how it is that you’re serving them.
ROB: That case study question – is that more important simply as a mirror that you hold up and look at? Or do you have a held belief that case studies are a key part of growth? I think that would be my question off of that.
ERIK: I do think case studies have a really interesting position in an agency’s growth. One, they put a filter on your biz dev efforts at the very beginning so that you’re not saying yes to everybody. Because if you don’t believe that you can do great work for them, you’re not going to take them on. That already changes most agencies in a pretty significant way.
The second piece is it forces you to be documenting your work in a meaningful way to be able to tell a story. That’s useful both externally, which I’ll get to in the third point, but it’s also really useful when you’re talking to your client to be able to say, “This is the work that we did; here is the evidence for that work.” Which is, again, uncommon for a lot of agencies to want to have that conversation, that are excited about having that conversation because they’re prepared for that conversation.
The third piece is, what better way to be able to present the sort of things that you do than to be able to use social proof from others to say, “We’re great, and we don’t have to say it about ourselves. Here’s what other people say about us.”
ROB: That definitely makes sense. Erik, if we rewind the clock a little bit, how did you get here? How did you end up being the co-owner of Predictive ROI? What led you into the business? What led it to grow? What’s the journey here?
ERIK: I had an unusual upbringing. I won’t dive into all of that stuff, but I was fortunate enough to be around a lot of business owners throughout most of my life. My family own their own business; my brother and I started our own businesses fairly young. We had several of those. I was really fortunate to run across excellent mentors at the right time in my life, and I had the tremendous fortune in finding the right business partner. For anybody that has worked alongside a business partner, it’s a really important relationship to get right. If you don’t get it right, I cannot imagine how much stress and frustration that would cause on a daily basis.
So, I was really lucky. I actually met my business partner, Steven – I was going to school at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse; he was working in small business development at the time, helping with businesses and their business plans. I had a question about a business plan that a friend and I were doing through Duke University, and he helped me do that. But he did it in a way that really impressed me. He actually sat me down with potential investors. He tapped his relationships in order to be able to say, “Hey, here’s a student who really needs help. I’d like to get him in front of the right people to be able to give him the right feedback.”
From that day forward, I was really impressed with what I saw from him, as far as his ability to step above and beyond for those who he was helping. And he was apparently impressed with the way that I handled everything as well. He likes to tell this story; he went back and later talked to his wife that day and said, “I don’t know when, I don’t know how, but Erik and I are going to do something together.”
Fast forward a couple years, and he had just started to get Predictive off the ground. He gave me a call and he asked me if I wanted to be a part of it. He and I had some good conversations. I specifically asked him to start off as an intern within the agency and to grow with it, and we developed a five-year path for me moving forward that led to ownership, and the metrics that I needed to hit, and the criteria and the milestones that needed to be met. So that was the journey. It’s been closing on 12 years now.
ROB: Wow. That’s a lot of trust to put in someone else, to say you’re going to start it together, but to start from a position of non-ownership and have to earn it. I guess you’d had a chance to get to know him a little bit, because if you didn’t know somebody, there’s a lot of ways to get messed over that way.
ERIK: Yeah. I wouldn’t suggest that it’s the only path forward for people to consider. [laughs] But I do think for anybody that currently owns a company and is looking to bring on someone to step into an ownership position, that’s risky on their part too. So there has to be skin in the game on both sides, and depending on how you want to structure that – it’s completely up to you. There’s great advice on that from a lot of folks. I wouldn’t consider myself to be the best person to ask about that.
But I would say there is a critical factor in that both parties need to have skin in the game on it. If they don’t, it’s easy to go, “I want to be an owner!” and not really understand what that means, not really understand the impact. There’s been times when Steven and I have made the decision not to pay ourselves and make sure the team gets paid.
ROB: That’s part of the owner’s job. That’s not the attractive part of it.
ERIK: But if you have someone that doesn’t understand that and hasn’t been part of the agency in a meaningful way long enough to know that that is part of owning it, when that decision comes, they’re going to rebel against that pretty hard.
ROB: Yeah, they’re not going to be thinking like an owner in that moment. It is very notable. I’m sure that Steven had plenty of choices of people he could have – he was seeing a lot of people in their businesses, so it’s a very special position that you hold.
You also highlight it’s an interesting thing about services businesses apart from others, where you have this progressive path to ownership. You have your startup world where there’s vesting of equity over time, it caps – it’s very different from the way that people can grow into a partner role. Do you have any insight? What is it that’s special about services – even law firms, consulting firms? What changes in that world that makes it make sense to tip over and grant partnership? Because that’s not always the case in let’s say an air conditioning firm that scales or something like that.
ERIK: Yeah, absolutely. Anything to do with the service industry is all about relationships. Now, that’s true to a certain extent in all businesses, but more so. When we think about agencies, agencies live and die on their relationships, whether that is the relationships they have with their team, the relationships they have with vendors and partners to be able to provide certain products or services, the relationships they have with their referral sources or the ponds they fish in as far as where they get their business, or the relationships they have with their current clients.
In order to be able to tell the difference, we have a couple of factors that we consider. We’ve talked about this pretty extensively, just because of obviously the journey towards ownership for me years ago, and obviously the journey since, because we do get asked about what that looks like from other agency owners who are considering that path.
One thing is you absolutely have to treat the person as an owner from the very beginning. They may not have the opportunity to leverage all of that power, but they need to be treated as an owner from the beginning. That includes things like transparency about finances. That includes how to have difficult conversations. That includes being there when strategic decisions are being made, etc. I think a lot of people shy away from that and they want to hide so much of the business from a potential partner for a really, really long time. Then all of a sudden they’re like, “And boom, now you’re an owner! Look in the closet, here’s all the other scary things you never knew about.” That’s not a great way to set someone up for success. So, I think that’s one thing to keep in mind.
A second thing to keep in mind is that when we think about bringing someone on for a partner, we need to really make sure that the values are in line with who we are. Eventually someone is going to be making decisions for the team, for your clients, for your products, for your services, and your job as an owner is to multiply yourself as best as you can. But it’s not just multiplying of tasks. You’re moving up in tasks; you’re not trying to multiply those tasks. You’re trying to hand off other tasks, but you want those tasks to be done in a meaningful way that aligns with how you want the business to be conducted. So doing values checks along the way – hugely, hugely important, and making sure that everyone is in alignment on that.
ROB: Right. Those values, much like the value proposition of the firm, it’s far preferable to drive those from authenticity rather than something aspirational. You talked about looking for a market position and expertise, but really, I think quite often people have something far better within them. It’s about finding it.
ERIK: Yeah. Another thing that I think is useful for that is – we’re big proponents of five-year career paths. When someone comes on, we develop five-year career paths with them so that they know what the journey looks like. There’s nothing more frustrating for an ‘A’ player in an organization than not knowing what moving forward looks like. That’s a good way for agencies to lose their ‘A’ players.
Finally, we have different levels of decision-making. We actually structure the decision-making process. We have Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 decisions. Level 1 is “I’ve made the decision. I’m letting you all know.” Level 2 is “I want input, but I will be making the decision ultimately,” and Level 3 is “This is a group decision.” Starting off the conversations with the right tone and saying, “Hey, I want to let you know this is a Level 1,” or “This is a Level 2,” or “This is going to be a Level 3 decision” sets the tone for what others should expect from an outcome. That can help prevent a lot of frustration, too, if they’re really invested in that outcome. If this is a Level 1 decision, they don’t emotionally invest that same way. They go, “Okay, good. Level 1 decision. It’s been made. I just need to be able to take it in.”
ROB: Yeah, versus someone thinking that it’s a group decision and it’s an owner decision, and just the loss of morale, the loss of investment, a little bit of loss of trust. Certainly challenging. Sounds like some good lessons there.
When you reflect on the Predictive ROI journey, what are some other key learning points / lessons you have that you would extract from the business and that you still think about, maybe?
ERIK: You got like six hours? Because we could go a long time. [laughs] I think if there was one overarching lesson that I would really recommend or that we keep front and center all the time, it’s niche faster and deeper. That’s it. The faster and the deeper you niche, it makes every other decision in the company easier. No better way to put it.
ROB: There’s a clarity and consistency to your message. One of the things that you shared when we were scheduling this was about a book that might be interesting to our audience. Talk about that. I think it’s very aligned with what we’ve been talking about.
ERIK: I appreciate you bringing that up. For us, one of the things we talk about is peanut butter & jelly relationships. It’s this idea that you’ve got to have the right relationships and keep your audience at the center. Business is hard. It requires a lot of sacrifice for those who go down this path. The right relationships, teachers, and resources make a world of difference. If it’s you against the world, that really sucks. [laughs] It isn’t even against the world. You just have to look for those who will help without strings attached.
When you were talking about the book, we talk about authority positioning, we talk about niching down, and we talk about all of this coming from a position of being helpful. We try to demonstrate that concept in a concrete way with our audience to teach what we mean. We’re happy to do that with yours, too. Anybody who wants a copy of our book, it’s Sell With Authority. Free of change, you can get one. There’s no weird shipping costs, there’s no quick pitch when you get it. It’s just a free paperback copy of the book. And we mean it. We actually spent hundreds of dollars recently to get a copy to a participant in our free weekly Q&As because that participant lives in South Africa. That’s a whole other story. [laughs]
But if you’re on this journey to being an authority, we truly want you to succeed because the world needs more meaningful content and thought leadership and a whole lot less noise. So, for anybody that does want that, that’s at predictiveroi.com/free-book. Pretty simple. Happy to send it to anybody that wants it. If you’re struggling with niching down, if you’re struggling with how to really leverage authority and turn it into a monetization stream, if you’re struggling with your content, feeling like “I know we’re supposed to do it but I don’t know why” – it dives into all of that, and we reference it all the time. It’s pretty good use.
ROB: That’s excellent. I love the no strings attached part. We will get that into the show notes for sure. I think there’s probably an inception layer here. Is a book a way that you would, for many clients, potentially recommend establishing that authority and that positioning? That seems like it’s one of the tools in the toolkit for sure. What are some of the core pillars?
ERIK: A book is what we would consider to be a tactic. It’s definitely not a strategy. When we think about authority positioning, there are a couple things to keep in mind: your expertise, your point of view, and why you care. We talked about that a little bit earlier. All of that drives into this idea of niching down and planting your flag.
From there, what we recommend is coming up with a core promise, like “We promise to do this. As a company, we promise to give you a return on investment.” That’s our core promise. If somebody’s working with us, that’s our core promise. Everything that we do is driven by that core promise. Then we look at the three levers that have to be pulled time and time again for someone to be able to achieve that core promise. Those are the strategies that you’re aiming for from a content standpoint. Everything needs to lead up into those three things.
For us, we know that you’ve got to grow your audience, you’ve got to nurture your leads, and you have to be able to sell. If you’ve got those three things down, you’re going to be running a really nice profitable business. If you forget any of those, you’re not going to be running a business. [laughs] So we dive into those a little bit more.
But when it comes to how to do some of this, a book is generally the product of having done a lot of that work already. Rob, let’s put yourself in this position. If you wanted to, you could take all of the interviews that you’ve done, you could find a common theme because you’re controlling the theme of these podcast interviews, because you had a clear goal in mind of what this podcast was going to deliver.
This podcast is what we consider to be cornerstone content. It is regular; it is meaty enough to be sliced and diced; and it’s not a one-trick pony, meaning if you wanted to – let’s say iTunes closed down, no more podcasts. It’s still on Spotify, it’s still on Libsyn, all those other places. So, you could take your cornerstone content, which you had a strategy behind in order to create, you had a goal with it – what would it look like if you took 30 of those interviews and turned them into a book? By the way, somebody literally just did that.
ROB: Yeah, our writer for our episode summaries regularly campaigns to do this very thing.
ERIK: In fact, one of our books, Profitable Podcasting, half of it was written from podcast interviews and episodes. We wrote half a book without having to write half a book. That’s the difference between when we think about the content that we put forward in order to help us plant a flag. Every time you put forward a piece of content, whether that is social media, email, blog post, book, podcast episode, video series, research series, case study, eBook, streaming – the list goes on and on and on. Every time you do that, you’re taking a hammer and you’re either pounding that flag deeper into the dirt of where you are, or you’re flailing that hammer around somewhere in the air.
It’s your choice on how much of your effort you want to waste and how much of your effort you want to put towards your position of authority.
ROB: There’s a lot to think about there. That’s good. Erik, thank you for that. Thank you for the book link. Again, that’ll be in the notes. When people want to find and connect with you, Erik, and with Predictive ROI, where should they go to find you?
ERIK: You can obviously connect with us through all the usual social media suspects, like LinkedIn and Facebook. Honestly, though, if you actually want to get to know us, go to our website, predictiveroi.com, and join our free weekly Q&A. Literally, it’s a group of awesome people and business owners that get together; we do 10 minutes of teaching, and then it opens the floor, everybody asks questions about whatever they need to, to solve business problems. Again, our audience is agency coaches and consultants, so you’re going to be surrounded by agencies, coaches, and consultants. I really like that because it’s a great low-key way to get to know who people are without any sort of commitment or anything along those lines. And it’s a cool way to learn something at the same time. So that’s what I’d recommend.
ROB: We find the weekly thing through your website, sign up, show up, open Q&A.
ERIK: Yep.
ROB: Excellent. Thank you, Erik, for coming on the podcast and sharing your expertise and where you have planted your flag. We are very grateful for it.
ERIK: Absolutely. Hopefully, this was helpful. Rob, if there’s anything else that I can provide afterwards, just let me know. If anybody’s got any questions, happy to help. This was fun.
ROB: Much appreciated. Thank you. Take care.
ERIK: You too.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Donna Loughlin, is President and Founder at LMGPR, a public relations agency that works with “emerging market players and visionaries” to help them build out their Leadership (the “L” in the agency’s name), Momentum, and Growth. Key to this effort is researching the client’s “story” and the drivers for the client founding the business. The client/agency relationship typically takes a minimum of a year to launch and continues, in some cases, for up to 8 years until the client goes through its IPO. Media relations initiatives include earned content – “talking to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and trade publications” – and/or “creating original content” (such things as whitepapers and podcasts).
Donna began her career as a journalist, working with Reuters, BBC, and Washington Post, and migrated into doing PR inside technology companies going through IPOs during the dot-com bubble. Donna, in her role as a “corporate person,” deflected phone calls from investors in other companies who were seeking her help by referring them to her friends . . . until the day she realized that she had sent away “$1.8 million in revenue.”
It was time to start her own agency. Initially, she worked out of her home and consulted with smaller, venture-backed companies and VC firms directly to launch these new companies before they had any marketing, or even, in some cases, a product. Within 90 days, she found she needed to add media and PR talent. She searched online and built a network of independent consultants, working mothers taking time off to have children, who became another (internal) iteration of LMGPR – “Loving Mothers, Good PR,” and then brought on people as employees.
Today’s clients are widely varied in their needs. They may want to raise funds to start manufacturing a new product, bring a product to market, prepare for a SPAC or an IPO – or be looking to be acquired (as an exit strategy).
In this interview, Donna explains the discovery process the agency uses to find a client’s authentic story, exploring such things as:
- What is the company product and strategy?
- What is the genesis and the genius behind the product?
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What are the six components of success?
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Are you relevant?
- Are you bold and fearless? (If you’re not, what can you capitalize or own that would make you stand out?)
- Do you think out of the box?
- Do you listen to the market?
- Are you a disruptor or are you changing an entire category?)
Donna has found that the founder’s passion is often still in a company’s narrative for early- to mid-stage companies but the purpose of the product or solution may be missing. Hence:
- Why did you bring the product to market in the first place?
Donna mentors college students and younger associates in her agency. She emphasizes the importance of maintaining a strong network throughout a career. She can be reached on LinkedIn under Donna Loughlin, by email at donna@lmgpr.com. Her podcast, Before It Happened (https://www.beforeithappened.com/), focuses on visionaries and the future they imagine.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Donna Loughlin, President and Founder at LMGPR based in San Jose, California. Welcome to the podcast, Donna.
DONNA: Thank you so much for having me on the show.
ROB: It’s great to have you here. Why don’t you give us an introduction to LMGPR and the firm’s superpowers?
DONNA: Absolutely. First of all, LMGPR stands for Leadership, Momentum, and Growth, and that’s exactly what we do. I think that’s our superpower: we work with emerging market players and visionaries and we help them build their leadership and their momentum and their growth. That obviously doesn’t happen overnight; our relationships with our clients typically are a minimum of a year to launch and then going into, in some relationships, 7 to 8 years till they go through their IPO.
ROB: Got it. You are focused in, obviously, a key technology hub. People are starting sometimes from nothing, and they may not even know how to think or speak – I’m assuming “leadership” is largely a marketing leadership/ thought leadership perspective. Is that where people are coming from?
DONNA: It’s a combination of things. Obviously, curating the authentic story of the visionary and the founders is a key component, but also really dialing back and looking at why they even began to want to bring a product or a service to market – those epiphany moments where they decided, “I need to solve this problem, I need to bring this market, and I am the chosen one. I’m going to be the one that’s going to trade in the dog for a cat and put all my chips on the table and make it happen.”
Oftentimes those conversations start on napkins before they even make it to a whiteboard, or over a quick cup of coffee or my favorite sparkling beverage, Topo Chico. That’s about as raw as it can get.
ROB: Got it. For some people, I think starting a firm can almost be more instinctive. How do you take someone who might not even be able to tell you why they started the firm and get to the core truth of where this impetus for the business came from and decode that in an authentic way?
DONNA: It was actually almost a happy accident. I was a journalist before I became a professional public relations agent, so to speak. I was with Reuters and BBC, and I also did internships with the Washington Post. So, I had really deep editorial, journalistic roots that migrated into working with technology companies and working inside and doing a number of IPOs and very fast-paced IPOs during the dot-com bubble.
All that experience formed into this factor that started bringing me into more firsthand discussions with the backers, the investors themselves, the angel investors, the venture capital investors, which is huge in the tech sector. So, I started getting a lot of phone calls from them asking for help when I had a full-time corporate job, and I kept referring the business to friends. Then I realized one day, wow, I just referred X amount of business – I think I calculated it was something like $1.8 million in revenue that I could’ve put on my own plate. And I was referring it to people because I was a corporate person.
So, I stood back and thought, you know what? I actually think I have the makings for an agency. And that’s exactly how it happened. I started working and consulting with the venture-backed smaller companies and going in-house and working with the VC firms firsthand to get the companies airborne before they had marketing, before they had, in some cases, a product.
ROB: Got it. For someone who’s maybe not as deep in the tech industry, how would you explain what a typical client looks like? What’s a particular client that you could maybe drill a little bit into their own narrative and their journey to market?
DONNA: First of all, there’s no one-size-fits all. There’s no typical client. Each client is a very specific need. Sometimes clients come to us because they need to bring a product to market; other times, they need to raise funding because they have a product, but now they need to go to manufacturing. Others, they’re looking for an acquisition as an exit strategy, and others are getting ready for a SPAC or an IPO. So there’s no one-size-fits-all, as I mentioned.
But the process is the same. We like to take them through what I call a discovery process of looking for their authentic story. What is the company product and strategy? What is the genesis and the genius behind the product? And then being able to craft a story, looking at what I call six components of success, which are: Are you relevant? Are you bold and fearless? If you’re not, what can you capitalize or own that would make you stand out? Thinking out of the box, listening to the market. Are you a disruptor or are you changing an entire category?
Then as you mature and grow, it’s being agile and also gaining speed. Once a company comes to market – I just came back from CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, last week, and it was really interesting to see what was hot. Every year, analysts forecast what’s going to be hot. A lot of the companies that launched this year were virtual. They didn’t go to the show itself. These are mega companies, big companies that are public-facing – transportation, robotics, and consumer electronics companies. They didn’t show.
But what did show well were the smaller companies that were a little more nimble and a little more scrappy in some ways and didn’t necessarily have the big funding. They introduced products to market. So, you can still go to venues like that and see a little bit of a science fair. That’s something I particularly am always intrigued with when it comes to the tech sector. There’s always a little bit of a science fair, whether it’s in Silicon Valley or it’s in Atlanta or it’s in Carolina or it’s in Washington State. We have all these different belts of technology – Colorado, around the world, Portugal, parts of the UK, and even parts of Los Angeles have these gulches, so to speak, of innovation and technology. I think we’re really lucky that we constantly have this cycle of newness in the industry.
ROB: Absolutely. I heard a lot from CES this year where even some major exhibitors didn’t show up at the last minute. You walk into a main hall, there’s supposed to be a big booth and there’s just like a QR code of what would have been there at the booth. It really seemed like a different experience, and maybe some embryonic companies whose stories were quite early.
When you see someone who’s maybe not as polished and hasn’t been through your process, what are they missing from their story? What’s a common founder error when they’re thinking about communicating to market?
DONNA: I think the one great thing about early-stage companies particularly, and even as they evolve and become more mature and ultimately public, is the founder’s passion typically is still in the narrative and in the soul of the company. I think the part that oftentimes people miss is the purpose of the product or the solution. Why did you bring it to market in the first place?
If you think of something as common as a paperclip, a paperclip is a pretty low-tech product, but it actually adds a lot of functionality. I can clip it, I can clip papers, I can use it to fix my iPhone, I can use it to pick something out of my teeth, I can use it to also do basic IT to my computer. Pretty low-tech. But I think one thing about a paperclip – and I’m dumbing this down to literally a flea and a tick – is that a paperclip still has a purpose.
I think companies oftentimes lose sight of what their purpose is. What is that authentic component that you’re trying to get a consumer or business to adapt or adopt? I think as companies get bigger, sometimes they lose track of that. You’ve got to keep a pulse on what customers want. You’ve got to keep a pulse on, if you’re in a reseller channel, what does the channel need? What do the consumers want and what can your partners advocate as well?
ROB: It is always a challenge to keep the spotlight off of yourself and to, as many would say, make the customer the hero. It can be challenging to remember sometimes, especially when things thrive a little bit.
You have given us, Donna, some of your origin story and how you went from some of these news outlets and reporting to seeing an opportunity that was crossing your plate regularly. When did it become evident that this was going to move from single-player mode at first to multiplayer mode and you had to start thinking about maybe not doing everything, maybe training other people to do things that you felt like you’d been the best at over time?
DONNA: Your best IP is your talent, right? Going from literally working from my coffee table and my kitchen table and whatever table in the house I wanted to work from as an independent consultant – it happened pretty quickly. Within the first 90 days, it was clear that I needed to find some other media and PR talent.
So, I went online and found some great stay-at-home working moms who had taken time off from having children, and I created a great network of independent consultants. The working name for LMGPR internally was “Loving Mothers, Good PR,” because I had these amazing women that were working for me, and they had small children, and some of them are still with me to this day. Their kids are in high school now, and off to college.
Quickly I went from an individual to a network of independents to employees, and when I hit that employee mark that first year, that was a scary milestone move. It was like having more children. I was then responsible for the caretaking and the creation and the mentoring of their careers and their finance and really being instrumental in that. I think that was a big business step for me. At the point when I made that migration, I think we had about 10 clients, and those were 10 retainer clients.
I myself, the same year that I started the business, adopted two kids from Russia. So, I not only had an infant startup at home, I was managing and working directly with a lot of infant companies and taking them to market. I don’t recommend anyone do that, but I’m a multitasker, so it seemed to allow me to thrive and focus. It was like the AM/PM type of scenario.
As we’ve grown, we just celebrated a 20-year anniversary. I look back at the portfolio of companies that we worked with in the market – I’ll take security as an example. Cybersecurity was huge when I first started my business. Now we have security and artificial intelligence and the security of intelligence and blockchain and the need for security in blockchain, and then we have all the different nuances of security that’s built into the cars and the robots and all the IoT objects we have in our home. Watching the security world mature has been really interesting because all these products once upon a time were a la carte, and now we have all this integration.
ROB: There is so much going on in cybersecurity. I looked on your roster of clients; I recognize one of our Atlanta favorites with Bastille, so congratulations on working with them. Some would look at your timing – and congratulations on 20 years, by the way – and argue that you might have started the firm at perhaps one of the worst times to start a marketing firm in Silicon Valley.
DONNA: Absolutely did. [laughs]
ROB: What made that not the case for you? People who weren’t around or don’t remember, I was working for a venture-funded startup in 2000 and 2001, and going into 2002, we had three rounds of layoffs. We cut the firm size down by two-thirds; eventually had to compromise on a sale to an EMEA firm that bought this company. With that retraction in tech at that time, what made it work? Because there weren’t as many clients as there were two years before that.
DONNA: What made it work was a lot of the bigger national agencies – and I have respect for the big ones like the Bursons and the Edelmans, and I’ve actually done work for them in the past – were closing up their regional offices in the Silicon Valley to San Francisco, and there were a lot of boutique agencies. So, my competition had shrunk. In terms of working with emerging market companies, their retainer rates were typically around $10,000, but in some cases there were maybe projects that were three month stints for $15k. Their budgets weren’t quite as big, but if you did the calculations and you brought in thirsty clients and you were hungry enough to make a difference, you could build a business.
And I wasn’t the only one at that time; there were other advertising, marketing, and branding firms that also had the opportunity to pick up the slack, so to speak. Because the venture capital firms were a big funnel for me, I was getting venture-backed companies that had gone from scrappy to a little more of what I call the happy mode. They were probably six months to a year from bringing products to market. I think that was really a sweet spot, because you’re absolutely right; the market was not – I personally know a lot of people who lost jobs and were moving out of the Valley and cashing out of their houses. And you know what happened in the housing market; it was just nuts.
But I think it was using my own philosophy of being bold and fearless, and I never looked back. I think the only time you really want to use the rearview mirror is when you’re driving, and I clearly was not going to look back. I could go work in another corporate job and cycle through that and do some great things but having the variety and being able to choose exactly the innovations and the technologies – you mentioned Bastille; recently FireEye was acquired by McAfee, and I worked with that company for their first five years, taking them from literally 3 and then 5 and then 10 all the way up to 1,000 employees. So, I’m known for being able to scale and grow the business, but also scale and grow with that business.
ROB: That seems like a theme that would carry across from the venture side to the startups they work with. It’s a very interesting customer acquisition channel. It makes sense. I think some of the venture firms would project into the market that they are increasing the array of services they can provide. They may purport to have a PR arm. How much of that is a trend? How much of that is still smoke and mirrors, where they may still be cobbling together services underneath the umbrella of the firm, so they provide it, but it’s partnering with people who are focused practitioners? What’s that mix look like?
DONNA: I pride myself in that we do one thing and we do one thing only, and that is media relations. I don’t do social media. I don’t do product marketing. There’s a whole list of things that we don’t do. But there’s a lot of great people in the marketplace that can do brand positioning, meaning the physical. I feel like our core strength is the written and spoken word and taking that and turning it into the narrative that then helps churn the media, whether it be earned content, owned content, or digital content.
At one point we did have a social media team, and nobody really wanted to pay for it. I can’t give away those services for free. Social media for a period of time was considered to be something really inexpensive that you could offshore, and there were a lot of offshore services. So, you were competing not necessarily with other agencies, but you were competing with this offshore – Fiverr and those types of services. You can’t compete with that. The margins are too low. That’s when I realized, let’s do what we do best and what we’re known for, which is creating the leadership, momentum, and growth editorial content, whether it’s the earned content – talking to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and the trade publications – or it’s creating original content such as whitepapers or podcasts or those types of things. That I feel is the most valuable for our clients.
ROB: You mentioned upfront a couple of things. One, you mentioned the duration of a client engagement being on the longer side, and then you also mentioned retainers. It seems like that’s potentially a very instrumental tool in thinking about how to grow the firm. You mentioned having 10 retainer clients and how that potentially would embolden you to be able to bring on an employee because there’s a little bit more certainty than a bunch of little projects.
How, though, should a client think about the value of PR over time? I think a lot of times people get that splashy placement, that earned placement, and they don’t know whether money’s going to fall from the sky or whether it’s just going to shore up a conversation that we’re already having. How do they think about value?
DONNA: That’s a great question. I do think engagement is so important in building your relationship with a client, and it’s not about a transaction. It’s about people, and it’s about ensuring that the people in the room, whether it’s the C-suite, you have your core executive team, you have your engineering team, your sales team – all these different operational groups within the company might need PR for different reasons. I think the best clients are the ones that we’re working with in all aspects. Some companies are larger corporations, so we might just do PR for a division versus the whole corporation.
But bringing value starts with having realistic and authentic conversations and being transparent and being open, being able to really understand the company going into 2022, knowing exactly their top three business objectives, their revenue goals, their client goals, their tech and innovation competitive challenges that they’re seeing in the sales funnel. And to be able to look at PR not as a tool but as a strategic weapon that’s going to allow them to meet those goals, but also to be able to drive revenue.
At the end of the day, if my clients cannot bring in revenue – and I know each one of my clients has brought in revenue from very specific articles. Not every article is going to bring revenue, but the culmination over time of articles – we just did a poll this morning for a client; last year we had more than 1,200 articles that came out on a company that nobody heard of two years ago. Of those 1,200 articles, I’d say maybe 500 are really hallmark, feature-type articles. But the fact that we saturated the conversation within their market space, which is an electric motorcycle or transportation company, is a testament to being relentless.
So, showing value every day, constantly thinking – I always think the same way I did when I was an intern or when I was an editorial assistant: How hungry are you? Every day, I wake up hungry and thirsty, wanting to get results. I still squeal when I get an article in Forbes or Bloomberg or Wall Street Journals or the cover of Road & Track. That personally is the integrity of what it is that I was hired to do. So it’s showing that enthusiasm, showing that constant insightfulness of “How do we go faster? How do we go harder? How do we charge?” Not charge our client more but charge forward ahead to get results.
ROB: You mentioned in the trajectory of clients, leadership, momentum, growth – I wonder a little bit, because almost all of your clients are at some point new to market and then hopefully catering to different personas as they grow, does that align in some way with the customer adoption / technology adoption cycle of early adopters versus where somebody is in the maturity of a market? Does that affect what the messaging is along that LMG and where you place the message?
DONNA: That’s interesting. Let’s look at the electric vehicle (EV) market as an example. The first electric vehicle company I worked with was 10 years ago. Tesla wasn’t shipping 10 years ago. I’ve been in that space for a while, so I think I have a vantage point of having access to the early market analysts and the early channel players that were selling EV products and really being able to understand that particular category.
I fly. One of the things I love about flying is that I have a multitude of things that I need to make sure I’m in tune with when I’m flying. When I fly on commercial airlines, I can sit back and relax. But my name’s on the door, so at the end of the day, if I’m not in control of my plane with my client and being able to understand all the instrumentation and all the landing gear that I need to – because at any moment, things can change. When I talk about being agile, it’s like all of a sudden one of your customers came out with a product and they blindsided you, or you have a competitor that bought your #2 and #3 competitor and all of a sudden they’re like Goliath. Stock market crashes. COVID happens. All these things happen.
I think being calm and preventative – I don’t like the word “crisis communications”; I like preventative conversations so that you can actually defuse things very easily and stealthily, before maybe even the client sees it happening.
ROB: Got it. Certainly there’s a nuance to it. As you reflect, Donna, on your journey with LMGPR, what are some lessons you have learned that you wish you could go back and tell yourself?
DONNA: Maybe more sleep. [laughs] Ariana Huffington came out with a book about sleep not too long ago and I’ve yet to read it, but I thought that’s pretty amazing. Here’s this woman who’s a real powerhouse and she’s like, “Sleep is sacred.”
I think the second thing I wish I’d kept tabs on – this is pre-LinkedIn – is keeping the power of the network and keeping in contact and networking with people throughout your entire career. I always tell the younger team members that I’m mentoring – not just through my agency, but I also mentor through a couple universities and I sit on a board at a university – that the power of the network is so invaluable. You never know exactly when you’re going to tap in on something.
I just got a text and the same person really wanted to talk to me. Text, and he Slacked me and LinkedIn me. It was like three different trifecta levels. Like, who is this man and why is he trying to get a hold of me? Well, we had worked together a good 20 years ago, back when I was a reporter, and he’s transitioning into my career. He knew that because I was part of the digital boom and I was part of the networking boom and I was part of the security boom and all these other booms, I might know somebody who could be of service to him. He didn’t expect that I was still in the industry; he thought I’d retired by now. I’m like, why would I retire?
So, I think the power of that network and keeping connected with everybody in your career cycle is important. And I think the other thing is I’ve learned a lot from so many great people, mentors that I had access to, but I think taking time to mentor more is something – I mentor every day, but I recently got on the board for University of California Santa Barbara, working as a board member and mentoring women that are pursuing careers in STEM. I think STEM has become a commonplace term now, but we took so much of the STEM out of the classroom, and now we’re fortifying. It’s like with food. You take everything out and now you’re putting it back in.
I think that’s an area where I personally would’ve taken more computer science or more math. I took all those core things, but I didn’t pursue a career specifically in STEM. But I work with so many amazing people that are gifted in STEM. I feel like I’m street smart, and I think I would’ve loved to have taken some more of those classes when I was at UC Berkeley.
ROB: That makes so much sense. STEM has certainly come into so many areas of our lives where it was not previously present. We rewind to the beginning of the firm, and not everybody bought a computer. Sometimes they asked an expert what to buy. Now people just walk into Best Buy and pick a computer. They require so much more knowledge, and you can speak to different needs rather than just “It’s a computer.” There’s features that people care about.
DONNA: Do you remember – those listening might not remember at all, but you would go to Tandy RadioShack or some other component place and you’d buy all the pieces and you’d make a computer. The idea of walking into a big box store and buying a computer, needless to say under $500, just didn’t exist. When I first started, I had a word processor, and then I had the first Apple – I’m dating myself here for sure, but I had an Apple Lisa. That was my first computer.
ROB: Nice. Wow.
DONNA: And nobody knew how to use it. They said, “Kid, you’re the youngest one here. Learn how to use it.”
ROB: I definitely built some computers from parts and everybody looked at me like I was a little bit crazy. But it wasn’t crazier than what they wanted to charge me for it at the store.
DONNA: It’s amazing. You still have that computer?
ROB: Oh, no, that was a while back. But golly, there was a GTE Data Services location in Tampa, Florida that ran a Boy Scout Explorers Club where we were stripping down, tearing apart 8086 desktop computers down to the case, what’s the video card, what’s the RAM – we knew all that stuff. It was a different time, but maybe we could all learn from it.
Donna, when people want to get in touch with you and with LMGPR, how should they find and connect with you?
DONNA: There’s a couple places. LinkedIn I think is the best, under Donna Loughlin. And then you’ll see LMGPR there. My email is donna@lmgpr.com, and I don’t mind receiving emails from students and professionals both. I’ve talked about mentoring; I’m here to mentor the next generation in this industry.
And then my podcast, Before It Happened, is also a great place to check out, which is a podcast that’s focused on visionaries and the future they imagine. And there’s obviously a lot of tech and innovation in that podcast.
ROB: We will certainly get that podcast into the show notes for people to have a look and encourage everyone to subscribe. Donna, thank you for coming on the show and sharing from your wisdom and experience in the industry. It’s definitely appreciated.
DONNA: Absolutely. Thank you so much. Hopefully I’ll see you when I come out to Atlanta.
ROB: Sounds good. Be well. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Avi Kumar is Founder and CEO of Kuware, an almost 14-year-old business that bills itself “as a full-service agency, but a little bit more focused on strategy than actual implementation.”
The shift away from “traditional marketing services and taking customers as they came” started 5 years ago. Today, the agency works with clients who want to put some strategy behind their efforts and are less concerned about the agency providing implementation. Avi says it was very difficult when the agency first made that transition to, while it was trying to grow the business, turn away customers that did not have a strategy focus. Current clients not only need be willing to work with Kuware’s fractional CMO to develop a strategy . . . they also have to be ambitious about “big growth,” have funding or be ready to move to the next level, or to be invested in brick-and-mortar with a solid, fixed budget. When all the pieces are In place, the agency can say, “Get the whole package. We can really move you to the next level.”
If a prospective client is not yet serious about their business, they are not ready for Kuware.
The planning process takes a few months. Although written for a longer period of time, the agency contract allows a client to fire the agency within the first month. This tasks the agency to provide enough proof within that first month to gain a client’s trust that the value that will come.
In this interview, Avi describes the challenge for a growing agency of deciding “who to turn away.” The agency does not “fire” its small, established clients . . . but once a new monthly billing threshold Is set (based on its 50% billing “midpoint”), it will not take on new customers that fall below that threshold. The agency keeps developing processes to meet client needs and raising that threshold as more clients come onboard. Avi addresses in detail the impacts of hiring in changing an agency, managing its expenses, and determining people’s perceptions of an agency’s capabilities.
Avi started his career as an engineer, a microprocessor architect. On sabbatical from Intel, Avi decided to try ecommerce, did very well at it, and used it as an “on-ramp” to marketing. To ensure controllable costs and fast client service, the agency maintains a salaried development team in Avi’s home-country, India. He pays everyone 20% over the market, so that in the 11 years the company has been in India, “nobody has quit.”
The agency recently acquired a white-label PPC service which helps small agencies provide reasonably priced PPC for small niches in local markets. The PPC service is separate from Kuware’s agency operations, but the agencies which use it are the same small agencies to which Kuware refers clients that don’t fit its criteria.
Avi can be found on LinkedIn, on his agency’s website at: https://kuware.com/, or at: Avi@kuware.com.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Avi Kumar, Founder and CEO at Kuware based in Austin, Texas. Welcome to the podcast, Avi.
AVI: Thank you, Rob. Thank you for inviting me to this.
ROB: It’s good to have you on. You’re from one of those popular cities where everybody’s moving to in Austin, Texas, but let’s focus on Kuware for a moment here. Why don’t you tell us about the firm and where you specialize?
AVI: Certainly. Kuware is now coming up on its 14th year as a business. We right now bill ourselves as a full-service agency, but a little bit more focused on strategy than actual implementation. We do do the implementation, but what we found is what was lacking for a lot of businesses is they needed to figure out what kind of marketing they should do because just saying, “Just do Facebook ads” or “Just do this or that.” So we added that layer five years back, and we service it through a fractional CMO or a part-time CMO who comes on board and helps guide the strategy, and then go to the implementation.
That’s what, in five years, we have evolved to. Before that, we were more traditional, just taking on business as it came in a sense. If somebody wants ads, okay, we’ll do it. Need websites, being full-service, we’ll do that. But now we only take clients who want the strategy as part of it and who want to spend time figuring things out before implementing it. So that’s what we have evolved and started specializing that way.
ROB: That can be a pretty difficult transition. Lots of people start an agency as the order-takers, the people who can say, “What’s your budget? We’ll do our darndest with it. What are you trying to do? You want clicks, here’s your clicks.” How do you take someone who comes to you and they think they know what they want – there is this challenger sale moment where you’re like, “Hey, wait a minute, let’s take a step back. What do you really want?” Sometimes they’re like, “No, I just want this ad. I just want to spend this budget. That’s my job.”
AVI: That’s an excellent point. For us, I discovered this process along the way. We had some clients that had a few people in-house who were doing social media. We did their website and we managed the ecommerce and we were trying to do that. Then slowly, as I got to know the client for a while – and this client was with us for almost 10 years – after a few years, I said to them, “You know that person you keep hiring for social media and they keep quitting after six months? Why don’t you give us that, too?” They said, “Okay, you got it. Makes sense.”
Then I said, “Who’s planning your marketing?” They hired somebody, a new person, young, assuming that they knew what they’re doing, and in a year and a half they quit. So, I said, “What if we manage the whole thing for a fixed price for you? We’ll do the strategy.” So that’s how we started. This was a company, a brand of sunglasses, prescription glasses. They created the category.
In this case, being a single owner business, but a pretty good-sized business, we fine-tuned this, and then we convinced them, “Hey, you should sell direct. Don’t just sell through opticians only. Why don’t you sell direct also?” They said, “No way. Our retailers would be mad.” So, we figured out a strategy, convinced them, and they almost doubled their sales without losing any retailers.
Then I learned that this is what they needed – a little bit of the business side, but marketing-centric. If I go and build myself as a business consultant, it’ll be hard to explain that. Most marketers do give some business advice for free and some marketing strategy for free. So, I said, “Well, this client was willing to pay, and he sold.” They sold the company to Hilco. Much larger, $300 million company. They kept us around for a year because they were actually amazed at what we could do with our team. And they had a 50-people marketing team. They let us run this, and then eventually they absorbed it in-house.
That was the time I said, “Okay, we can do this for other clients and start selling it.” The hardest point was what you did identify: if somebody comes to us, “We’ve just got $2,000” – turning down that $2,000 was hard, because you’re still building the agency. They’re willing to give you $2,000 per month for a few months. We had to tell them, “Sorry, we don’t do that anymore. You should really spend money to figure out what you need and then plan.”
The other thing we started realizing is that this only works for companies who really think they want to double, triple, or who are brick-and-mortar who have fixed money already and they have a fixed budget. It doesn’t work for somebody who’s just trying and playing and not serious about the business. They need to be somebody who’s also ambitious. Either they’ve got funding, or they have decided now to really move to the next stage. Only then can we tell them, “Get the whole package. We can really move you to the next level.”
The other challenge is this stuff takes time, a few months. We sign them up for longer, but we have a deal that you can fire us within the first month. So, we’ve got to do enough in the first month to buy in their trust that, “These guys are not just planning. They’re actually saying things which make sense.” It took us a while, but we do have a system now where we are able to show them within a month the value that will come. Even if actual sales might not happen, they will see enough plans to say, “This will work” and continue on a longer term contract.
As a small agency, that’s the thing you’ve got to decide at some point, who to turn away. We keep increasing the threshold – “This much, no, this much, no, this much, no,” and then we moved on from there. It was a transition, for sure.
ROB: What size metric would you use to describe that you were at when you felt like you needed to start cutting off this low-end, very transactional customer?
AVI: Basically, in size metrics, what we said is that when we switched to more than 50% who we were billing at least $5k a month, then we said we might lose some – we didn’t fire any client if they were small ones. But we said, “We won’t take anymore, because we have proven that more than 50% of our revenue comes from these bigger clients who are willing to” – so that was our criteria. Once we get more than 50% of clients paying $5,000 a month and they are going for strategy – and usually the average client ends up at 20 to 25. So, we said, “Don’t take anymore. Just existing ones.” We do have some for now, 12 years, existing clients working. We’re still doing their social media. But it’s a lot fewer of them.
ROB: That also makes sense, how you’re able to then incubate this capability within the firm. It’s hard to go from not having an offering to having an offering, but when 50% of your clients need the service, you’re able to start building the processes, building the people. You’re not trying to go from nothing to something. You’re saying, “Here’s the offering. Now we know how to maybe repeat it a little bit.”
AVI: Absolutely. By the way, the building process part – even though we’ve been doing this overall 13 years and the last 5 years, this – it’s an ongoing process. It’s never set as a cookie-cutter, ever. Things change and the business changes. What we have said is just agree to the fact that the process itself will be changing, but we need a process. That’s what we’ve been doing.
ROB: Processes are all about enablement. They’re not about restrictions, they’re not about tying hands. They create freedom. It’s hard to feel that, because I’m not a process kind myself, but it’s necessary, or else you go crazy.
AVI: Yeah, absolutely.
ROB: Avi, what led you into this business in the first place? What led you to start an agency and originally start taking some ad budgets and then continue figuring out what the business needed to be?
AVI: I worked for a major corporation. I was a microprocessor architect. I worked on Pentium 4. I worked on some low power processors for Intel and going into Apple. It was a very different area. So, when I wanted to do something, I realized it’s impossible, almost, to start a hardware business. You want to do chip design? It’s very expensive. And I did try that for about a year. I had some funding from the Chinese government, but it didn’t go very far.
Then I had to pivot and say, okay, I want to do my own thing. My sabbatical came up; I left Intel. I wanted to start something different. I had enough money from Intel, from stock options, so I said, let’s play the stock market and do things on the side. That’s when I started looking at ecommerce and started doing and selling things from my connections in China online. This was 14 years back or so. I was not expecting to do well. Everybody knows so much SEO, they’re talking about techniques, and I’m a hardware guy. And marketing – I mean, yeah, I did have an MBS somewhere along the line, but they don’t teach you marketing there. It was more management. So, I was thinking this would never work.
But soon I found I became the number one seller of Windows XP online, and an Adobe reseller, by just doing a few things online. That’s what got me thinking, okay, if I can do this in three to four months, then I think I can help others too and create a business out of it. It seems like it’s not as – the system, everybody’s not exploited it yet. I used to assume that marketing guys knew everything; “How will I learn this?”
That’s where we just kept on doing ecommerce. First a lot more ecommerce. We were doing Zen Cart, if you can remember that. Then moved on to Drupal Commerce and Magento. Did a lot more ecommerce initially. The thing was, ecommerce people have money. They’re selling something, always. So that’s what we did a lot more, and then we moved on to B2B. So it was more of a slow process, and I didn’t trust myself in marketing for the first five years. I kept telling people, “I know slightly more than the customers but not much more.” That was a learning process also, just to try to figure that out.
ROB: Right, but ecommerce is a pretty good on-ramp for a lot of mathematical minds. It adds up. You can put some money in, you can get some money out, get some feedback on whether or not you’re doing a good job. This is one of these funny episodes we have from time to time where you’re a computer engineer from UT Austin, got your MBA, I’m a computer engineer from Georgia Tech, I have my MBA, and we get to hang out and talk marketing. [laughs] We have these episodes every year or so. We have engineers who have made their way into the marketing world.
AVI: The phrase I use is ecommerce is the closest you can get to engineering in marketing. If you’re used to engineering, ecommerce is the closest thing you can touch which looks/feels a little bit like engineering.
ROB: As you’ve had to grow the capabilities, grow the firm, sometimes you think about those key hires that have come at a moment where you needed a little something different in the business or it was really an inflection point. What are some of the people or roles that have made a difference in Kuware?
AVI: Early days, the first hire which people talk about, it should be done earlier than later, before contracting. I’m talking about beyond contracting. Of course, contracting and outsourcing still works, and we all have done that and we still do some of it. But your first full-time hire I think should be done as soon as possible. It really changes the game because you have to think about two people. You have to make enough money for two people now. You start thinking more seriously than just playing it as a game at that point. You’re responsible for people’s salaries at that point. I think that was a key. And that person was great. She was not a great marketer, but she was a great person to work with.
Then as I moved on, into the CMO world, I needed people with credentials beyond me so when I took them to clients, they’d say, “Oh yeah, they have experience. They can handle our CMO.” So those became our key employees later because their credentials they had from other places got us to easily sell that service – which we already knew how to do, but people still want to know who will be the CMO. Those became key people for us.
I think the next key thing for me was stop outsourcing. We used to do development outsourcing to India. Being of Indian origin, I said, “I’m just going to go to India and set up shop,” because I learned my first outsourcing team were outsourcing to somebody else. Being an Indian, I thought, “They will not fool me because I’m Indian origin, right?” But that happened to me. So, then I said, “I want my actual salaried team in India.” If you have a system, if you are doing it for low cost, I would say start owning the piece of it somehow.
To me, that building of the business that way gave us the stability that I never had to think – I mean, I can give a quote on any website without spending too much time now. I don’t have to depend on a freelancer or somebody telling me how much it’ll be so I can pad it and add my expense and do it because it’s all in-house. I think that changed the game for us, and for our customers, because now when customers say something needs to be fixed, it’ll be fixed overnight. And if it’s a small thing, we don’t even worry about billing it. It’s not worth the time to bill it. And they’re happy. Customers are happy that this happened so quickly.
ROB: Right, it’s a strategy to overserve. It makes a ton of sense. For people who find that idea, though, of salaried employees outside of their country intimidating, how did you get over that hill? I think about setting up a legal entity. What’s the local compliance, what’s all that look like? I would be scared a little bit. How do you think about it?
AVI: It was a hassle, for sure, absolutely. I would rather do business, I used to say those days, in China than India. I spent a lot of time in China with Intel. In India, in many places, things are not as clear. So, it was just a question of, I’m going to risk getting two to three people, and how much is it? It’s money which will go away. As long as I can afford that money, worst case, this will fail. That’s how I started. I start all situations by saying, “Can I afford this failure, this much money, pragmatically?” And that’s what I did with it. It worked. Great. We had to make some changes there. Another thing I did for outsourcing is I said I’m going to pay everybody over 20% the market. As a result, in our 11 years of company in India, nobody has quit.
ROB: Wow.
AVI: We have fired people because they didn’t work out, but they don’t quit because they’re going to another job. And India is like Silicon Valley of 2000, where people quit every three months for more money. We have managed to do that by keeping the salary slightly higher and not getting too greedy on how we pay them and compensate them in India.
ROB: Yeah, this past year we have a partner who’s very much in that outsourcing space in India, and I feel like they had to do about 25% bumps across the board to stop the bleeding from people. They had really good retention and then they got hit by the COVID compensation wave over there.
AVI: Yeah. I was concerned. My being of Indian origin didn’t help that part, because that was definitely the same worry, a U.S. company dealing with these entities in India.
ROB: One thing that you shared with us as we were booking is that you’ve recently undertaken an acquisition, which is a different sort of adventure in another entity. Talk about that process, how you figured out who you wanted to acquire, how you closed that transaction.
AVI: Sure. For a year and a half, I was saying, “I need to grow faster; should I invest?” This opportunity – this is a white label PPC service. The reason I was very intrigued by this is we do PPC for our clients. Our clients’ ad spends are in hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, so these are big, and they allow us to experiment. I thought, we do this and our clients let us do whatever; are we really good? There must be somebody who does only PPC. If anybody does only PPC and nothing else, they must be good because that’s all they do. So, I used to keep hiring consultants from other companies to audit us. But anything they told us was not eye-opening. Some good ideas.
When I ran into this opportunity, Rob Warner’s company InvisiblePPC – he’s out of the UK – I said, “Oh, you guys do just PPC ads, and you do it for agencies, and you are not working with a $100,000 budget. Most of your clients are spending $5,000-$10,000 a month, which means these small clients, if they don’t see the results, are going to fire you. You’ve got to figure this out very quickly on $5,000, so you must be really good, right? I’m very intrigued just understanding how you do this.” I had a technical interest in seeing how he does it. As I talked to Rob more, I realized they really know.
And by the way, the secret sauce, which I’m happy to give away, is simple: if you do the same kind of ads again and again, and once you spend hundreds of millions of dollars doing it for those sectors, you become really good. What the white label service does – it only works for smaller agencies who cannot do their ads, and we take only what we call smart niches. If it is a local business – plumber, HVAC – those we have figured out exactly, so we can tell you for $1,000, you’ll get so many leads, guaranteed. Because we have been doing it for so long.
It’s unlike our main agency business. There, every client is special, is different. We have to figure out and tell them in advance the cost per acquisition, work together. Here, we are able to actually tell our clients that “This is what it’ll be.” It’s an amazing business that way. If it fits the right kind of client and right agency, it’s like a no-brainer. You will not lose money. How often can a marketer go to a client and say, “Yes, I’ll get you a lead for this much, guaranteed, don’t worry, and first month you’ll have it. You won’t have to wait for two months for me to do planning”?
That’s what this white label business does. Once I saw inside, doing this again and again and spending that much money and becoming a Google Premier Partner and having access to all that is amazing. That’s where I felt great – it’s a technology kind of business, and I understand this stuff, and Rob had built a lot of tools which are proprietary tools that others don’t have. I can tell who is advertising in the local market. I can use that. Even SEMrush don’t do that. So we can really target that kind of thing.
As a growth strategy, I think if it matches and you understand the business, then acquire. That’s what I learned. If we were taking on something else which we didn’t do at all, then we’d have to figure it out. At least the systems we follow there, but we know PPC. We have done it. We understand the business in general. And we can keep it separate in a sense and not mess with it. We are a big agency. Our clients are not the clients of agencies who come there, because it’s a very different business.
Also, as I was telling you, those $2,000 a month ones who we don’t want to take on, now we can pass on to those agencies and say, “Hey, we don’t deal with that. Here are some clients for you. You guys do their social, because unfortunately we don’t take them on.”
ROB: The predictability of it certainly makes sense. If you’re a plumber, there’s lots of places you can get leads, and you’re going to pay for them. You’re going to pay for Yelp, you’re going to pay for Angie’s List. If your PPC partner can’t be in that ballpark or better – there’s a price tag. They know what the expected price is, and you have to match it. But I guess those platforms also know what the going rate is for a PPC lead and they probably reprice a little bit according to the market rate as well.
AVI: Exactly. It’s just the volume and having done the same thing. HVAC in Boston to Austin will not be that different. It will be very similar pricing. We have data on both cities, so we can tell you exactly. I’m amazed at the fact that you can have this predictable marketing and still saying, “Let’s figure it out together.”
ROB: Some agencies are probably glad for the business, they’re glad for the backend help. I can see some of them being a little bit apprehensive about working with a white label PPC partner that’s also owned by somebody who could arguably steal the business if the client grows up. How do you calm those fears?
AVI: In some ways, if they don’t know the details, it’s a legitimate fear. If I was an agency, I’d worry about that. Two things. There are different people running those two companies. I just own it, and I kept that team intact. My team is not talking to them. I mean, they’re talking in the sense – our business, we transition to them the smaller ones. But otherwise, keep it separate. That’s one.
The other one is we have looked at the market. We don’t take on local clients who need local SEO. These are exactly that. So those ones, that is never our market. Unless they are a nationwide company, they’re not our client. It becomes a very different story. That’s what we tell them.
And here’s the other part. I teach our company – we have started presenting to our company the details of how to build an agency. Exactly how to build an agency. That’s available to our agency partners. We’re teaching those as courses. “Go and build your agency like this if you want. This is what we did.” That’s the added value we are giving to them. We’ll tell you how we do it so you can compete with us and grow if you want to. That’s open.
Just to be fair, there’s no doubt we will add more white label services. Right now it’s pure PPC, but I do foresee – why not Facebook ads too? But we will keep that always focused on a special market, not for everybody because it just does not make sense.
ROB: It helps to think about that all in abundance. There really is no shortage of business out there for most people in services firms; it’s just about earning that business, being known, liked, and trusted, all of that sort of thing.
If we rewind a little bit, Avi, and look at the big picture of Kuware, we look at the journey, what are some key things you’ve learned along the way that you might go back and tell yourself to do a little bit differently if you had to start fresh?
AVI: One thing which it took me a long time to learn, because I came from salaried employee, very well compensated options and things – I was not used to this concept – even if the bank was willing to give me a loan, I would not take it. I said, “It needs to be bootstrapped or it needs to be VC funding.” So one of the things I would tell myself is, hey, if it is a business, you want to grow it? Get that capital. Not as equity capital if possible. That’s the only way you’ll grow, and it’s okay. Be comfortable with it.
The other part I’ve learned is that things will break. Get used to it. This took a while. Initially, “What are we going to do now?” When we acquired this business, things happened, and I realized that I’m so calm about it. It’s okay. I would be surprised if things didn’t break. That means something is hidden, something is not working right. That is the advice I would give everybody. Stay calm. You’ll figure it out. Things will go wrong. It’s a business. Things will not run smoothly, ever. In fact, if they’re running too smoothly, then you’re not aggressive enough. You’re not growing. Things will have to break, and then they break, you’ll figure it out. That’s the advice I would give myself if I went back when I used to get very worried and unable to sleep. Now I can handle it.
ROB: There are so many ways to respond to that breaking. There is sleeplessness, there is frustration. Some people take it out on people, and I think that’s something people dread when they’re going to work for a smaller, privately held business. Sometimes somebody needs to be fired, and the rest of the time you just go figure it out together. It’s usually not the first one. It’s usually not that somebody needs to be fired because it’s usually my fault in the business anyhow.
AVI: Correct. I tell people in my team, don’t do the same mistake again and again. I learned this at Intel. You’re allowed to every day do a mistake, but don’t do the mistake you did yesterday. In a smaller business it’s harder, but I said, “It’s okay. It’ll happen.”
The other thing is a rule – we came up with this – a lot of times it’s clients. At that time, I’ve got all the way down through the hierarchy that any of our associates can fire a client because it’s not working. They don’t have to go all the way to ask us because it’s a big client. Some clients say “Eff this, eff that.” I don’t have a problem if they talk to me in a friendly manner and they’re friendly and they do that. But if they do that with meanness, then the f-word is a problem at that point. Then we don’t take it. As simple as that.
So, our employees feel very empowered, and as a result they go to bat for us. They will do extra work because they know they have the right to decide if somebody is not working right with them. Those are the kinds of things – that took a while. Earlier, it was always this worry about what’ll happen. One client goes and what happens? But slowly – it’s a journey, for sure.
ROB: It sounds like you have your mind and your eyes already a little bit on what else might be viable as a white label service to add on. What comes to mind? Is it Instagram in a box? Is it SEO? What scales similarly?
AVI: The local SEO will scale. Facebook ads is very similar and will scale. TikTok ads will scale. They are very specialized services, and Facebook and all is harder, but it’s getting very specialized. Anything which is specialized and localized will scale and can be added as a service, and it’s harder for people to learn. Those will scale.
But at the same time, I’m not of the mindset, like some other white label agencies, “We’ll do everything for you.” If you’re running a marketing agency, there’s a part of it you’ve got to do. You cannot just be a manager outsourcing everything to somebody. You’ve got to find some areas where you’re good, especially if you want to grow. You’ve got to start owning a few of those pieces. That’s what I tell the agency owners. You don’t do PPC right now, but if you find that’s the area eventually you want, you’ve got to take it on. There are some things you’ve got to start keeping in-house. Otherwise you’re becoming a manager and you will not learn the marketing aspects to grow to the next level.
I’m not envisioning building a white label agency which does “Just give it to us, we’ll take care of it for you. Just talk to the clients.” I want to keep it specific services which you handle here, and we will do it for you kind of thing.
ROB: Got it. That’s really interesting. It’ll be interesting to hear as you evolve in that direction, as you consider more acquisitions. There’s all sorts of mechanics to get into in acquisitions that we won’t deal with in the moment, but are fascinating in and of themselves.
Avi, when people want to find and connect with you and with Kuware, where should they go to find you?
AVI: I am most active on LinkedIn. That’s the best way to find me. Kuware also. I’m just Avi at Kuware. That will work. Also direct email will absolutely work. LinkedIn message will always work. Of course, LinkedIn has become a little bit – everybody’s trying to prospect so much, and we offer a service too, so we are in the same game in some ways. But for sure, any message which has something substantial gets through fine. That’s not a problem. LinkedIn will be the best way to find me. Avi at kuware.com would be the other great way to do it. I do hardly any Twitter at all.
ROB: [laughs] Sometimes it’s safer that way. Avi, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast, to share with the audience. We will be glad to keep an eye on your journey, and certainly wish you the best. Maybe we’ll all get out to Austin next year. We’ll see.
AVI: Yeah, that would be great, Rob. Thank you. It was very natural talking to you. That part was absolutely great. I’m looking forward to staying connected and chatting more.
ROB: Sounds good. Thank you so much, Avi. Be well.
AVI: All right.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Matthew Hunt built and sold two agencies over the past decade. Automation Wolf is his third iteration.
In his second agency, after losing almost two years of momentum because he never “got around” to marketing his own business, he hired another marketing agency to promote his agency. Although he was not completely satisfied with the result, he says, “80 percent done is better than not done at all” and his agency finally gained momentum and grew.
In this interview, Matthew explains his understanding of what a lot of agencies don’t understand – that clients are “not looking for a do-it-yourself model or a done-with-you model” and “not looking to coach-and-consult it.” He claims, “They're looking for done-for-you model.”
Matthew believes that most agencies should probably not be trying to do for themselves what they do for their clients. He has found that webinars, epic inbound-outbound marketing efforts, and labyrinthine Rube-Goldberg-machine sales funnels don’t work. He proposes that the most important website component for agencies with under a million dollars in annual revenue is a “ten-minute amplifier video,” where the owner-founder (usually an agency’s best salesperson) articulates the transformation the agency can provide for its clients. Skip the blogs. Skip the podcasts. The abbreviated VSL (video sales letter, which Matthew says needs to be “done right”), social proofs of success (before-and-after reports, analytics screenshots, and brief descriptions of how the agency effected change), a scrolling list of customer testimonials, and the price are all a smaller agency needs to drive business. The goal is to get as few leads as possible but to get pre-qualified, pre-sold leads and to close them all.
As it grows, the “filter” for an agency is not how much money it will take to scale, but how much time you can put into it. Matthew holds that low effort, high-impact demand generation is the most effective way to generate business. He recommends connecting with clients and potential clients on LinkedIn and posting helpful, short-form (snackable) content to build relationships and entice potential customers to the agency’s VSL. Matthew says, “People only buy from people they know, like, and trust, and no selling can be done until you actually establish trust.” He then goes on to say that the biggest mistake many people make with inbound and outbound is they're always trying to sell too early.”
Matthew discusses the challenges an agency faces in building an agency team and a “referral engine” and the strategies he has employed to move his agency quickly through the phases of startup . . . stay up . . . and scale up. He can be found as Matthew Hunt on LinkedIn or on his agency’s website at: automationwolf.com.
ROB: Welcome to The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host Rob Kischuk and I am joined today by Matthew Hunt who is the founder at Automation Wolf based in Toronto Ontario, welcome to the podcast, Matthew.
MATTHEW: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for having me.
ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by giving us the rundown on Automation Wolf? What is your sweet spot?
MATTHEW: Automation was created because it was one of my own problems. I wish I had had this service when I built my first two agencies. Most agencies, at the end of the day, suffer from what we call the cobbler's kid goes with no shoes syndrome – where they're so busy taking care of their team and their existing clients that they never get around to doing their own marketing. I remember my second agency, so this is my third agency. I've had two that I sold in the last ten years and built – this is the third one. But my second one, I remember losing almost two years of momentum because I kept thinking we were going to get around to doing our own marketing. Finally, after two years, I finally bit the bullet. I hired another agency to do marketing for our marketing agency. It wasn't done perfectly, but I'll tell you something – 80 percent of done is better than not done at all. So even though I didn't think it was perfect and it wasn't exactly what I wanted, it provided so much momentum. That's when we really started to grow, so sometimes you just got to do it.
ROB: What was the lag time from pulling the trigger to impact? Because there's kind of some shortcuts . . . there's some cheats . . . there's some fast forwards you can do and then you really have to do the work and build the engine, right?
MATTHEW: Yeah, totally. What's really interesting is another thing a lot of marketing agencies tend to make mistakes with is they think what they do for their clients is what they should do for themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. I spent a lot of time doing a lot of inbound marketing and then even trying outbound marketing. In general, both were pretty epic failures for my agency. Same thing with webinars or doing other things like this . . . they really did not produce the results that I was after. I would say that's the case for most marketing agencies. They can't understand, or there's two things – one is it becomes sort of, for lack of better vocabulary, but of a mind eff because it works so well for your clients, but then it doesn't work for you. The second thing, right? You're like, “Why is this working for clients but my own damn agency, it doesn't work for.” The second thing is a lot of times the thing that they do for their client isn't the right thing for them because they're not – they shouldn't be using the same filter, The filter you should be using for your own agency is really a different question than the money question. That's usually what people are asking, like “What's the ROI and how much money can I throw at this thing to scale this thing up?” That's not the real problem for them. The real problem is time. How much time can you provide? What you want to look at is, “What is the thing that we can do as an agency that is a low effort but yet high impact? That's the first thing. So, to get things in the right order. Once you use that as a filter, what you're going to discover is, it's much like growing up as a kid – if you've ever raised kids. I've got 3 of them myself now. But they have to learn how to sit up first before they crawl. Then they learn how to crawl and then they learn how to walk, and then they learn how to run. Then, when they get to be – my kids’ age now is teens, they start to do backflips off the back shed of the house and you go, “My god! Get off the shed! Why are you on the roof?” Right? But that's a good problem to have. That's one filter. The next thing is really understanding. You know how your ideal clients actually buy and where your best customers come from. Once you understand that, then you start making the right marketing decisions. A lot of agencies, what they don't understand is their clients don't actually want to know how to do something – they're coming to you because they're not looking for a do-it-yourself model or a done-with-you model. They're not looking to coach-and-consult it. They're looking for done-for-you model. They're also busy as well, too. In general, the first thing that most agencies need to do is get their ten-minute amplifier video on their website that explains what sort of transformation they provide for other people. The reason why you want to do this – some people call the VSL, but a VSL is way too long. If it's more than ten minutes, it's too long. That's the first asset you need because, what it does, it multiplies you. Usually, who's the best salesperson in your organization? Yeah, usually owner-founder. If you can create your signature system and you can clearly articulate the transformation that you provide for people – from the before and after state that they're going to receive – in ten minutes or less and you don't gate the video, people will watch it and they will fill out your contact form and you've already done the demo. So, then you're only getting people . . . and you should put the price in there too and that is the only thing you need. And if you're a marketing agency that's under a million dollars per year, if you do anything else besides that VSL and a whack of testimonials down below, you are totally wasting your time. Do not do anything else. Do not blog. Do not create a podcast. Do not. You do not get to collect go and collect your two hundred dollars. That is where you need to start. If you haven't done that, that's the only thing you need to do. Then you need to find a way to get people to that VSL. Getting them there is not as hard as you think. You don't need as many people as you think either, because the goal is not to get lots of leads and fill your calendar with loads of leads. The goal is to get as few leads as possible but close them all. And have them pre-qualified before they get there, right? And if you can have them pre-qualified, pre-sold, then the time that they get to you – you can suck at sales and you can charge more. Because you shouldn't seem like everybody else – which is like all your other competitors – which is probably a sea of sameness. If – just go ahead and do this – please type in digital marketing agency of any kind that you want. You go and do this right? Go to Google right now, I dare you to pause this and go and look. I want you with it, quickly go and look at all the digital marketing websites from city to city to city, from service offer to service offer – you all look exactly the freaking same. Then I dare you to go and look at your Google analytics or whatever analytics tool you want to look at and look at what is the average time on your website. It's probably a minute. What do you think all this other stuff is doing for you at the end of the day? I know you sell this as a service – to blog and create content and to run ads into having these epic crazy labyrinth funnels that one thing triggers to another thing, which triggers this email, and this triggers this upsell, in this downsell and ends up turning into this giant Rube Goldberg machine which is totally cool. Don't get me wrong – I am wowed by it. It is awesome and there was so much work into it, but it didn't do anything for you. It didn't create any transformation. It didn't help you, except for create a whole lot of noise, a whole lot of effort, and provided very little impact for you. So, these are some things I want you to consider. The other thing I want you to consider is usually when you're focused on inbound and/or outbound, it's very, very small thinking. It does not leverage what you have already created because most agencies, right, or businesses, begin organically and grow out of referrals. The business grows, which is awesome. But what happens is the business grows and you get some people on payroll and then you have mouths to feed and mortgages to cover and it starts going, “Oh, crap! This is a serious business!” And then you go, “Oh, a client left.” Or, all of the sudden you have a bad month or Covid hits and shish hits the fan and you're like, “I need a consistent way of getting business,” and so you think the solution is . . . more leads. You're like, “Hey, that worked for my clients and B2C. We sent the gym or the dentist or the lawyer the whatever more business and they're loving it. This is going to work for my agency too.” And wrong. It doesn't, you don't need leads, what you need is a consistent way of getting more referrals and staying top of mind with your existing clientele, with your existing partners with, your existing network at the end of the day, without coming across as being salesy or sleazy because nobody likes to be marketed to. Including you, right? Marketers are the most jaded people in the world, right? Nobody likes to be sold to – so it has to feel invisible. So, if it has to feel invisible, it has to be low effort but high impact. Well, what do you do? What I usually recommend is that you look at doing something called Demand Gen. Demand Gen is just a simple way of saying putting helpful content out there that makes people more awesome and gives you the ability to do one to many selling, ideally to your existing warm network. Now, if you're going to do that, a great place to begin is emailing them if you have a list with your database but more ideally, that feels like marketing, a better thing to do is make sure you're connected with them on a place like LinkedIn and then publish little short snackable content on LinkedIn where they go. They don't go to LinkedIn to consume long-form content or read articles or blogs they go to LinkedIn because they treat it like any other social media network and they're in the mindset to discover, maybe learn something very quickly, and/or most likely procrastinate before and after meetings, right, is what they're doing. If you do, that your warm network will see you being helpful and will keep you top of mind. Then they continue to send you referrals. Good things happen and more opportunities come up because, at the end of the day, people only buy from people they know, like, and trust. No selling can be done until you establish trust. So, the biggest mistake that people make with inbound and outbound is they're always trying to sell too early. It's they’re eager beavers, right?
ROB: So, we poke in tactically a little bit on LinkedIn. Obviously, strategy level makes sense. Tactically, you get all sorts of advice all over the map. You have your brand page. You have companies developing entire initiatives around getting their team to share their brand content. Sometimes there's just the founder as a salesperson in an authentic way. What kind of mix of activity do you see as effective? It seems to me it's a golden age in LinkedIn right now. I see nothing but opportunity there. But there's a lot of ways to waste time, too.
MATTHEW: Totally. So, we have a system that we recommend agency owners follow. It's called the “ACES” method – to keep it simple. Basically, you're asking what kind of content do we create and what is most impactful, right? And how do we do this? Here's how you the ACES method – Authority, Connect, Engage, and Show. Authority is anything that you want to be known for, that you know really well, that you can share – where you can offer a tip and make people more awesome. Connect is anything that hits the heart, the gut, and/or the funny bone – comedy goes a long way. Engage is not necessarily always having to come up with the content – a lot of time you can ask your network, your community, your connections for advice to start conversations. Let them create the content for you to gamify a little bit. Why do you always have to be the one coming up with the content? The last one is Show. We don't tell, we Show. We don't want to come across as braggadocios, right? We don't want to be telling people and beating our chest about how amazing we are. What we want to do is give sneak peeks behind the scene. We want to show before-and-after transformations or screenshots of analytics and growth with a little tip of how you went about doing it. This positions you as an expert on what you're doing by showing. If you do that and then break it up into the different content formats – we've got video, text posts, images, and polls, and then pdf documents – those are basically the core types of content, because you don't know what people enjoy. Do a version of each. I only put a post out per day. That's how you stay top of mind. It's all about consistency, right? They can't trust you if they don't like you. They can't like you if they don't know you. So, step one is about being consistent. The biggest challenge is most people are inconsistent. We all know we’ve got to go to the gym on a regular basis and eat clean if we want to be fit, right? That this is not brain surgery. Well, it's the same thing with LinkedIn, you need the consistency. The problem is time. It’s why most people fail. This is why we created one of our personal branding LinkedIn products. We created a product because this would solve this problem – where someone can spend an hour-and-a-half with us per month and we will create all of their social media, snackable content including for LinkedIn, and post it every single day. The way we do it is we record them via Zoom with the intention that snackable content is the lead domino which gets all the videos, and the videos that inspire all the text posts, the images, the polls, the pdf document carousels, etc., and then we post it for them. Basically, we created a product that allows people to look like they go to the gym every day and eat clean. Yet, they only have to go to the gym once a month for an hour and a half.
ROB: It's like a filter for your social media. You just put the filter on, everybody looks good. You hinted at it and I'm curious. You said, you had your previous agencies. You sold them. You had one agency that came in and did things about 80 percent right, and then you started Automation Wolf. Number one, what led you to want to dive back into the fray and then start over again? Number two, what was that difference – the twenty percent between what was done for you and what you felt like needed to be done for others?
MATTHEW: Great questions. I sold my shares in my second agency due to partner conflicts. Having partners is a very tricky ship to sail. When it works well, it's amazing. When it doesn't, it's like going through an ugly divorce. It's never fun. So, we went through our divorce and I was not finished with my mission yet on creating the business that I wanted to create. That's what sent me back to the fray now. We had an inbound marketing agency that we were a Goldspot, a Reseller of Hubspot, did PPC, did SEO. We were mostly focused on enterprise clients, mostly Fortune Five Hundred. Very successful agency, did very, very well. I was in a non-compete – to not able to do any sort of inbound marketing for two years – which is fine. When you sell your shares, that's the rightful thing that needs to come up – which led me to doing outbound. Yeah, it was like, “All right, fine. I can't do inbound. I'll do outbound.” So, I started the outbound agency. We basically sprayed and prayed. We basically spammed people on LinkedIn, used LinkedIn automation. We cold emailed you and did all kinds of stuff. Throughout that process, I quickly realized what worked and what didn't work. The reality was outbound sucks even more than inbound and works even less if you really want to piss the whole industry. Inbound is the same thing but when you do inbound and outbound, you're focused on the exact same market which is the 1 to 3 percent of the market that's in market right now. So, you can grow that way. Inbound, you don't feel it emotionally because you don't see all the nos. When you do outbound, you feel it immediately because everybody tells you how much they hate you in the process, right? What the challenge that I realized was – both are not the correct answer. The right answer is actually creating demand first so you can do outbound and inbound. You want to put them into an invisible marketing funnel where you're adding value first and creating demand. Once we switch around to being focused on that – wow! Magic happened. So, we focus a lot on personal branding on LinkedIn so you can connect with people and put them in a controlled environment where they can get to know, like, and trust you. You could do it through an interview series just like you're doing right now, you can do it through community, you can do it through all different ways. There's a lot of different tactics that do it. But, at the end of the day, all we're trying to do is take a group of people and put them in a controlled environment where it doesn’t feel like we're marketing and selling to them. Then we can do one-to-many selling to them where they can get to know, like, and trust me and they can go across that trusto meter to like – ding-ding-ding-trust – that once they end up in our pipeline, they're presold. And this way we can suck at sales and we can charge more money. And that's basically the gist of it, at the end of the day, once you set up a system like that and use the right tactics in the right order, you're off to the races. The right order is always not based on money. It's based on your time.
ROB: Yeah, it's certainly about kind of getting to that distinctive place. You mentioned you can do a ten-minute video but you've got to look different from the other thousand agency websites that people saw along the way. Peter Thiel put it differently in saying he likes to be a monopoly. You're talking about a way of being a monopoly in the eye of the buyer. When it comes time to buy, you just can't predict, that you can't time it. That ten-minute video, to me – maybe to some people that's a short video – that sounds like a lot. What is the structure of a good ten-minute video that introduces someone to an agency and starts to build that layer of trust?
MATTHEW: That's a great question. There's absolutely a format to doing it. I'll tell you the format and the framework that I follow every single time that works like gangbusters. One is, your first thirty seconds should be a big giant epic promise. For example, when it comes to our LinkedIn services, ours is, “How to get new clients right now from LinkedIn, organically. I'm going to show you how to create all your LinkedIn content by only spending one-and-a-half hours with my team each month.” That's it. That's the offer, right? Something like that. The second part is, who it is for, and who it is not for? You can't be all things to everybody. It's really important that you niche down. That’s the case. So, for us, we call it out, “Hey! We work with consultants, coaches, people who do B2B, B2B, SAS companies, and agencies. That's, “If you're in B2B and your audience is on LinkedIn, this is for you.” The next thing you need to do is tell them all the things that they want and that they've been lied to. It's really, really important that you shout out that they've been lied to because you have to absolve them of their problems. If you tell them it's their fault, they're not going to listen to you. But if you tell them, “It's someone else's fault that’s lied to you,” then you're going to get their attention. Now that you have their attention, you start going through and describing their problems better than they can describe themselves. You need to hit the hot buttons, fears, frustrations, wants, and aspirations. Remember, if you can make it sound like you're reading their mind, you're saying the stuff they're thinking but they won't say out loud, you know you've hit the hot buttons. Once you've been able to describe their problems better than they can themselves, the next thing is to have counterintuitive thinking about what the problem is. It must be something that’s new. So, if you'll notice me, I keep playing with this theme, ‘inbound sucks, outbound sucks, but demand gen is right’ – here's the old way of doing things versus the new way right? We're playing constantly with FAQ’s versus SAQ’s, so, frequently-asked questions versus should-ask questions. You know when you discover a problem, the questions you ask to discover it are not going to solve it. You have to ask deeper questions to get there. This is why the five whys exists right? There's a whole system from this – “Why did that happen? Well. why did that? And why did this? Why did that? Why?” And then you get to the root cause of really what's causing the problem and if you can come up with this counterintuitive thinking that is different than everybody else's saying – Boom! That's called positioning and you are no longer in the sea of sameness. You are now unique. You are now monopoly like you said, right? Once you have the monopoly you need to have a very simple signature system that explains what it is that you do. I recommend that everybody have a three-pillar system. So, mine is short-form, long-form, community, which is tied to “know you, like you, trust you.” You have three pillars. Usually you have a three-step process for each pillar, so you have a three-by-three matrix. If you can clearly articulate the matrix, then you're good-to-go to get their attention. You clearly state what you're going to charge, so that it's not a surprise to anybody. Nobody should be coming into your marketing funnel who doesn't know what the approximate price is going to be. You don't want to talk to them. You want to spend a lot of time on repelling just as much as you were attracting. This way, by the time they get to you, they're pretty qualified. You didn't have to spend thirty minutes qualifying them when you could have used an automated ten-minute video to do so, right? Then, a sign of the only thing you need is some sort of social proof of success, of transformation – before-and-afters or a whack of testimonials on your site. If you go to my website today, it's a 1-page website with nothing else that you can do except watch a ten-minute video or read the endless scrolling testimonials that are there of our clients. The only thing you can do is reach out and connect to us, so you have no other options. There's nowhere to be confused about what to do. That business in twelve months has grown an agency from zero to over a million dollars of recurring revenue.
ROB: That's solid. It sounds like you're at a price point where, if you're demonstrating results, it recurs at loops. You keep building. You scale the process. All of that clearly makes sense and you've kind of shorthanded. But if you really get down to it, in particular, what are some things you're doing differently this time, what you know? You built two companies before. What did you learn in those – obviously a partnership lesson, but outside of that – what have you learned that's different this time?
MATTHEW: Less is more, right? Which we all know. Even this system here that we're doing on-demand gen – we just launch one service per year and perfect it. This last year, we perfected the LinkedIn content creation, demand gen system. It's awesome, man. It's perfect. It took a whole year. They do it really well. Next year, we're adding on a few more services. So, do one thing at a time. The one thing. I think there's a whole book on it – just the one thing, right? So, that's the big lesson – less is more. The next big lesson is, spend a lot of time on operations and hiring, on talent and training your talent, and supporting your team, right? You don't want to have false starts. Your team is everything, especially for an agency. Your highest expense is going to usually be people. People are difficult – more people, more problems. It's not like Biggie said. Biggie said, “Mo money, Mo problems.” It's not. It's more people, more problems, right? So, focus on really developing the team and understanding the team and understanding what that looks like and getting a lot of referrals. That next thing is, if you deliver what you say you're going to deliver and you even come close to coming to what you say you're going deliver, you will get referrals – and a ton of referrals. So, if you get the referral engine going, you get the team going, I would say that you've got a decent startup and a proof of model. The goal from a startup is to get to stay up and then from stay up is to scale up. I believe that you can do it in a three-year period. Usually, year one is startup. In my case, I even had year one as a false start, focusing on the wrong business – which is proof of model really, right? So, proof. So, it's one thing to sell it. It's one thing to keep it. It's a little bit of the balance of two. I was able to sell the cold emailing spamming thing because people want to buy that too, just like inbound. But ultimately it kind of worked. I wasn't really excited about it. It didn't focus on my unique ability. It didn't make me happy. I didn't go to bed going, “Oh, my god! That was a great day!”. It was like, “Oh, my god! I just spammed the world. I’m a fraud, right?” You know, you’ve got to love what you do, too. But once you get the right thing that people want to buy and then you can keep them, then you've got what’s called proof of model and that's really your first year. The second year, and the way I’m looking at this is the first year is proof of model, the second year is getting up or the first years is about getting you out of operations – the day-to-day operations – so, that the second year, you can focus on marketing, selling, and talent acquisition. The third year is scale up that you can get you out of marketing, selling, and talent acquisition. Then once you're out of the third year you have the option at that point to keep it as a running asset because it doesn't take . . . you should only be attending the board meetings and a few other things or you have an asset that you can sell, right? Which is exactly why you bought the business or created the business. Whether you bought it or created it, that's it. If you can't do that in a three-year period, you're probably on the wrong track – you're probably spinning your wheels and not focusing on the right things. That's a very realistic and fair amount of time to build a great business.
ROB: It's an interesting mirror that you talk about holding up with the spamming. There were some folks who were involved in starting Sales Loft, which is now a billion-dollar valuation company. Their first product was built around scraping and spamming LinkedIn, harvesting email addresses, that sort of thing. They had a million dollars in revenue around it and they threw the product away because it wasn't really authentic to them. They were selling a sugar high. It sounds like you've been in that world. I've seen the LinkedIn automation in the agency space. We've seen how many sugar high newsfeed optimizations, spamming, SEO, right? SEO used to be about tactics and ways to skirt the rules. We keep having to figure out how to be authentic if we want to build a real business.
MATTHEW: It always comes back to the fundamentals. At the end of the day, most people think they have a sales problem or they think they have a lead-gen problem – but they don't. They actually have a community problem and a trust problem. If they made the measurement of the objective to build more community and to build more trust in that community, they would make very different decisions. Same thing, as well, to the mindset about forever business versus a short-term business – because one is focused on tactics and me-me-me-me versus you-you-you-you. Then the same thing even when it comes like creating content. You're very smart to have this podcast because you're focused on being a talent scout instead of being the talent. Being talent is actually really hard. If you look at the biggest and best and fastest-growing companies out there, they focus on two things – one, being a media company is really good talent scouts or two, they focus on the network effect. Okay, if you do that, you have epic growth really, really quick. The reason you have it is this. If you are a talent scout, then you become Tim Ferriss, Joe Rogan, Oprah. What are the experts of absolutely all? Okay. But what are they really good at? What are they really good at doing? Bringing in really interesting people, asking them really interesting questions to teach their audience what to look for and what to look out that builds trust. So then expert comes and goes, okay, and the law of transference passes all that expertise to those hosts. They're the ones who are the sticky ones that everybody is after going forward. They're building what's called a media company. Then those who take that media company flip it into these private communities -- something like real vision television – you name it. They then get the network effect, which is what Facebook is, and Youtube is, and Instagram is, that has exponential growth that it takes on its own life. Once you have the network effect and you have that ability of hosting where you built trust with the community basically – instead of calling it network, call it community – it's a deeper connection, you then have a license to print money – because you can go to that community you want and say, “What is the problem? What is it that you want to solve?”, go find the product or service and connect it with your community, and instantly print money. The end. If you ask yourself, instead, as a business and in B2B, “How do I create more community? How do I build more trust with this? How do I treat this as a forever business?”, you start making really different decisions about what you're going to invest your time and energy and money into at the end of the day. So, it's usually just that you're asking their problems. They're asking, “How do I get more leads and how do I get more sales?” It's a very surface-level question. It's a byproduct. A byproduct of community and trust is lots of leads and sales and rabid buyers who are ready to throw you money.
ROB: But there's a lot of work ahead of that.
MATTHEW Yeah.
ROB: Lots of good thoughts, lots of distilled knowledge from experience from building businesses, from scaling up. Congratulations on all of that. When people want to connect with you and with Automation Wolf, where should, they go to find you?
MATTHEW: There's only two places you can find me – either on LinkedIn – you just search Matthew Hunt – or at automationwolf.com. You won't find me anywhere else.
ROB: Yeah, and you can do like three things on the site – you can read the testimonials, you can watch the video, you can schedule some time. It's all pretty clean and simple, very good. Well thank you so much for that distillation of wisdom, Matthew. Good to connect with you. Thank you for sharing with the audience I wish you all the best.
MATTHEW: You too Rob. Thank you for having me.
ROB: All right. Be well. Thanks.
Tim Ringle is Global CEO of Meet the People, an “international family of unified but independent agencies. In the three months since its inception, Meet the People has acquired 3 agency brands. Tim has bigger plans. He intends to bring in a total of up to 15 agencies, reaching from Canada and the US to Europe and Asia. “We have 400 people in North America right now. We want to be 2,000 people in at most 18 to 24 months globally.”
Even though he is acquiring agencies at a fast pace, Tim says what he is not building a holding company. He explains that holding companies have been consolidating the industry, the trend a “survival response” to complications from the digitization of processes and channels and, more recently, because covid has changed how work is done. He says small agencies may need to hire one or more people “just to handle the benefits, taxes, payroll, inflation, and salary increases” of those employees who now want to work from “anywhere,” where “anywhere” has different laws, tax rates, and costs of living and working than at an agency’s home office.
Tim sees holding companies as a powerful trend. Even though there are 14,000 independent agencies in the United States, six major holding company networks “own sixty percent of the entire media industry within the agency space.” However, Tim says, they often don’t act in the best interests of their clients because they are driven from the top by financial rather than client interests. He claims that both small, independent agencies and holding companies often fail in communicating when passing clients from one agency or holding-company-entity to the next. “They’re only going to talk to each other if there’s some money to be made in between . . . there’s a lot of lost information . . . .”
In Meet the People’s “family,” the agency owns its affiliate agencies, but the people within those affiliate agencies also “own a part of Meet the People.” The network structure provides “a fully integrated approach for brands . . . to cross-pollinate across multiple services,” the opportunity for the agency to build multi-brand micro-offices, and scalable support for dealing with “anywhere” variances. Tim says, “Keep the brand, be the best you can, but let us create connective tissue between the different companies to see if we can increase share volume with a client.”
Tim has a lot of experience building global agencies. He says he has learned that it is extremely important, “especially in the beginning of the engagement,” to build trust with the client. To do this, his team of disparate agencies will need to work as one. Tim is bringing his people together physically to take time to create “a deep understanding and culture between all the different offices, people, trades, and brands,” building what Tim describes as an “integrated DNA.” They also will be discussing the implementation of individualized OKRs (Objectives, Key Results), a tech tool for tracking accountability.
Tim says his agency is very focused on operational excellence, on brand positioning, on bringing really good entrepreneurs . . . and on hyper-goals. He says it is important to make the right decisions now because, “if you build something with small cracks, they become massive gaps when you are at scale.”
As his agency network continues to grow, Tim is excited about finding “really talented entrepreneurs who want to change the industry who can't or are tapping out” with their skills/abilities/finances and being able, through Meet the People, to provide the experience, capital, and structure and small-enough scale “where they can actually still move things.”
Tim can be reached on his agency’s website at: https://www.meet-the-people.com/.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast I'm your host Rob Kischuk and I'm joined today by Tim Ringle, Global CEO at Meet the People based in New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Tim.
TIM: Hi, Rob. Thank you for having me.
ROB: It's great to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Meet the People, what is the business, and what are you all best at.
TIM: I think, to understand what we are building with Meet the People, you have to understand a bit of my background. I've been an entrepreneur in the agency space – primarily digital agency space for 24 years. That sounds long but I'm also 45 years old so I can carry that. I started my first agency literally in the basement of my friend's house. We started as a SEO agency digital marketing agency, very much focused on performance marketing. I was blessed to be able to do that in ’98, ’99 – when this industry was about to develop and therefore was able build that business to 150 people and then sell the business. After that, I did a reverse takeover of the company that bought my business –and that got me to around 400 people in Europe. So, I started my first business in Germany – my native Germany – and we scaled the 400 people agency that was all across Europe into 1,000 people. It was stock market listed in beautiful Paris. I left that to move to the dark side of the ad industry as I call it. Having built multiple agencies as an independent agency entrepreneur, you were always battling the holding companies, right? And I swore to myself many times because they beat me and sometimes I beat them. That's how it works, right? I swore to them I would never work for them. So, I ended up moving to New York City and working for 1 of the holding companies who always wanted to acquire my business. So, I did that for 3 years within IPG. I have to say the experience was amazing. I really learned a ton of stuff that I couldn't learn from being someone who was leading 1,000 people. Now I was part of 65,000 people. I inherited an agency there – once again, a performance marketing agency – around 1,000 people – and then left it after 3 years scaling it to 3,000 people. So, I've done this a couple of times and what we're building with Meet the People is what I would say is version number four of my vision of what an independent agency network should look like. We're building it with my 24 years of experience of what I liked and disliked in the agencies that I've built in the past. What I liked the most was that people in the advertising industry are mainly driven by culture. If you're good in your trade in advertising, you can get a job anywhere on the client side in tech companies. You can build your own company because marketing, just like legal, is a service that you always need everywhere. So, selling a product, branding a product, coming up with a marketing strategy is something you can use pretty much in every business in the world. It's 1 of the integrated parts. Why do people choose to work for an agency? Because they love the culture in agencies, right? What we're doing at Meet the People – when we looked at the industry and I had – I still have the same vision. I'm building a global agency network as an alternative to the large holding companies. I figured that nobody's talking about the people anymore. Everybody's talking about technology, data, automation, and how computers will replace us, how AI will come up with creatives – all this kind of stuff. It’s true that the technology has enabled us to be extremely more efficient. But, in the end, the new Coke logo or the new “just do it” from Nike does not come out of AI or a computer, it comes out of the brain of a human being a creative strategist. So, we believe (or I believe) that we have to remember in the ad industry that it's all about the people. We are a service industry. Without the people who are sitting behind the machines and using the machines, tech enabled, we're not going to produce disruptive, new ideas that actually put a brand on the map. That’s why we’re building Meet the People. I can obviously talk much more about it. But that's kind of it in a nutshell.
ROB: When you say an agency network . . . what does that look like when it's an agency network? It's not a holding company. I'm curious about the differentiation of some of the different agencies within the network and how you think about that – because your website is very people-centric. It's more about the people, the partners, than it is about this brand and this specialization and this other thing we just acquired and all that you see in the holding company world.
TIM: Correct. So, why am I not calling it a holding company? A holding company has one purpose – and it is a financial orientation. right? So, a holding company is most a holding company because it is actually managed by finance people. I don't necessarily I don't want to diss anyone. But I would say that a finance-led company most probably will be struggling with creating the best strategy, best creative, and best outcome for their clients. They might create the best outcome for themselves, right? That's why we're not calling ourselves a holding company. We are running this network of agencies who, don't misunderstand me, we do own the agencies – and the people within the agencies own a part of Meet the People. That's the concept. We are building this, first of all, to fulfill a fully integrated approach for brands so, instead of just servicing one client within one specialty with one agency, we are allowing the conversation to be elevated and to cross-pollinate across multiple services. For example, when our creative agency, VSA Partners, out of Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. Beautiful, creative design work and strategy. When they come up with a brand refresh or rebranding or brand strategy – I would love to see that through until you actually can see it on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn – wherever that brand comes to life besides on brochures, in magazines, or the logo or the CI. Many independent agencies, because of their size and their financial scrutiny because they're small, can't invest a lot of capital into innovation or additional services. They can't see that journey through. That means you have a lot of inefficient handshakes in between. That happens in holding companies because they're structured that way, but it happens in independent agencies as well. One independent agency is a hundred people might be excellent in creative. The next one might be excellent in social media. But they're only going to talk to each other if there's some money to be made in between. There's a lot of lost information when a chief creative officer comes up with a brand strategy and somebody implements that on social media in community management. We want to make that a much more seamless flow with less barriers for the client but also more excitement for the people involved because you actually see the product living there and a colleague of you in another agency – but it's part of our structure – has basically put that on the social channel or billboard.
ROB: When you come to thinking about – there's, obviously, within a holding company lots of capabilities, you're talking about these more seamless handoffs. How do you think about building that team? Did you go out hunting for best of breed agencies to bring them into the group or did you build some capabilities from scratch? How did you think about this?
TIM: We were going to do both. We started Meet the People three months ago and since then we had 3 agency brands join us – so we acquired 3 brands. Three agencies and we're going to bring more than 10 – probably 15 plus – companies into Meet the People as a group. We're going to do that in North America – so we already have US, Canada, some capabilities. We're going to do it in Europe and then we're going to do it in Asia. How we decide what to go for depends on what services we need next in that journey. Right now, we have a very strong creative agency with VSA Partners and we have a very strong experiential agency with Public Labels. We have certain services that sit in a similar bucket where the client sees the service, so that adjacent service is part of the scope. If we don't service that ourselves. then we should basically fill that gap either with another agency joining us or with building these capabilities organically with the acquire or actually hire before revenue. Ultimately, we want to have a seamless handshake between the different trades.
ROB: We have 2 former guests who have been acquired into a similar opportunity recently – which is interesting. We had Chantel from Imagine Media and Techwood Digital were both acquired. Jared Belski, who was the CEO of 360i, has rolled up 3 or 4 agencies. That's all I know. Is this a trend or is this just 2 people that happen to have done a similar thing and why now?
TIM: No, it is a trend. As much as I don't like the traditional holding company model, we have to respect that the holding companies have created an industry. Because there's 14,000 independent agencies in the United States alone. Fourteen thousand and there are six networks and the six networks own sixty percent of the entire media industry within the agency space, right? So they've created an industry. We all live in that ecosystem and that industry. The trend right now and primarily driven by the extreme success of what whatever intention Martin Sorrell, Sir Martin Sorrell, had to bid as for capital. If it was ego, if it was revenge, I don't know. He only knows. But he has been extremely successful from a financial perspective doing that because there is a gap, a vacuum in the Market. So, there’s models like that that are older than the S4 Capital MediaMonks model. MediaMonks is only 3 years old but Stagwell MDC by Mark Penn is 5-6 years old and You & Mr. Jones is also 7 years old, I think. So, there's a couple of these what we call an agency rollup network model. They existed for years. What has changed in the industry is covid has accelerated the fact that independent agencies got scrutinized because of their size. Before, when you were 100 people, you could live a very good life as an independent agency. There's two real trends. One is the digitalization of processes and channels. At the same time covid is putting extraordinary pressure on talent, new work. This is all very complicated for smaller companies to handle because now your people tell you, “I want to work from anywhere.” How are you going to do that from a benefits perspective . . . tax perspective? It creates complications. Clients are the same. “Oh, I don't need you to come into my office anymore, but I want to take T&E out of your expenses.” Economy of scale becomes more and more important. A couple of people have understood that, so these networks are created over the last couple of years. But they're also created all over the planet. So there are networks in Asia, networks in Europe, networks in the US. There's only very few who can bridge multiple continents. This is one thing we're going to do with Meet the People. We're going to bridge multiple continents because we believe (or I believe) that our clients want the same quality of service across multiple jurisdictions that are not only North America. So, I've not invented this model, right? They exist. They're very successful. The main reason why they're successful is that, when you have, as I said, 100 people on your P&L, it's very difficult for you to invest a million dollars into innovation technology. You might only have a million dollars of profit and you want to keep some of that. Usually, it's very difficult for them to hire before revenue, to anticipate bigger jumps. In economy of scale, it's easier for us to say, “Ten, twenty percent of our EBITA goes to a business strategy consultancy layer that most agencies can't afford or a technology IP that you actually own as a company. We can make these investments. And that makes it extremely attractive.
ROB: How do the capital markets feel about this sort of arrangement? I know there's a lot of money out there looking for yield. I could also see the case that you just have to self-finance this sort of thing if you want to. Where is the money side of the world? Are they looking to fund this sort of thing because they need something to believe in and something that's going to give them better than inflation? Although inflation is getting pretty good now.
TIM: Let's make a relatable example. Let's imagine you have a million dollars excess capital right now. You have it lying around. Where are you going to put it? You can put it into crypto. Very risky. You can put it into NFTs. Even riskier. You can put it into traditional venture capital. So, there's a lot of money in the market. But there's also a lot of options in the market. You know pre-IPO, post-IPO, or FinTech, software as a service, space – there’s so many categories. The service business as a sector in general or the advertising industry service side of it – not MarTech AdTech – it's not the most attractive industry to invest money. Why? Because you have no tangible assets. The desks, the computers – they're all at home right now. As people, as a company, you maybe own intellectual property. But mostly you have a lot of walking assets and that's your people. For the longest time, the ad industry was not super attractive for larger investors. That has dramatically changed because of the pressure coming from tech. Tech has gotten so heavy on advertising and so relying on advertising. Same time that there's more capital in the market and that a couple of people, including Sir Martin and others, have proven that you can make real money there. Most of the investment in this space is private equity and I would say large family offices.
ROB: It's fascinating just to see this emerge. I think I hear what you're saying that you know there's all these different factors in play, right? You have some firms that are a little bit “walking wounded” due to . . . it does get complicated when people want to be in different states and now you're having to pay taxes on your payroll in different states. There's an economy to having 1,000 people, 10,000 people where you know what there's a department that handles that baked into the margins of the overall business. I totally get it.
TIM: Yeah, and you don't go through this alone, right? If you have a 50-people business and 20 people decide they don't want to work from New York anymore or LA, they're going to work from anywhere, you need to hire at least 1 more person just to handle the benefits, taxes, payroll plus inflation increases plus salary increases. So, it's complicated. What's important about Meet the People is we give that layer at scale, but the agency brands stay independent in their DNA. We're not changing their brands. VSA Partners that joined us at the beginning of the year is VSA Partners. They've done that. This work for 40 years . . . successful. They're an incredible, talented shop and great people. Why would we change any of that? Doesn't make any sense. Keep the brand, be the best you can, but let us create connective tissue between the different companies to see if we can increase share volume with a client. You're already sitting on an amazing client. You define the strategy. Why don't we talk about who actually builds the website, who actually manages social media? Why don't we talk about it because we already have that relationship? That is very attractive to companies who don't have that client access. There's a lot of independent agencies who are very specialized, who would die to get into a client like Google or IBM or Ford who just can't because they don't have the gravitas.
ROB: When it comes to new and existing business, it sounds like you have some thoughts about the role of location. But the role of location is different from what it used to be. On the one hand you mentioned having offices and having people in these different geographies. But you also had this dynamic where some of the agencies that are joining the network may have played very much off a home field advantage that may not be the case anymore. So, how are you looking at the strategic role of geography?
TIM: I think geography stays extremely important. I'm someone who grew up with in-person meetings and built businesses within in-person meetings. I do believe in-person meetings to create chemistry. Especially in the beginning of the engagement with the client, it’s extremely important because you're not only buying a service, you're buying the trust into the person across from you. Because there's so many agencies out there. So many service providers out there. Who are you going to go for if the service is extremely comparable and they sadly so are? In the creative space, not as much, but in the digital execution, who does better search than that person – there is a chemistry factor to that. I think in person will stay extremely relevant. Our strategy here is to say, instead of having large headquarters, we're going to have more micro-offices. When we have 10 agencies, let’s say in North America, it's extremely likely that we end up having 20 offices all over the place. Instead of having one person in a WeWork, we're going to have 20 people from maybe 5 different agencies in Austin, Texas. Or we're going to have the same in Dallas, or we’re going to have the same in San Francisco. We already have 5 offices in North America and anyone from these companies can really work from anywhere within these proximities. We also hire outside of these proximities because we want to have at some point an office in Miami, maybe in New Orleans, and whatnot. So, I foresee that we have certain client-centric larger footprints in New York, LA, San Francisco. We have Boulder, Colorado, we have Chicago, we have Toronto . . . but we're going to have a lot of micro-offices because we need to have flexibility. That's new work. This is part of that. Maybe one of the things we got from covid . . . besides covid.
ROB: Really fascinating. Tim, we quite often ask people what lessons they've learned and what they would do differently, but it strikes me that you are actually in the process of getting to do things differently. You know we say, what would you do if you were starting over? You, you have had a chance to do that in some cases. An interesting thing about this model is you're kind of starting on third base but you have agencies who have made it here on their own journeys and you're having to coalesce something together. What are you doing differently in the structuring of Meet the People that you learned in your past and said, “It's got to be different”?
TIM: One thing that we're doing the same is creating a deep understanding and culture between all the different offices, people, trades, and brands. I've done this before. The last business I managed for IPG, I ended up having 72 offices around the globe. The business before had 25 offices around the globe and we made sure that these people met physically. It sounds counterintuitive during covid but, the fact that you spend time together workshopping. For example, let's say we have five companies and all their creatives can come together in one location for three days and talk about the differences of their work approach. That would be such a forming experience for them because they all are going to learn from that. You have some people who have done this for 40 years. You have some people who are doing this for 4 years. It's that culture of respect, of understanding, of bringing the different traits together. I think that is extremely powerful. I learned through this journey that you can have you can have the best product in the world. If your people don't believe in it, you're not going to go anywhere. Creating that belief and creating that culture and creating that integrated DNA is a little bit of magic that's extremely important to build a successful business. That's what I learned. What I go to do different, and I kind of promised my wife I would, is travel less. I don't think that's not happening. What I try to do is travel a little bit less because covid allows for that new model. The second thing that I learned is to run an agency a little bit more like an agile tech company. Not because I want to strip away the creativity or anything – none of none of that. The problem in many agencies is that there’s a lack of accountability because of a mutual understanding that the creative process is complicated. You know what I mean. Building a tech product is as complicated and needs as much creativity. But somehow there are better levers or control mechanisms in there that allow you to achieve a target in your planning session a little bit quicker and more agile. We want to apply a little bit of startup thinking to a very traditional industry.
ROB: I think anybody in the startup industry would claim the same degree of creativity and the same degree of craftsmanship. I'm very much from a software development background and if you want to talk about something that resists measurement. People always say, “Building software is not the same as building a house. You can stamp out houses, but software is a different thing.” Yet within technology there are certain constraints that you talk about. You don't get to just walk away and say, “Well I'm sorry. It'll take some amount of time and we'll show up and it'll be great. There’s process to it.
TIM: In the advertising industry, that is not always the case. People walk away and they say, “I’m going to come back in a week or two because I don't know when I'm going to come to a product.” I get that because it's creative and it needs time but in many of these trades you can have OKR’s, for example. So you can have certain accountability factors or set certain targets. That’s how you can manage a large company. A bit more agile and efficient.
ROB: Yeah, so to talk about OKR’s for a moment because they're popularly said, but I think sometimes poorly understood. Where did you come to a good understanding of them and how do you think about deploying them?
TIM: I’ve got to be honest with you. This is why I got my management team together in New York this week. They're all here in the office in New York – came in from Germany, London, Connecticut. Sounds like a long trip but we're all coming together.
ROB: Can be.
TIM: We are coming together right now, here in New York, to decide “how do we implement OKR’s within an agency environment” and we're not done with that journey. We're not done with the discussion, but we do know we want to approach it a little bit different than the last 3 times we did it together. I think in six months’ time I can answer that question much better. I do believe that OKR’s need to be very individualized. Your overall underlying principles are the same, but you have to individually craft it towards your organization because you don't want to over-engineer it as well, right? You need to give people the freedom. So, I will be able to answer that question in three to six months
ROB: Sounds good, sounds good. Tim, as you’re thinking about what's next for Meet the People and for this evolved holding company model, what's coming up next? What are you excited about?
TIM: For us, it's hyper-goals. We have 400 people in North America right now. We want to be 2,000 people in at most 18 to 24 months globally. So, we are very much focused on making the right decisions now because, once you build something with small cracks, they become massive gaps when you are at scale. So, we're very much focused on operational excellence, on our brand positioning, on bringing really good entrepreneurs. When I look at companies, we have to do the financial background checks and stuff like that needs to be in order. But I'm looking much more for entrepreneurs who see that the industry needs to change. That is where the minds are aligned with the companies we are looking at and acquiring and partnering with. That's what I'm most excited about, finding really talented entrepreneurs who want to change the industry who can't or are tapping out with their skills or their abilities or financially and asking, how do I get from 50 to 100 people? How do I get from 100 to 200 people? We bring the experience. We bring the capital. We bring structure where they can actually still move things – because we're not 10,000 people or 5,000 people like our competitors are. So, that's what gets me most excited. Then, obviously, there's always something new in our industry, there's always something new, right? It never stops. I remember when I built my first agency, I thought, when I master search, I'm going to be done with this. Affiliate marketing comes along. Oh well. Then I master affiliate marketing. Then social came and I mastered social. Programmatic came. It never ends – and that's also, to some extent, very exciting because you keep having to learn and adapt. At some point, I will age out, where people will tell me, “Tim you know what? Just drink your coffee. You know we have got it because you don't, and you don't get it anymore.”
ROB: (Laughs) Ah, so it's always a struggle to try and figure out what things you might be aging out of and what things are just a little weird. It's always a little bit of both.
TIM: That's right. And what's the little bit of bullshit right now in the industry that you can just face over. You don't need to go deep.
ROB: I think there were moments early in social where it felt very experimental. It felt very strange. It felt very frothy. We've been through that on an influencer. You were around. I was around. You look at the crypto world and it seems almost like – I could be dead wrong – I think the thing that's most misunderstood but also well observed now about the dot Com era is everything happened eventually. But it didn't happen then. That’s maybe where we're at with crypto. I'm not sure.
TIM: Well, like crypto is one thing, but then think about NFTs, right?
ROB: Yeah, I’m lumping that in. Yeah
TIM: Okay, if you lump it all into one OKR, fair enough. I can talk for hours about my diverse opinions on NFTs and the NFT world. Nevertheless, we have clients who are extremely excited about and who really want to deploy capital, being part of that industry because there's the strong underlying belief of making something really good at the same time. There is this unnecessary social hype on certain topics where I'm thinking, “Guys, you're destroying something that was meant to be really good. I think blockchain and crypto is falling or has fallen into a similar trap where the underlying idea . . . because technically I'm an engineer, right? I got my first pc when I was eleven. Taught myself coding and all this kind of stuff. So, I love the idea of blockchain and decentralized holding of assets and accountability and ledgers. That's amazing. It could solve so many problems in world. The problem is that when dodgecoin comes along in Shibona or whatever, the next thing is, it drags it in the dirt. The underlying technology is incredible. The sad story is people want to get rich fast and lots of them don't.
ROB: That's right. It happened before. People built the worst websites in the world for a couple million bucks back once-upon-a-time early internet.
TIM: But you remember when you could buy 1 pixel on a website or something like that for a thousand dollars and there were these crazy businesses out there and it's coming back, just differently now. My hope is that just like the dot com bubble . . . yes, there was a hype. Yes, there was a crash but, after that an actual industry developed. So, I'm hoping that we're going to go through the same thing with NFTs and some of these offsprings of crypto.
ROB: That makes complete sense. Well, Tim, Thanks for hopping on. Thanks for illuminating us on what's going on in this holding company opportunity, what you're doing with that. I think it's interesting you started and you kind of knew what it looked like to run a large organization. I can imagine starting with 2 people in a closet might not always be the best use of those skills. It's neat to see the industry lining up in a way that that lets us see so much happen so quickly. So, thanks for coming on. Good to have you, Tim.
TIM: Thanks Rob for having me. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
ROB: Alright, be well, thanks, bye.
Kevin Urrutia is Founder of Voy Media, a “growth marketing agency” focused on helping marketing executives grow their online businesses – but not from the “ground up.” Voy Media does not help companies that want to get started in online marketing, build clients’ businesses, or act as any client’s marketing team. Instead, the focus is on scaling successful client companies and taking them to the next level, moving them from 6 to 7 to 8 figures in monthly sales . . . and doing it fast.
These clients already know what they need to do to build a business and they’re doing it. They already have mature systems and processes in place for emailing prospective buyers and getting online content and reviews. Voy takes this collected information, breaks it down, and uses it to feed the creation of new ads, new videos, and new images for clients’ social media – their already existing Facebook pages, Google Ads, and LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and TikTok accounts.
Kevin’s background is in computer programming. During college, he started a web development consulting company. After he graduated, he moved to Silicon Valley to work for Mint.com (Intuit). In that fevered e-commerce boom era (global e-commerce sales topped $1 trillion in 2012, up 21.9% from the previous year), “I kept building things. I kept going to hackathon startup events.” Frustratingly, all that “building” and networking did not result in sales.
Then Kevin discovered “marketing.” He researched SEO, found it “interesting,” and concluded that “Everything around you is really marketing, but it's great marketing when you don't think it's marketing.” He jumped to a startup called Zaarly, and then moved to New York and did what none of his programming buddies wanted to do: He started starting his own businesses. His buddies wanted “jobs.” He wanted to own something bigger and was willing to take the risk.
Kevin started an online-scheduled cleaning company. and thereafter, a number of e-commerce companies, learning the lessons on switching products to drive sales and growing teams that he, today, passes on to his clients.
In this interview, Kevin discusses how the recent iOS update, iOS 14, allows individuals to turn off tracking and limits a lot of ad options that used to be available for advertisers. Now, instead of looking at the individual platforms to get information, companies must ask the questions: “How much revenue did we make from new customers this week? How much did we spend on ads? What is the ratio between new customer revenue with ad spend?” Kevin says things are more “fluffy” in one sense, but companies do have a better grasp on their profitability. He says, “People are actually building brands again, versus like, ‘Hey I just want to make quick buck online.’”
That’s a good thing, he believes, because “Building a real business takes years.” Companies need to “reinvest into the branding. You got to reinvest into ads, copy, photography.”
Kevin can be reached social platforms and on his agency’s website at: https://voymedia.com/ where you will find case studies, courses, and Kevin’s blog.
Transcript follows:
ROB: Welcome to The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Kevin Urrutia, founder at Voy Media, based in New York City. Welcome to the podcast, Kevin.
KEVIN: Hey, Rob. Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.
ROB: Great to have you on the cast. Why don't you start off by giving us an intro to Voy Media. What do you want to be known for?
KEVIN: Voy Media . . . we're growth marketing agency. Pretty typical, but the difference between us and other agencies is my background is in computer science programming. We'll talk about a little bit more of that later on. The way we help founders is by we come in to help you scale. We're not here to help you get started in online marketing. That's a different type of agency. We're more here for founders or other marketing executives that want help to grow their online business with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Creatives are also a big part. We're doing that now with the whole new iOS update and we're seen trying to switch around and again restructure agency to fit the market's needs too.
ROB: (Laughs) I see. So, this is not, “I have an idea. I want to get the word out there.” This is “I know who my customer is but help me because I still don't know how to reach them.” Is that where you play?
KEVIN: It's a little bit after that, too, where you already spent some money and now you're saying, “Hey I have a marketing person in-house but we still need help because we want to scale” and you don't want to bring somebody new on again. So, I tell people all the time, we used to do what we said before . . . “Hey, you have a brand new idea. Let's help you” . . . and then it turned out that this was just a different type of client or customer that we didn't want to educate about what marketing was. It was just very difficult. I see some agencies do that. It’s like I’m prey to you. Those clients, the ones that pay you that much, they're calling you every single day to give you an update. I think it's so funny, but like you’ve probably heard before, the more they pay you the less they call you. It's so true.
ROB: That's amazing. What is it about a business at that stage that aligns with your talents? What's the playbook that starts to make sense at that stage that maybe isn't available sooner?
KEVIN: I think the playbook that's available is that these businesses already have systems on how to get content, how to get reviews, how to do all that stuff – just feeds our creative team to make new ads, to make new videos, to make new images for their social media, for their Facebook page. It's not like we're saying, “Hey, you should send an email out to get customer reviews.” They already are doing this, so their mindsets are already in this – “Yep, this is what we need to build a brand or a company.” It's just a different business shift of a person and for us, it's less pulling, like “Hey, we need this from you.” It's more like “Yep, this is already in our pipeline. You're gonna get it next week.” If we can, we get user-generated content every week – We just get that in the Slack channel – “Hey, guys. Here's this week's content.” They already have a process in place and we're here to help them. I tell people all the time – a lot of times business owners, in the beginning, want us to basically build their whole business for them. I say, “No, I'm your marketing team. I'm not here to build your company.”
ROB: This is our customer. What do you think?
KEVIN: Yeah. I'm like, “I don't know. You have the product.” They’re like, “Isn't your team supposed to do that?” Yes, but like, “I don't know exactly what you're doing” :Hey, it looks like this product. . . .like customers are complaining about this. Are you going to switch your product?” They're like, “No.” I'm like, “All right then. If your sales aren’t going up, then you need to do something.” So, for me too, this comes from not just doing marketing, but because I've also had my own e-commerce companies too. So, I've had to switch products, I've had to grow a team, and that's where for me, it's like, I see you sometimes, I mean before like we work with founders, I'm like, “Hey, people are clearly complaining about this. Why aren't you switching or doing something?” And at least for me when I had my outdoor gear company – we recently sold it -- we made three to four versions of a trekking pole based on customer feedback because that's what you do as a business. You iterate over and over again. Sometimes people say, “Hey, this is a perfect product.” I'm like, “Is it a perfect product? You need to switch things around if people are complaining about it.” So, I don’t know, for me, I'm trying to find people that, like I tell people all the time, the best people that we work with are people that have done it once, failed, and like, “Okay now. I know what to do because everybody has been through the trenches in the fire.”
ROB: Sure. What it sounds like they have is they have a steady pipeline of content that speaks to their audience but . . . I think a lot of people's natural format is more long-form and not marketing copy, right? So, you can kind of take what they have, break it down, atomize it, align it to different channels, test some things, and then layer on a set of known tactics that work when you have legitimate content.
KEVIN: Exactly. That's what it is. It's like, “We're here to use tactics to help you grow versus help you figure out these tactics are. We can help somewhat but there's only so much time we can tell clients, “Hey, you need you see.” and they're like “Oh? why? I don't know how to go get it.” I'm like. “Send an email out.” They're like, “Oh okay I forgot this week.” I'm like, “All right. (sighs) I can't press this send button for you.”
ROB: Right? Step 1 is send an email this week. Then come back and talk to me.
KEVIN: So yeah. I get it. I think for me, our agency – at least I tell people all the time – it just depends on what type of company or business you want to build. There's people that want to be in that zero to 1 stage, where it's like, “Hey, we're gonna build this system and process for you. But for me, I just don't want to be doing that. So, we're saying, we're shifting more towards – “Hey you have something and you have some sort of team. We're gonna come here implement, help you and supplement you and be that agency.”
ROB: Sure. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention, I heard you mention briefly iOS 14. Obviously, the kind of individual targeting, opt-outs, all that is changing how ads run, how ads are tracked. What has been changing for you and how are you responding or suggesting people respond when it comes to the options that are no longer available to them due to those changes?
KEVIN: I think iOS 14 . . . it's interesting. I see both. For us, bad side for a lot of agencies like us is . . . I tell people, like we were, you could track everything. So, our incentives are very like, “Hey look! We spend more money. We make more money.” We see revenue going up, we can spend more money.” Because it's tracked and now that has really affected our ability to scale as an agency and again clients as well because they were spending 15k a month, now they're spending 20k, and they're just like, “Well, the results are even worse and we're not getting any sales.” So, I think, what has changed a lot is the way we're tracking because now we're so used to just looking at the platforms, Google, Facebook, say, “Yep, this is a 1 to 1 or at least pseudo 1 to 1, where right now it's even worse. I don't even know where it’s coming from. So, tracking itself has changed and, at least for us, the way we're doing it now is like what people should have been doing or at least sort of had done. Which is like, “Hey, this week, how much revenue did you make from new customers? How much did we spend on ads? What is the ratio between new customer revenue with ad spend?” It's a bit more fluffy, but at least you're saying that, yes, you are profitable. So, more daily profitability sheets/ weekly profitability sheets or even monthly – like your P&L. Go into your account each month and say, “Yep, reconcile all the expenses. Were we profitable?” Great, business is still good. That is something that, at least before iOS 14, people didn't really know, which is interesting. I think any business, you have to know this stuff. People are getting a little more savvy with these numbers. At the same time, something that I've seen shift is that – I think it's good going back with my background. I think now people are actually building brands again, versus like, “Hey I just want to make quick buck online.”
ROB: Right.
KEVIN: That was something that we saw so much because it was so easy to track, like, “Hey, you like pet stuff, right? Let me make this pet niche store and for the next 3 months let me make 20K.” It wasn't like a brand where, right now, similar to any business like you probably seen . . . Building a real business takes years.
ROB: Right.
KEVIN: And there's gonna be years where you don't make money. Everybody had this weird mentality like, “Hey, if I spend a thousand bucks, I need to make 5k this month” . . . or else “You suck – not me.” This is not how you build a company. You got to reinvest into the branding. You got to reinvest into ads, copy, photography . . . I just saw this crazy, quick-flipping of businesses where ten years ago, you were actually okay, “I'm gonna mess with your cake(?) and I'm gonna make this thing a big brand and try to build something. I think that's coming back again, which is great because it's gonna be entrepreneurs that I think want to build true businesses for the long-term.
ROB: Right on. I think I may have heard this. I may have heard it wrong, but there's also an increasing challenge with now with the attribution window. Is that right? That there's actually a short, you can't, I think it's like used to be able to see if . . . so you ran an ad and somebody bought in thirty days. Mow you get what 7?
KEVIN: Yeah. You got like 7 or even like 1 day. Sometimes it's just so much tougher? Yeah.
ROB: So, it is more empirical. It's, “I spent money, am I making money? I increased my spend a little bit ago, am I making more money now?” It's trickier.
KEVIN: It's definitely trickier, like I said. I think you now need to have the stomach for it, like, “Hey, you're hoping to make money,” and I get both sides. You know there's always the side of like, “Hey, I'm not a VC-funded company.” I'm like, “Yeah, I know.” Most people aren't, but there's a reason why companies like Facebook and Google – obviously those are outliers, but other companies such as them that spend . . . like Uber, right? literally in business for ten years and every year lose money, right? There's a reason why it's like – again, that's a bigger scale but you sometimes need to think yourself as a smaller scale, say, “Hey, you're in this for the long run.” You're like, “There's a reason why everybody knows Uber, like, “Hey I'm gonna get a cab because all the brand equity of the advertising.” So, a lot of times you’ve probably seen business owners don't want to do that because like, “No I need to make money.” I'm like, “Yes, you should make money – but there is something to be said for reinvest into your business and saying, “Hey, I'm gonna do this as ‘quote-unquote’ my life's work. It doesn't do your life, but like the next 5 to 10 years, right.
ROB: Sure. I think it's helpful. I think people are starting to get this understanding a little more – to know when you're doing brand marketing and to know when you're doing performance marketing because getting those things twisted is also a real source of misunderstanding if you . . .
KEVIN: Oh yeah, there's definitely performance marketing everything and there's also brand marketing. A lot of people just want to do performance marketing but you still need to have great Instagram accounts, great Twitter accounts, great social media people. I tell people all the time, like, “Why do I need a social media manager– they don't make any money?” – But you still want people interacting with your community, talking to them. You know, some of the best companies out there do both performance and branding. Branding is one of those things that you see it when you see it. But when you're doing it, you don't see it. It's tough to put into a balance sheet but you know it when you see it. It’s like Uber, you know? Lyft, you know? So it's hard. I know that for sure.
ROB: And when sometimes it's even just a negative signal you're never going to see right? Somebody looks up your company. They look up your Twitter or your Instagram or your Facebook or your LinkedIn and if there's nothing there or if it's really dead, people judge that. I mean, they do. I do.
KEVIN: I know I do. I always think marketing is so funny because, like I tell people, “What do you do when you look up a business?” I know you're gonna go like look up reviews. I know you're gonna look at Instagram and then I'm like, “How come for your company you don't think you need to do that?”
ROB: Yeah.
KEVIN: They hate when it’s like, “Oh, yeah. I don't know what I'm saying.” They feel dumb but I just hate saying, “I'm like you. You do this same thing, too. So why don't you do for your business? I'm like “Hey if . . . I also tell people this. I'm on calls. I'm like, “If you weren’t on your website, would you buy?” And if it's a no, then, “Why do you think other customers would buy?” – So like, “I don't know.”
ROB: Take us back a little bit in time here, Kevin. Where did Voy Media come from and what led you to jump off this company-building cliff.
KEVIN: Voy Media is my newest company that I started. Basically, my quick background is computer science. I was a programming major in upstate New York . . . Binghamton. All throughout college I knew I wanted to do my own startup – since I was17 – it's something I wanted to do for a long time. So, in college, I started doing one tiny bit which is my web building. I was 19 or 20. I had 2 employees working on web projects there. We were just getting customers through Craigslist – so developing stuff. For me it was mostly like I've always wanted to build a startup. After college I was like, “Okay I gotta go to Silicon Valley.” I went to work for Mint.com as a programmer and then I went to work for another startup there for 3 years. During this time, I wanted to build stuff so I kept building things. I kept going to hackathon startup events. One of the things that happened for me during this time – I have always was in this mindset of like, “Hey, if you build it, they will come.” Because, hey, if you have a great product people just naturally find you. That was the thing that programmers in Silicon Valley just said to each other. Like “Hey, if people build something great, people will just find it” is one hundred percent not true looking back – but the mindset was very different back then. So, I kept building stuff. Eventually, I was like, “Man, how come I'm not getting any customers?” And then, I started looking up “what is marketing.” I was like, “Okay, this is actually a thing.” That's when I started learning more about marketing. My initial foray into marketing was SEO, like black-hat, world-affiliate marketing, CPA stuff. That was for me very interesting. When I first discovered it, I was like, “Oh, this is very interesting.” The reason why I found it so interesting because these affiliate guys were getting these twenty dollars like, “Hey, you can make twenty dollars off this widget that you sell,” so they had to sell it for a hundred twenty bucks to make profit. So, I was like, “Oh, these guys are using cutting edge tactics.” You would join these underground forums or Skype groups of people saying like, “Hey, try this marketing message.” I was like, “Whoa!” I didn't realize marketing is like that – it was like performance for me. I always thought marketing was this branded thing. I didn't know there's this other type of marketing that was purely based on sales. That's what got me at least . . . at that point I wasn't doing ads. It opened up my eyes to this marketing world. I was like, “Oh, everything around you is really marketing, but it's great marketing when you don't think it's marketing.” Behind the scenes, there's guys pulling the levers that's doing the marketing. So, it's like one of those like realizations that you have. I was like, “Okay, this is kind of what I need to do anyways.” I came back to New York because I missed my family. I started my cleaning company called Maid Sailers and here, for this cleaning company, is where I did almost all the marketing. I did SEO. I did reviews, blogging, PPC, Yelp ads, kind of everything. I did that for about a year-and-a-half. I wanted to keep growing it but people that have a service-based company – even some like Moy media – service-based businesses can only grow as you grow people – humans, right? So, it's human capital intense kind of business, which is great to get started. So, I think I tell people, times like these are great businesses start. But if you want to grow it, I didn't think I could grow it that big. So, then I started ecommerce because at that time too I saw all my friends are doing FBA, Amazon, I was like, “I got to jump into this, right?” It's one of those things with FOMO -- I got to do it. Then I did my Montem, which is my outdoor gear company. This was more scalable because, at the time – it was much easier back then with e-commerce products like Amazon. You're selling. Then, again for Montem, when we did e-commerce, I learned so much more. This is kind of where I first started doing more Facebook ads, Google ads, review blogger reviews. We were like number 1 on Wirecutter, so we were able to do partnerships. We did retail. We were pitching retails with the events – kind of like everything involved and, at least for me, that's why I like entrepreneurship in startups because I like all this stuff I just described. If I worked for somebody, I would never be able to do it all. Because you're only stuck in 1 thing where it's like a founder you could just say, “Okay, I'm going to do it all like,” and you figured it out somehow, which is either exciting or not exciting for some people. For me, it's like, “Oh, this is awesome.” I went to China 3 times up to my factories. So that's kind of where the concept of Voy Media came – because I was doing this e-commerce stuff. And then I was like, “Okay, I want to help other founders achieve success,” – that's the inkling, the idea of Voy Media. Of course, what we are now is very different than what I thought initially because you iterate your business based on what you see. But that's how Voy Media started.
ROB: How did you navigate away from those assumptions of the business, from those predispositions that you had? I mean, candidly, folks who come from a software developer background a lot of time have a hard time taking their hands off the keyboard. They want to be writing code, right? So how did you kind of navigate to the truth of the business instead of where you started?
KEVIN: I always tell people that one of the main reasons why I always wanted to do a startup and it's something that I've always like wanted to do since I was 17. But one of the things when I was in Silicon Valley, at least for me when I was 21 or 22 – I don't know, I was probably 23 at the time – very naïve. I was looking at a lot of my friends in the space, like the programmers there, and they would just talk about stuff and I was like, “Oh, wow! These guys are really smart. I don't think I'll ever be that good. I need to do something else because these guys are just awesome programmers.” My roommate, his name was Adam. We worked at the same company and he would talk about a concept. I’m like, “Dude, I have no clue how you just got that!” I thought I was smart but that's kind of what for me I'm like, “I got figure out something else in my life because I want to make money but, clearly, you're on another level.” I was like, “Let me just do business stuff and that's kind of it for me.” Another relationship for me was that I would talk to him or talk to other people like, “Hey, why don't you start a company. You are really smart,” but they're like, “No, I just want to be an employee.” That made me think, “Hey, there's guys like me that want to have a company and then I can hire guys like him that don't want to take the risk,” and you're gonna hire these super smart people that are gonna work for you and that's where the realization came to me, “Hey, I don't have to be the smartest but there's a lot of smart people that don't want to take the risk I want to take, and they could just work for me. Yeah!”
ROB: Yeah, so that's a good lesson to pick up along the way. As you reflect on the journey so far in building the business, what are some other key lessons you might want to go back and just tell yourself if you were starting over? Some good advice.
KEVIN: Good advice is so obvious. But like hiring people – I think once you feel an inkling that a person's not going to work out, you really got to let them go because it's a drain on the company and drain on yourself. That's probably the one people always say but it's also the hardest because people with emotions and working with them. But that's really tough. I think it's getting better, at least for service-based companies, it's just getting really better at vetting the people you work with just because it's a really personal relationship and, if you already feel like they're gonna be a very demanding, upstart, they're probably gonna be demanding the whole relationship and it's just gonna be a battle to please them. That's something I tell my sales team all the time. Like any red flag. I could see an email and I'm like, “This is a red flag. I can tell already this is gonna be a terrible partner to work with. Let's not even sign them,” and they're like, “Why?” I'm like. “Trust me. This one word they said, I pretty much know what they're looking for.” I think another one that's super important, I think for me at least, it's like, “I couldn't do my theme(?) companies. Every company I've done it, it's been with a partner.” You need somebody there to talk to, to help you with the problem, because like any business they're gonna be high highs and low lows. Sometimes you need somebody else to talk to them about it because sometimes you can't tell your employees how you're feeling because then it's like, “I work for you,” and then they're like, “Oh well. If the founder's feeling this way, I can't feel that way either.” Having a partner that's on the same like equal level as you or around that area – you can like tell them the real issues and how you're feeling, so I think a partner is gonna be great. And again, it helps distribute the work depending on what you're doing and how you're splitting the stuff with the business because it's a lot of stuff to do.
ROB: Yeah, is that somebody that you had early in the business or is that somebody you brought in? Is that somebody outside the business for you? What's that look like?
KEVIN: For Voy Media, it's Wilson. I've known him since college. We've literally known each other for over ten years and we've going back to everything before like one tiny bit the Ruby on Rails company. He was my partner there, too, in Silicon Valley. When I moved there, he was in college and I just graduated. And I was like, “Yo, Wilson! I'm moving.” He's like, “I’ll move there with you.” So I've known him for a long time. I tell people it really depends. There's these relationships are very . . . You need to be careful because there's a level of trust you already have so you can't really get mad at each other. But again, it's careful. Sometimes things go wrong, you get mad at each other but you know that “Hey, we're doing it because we both” . . . I I think you both need to know the goal of the business. So, it's like, “Hey, this is why I'm like upset with you. It's not that I'm upset about you personally, it's because I’m upset about the business and we both want to achieve this and we're not achieving it together. How do we get there?” So, it's a careful relationship, like any couple. Things are upsetting us. Why? Because we both want to be happy. How do we fix that issue so it's not like I'm attacking you personally?
ROB: Right. And if you’re partners on that, you got to solve it one way or another. You can't stay grumpy and you can't stay stuck in the mud. It can go sideways pretty quick. So, you had Wilson there really early on in the business.
KEVIN: Yeah.
ROB: What was another kind of key inflection point that you noticed, where you felt like you had to level up the capabilities of the firm? The people in the firm, the processes – were there any kind of chokepoints so far that you had to kind of reevaluate in a significant way?
KEVIN: Yeah. I mean like honestly, at least for Voy Media, one of the biggest things that we made was hiring an operations person to really help clean up everything at the agency. Because from reporting to hiring, I think that really helped us. I think it's one of those things where . . . I consider one of those positions where you want to be so involved sometimes. But you need to bring on someone that can do the work for you, that's smarter than you, that you can give complete ownership. I think, with any business, that's probably the hardest part – giving up some part of the business to somebody else to run and just trusting them. That's probably some of the best things that we've done because now the agency has grown quicker. With that comes a few points. One is cash load. You have to have the money to hire somebody good or can you take a little hit on income? That way you know that this person is going to hopefully pay off in six months. As a bootstrap founder, you think about these things but hiring people like that is super helpful.
ROB: Where was the business in terms of size, however you think about it, when you made that operations move?
KEVIN: We were probably like 5 to 6 people. Now we're about 30 people. So, it's definitely grown a lot more now. But yeah, hiring those people – like higher level people are helpful because there's only so many people that are doing the work. Of course, you need those people as well. But you need people thinking about strategy, thinking about processes and systems and that's why it’s helpful and again, at least for me, it's the biggest . . . honestly, one of the biggest things too is thinking about yourself as the founder, as the person running the company. What do you want to be doing? I don't want to be doing all this stuff. I want to hire somebody else to do it because that doesn't give me energy. It drains me. I want to be doing what gives me energy, which is podcasting, sales – that's exciting for me. So, I know I'm gonna do a better job and I know I'm gonna be reading books about it whereas like – “Hey, accounting, – I don't want to look this up.” Find somebody else to do it because it's going to drain you and that's going to affect your whole day.
ROB: Wow. That all makes sense. As we look ahead for Voy Media – when you look at either what the company's doing or what will be necessary in the types of marketing that you do – what's coming up that you're excited about?
KEVIN: What we're excited about right now I think, again going back to what I said before, we're working with founders building these great brands. Better for us to work with founders out in the long run – before I was quick. Like, “Hey this month sucked. You guys suck.” It's like, “Oh god, this is a stressful relationship.” It's more like, “Hey, let's build something big and great together,” and again a big thing for us too. It's gonna be the creatives. People are really open to having great images, great creatives. People are more open to trying new things now because they're seeing that Facebook isn't the only platform. There's now Facebook, there's TikTok, there's Instagram stories, like there's all this new stuff out there. It's exciting again to make content. I see that as exciting. Where before people were just like, “I just want to do Facebook ads. Okay.” “Well, TikTok.” “No, I don't know that platform.” Where people are, I think . . . I don't know . . . there’s a shift there where people are more open to new stuff now.
ROB: Yeah, it's certainly a shift. It's certainly interesting in terms of openness. How do you think about the difference between what should be legitimately out of bounds for a particular brand versus what is their being flexible in a way that that is actually necessary? People have their experimental budgets. It can't all be experimental but some of it has to be.
KEVIN: I think it just depends what level you are. I think, for example, when we work with consumer companies, all the consumer platform is always great – TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook of course. But if you're a consumer company, Linkedin doesn't make sense because that's more like professional. So, there are certain industries where it's very clear cut like, “Hey, if you're a SaaS or software or marketing company, you should be on LinkedIn because that's where quote – unquote professionals are. We think about it like that. As you get bigger and you're scaling your business, you need to think about platforms outside – like billboard ads are something that's more branded but there's a lot of ways to access those now in like easy platforms stuff. Some of my friends do that because they raise money and they say it's not effective. But I think something that brands need to think about right now is that, before, it was “you just sell online.” Now I'm seeing a big shift of online plus retail as well. So, getting into the Walmarts, the Targets, the Amazon's, the stores – everything like that is so important because it's more omnichannel versus like, “Hey I'm only direct to consumer.” I'm seeing that big shift now, too.
ROB: Right on. When you say the billboard stuff is more accessible, what does that actually look like? Can I go like buy a billboard? Can I buy it where I want it? Can I set what time of day I want to see a digital like, I don't know . . . What can I do?
KEVIN: I forgot the exact website. I’ll try to find it later. But yeah, basically you can do exactly that. I think it's ClearView, one of those company that owns it. They now have a website similar to what you said where you can just say like, “Hey, for 100 bucks I want an ad near Times Square.” It makes it super simple and easy. You can just upload your creatives. Before it was kind of what you were saying . . . even subway ads now in New York City, you have to spend 30K minimum to get like one car of subway ads, where it should be self-serve, right? “Okay, I want one car, one creative . . . how much is it gonna cost? All right?” Subway ads are harder because you actually need to print the thing, where some of these new billboards are digital. So yeah, you could do it. I forgot the exact platform but it's cool. I’ve seen some friends do it just for experimental. It kind of works but it's one of those things where you just try it out and see.
ROB: Sure. I've thought about it. There's some ways . . . maybe it's too creepy . . . but you can almost get account-based marketing. You know a bunch of people for this company come this way, light up this billboard during the commute, leave it shut down during lunchtime – like who knows, right?
KEVIN: Yeah. It's funny you're saying that because there's this company . . . they were a remote job board, right? Facebook announced, I think a few months ago, that like, “Hey, starting in 2022, everybody needs to go back to work in the office.” So, then this company took out ads on that highway to say, “Hey, don't want to go back to work? Apply for new jobs here.” But exactly what you're saying. You can know where these things are, they'll pinpoint the area, and then you can do account-based marketing that way. People do this when they launch a Walmart or Target in the city. There will be billboards around there so say, “Hey, look! We're now available at Target down the street!” So, you can do that type of stuff.
ROB: Very interesting. So much to do. So much to learn. Still, Kevin, congrats on the journey so far. Thank you for coming on and sharing with us as well. I wish you well and I know our audience will enjoy what you had to share.
KEVIN: Thank you Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
ROB: Thanks, Kevin take care. Bye
Jamie Michelson is President and CEO of SMZ Advertising, a Detroit-based agency that started in 1929, producing and distributing jeweler artwork ad kits. These ad packages, delivered as a monthly subscription service, provided graphics to promote and showcase jewelry and were used in catalogs and newspaper advertisements.
Early advertising, Jamie says, “was much more informational” than today. As advertising evolved, information had to be packaged with some entertainment and hooks to get people’s attention. The agency adapted and grew through that transitional period.
Today, at 92 years old, the still independent, family-owned full-service agency focuses on communications, planning and strategy, research, design, advertising heavily, retail, events, mobile, social, and “moving our clients’ businesses forward.” Jamie says, “All that history doesn’t mean we know everything. It teaches you to question everything.”
He then describes his agency as “a team of around 40 people” . . . with “new ideas, new media, new ways of communicating” – “quietly making noise with purpose” – to keep the focus on the client.
Initially, Jamie wanted no part of his family’s business. A few internships changed his mind. Today two of his sisters run groups of accounts in the agency. Jamie’s third sister, the fourth sibling, went to law school and serves as a federal judge.
In this interview, Jamie discusses in depth the mindsets, tools, attitudes, and strategies SMZ has used to survive so many years and how an agency changes as it is passed down through the generations. Jamie says the first generation, the founders, the creators, tend to stay involved. The second generation had to wrest control from the founders. The transition from second to third generation has been much smoother. The long-term plan is to keep the agency going as a legacy business.
Jamie says the agency business can be all-consuming. He has found it important to take time from day-to-day client servicing “to think about the future, the visioning, the structure, the governance, all that.” A second tip he offers is that companies need to codify and write down their values.
Driving out to his employees’ homes to deliver packages of information made Jamie aware of some of his employees’ beastly commutes. He says his intention going forward is to be flexible . . . in a number of ways. That flexibility has probably contributed greatly to his agency’s “long life.”
Jamie can be reached on his agency’s website at: smz.com, where visitors can find the agency’s blog, and Jamie’s Generation Excellence podcast, which explores generational family businesses. SMZ Advertising is also on all of the social platforms.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Jamie Michelson. He is the President and CEO of SMZ Advertising based in Troy, Michigan. Welcome to the podcast, Jamie.
JAMIE: Thank you for having me, Rob. I’m really looking forward to our conversation.
ROB: It’s exciting to have you here. Why don’t you start us off with an introduction to SMZ? Tell us about the firm and any key metrics, any key focuses, key verticals. Go for it.
JAMIE: People like to talk about the elevator pitch; our agency is located on the first floor of the building, so it’s more of a “walk in the door” pitch. I guess I would start with very few things survive 92 years, let alone biologically or in business. It’s something to remember, something to know. At SMZ Advertising, we’re proud of that length of time of operation. I’m proud of our long-term and enduring relationships with our clients.
But it’s kind of like all that history doesn’t mean we know everything. It teaches you to question everything. We say we remain an independent, family-owned, creatively driven, full-service – and we like to go, “accent on the full” – agency doing work in communications, planning and strategy, research, design, advertising (heavily), retail, events, mobile, social, and more. We’re a team of around 40 people, moving our clients’ businesses and then ours forward. New ideas, new media, new ways of communicating.
Our theme for our agency, if you will, our own headline, is what we call “quietly making noise with purpose.” There’s a tension between quiet and noise. Really, it’s about the spotlight shining on our clients and being humble about ourselves and very focused on them.
ROB: How does that propagate out to a client campaign? Does that echo into their campaigns, where there’s a “speak softly and carry a big stick” mentality in that as well? Or do they get to be a little bit more boisterous?
JAMIE: There’s all these books out there about filtering through the noise, avoid the noise, ignore the noise. Yet we are trying to make appropriate levels of noise, and strategic noise. I feel that our approach to it – and this goes back to roots – I’m part of a third generation of a family business where there’s a strong belief in likeability. You do business with brands you like and people you like. And it’s not namby-pamby likeability; it’s not love or “lovemarks,” but it’s just that someone likes you and they might buy what you’re selling. So, we want people to really like the work we’re doing and the brand and the business. Especially with so much choice and so much competition.
ROB: We don’t normally jump so quicky to the origin story here, but 92 years is a little bit of something. We are talking about quite a long time ago. We are talking about a Great Depression era business. What is the background here? Was it always something we would call an ad agency, or was it even something different in that regard?
JAMIE: It’s a great question. It’s a pretty neat story. Clearly, the world doesn’t look like it did in 1929. We’re faster and global and colorful and we know a lot more. But the origin was a gentleman who was my grandfather and a partner. When you talk to newer agencies, oftentimes it’s a partnership. A couple people have a dream, a vision. One’s a business guy, one’s an artist or creative.
Their early work was what we would today call ad kits. It was the artwork for jewelers. Jewelry stores, jewelry retailers around North America. There was no digital way to distribute that. There wasn’t even FedEx to deliver it. It wasn’t even Slicks, for those who go back to those in the early print/design ways. It was packages that were sent with art that became print, catalogue, even newspaper, and that got them into some jewelers as retailers and the roots of a retail agency. This is a Detroit-based company.
It was actually, weirdly, software as a service. It was subscription as a service. These people were buying this package each month so they could promote and showcase jewelry. And along came layaway and credit and these innovations in retail and business that they were a part of, and then moving that into outdoor and radio and the whole explosion of media.
ROB: Wow. Thinking about that, how are you distributing what goes into outdoor advertising on potentially a distributed basis? It’s more about a package and a solution than it is about hours and the hour trap.
JAMIE: They talked about getting that package out, because it was very calendar-driven, time-driven. Sleeping around the agency on cots and stuff to make the deadlines. Again, what’s old is new. But the idea that in the earlier roots of advertising, stuff was much more informational, and then you started to get into the beginning of having to package that information with some entertainment, some other hooks to get people to pay attention to it. It was really an agency that followed that journey.
I think what it says is – as you talk about COVID years and difficult times the agency’s gone through, there’s certainly some level of resilience in the company that starts in 1929, hits the Great Depression, the stock market crash, world wars, other follow-on wars – there were pandemics, even, in that 90-some years. You don’t assume, “We’re going to make it because we’ve been there,” but there’s something woven into – with brands, we talk about DNA a lot. I think because we’re from Detroit and it’s Motown and whatever, we talk about soul. There’s something in the soul of this agency and its people. It’s hard to describe and find, but it makes us proud of what we did and charging forward.
ROB: When in your upbringing did you become distinctly aware of the business and what it was? I don’t know if you knew it as something your grandfather was involved in, or your dad. When did you start to figure out what it was?
JAMIE: Agency people, we have this role of you do business with who you do business with. If you have a product, you have a service, you support that. Whether they did some work for Pepsi-Cola bottlers or a potato chip company or a restaurant brand, you’re using those clients’ products. One of the cornerstone accounts of the agency in my childhood years was Big Boy Restaurants in what would’ve been their heyday. There were a lot of Sunday night family dinners at the Big Boy, even to the point of my father and his partner, who are the second generation, owning a Big Boy restaurant. I’d get to be back in the kitchen as a high schooler and experience it close-hand.
But with that, I was not running into this business. I grew up around it at the kitchen table and that dinner table at restaurants. “Okay, my grandfather did it, my father did it.” When you’re a teenager, typical is rebellion. You’re going to do the other thing. I wasn’t disinterested, because I understood – I went and studied finance; I was going to be an investment banker, the whole Wall Street thing. I’m still passionate about business. But I didn’t really want things to do with this business until I experienced it firsthand with some internships and through college years and different parts of the business.
Back to that soul thing. It’s definitely in my blood. It’s just absorption. [laughs] So I worked since college at basically three different agencies, independent agencies for the most part. Never client side. A little bit, one weird little thing. But my whole career. That’s what I know, and I’m still fired up about it.
ROB: Did you have siblings that also looked to get involved, did get involved, chose to actually rebel? What is that dynamic?
JAMIE: I have three sisters, so we have four children in the third generation. Two of my sisters are involved in the business, run groups of accounts, and have been very involved with the agency and each had their own path or track into it. And then my third sister, the fourth sibling, went to law school and to a law firm and is a federal judge. That’s what’s fun. We refer to her as the black sheep.
ROB: [laughs] The woman who is a federal judge.
JAMIE: [laughs] Exactly.
ROB: That sketchy business, right?
JAMIE: Yeah. She’s good counsel to the agency because she’s sure learned to ask probing and challenging questions.
ROB: I think there’s probably an interesting season here. It’s interesting that you chose to spend some time getting experience in other businesses. Clearly, the agency had to change. The whole firm went in and out of the golden age of advertising, the kind of Mad Men. How has the firm navigated these shifts of adding services, keeping a sense of identity – that balance of not getting overwhelmed with the shiny and becoming a social media influencer agency exclusively, but also not being mired in – you’re not just broadcasting car dealerships, either.
JAMIE: I think about that all the time, the path. They talk about sins of omission/commission, those things you didn’t do or you passed on those things you did do. We talk a lot about those decisions we made or moves we made where you do them and then you go, “We should’ve done this sooner” versus “Why did we do this at all?”
The things that we’ve done were good moves for the most part. Not a lot of giant blowout mistakes, disasters. I remember stringing phone line to plug into a computer to go through modem sounds, to be on AOL, to have earliest of site stuff. Our URL is SMZ.com, so to have a three-letter URL says you were in it early. But not necessarily going on all things digital. A lot of it has been your clients take you, smoothly or kicking and screaming, into some of these new spaces and areas, or you do it the same way with them.
I think we’ve been open-minded all the time to experiment and try. It’s always changing, like you said, and there’s going to be that next new thing. Don’t get so enamored with the shiny, but don’t get to the “This is how we do it” or “It was better then” or “God, I wish it would slow down and not change.” I refer to myself – you gave my formal title, CEO/President or whatever. I talk about being Chief Agitator. I’ve got to keep the place and myself shaken up a little bit so that we don’t rest and settle.
ROB: Was SMZ a longer name at one point?
JAMIE: The original company was Simons Michelson Company, SM Co. Simons Michelson Zieve for the gentleman, son-in-law of one of the founders, my father’s partner, second gen. And then that got shortened to SMZ, I think for the poor person who had to answer the phone at the front desk all the time, saying that over and over and over again. [laughs]
ROB: What did that transition of you coming into the business – you had some experience from other places; I guess your dad was in charge. What did that transition of generations look like?
JAMIE: The transition from the first generation – and I’m a big student and have a podcast I do called Generation Excellence where I’m focused on other generational businesses and the follow-ons, G2, G3, G4. Not just because HBO does Succession and it’s super dramatic, but it’s a fertile area.
The first generation, they’re the founders, the creators. Those two guys worked, and that’s what they did. They didn’t really retire. They kept involved. The second gen had to wrest control from them a little bit. You’re talking about guys now in their seventies, eighties, whatever it was. The transition from second gen to this third generation was much smoother.
I give my father, Jim Michelson, incredible credit because it is a very hard thing to be in that command chair, be the president, running an agency, and then give away both authority and responsibility and not backtrack. Not jump back in, try to fix stuff if you don’t like how it is. You’re giving up control and letting others go make those mistakes you talked about, make those new moves. He did that and really set a model for me that I have memorized. As we figure out whatever’s next after me – because that’s the plan, the infinite game, keep this going as a legacy business – to be able to do that that same way.
ROB: I interned once upon a time at Chick-fil-A corporate. I was there under the Truett Cathy regime. Truett was there for forever, and then his son Dan comes in, and the window for Dan was much shorter. They’ve transitioned off to the third generation now. It seemed much faster. He seemed very happy to transition it sooner than maybe he did. I don’t know if you’ve looked at what they did and what they’re thinking.
JAMIE: It’s a multiparty thing. And then you’ve got the people who work for the agency, and they’re watching how this goes. You have the clients. It adds a layer on top of any other business when you add this family dynamic to it.
We do have now as a company a formal written policy that next generation family members need to have some successful work experience outside the business, because it is really nice to be able to do what you do not just as a son/daughter of someone who created a business, but on your own merits. Make your own way.
ROB: It’s funny you bring up Succession. I didn’t think about it as you talked about having these four siblings –
JAMIE: It is much less dramatic within our walls and halls.
ROB: But also interesting because you have three siblings. Presumably at least some of you have kids. We’re on video; I can see a picture behind you of a couple of fresh faces.
JAMIE: Yeah, a couple of young adult daughters working out there in the business world in both geography of where they want to be, areas they want to be in – my one daughter works out in Portland, Oregon. She’s been five years at Nike. She’s an engineer. She’s very much involved in sourcing, manufacturing product at scale. So different than what a more boutique agency does where everything is bespoke and one-offs and ideas that you can’t touch. For a lot of businesses, a lot of our clients are marketing the invisible. My other daughter is a business consultant, so more in our space at one of the consulting firms as she finishes business school this year.
They’re making their way. Again, grew up around it at the dinner table, and they know some things. It’s really helpful to have that perspective of what they’re going through. Use of social media, use of digital tools, how they communicate, remote work – every bit of those things as a mini focus group, really.
ROB: Do you even have maybe some nieces or nephews that are also in that leadership pool for the next generation?
JAMIE: Yeah, what they call the “cousins’ consortium” in family business land. The next oldest would be my nephew, who’s 20. He’s in film school. Very talented creative. I think looking to go more out West and be involved in the movie business. It’s still a bit of a journey for him to even join us. So, we have some things to figure out in our transitioning future, which is one of the things that excites me about the coming years of the business part of the business.
ROB: Yeah, absolutely. You’ve done some transition, you’ll see some transition. When you think about your history with SMZ, what are some things you think about as lessons you might tell on to the next generation about maybe what you’d do differently or what they should think about?
JAMIE: We meet probably not regularly – you know that old expression, work on the business/in the business. The agency business can be all-consuming. Your list of things to do can be so filled with serving your clients, and you have to work to take that time to think about the future, the visioning, the structure, the governance, all that. We try to take some time to do that.
In a recent meeting, I had a quote up on the screen from Tallulah Bankhead, an old Hollywood actress. She said, “If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.” The definite advice I’d give or the thing I’ve learned is, businesses that are longstanding like ours and legacy, when they started out, there wasn’t all this content and advice for startups and podcasts and videos. They were just running a business through the Depression and then going on.
The agency definitely had values, and they are woven into the place. It took us a long time. It was really only recently that we codified those values in writing, where they’re on the wall, where they’re on a sheet, where you share them with everybody at the agency and use that more as how we operate, how we hire, how we put that in front of our clients. That’s not a new idea, that businesses are based on their values, and that as good marketers, you don’t just pick the same six buzzword values that every business has.
But to do that work, to have them be really true to who you are – you mentioned Chick-fil-A. They’re a business that I think their values and their approach – and somewhat controversial sometimes – are so much a part of how they operate and who they are.
ROB: Is there anything in particular that’s happened – you could argue that for some portion of the firm, the values were intrinsic. A lot of firms starting from scratch, the values may be absent. You’ve seen this need to move the values from intrinsic to explicit. What do you think may have changed in your time there and your time in business – is that a necessity now? Has something changed? Or is it just a better way that we understand now to make them more explicit?
JAMIE: Many of us in business have had the good fortune to go to seminars, webinars, conferences. You go to those and there’s a moment, something hot for a moment, you come back, you bring it up all charged up, and then it fades off.
But I did, a few years ago, attend – Family Business has a conference called Transitions. They do it once or twice a year. You’re immersed for a few days with other – these are not all marketing firms. These are just businesses that have that test of time thing to them. The title of their thing was “Values-Based Businesses Are Valuable Businesses.” Example after example was brought up of how these different businesses had used what was true to the values that they were all about to help them not just operate, but grow – whether it was Bigelow Tea, down to the detail of the person whose name is on the teabag inside the box that packaged your product. Kind of like some of the car manufacturers where there’s someone who signs the engine, or one of the parts inside, or the steelworkers sign the last beam highest up. Just to be much more explicit about it.
ROB: Sure.
JAMIE: You see people react well to it and be involved in that process.
ROB: Yeah, that involvement in the process is so key for ownership, for carrying forward. Earlier, you talked about remote distributed work. How has that played into SMZ at this point? How do you think it plays into SMZ moving forward? October 2021, some folks are never going back to the office. Some people are already back in the office full-time. How are you thinking about that dynamic right now?
JAMIE: It’s certainly front, middle, back of mind a lot of the time. I’ll start with our feeling that our physical office we’ve always felt is a competitive advantage. It’s a great box. It’s colorful, it’s alive, it’s well-designed, it’s functional. We like being there. We like working with clients being there. Great.
At the same time, we’ve had some creative people who have worked remotely for 15, 20, 30 years and interacting with people at the agency. We’ve had others who have had all kinds of different flexible schedules and been accommodating that and learning from that. So at least for us, it wasn’t a full 180 or whatever, like maybe for many other businesses. We’re so open right now to the idea of how this is going to work, listening to our people, and using it to hire and fill new positions – which we’re able to do. It’s hard, but hybrid – my next car will probably be a hybrid. We talk about hybrid a lot in other categories and stuff that mashes together.
One of the things that was eye-opening to me was one day I took some packages and delivered them, driveway deliveries, to almost the entire employee list. My wife helped map it out on a map thing. A few of the people I got to, that commute for them, the most outlying spots, the time that they get back if they can have a few of those days where they’re not having to come into the office and can work from home – that’s life-changing. So, we’re going to embrace it.
We went back mid-July to three days in, two days remote, everybody in on Wednesdays, and we had to revert back a little bit to an all-optional in the office mode. So, there’s always somebody in each day, but it’s small groups.
ROB: It seems like the most important thing is to have an intentionality about it. Some of that’s going to be aligned to the culture and the place where you are. It seems to me that somebody around Detroit can work virtual for anyone, but they’ve chosen to be there. I think there’s an extent to which if you’re in digital marketing, if you’re in Detroit, you’ve chosen to be there.
JAMIE: Correct.
ROB: So, giving people more reasons to be there and to enjoy why they’re there is meaningful and life-giving.
JAMIE: I’m glad you brought up Detroit. We’re a proud Detroit-based business. That’s our roots, physically in the city for 50-some years in operation. A bunch of clients that are Detroit downtown-based, or the whole city. We love our region. Nationally or internationally, it gets some press reviews that aren’t fair and accurate. It’s a great place to live and work. So, there’s that spirit that people have here about our hometown, and we want to have people from here work here and be connected to here.
At the same time, this place is still a community that makes a lot of stuff. Manufactures and builds. Those operations, you can’t do that from your kitchen table. You’ve got to go to those buildings and warehouses. It’s still 30% of people that have this luxury of remote or this tech work, and everybody else has to go to the hospital, go to the school, go to the manufacturing facility, go to the supermarket, do those jobs. That’s going on around us. We’re part of that. We’ll figure it out.
The biggest part for me is – we’re having this meeting right now. It’s virtual. If it were physically in the conference room with a couple clients and you were in there with them, Rob, I might just walk by – our place is a lot of an aquarium. It’s got a lot of glass boxes. [laughs] You can see in most everywhere. Pretty transparent. You see these meetings going on and you can stick your head in and say hi, and you can see clients and you can see people. That’s the biggest miss for me, those little, quick – you just don’t know those things are going on. Not to disrupt them or interrupt them, but just to wave. Just to see that that meeting’s going on. It’s actually uplifting. You see those meetings going on and go, “They don’t need me in there. They’re doing great in there.” [laughs]
ROB: It’s meaningful for you, it’s meaningful for them. It’s meaningful for the client. I don’t know if there’s going to be a client situation –
JAMIE: Clients love getting away and going to the agency. We’ve got a dog running around or somebody’s dog running around. It’s just a different environment.
ROB: It’s going to be hard for them to get on a plane to go to an agency. At some scale, yes, but mostly no.
JAMIE: It’s taking a while. It’s really productions or major things that our people are getting on a plane or those people where, again, you have to be somewhere, versus it would be nice to be there.
ROB: Jamie, when you think about what’s coming up next for SMZ and for the marketing landscape that you’re in the middle of, what are you excited about? What’s next?
JAMIE: We talk about that history and we use that number 92. What got us driven a little bit more a year and a half ago was we embraced a program called EOS, if you’re familiar with it. Entrepreneurial Operating System. We used that. That 100-year milestone is a pretty neat concept/sound. What are we going to smell like, look like, feel like when we get there? I’m really excited about being this smart, steady, scrappy, creative – still creative; I think ideas still matter – growing agency, celebrating that in the right way. Not just “We made it” and it’s a moment, but that whole year should be something, and that should be a stepping stone to what’s next.
So that excites me. I mentioned before, mapping out, going to visit people who work for the agency. That’s what we do for clients. We ask them that question all the time. “Where are you trying to go? What are you trying to be? How do we get there?” We don’t always do it as well for ourselves as marketing firms. So doing that work and doing that visioning. And when you do that and you have goals and you write it down and say how you’re going to get there, you tend to not only get there, you tend to get there faster and even a little better.
The other thing that excites me is I was really caught up or hung up with the trend – and it was real, and we faced it. Clients were in-housing a lot of stuff. This whole great reshuffle of everything that’s going on from where ships are to where chips are to where people are is upsetting that, too, for in-house operations. I think it’s going to yield opportunity for, as your podcast is for, marketing leadership and marketing firms of all shapes and sizes. They’re like, “I can’t get the people to do this,” so now they’ve got to go back to outsourcing and finding folks to help. We’ll certainly going to be there and do that. I hope I’m right on that.
ROB: That’s definitely a tricky wave. Sometimes it’s even very client-specific. I’m usually in Atlanta, and to an extent, the fabled Coca-Cola company is perpetually on one end of the pendulum or the other on in-house, out-of-house. Certainly, macro trends also impact that.
JAMIE: Yeah, there’s that whole thing of get closer to the data. I get that. But when you said growing up around agencies, or my sense of it, that concept of being – we talk about being partnerships or even beyond a partnership with clients, stakeholders and very involved, but still objective outsiders at the same time. That combination can be powerful for client operations. We think we age well with the client relationships. We learn more and we get better.
ROB: Jamie, you mentioned a little bit earlier on the digital real estate, but when people want to find you and find SMZ, where should they go to find you?
JAMIE: It starts with smz.com, which is our website. That also houses our blog and the podcast I do called Generation Excellence, which is for those who are really interested in that very niche-y space of generational family businesses. And then SMZ Advertising is on all of the social platforms, sharing stories of our people, our clients, our work, a little thought leadership, little bit of our fun and things that we do to stay connected, which is a big effort right now inside of work and outside of work. I guess that would probably be about it.
I welcome anyone who wants to reach out to me via the email address on the site, or call me. I’m open to talk about this business. I’m very fortunate to steward a unique and special place, and I want to put my energies against it being successful, but I love helping others.
ROB: Definitely. Congratulations on being 92 going on 100 as a firm. That is exciting.
JAMIE: For those who can’t see me, the firm’s 92. I’m a little bit younger than that.
ROB: [laughs] Yeah. We’ll see what a 100-year-old SMZ looks like. We’ll look forward to that. Jamie, I wish you and the team the best. Thank you for coming on the podcast.
JAMIE: I thank you for having me on this. I like that you blend the individual story and the business story, because they are intertwined and interconnected.
ROB: In this kind of firm, absolutely. They’re inseparable.
JAMIE: Yep. Thanks, Rob.
ROB: Thanks, Jamie. Be well.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Adam McChesney, Owner, and Partner at St. Louis, Missouri franchise of Hite Digital, a service digital marketing agency with 15 locations. Adam’s agency provides logo design, branding services, website design, search engine optimization, paid advertising, and recently launched Hite CRM, a technology-based software based on GoHighLevel’s white-labeled CRM.
The goal? “To create an ecosystem that . . . helps us generate more business for them, . . . turn(s) those leads into customers, and then turn(s) those customers into walking billboards for our clients.” He wants to “turn a client’s business into “a scalable model” that helps them reach their goals and helps them get more out of what they put in.” Adam says over 75% of his clients are in a home-service or contracting-type industry.
Before Hite, Adam sold medical devices for around five years. When Covid hit, he decided he wanted to get into marketing. His background in prospecting, sales, and growing business gave him the skills he needed to get clients. He studied up on website building, ranking, and paid ad production so he could do the work.
He started his agency in July of 2020 and grew it “from basically nothing up to 30 or 40 clients,” but then came the problems. A lot of issues – fulfillment, account management, and scaling – were breaking the agency and its business. Adam started looking for ways to outsource. After he became “official” with Hite in June of this year, he doubled his agency’s monthly revenue in 90 days . . . jumping from $30K to $60k a month.
Hite Digital at the corporate level handles processes, systems, fulfillment, and some of the prospecting and administration services, leaving Adam with the time and energy to focus on prospecting, selling, growing, and scaling his business. Daily franchise calls with other franchise owners cover different business topics – each week starts with sales, then progresses through mindset, general operations, product, and on Friday, family-oriented personal sharing – providing a rich source of franchise “lessons learned,” but, more importantly, supportive relationships.
The franchise has allowed him to leverage the resources and abilities of about 150 full-time team members and 15 distinct locations, and do work at a scale that a small, independent agency could not. Adam feels the franchise certifications, high-profile sponsorships, and publicity have increased his “validity” . . . he no longer has to sell himself as an individual product. With Hite corporate providing the processes and systems (“Sales are not going to outperform and out-scale bad processes and systems,” Adam warns), he now has the time to be “hyper-focused on what’s going to take this agency and continue to grow.” He then concludes, “The things that are happening behind the scenes – strategy, everything like that – have continued to stay the same
One key to finding quality clients? Adam is in a number of mastermind groups where he meets with business owners from all over the country on a regular basis. Many of the people in his mastermind groups are his clients or become his clients . . . and those people refer new clients to him, as well. Adam feels personal branding contributes to his ability to get and retain clients, because people know, like, and trust him based on the relationship created before they even consider a partnership.
Adam is available on Instagram: @adamlmcchesney or on his agency’s website at: hitedigital.com/st-louis
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Adam McChesney, Owner and Partner at Hite Digital St. Louis, obviously in St. Louis, Missouri. Welcome to the podcast, Adam.
ADAM: Yeah, Rob. Thanks for having me on. Super excited to be here today. Appreciate you having me here today.
ROB: Excellent to have you on the podcast. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Hite Digital St. Louis? Tell us what you all are doing, what’s exciting there, what clients seek out.
ADAM: Yeah, absolutely. Hite Digital St. Louis is a franchise operation of Hite Digital. Hite Digital has 15 locations as of this recording today, and I’m lucky enough to be the owner/partner here in St. Louis, Missouri. We’re a full-service digital marketing agency. We do everything from logo and branding, website design, search engine optimization, paid advertising, and we’ve recently launched our own CRM as well.
We do things a little bit differently over at Hite. Some really cool things that we have in the works. But we are a franchise model, so we leverage the resources and the abilities of about 150 full-time team members and 15 different locations. It has allowed us to do a lot of things at scale that, if you were basically your own little hyper-agency like I was before merging with Hite, you just couldn’t do. Some really exciting things we have going on.
ROB: It’s a really interesting model, and I think it’s one we really haven’t encountered before on this podcast. How did you become aware of Hite, and how did you get drawn in? I’m sure that’s a process; I’m sure there’s some aspirations of what you can build on your own, what you can build together. It’s probably a journey.
ADAM: Absolutely. It’s definitely been a journey. I’ve been an agency owner full-time now since July of 2020. Quick backstory on me: I was in the medical device sales field for about five years. Worked my way up through multiple companies and was pretty successful, but right as COVID was going on, I realized I didn’t know if this was necessarily for me. I’d always wanted to take marketing full-time to see what I could do, helping local businesses – especially during such a unique time that we were seeing with the pandemic. So, in July of 2020, I left.
My background, my strengths are really in prospecting and sales and growing business, so I never really had any issues finding people that were interested in allowing me to do their marketing and advertising. And then I was taught through courses and programs and a lot of self-teaching how to build a website, rank a website, do all the paid ads. So, I could sell and then I could also do it, which was nice, but it also brought its own set of problems for fulfillment and account management and scaling. As I took my agency from basically nothing up to 30 or 40 clients, I had a lot of issues that were breaking the agency and the business as a whole. I started looking into ways to outsource.
Hite Digital was one of those ways that I was looking. Hite Digital in the past had been a white label fulfillment company for agencies that obviously didn’t want to do the work internally. So, transitioning over to this franchise model – I had heard about it; never heard anything like it. I thought, “Wow, this is way too good to be true.” They handle the processes and the systems, they handle the fulfillment, they handle some prospecting and admin stuff. For me, it was a perfect storm where I was at in my agency to be able to continue and focus on what I wanted to do, which is prospect and sell and grow a business.
ROB: It’s really fascinating. It sounds like the whole delivery aspect of the business is something you don’t really have to worry about on a day-to-day basis.
ADAM: That’s correct.
ROB: But then with that also comes – you still do have to sell something that is aligned to what Hite can deliver as an organization. How do you think about the alignment between what you’re selling and what’s being delivered?
ADAM: Luckily, I had a taste of what Hite was able to do before I came on as a franchise. I knew a couple other people that were already franchisees of Hite, I had seen it from a white label standpoint, and most of what I’m selling today was also what I had previously sold and also done myself. So, for me, it wasn’t much of a transition. The biggest transition for me was to get out of a lot of the mundane tasks of the day to day. So, managing the accounts, managing the projects, building a website myself – all the things that in theory were good for me in the beginning to get access to knowing how to do it and be able to better sell what I was selling, but it got me very focused on the things that weren’t going to grow and scale a business.
ROB: What kind of territory do you have, then? Is it St. Louis in fact, and someone else might come in and do Kansas City or Nashville? You’ve got about 100 miles? What’s your range?
ADAM: Basically, right now I’m the only one in Missouri. I can’t remember the specifics on the range. I want to say it’s about 120 miles that I can remember. For example, in the state of Texas we have four franchisees down there. We don’t really necessarily have a boundary of where we can do business, being digital marketing. There’s not any caps on anything like that. But I want to say it’s about 120 miles in terms of where another franchise would be opening.
ROB: Got it. It reminds me – the NBA operates kind of like that too, and they seem to be doing all right for everyone there. [laughs]
When it comes to prospecting, you almost get to go out and prospect a bit more unencumbered with the day to day of the operations, which is fascinating. Quite often in the medical sales field, it’s I think a little bit similar. How do you think about which kinds of clients you’re working with locally?
ADAM: Where I really got my start was online networking. I’m in a variety of different masterminds where likeminded people are coming together. I’m meeting business owners all the time, and whether I’m working with people within those masterminds as clients of mine or they’re referring people to me, most of my clients were all over the country.
This has now given me an aspect to start doing some cool things locally in terms of networking, getting my name out there from a standpoint that actually means something. When I am the product, the service, and everything, and I’m telling people, “Hey, this is what I’ve got,” no one really understands that. Now I can send them over to Hite Digital, show them all the team members that we have, all the certifications, all the sponsorships, all the stuff that has been written about Hite Digital throughout the publications. It has a lot more validity.
So, I’m more proud to be able to go and show that and do that, and it’s given me access and more time to be able to do it. Personal branding is such a big aspect of where I’ve been able to get clients, keep clients and retain clients, because people know, like, and trust me based on the relationship that we’ve already created before even coming into a partnership together.
ROB: Where does that lead you? Are there particular verticals or sizes of companies? Is there a typical client right now in St. Louis for you?
ADAM: Most of the clients I have are in the home service or contracting space. That’s really where I got my start and where I’m heavily involved from a client standpoint. But transitioning over to Hite, we’ve been able to work with clients of all shapes and sizes and a variety of different industries. Even started getting into the ecommerce space, which I had never been into before. There’s really not a cap, but if I had to say, majority of my clients, 75% and above right now are all in a home service or contracting type industry.
ROB: Got it. That certainly makes sense from a services perspective, whether you’re talking about SEO, whether you’re talking about paid search. All of those kinds of things, you need a certain kind of website; you need to be distributed certain places. You can definitely see how there’s a lot of them, and you’re prospecting probably looks a little bit similar on that side too, going to the medical. There’s lists of these people. You can find them, you can build trust with them, and keep on going. Does that transfer?
ADAM: Exactly. That absolutely does.
ROB: You mentioned the CRM product, then. Is that a Hite central offering? What does that look like?
ADAM: Yes. We partnered with GoHighLevel to create a technology-based software of their white label CRM. It’s called Hite CRM. We launched it probably about two months ago right now. We’ve started to have some people adopt it. But essentially, we want to create an ecosystem that not only helps us generate more business for them, but able to obviously turn those leads into customers, and then turn those customers into walking billboards for our clients.
The strategic part about what we do isn’t just getting them more lead flow or more calls; it’s how we turn your business into a scalable model that helps you reach your goals and helps you get out more of what you put in.
ROB: That part makes sense. I do wonder – and this is always a little bit of a tricky art between that transition from sales to delivery in terms of relationship. You mentioned relationship, you mentioned retention. How do you think about the ownership of the relationship when a client goes from sales in your office to delivery, which is across the world, and certainly has to be at a level of quality – but it seems like the boundary of who owns the account is a little bit trickier than maybe if you had everything in-house.
ADAM: Absolutely. Technically, we still obviously have it in-house. My account managers that I have are full-time. They just work with my clients. We have created the relationship and created that on a very high level. People obviously do business with me because they know, like, and trust me, and then I transition to not necessarily completely step away from the account, but “Hey, here is Kevin or Moe that’s going to be able to take care of you on a daily basis.” The problem in agencies, as you grow and scale, and the issue I was having, is I was lucky if I was able to hop on a call with a client that was paying me a good amount of money once per month. In that, I wanted to make sure that the customer service was to a tier above where I had it and that we were still getting the results, that we were getting the correct reporting, that we were building efficiencies around how we do things for our clients.
The aspect of the touching of each account and to the effectiveness we’ve been able to do it has completely gone through the roof in the transition. Obviously, that comes with me stepping back and delegating and putting processes and systems in place so I’m not the face of the day-to-day communication. But at the end of the day, the things that are happening behind the scenes – strategy, everything like that – has continued to stay the same.
ROB: What does it look like? What’s maybe the most extreme example of what it looks like to scale a city as a Hite franchisee? What’s the limit? There’s almost an unlimited amount of business.
ADAM: Yeah, there’s unlimited amount of business. Ideally, I think in the future we create physical offices, we have all these different things. Being able to work remote and pretty much anywhere in the world, I think there’s a ton of opportunity just with one location.
Just to give you an idea, I came into Hite officially June of this year, and by stepping away from the account management, by stepping away from the fulfillment and the admin tasks, I’ve been able to double my agency in 90 days. We went from about $30k a month to over $60k a month. And really all that is attributed to me being able to step away and not have to worry about “When’s this project going to be due?” or “How am I going to figure out how to get all of these reports out to these clients and then hop on calls with them, and then hopefully for 30 minutes to an hour a day focus on my personal brand and also prospecting?” Those things tend to go in the backseat when you have to figure out the projects and the account management. For me, I’ve been able to be very hyper-focused on what’s going to take this agency and continue to grow.
ROB: A lot less fires to fight, for sure. A flipside of that, I would think, is maybe having fewer people around you when it comes to having a table of different opinions to help challenge the business, to move it forward, to think of what’s next. How do you think about finding peer support and things to drive you forward in that way?
ADAM: Luckily, the support system with the franchise model at Hite is absolutely phenomenal. We have a daily franchise call. Each day of the week is a particular sector or topic of the business. Today was sales, getting the week started off right. Tomorrow is mindset. Then we have general operations, product, and then family-oriented personalized stuff. So, we talk together on a consistent basis, even though we are completely on opposite ends of the country or the world or wherever we’re talking.
I think by having all of this communication and collaboration in the last 90 days, what’s also taken me is I’m finding new ways to put different twists on my business based off of what all these agency owners are doing, because we’re all in it together. If someone is finding success in a certain area, we’re going to share it with the team because we want to grow and scale at its height. If you were to just have a daily call with 15 agency owners, I don’t know how many people are going to start sharing their secrets every single day of the week to help you grow. You might get one or two things. But we’re able to do this thing at scale and really help a ton of clients, a ton of people, and do it on a consistent basis. So that’s been a really cool part.
ROB: Right. From a geography perspective, there’s no competition. You can be fully transparent. Someone can tell you exactly one account they’re having a hard time with, they’re weak, they’re dying, the client’s at risk, and you can’t go steal that client. There’s nothing you can do. That’s their client, and they need the help to succeed, and you can learn from it.
ADAM: Yeah, it’s been phenomenal. To also give you an idea, we have one of our owner/partners who’s in Nashville, and he’s a real estate investor himself. He got into the space for being a real estate investor, to try to grow and scale his wholesaling company. He’s jumped on calls with me to talk real estate with potential clients that he’s never going to see anything from. No one’s ever going to take time out of their day to do that if you’re not a part of something like we have going on at Hite.
ROB: One thing that seems like it would be tricky – and I’m sure they’ve solved it – how do you handle the question of product offerings and pricing? Because it seems like there’s a lot of room for transparency there. There’s a lot of room for you to try to mark up a service 10 times the rack rate. There’s room for Hite to mark up a service 10% and tell you to just deal with it. How does that balance work from the pricing as it flows through to a client?
ADAM: We have our fulfillment costs of what we pay per project or per service offering, what have you, and then we have “Hey, here’s what we recommend selling it for.” You can sell it for what you want. If you want to package something together, if you want to offer X, Y, and Z free for 90 days or at a percentage off, you have the complete ability to do that. Clients are never really getting access to what our cost is on anything, so you then can go and say, “Hey, here’s what I want to do in my business to be able to get to XYZ goal, and I’m going to reverse-engineer back knowing your costs.” So yeah, we haven’t had any issues with it thus far.
ROB: It’s an interesting thing. It also allows you to be entrepreneurial because you can assess the market conditions locally, the competitive situation. It all makes sense. It still feels like selling, sounds like.
ADAM: Yeah, it does. The huge thing for us is we’ve been able to get access to opportunities that we would’ve never gotten access to if we were just our little agency here in St. Louis. We were the VIP sponsor out at Traffic & Conversion. We got a ton of exposure there. We’re a sponsor on Dave Ramsey’s podcast. There’s a lot of things you can now do when you have 15 locations that are all pooling things together. We have an opportunity generation department that helps out with our prospecting and even sets appointments for us. There’s a lot of really cool things you’re able to do when doing it at scale.
ROB: Absolutely. That did ring a bell, actually. I have listened on the EntreLeadership Podcast. I have heard Hite Digital. It did ring a bell, and part of me wondered how much that sponsorship cost. I don’t expect you to know that, but… [laughs]
ADAM: I don’t know it. [laughs]
ROB: It’s probably something you wouldn’t do on your own.
ADAM: Yes, exactly.
ROB: Very good. Adam, you’ve done your own agency, you’ve chopped the delivery part off now and freed yourself to focus on some strengths; what are some lessons you’ve learned on your journey leading the agency that you might go back and tell yourself if you could rewind the clock and try to play Back to the Future and tell yourself what you ought to have known?
ADAM: There’s a variety of different things. It’s only been 15 months of doing this full-time, and I’ve had a lot of success, but I’ve made a lot of mistakes, so the list could be very long. But I think the biggest thing for me, being a sales rep in my past, is sales are not going to outperform and out-scale bad processes and systems.
When I first started running this full-time, I leave medical device, I leave a very lucrative industry, benefits, security, all those different things, and the shiny object is “Just go get sales. Take whatever product or service you can get in here and start selling it. Get people in the door.” Which was fine to an extent, but then my weakness – and why it’s been such a great transition into Hite – is the processes and the systems. It’s the organization. It’s the fulfillment aspect.
Trying to outsell bad processes and systems is never going to be the answer, and I think so many agency owners experience those problems where they’re just focused on the shiny object, which is that next deal or that next month’s worth of retainers, when not focusing on a process or system could set you back next month, 90 days, 6 months from now, and keep you from scaling to grow your business.
ROB: Sure. A lot of the processes are handled for you. How do you think about the processes that are not handled for you? How do you think about keeping consistency? Is there a playbook you’re pulling from Hite? Is there a playbook you’re writing yourself? How do you keep those account managers locked and loaded? How do you think about the next zero on the size of the business?
ADAM: There’s definitely a playbook and framework from Hite, but with how we do our business – to give you an idea, not everyone is going to have an account manager based on where they’re at in their franchise. I happen to have two of them due to the size of our franchise. There’s different dynamics that are coming in. I’m doing things a little bit differently than someone else is doing them based on our comfortability and based on where we’re at with our clients and what projects we have going on.
I’m managing it and learning new things each day, because I’ve really never managed people in a full-time aspect, especially in the account manager role, and I’ve also never been just an account manager. So, there’s a variety of different factors that are going on. The next level in my agency is to bring in an integrator type person with digital marketing experience that really knows how to grow and scale an account management team, eventually a sales team. That way, I can really focus on what I’m doing best, which is at the top, strategizing, growing, and scaling the franchise itself, and not in the day to day still when it comes to managing people and the operations aspect.
ROB: That lets you focus also on bringing in a very interesting sort of integrator, because you’re not talking about a full-scale ops and delivery integrator. You can think about it as a different sort of organization, probably bring a more specialized integrator into that role.
ADAM: A specialized integrator, one that’s done SOPs, one that’s done the product and the service aspect of what you do, and that likes doing it. Because at the end of the day, I think a lot of people are put in positions or pivoted to be an integrator when really they could be a visionary type of person or someone that doesn’t like “I’m going to check the boxes and do all these different things.” My mind races at 1,000 miles per hour, and I need someone to help reel that in, and when we do have a good idea or a new process and system that could take the business to the next level, have someone that can run and put it into place and actually make it work.
ROB: Absolutely. You’ve mentioned there’s different scales of these franchises; there’s one-man/one-woman shows. You’ve got a couple people around you. With the visibility that you have, what’s the biggest you’ve seen a franchise get so far, and what does it look like from a work structure?
ADAM: The franchise model is actually not even a year old. It’s super new. We have people that have come in with agencies of all sizes, and then also people that are brand new to running their own agency, which I think is really cool. I think on the spectrum of where things are at, our average agency – we just saw the numbers today – is doing almost $30,000 a month. That’s between all the agencies that are out there.
Our agency here in St. Louis is definitely the largest in terms of I have two full-time people. I think everyone else pretty much at least has another full-time person or is working towards that. From a monetary standpoint, those things are going to be on every which end of the spectrum. But the average is right around $30,000, which is pretty healthy for 15 and only being a year old.
ROB: Yeah, and you’re setting the pace then a little bit, creating what this looks like. I wondered up front what it looked like perhaps from a pride perspective, because you start your own business and then you’re merging, you’re rebranding. But it almost sounds like a way to think about it is it’s a way of making a bet and investing in growth. You’re saying, “I think if I take this path instead of another one, I’m going to rebrand, I’m going to gain this halo over me” – and I guess some podcast ads, and this conference, plenty of other lead routes. But sometimes a merger is an ego battle, and it sounds like this is a little bit more of an investment strategy.
ADAM: Yeah. It was a concern for me, to be honest. I was a lot more concerned with the way that I thought it was going to go versus how it actually did. For me, it wasn’t so much the ego, but it was that I was the product, the service, and the everything. Basically, taking feedback and taking how the customers at the time and eventual customers took it, I took all that stuff personally. Some was good, some was not so good, and there were areas of opportunity.
But for me, it was more so we each have our own commitment at Hite, and we’re committed to so many different things of helping people, empowering people. I am the commitment to live a more whole, well-rounded life. If I want to do that, the way I do that is by impacting as many people as possible. I can only impact so many people if I’m doing everything, and I don’t have the support, I don’t have what I have now at Hite.
Now, in 90 days, I’ve already grown the business double to what it was already at before, which was helping a lot of people. It’s really cool to see even what we’ll have at the end of the year and then this time next year. We’re able to fulfill our commitments at a higher level, and in the process of that we’re obviously going to lose clients that maybe we wouldn’t have lost if I stayed and did my little agency. But we have to look at the bigger picture. I have to look at the bigger picture and what’s best for me, my family, my agency, and everything else that’s included.
ROB: For sure. When you’re looking ahead, Adam, at the next year, if we were to catch up a year from now, what’s going to be new from the Hite Digital fulfillment mothership, and what will be different in St. Louis? What should we be looking forward to?
ADAM: I alluded to earlier, over the next three to six months, I really want to bring in an operations integrator type manager to help take this business and plug up the holes that are here. What I think that allows us to do is to grow our team here in St. Louis – adding that person that would be local here in St. Louis, potentially adding some sales managers, more account managers. But getting very strategic on the partnerships and the things we’re doing, investing in relationships, investing in masterminds to make sure that we’re impacting not only as many people as we possibly can, but the right people, the right clients to come in here. The more people we’re able to work with on a consistent basis, it’s really going to help everyone win.
I think in terms of Hite, we have ambitions of taking it from 15 franchises – I don’t know what the end goal looks like in terms of a specific number of franchisees, but I think the people we’re bringing in are all quality. They fit the bill of what makes Hite, Hite. And the best part is we’re attracting all of these people. We’re bringing in agency owners that we’re connected to in our market, we’re in other masterminds together. There’s just a uniqueness to what we’re doing. I think that continues on over the next couple months and throughout the years.
ROB: Excellent. Adam, when people want to find and connect with you and Hite Digital St. Louis, where should they go to find you?
ADAM: The easiest place is going to be my Instagram account. That’s @adamlmcchesney. That’s where I’m probably the most active in terms of messaging back and forth with people. You can also go to hitedigital.com/st-louis and find our information there in terms of what we offer and everything we have going on here at Hite Digital St. Louis.
ROB: Excellent. Adam, thank you for coming on. This really does uncover a model we haven’t talked about a lot on this podcast. It’s a different path. It’s clear it’s working for you, it’s exciting, and I think we’re going to hear more about it. Thanks for coming on and sharing your experience, sharing your vision and leadership thus far, and we can’t wait to see where it all goes.
ADAM: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to be on. Super excited for the future.
ROB: Thanks so much, Adam. Take care.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Sara Helmy is CEO at Tribu (tribe in Latin), a 20-employee digital marketing and branding agency that prides itself on “building tribes for the brands that we serve.” Sara, with a passion for SEO, started the agency ten years ago with about $6,000, no outside funding, no debt . . . and for the first three years, doubled-down, boot-strapped, added things over time, and eventually morphed the agency into a branding powerhouse with close to $3 million in service revenue this year.
Tribu serves a diverse group of clients . . . facilitating government-supported projects (like San Antonio’s 300-year anniversary celebration), B2C (Devils River Whiskey), B2B, and healthcare . . . but most clients have one thing in common: They have high, ambitious growth goals . . . and they want to be disruptive in some sense.
Tribu’s view of “brand” is far broader than having a logo and a website. Sara includes in “brand” the assets a company creates and deploys, the nurturing, the daily “rock pounding,” the tribe growing, the follower building, and the activities compelling potential customers to sign up for email lists. Branding efforts may be for a brand that never existed before or for existing brands that are looking to “reinvent themselves.”
Sara says that branding (and rebranding) are more about identifying and extracting value that is already there, something unique that will resonate with customers, rather than in creating something new that didn’t exist before. The invention part comes in creating a new way to communicate that message.
When the agency works with a new brand, there is more freedom . . . but, without an existing customer base, Sara says, “You’re a little bit more blind.” A brand may think it knows itself, but often, Tribu has to collect data from potential customers and focus groups to show companies how they are “seen.” Sara says “95% of good businesses are going to choose to honor their customers.”
When a company already has an existing customer base, rebranding may be easier because customers will tell you who you are . . . but it is also harder because, if the business direction changes substantially, you risk alienating existing customers who got you to where you are.
In this interview, Sara offers two important business tips:
- Invest in “A” players, because they are the ones who will solve your problems, help navigate, and help your agency grow.
- Plan, nurture, and control your culture . . . the health of your finances will often match the health of your agency culture.
Sara can be reached on her agency’s website at: Wearetribu.com – and from the beginning to this day, the onsite contact form goes straight to her personal mailbox!
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Sara Helmy, CEO at Tribu based in San Antonio, Texas. Welcome to the podcast, Sara.
SARA: Thank you for having me, Rob. I’m excited to be here.
ROB: It’s excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by introducing us to Tribu? What should we know? What is your specialty?
SARA: Tribu means “tribe” in Latin. We pride ourselves on building tribes for the brands that we serve. More literally, I guess you could consider us a digital marketing and branding agency. We’ve been around since 2011, so this year will be our 10th year in November. We’re very excited about that. In general, that’s Tribu.
We’re a tribe of 20 people today. When we started, we started with about $6,000. No outside funding, no debt. Just doing really good work and climbing ladders. We’re still a small agency. We’ll do probably about $3 million in service revenue this year with our tribe. (That’s what we call our team of 20.) But in 10 years, no outside funding, no debt. That’s just been organic growth by serving a whole bunch of partners we’re really thrilled and excited to have every day.
ROB: Congratulations on 10 years, on $3 million, on 20 people. I’m sure there’s days when that feels like a lot of responsibility. Dig a little deeper with the brands you serve. Is there a typical example you can give us of who you work with, what the scope of the engagement or the range perhaps can look like?
SARA: Absolutely. We’re actually a little bit everywhere when it comes to industry. We don’t have a particular industry niche. But most everybody that we work with has really high and ambitious growth goals, and they want to be disruptive in some sense. So far, for us at times that’s spanned government – it’s a lot of B2C, B2B, healthcare. We’re literally everywhere. What they have in common is they’ve got some project or some initiative that they consider disruptive and they really want to grow it fast.
More specific examples. Devils River Whiskey was one that we worked with for very many years. Travis Park, which is one of the oldest municipal parks in the United States, was one that we rebranded and revamped. When San Antonio turned 300 years old, we helped them put on that celebration. Then we’ll also serve the plastic surgeon who’s got really high ambitious goals, or we’ll partner up with a private equity who buys companies and turns them around and plug in as their marketing partner.
So we’re a little bit everywhere in that sense, but what they all have in common is they want to disrupt and they want to grow very fast.
ROB: It seems like that branding component of what you do – I think a trick with branding agencies can often be the “What next?” I did the brand and then the engagement falls off. It sounds like you have this pairing of people who are using the rebrand as a jumping-off point to get more aggressive overall.
SARA: Yes, I would say that’s pretty accurate. It’s either a ground-up brand that hasn’t existed before, or there’s a big rebrand initiative in there somewhere. One of the things we deal with all the time is that your brand is so much more than a logo and a website. Those are assets that you created, that you smartly deployed, but brands aren’t created just when you create those things. They’re created through nurturing, through pounding the rock every single day, growing a tribe, amassing a following, giving people a compelling reason to sign up for an email list. When we say brand building, we mean so much more down the line than just getting a new website or designing a logo.
ROB: Sure. Brand is also partly who you actually are. It’s who you actually are when you are out in the market. How do you take a client who is looking to rebrand and get past who they think they are or who they think they should be and get to who they actually can be and break through with that?
SARA: I love that question. I think a lot of people think when you’re rebranding or something, you’re creating something new. In actuality, you’re extracting, with a very good strategic understanding, what’s compelling that lives there. A lot of times, a partner or business will come in and tell you all about their brand, all about what they do, all about their history.
I think what we’re doing is inventing the way that’s communicated, but it’s so much more than inventing things to invent things. You’re extracting something that’s there. Typically there’s a differentiator. There’s something unique about them, and it’s just hidden. When we enter a rebrand, or when we decide we’re going to brand something from the ground up for somebody, we’re extracting more than we are inventing what’s valuable there. What is there that would truly resonate with a tribe or an audience? Who is that audience, and where’s the match?
So it’s more extracting. It’s more strategic identifying of those things, and then you build a brand around that – the more traditional, well-known aspects of it, like what it looks like, the tone of voice, the colors and the typography, and our strategy for getting in front of this tribe, or what most people refer to as target audiences.
ROB: Is there an aspect of that that is easier when there’s also an existing customer base? Because in some cases then the customers actually tell you who you are.
SARA: Yeah, it’s easier and harder when there’s an existing customer base, I think. Easier in the sense that you’ve got the best resource ever. You’ve got customers, and exactly what you said, you can ask them and they’ll tell you. Harder in the sense that if the business’s goals are to substantially change, you have to consider the existing customer. You can’t just 180. You’ve got to love the people that got you where you are.
So preserving equity and being mindful in how you do that sometimes makes those circumstances more complex than when you’re starting something at the ground floor and you have a little bit more freedom to work with. But also, you’re a little bit more blind because there’s not a customer base that you can tap into at that point.
ROB: How do you help someone when they have this conception of themselves and there’s a better dimension of themselves that they actually need to be highlighting, because they really can’t inhabit the brand of what they think they are?
SARA: I think you show them. That’s one of the most beautiful parts of the digital marketing world and living in the technology we live today. There’s a way to show them. There’s data, where maybe previously marketers had to fly a little bit more blind. It’s super easy these days to ask a question and get a response. You don’t necessarily have to always have a 10- or 15-person, immaculately sourced focus group, conducted very formally. So in that situation, you show them, and at that point you let the business decide. I think 95% of good businesses are going to choose to honor their customers.
ROB: I get it. You mentioned 10 years ago, $6,000 to start; what led up to that moment, though? What led you to say, “I have this $6,000” – maybe you saved it up, maybe you didn’t – “and I’m going to put it on the line to make Tribu happen”? What did that look like?
SARA: What a bootstrap startup, right? I was young. I was 22 years old at the time. My father had passed away, unfortunately, probably two years before that. So I had learned life is short, and I was a little bit less scared of entrepreneurship failure potential as a result. Also, when you’re young, it’s easier to get something off the ground when you consider that you don’t have a mortgage to worry about or a family to feed at that point.
I happened to be working in SEO, and I absolutely love SEO. That’s the service in this world where I got my start. I was fortunate to, at such a young age, be an operations manager for an SEO division inside of an agency. The entrepreneurial itch, the combination of losing my dad and realizing that life is short, finding an industry that I absolutely loved, a field of study I was completely passionate about – it collided.
Also, because I was young, I just didn’t really have that much money. Hello. [laughs] So $6,000 was what I could put in. I was fortunate enough that I had a little bit of a measly extra that I could live off for that first year, really. So it had to work within that year, at least enough to get me to the next year. That was pretty much the backstory of how Tribu started.
ROB: When you’re bootstrapped, it’s a little bit harder to decide those moments when you’re going to actually – you make decisions to invest in the business sometimes, especially in the services thing, no investors. You can take the money out or you can double down on certain aspects of the business. What were some of those bets you made early to invest in particular aspects of the business that were maybe some key decisions?
SARA: In hindsight – I don’t know that I was doing this then; it just seemed like what you had to do when you’re bootstrapped. But I think we doubled down a zillion times. I paid our staff before I ever paid myself. There were several years in Tribu’s early start that I would pull enough out in terms of – I didn’t get a salary. I would distribute enough that I could eat a meal if I needed to. In the meantime, there were graphic designers who were employed and we were doubling down in the sense that the money was going to that. We doubled down when we purchased our own building, probably about four or five years in.
I hope I didn’t fail to answer your question, Rob, and go roundabout, but I think there was a series of doing nothing but doubling down in those first three years, probably, of Tribu’s life.
ROB: Sure. There’s an extent to which every hire is an investment into the business. Some make you choke on payroll a little bit harder than others, when you’re like, “We’re going to hire somebody who makes what?” Then you have to say, “Yeah, I guess we’re going to do that.”
SARA: [laughs] Yep.
ROB: How do you make the jump, or connect the dots, then, between SEO and brand? I might see a shadow of it, but it’s not a common conversation, right? Most folks in SEO don’t get really excited about rebranding, except for what keywords they’re going to target. How did you get there?
SARA: I love that question. Honestly, I think when you get really, really deep into SEO and you start trying to guess the algorithm and what Google’s up to and what it’s going to change towards and what’s going to be their next move – the deeper you go, the more you find that the algorithm – my theory is that it’s going to go towards what is genuinely, authentically inspiring to another human being. That’s what we want to show in our result when someone enters in a query. And that’s what led me to, okay, brand really, really matters from SEO, if that makes sense.
I think that’s where the connection was made. I also think good SEO strategies, good organics, really focus on – even though it’s not stereotypical in an SEO’s mind, engagement rate really matters. What’s your popularity? That’s a very big one in terms of SEO. In order to get there, sure, you can do all these little tips and tricks and technical hacks, and it’s really good to know them, but in order to get there you’ve got to have some substance. You’ve got to have a good brand.
That’s where the interest came from. I also think previously, I was very rebellious when I was young. [laughs] I did not know that I was going to necessarily love a subject of any sort in school, but I absolutely loved creativity. I know this is marketing, but business and entrepreneurship is a very good way for a rebel to be a productive person to society.
So you take that and you combine that with creativity and this fortunate thing that I landed in SEO, honestly, and it all hodgepodged, and that’s how we went from SEO to brand.
ROB: The connection’s definitely there. There’s all of the parlor tricks, and then there’s the conviction that eventually what Google’s going to keep doing is optimizing for giving people what they want. If that aligns to who you are – the essence of the brand is who you are, and the essence of SEO is what people want, and you put those together. It ties, but it’s not often in the same conversation. I haven’t heard it very much. It’s fascinating coming through who you are.
SARA: It makes it an interesting combination for Tribu, honestly. It’s a cool combination for our partners to enjoy. There’s that very technical, astute digital marketing aspect and strategy, but there’s also that very award-winning, strong creativity coming out of Tribu. I feel like a lot of times when partners or customers in the marketplace hire agencies – not every agency puts them in this, but a lot of agencies put you into making a choice. Like, “I can hire really good strategy, really good technical stuff, or I can hire really creative stuff, but I don’t know that the message is ever going to completely go as far as it could go.”
We’re not the only agency that does this, but we do pride ourselves on it at Tribu. We try really hard to be the agency where you don’t have to compromise between creativity and strategy and the digital, technical stuff that helps brands really grow.
ROB: Absolutely, for sure. It’s very self-aware, and I think it’s important for entrepreneurs to keep in mind their rebellious streaks. I went through a profile of one sort or another this past week, and basically, I scored ultimately on this axis where it’s like “If somebody tells you to do something, you’re probably going to do the opposite.”
Another entrepreneur who was in that conversation – I think a lot of us, especially in the services world, have this acquisition fantasy that someone’s going to show up someday and drop a big pile of cash on the front door and acquire your business. But most of the time, that actually ends up looking like an earnout. So someone I know who’s in the middle of that had this rebellious streak, the want-to-be-the-lead-horse streak, and this particular analysis – they didn’t know anything about what the person’s experience was, but it said, “Something in your life is out of alignment here. At work, you are not being that lead horse that you usually are.” It was because they had a boss.
Have you ever contemplated this sort of agency acquisition fantasy that some of us have? Or maybe you just realized that wouldn’t go well? How do you think about it?
SARA: I don’t know. I hope I’m self-aware in that regard. What you just explained, I am so guilty of, which is like as soon as you add the boss on top of me, I’m a miserable person, even if the boss didn’t tell me anything. [laughs]
But yeah, in terms of Tribu’s future, I don’t know, maybe one day there will be an exit. I’m not ever going to say never. But we’re not working towards that right now. That’s not our strategy. That’s not where our eyes are at. We’re still at that phase in business where we’re realizing our own best and obsessed enough with figuring that out for ourselves and especially for the people we serve.
I think knowing about exit strategy, even not wanting to right now, is valuable in the sense that what you have to do to prepare for an exit makes you a better business. It makes you cleaner on financials. It makes you put together core processes that help everybody get more aligned. So we like to know about exits, and sure, we think about them sometimes because it makes you a better business, but we’re not coming at it from the perspective of hoping for an exit. That’s not in the plans right now.
ROB: That’s so key, and people don’t realize it when they start to look at the checklists of especially what makes a services firm worth more than like 1x revenue on an earnout. It’s all of those things. How well does this thing operate without you? How are the processes? How are the renewals? It’s all of these things.
Do you have a particular set of tools you have found work really well for you to store and maintain and update processes in a way that everybody knows where to look? Do you have anything that’s working?
SARA: We struggled with that for a couple of years when we started. Where we landed was Asana, which is our project management system. It’s also where we store all of our core processes so that if you’re working at Tribu, the program that everybody, regardless of your position, is working in is also the place where you can find all the core processes. That’s pretty much what we landed on in terms of tools for that.
We at one point had one-sheeters on everything we could think of in Google Drive, and then everybody would forget what one-sheeters existed. I don’t know if that was too literal of an answer, or if that’s what you meant by systems, but literally we decided to store them all in Asana.
ROB: That’s right. It’s interesting at two levels. There’s one that is the lesson that there is one place and that’s where you go. You don’t have to say, “Is this in Drive or in Gmail or in Dropbox?”, all the way down the line. I think it helps you realize why there’s so many of these systems out there, but also why people switch. People switch when they can’t find a way to invest enough in their PM tool to make it the source of truth.
SARA: Yeah, honestly, in marketing, that’s one of the things that’s happening in general. There’s so many tools out there, so many things you can use. I think in marketing in general, that’s one of the things that makes it more fun – I like change – but it makes it harder to play. I mean, how much momentum and how deep can you get if you’re changing the tool you’re using every four months? We just made the decision that we don’t need it to be the most perfect thing, but we need it to be a stable thing. We need it to be a constant thing. We need it to be a thing that maybe doesn’t have every feature that we want, but is going to do the job really well.
ROB: But commit to it.
SARA: Yes.
ROB: Sara, when you rewind this journey, these 10 years so far, what are some lessons you’ve learned that you might wish you could go back and tell yourself to do a little bit differently, if you were intercepting yourself in that moment of the business?
SARA: Oh God, so many. I think we’re a great business today, but we’re definitely not perfect and we have our moments in history where we look back and go, “Uh, we should’ve thought about that one a little bit more.”
I think the biggest takeaway is ‘A’ players. Nothing replaces ‘A’ players, whatever ‘A’ players is to your agency. There were times where I think we compromised out of desperation. We grew too fast, like “We need to fill this role – someone get a body in there.” But we’ve I think learned the hard way that you never compromise on ‘A’ players. You figure out whatever you have to figure out, but get the ‘A’ players in because they’re going to solve the problems. You get them in, you take care of them, and you trust them. They’re going to solve the problems. They’re going to help navigate. They’re going to help grow. That was a big lesson learned for us, painfully at times, as we were getting to where we are today.
Another lesson that I think goes along with that is – and it’s the most stereotypical thing; you hear it all the time – but culture. Culture is the thing that has to be managed and taken care of and nurtured and planned and intentional and worked at. Don’t just let it be a thing that roams free and gets away from you. Controlling that is so important. I’ve seen times in these short 10 years where I wasn’t very proud of the culture we had at that moment in time, and I’ve seen times where I’m like, oh my God, how can I clone this cultural moment? You can basically put those times alongside our financials, and they match. [laughs] The good times, the finances look good; the times that culture’s not so great, the finances don’t look so great.
So ‘A’ players and culture. Those are things I would’ve – it’s 20/20 hindsight, always, but I would’ve put more importance on those things earlier if I could go back in time.
ROB: That’s another area where I think we get tempted to fake it, on culture. You feel like you need to make up some values or something like that. But it doesn’t work until it’s real, and you can’t keep the ‘A’ players until that part’s real also.
A question that comes to mind right where we are right now, October 2021 – I’m sure you spent at least some, if not a lot, of last year working apart where maybe you were accustomed to working together. How do you think about spreading, driving, reinforcing culture when you’re not in the same place, and maybe the patterns that helped form it before aren’t available?
SARA: How do I answer that? There’s so much to say there. That’s such a great question. That was actually something that in some ways we did so excellent last year, and in some ways we did so poorly. It was such a year of learning.
One of the things I think we did excellent in terms of “How did we do that and retain it?” was just surprises. When you’re inside an office, operating in a good culture, there are pleasant surprises that happen in your day that you don’t necessarily think about because that’s just your day. That’s just every day. So being intentional about creating those surprises when we were all apart from each other, whether that was mailing everybody a cookie kit or something that they didn’t know was going to come, but they can do with their kids and send pictures and create conversation about that maybe had nothing to do with work, but to make up for that passing hallway conversation that you miss out on – those are things I look at last year and I’m like, that was pretty cool that we did that. Patting ourselves on the back, that was smart.
There are other things that I look at that we did last year as we were learning to navigate remote where, now that we’ve been doing it longer, I’m like, we should’ve done that better. Like making time to say, “How are you?”, not “How’s this project?”
And then also – and this one surprised me – I think most executives were worried about productivity drops. We had a productivity skyrocket. People could not turn it off. So something that I didn’t learn, because I was actually expecting in part an opposite result, but we had to help our team turn it off. That was a surprise to us and something I think we would’ve done better, or do better now, honestly. When you’ve got Slack going and everybody’s remote, it’s so easy for someone to send you a Slack message at 8:30, 9:00, and it’s totally fine to let that wait till the next morning, but you just don’t want to do that to your peer, your coworker, your friend. And then eventually it just never stopped. So that was a surprise to us.
ROB: Definitely, my own habit, I’m a sloppy Slacker. I tell everybody involved with me, look, if I don’t send you this Slack message right now, I’m going to forget this thing, and it’s important, but you should not respond to it if it’s the weekend, if it’s the evening.
SARA: Of course you can read it, right? [laughs]
ROB: You should just hold it right there, and when you get to work on Monday or in the morning, pay attention then. Please do not – unless I tell you “Do this now,” which just doesn’t happen – because if something’s on fire, they’re already responding to it. They understand urgency. That false urgency is potentially pretty dangerous.
Sara, when you think about what’s coming up for Tribu and the kind of work that you all do, what are you excited about? What’s next?
SARA: Again, bootstrapped, organic growth. We’ve had to add things over time. We recently this year formally added videography and production in-house. We were collaborating with an awesome group of freelancers and many people before to fill those needs. I’m very excited about having that in-house. It makes everything else we’re already offering much more powerful.
And then in general, the industry, what’s coming up that I’m super excited about – and I think all of us at Tribu are – things like TikTok. Not necessarily that there’s a new social media platform. It’s more so the format change that a platform like TikTok is driving – that informal, very human, fun, relatable, just people being goofy. That type of content. That’s just so exciting that brands are going to get to play in that space.
As the world’s moved – we talked about it when we were talking about SEO – whatever’s really core and authentic to a human’s heart, to those tribes, seems to be the good business move in terms of brand building as well. So to see that that’s an opportunity for brands to have more fun and be lighthearted and participate in those types of conversations, to show more of their human side because of platforms like TikTok and the formats they’re encouraging, that I’m very excited about. I think we all are at Tribu.
ROB: It’s a great point. It’s almost like TikTok broke all of us, in a way, because you could kind of pretend that every channel was the same if you really were committed to it, and it just breaks the narrative. I think it helps you be who you need to be on Twitter versus LinkedIn versus Facebook. It fractures everything by making more than one message. I think it helps people get channel-specific, even if they’re not even touching TikTok, because sometimes it might not make sense. Maybe it always makes sense if you can figure it out. I don’t know.
SARA: If you’re on alcohol, they don’t let you play on it right now. So sometimes even if it did make sense, it’s not an option yet. [laughs] But yeah, for sure. You said it so spot-on. TikTok really is breaking that format, and it’s going to inspire a lot of channel specificity in marketing, which we’re excited about.
ROB: Especially with that video capability. Sara, when people want to find you and Tribu, where should they go to connect with you?
SARA: Oh, thank you. Wearetribu.com. A little fun secret is that as we’ve scaled, the one thing I refuse to change is that that contact form goes straight to my inbox. So if ever anybody wants to send in a message, I’d love to hear from anybody.
ROB: Fantastic. We’ll get the site dialed into the show notes as well. Sara, congratulations on everything so far. Looking forward to what comes next as well. Thanks for coming on and sharing with us.
SARA: Thanks for having me.
ROB: You bet. Be well.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Leeann Leahy is CEO at VIA, a full-service advertising agency/communications company and winner of AdAge’s 2019 Small Agency of the year. Via‘s 100 or so employees work their creative magic to unleash growth for such name brands as Arm & Hammer, Unilever (ice cream novelties Klondike, Good Humor, Popsicle), Perdue Chicken, and CarGurus. The agency has a few clients in Maine . . . a lot more nationally . . . and even some that are global.
Leeann says the agency makes small budgets work “much bigger and harder than they should” and runs on a critical balance of head and heart. In this interview, Leeann outlines the agency’s 5 responsive principles: “be curious,” “think like the audience,” “be on time,” “be on budget,” and “create respect,” and 5 artistic principles: “figure it out,” “find the magic,” “believe,” “do work that makes you proud,” and “honor the process.” It’s a formula that succeeds . . . as evidenced by the agency’s 28 years in the business.
In this interview, Leeann talks about VIA’s strategy for building two-way brand/consumer conversations and the magic of the “Aha! Moment,” when the mind jumps from “facts” to understanding. The process?
- Dig deep with clients to get beyond the facts and gain meaningful insights;
- Understand who a brand’s customers are, their experience with the brand, and their “journey
- Analyze insights to reveal and unlock a pathway to connect consumers with the brand
- Bring real emotion to the table
- Present the brand in a way that’s useful, practical, and meaningful at a personal level . . . and not just talking at the customer.
Leeann says, “It’s not just selling attributes, but selling utility and meaningfulness and relevancy.”
Six years ago, in order to streamline operations, the agency eliminated departmental siloes and set up interdisciplinary pods which are led by four equal partners:
- A client strategy lead (who elicits from the client what is to be done and why),
- A planning lead (who aligns work with client needs, market trends/ opportunities, and strategies),
- A creative lead (who invents new products, generates advertising promotion, or “produces the show”), and
- A project management lead (who oversees resourcing, time management, budgets, and scopes – how the work is done and when).
Then, three years ago, the agency established VIAlocity, a remote pool of diverse (culturally, ethnically, life-stage-wise, and ability-wise) freelance consultants (who may or may not be in advertising). These journalists, painters, photographers, or stay-at-home moms, who are kept on retainer, can be tapped for projects for an additional fee to collaborate on VIA’s offerings. The program recently expanded to include some full-time remote workers.
Leeann can be found on her agency’s website at: https://theviaagency.com/.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Leeann Leahy, CEO at VIA based in Portland, Maine. Welcome to the podcast, Leeann.
LEEANN: Hi. Thank you for having me.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you kick us off by telling us about VIA and what the agency’s superpowers are?
LEEANN: VIA is a magical place that operates out of Portland, Maine. We are a full-service advertising agency, although advertising is a narrow term. We’re really a communications company that helps unleash the growth potential of our clients’ brands. We’re about 100 people. I say we operate from Portland, Maine because that’s where we’re headquartered, but our clients actually are all over the country and indeed the globe. I used to say we don’t have any clients in Maine, but we do work with a couple now.
We’re on a quest to bring the fun back into our industry. I think our superpower is that we believe in magic. We believe in the power of magic. We have 10 principles, and they range from “be curious,” “think like the audience,” “be on time,” “be on budget,” and “create respect,” which are the responsive ones, to “figure it out,” “find the magic,” “believe,” “do work that makes you proud,” which are the artistic ones. There’s a really great balance between the head and the heart in those principles.
The heart side of it I think is our superpower because we do believe in magic. We believe that it can be found if you have a smart enough strategy, or indeed, the strategy itself could be magic if you can dig deep enough and find some insights that are revealing and unlocking a pathway to connect a consumer and a brand. We believe that creatively, the choices you make and the craft you construct and the way you engage consumers – there’s a lot of magic in that. And we believe all of this works to grow brands. We’ve seen it over and over again.
I guess the last thing I would say is in our own culture, we believe that joy and happiness and fearlessness lead to better creative work. That’s not just in the creative department; that’s across the whole agency. So we find the magic and we believe it’s possible. That’s our superpower. I think it sets us apart from other agencies, because as I said, we’re having fun where very few are.
ROB: Right, a little bit of magic, a little bit of joy, and just this pervasive sense of optimism over pure execution. The head and the heart, as you said. Pull us a little deeper and give us a picture. A typical client is not in Maine, apparently, for the most part, but what does a common client look like for you all? What size, what stage, what type of brand?
LEEANN: It really ranges. We’ve worked with Perdue Farms chicken for the last 10 years, and we’re their agency of record and the lead of their integrated agency team. We set all the strategy for them. We help them understand their brand portfolio, architecture. We dig deep on consumer insights. We help them manage their branded versus private label conundrum that they’re in in the marketplace. We create all the communications, whether it’s broadcast-based or digital. We generate lots of social assets. And then we work with all of their other agencies – shopper, marketing, promotional, etc. – to make sure everyone’s operating off the same strategy. That’s one kind of relationship.
Another one is we work with the ice cream novelties portfolio of North America for Unilever, so Klondike, Good Humor, Popsicle. In that instance, we’re really unleashing a lot of work the client has done strategically and we’re setting it free creatively. We come back with creative solutions that take what are sometimes considered small budgets competitively, and we make them work much bigger and harder than they should. They punch above their weight.
We work with Church & Dwight. Arm & Hammer is one of our clients. They exist, believe it or not, in about 17 categories in the grocery store. You think of it as baking soda, but actually it’s everything from baking soda to laundry detergent to kitty litter to toothpaste to deodorant to licensing agreements with Hefty and other garbage bags and things like that. It is a really wide range. For them, again, we’re thinking through everything, from the customer experience on those brands and where we can hit touchpoints to creating the advertising itself to putting it in the market to doing the analytics.
So we really have varied relationships with our different clients, and that’s what I think keeps it fun for us. I’ve always loved being in advertising and on the agency side because we go deep, deep, deep on very different categories. I can be talking about baking soda for hours one day, and the next day I’m talking about people buying cars online with CarGurus, or I’m talking about modern commerce with another client, or I’m talking about financial services. We really run the gamut. Check into financial services. You can’t get bored.
ROB: You’re talking about digging into that customer experience, and it seems like that’s where some of the magic can come from. When you’re talking about novelty ice cream, you’re not selling features. For a lot of people, you are thinking through to an experience, an emotional attachment, a different season in their life, even, perhaps. You just can’t get there if you’re sitting up in an ivory tower, thinking creatively by yourself.
LEEANN: Absolutely. We do a lot of deep digging and consumer research and ethnographies and anthropological digging into our consumers and our prospects, and we try to talk about them as if they’re family members or friends. We don’t describe targets as 18- to 24-year-old white men who play these following sports and believe these five things. That’s not going to help us. We really need to think of them as maybe people who seriously don’t take life that seriously. That would be a way you want to talk about the target.
We try to get to the mindset, because that’s where the magic happens. It’s not that there’s not a lot of rigor to get to that mindset; there is. But there’s a difference between a fact and an insight, and too often, I think people confuse them, or companies confuse them. They do the research, they get the answers, they have a bunch of facts, and then they say, “This is what we need to talk to.” Facts are important, but they are really just stimulus from which you can find and articulate the insight, because the insight has to be much deeper and more meaningful.
The way I like to think about it, you know you have an insight when somebody says it when you’re describing a consumer or their mindset or their need state or something, and you go, “Oh my God, that is so smart and also so completely obvious.” It’s like, “Why didn’t I see that before?” That to me is an insight. I think we spend a lot of time differentiating between facts and insights, and that helps us to get to a richer understanding of who we’re talking to. Once you have that richer understanding, you can create work that really hits that nerve dead-on.
And when it hits that nerve, it becomes an engaging two-way conversation because now you’ve filled into my life as a brand in a way that’s useful, practical, and meaningful to me, not just talking at me.
ROB: That’s really grounded, really human. Leeann, if we rewind a little bit, talk about the origin story of VIA. How did the agency come to be in the first place?
LEEANN: The agency was founded 28 years ago by John Coleman and a couple of other founders and partners. Specifically, John Coleman and Rich Rico were working at a big software company together. Rich was in charge of the design of marketing materials and John was a salesman. As any good salesman does in an internal marketing organization, they call up and complain about the materials they’re given and have rich conversations about how they can be better, which I’m sure came very, very happily across the phone lines. [laughs]
But the two struck up a relationship where they really could trust each other and rely on each other and understand how they could make materials even to sell these multimillion dollar programs in a more meaningful way. It was, again, by digging into those insights and being different strategically and not just selling attributes, but selling utility and meaningfulness and relevancy.
The two of them spun out and started with one division of that company, which was called ABB. By the end of that year, they had 12 divisions of ABB as clients. So the agency was born doing B2B work to support sales teams. Over the years, it evolved many, many times. We have a saying at VIA: Born in 1993, reborn every year since.
Because John was an engineer by education, they were very at the forefront of the digital era and did a lot of big technology website strategy as the internet emerged in the late ’90s, early 2000s. Then pivoted again after the dot-com bust of the early 2000s. Pivoted again to do a lot of design and corporate work, really built on the strategic consultancy background they had. They were doing really deep strategic projects for clients, and then also design components and nomenclature and visual vocabularies for clients. All sorts of things. Then evolved again to be more focused on some B2C, direct-to-consumer work, but on a more regional basis, and then evolved again to be nationally recognized, national brands targeting primarily towards consumers.
Now, I would say we’re the best of all of those bits because we understand the digital landscape in a way that many don’t, which is why we work with Chick-fil-A as their social and digital AOR. We understand big business and complications, which is why we work with some B2B clients and we take very, very complicated stories and make them very simple and digestible and important, and why we have these very, very powerful consumer brands like a Perdue or a Popsicle or Golden Corral. These are clients that have real meaning and bring real emotion to the table with consumers.
We get to do all of those things every day, and that’s, as I say, the best bits of all parts of our history.
ROB: It’s quite a path to navigate, too, because a lot of people crashed on the rocks. They got fat and happy from the late ’90s, the era of the million-dollar website. I’m sure some things were almost like shooting fish in a barrel for people who were digitally savvy. We kind of went through that again with social for a season, where people were splashing similar budgets. But it’s kind of matured in. It doesn’t feel like there’s as much of that splash, and now it has to be substance. Go ahead, it sounds like you’ve got something to drop in.
LEEANN: I agree with you. I think what people were doing was saying, “Ooh, I have to be on social because that’s where my consumer is” – again, a fact but not necessarily an insight. Just because they’re there, doesn’t mean you have to be there. They would just create content and, as we say, “spray and pray.” Just throw it out on the social channels and figure, “Oh, that’s good. People will want to engage with me.” And that busted.
I think what we’re seeing is now the brands that are most successful in the social sphere are the ones who are understanding their place in the conversation and maintaining that place in the consumer’s heart and mind and being respectful of the conversation they’re entering, but also offering and being additive to it. Maybe it’s utilitarian. Maybe it’s something that is a little bit of shared brand custody, as we call it, when you want the consumer to take ownership of some of the brand elements.
I think it requires deep strategy and a lot of thoughtfulness. It’s not just, “I had a television ad and I made a shorter version of it and threw it all over Facebook and Instagram,” because that’s not how those platforms work.
ROB: Let’s look at the intersection of VIA and its origin story with you. How did you come into the business and then end up in such a position of ultimate trust? What did that journey look like?
LEEANN: I started in the business as a planner, at the time called an account planner. In my days as a planner, I was an account planner, a brand planner, a strategic planner. I wore every single version of that title. But I grew up in this world of consumer insights and understanding that the agency role could be to be the conscience or the therapist, really, between the consumer and the brand – connecting and listening to both and connecting the dots: being the conscience of the brand so they didn’t overstep, and being the conscience of the consumer so they didn’t turn away or block out the brand.
So I grew up in planning. I was Chief Strategy Officer on a global level at an agency, and then at a more local level at an agency, I worked on blue chip brands like JPMorgan Chase, the NFL, AT&T, and Johnson & Johnson, all those good things. Then I transitioned in about 2012 to general agency management. That was because I had a relationship with someone who ran an agency called Translation in New York, and he was looking to make it go from just a project-based consultancy to a full-service agency. He and I had a friendship and relationship and really respected one another’s intellects and points of view on how to turn brands on.
So I joined him and I was there for a couple of years. The agency was exploding. We were doing great things. But in that time, I actually met John Coleman, our founder, and we had a lunch that struck me because we shared a lot of the same values. We talked a lot about what the business could be and what we wanted it to be and the kind of work we wanted to do. Honestly, again, it goes back to we find magic and we believe, and that’s that optimism. We felt like we could do work that would not only move people, but maybe even leave the world a better place.
We had a great talk, a couple hours, and we walked away friends. It occurred to me after that conversation that I was laughing a lot, and I realized – thanks to my husband actually pointing it out – that in my role as president of that other agency, I was having a lot of success, but I wasn’t really having any fun. I went into this business because I thought it would be fun and magical and creative, and that was the part that was being stifled.
Over the course of like six months, John and I became friends; he offered me the opportunity to come up to Maine. I was like, “I can’t believe we’re moving from New York.” I was born and raised in the New York area. But we moved ourselves to Maine, and I have not looked back once. I absolutely love it, and we do feel like we tend to put people before profits. We tend to have a lot of fun. We enjoy each other. John has since stepped out of the day-to-day of the business, but the management team and the associates – everybody here, really – we strive to create an environment where people enjoy each other because it creates a baseline of collaboration and inspiration that leads us to better work.
Kind of a roundabout answer to your question, but I started out on the insight side. I’ve always really been invested in the creative aspect of what we do. I think the culture in which we do that really feeds the creative, so VIA gives an opportunity to do all of those things: really, really smart strategic consultancy background, really important focus on culture, and now we’ve also brought in a Chief Creative Officer who has fabulous expertise in crafting. His name’s Bobby Hershfield, and he’s amazing at crafting ideas so that the way they’re presented and put out into the world really engages the consumer in a very intimate way.
ROB: What a journey. You’ve mentioned a couple of times this AOR, agency of record designation. You’ve probably seen that phrase change meaning a few times. What does it mean now versus what it used to mean, and how should ambitious agencies that are chasing that designation think about it?
LEEANN: There was a time when all we wanted was to be AOR. We couldn’t be bothered with projects. Not VIA “we”; I mean “we,” the industry. We kind of shunned the idea that we could pop in and be experts on a project, or consultants. I think that’s not true anymore. There are lots of amazing, interesting projects out there that you can work with really interesting partner agencies on, and partner clients. We do a combination of AOR and project work.
But I think when you are AOR, it is a lot more than just “we set the campaign and everybody else executes it.” That is not what it is at all. I think it really is about understanding deeply the business that the client has, how it sits within the competitive marketplace, what their operational realities are, what the political realities are, how that business can grow, identifying that growth opportunity, and then unleashing creative to optimize it and to really go out and get that growth.
That means thinking through everything, understanding the consumer experience and the customer journey and where the brand can plug into it and where it shouldn’t, and then concepting ideas that go through that journey with the customer. That means way more than “I’m making an advertising campaign around a single idea and then everyone’s executing it.” Now it’s “I’m understanding the business. I’m understanding the consumer. I’m bringing those two together in a thoughtful way, and I’m going to create an idea that hits at different points in different ways so that the effect is not redundant, but it is in fact cumulative.
ROB: That would seem probably more channel-specific, which is why some of the AOR designations have gone more channel, do you think?
LEEANN: Yeah, possibly. But I think it’s also because we’re in a business now where we’re competing not just with other people who do the same thing we’re doing, but we’re competing with agencies that do different things than we do. You might have a client who goes, “I have a traditional agency of record and then I have a digital agency of record.” But in fact, that’s just false silos. If you have somebody who truly understands your business, they’re thinking of it as how the consumer is experiencing this, not just what channel it’s going to be on. The channels are very secondary to the story you’re trying to tell and how you want the consumer to experience that story.
ROB: Right. The brand still has to live somewhere. You can’t just have a bunch of fractured brands.
LEEANN: Yeah, exactly.
ROB: Leeann, as you reflect on your time in leading VIA, and even before that maybe, in the industry, what are some things you’ve learned along the way that you might do a little bit differently if you were going back and giving yourself some advice?
LEEANN: I kind of had a feeling a long time ago, well before I was even in a managerial role in an agency at large – I was in a managerial role in my discipline of planning, but not at the agency at large, and as a planner, I didn’t have to know the business of our business. That’s one piece of advice. I don’t care what level you are or what discipline you are; you should understand how this industry makes money. I got away with living in la-la land as a planner for a good portion of my career, not really ever even understanding how we billed clients. You can get bogged down by it, but I think it’s also important to understand. There’s a balance.
But I had this intuitive sense that there was a lot of waste in agencies. A lot of wasted hours, a lot of wasted discussion, a lot of wasted time, and we weren’t getting to the meat. We were passing a baton around the agency in the hopes that somebody would stop and hold the baton and be like, “Okay, now I’m going to work on this.”
I refer to it as the “See below” email. You may have gotten one of these from someone once upon a time. I consider these evil. Someone gets an email from someone else requesting something, and they just pass it along to someone who works with them and say, “See below” – which they might as well have said, “I didn’t bother to read this. I’m making it your problem.” The person under them very often sends it to a person under them, and it just continues from there. That’s what I mean by passing the baton and not really stopping and thinking.
About six years ago at VIA, we got rid of all of the department silos within the agency and got rid of the gatekeeper mentality that perpetuated that baton passing. We rebuilt the agency from the bottom up to be much more agile, to be much more collaborative, and to have much more fun together.
We created these interdisciplinary pods that work around clients, and each pod is led by four equal partners and leaders. There’s a client strategy lead who’s responsible for understanding what’s being asked of us and, more importantly, why. There’s a planning lead who helps us to honor insights and market trends and opportunities to have a strategic pathway. So they’re responsible for the way. We have a creative lead who’s responsible for the “wow,” whatever that means, whether it’s inventing a new product or doing an advertisement or producing a show. It’s all under the “wow.” Then we have the project management lead, who’s responsible for the how and the when, which is really about resourcing, time management, budgets, scopes, all of that.
When we put them all on equal footing, something really wonderful happened. They started acting like real partners. They started understanding that they were mutually accountable for this client’s growth and that they were all part of the same sentence. Longer than a sentence; it would be a run-on. But you get what I’m saying. [laughs] You couldn’t just have a client call one of them and ask a question and necessarily get the “Yes, you can have that Tuesday at 3:00,” because they’re not responsible for that. They have to go, “Wait, are you asking the right question? Why are you asking that? Let’s think about that strategically. Let’s see if there’s a different creative response. And oh, by the way, I have to go check with somebody else to see how our resources go.”
It became honestly faster, which is sort of counterintuitive, but it’s faster to get things done. It’s inherently more collaborative. And as a result of it being more collaborative, everybody feels included and they can see their fingerprints on the work, and that makes it more fun.
I would’ve done that a lot sooner. I kind of had that specced out in my brain I want to say almost 20 years ago, and we wrote it up and then I didn’t do anything with it. It took a long time, but six years ago we did it, and it has helped shape our agency. It’s helped get to better work. It gets to better insights. We have deeper client relationships. As I said, we have a happier populace all around because everyone feels included. And frankly, as everyone else is complaining that procurement is out there squeezing the profitability out of agencies, I feel like we regained our ability to be profitable because we eliminated the fat. So I would’ve done that sooner.
ROB: Certainly less layers. Some of that seems to also come along with the evolution of communication channels that are available. Maybe this is more relevant to – it sounds like your org is largely in Portland, even if your clients are elsewhere. But even on distributed teams, you almost get stuck in the “See below” thing; when your choices are “Am I going to call someone, am I going to text them, or am I going to email them?”, you fall into email. But now we have some tighter lines on messaging. People will hop in a quick chat now, even online, even on a Zoom or a Slack group chat.
LEEANN: Absolutely. Listen, dispersed teams are the reality of the future. We at VIA do believe that we are better when we are together in person as much as possible, so we really do try to do that, and we’re being very thoughtful about how to do that safely. We did go back to the office in July. But we also really appreciate that some people have certain tasks or certain roles that are just more productive when they’re working as individuals and remotely. So we have a hybrid model, and it really boils down to what task you have and what role you’re playing on a given day.
But you’re right. We’ve retrained everyone, because now I know I have to consider others as thoughts pop into my head. I can’t just sit there and do my own work. Even if I am remote, I’ve got to reach out to my partners. So I’m going to jump on Slack, I’m going to jump on Zoom, I’m going to pick up the phone, I’m going to even shoot them a text. But the conversation is much more free-flowing, and I think it gets to better solutions.
Then to your other point, the channels that are available to us are changing so much. We took that model that we used at the top of every piece of business and we then applied it in the creative department. Like, why do we always just have our directors and copywriters concepting? That doesn’t make sense. Maybe there’s a product design person or maybe a technologist or a promotional person who should be in those concepting phases.
So we actually work in creative roundtables where it’s not just a two-person team; we assemble the right team for each assignment and we draw from all different areas of expertise, and it’s the same kind of collaboration. You’re all mutually responsible for the concept, so whatever concept we have is born able to fit all those different places.
ROB: There’s a lot to pull on there as well, but I want to be mindful of our time here. What is coming up, Leeann? What’s coming up for VIA and the industry as a whole that you’re excited about?
LEEANN: I think it’s a great time to be in advertising, honestly. I’m excited that our competitive set changes every day. I’m excited that sometimes we’re competing with media companies and other times with creative boutiques and other times with consultants. I think that’s really interesting. I’m excited that the smartest and best agencies can get deeper in with the C-suite and not just the marketing department or the CMO.
I’m excited for how we utilize remote workforces and invite more diverse populations into our agencies and into our industry as a result of that opportunity, because we can reach further afield. I think that fundamentally changes the experiences and thoughts that come to the table. Of course, if you want to really have a great brainstorm and great creative, bring together two completely disparate things and throw them into a room and see what explodes out of it. People who are together, people who are dispersed, people of different backgrounds, people at different life stages – it’s all an opportunity for us to think more broadly.
And because clients are starting to see that they need more partners in helping them think – even in-house agencies. I don’t see that as a threat. I see that as an opportunity, because we can get in there and help them think through things strategically and stop them from navel-gazing, but also leverage them for their expertise that we don’t have from being in the four walls.
So I think the most exciting thing is how our competitive sets are changing and how that opens up creative opportunities for us. And in order to get there, I think we need to – well, I know, and we all know, but we’re actively working to diversify our workforce so we can come to the table with different ideas that catapult businesses forward.
ROB: That’s a whole other area where distributed helps tremendously.
LEEANN: It definitely does.
ROB: Different circumstances, different places. You can tap a lot broader pool of people to come together.
LEEANN: Yeah, we have a program called VIAlocity that we started three years ago, before COVID, if there was a before COVID. [laughs] We hired talent from all over the world who were different from us, whether they were different culturally, ethnically, life stage-wise, ability-wise.
We hired them into this collective and put them on a retainer. They were mostly freelancers who worked in different fields all around, or people who weren’t traditionally in advertising. They were journalists or painters or photographers or stay-at-home moms. We put them in this collective so that we could tap into them. The retainer bought us the right to have them engaged in our email system and assigned to a pod so they knew what was going on, and then when we activate them on a project, we pay them a project fee on top of that. They’re able to work for other people as well, but it gave us access to a much bigger pool.
And that was fully remote, with the idea that we asked VIAlocity participants to be in Maine five days out of each quarter. They didn’t have to be five consecutive days, but five days, just so that we could get that chemistry and get to know each other. Now, post-COVID, we’ve actually expanded VIAlocity to not just be our fractional workers who are on retainer and get project fees, but we have a couple of full-time remote workers who are part of VIAlocity also. If you’re full-time remote, you have to be at the headquarters for 10 days out of each quarter. Obviously, the health situation, dependent on that. But so far, so good.
ROB: Assuming they can get back into their home country. We have a guy who’s out of country and he hasn’t been able to come see us because he’s not sure he can get back in. He’s a U.S. citizen living elsewhere. It makes it interesting. But I think we’re getting closer, is what I can say.
LEEANN: I think so. We’re getting better at working together in different ways, and that’s great. I still think there’s nothing like a good old-fashioned collaboration when you’re in person because you just can’t interrupt each other or build on each other’s ideas on Zoom the way you can naturally in a room. The energy’s just not there the way it is physically. But if you can combine the best of the physical togetherness with the best of the remote work and what it gives you, then there’s magic to be found.
ROB: Magic. Right back where we started with the magic. Magic here at VIA. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Leeann.
LEEANN: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
ROB: And for sharing your experience, your wisdom. You’ve got it very well-formed and very well-communicated. Glad to have you.
LEEANN: Thank you. Sometimes I just nerd out on it, though, so that’s a little weird too. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] All good. Wonderful, Leeann. Be well. Bye.
LEEANN: Great. Thank you, Rob.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Matthew Berman is President/ co-founder of Emerald Digital, a full-service data- and creative-driven digital marketing/ public relations agency that specializes in generating quantifiable leads and sales by:
- Mapping and generating consumer-journey-stage-specific touchpoints across multiple digital channels,
- Developing and delivering personalized, consumer-journey-stage-specific content.
Typical clients are B2C premium consumer goods providers, B2B clients, and professional services (legal, healthcare, and some financial companies).
Matthew talks about journey stages as being three funnels: awareness, consideration, and purchase. Awareness involves highlighting a consumer’s major” pain points, introducing the client, and clearly presenting the client’s unique benefits. At the purchase stage, where the user is already familiar with the client and trust and authority have been established, the message can be “a little more aggressive.”
The client, its product, and its target market determine the mix of content, platform, audience, and messaging needed to best address the target audience at each particular stage. Although the agency’s focus is digital, Matthew says it will get into whatever space their target market is in.
Matthew cites the example of a pet brand client with “two audiences.” When communicating with “the general public (traditional consumer channels), the focus is on digital with some print media, and media buying. For the industry-specific retail buyers (industry trades), the media mix is more traditional.
It has been difficult in the past to track billboard impact (except perhaps by sending viewers through distinct contact options). Today, companies can purchase digital space for times when prospective customers will be passing by that billboard, change up the message more frequently to keep it “fresh” or to meet the client’s changing needs and goals (to increase business, build brand, hire new employees), or try to ping passing cell phones to track “views.”
Matthew started his career in music production, selling songs through NYC ad agencies to support large brands’ digital content. He partnered with a creative director contact to create Chunnel TV, a video curation and production platform. Funding for that evaporated with the Great Recession and Matthew moved to a traditional marketing agency in New Orleans to work on social and ambassador programs.
A few years later, he started Ember Networks, which provided other agencies with white-label social, web, and SEO support, and often consulted and collaborated with a close friend who owned Herald PR in New York City. On a joint project in the Turks and Caicos, they realized their teams were already integrated and that they would be able to tackle larger projects and work smarter if they combined the two companies. Ember Networks and Herald PR became Emerald Digital.
When COVID hit, both locations shut down. Growth was exploding – the company probably tripled last year. Finding, hiring, and integrating new employees into the team was a challenge when everyone was remote. Processes needed to be thoroughly documented, mapped, and assessed; SOPs written, organized, posted, and automated; and communications tools updated and unified. In this interview, Matthew explains how a key tool of the agency’s operationalization, a program called ClickUp, has allowed them to aggregate all their documents, automate processes, streamline reporting, and handle client communication.
Matthew is excited about how, today, his clients can tell never-ending stories and have ongoing narratives broken into digestible pieces across multiple platforms and multiple touchpoints and, even more so, how technological advances, AR, VR, AI will impact storytelling in the not-so-distant future. He can be reached on his agency’s website at: https://emerald.digital
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Matthew Berman, who is President and Partner at Emerald Digital with offices in New York, New York and New Orleans, Louisiana. Welcome to the podcast, Matthew.
MATTHEW: Thank you so much for having me, Rob.
ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don’t you start by introducing Emerald Digital and what it is that you all are excellent in doing for your clients?
MATTHEW: Absolutely. I am the president and a co-founder of Emerald Digital. We are a full-service digital marketing and public relations agency. Our superpower is we are exceptional at generating quantifiable leads and sales. We do this by mapping out and generating consumer touchpoints across multiple digital channels, and we strive to engineer these consumer touchpoints by the stage which the consumer journey and the user is actually in. If they’re at the awareness stage, we have different content pieces generated just for them and personalized just for them. If they’re at the consideration stage, we do the same thing.
ROB: You’ve kind of teased it; give us all the stages as you all think about it.
MATTHEW: Sure. At a very general level, let’s think about awareness, let’s think about consideration, and let’s think about purchase. We can break them down into those three major funnels. We try to identify, based on the client that we have, what mix of content, what mix of platform, what mix of audience, and what mix of message we need to best speak to our audience at that particular stage.
If we’re just trying to generate awareness, we want to highlight what their major pain points are. We want to introduce who our client is, and we want to distill our message such that it can focus on the unique benefits that our client offers in an easy-to-understand way for our target market. If it’s at the purchase stage, we would generally have communicated with that particular user several times by now, so we’ve built up trust, we’ve built up authority. Our messaging is going to be a little more aggressive.
ROB: Give us a picture here. Dive down a little bit. Are there typical clients for you? Particular industry, particular size? What’s the wheelhouse?
MATTHEW: I think in general, we see two different kinds, although it certainly extends beyond that. But the two different kinds that we have are a B2C company, generally consumer goods, with a product or service that might be a little more premium, a little more expensive, whether that be a luxury hotel or a private jet or a luxury villa or a more expensive food item. So we see that.
On the other side, we handle a lot of B2B clients and professional services. We deal very frequently in the legal and healthcare and sometimes the financial space.
ROB: I can’t let it just sit there – I need to know more about expensive food items.
MATTHEW: One of the examples is we’re working with one of the most premium hotdog manufacturers and sellers in the United States. You would normally think about a hotdog as just a few bucks, and the ingredients that would go into that are maybe not the ingredients you would want to eat. We’re working with this great brand where all of their ingredients are ultra-premium. It tastes amazing. It might cost a few dollars more than your typical hotdog, but we have to break down, where would this product be sold? Who would it be sold to? What type of benefits would a prospective buyer be looking for? That might be health, that might be ease of making it, things like that. But they do taste great. [laughs]
I always love working with our consumer brands, especially in the food and drink business, because one of the benefits that we get is we get to try the product. I’ve probably worked with 50 alcohol brands or something by now, and that’s always fun because you have to try it out. You have to make recipes, you have to shoot the product. You get to meet fascinating people all over the country.
ROB: That might help with recruiting too.
MATTHEW: [laughs] It’s always a fun gig.
ROB: You’re like, “Hey, come here. Here’s who we work with.” That makes sense, especially on the premium food side. There’s a trend here that is fascinating. You’re talking about educating people around considered purchases, but it is interesting how it spans across consumer versus the business side. The awareness, the consideration, the purchase, that’s all there. You’re not very much into the transactional world. You have digital in your name, but I would imagine you also – how do you think about traditional media as part of the media mix when you’re talking about these long-term considered purchases?
MATTHEW: Oh, without a doubt. Our expertise is certainly in the digital world, and that’s where my background comes from. But I think as our business grows and as we take on more mature clients, we very much had to get into the space where it’s also billboard, it’s also print. It really matters where our target market is. I’m not going to only focus on a digital solution if my client’s market isn’t active there.
We’re working with a pet brand now, and we have two audiences that we need to communicate with. We need to communicate with the general public; those would be our more traditional consumer channels, and for us, we definitely highlight on the digital side there. But we can also focus on print media. We can focus on traditional news, media buying, things like that. But then there’s this other audience, which is very industry-specific. Those are your retail buyers, your industry trades. Things like that, we might go with a more traditional mix than a more digital mix.
But I’ve been a big proponent of this digital revolution for many years. It’s sort of mirroring what my own personal habits were. I’m 34 now, so I’ve seen – I’m at that age where when I was younger, it was only traditional, and I’ve seen more and more brands moving to the digital space. If the last few years have taught us anything, we went from where you had to sell clients on the concept of digital 10-15 years ago, but now they all understand that that’s where they need to be. They just need to know exactly what they have to do and what exactly they should be doing.
ROB: It probably gives you a pretty good advantage. A lot of traditional media is digitizing in the buying, whether you’re talking about billboards, out of home, whether you’re talking about TV and you have the OTT stuff. That becomes an increasingly digital buy, I think. You might know better.
MATTHEW: You’re absolutely right. We were hesitant to recommend things like traditional billboards to our clients in the past. We’re this interesting marriage of being data-driven but also creative-driven. If we couldn’t get the right data for why we were buying something or why a client should be there, it was hard for me to make that recommendation.
I might say, let’s conduct some hopefully siloed experiment where if we buy this particular billboard without digital capabilities, let’s see if we can see any noticeable lift in sales or phone calls. We can have a tracking number. We can send them to a unique URL that’s on the billboard. But if it was hard for us to measure, it was hard for us to manage.
With billboards now, especially in the digital space, there are Bluetooth – I’m not sure what the phrase is, but there’s this Bluetooth tracking on it so it can try to ping all the phones driving by to give us some information on that. We can also purchase particular space if we only want it between 12:00 and 2:00 and 4:00 and 6:00 when people are driving back and forth. It just gives us more options than a general “This billboard is on the corner of X & X.”
ROB: I’m just curious, because I’ve seen things on billboards that I would never have expected would have the correct ROI for the cost. What is the cost and entry point to get into a digital billboard placement? I see restaurants hiring for chefs and I’m like, man, how does that ever ROI? Or maybe they’re thinking more about awareness. It seems like it doesn’t add up to me, but how does that work?
MATTHEW: There is such a variation in what these prices are. It’s tough to give you an exact number. I would think there might be a branding component there. We bought a billboard for a client a few weeks back, and we were looking at rural markets versus urban markets, how many people. The urban billboard, I think we were looking at something like $15-$20K a month versus the rural one was maybe $800 or $1,000 or something.
ROB: Wow.
MATTHEW: So there’s a wide variation of what those costs should be. With a message like “We need to hire someone,” that’s not the message you would expect. [laughs] I’m not tracking that; I don’t know what their ROI is. It’s possible they just really needed workers. But it’s also possible they’re thinking about it from a brand place.
ROB: Right, I get that. It’s like, “Hey, we’re a restaurant, we’re here.” Even maybe an opportunity afforded by digital is you get to shift up the creative more often, sometimes saying you’re hiring and sometimes talking about your fish and chips.
MATTHEW: That’s exactly it.
ROB: Rotating the message.
MATTHEW: Yes. Frequency – we have to heavily consider that, because you don’t want to give the same individual the same message 10 times in a row. It will fall flat. It may also be that that particular restaurant purchased a set amount of billboard space, and they were committed to that for X amount of months, and it came to be that they were already busy, or perhaps COVID changed things for them, and they decided, with the digital billboard, “Let’s allocate 15% of that space to hiring. We’ve already accomplished some of the goals we intended to here, and the money has already been spent, so let’s use it for something that can affect us right now.”
ROB: Matthew, let’s rewind the clock here a little bit. Talk us through the origin story of Emerald Digital. Where did this business come from? What led you to start it? What were you leaving behind? All of that.
MATTHEW: Let me give you a little run-through here. I got into this marketing world – I’ve been a musician for over 25 years, and in my late teens I was heavily into music production. I started selling songs to Heineken, Hennessey, and some other large brands for the digital content they were at that time producing.
I was able to do this through some ad agency contacts in New York City, which ultimately led me to partnering with one of the creative directors there, and we created a video curation and production platform called Chunnel TV. After the Great Recession hit, we were unable to raise any more money for that, and I moved to a traditional market agency in New Orleans, where I was heavily involved in social and ambassador programs.
A few years later, I decided to start my own firm. This is I think where the story of Emerald begins. At that point, I started a firm called Ember Networks. We focused heavily on social, web, and SEO. A lot of the time, there were other agencies that were hiring us. They would say they were able to do XYZ, but they either didn’t have the bandwidth or the ability to, so they white-labeled out.
More and more over time, I began working with a firm called Herald PR, which is owned by one of my dear friends. He was in New York City. He was my college roommate, so we were always bouncing ideas off of each other. As an agency owner, it’s always helpful to have that bouncing-off point. “How are you doing this? How are you doing that?” So we started working together more and more on escalating projects.
After a few years, we had a client who was a villa in the Turks and Caicos. Villa Bella Vita. It’s absolutely gorgeous. We went down there, we were shooting drones and doing pictures, and we had brought some of our other clients down. We said, “Why are we doing this separately? Our teams are already integrated. They’re already working together. We’re able to take on larger projects together and work smarter than we are alone, so let’s create a joint venture.” So Emerald is a joint venture between Ember and Herald PR. And you get to work with your friends.
ROB: And hopefully you get to go back down to that villa every now and again.
MATTHEW: Yes, we do, actually. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] That’s good, to revisit the origin a little bit in that way, for sure.
MATTHEW: Yeah. That’s one of the benefits of working a little bit in the luxury space. You get to look at some of these beautiful places.
ROB: As we follow the narrative of Emerald Digital, that’s a good starting point. What have been some key inflection points, some times in the business where the difficulty level ramped up a little bit?
MATTHEW: Well, an obvious one I think would be last year. I think everyone was under similar stress. We had to shut down both of our offices, but at the same time, we were growing at a tremendous pace. We were hiring, hiring, hiring. I think our team tripled or something last year. We were trying to identify people, work with them, merge them into our team, and inculcate them on the business without being in the same physical space. So I would say that was particularly challenging.
That very much led us to hyper-focusing on the documentation of our processes and making sure that we had the right communication tools in place to try to break down these physical barriers that we have now, because we have people all over the country now. While our team was mainly focused in New Orleans and New York, during the last year we’ve had people want to move out of Manhattan; we’ve had people trying to move a little closer to the middle of the country, whether that’s the Midwest, Michigan, and we’ve had a certain amount of team members moving to Florida.
So how do we collaborate? How do we communicate? How are we working efficiently in this environment where we’re all separated? That was a pretty major challenge. But it really led us to hyper-focusing on what these processes were and then implementing a toolset that was able to mold our workflow so that we weren’t looking at “This thing is on Dropbox and this thing is on Drive and this guy communicates on Zoom and this person communicates on Slack.”
It was looking at all of the different things we were doing across two offices, and now we’re trying to operationalize this entire business.
ROB: That’s a really interesting thread to pull on. What are some of those key tools, practices? What makes distributed work for Emerald?
MATTHEW: The first thing was we had to write all of these SOPs. First it was, what are the different stages in the work that we have to do, whether it’s account service, biz dev, sales, the content creation process – everything from the brainstorm to the client revision to the scheduling to the ad buying? It was mapping out each of these different things we do.
I think one of the first things was we wrote this book. I think we had 91 individual SOPs. And it didn’t at that point cover everything. So it was like, all right, we have all of these SOPs. No one’s going to read 91 separate things, so we need to put them in a single place that everyone can see at all times, and we have to add video. We added GIFs. We unified all of the documents. We had that all in a drive.
But then in the last few months, we moved over to a program called ClickUp. It’s been fantastic. We’re very happy to have moved over because we can aggregate all of our docs. We implemented all of our different processes into the actual software, so we were able to automate a lot of different things. We were able to streamline a lot of our reporting as well and a lot of our client communication. If there was a particular deliverable we had, we were able to have that automatically pull up.
So if we have a social client that needs XYZ, when that job is created, it will pull in the SOPs that we have made and automatically pull in some of our primary documentation so that the employee doesn’t need to go looking for it or even realize they have to pull that up. It’ll just have it right there.
ROB: Sure, and then nobody has to ask where something is, right? They can go look for it, actually, which is helpful.
MATTHEW: Yes. Not only be able to look for it, but to remind them that it’s there. I think that first month when everyone was working from home, it was, “Where is this thing? Where is that thing? Which folder?” It was a big organizational task. Not only to have it where it’s all in a place that the person can find, but it’s to create automated reminders and touchpoints on our end so that we don’t even have to find it. It’s right there. “Hey, by the way, since you’re making a social media post, here’s a few things that might help you out. Here’s previous creative. Here’s file assets. Here’s a step-by-step on how to do this. Here’s a video. And if you need help, here’s a simple form that you can fill out right there, and that form will automatically be sent to your superior, our management team, or even our leadership.”
ROB: Has it been difficult for everyone to make that transition? It seems like that’s a cultural shift, and with that comes the privilege of being able to be distributed, of being able to move to Florida whenever you want. But has that been a tough transition across the team in some cases?
MATTHEW: I want to point out that I’m so happy with the way our team has adapted. Everyone has done a tremendous job, to the point where I think in many cases we’re more efficient now than we even were before.
But I think on a personal level, for many people, with that shift in not going to the office and being in the same house with all of your kids who can’t go to school for months at a time, or for even the new hires, there’s certainly difficulty there. Or we have employees who have older parents. So there’s certainly difficulties. But I think on a professional level, our team has adapted to it tremendously.
ROB: That’s good news. It’s a tricky transition. Now, as you’re spread apart, how are you thinking about in person? Is there a cadence of getting together, or is it off the table for now?
MATTHEW: That’s a great question. With your previous question, you asked what some of the challenges are, and I think one of the biggest ones, especially for me and our creative team, is there are these great ideas that happen off the cuff around the water cooler, and you can sit around a whiteboard in the same physical space and be like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did XYZ?” There is absolutely something to being in the same physical space. I don’t want to discount that.
Where I believe we will be moving to as things open up is a more flex time model, where you can come into the office two or three times a week and then you can work from home the rest of the time. If you’re not in a location where one of the offices is, then obviously you cannot come in. But wherever possible, I think we’re going to identify physical opportunities for everyone to get together, whether that’s once a quarter or – we’re not sure exactly what that frequency is.
But we have several different cadences now for our team to brainstorm, to basically connect. We have an all hands meeting every Monday, every Friday, and then each of our separate teams meets every single morning. “What are we doing today? What are our goals? How did yesterday go?” Those are our primary touchpoints. Most of us are in communication with each other throughout the day anyway, but it’s still good to get everyone on those face-to-faces. On a digital face-to-face, I should say.
ROB: [laughs] Absolutely. Matthew, as you think back on the journey so far, what are maybe some lessons you have learned that you would tell yourself to do a little bit differently if you were starting from scratch?
MATTHEW: I think to document these processes is something I would’ve done much, much sooner. It would’ve helped us scale a lot faster, and I think a lot more efficiently. So certainly that. And it would have allowed us to train and hire people in a much easier manner, and I think for us to even identify what some of our own roadblocks were and to have a better understanding of what repeatable processes we have and where we can identify pain points and how we can grow those.
And certainly another one for myself – for many years, I wanted to see every creative and had to approve it. It was almost like all roads went through me. That’s a tough thing to let go of, but as a business owner, you have to. You have to trust the people that you’re hiring to make the decisions that you hired them to do, and only to come to you when they need you, or for you to bring them that strategic vision or directive. But give them enough room to do their job properly.
So I would say, “Chill out, Matt. Let go.” [laughs] Bring on the smartest people that you possibly can. That’s a really major part. You as the business owner want to be the dumbest person in the entire room. Your job is to hire the smartest people for the best job that you can find, and hire them no matter what it takes so that you can trust them to do what they do well.
ROB: How do you time that transition? Because clearly, you start the thing from zero and you’re going to be working in the business, necessarily. Very few people – I know one guy that bought five agencies and he just starts being in charge. But for most of us, you’re starting with a special talent. You’re starting with that skill that you have being the reason that people come to you, and then you start having people fill in some of your weaknesses, and then people who also have your strengths.
How do you think about when to start turning the corner on getting yourself out of every piece of creative? How do you time that?
MATTHEW: That’s a great question. Certainly bringing in smart people and then making sure they know exactly the job they’re supposed to do, and then giving them – maybe working with them for the first month or two, where you are a little more hands-on, and just ensure that your processes work. Just oversee. Say, “I built all these processes out. I have trained you. Here’s enough room for you to do it yourself.” And you set, “Every Thursday I’m going to dedicate three hours to ensuring that this foundation that we’ve made is actually working.”
You start with different topics. Maybe I’m going to let go of all of the creative when it comes to social posts and video production, but I’m still going to hold on to this web dev side. For now, I want to be able to test everything and I want to be able to overlook the code. I just want to make sure everything’s working properly. I think one by one, start making sure that each of those teams has that process down.
I would start thinking about what unique assets you have. Are you the best at social? Are you the best web guy? Are you the best for overall strategy? Did you create a web firm because you’re a killer coder? Start thinking about the things that you can offload that maybe don’t fall into your expertise as much as the others.
ROB: That makes perfect sense. As we look at the future of Emerald and of the work that you do for clients, what’s coming up? What’s the future look like? What’s exciting there? What should we be looking out for?
MATTHEW: Awesome. If we talk general industry – and I kind of mentioned this before, but it felt like for many years we had to pitch about why you should be in the digital space at all. That conversation, especially in the last two years, has really shifted to “You know that you have to be here. Now we can do some really interesting things.”
Our clients are much more on board with this concept of telling a never-ending story, having an ongoing narrative that can be broken up into digestible pieces across multiple platforms, multiple touchpoints. I think that’s very exciting as a storyteller. We can create video, we can create audio, we can do all these interesting things. I think that’s really fun.
That brings us to what’s on the horizon. We’re not going to be using the same platforms forever, and they change all of the time. More and more, we’re seeing movement in the AR, VR, and AI space. I think it’s really exciting. There’s this fantastic firm up in New York that we are friends with, and some of the stuff they create is this marriage of a digital space with a real-world space. I think as a storyteller, that opens up so many different avenues for us, because now all of your content and all of your communication doesn’t have to be flat. It can be 3D. It can be all-encompassing. You can build things that can sit on someone’s table and look like they actually exist.
So I’m very excited for that AR/VR space, and then on the AI side, it’s certainly helping us to more intelligently gather and parse out what our data means, but also to create content faster.
ROB: Lots going on there. It would probably be a whole interesting other conversation to get into the level and approach and who’s appropriate to get into AR/VR. But I think with the right creative people, a lot is certainly possible.
MATTHEW: Yeah. I definitely think we’re still a few years out, and it’s probably a matter of one of these big tech firms releasing the Apple Glasses or a contact lens. I think the general user hasn’t adopted these yet. We’re very much still in the first mover advantage. It’s not quite there. But part of our role as a business owner here is to set the business up for success 10 years from now. We don’t want to be the best Facebook ads guys in 10 years. We want to be the guys that are doing the next thing great as well.
ROB: Excellent. Matthew, when people want to track you down, and Emerald Digital, how should they connect with you?
MATTHEW: Check us out at https://emerald.digital.
ROB: Awesome. We get these hot new domains. I kind of want to get a .digital myself, but maybe just to track my billboard ads. I don’t know. We’ll get there. [laughs]
MATTHEW: Yes, done. [laughs]
ROB: Thank you so much, Matthew. Thank you for coming on, for sharing. Best wishes to you and the whole Emerald team.
MATTHEW: Thank you so much.
ROB: And all the good stuff going on in New York and New Orleans and beyond, right?
MATTHEW: And beyond.
ROB: Excellent. Have a wonderful day, a wonderful week, and thank you so much, Matthew.
MATTHEW: Thank you, Rob, for absolutely everything. Cheers.
ROB: Cheers. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Lisa Vielee is President at Well Done Marketing, a 15-yer-old full-spectrum, strategic, creative, and technical agency that provides design, branding, content marketing, public relations, and digital strategy services . . . but not traditional media-buying.
Lisa claims this small, independent agency is unusual for its size in that it has a full web development team and can “go straight from web design to UX, UI, and development, testing, and then continue with ongoing maintenance web development. Lisa explains that “design to development” can be a rocky handoff – but keeping everything “in agency” eliminates this problem. Today, websites, which used to be one-and-done “catalogs,” require constant updating to make sure they provide great customer experience, enhance and support the customer journey, and align with changing customer needs.
New business comes into Well Done in one of three ways—through referrals, through “the dreaded RFP process, and finally, and through outbound sales. Dedicated service managers serve as primary points of contact for clients, represent the agency’s team for the client and the client internally, and bring in the staff with required skill sets as they are needed. Lisa believes the agency’s small size of 30-some employees promotes nimbleness and the ability to maximize budgets.
The agency’s clients present the agency with “problems to be solved” but solutions now are far more comprehensive than they were in the past. Lisa says it is important to “not just focus on the initial creative strategy” (which tends to live short term inside a campaign) but to take a wider view and develop marketing strategies aligned with long term business and brand goals. She says marketing, is “more than just distribution channels and the4 Ps” (product, price, place, promotion)—marketing needs a seat at the C table.
Lisa feels it is important to mentor younger people and asks them to define their “end goals” and “their visions of success.” She explains that some people may want to create a company, sell it, and become millionaires. Others may want a tight, small, focused team that provides meaningful service and personal satisfaction. Still, others just want to come to work and do a good job, day in and day out. Lisa says these are all valid and that, no matter what each individual is pursuing as success, Well Done will work to keep them challenged.
Lisa, who refers to herself as a “communications generalist,” did not start her career at Well Done Marketing. After earning a degree in journalism, she almost immediately went to the “dark side,” and worked in a variety of public relations positions. When her political candidate/employer lost an election, Lisa started her own PR firm . . . which grew until she had a choice, she either had to start saying “no” or add employees. She met with an old friend, Ken Honeywell, to ask him to mentor her and help her grow to the next level.
But Ken Honeywell had other ideas. He and a fellow freelance writer had started Well Done Marketing by outsourcing their services to other agencies. As they grew, they added visual and strategic skills and data management. Now, Ken wanted to add public relations to his firm’s offerings. He brought Lisa on board to add PR and with the intention of grooming her to take over the agency’s leadership as he started his 5- to 8-year journey toward retirement.
Six years in, Lisa understands the culture, knows where the agency excels and has developed her vision for the agency’s future. Ken will be retiring at the end of the year. Lisa says the hardest part for her in stepping into the role of president has been giving up day-to-day client interaction. Her focus now is on agency-level problems and issues, expanding the agency from a regional to a national “marketing force,” and making it a legacy that lives beyond this transition in leadership.
Lisa is available on her agency’s website at Welldonemarketing.com.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Lisa Vielee, President at Well Done Marketing based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast, Lisa.
LISA: Thanks, Rob. It’s good to be here.
ROB: It’s excellent to have you here. Why don’t you give us an introduction to Well Done Marketing and what you do that is so well done?
LISA: Well Done Marketing is a 15-year shop here in Indianapolis. We’re a full-service marketing agency. We like to say that if it’s strategic, creative, or technical, we probably do it. That’s everything from design, branding, content marketing, public relations, digital strategy.
Also, kind of unusual for an agency our size as a small/mid-size agency, we have a full web development team. So we can go straight from web design to UX, UI, and development, testing, and then ongoing maintenance for our clients, which is really great because sometimes that handoff from design to development can be a little rocky and some things can get lost in translation. That’s part of the reason why we brought it in-house. For the most part, unless it’s traditional media buying, you can find it here at Well Done.
ROB: That’s an interesting evolution, because for a time – and this may be part of your transition – web development used to be kind of one-and-done. It seems to me now that a website is never really done and needs to be adjusted alongside everything else that’s going on with the brand.
LISA: Absolutely. Websites have gone from brochures online to really more of a customer experience. It’s the first thing people see and learn about your company, so keeping that content fresh has really evolved from being just updating blog posts to updating everything on your site and making sure it aligns with what the customer wants.
The customer journey is paramount, and I think that’s where having data and content and having that come together makes a lot of sense, and being able to change that in real time helps us as an agency, and we think helps our clients be really competitive in the market.
ROB: Right. It turns it from this big event into just part of the cadence. I totally understand that. Can you maybe give us a picture through the lens of a particular client? What’s a walk-through of a typical-ish client engagement for you? Who are you working with? What are the touchpoints?
LISA: For any advertising agency, there’s probably no such thing as a “typical” client. The clients that we love to work with are the clients that come to us with an overall problem to be solved. It used to be that was always an agency of record, but now it tends to be a project comes in and they recognize that marketing partners such as ourselves can help them do more than put a piece of content or an advertising campaign together.
One of our philosophies is to not just focus on the initial creative strategy, but to really take a step back whenever we can and focus on the marketing strategy. That’s really more aligned with business goals and brand goals, whereas a campaign – creative strategy tends to live in that campaign, that short term. For a lot of our clients, they’ll come to us for a project and then find that we’re asking questions and going outside of our lane, giving advice to them that goes beyond the campaign. Even if they don’t continue with us, our hope is that we can help that marketing person or that marketing director really understand why they need a seat at the table in the C-suite, and that marketing is really more than just distribution channels and the 4 Ps.
ROB: Right. As you talk about the range of services that you work with clients on, how are you then structuring the client engagement and the team around them? How are you establishing the primary point of contact and how do you bring people to the team around them? What’s that structure look like?
LISA: We have dedicated service managers responsible for all of our clients. They’re the primary point of contact. Then we bring in people as needed. Again, as a small independent agency, we can be a little more nimble. We can maximize budgets that way. So we’ll tell clients, with the exception of the initial kick-off meeting, where you want everybody at the table – other than that, you will see people when you need them at whatever stage of the process you’re in. That account manager’s responsibility is not only to represent our team for the client, but also to represent the client internally.
ROB: It’s such a key relationship and it’s always interesting to think about how to structure it, because it’s really make or break. There’s a lot of stake there in that role.
LISA: There absolutely is. A lot of agencies get started with the trifecta. You’ve got a creative person, a writer, a designer, and an account service person. For us, that’s not really how we started. Our two founders were both freelancers, so they started with this loose coalition of freelancers. The two people were writers, and they started an agency based on providing good content. Their first clients were typically other agencies.
Along the way, our founder decided that we could do more, that it really was about how he and his partner were thinking as well as the content that came out of it. So as the agency evolved, we found it made sense to show how that thinking works visually, strategically, through buys, through data management, and ultimately – my background’s in PR, so also in how we were communicating to different stakeholders.
ROB: Absolutely. I think you bring us to an important part of the conversation. You mentioned the founders of the firm, you mentioned those older parts. You’ve taken us through a little bit of the origin story, but let’s talk about your journey into the firm, what you were up to before, and what it looked like to dive into Well Done, and now you’re the president.
LISA: I am a proud communications generalist. I graduated with a degree in journalism, went over to the dark side and started working in public relations almost immediately, and over the course of my career, I’ve worked in internationally recognized nonprofits; I’ve done a stint in two or three different agencies of different sizes. I worked in state government, and then, as is typically the case in government, eventually your candidate loses. When my candidate lost, I took some time to think about what I wanted to do and how I wanted to balance my work and life.
I decided to hang my own shingle. You get to a point as a freelancer where you have to decide if you’re going to start saying no to preserve your own sanity or if you’re going to add people. I have trouble saying no, so I started adding additional people.
Ken Honeywell, our founder, and I have known each other forever. Indianapolis is known as one of those “small town” big cities. Everybody seems to know everybody, and in the marketing and advertising space, we all have tended to work with each other or for each other. So Ken and I have known each other for years. We came to a point where I actually asked him to go to lunch because I wanted to ask him how to take the next step. I was under five employees; he at the time had about 20, and I wanted to ask him to be my mentor and really help me grow.
It was a fun conversation because his answer was, “Well, sure, I’d be happy to help you, but I was hoping we could take this conversation in a different direction. I think we need to add PR, and why don’t you come on board? And oh, by the way, I think you’d be a great successor and a great leader for Well Done.” Really, it was one of those I was looking through a door and he opened the window, and we started having that conversation.
From the beginning, we were very intentional about not only how to add that service line and that different way of approaching a customer’s communication needs, but also how we were going to approach the internal management of the agency. The staff immediately knew that it was a sign that Ken was going to retire. We always said it was a 5- to 8-year journey so that I could learn the culture, I could really come in and understand where we did our best work and what that meant, and also put my vision together for the second generation of leadership.
And now here we are 6 years later, and it’s bittersweet because Ken is retiring at the end of the year, but everyone is ready. Not ready as in “Get out of here,” but ready in terms of we know where we’ve been, where we’re going, how our story is evolving.
ROB: What I’m hearing you say is first day in the door, you were going from around five people in your organization to maybe around 30 or so? What was that jump in responsibility?
LISA: Yeah, I was employee #24. In the last few years, we’ve added people. I think we’re now at mid-30s. I’d like to think that bringing my company in was a good addition because we’ve been able to add clients and add people.
But the other thing that I’ve realized, again, as that communications generalist, is I was well-positioned to understand the agency from a business perspective. A lot of agencies that are started the way ours started don’t necessarily have the greatest business structure.
I take this role of president really seriously in that I’ve given up being involved on the day-to-day – which was really, really hard. That was probably my biggest challenge at first. I didn’t want to give up that day-to-day client interaction and being involved in solving their problems. It took me a couple of years, but I realized after time that my job was to solve the problems and issues of the agency and working on the agency.
That’s really set us up for success going forward because my leadership team, we have big dreams. We want to grow from a regional company to a more nationally recognized agency. And having someone at the helm of that is a really important part to making that happen.
ROB: Was that the hardest part to let go of? The last responsibility you wanted to give up was working directly with the clients, then?
LISA: It’s been a 5-year journey. To be fully transparent, I am turning over the reins for my last client next month.
ROB: That’s progress, right? I think you highlight a neat opportunity for the entire services industry. There’s seemingly always room for the next wave of companies to rise up from nothing to regional player to national player. Some of them get bought along the way and some of them stand strong. It’s a great journey to be on.
LISA: Yeah, I think so. It’s exciting, for sure. In my experience, from the places where I’ve worked, a lot of agencies, especially in the Midwest – we’re very humble people. It’s kind of scary to share that big goal. But again, to have a founder who is so willing to help his baby get to the next step and bring on someone that can really make it become a legacy – because that’s the other thing. Agencies tend to come and go as the founders come and go. It’s been a real gift to have this opportunity to really work with our leadership team and envision where we want to go and make it something that can be a legacy for our founder.
ROB: When you start to think about growth, there’s lots of struggles, but there’s a couple that constantly come into play. It’s sales and execution in the services business overall. I think one of the hardest things to get predictable for an agency can be seeing a lane to predictable growth beyond – I think sometimes we just feel like we luck into business, we get referrals, we grow organically. How have you thought about scaling growth? I think that can be very intimidating.
LISA: That’s an interesting question, because we’ve tried several different models for that. We have had a couple of new business directors and have found – and maybe it’s just my poor hiring, but we’ve had people that are great networkers and can open doors, but are not salesmen, and we’ve had people that are great salespeople but don’t necessarily understand the agency business.
We have now made business development a responsibility of our accounts team and really have encouraged anyone that has that dream client or that industry that they bring some expertise or they want to grow in, to bring that to the table, and we’ll start looking for connections. I might be dating myself here, but it’s a little bit like seven degrees of Kevin Bacon. Eventually we sit down and realize that there’s no such thing as a cold lead.
ROB: Right. What I hear you saying is that the accounts team function in an opportunity identification mode, and then it’s more of a team sport after that.
LISA: Yeah, it is. Let me take a step back. New business comes in in one of three ways. We’ve mentioned referrals; that’s always a primary source, especially from clients who believe in what you do and think you’re a good partner. There’s always the dreaded RFP process. [laughs] It’s a necessary evil of our business and can result in really good work. Then the third piece is that outbound sales. I think this is a place where ecommerce, SaaS companies – obviously, you get into the retail and consumer market, people do really well. But professional services tend to have a struggle in carving out time for that.
I think that’s the difference. That’s where the lead really happens for a small agency to become more of a mid-size regional player: by recognizing that you have to sell yourself a little bit as well and go after some of those big fish. For a long time, we talked about how we were punching above our weight class. I’ve really challenged our team to start thinking, maybe we’re in our weight class. Let’s just punch where we are because we can do the work and we bring a special kind of strategy and thinking to the table that helps distinguish us from some of our larger competitors who may have scaled to such a size that the process is there, and it works for their clients, but we’re a little bit scrappier.
ROB: Right. There’s an extent to which I think unless an organization is very intentional about seeking a particular size of opportunity – I know very small consultancies that pursue very large clients, and we’ve talked to a couple of agencies on the podcast that are 800 people and they’re working with local plumbers. Those are the exceptions. Everything else seems like, to an extent, the right size opportunity ends up matching your speed. I can’t quite explain the serendipity of it, but it seems the size of opportunity comes to you when you’re ready for it, to an extent.
LISA: Yeah, I completely agree. Serendipity is a great word. I have always referred to it as karma. One of the things any company has to do, in my opinion, as they grow is have the ability to say no. That’s the local plumber thing. It’s really hard to say no to business, especially – we’re a 15-year agency; we lived through the recession. We’re currently living through COVID, and third and fourth generation of COVID. There’s a tendency to just take any work as it comes.
I’m a firm believer that if you say “No, thank you” with a referral – “Let me hook you up with someone that might be a better fit” – that’s karmic, and people remember that. They remember that you’re good people, and when the time is right, that’s going to come back around and it’s going to serve you.
ROB: Something I think you alluded to when you mentioned the SaaS companies, the startups, the software companies – it seems that sometimes service companies, agencies, will try to borrow maybe a little bit too much from those playbooks, and in the process they’ll try to act like a SaaS company that’s trying to sell $500 a month widgets, which is never going to feed the business sufficiently.
How have you thought about the right granularity of sales? It sounds like by surfacing the leads through a thoughtful process with the team, you’re avoiding this kind of “Let’s blast the universe and everyone who could be our customer.”
LISA: You couldn’t have said it better. On my drive in to work, I listen to marketing podcasts much like this one, and I wish I could remember where I heard it so I could attribute it correctly, but I heard someone talk about issuing a challenge to agencies to decide where they live on a continuum. Are you an agency that makes things, or are you an agency that thinks things? So a true consultancy, which has become a bad word, or that widget-maker?
I like to think Well Done leans more to the thinking things side. We’re not a good fit for people that need widgets. We’re going to be too expensive, or our process is going to be too frontloaded, or frankly you’re going to get frustrated because we are interested in creating your brochure or your website. We’re really interested in understanding not only how to find a solution for your problem, but why is your problem a problem?
So we tend to really look at context as well as content. Our model is very audience-centric, and that means our client – we get that our clients have 1,000 things to think about. For us, we’re thinking about them 100% of the time we’re working on the account, but for them, our work is only a part of it. If we can ask smart questions, help them consider things outside of our little part of it, and take some of that off their plate simply by understanding the context in which they’re working, then for us, that’s really when we’re successful at our job.
ROB: That makes sense. You’re going to naturally match pace with some of those clients that look like where you are as an organization and where you’re comfortable. In the startup world, they talk about – not that we’re hunting animals; people won’t like that metaphor – but the question, are you hunting rabbits or deer or elephants? You need to know, because those tasks all take specific tools, specific teams, specific tactics, and you’re going to have to build the whole organization around it. Or you’re just going to wait around and see what falls into the trap, I guess might be the metaphor. [laughs]
LISA: [laughs] And it requires some strength of character as an organization as well. When you hunt elephants, that’s a longer play. It takes more people. You’ve got to see the elephant from every side, and there’s some risk involved with that. So it’s building some of that internal trust that this is going to be the right fit for us; this is going to fit our mission. For Well Done, our mission is to do good in the world and work with clients who are doing good in the world. That’s not a fit for everybody.
Yeah, sure, we could – what’s the other analogy? – shoot fish in a barrel, as long as we’re on the hunting theme here. You could shoot fish in a barrel and get all of those little projects pretty easily, but it doesn’t help an agency grow, and frankly, in my experience, I don’t think it is satisfying for people that really have a passion for this industry.
ROB: Lisa, as you reflect on your tenure with Well Done, but also leading into that, what are some lessons you’ve learned along the way that you might want to go back and tell yourself to do things a little bit differently if you were starting over?
LISA: Some of it is really personal to me and my personality, so I’m not sure how helpful this’ll be, but all the personality tests I’ve taken, I’m a driver, I’m a high D, Type A. One of the things I’ve learned along the way is the bull in a china shop method is really not effective. It really, really is not effective. It really is about listening and learning and creating a culture of mentorship. Up, down, sideways, we all have something that we can teach one another.
I think when I stopped moving and sat and observed this agency – and that was really a gift, to have that time to do that – that was when I recognized that the sum is greater than the parts. I know it sounds kind of cliché to say that, but you’ve got to focus on people as well as profits.
I get a lot of questions from our team about “How big is big enough? How large are we going to grow?” It’s really hard to put a concrete number to that for someone like me. It really is about we will be too big when we can’t focus on our people and also maintain a profit that allows us to grow. That’s the best answer I can give. That’s when I’ll know that we’ve grown too large: when our culture and our mission start to suffer.
ROB: That is so much the answer that I think is hard to learn and hard to articulate. Start with the mission. What is the mission? We actually had a situation where our team said, “We’re too small to be the partner that we want to be for clients right now in every respect.” But that’s part of the goal of the mission: to have a place to go to. If you’re not doing it anymore, then you realize you’re not on the mission and it’s too big.
LISA: That’s really interesting. I know several companies here locally that have actually decided to downsize because they weren’t able to provide what they felt was best. I applaud that. I’m at a stage in my career where it’s really important to me to start giving back to younger professionals, and one of the things I tell the people that I mentor is to really understand how you define success. Success doesn’t have to be creating a company that gets bought and you’re suddenly a millionaire. For some people, that’s exactly what success looks like. But for other people it really is having a tight, small team and staying in your lane and providing the service that is meaningful for you and allows that personal satisfaction.
I think generationally, that is starting to change. I think the younger generation gets the fact that there needs to be some personal satisfaction and that the career ladder is not maybe as important as it used to be, and the focus on personal growth. That’s something that, again, talking about listening, we try to understand as people come on board. What is your vision of success? What is your end goal? If you want to go from production designer to designer to art director to creative director, if we know that, we can help provide a better career for you and also know that you are interested in growing with us.
But you know what? If you want to come in and do your job effectively, day in and day out, there is absolutely room for that as well, and we’re going to try to keep you challenged. That’s something as an industry I think marketing and advertising needs to come to terms with: people that just want to come and do a great job every day are still so valuable to the organization.
ROB: Yeah, it’s a very timely both challenge and opportunity. In this time, I think a lot of people have reconsidered what kind of role they want to do, and when and where. People who want to max out compensation can play that game, and some people who want to do meaningful work can play that game, but they might want to do it differently from how they were doing it let’s say two years ago.
LISA: Yeah, it’s a totally different way to think about business, and that can be a challenge, to be that kind of flexible organization. And again, there are very large agencies that are doing it really well. It just depends on where you want to go and what your definition of success is. But I think to your point, it also is really important that we change the business mindset to fit the people that are coming into it.
ROB: Lisa, when people want to find you and connect with you and Well Done Marketing, where should they go to track you down?
LISA: Well, they’d better go to the web, because I just said that’s where everybody starts. [laughs] The nice thing about our name is it’s really searchable. Welldonemarketing.com is our address. If you’re in Indianapolis, we say our door is always open. We’re right next to a Mexican restaurant with great margaritas, so you can come and see us too.
ROB: That’s wonderful. I do recommend a visit to Indianapolis. I’ve enjoyed some time there, for certain. Thank you so much, Lisa, for coming on the podcast and sharing your journey and the story of Well Done.
LISA: Thanks, Rob. It’s been a really great discussion.
ROB: Be well. Thank you.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Heather Isch is CEO and President at LKF Marketing, a B2B-focused full-service marketing communications company that specializes in working with manufacturers with complex, often highly technical products and complicated sales channels; governmental agencies working on regional economic development; and local community-focused arts organizations and nonprofits (the agency’s give-back “passion” projects).
Heather describes the process of getting to know LKF clients as a “deep dive” – into understanding all of the different industries they work in, the “customer levels” within each of those industries, who clients are trying to reach (which may vary by product application), what clients are trying to sell, and how they are trying to solve their customers’ problems – and compiling that information into “customer maps.” In addition to questioning clients, the agency gets industry information through accessing existing research, consulting with trade partners, following industry trade journals, through trade shows (when possible), or by, when something is completely new and needs to be “explored,” commissioning paid research. “We spend a lot of time with engineers,” Heather says.
Another piece of the “deep dive” is market research: finding and figuring out how to effectively reach target audiences – where these people are, how they make decisions, their internal “cultures” and inter-relationships, and the right media mix to support client messages.
LKF started in 1989 with two partners, graphic designer Charlie King and strategist Brad Lawton – and soon added media buyer Carol Fricke. After a number of years, Carol bought out her partners and invited Heather on board. In 2015, after Heather had served in the role of vice president for about 8 years, Carol retired and Heather took over as owner. Heather says that this transition was “always part of the plan” and that “when you plan for . . . transitions, they go a lot smoother.” Even now, Heather is working with her team so that when it is time for her to go, her current team of leaders will have everything they need to make the transition seamless.
In this interview, Heather talks about how her team of 17, each of whom has a specific “area of expertise,” has maintained relevance through the years. She explains that the agency’s culture supports “keeping ahead of trends” and not fearing trying new things or failure. The agency actively promotes continued training, attending seminars, and trying out and leveraging new client-appropriate tools and technology . . . all with a focus on delivering results for LKF’s clients. A recent example: LKF developed a trademarked Content Management System, McConimore, to facilitate rapid/ agile Web development and overcome some of what Heather describes as WordPress’s “intrinsic flaws.”
Heather takes a very holistic view of her organization. She explains that LKF’s passion statement, “Assisting the people in our family to thrive,” applies to the agency’s clients as well as the agency’s internal work family, employees’ families, and the community the agency serves.
Heather can be reached on her agency’s website at: lkfmarketing.com and on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m excited to be joined today by Heather Isch. She is the CEO and President at LKF Marketing based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Welcome to the podcast, Heather.
HEATHER: Thanks. I’m glad to be here.
ROB: Super great to have you here. Why don’t you kick us off by telling us what LKF Marketing excels in? What’s your specialty?
HEATHER: We are a full-service marketing communications company. We primarily serve B2B. We like really technical, confusing kinds of clients, so we have a lot of clients in the manufacturing space. We also have a lot of digital skills, so a lot of web development, that kind of thing. So helping clients with complicated sales channels, complicated products, that kind of thing.
ROB: Got it. When you say “technical and confusing,” let’s pull on that thread for a minute. What would something technical and confusing sound like? Even though once you describe it, it may not sound so technical and confusing.
HEATHER: A lot of our clients serve highly technical clients. They might be working with highly engineered products that might be sold into packaging or beverage or wastewater treatment. Sometimes in the medical industry, like for MRI equipment. So a lot of our clients have technical products that you really have to dig in and understand, spend a lot of time with engineers so that you understand what you’re talking about, first of all. But then those clients typically have very complicated sales channels, and it’s understanding how to get to and share their messaging in a variety of different industries to a variety of different levels, whether they’re influencers or the buyers.
In other markets that we serve, we work in economic development, so we have a lot of development clients working with, in our case, the state of Michigan working to understand brownfields and redevelopment credits and all kinds of crazy stuff. And then we have some of our more fun clients that might be a little bit more – those are our passion projects, more in the community that we live in. We like to give back, so we’ll be working with people in our arts community or some of our nonprofits. But we’re not typically the consumer products group, if that makes any sense.
ROB: It certainly does to an extent, although I’m now also contemplating who a wastewater influencer is. [HEATHER laughs] When we get into the particulars of it, take us down a layer on that. The complexity affects who you’re targeting, it affects your marketing channels. How do you take a problem like wastewater treatment – I imagine the client is very helpful in informing you of what they know, but they also might not know, and the knowledge may not transfer over the same way as if you’re in a core B2B context.
HEATHER: Right. With a client like that, it could be a wastewater treatment plant, it could be – here’s one for you. We’ve started working with some of the people that are trying to do extraction in the cannabis market. That’s really been more of an exploration. Who is making these decisions? Same thing in wastewater treatment plant. It may be the facilities manager that we need to get to; it could be an operations person in a specific area, but then you may also need to be speaking with the director of public services, depending on the different cities and states.
A lot of times it’s doing a deep dive with our clients to really understand all of the different industries that they’re working in, who they’re trying to connect with, what we’re trying to sell them, or how we’re trying to solve their problems, and then really going to work and putting together all of those customer maps. Sometimes there’s research that exists; a lot of times we rely heavily on some of our trade partners. We’ve spent a lot of time with engineers.
And in some cases, there might be actual research that we commission because we’re really in exploratory mode. If the client’s trying to launch something new, then we have to go down that paid research path.
ROB: It seems like some of these prospects for these products – they’re almost going to be pleasantly surprised if you can reach them with a convincing message directly. But how do you think about reaching such a specific customer? This certainly doesn’t sound like billboard and TV ad territory.
HEATHER: Not typically billboards, no. Usually there’s heavy emphasis in the different – there’s trade journals for everything under the sun. We work with a client that makes products for linemen to keep them safe when they’re up on utility poles. You would be amazed at how many trade journals there are for that industry and for very specific titles.
So for that particular group, we might be doing a combination of traditional print mixed with some social media, heavy web presence. Honestly, it’s trying to do the deep dive by industry, figuring out where these folks are, and doing the right media mix. Sometimes it’s tradeshows thrown in there, although COVID has not done us any favors in that department, so we’ve had to get a little more creative with how to reach our customers.
ROB: That’s wild, because I’m also thinking that linemen are probably not on LinkedIn very much. Maybe less than other industries, if you will.
HEATHER: Right.
ROB: I can’t imagine all the trade journals you get at your office. That must be a heck of a picture on its own.
HEATHER: Yeah, we have a lot of trade journals that come here. Also, I think one of the things that has been fascinating is the connection that linemen have with each other. There’s a very tight, almost like a brotherhood. There are a lot of ways to reach this group, but they’re also very connected and become very attached to their brands, and we are lucky enough that our client is very, very well-known, and linemen ask for it by name. That’s been an interesting little twist in their industry.
And we find that across the board. Every industry is very different, so you really have to figure out what’s going to get the best result based on the market. You learn to talk. You learn to figure out where these people are and how they make decisions.
ROB: It’s interesting, especially with the linemen. When someone’s going to get up near high-energy power, downed lines, all that stuff, when they ask for safety equipment, I feel like you listen to them. [laughs] But I don’t know.
Also, you’re talking about getting deep into an industry. It seems to me there could be some big opportunities – if somebody’s been marketing with a firm that doesn’t take the time to get in deep, there could be huge uncovered opportunities that are maybe even pretty low-hanging in the content and search world. Have you found examples of keywords that are lying out in the wide open for the taking, but weren’t claimed by the industry?
HEATHER: Absolutely.
ROB: What’s that look like?
HEATHER: I think that’s probably one of our key strengths. We are hell-bent on getting results for our clients, and the way you do that is really digging in deep and understanding their business and what they’re making, what they’re creating, what that end game is. We have search engine optimization talent on staff as well as usability experts, and a lot of this is really just years of learning to understand, I guess as best as anyone can, Google. They change everything every day. That’s a full-time job. But I feel like we’re pretty gifted in that department.
ROB: Heather, let’s rewind the clock a little bit on this. What is the origin story of LKF? Where did this business come from?
HEATHER: This business was actually created in 1989, and there were two partners, Charlie King and Brad Lawton, the ‘L’ and the ‘K’ in LKF. Charlie was a graphic designer and Brad was a strategy guy. Then they met up with Carol Fricke, and she was a media buyer. She came to Kalamazoo after a long stint in Atlanta, Georgia, and she teamed up with this group. They formed the trio, Lawton, King, Fricke, and operated for quite a few years together.
During that time, I was actually a kid fresh out of college and I met Carol while I was selling ad space for one of the papers. I continued to have that relationship with her for many years. I left publishing and became a marketing manager for a manufacturing company, which is where I probably learned to really love all of those nerdy technical things.
She and I stayed in touch, and actually LKF did a lot of design work for the manufacturing company that I worked with. During one of our lunches one day, she told me she wondered what was happening with me. I said I was negotiating hopefully what I thought would be “the job” with a local agency, and she said, “I don’t think so. I don’t want you to go work for another agency. I just bought my partners out, so I think you should come and work for me.”
So I did. I worked with her for many, many years, and in 2015 she was ready to retire, and I took over as owner.
ROB: Congratulations. It’s a good long story, and some of the best stories are those long stories. I find that every change of control of an agency is a little bit the same and a little bit different. What do the mechanics of assuming ownership, as it were, of an agency – I mean, you don’t have to get into particulars and percentages, but how does that even work? These are often somebody’s baby, but they also don’t want to care for it anymore. So what does that look like?
HEATHER: I think one of the things that was really beautiful about our transition is Carol and I had talked about that early on. That was always kind of the game plan. Neither one of us really had an end date, but we worked towards that, and I worked as the vice president for about eight years before taking over as owner.
I think your point about the same yet different – there are so many things that make LKF who we are today, and we have always been uber-focused on delivering results for the client. That’s just embedded in who we are. I think the culture piece also. We’ve always had this – it’s overused, but “work hard, play hard” focus. We always enjoyed each other’s company. Carol made it possible for me to be a vice president, help run the company, but also raise two small children. I had a very flexible schedule throughout that time.
I think when I took over, I wanted to put a bigger light on that, taking that to the next level, really looking at giving our team the ability to take care of their own families but be wildly successful here at the agency. I think we’ve been doing flex schedules – it was fashionable before COVID made it fashionable. [laughs] So we’re very blessed in that department. Our passion statement is “Assisting the people in our family to thrive,” and in the LKF bunch, we describe our family as our clients as well as our internal work family, their families, and the community that we serve.
I feel like that has just gotten bigger, I think, in that transition. But it was planned for, and I think when you plan for those transitions, they go a lot smoother.
ROB: How does that inform where you sit now? I’m sure someday you are planning to not run the agency anymore. How are you thinking about even the next generation? And really, you’re talking about handling a 50-year-old agency before too long, 40 even sooner.
HEATHER: That’s my goal. I would say my vision is that my current team of leaders are getting everything that they need so that the day that it’s time for me to go, it’s really seamless. I think good leadership is not about the who or the personality cult of what’s at the top; it’s what has made us who we are. Is everybody trained and schooled in all things LKF Marketing, the LKF way? How do we push that down in the organization so that there’s a seamless transition when the time comes?
ROB: Nobody’s surprised, right?
HEATHER: Nobody’s surprised.
ROB: It makes logical sense to everybody involved.
HEATHER: Yep.
ROB: That is quite a journey, and congratulations on everything so far. In the time that you have been there, when you track back to 1989, in terms of skills of the team members, some things are still very valid and helpful. There are still media buying elements there. But how media is bought and the other marketing channels that are involved have shifted entirely. How has the team over time been able to continue to stay relevant?
You mentioned even getting up into social, and then there’s stuff beyond that. There are so many places where an agency can get stuck in media, in SEO, in PPC, and others keep going past that. How do you think about these practice areas, which ones are ready to adopt for the agency, and how to either upskill or add skills to the team to get there?
HEATHER: I think that’s always the question. How do you keep yourself relevant? One of the things that we’ve always been very good at is not being afraid to fail and not being afraid to try things. Having experts – our team is very small. There’s 17 of us. But every person on the team has an area of expertise, and they’re really charged with keeping ahead of trends. We put significant emphasis on training and making sure that we’re attending seminars, that we’re trying out tools, that we’re figuring out which tools make sense for our client base and how to apply them so that they’re getting the best results and we’re leveraging the right technology, and we’re not becoming irrelevant.
I think that’s also something that has happened during the past 18-20 months, this explosion of digital tools, technology. And that’s what we’re excited about: how are we going to harness some of this new technology and really apply it to our client base? One of the things we had started working on pre-COVID was a new web development platform. We in the past have had a proprietary development platform, and over the years we’ve realized that’s just not a thing anymore.
But we’ve also seen the need for some tools to allow rapid or agile development. WordPress is always the thing that people are all about, but we’ve always felt like it had some intrinsic flaws. [laughs] So we went to work and have come up with our own product in that category. It’s been trademarked. We’re really excited about using that, alongside many other tools. But I think that’s a testament to how we’re staying relevant. We’re constantly saying, “This is good. We tried this; it didn’t work. That’s okay.”
And honestly, every client, because of the industries that they’re in, they’re pushing us to try things that might work for them but don’t work for one of our other clients. So I think that also helps us to stay relevant and on top of what’s out there.
ROB: Very, very interesting. Very tricky, of course. You’re saying you’ve built a new CMS up from scratch? Is that my understanding, or did I miss a detail there?
HEATHER: Say that again?
ROB: You have a new CMS that you’ve put together?
HEATHER: Yes.
ROB: Wow. What’s it called?
HEATHER: It is called McConimore and we don’t widely – it’s really only available to our customers.
ROB: Pretty interesting. There’s always room for new ideas there. That’s a category where everybody’s always trying to dominate it and nobody ever does. It’s sort of the tale as old as time. WordPress is always there, but you’ve got your GoDaddys, your Webflows – all of the things. But nothing ever dominates. It’s pretty interesting.
Heather, as you look at your tenure, as you look at your time in LKF and overall, what are some key lessons that you’ve learned as you’ve been leading that you might want to go back and tell yourself if you could rewind a little bit?
HEATHER: I think for me personally, I am a thinker, a big picture person. I love data. But once I have enough data, I’m definitely ready to move, and I think my younger self could get talked out of moving as quick as she would like to go. [laughs] There has to be calculated risk. There has to be data, all of those things. But I think that is part of, in our industry, staying ahead of everybody else. Failure or trying things on, that’s all part of the learning journey, and I hope that’s one thing that we instill in our teams: to never be afraid to try something and see if it works. I think that’s probably it.
ROB: Very good. As you’re looking forward at the future of LKF, the future of marketing in general, what are some things you are looking forward to? What’s next?
HEATHER: I think really taking our team to the next level. We are training up newer teams, and I’m looking forward to being able to serve more clients. We’re ready.
I also think harnessing all of these different technologies and leveraging them for our clients. There’s been a really big shift over the last 20 months, and I think as people get back online, helping them to really innovate and think about how to solve some of their challenges – that’s been a topic of discussion for us because I think we’ve been so focused over the past 18 months on tomorrow and next month. We’ve got to get people asking different questions, thinking about how we’re going to do it differently, how we’re going to tackle this problem in a different way. Some of the previous solutions just don’t work.
So I’m excited about what’s next for our clients and how we might go to market and start looking at things from a different perspective.
ROB: Absolutely. I always enjoy thinking through the individual contexts of where people are. It sounds like you are very aligned to your local community, to the art community. If someone has not been to visit you in the place that you call home in Kalamazoo, what should somebody go see? What are some of the highlight reels of your home?
HEATHER: We have a beautiful downtown that is very vibrant with lots of fun little boutiques and breweries. Wonderful little shops. We also, on the outside edges of Kalamazoo, have a wonderful Air Zoo, which is a great museum to take your families to. We also are home to Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo Valley Community College. We are a town that is very focused on education and keeping our talent here in Kalamazoo.
We are also home to The Promise, if you’ve ever heard of that. The Kalamazoo Promise has been talked about all over the United States. We have a very philanthropic community. So lots of good reasons to come and visit.
ROB: It sounds wonderful. I always like to dig in and honor – my team is around the country, and I just like to have us all think about what makes each other’s homes special. So thank you for sharing that. I know we always see Western Michigan jumping up and biting some other team in college football that wasn’t expecting to get beaten that week. They’re one of those upstarts that likes to surprise people, but it sounds like the people there are not surprised.
HEATHER: Kalamazoo is a great place to live.
ROB: Heather, when people want to get in touch with you and with LKF, where should they go to find you?
HEATHER: You can find us at lkfmarketing.com. You can also find us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
ROB: Fantastic. Heather, thank you so much for your time, for sharing your journey, for sharing that unique depth of understanding that you get into with clients to sell things that I think are hard to sell by a formula. That is very much to your credit, so congratulations.
HEATHER: Thank you.
ROB: Be well, and we’ll look for more great things from LKF.
HEATHER: Thanks, Rob. It was great talking to you.
ROB: Thanks, Heather. Take care. Bye.
HEATHER: Bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Karl Sakas is an Agency Consultant and Executive Coach at Sakas & Company where he consults with, coaches, and trains marketing agency owners struggling with various challenges related to their teams, their clients, and their services. His focus? To guide agency owners through risky decision-making, help them overcome constraints, enable them to grow profitably to the next level, and to make them “better bosses.”
Karl has a strong agency operations background and has worked with agencies around the world. His team is often called in when an agency:
- Founder’s network runs out and the agency needs to find new customers,
- Is slammed by new growth opportunities, or
- Needs help on a sales process . . . figuring out team member and client onboarding processes, smoothing delivery, or developing strategies for building long-term relationships.
In this interview, Karl identifies six agency “roles”:
- Account managers sell additional services to existing clients and keep them happy;
- Project managers ensure that work progresses smoothly and profitably;
- Subject matter experts (SMEs) . . . the craft-focused analysts, developers, designers, and writers;
- Broadly experienced, client-facing Strategists;
- Business developers, who provide organizational marketing, sales, and partnership-building; and
- Support, the overarching leadership, and operations management team that ensures smooth agency function.
In this interview, Karl recommends that overwhelmed agency owners offload tasks in a prescribed order (subject to agency-owner preferences);
- The SME work. Start using freelancers and later hire full-timers to do the highly visible client execution work. If an agency owner wants to spend all his or her time on “craft,” he or she should either be willing to hire six-figure management talent or shift to being a super-consultant and not own an agency.
- Project management, which is mostly (client-facing) internal coordination.
- Account management, so the agency owner is not the first person clients call when they need something.
- Sales . . . or strategy . . . depending on what the agency owner wants to “keep.” Or a hybrid, e.g., where another member of the team qualifies the client and the agency owner serves as the “closer.” This person does NOT have to be the expert the agency owner is . . . so he or she can be hired for less than the agency owner would pay for a personal clone.
Karl notes that there is a big difference between delegation and abdication. He warns, “Don’t just dump everything on someone and expect them to figure it all out.” The agency owner has to train these “replacements” and help them build the qualification process, so prospective clients, now vetted and talking with the agency owner, will be more ready to “sign on the line.”
In 2016, Karl founded a CMOs-only mastermind group, where he guides non-client CMOs through their challenges. He compiles the data he gathers from these CMOs into anonymized insights which he passes on to his agency clients . . . to help them improve.
Karl has built a ranking tool to help agencies assess current and future client value, clarify “fit,” and optimize client satisfaction and agency profitability. He will be running an “Ask Me Anything” session at HubSpot Inbound 2021, sharing scripts for difficult client conversations, talking about commitment to warmth and competence decision-making, and presenting a Reason, Options, Choose (ROC) negotiation framework that guides agency/client conflicts through chosen options toward mutually satisfactory solutions.
Karl can be reached on his agency’s website at: sakasandcompany.com, where he offers free newsletters and articles.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Karl Sakas, who is an Agency Consultant and Executive Coach at Sakas & Company based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to the podcast, Karl.
KARL: Rob, great to be here.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. This is a part of our annual Inbound series of podcasts. Karl, you’ll be speaking at Inbound, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But why don’t you start off by telling us about Sakas & Company and what it is that you all do?
KARL: Through Sakas & Company, I help owners of marketing agencies grow more profitably. That spans a range of areas. I’ve worked with agencies all over the world, every inhabited continent, around dealing with growing pains around getting to the next level, whatever that might be for each agency owner or owners. I come from an agency operations background. I actually started in digital marketing as a freelance web designer in high school back in the days of dial-up. Since then, I’ve been an Agency Project Manager, Director of Client Services, Director of Operations. This is my third business since high school, and I’m a fourth generation entrepreneur.
The work that I do, I love that I’m helping agency owners who often are in over their head and they’re struggling with different challenges around how to grow, how to grow profitably, major decisions related to their team and their clients and their services. I love being able to help them out. Several clients call me their agency therapist. Let me clarify, I’m not an actual therapist. Everyone ideally has an actual therapist, but when it comes to their agency, I love helping people out – helping them, as one client put it, “calm the chaos.”
ROB: When you mention focusing on growth, what I hear is where a lot of agencies end up feeling stuck – one of the transition points; you’ve probably seen a couple – is they hit a lid in one way or another in terms of founder sales.
KARL: Yes.
ROB: Is that where people often end up turning to you, in that area?
KARL: Sometimes. In that case, thinking of founder sales, often it is the founder’s network. Their network lasts maybe a year or two into the business; maybe it lasts three or four years. But eventually it’s like, “uh-oh” – they’ve realized that if their network is going to buy, they’ve bought. It’s funny; the marketing agency needs to do its own marketing. There’s a shoemaker’s kids problem.
Sometimes people reach out. Other times, and more often, given my operations background, they’ll reach out when they are overwhelmed by new growth opportunities. They’ve got more leads than they can deal with. Their salesperson or salespeople are having trouble keeping up, whether the owner is doing sales or otherwise. Often I’m helping on sales process. Given my background as a PM, helping with onboarding, figuring out their onboarding process, both for team members and for clients, how to sort out delivery running smoothly, and figuring out how to build long-term relationships.
All of my consulting, coaching, and training is exclusively with agencies. I don’t work with any brand side clients. But through a marketing association, in 2016 I founded a CMOs-only mastermind group. No agencies allowed. Through that, I’m helping the CMOs, who are not my clients, through some of their challenges and I get them together. I’m able to share anonymized insights from that to help agencies do a better job, like the CMOs keep talking about revenue attribution through agency, because otherwise you’re going to lose your clients to someone who is.
ROB: That makes complete sense. In the middle of that, you mentioned process. Does process tend to be one of those Kryptonites and Waterloos of agencies in general? It seems like you have this double effect. First of all, you have someone who has deliberately opted out of some of the structured environments they could work in in a big corporation. Then you combine that, often, with a free-spirited and creative nature to building the agency, which may not turn to process as its first instinct to solve problems.
KARL: That is a great point. It varies by agency, but part of my intake process if someone reaches out for my help, I’ll ask why they started their agency and how things have turned out compared to what they expected. A very common thread – not for everyone, but very common – is they were working at an agency and they’re like, “I can do this better.” Or as one agency owner put it, “If the CEO is going to be a moron, I want to be the moron.” Sort of the “I could do it better.”
The problem is that people often find when they are now in charge, they have some new empathy for their former boss. When they saw the boss wasn’t always making the best decisions or what have you, now they realize what the boss was going through, juggling all of these different stakeholders, clients, team members, suppliers, and others, and now they often don’t have a sounding board. Sometimes if they have a business partner, they’ve got their business partner as a sounding board, “Is this normal?” Sometimes their romantic partner, who sometimes is also the business partner, which adds its own layer of complications. Bu they’re both in the same situation.
One of my coaching clients said that our coaching work helped him free up time in his therapy sessions because he wasn’t having to tell his therapist all about his agency challenges – which the therapist couldn’t really help with. I mean, in pieces, but not “Here are the best practices. Let’s customize them to you.”
ROB: Right, the therapist can help you with the psychology of being in the role, but it doesn’t necessarily get you to what’s effective for business. I’m sure in some cases when it’s a romantic partnership that are also business partners, you are kind of in a therapist role at times.
When we get to scaling past this founder or you have too much business coming in even for the people who are in the sales role, the first lever I see people pull, often, when they get capped out on sales is they’ll just go hire salespeople. They’ll hire one or two and send them into the world and tell them to go sell things. I think it usually doesn’t turn out too well when that’s the plan.
KARL: By accident, that approach sometimes accidentally works. But usually not.
ROB: Sometimes you’re scaling the founder-led sales a little bit and sometimes you’re distributing. How do you processize and get it so that you have – I think an enemy sometimes in sales is authenticity. You really have to get the right people at least to reflect your own agency’s brand in that conversation.
KARL: It starts by understanding, should you even outsource sales or something else? In my work, I’ve identified six agency roles. You’ve got account management (keep the clients happy, sell them more work); project management (get the work done smoothly and profitably); you’ve got your subject matter experts (depending on your agency’s services, those are your designers, developers, writers, analysts, that kind of thing), who are primarily focusing on doing their craft all day long; you’ve got strategists, who are sort of like a super subject matter expert (they have broader experience, they tend to have more experience in general, they tend to be fairly client-facing); and then the last two, you’ve got biz dev, which is really marketing, sales, and partnerships; and then you’ve got support, which is operations and leadership, keeping things running smoothly.
When it comes to getting things off your plate as an agency owner, my recommendation is to follow roughly this order, depending on your preferences.
First thing to get off your plate: the SME work. If you are the owner of the agency and you are still in the client execution tools all day long, you probably should outsource that to someone else – maybe initially freelancers, eventually hiring people full-time, that kind of thing. Get that off your plate, the things that are more visible to your clients.
The next thing to do probably is project management, the mostly internal coordination, though PMs are indeed client-facing. Then you may want to do account management – not being the first person clients call every single time they need something.
And then the question becomes – and this is the piece to your question of getting sales off your plate – depending on your preferences, you might choose to hire someone to help with sales while you keep doing client strategy, or maybe the other way. You want to do client strategy, you don’t want to do sales. There is an in-the-middle option, which is maybe you continue as the closer, you’re closing the deal, but someone else on your team is doing the qualifying. If this were a really large sales organization, that would be a business development representative.
The good news is they don’t need to be as much of an expert as you are, which means that you can hire them for less than you would hire a clone of yourself. And if they do their job and you help them build process – they’re not going to magically know who’s qualified or not – you ultimately will find yourself on the phone solely with qualified, or at least initially qualified, prospects.
On the other hand, if you like doing all the conversations but you’ve outsourced everything else, okay. Do what you want to do, but if you’re doing something that you’d rather not do – as the owner of an agency, you’re in a lucky spot. Most people out in the world don’t get to choose what they do day to day. It’s your business. But you do need to take some steps to make it happen rather than just – instead of delegating, sometimes people will abdicate. Don’t just dump everything on someone and expect them to figure it all out.
ROB: Yeah, I hear two traps in there that are pretty common. One is the abdication. Two is really, a lot of people get into the business not to build a business, but because they enjoy the delivery work.
KARL: Yes. And if that’s what you love most, you need someone on your team doing the rest, doing the support work, operations and leadership, doing the biz dev work, marketing, sales, and partnerships, and so on. But it is worth considering. Occasionally, out of the over 400 clients I’ve worked with in 36 countries, some of the clients conclude they don’t like running an agency. Sometimes they don’t like the sales; other times they don’t like managing people. And there are things you can do to delegate aspects of management, though it’s not cheap. You’re hiring someone with a six-figure salary, profit-sharing, and potentially some sort of equity to take over for you if you don’t love doing that.
But sometimes people conclude they don’t want to run an agency because they want to do the craft, primarily, and in that case, I call that shifting to the “super consultant” model. They might have one administrative person helping them stay on track, but their job is to do consulting, do their craft, whether it’s SEO or marketing strategy or PR or something else. If you want to do your favorite craft all day long, you probably should not be an agency owner.
ROB: And that might take us a little bit into even your own journey. You were leading in agencies, building a career. There were obviously plenty of places you could’ve gone from there, but you’ve got a much more focused scope of services now. How did you come to this conclusion for yourself of how you wanted to help agencies that maybe wasn’t managing a bunch of delivery?
KARL: Thinking about the moving parts, I realized after working for one agency and then another, while I was at the second agency, there was this opportunity. Agency owners typically start the agency because they love the work. At my first agency, there were three founders; one loved design, another loved SEO, another loved development. At the second agency, it was development and marketing strategy.
The challenge is, suddenly you start an agency, you’re now a business owner. You’re dealing with hiring and firing and office supplies, or making sure someone bought the office supplies so you don’t run out, that kind of thing. Often that’s not as much fun.
In my case, coming from an operations background, I was usually doing the things the owners didn’t like doing. For instance, one of my first jobs as a Director of Client Services at an agency – I think they had not mentioned this as part of the hiring process – learned in the first week that I would be telling all of the clients that our prices had gone up about 30%. We’d been at an old rate for a long time. And you know what? Because I had been working with clients as a web designer in the days of dial-up and otherwise, it worked. Out of all of our retainer clients, all but one renewed at the new rate, and the one that didn’t continued working on a project basis – and also was kind of a difficult client anyway, so that maybe wasn’t terrible.
But they delegated that to me and I got it done. Everything down to figuring out health insurance plan options. So operations is often doing stuff the owners don’t want – and I have some clients where the owners do do operations, but that gets into a division of labor.
But I realized there was this opportunity. Owners often don’t love running the business smoothly, but if you don’t do that, you’re going to go out of business. Someone has to pay attention to that. In my case, business was just normal. My parents are both career army officers, and as they retired and after they retired, they started a small rental property management business and they put the kids to work. I’m the oldest of five, and starting in elementary school I was helping with things like cleanouts during tenant turnover and things like that. So I would see them negotiating with various stakeholders – with tenants, with suppliers and so on. Talking about business was normal.
By high school, I was running the web design and technology consulting business that I built solely by a mix of referral and word-of-mouth in the Washington, D.C. area. I was later a business major in college. And it even goes back further than that. One of my grandfathers was a business professor for 47 years and a management consultant, so I’d hear stories focusing on organizational behavior about working with big companies, like GE and Caterpillar and Nestle, helping them work more effectively with their employees.
There’s a big theme around that today. In a sense, my secret mission is to make agency owners better bosses. Having been an employee at one agency and then another, agency life is often this rollercoaster. If you’re the owner, you’re at least in charge of controlling aspects of the rollercoaster, but if you’re an employee, there are limits. So part of my goal is, yes, make life better for agency owners, help them secure what is typically their number one or number two financial asset, but also make things more stable, make work better for their employees.
So I’m helping the owners and their families; I’m helping, more indirectly, agency employees and their families. This is thousands and thousands of people all over the world.
ROB: It sounds rewarding to you personally on several levels, up against your own values. You mentioned something in that, and I think it’s a good time to transition. You were talking about a client that wasn’t such a good client. What you’re speaking on – you’ll be on a virtual stage at Inbound. Maybe next year we can get back to a real stage. You have an “Ask Me Anything” session, so people are just going to throw random things at you. You’re going to be there and ready to respond.
Your session description mentions how to keep your best clients happy. There are many different potential definitions for “best client.” How do you think about that before you figure out how to keep them happy?
KARL: Best client is going to be unique to each agency, but typically they’re clients who pay you reasonably for the work you do. Ideally and most often, your best clients are going to be your highest paying clients. Not always. They are profitable within the relationship. If the client is 3% of your revenue, they’re roughly needing 3% of your time, not 10% of your team’s time. That isn’t ideal.
You enjoy working with them. If you see there’s an email from them or a text from them or a call from them, you are hopefully excited to see that they’re reaching out, and your team is also excited. You’re doing work that you can see the impact and the client appreciates the impact. The client is open to new ideas, trying new things that’ll benefit them. The client generally trusts you, trusts the advice you have. That doesn’t mean they would never have any questions, but generally they assume that if you’ve recommended it, it makes sense to explore.
There could be other factors as well. I’ve actually built a spreadsheet for that that I use with my coaching and consulting clients. It’s the client rating or ranking matrix. You put all your clients in and you look at them in terms of a few key criteria. One is, what is their current value (high, medium, or low)? That’ll vary by your client mix. And also, what’s their future potential (high, medium, or low)? That’ll help you decide, is this a client you want to keep as-is? Is this a client you want to try to grow? Or maybe you should assume that you might lose them.
And sometimes, if there’s a client, especially if it’s a lower budget client, that probably won’t grow and you don’t like working with them – probably time to fire them.
ROB: Do you have any way that you suggest firing a client? Because I think that’s one of those things that can probably be a little bit intimidating and feels, to an extent, counterintuitive.
KARL: One of the big drivers is whether you’re firing them because you’ve outgrown them or you’re firing them because there are major dysfunctions. I was talking with a client about this yesterday. They’ve grown; they have a legacy client at $2,500 a month. Their goal for new clients is to be $10,000+, but they had some legacy clients.
They reached out asking if the client wanted to expand their retainer, and the client declined – which made sense based on where their business was. They certainly couldn’t get to $10,000 a month. It seemed like it was time to part ways. My advice to the agency owners that I was speaking with on the call was: frame it as you’ve enjoyed working with them; “Here’s another agency or two that might be a match.”
In that case, I said, “Do you have agencies who would be thrilled to get that $2,500 a month client?” “Yes, agencies that are earlier in their lifecycle, things like that, that my client knows and trusts.” I said, “Offer to introduce them.” Whether there’s a referral fee or not, that’s doing the right thing. Create a smooth transition. Point them somewhere.
There’s a second category, which is that the client is significantly dysfunctional. For instance, I mentioned the client that didn’t renew their retainer but just projects – I really liked my day to day contact. Her boss was kind of terrible. I was on the phone with my day to day contact one day; I made a joke about something. She laughed and she said, “Thanks, I needed that. We don’t laugh much here.” So sad. Her boss was terrible. I could understand the environment. That wasn’t a client that we tried hard to keep. The work was interesting, but not ideal.
But sometimes it’s worse. I had a client in Toronto who had a smaller client who she said was making misogynistic comments to her team. In a coaching call – it actually ended up being an emergency support outreach – she was like, “Can I fire this guy as a client?” I knew the backstory on the client’s size and things like that. It was a smaller client. I hadn’t heard about the employee harassment; that was newer. I’m like, “Yeah, fire him. And you’re under no obligation to help him find another agency based on his behavior.”
So sometimes I think I’m helping people feel more confident in taking action on things they probably know they need to do, but they’re looking for a nudge.
ROB: Sure. A lot of times in the lead chair of an agency, or really any organization, you’re missing that sounding board, so it is good to have that from a coach, from a consultant, from somebody, for sure.
Frequently on this podcast, we talk about lessons learned. It sounds like a lot of your business is defined, almost, by lessons learned and things that you would share. I’d maybe twist the question a little bit and say – normally I say “What have you learned?” I would say, when you prepare for an Ask Me Anything session, I imagine there’s an extent to which you already know some of the lessons you’re going to put back into the audience. So apart from some things we’ve already talked about, what are some of the top questions that you end up fielding and teaching back to the audience in these sessions?
KARL: One is maybe the owner is really good at account management, but they’re like, “How do I get my team to improve at it? They have potential, but what can I do?” There are two things to keep in mind.
One is a concept called warmth and competence. It comes from a book called The Human Brand by Chris Malone, who’s a former Fortune 500 CMO, and Susan Fiske, who’s a psychology professor at Princeton. The idea of warmth and competence – and you can use this to make better decisions – is this: whenever you’re interacting with a person or a company or other organization, you’re thinking about how is the warmth, how is the competence (high, medium, or low)? High competence is you’re getting the job done, you’re delivering as expected, everything is according to the specifications. High warmth is, do you make the person feel special? Do you make them feel that you value them? It’s not just about the money.
You can apply this in your client relationships and also with your team, your employee relationships. If you commit to warmth and competence from The Human Brand as one of your core values, your team can make better decisions. And I talk about this with my team. What’s the warmth and competence solution? If it’s in line with the overall values and it is high warmth and high competence, do it. It makes the decision-making a lot easier, and that helps with client retention.
The second thing to think about is, when you’re delegating client services or account management or delegating more of it, what do you do when a client wants something that isn’t aligned to what you want to give them?
I will be sharing a resource at my Inbound talk, the “Ask Me Anything” on working with clients, which is a couple dozen scripts for different scenarios that may be a difficult conversation. For instance, you have gone over budget and you haven’t warned the client. Or maybe the client wants something that isn’t in scope, but they seem to think it should be.
The solution to that, apart from come to my Inbound session and sign up for the bonus of these scripts for handling difficult clients – and I’m always expanding those; I’ve added several in the past year – is a concept I call Reason, Options, Choose (ROC). The idea there is as a negotiation framework.
A client wants something; you don’t want to do that, or at least not under those terms. You cite a reason. Say they don’t like the price you’ve quoted for something. “We’d love to do that. That is the price for that scope.” But then you give them two to three options that you hand-pick. You might say, “We looked at the lower budget you mentioned. Here’s the smaller scope we could do. Do you want the full price, full scope (Option A)? Do you want the smaller scope, smaller budget (Option B)?” There’s also in that case an implicit Option C, which is client doesn’t want to pay anything – great, we don’t do anything and we work on a client who will pay us for something.
So you give them a reason, you give them two to three hand-picked options, and then you let them choose. You’re not making them choose any specific one, and importantly, they’re not making you do something you don’t want to do. And any of the options are going to be acceptable to your agency because you have hand-picked them. Reason, Options, Choose.
ROB: That seems like one of those things – a lot of these are almost muscles you have to exercise and get comfortable with. It’s not going to be easy. But it seems like once you pattern them and model them, your team would even get used to it and start to think in that same mindset.
KARL: Yes. You want the team to internalize it. Actually, I discovered that in an inside joke way. A client had a birthday coming up and she was really into wine. She was also a big fan of Reason, Options, Choose, and she had told her team about it. So the team decided to make some fake wine labels and put them on wine bottles, and one of the wines the team called “Riesling, Options, Choose.” They included some pairing notes: that it was a bittersweet blend best served with a pep talk from Karl, lots of proofreading, and apparently stress-eating pretzels.
The more your team can make better decisions on your behalf through things like warmth and competence, through Reason, Options, Choose – by understanding your values, by understanding what is important – really, it’s three things. I call it your VGR: your values, goals, and resources. Values on how you operate, goals on where you want to go, and resources in terms of time, money, people, tools to get things done. Your team can make better decisions on your behalf and ultimately find ways so that you can work less and earn more.
ROB: Plenty to digest there. It’s so helpful to have these tools. I talk to my team a lot about – I think especially folks in smaller businesses get a little scared; they’re in a smaller business because they don’t want to be beset by process. But there’s a certain amount of process that exists not to avoid intelligence decisions, but to avoid decision paralysis and inaction. That’s I think where process is so helpful and enabling. You don’t have to decide what you’re going to send.
For example, you get a resume of someone you want to talk to. How do you decide you want to talk to them, and what do you send them when you decide? Or do you want to freelance that every time and get stuck in the mud? These processes are helpful in a lot of ways.
KARL: Absolutely. That also includes making time to think through when to change. You ideally aren’t changing processes every single day so your team’s like, “Is this version 3.6 or version 4.28?” It makes sense to do an annual review, quarterly review. And importantly, get input from your team. Just because you’re thinking about certain priorities and that’s important, your team has some concerns.
Two examples on that. With my grandfather’s consulting years ago – I’m into trains. Turned out he did a consulting project for the New York Central Railroad, and he was interviewing employees about what they liked and didn’t like. An employee was in the switching tower one hot summer day, and my grandfather asked him what he liked and didn’t like about his job. He said, “The biggest problem is it’s really hot. I’ve asked them to put in some window blinds, and they’ve even been out to measure them, but they haven’t put them in.” And he shared about a safety concern. My grandfather asked, “Did you escalate that?” The guy was like, “Why should I? They didn’t care about the window blinds. Why would they care about that?”
An example of a small thing at an agency – I did an anonymous culture survey, which I’ll sometimes do with my consulting clients, asking all the employees about what they liked or didn’t like and a number of other questions. One of the feedback points was about the coffeemaker in the office. Now, the two owners did not drink coffee. They’d heard there were some issues with the coffeemaker, but it wasn’t really a personal problem for them.
But the feedback was that the coffeemaker was always breaking. This was from an employee who was a bigger coffee fan. My advice to the owners was: this is not going to be the most impactful thing you do, but buy a new coffeemaker, and someone will be thrilled.
ROB: Yep. It’s so many of those little things that you don’t even realize, and it’s just such a simple cost, but the intention is where it matters.
KARL: Exactly.
ROB: Karl, we’ll look forward to your Ask Me Anything session at Inbound coming up in October. Between now and then, and maybe after, when people want to catch up with you and connect with you and Sakas & Company, where should they go to find you?
KARL: Visit online sakasandcompany.com. I have hundreds of free articles. I have monthly live office hours, answering questions live and free of charge with agency owners all over the world, and also a number of courses and things like that. The latest is Agency PM 101 for people who are stuck as deputized project managers doing PM on top of their existing job and they’d rather not. It doesn’t have to be quite so hard. So that’s Agency PM 101. But also, again, hundreds of free articles and a newsletter that more than one agency owner has said is one of the only emails they read. That’s sakasandcompany.com. Check it out.
ROB: The email newsletter is always worth a try. If you don’t like it, everybody knows how to find the unsubscribe button. Sounds like it’s well worth it to many agency owners. Karl, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It’s good to draw on your wisdom and share with the audience. Thank you for sharing at Inbound as well.
KARL: Thanks, Rob.
ROB: Take care.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Paul McDowall and Catherine Clark were neighbors when they founded ClarkMcDowall, a 21-year-old agency that with “intelligence and imagination” architects growth for “visionary companies.” Originally starting with big clients Catherine “inherited” from her previous employer, the agency had to put in effort to bring on the startups and mid-size companies that keep an agency nimble, fresh, and entrepreneurial – where there is a higher chance of “getting stuff done.”
Paul says the agency’s most productive relationships come with clients that want to think ahead and think differently, make changes and do something different, and push boundaries – that these companies have a “sophistication in the way they think, but also a progressive way of thinking about their own industry or their own business.” Catherine notes that the human side is important to the mix and that today’s clients are far more savvy about marketing and innovation than they were even six years ago.
Brand-architecting involves broad-scope innovation in such activities as creating new brands, amplifying “rising star brands,” and transforming legacy brands for visionary clients by changing brand strategy, purpose, or positioning. The agency’s brand expression work covers verbal expression (naming/ messaging) and visual expression (visual ID, packaging, design across the whole ecosystem, and web, video, and social components). Catherine says, “Architecting a brand is really about getting into what it stands for and then really thinking about how that impacts in all the ways it expresses itself.”
As an example of client work, Catherine talks about the agency’s multi-year effort with the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA team; addressing such issues as – What is their purpose? Why do they exist? How do they uniquely do things? What is it they actually do? – and then thinking how that manifests in the organization’s operations – a campaign, a tagline, player experience, how a new player is greeted . . . or about the arena itself and the experience of the arena. Paul extends the scope by mentioning that these things include the internal culture as well, “how they talk to each other” and “how they hire.”
Although ClarkMcDowall is based in New York City, the 2020 Covid lockdown forced the agency to rethink its organization. Catherine talks about the tension that comes with change . . . and the agency’s decision to “Just go hybrid and start building it.” Today, the agency uses different systems, different ways of hiring, and different ways of working than in the past . . . and has a strong focus on creating a work environment that is less transactional and more about people’s lives. About 25% of the agency’s 25 employees work remotely – across the country.
Catherine says all this change has come with some nice surprises (and these are quotes):
- The more we allow people to try to find their own rhythm and their own environment, the more we’re able to retain them and get the best out of them.
- I feel like we’re even truer to ourselves in our values. We’ve really doubled down on the way that we treat people, the way that we integrate into our community, some of the pro bono stuff that we’re doing.
- There’s this weird thing that the more you innovate, in a way, the easier it is to be true to yourself. You have to change a lot in order to really notice that anchor that you have.
Catherine and Paul can be reached on their agency’s website at: clarkmcdowall.com or on LinkedIn.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by a duo, Paul McDowall and Catherine Clark. They’re both Founding Partners at ClarkMcDowall, based in New York City. Welcome to the podcast.
PAUL: Thank you.
CATHERINE: Thanks for having us. We’re very excited to be here.
ROB: It’s very excellent to have you here. Maybe you could start off by telling us about ClarkMcDowall and about what it is that makes the firm unique.
CATHERINE: We call ourselves brand architects. I guess we’ll start there with the unique piece. Just to be tangible for everybody who might be listening in, that means we do a bunch of things. We create new brands, we amplify what we would call “rising star brands,” and then we transform legacy brands for clients that we would consider to be visionary clients who are really looking for some change.
What does that mean? It means we offer services like brand strategy, brand purpose, positioning, architecture. We also do a lot of innovation work, as that is also part of architecting those brands. Finally, we do brand expression work, whether that’s verbal expression like naming/messaging or visual expression like vis ID packaging, designing across the whole ecosystem, web, video, social.
There’s about 25 people in our agency. Our roots and our base are in New York City, but we are hybrid. We also have talent across the country.
I think what makes us unique is – we phrase it as “intelligence and imagination,” and I’m sure Paul will jump in and add to that, but it’s really born from the partnership that Paul and I have. I’m a strategist originally and Paul is a creative originally, and we both own 50% of this business. It’s very much about the fusion of two sides of our business that are usually not seen in equal partnership very much in the agency landscape.
PAUL: Yeah. We got to the intelligence and imagination – for a while we were talking about “we have strategy brains and creative brains working together,” and it sounded a little clunky. It also felt quite limiting as well. It feels as though creatives can’t think and then strategists don’t have a creative thought. It’s just not true.
The idea of intelligence and imagination is something that we do collectively as a team. It’s not one team, one person owns that. It’s everybody, whether it’s the strategists, whether it’s the creatives, but also whether it’s our client experience team, whether it’s our marketing team, ops team, whoever it is. That’s how we think and how we approach life. It’s a broader philosophy which has stood us in good stead for the last, gosh, 21 years, Catherine.
CATHERINE: It’s been a journey.
PAUL: Yeah. Awesome journey.
ROB: Congratulations on that alone. That’s quite a journey. You mentioned building brand architecture. When someone goes to your website and looks at the range of brands that are on there, we see quite an array of impressive top-level name brands. How does that play out? I imagine you can talk about some of those brands that are on the site. What does brand architecture look like for one of those examples that we might see looking at the firm?
CATHERINE: I could pick a couple of examples. Architecting a brand is really about getting into what it stands for and then really thinking about how that impacts in all the ways it expresses itself.
One client we like to talk about a lot is the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA team. We worked with them for a number of years, really helping define their purpose, why they exist, how they uniquely do things, what it is they actually do, and then thinking about how that manifests in all kinds of ways. It could be a campaign, a tagline, some visuals. It could also be the player experience. How do you greet a new player when they show up at your team? Or it could be about the arena itself and what the experience is like.
PAUL: Even their internal culture as well, how they talk to each other, how they hire. It’s from the inside out. Sorry, Catherine.
CATHERINE: No, no problem, Paul. This is our two heads thinking together, like we do. [laughter] So that’s how we would talk about being brand architects. It’s actually a little bit like an architect thinks about creating a building that is influencing the way people live their lives, the way they interact with each other, the way that building leaves a mark on the landscape. It’s really bringing a lot of things together.
Another manifestation of our work might be some work we did with Starbucks, restaging Evolution Fresh, which is their juice brand that was doing really well. They had this incredible, beautiful design, actually, that won some awards. But then the whole landscape changed around them. That’s what happens when we get brought in to do brand transformation. It’s like, “Hey, we’ve got this thing. It was doing great and now it’s hit a wall.” We would help them from the get-go in terms of understanding, what is the problem? Who is your audience? How do we change the way you position yourself and tell your story? Then we’re able to bring it to life.
In that particular instance, it was mainly packaging. The packaging was their main source of communication; they didn’t have any advertising. So that’s where we applied all our efforts, into the visual expression, and it turned their business around. They went from major decline to double-digit growth.
PAUL: They were getting delisted. Even from their own Starbucks stores, they were getting delisted. That’s how dire the situation was. Through the work we launched, they were doing double-digit growth. They had the biggest growth I think they’d seen in the brand itself, and actually outpacing the category itself. So a pretty dramatic transformation.
ROB: What was the timing of your engagement with Oklahoma City? Were you there right when they were moving and that transition? Was part of the brand design around the new team name? Or was it downstream from there?
CATHERINE: Downstream. We came in at the Kevin Durant free agency time. I can’t say too much about all of that, but you can imagine that that team was going through a lot of soul-searching in terms of what they stood for, and if that player was going to leave – which he ended up leaving – how do you make sure you define that team so that it has a real sense of purpose, regardless of the outcome they can’t control?
So we came in at that point and really helped them articulate what makes them different. And as Paul was saying, impacting their culture internally. They made this incredible bounce-back as soon as he left. And they’re always changing and there’s always players coming in, coming out. How, with a brand like that, do you help them to find what they stand for, agnostic of the players that might be there, knowing that the players are actually a huge part of the experience? So trying to create some stability and a sense of agency, if you like, for themselves outside of wins and losses and players.
PAUL: I think it’s interesting. They have a very progressive team way of thinking. I’m impressed with the GM, who we worked closely with and Catherine has a very good relationship with. He’s super thoughtful about everything, not wanting to be just another sports team or thinking like another sports team.
I think they’re the folks that we do really well with, those clients that really want to push the boundary, thinking ahead – not just reflecting the status quo – and wanting to do something different, wanting to make a change, wanting to think differently, wanting to think fresh. There’s a sophistication in the way they think, but also a progressive way of thinking about their own industry or their own business. We create wonderful, productive relationships with folks that are wired that way just because we’re wired that way as well.
CATHERINE: Just to build on that, a lot of agencies in our business are used to helping their clients narrow down their bull’s-eye, target audience and all those good things. We’ve had to do the same thing over the years and say, “Hey, what kind of clients do we work best with?” Because you can’t be everything to everyone.
That’s really been the thread: people who we consider to be visionary, who really want to do something different, transcend their category, push the boundaries, but at the same time have this very human side to them. We’re a very casual agency in terms of how we present ourselves and how we work with people. So there’s a real human side. We know we do better with clients that want that very personal, intimate relationship versus clients who are maybe looking for a big agency with lots of fancy style of working.
We’re in a category where there’s lots of different people doing different things, and if you can really define your niche, you’re more likely to be successful and be able to focus on that.
ROB: Right. There’s a big piece of the story there that I would like to come back to, because I think you look at a lot of the brands you’ve worked with, and I think a lot of agencies would look at the overall top-level brand and say that that brand is untouchable, that you really have to be a big holding company shop to engage with them.
But I’m going to put a pin in that for a moment. I want to get back to the origin story a little bit. Clearly, you two teamed up and you’re combining worlds of your own strengths. But how did ClarkMcDowall come to be in the first place? What’s the origin story?
PAUL: [laughs] This is a story that we actually didn’t tell from the get-go because I think it would’ve scared our clients, but we were literally next-door neighbors, literally over the garden fence. Catherine was running the UK side of a London branding company and I was doing my own thing with somebody else. I was very dissatisfied; I was on the creative side/design side, very limited. Wasn’t really allowed to ask a lot of questions. I’d inherit a brief and then respond to that brief.
Catherine was on the flipside, doing all this incredible thinking with innovation thinking, strategic thinking, and then it would be mistranslated or turned into – just lost, just melt into the ether and never see what happened to it.
We had a conversation one day – I think our spouse and partners were like, “The person next door, you should talk! They do what you do!”, whatever. And eventually we did. I remember Catherine sharing her insights. Catherine is extremely eloquent, as you can tell already. Very intelligent, bang-on. I just exploded and was like, “This is incredible.” It opened my mind to things. Likewise, Catherine, different side, “Here’s a creative that thinks differently about the industry and is dissatisfied and doesn’t just want to be a designer,” all those sorts of things.
It was literally a meeting of the minds. It was happenstance. It was one of those magic moments in your life that is transformational. And I mean that in the biggest sense of the word “transformational.” Then we built the business from there and basically shared thoughts and insights. We started in the East Village because that’s where we lived. As your audience will know, running an agency is a 24/7/365 job. We had babies at the time, or babies to come, so we wanted to stay close to our families. The human side, as Catherine touched upon, is super important to us, and recognizing that and trying to make it work for people.
By the way, Catherine, jump in at any time. You’ve heard this story a thousand times. You don’t need to hear me warbling on.
CATHERINE: But you tell it so romantically. It’s amazing. [laughter] I think what Paul’s saying is incredible because we ended up having two girls, two boys, they were the same ages, they all went to school together. It became kind of like a family thing. The company never felt like a family business, but there was definitely a sense of community.
We were very proud to have an office open on E 11th Street between A and 1st back in 1999. It was a complete scary neighborhood, and we were like, “This is where we live. We love it. We’re doing it.” Our clients were a little freaked out at first, and then as soon as they got into our office, or past the front door, they were like, “This is awesome. I feel energized. I feel like I’m part of something.”
I think we really stuck to who we were, and that’s carried us all the way through. Then we ended up in various spaces on the same block. We couldn’t really expand the space. At one point we had an apartment, we had a storefront, we had a studio, all literally on the same block. We called it our little village. That’s how we grew.
We started with some big clients that I’d inherited from my previous employer, Unilever – that then turned into Mars that then turned into other companies – just literally following people around. So we started really having what I would call big clients right from the get-go, and then over time actually had to work to try to get smaller clients – which is the opposite of maybe the journey a lot of other agencies take. They start with the smallest startups and then make their way up. We started literally with the big corporations and had to make an effort to go and acquire startups or mid-size companies that are actually really important to work with also, because they keep you nimble, they keep you fresh, they keep you entrepreneurial, and you have a higher chance of getting stuff out the door and published and all of those things. But it’s been definitely a very organic journey for us.
PAUL: Yeah. And it’s not being afraid to evolve, I think. It’s interesting because even after 21 years, we’ll stop and do a brand refresh or want to choose our narrative or whatever it is, and we go back to those original core tenets, those values. Maybe the language around them changes, but the essence of those things, what we believe in, is still really true to who we are – this idea of being original, this idea of evolving and problem-solving and going with the times, this idea of having an optimistic outlook, because you have to in order to keep in business and keep going. The idea of community, the idea of taking care of people, nurturing people. Those things were baked in from the start. They weren’t things that we made up. They’re just true to who we are as people.
I think that’s something, if any of your audience are new business owners as well, really doubling down on what you believe in and your values and being brave and sticking to them. When you start off, you’re a bit insecure. You think you need to be something else than you actually are. We had that, right, Catherine? We said, “Oh, we need to be like this agency,” and in the end it took a couple of years to be like, “No, people are buying ClarkMcDowall. They’re not buying the other agency.” Then it was like, “Oh, we are who we are.” You embrace it more and you really go with it. That quirky little storefront we used to have or whatever it might be, it becomes part of you, and then that’s what you build upon.
ROB: It’s really a key point. Maybe since you’ve made it through 21 years and probably continue to actually refine your authenticity – sometimes you think about building up layers; it seems like it’s almost the opposite sometimes. It’s peeling away the layers of what people made you think you were supposed to be and finding who you can authentically be. How have you figured some of those moments out? Because it’s really, really hard when you think about the expectations that people have upon you when you say, “This is us, this is what we do. We’re in the market.”
CATHERINE: There’s something about knowing your values. I think it was helpful that Paul and I met as people and shared values, so it’s easy for us to return to, if you like, as opposed to maybe people meeting through a business lens. We just genuinely wanted to do work together and respected each other’s ways of thinking. So there’s a human side.
I will say the tension comes when you want to change. For example, when 2020 hit, we were really quick to say – I think it was like April or something, a month or two after lockdown – “You know what? Just go hybrid and start building it. Whatever that means, we’ll define as we go, but let’s commit to that.” So we’ve changed in the last year and a half probably more ways of working than we’ve ever changed. Basically moving everything to Google, using different systems, different ways of working, having maybe 25% of the company remote.
But somehow, I feel like we’re even truer to ourselves in our values. We’ve really doubled down on the way that we treat people, the way that we integrate into our community, some of the pro bono stuff that we’re doing. So there’s this weird thing that the more you innovate, in a way, the easier it is to be true to yourself. You have to change a lot in order to really notice that anchor that you have.
ROB: Have you hired in a particular secondary location, or has it really been anywhere, everywhere, or maybe just North American time zones? What’s the range?
CATHERINE: We’re in North American time zones. We have had some team members go abroad for a month or so, and that’s fine, as long as it doesn’t exceed let’s say the 5- or 6-hour time range. But in general, it’s across the U.S. We have some people on the West Coast, which is great because we have some business over there as well. But there are some other people in places where we don’t have clients.
What we’re noticing, though, is there’s a fair amount of movement. Everybody’s like, “Do I want to move?”, or they move and then they miss New York and they come back. I think what’s been nice for people is that they’ve felt that they had the freedom to go and explore and not feel like, “I have to not move because we’re going to have to go in the office next month” or something. We’ve allowed people to also discover what works best for them, and I think it’s going to take a while to settle, because we’re still in this very unexpected, volatile time.
The more we allow people to try to find their own rhythm and their own environment, the more we’re able to retain them and get the best out of them. That’s our attitude.
ROB: It’s been an exciting opportunity. To your overall point, I think it can almost help when you’re not trying to choose “Who’s the best person we can find that wants to commute into the East Village?”, and instead you say, “Who’s the best person that aligns to our values and needs who wants to work remotely?” It’s a different question, and I think the numbers are bigger. The candidate pool is bigger. In our experience, at least, you can hire faster in a lot of cases.
CATHERINE: Absolutely. We’ve also experimented with different hiring models, getting people on short-term contracts so that they’re more willing to say, “I’m usually freelance, but I’m going to try to have this full-time experience for a period of time, but I’m not fully committed,” or people working part-time. I don’t know that we’ve cracked the code yet, but we’re very much in an open mindset around different ways to engage people, and that’s been super successful for us. We’ve been able to attract people and retain people that maybe in the past it would’ve been like, they’re not local, they don’t want to work on these hours, and we might’ve passed them by. And actually, they’ve contributed tremendously to the business.
PAUL: It’s like constantly learning. Same with the space as well, like Catherine said. We gave up our lease. The timing worked out. We’ve got other pals who are big agencies who are locked into leases and they’re like, “Gosh, what do I do with this now?” I guess we were in a fortunate position of being able to give that up, which means that we can experiment and we can learn and beta test.
We keep saying we could never imagine – if you were to create an office from the get-go, there’s no way you would put people in desks side by side, 9:00 to 6:00. You just wouldn’t build it that way. So we’re thinking about if and when we have the space – don’t even want to call it an office, but what would that space be? What’s its role, what’s its function? How do we design around people? How do we design around the team? How do we design around people’s lives? Because it’s not just about work. It’s not a transaction. I think work can often become, or has been in the past, a transactional relationship. We want to make it much more integrated and thoughtful in that sense.
So that’s the sort of experimentation. Do we have the answers? No, not at all. The same way Catherine said we don’t have the answers on the hiring. But we’re super open. We’re not afraid of testing things, and we’re not trying to be rigid because “That’s the way it was.” It’s, “What could it be?” And then we’ll try to figure that out.
ROB: It’s fascinating that you were able after 20 years to hold the office lease even somewhat loosely. But I’m sure maybe because you’ve moved around so much, it’s been possible to recognize that there will always be someone who will let you sign a lease when you show up with a signature in hand. But this moment is unique in what you can learn from it.
We talked a little bit about some other lessons along the way around peeling those layers back, but Catherine and Paul, what are some other key lessons you’d say you’ve learned along the way that if you were rewinding 21 years, you’d tell yourself to consider doing differently on this journey?
CATHERINE: Maybe I won’t answer fully the doing things differently, but one thing that has been a big thing is how much brands have changed and how much our clients’ needs have changed. For a long time – I would say for at least 10-15 years – I remember we used to do some work for a client, a big corporation, and you’d be educating them on this innovation process. They’d never done it before. Then six months later, you work with somebody else in the same company and they also don’t know anything. The years would go by. I’m like, when are they going to figure out that they keep learning the same stuff?
And suddenly, all of a sudden, I would say maybe five to six years ago, we started to see a shift where a lot of our clients became very sophisticated. They in-housed a lot more things, and all this stuff that we tended to have to educate them on, they know. What it means is you really have to make sure that you’re adding value on top of what is basic 101 for everybody now. So the level of sophistication has really increased in the industry – which is great, actually.
Different agencies are going to bring different things. For us, it’s really about joining the dots. I think having a company that’s owned both by somebody that comes from a creative background as well as someone who’s coming from a business and strategy background has meant that we’ve created this culture where one doesn’t trump the other. We don’t have a design-led culture where strategists are post-rationalizing, or the opposite. That confluence of thinking, of different minds, is really, really rich.
We find that harder to replicate in-house for clients just because they’re not built that way. They’re coming from a business perspective. So we’re able to maybe crack things, join dots between things in ways that really add value, and we understand that process really well. But every agency is going to need to be finding how they add value over and above clients being much more educated.
So if you ask me what we would do differently, I don’t know if I have an answer to that other than just keep staying ahead and making sure that we’re always attuned to what our clients really need and where the gaps are for them.
PAUL: Yeah. I think about doing differently, maybe things to avoid is avoid limitations. Don’t feel as though one has to behave and operate within a box. You can define that box yourself. I think there’s more – well, not just you’re able to do it; there’s more need to do it, to really redefine what those parameters are. I think that is super important, whether you want to call it evolution or whatever it might be. And not just talking about services. That’s a part of it, but how you do business is really important as well.
And then going back to the transactional nature of business – and we see it with other agencies. I know great agencies. I’m not going to name anybody. They do fantastic work. But what we hear is they’re still in a transaction with those folks. They have slots, they have people, they do the job, they go, they quit, they stay, whatever it is. They do great work.
We believe that’s really shifting and it’s really putting the human being first. You need to craft a different kind of relationship with the folks that work for you and work with you, and putting those at the center, and then how do we build around those needs and how do we support those needs? Because if they’re doing well and they’re feeling fulfilled and they’re feeling really good and energized, then your work product, what you do, your clients and your experience, is better as well. I think that’s how we think about our business tool.
ROB: It’s healthy. Definitely, as you get the team in there and aligned, it really lightens the load as well as they become more capable. You don’t have to always fill every hat that you’ve been wearing since the year 2000 or 1999.
CATHERINE: Yes, that’s definitely – and that’s probably been our biggest challenge, getting to a team that is really empowered and that works well together. I look back over the years; we’ve had incredible talent, but it takes a lot of time and effort to get to a place where you can look at your leadership team and the rest of your talent pool and go, “Whoa, what an amazing bunch of people, and they work really well together.”
Actually, we have an all-female leadership team at the moment, which is amazing, and they’re really empowered. We have a Head of Client Services, a Head of Creative, a Head of Strategy, a Head of Operations, and a Head of Growth, and they have incredible relationships with each other. A number of those people have been with us a long time and some of them are newer.
I think what’s been really amazing is exactly what you just said, finding ourselves not having to wear absolutely every hat every day. I think when you do that for too long, it’s hard to have big ideas when you’re running around basically taking care of millions of different things. As an agency owner, allowing a team to grow under you that can really take some of the responsibility and ownership is huge.
I think Paul and I spent a good 10 years running around like headless chickens. [laughter] Suddenly we hit a wall and it’s like, “We have to have a reorg,” all these kinds of things that we had to do 10 years ago. But we’ve really managed to build this incredible team under us, which enables us to do things like this and reflect and think about where we want to take the business.
PAUL: It’s an old adage, but hiring people that are really good at what they do and in certain things are better at you. There are certain disciplines where I’m happy to hand that over because you’re really good at that thing, and you’re going to make us better and up our game.
Advice to anyone starting a new business is don’t be afraid of that. As business owners, your ego – you say, “Oh my God, I’ve got to be the best at absolutely every single little thing.” You can’t. Nobody’s that good. Nobody can do that. A lot of it is just trust and support and letting those people do what they do, and letting them shine as best they can.
Like Catherine said, we have an awesome leadership team as well, a bunch of very intelligent, motivated, lovely human beings that I think have really helped us think about our business and move our business forward about the way we do things. Right, Catherine? And brought ideas to the table that we said, “Wow, we never thought of that” or “That really helps,” or building on ideas that we have and going with it. We call it “yes, and-ing.”
That really energizes you, and it pushes us all forward. It’s exciting when that happens. You get off one of those calls, those sessions, like “We just did something really good. I feel as though we’ve made steps forward here. I feel really good about this.” Those are great moments.
ROB: Gosh, all sorts of lessons in there. I’m grateful to have you both on the podcast here. Paul, Catherine, when folks want to get in touch with you and when they want to connect with the firm, ClarkMcDowall, where should they go to find you?
PAUL: If you go to our website, clarkmcdowall.com – that’s “McDowall” with an “A,” not an “E” – you’ll have contact details there if you want to get in touch, for talent. And then there’s also LinkedIn as well. We’re happy to connect with people.
ROB: That’s excellent. Paul McDowall, Catherine Clark, congratulations on what you’ve accomplished together, at the meeting of the minds known as ClarkMcDowall. Thank you for sharing your journey, and I wish you all the best moving forward with this new hybrid adventure as well.
CATHERINE: Thank you for having us. It was a great conversation. We also appreciate the forum that you have for other agency owners and talents to hear about agencies and get a little bit of an insight into the underbelly of these different companies. Really appreciate that focus on the industry.
PAUL: Totally agree. Thank you so much.
ROB: That’s wonderful. We all need each other. Thank you, and be well.
CATHERINE: Take care.
PAUL: Awesome. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye.
CATHERINE: Bye.
ROB: Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Ken Magma Marshall is Chief Growth Officer and Managing Partner at RevenueZen, an agency focused on helping high-growth-oriented B2B, SaaS, and professional service brands generate more demand and leads through SEO, content, and LinkedIn . . . to get real leads that actually convert.
Ken started his agency four-and-a-half years ago. His first milestone was developing a successful, process that worked and that he could pass onto another person with his SOPS and get the same results. Instead of waiting for clients to request particular services like keyword research or gap analysis, Ken could tell a client, “In the first 90 days, we’re going to do these two things that will lead to X outcome based on the research and analytics from my previous clients.”
The second one, he says, came about when the repeatable system evolved to the point where he no longer had to tweak the system himself to continue to get targeted outcomes.
About six months ago, Ken’s agency reached its third milestone, when it was aqui-hired by RevenueZen. RevenueZen, with a traditional focus on lead gen, appointment setting, and LinkedIn, got Ken’s agency’s assets, his knowledge of inbound technology, his presence on the executive team, and his agency’s book of business. Complementary strengths have proved win-win.
ReveueZen’s clients are typically established professional, mid-market service companies that have good revenues . . . but may or may not be profitable. All but three B2C “outliers” are B2B technology companies, with 60-70% in SaaS (software as a service). Most of these companies have marketing teams, but are not problem- or solution-aware with respect to RevenueZen’s methodologies, don’t know what kind of solution they need, or don’t know the right provider.
What do they know? They want results.
Ken says it is imperative for the agency to qualify its potential clients through the discovery process – if clients don’t understand customer lifetime values /average lead values, they are likely to have unrealistic expectations of the value of conversion or question whether they will get a positive return on spend.
Ken will be moderating a HubSpot’s Inbound2021 session, “Long Live Forms, All Hail Chatbots: The Epic Debate of Booking Demos.” In answer any participants’ subjective blanket assertions, such as a statement that “Chatbots are the future,” Ken will be asking such probing questions as: “For whom are chatbots correct?” What other marketing stack does the company use?” “How will the company measure effectiveness?” The objective is to dig to a deeper level . . . to determine which use cases are appropriate, who they’re appropriate for, at what level of business maturity, etc. This year’s online HubSpot Inbound conference is scheduled for October 12-14.
Ken is intrigued by some of the newer technologies:
- Lead-qualifying software that captures online prospects’ form data, qualifies leads programmatically in real time, filters their information to match rep data, and immediately either notifies the appropriate sales rep or establishes a live video chat.
- Conversion.AI software that generates scripts based on user inputs and expectations “learned” over time.
Alex Boyd (RevenueZen founder and CEO) and Kenneth David Warren Marshall II (a.k.a. Ken Magma Marshall), can be reached on LinkedIn or on the agency’s website at: revenuezen.com.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and it is that time of year once again. It is almost time for the Inbound Conference. Much like last year, it will be virtual, but what that means is this is the time of the year where this podcast gets a little bit more salesy, but in a good way. It’s just a different flavor of the agency services world that we like to cover.
I am joined today by Ken Magma Marshall, CGO and Managing Partner at RevenueZen based in Portland, Oregon, though he himself has newly moved to Brooklyn. Welcome to the podcast, Ken.
KEN: Thanks for having me, Rob. Really excited to dive on it.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about RevenueZen and the agency’s superpowers, what you’re known for, where you succeed well for clients?
KEN: There’s the 10,000-foot view elevator pitch, which is that we aim to help high-growth-oriented B2B, SaaS, and professional service brands to generate more demand and leads through SEO, content, and LinkedIn. Or in layman’s terms, we help our clients get real leads that actually convert.
Really, the company itself is the story of RevenueZen before Ken and then my agency. I actually started an agency four and a half years ago, and about six months ago, RevenueZen acquired it. So now, whereas they were focused on lead gen, appointment setting, LinkedIn only, I brought the inbound methodology with me. So now we’ve got a hybrid and best of both worlds.
ROB: Is that maybe also where some of the SEO flavor came in? I would say it’s a little bit atypical for HubSpot agencies in the whole ecosystem, lead gen agencies, to know SEO as well as you’re articulating.
KEN: That’s exactly right, and that’s why we utilize the terms “demand gen” and “lead gen” very intentionally, because with SEO agencies you get the whole “These are our deliverables and our clicks and our keyword increases.” We’re former salespeople. Three of our executives out of four were cold calling back in the day, so we understand how to map that search intent into pipeline, how things are going to go from each perspective that actually leads to those people converting, not just being users and clicks and searches. So full funnel knowledge helps inform the strategy.
ROB: I’m going to pull on a thread that you mentioned in there. You mentioned being acquired. What does it look like to be acquired, and how does that happen?
KEN: That’s a fun conversation. If I were a startup in Palo Alto and I was a kid in college, that might look like somebody buying me for a certain undisclosed amount of money. But for me, it was more about joining a team that was a little bit established. My run rate at my old company I think was around 600,000 ARR.
When RevenueZen acquired me, it was basically acqui-hire situation – they get all of my assets, my knowledge, me on the executive team, and all of my book of business. But the strength of it and really the allure for me, or I wouldn’t have done it, is that they understood these lead gen methodologies and channels and had these systems that we didn’t that strongly complement the inbound engine that I taught myself and learned how to build over the years. It was really that complementary partnership with a slightly mature agency where I could really hone in those growth focuses and new innovation initiatives. Because I’m a mad scientist at the end of the day, Rob. That’s what I love to do. [laughs]
ROB: Not to project too much of this onto you in particular, but in general, there’s a certain amount of confidence and ego that flows into starting a business, starting an agency, and then layer on top of that the degree of confidence and resilience required coming from a sales background. How do you navigate that into – there is a mutual admission of need and benefit. You have to get past the outer defenses to even have the conversation of “Hey, maybe we should get together,” and number two, “How does that look so we can all feel like we have the right seat at the table when we’re together?”
KEN: Absolutely. My ego, to use an analogy, went into the boxing ring and did not come out on top for the first few fights. I had to sit down with my wife, my friends, family members, and we really chewed on it. I even chewed on it with the CEO of the company. Now I’m the CGO. We lived in the same apartment building.
What it came down to was really just that I understood that he has a finance/sales – he worked at a revenue-based software company, very high growth. He has a ground level understanding of what it takes to scale, whereas, like I mentioned, my strength is in customer success and product development. I’m really gangster when it comes to those two things.
So I had to look at it and say, he knew that if he could just bolt on these assets that have taken me six years to create, and I knew that with his ability to understand scale and the other two executives taking on those things that I don’t do well – I hate this word because it’s overused, but we could create some real synergy and grow a lot more quickly. It just came down to that: being able to do what I love and a little bit more stability.
ROB: Especially early on, we all want a little bit more stability. Maybe not too much, but definitely more than that early entrepreneurial journey.
KEN: Exactly.
ROB: Paint a picture, Ken, of what a typical customer looks like, a typical client for RevenueZen. Is it B2B? What’s the mix and focus there, and maybe the size as well?
KEN: At this point it’s all B2B except for three companies. Upwork is one of our clients; Nalgene is one of our clients. But they’re the weird B2C outlier as far as consumer goods go, Upwork being this monster that it is. But most of them, 60-70% are B2B SaaS companies. These are technology companies. They have Series A, usually, investment. They’ve got a marketing team, but the marketing team are not problem- or solution-aware with our methodologies. They just know that they need to turn those levers because their investors or the CEO or whoever is talking to the, VP of Demand Gen or Marketing, and they just want results. They have money to do it, but they typically don’t have the knowledge of what kind of solution they need or the right provider.
So we can attach ourselves on as the Chief of Digital or an ad hoc CMO and guide them not only in knowledge-gathering, but lay the strategy out and then literally bolt on our team to execute it for them. Really, it’s those kind of companies who are more mid-market. They’re already established professional service companies, but as far as the SaaS companies, they have a go-to-market somewhat defined; they understand product-market fit. They might not be profitable, but they have good revenues. They really just need somebody to come in, tell them what to do, and have the army to do it for them.
ROB: Do they typically have an understanding – you said product-market fit, but they might have a general understanding of customer lifetime value so they can measure you that way?
KEN: Yes. Actually, when I’m qualifying them, and same with our CEO, we actually still do all of the sales. At my old company I sold every deal, and now it’s just us two closing every deal. But when we ask them about CLV or even their average lead values if they have lead storing and they understand the value of a lead, that’s actually done in the discovery process to qualify them as well. Because if they don’t understand those values, they’ll have unrealistic expectations when we start getting those conversions as to how much they’re worth or if it’s even going to return on their spend with us. Yeah, that’s pretty imperative.
ROB: I would imagine once you have provided a lead, that’s an MQL (marketing qualified lead). Then there’s that sales qualifying that happens after that. Is that typically on the client side? Is there an element of going further down the funnel that you get involved in? Where does that boundary start to happen?
KEN: Yeah, we do lean more heavily on inbound these days. I would say it’s about a 70/30 split as well. But the furthest we’ll get is when we are doing let’s say an inbound/outbound hybrid LinkedIn content marketing and outbound service – happy for you to go on the website and check out if you guys want to – the furthest we’ll get is setting those appointments with them and then letting them take over. It’s part MQL or SQL depending on how they define it, but it’s appointment setting as far as how far we go.
ROB: Which still can be, with the proper – it sounds like potentially a real blessing for a sales rep. You’re hanging out and stuff shows up on your calendar, and it’s people who seem interested in buying your software. That’s a good way to wake up in the morning.
KEN: Right. That’s why we love inbound. Not that outbound doesn’t have its place, and in fact, for a lot of startups it does in the beginning. There’s urgency. But that’s why we love it, because these people are coming to you saying, “You’ve built my trust, you’ve educated me, I’ve compared solutions and then learned about your solution, all on your site. All you need to do is not give me a reason to put my credit card down.”
ROB: Very interesting. You mentioned a little bit about the merger, but if we go a little bit further back, what led you to start your own business in the first place? And you got it pretty far along. That level of bookings is more than just typically one person in their closet. What led you to get started on the journey?
KEN: Not that amazing, but I’m pretty proud of it. For me, I think I’m the cliché entrepreneur without any background in it. Nobody in my family, none of my friends. But I was that kid with the lawnmower, I had lemonade stands. I used to take my neighbors’ trash and put it on my parents’ lawn and sell it at a yard sale. I always knew I was interested in making money and seeing what I could do, but I didn’t really have the background, or I would say some of the mentorship, to know that’s what it was called and how to start a company.
I went to school thinking that I would be a salesperson. I was personable, I understood psychology to a certain degree. Right around my junior year, I believe, I asked a counselor, “What should I be doing? I don’t really like this sales thing” when I saw my first sales job that I could get. She’s like, “You seem like one of those kids who should go check out that digital marketing thing.”
That really was the spark, when I started to understand if I can reverse-engineer this thing called an algorithm, nobody knows what that is. I asked a bunch of people, I asked business owners – that’s actually how I got my first client – and they had no clue. So that was my first lightbulb moment: I could start a business doing this. However, I’ve always been geared towards being an entrepreneur, and I always knew I would. That’s why I quit my last agency after only being there for about two years total between both of them.
ROB: As you got into the starting and progressing the business journey, were there any key inflection points? Obviously, the merger itself is a key point of validation. But before that day, there had to have been some key inflection points in the business, some points where it really seemed to be materially different than just rubbing two sticks together, making some phone calls and getting some clients. What were some of those moments in the growth of the business that were memorable?
KEN: Obviously, I still have the first dollar I ever made. Still have that first check. That’s the big one. That’s the pure validation of “Somebody’s willing to pay me money for this thing.”
But apart from that, I think the first milestone that sticks out was going from freelancer to having a repeatable process that worked and involving another human being. That was the first big thing for me. I was on Upwork – like I said, they’re now our client, so it went full circle. But I remember doing these projects, and I’m like, instead of people telling me what they want me to do, like keyword research or a gap analysis, I’ll just say “In the first 90 days, we’re going to do these two things that will lead to X outcome based on the research and analytics from my previous clients.” So I had this system that was starting to form. I could give it to another person with my SOPs and then they could do it, so it’s now an actual business.
That was the first one that was really exciting. The second one, I would say, is when I evolved from doing the work. I had downloaded this repeatable system to a point where I didn’t have to actually implement the changes or the recommendations myself for us to still get those desirable outcomes. That required a coach, who was not cheap [laughs], and a lot of hours and mistakes. But we finally got it dialed. Other than the merger, that was one of the most exciting. And then your first six-figure year is always exciting too, as far as validation.
ROB: I think people often underestimate the value of what they can do in terms of documenting a process, having people execute on it. The good part is you mostly don’t have to think about it. I think the risk after that, however, is that that process gets stale. How do you go about ensuring that a process you’ve understood and documented can then be also maintained as the landscape changes over 3, 6, 12 months, etc.?
KEN: I think I’m going to answer that in two parts. When I was still general managing the other company, I am so obsessed with strategy; I’m a technician, I’m a strategist by trade. I’m not a banker, I’m not a programmer. So it was always easy for me to have that layer of QA and innovation just because I was reading this stuff every day. I remember – shout out to Rand – after one Moz Local, going to a wine bar and having a bottle of wine and getting to chop it up.
But I always found that very easy because I loved that stuff and was interested in it. But now that I’m with this bigger organization and there’s four executives, our COO might say, “Here’s how we can squeeze out this operational efficiency.” The CEO is like, “Here’s how we hedge against risk.” I’m sitting here – and I think that’s why it’s such a blessing to be in my position – as the Chief Growth Officer, all I think about all day long is how we can ink out that efficiency for the team, make our client have less friction but also stay on top of effectiveness and industry trends.
So for me, the answer is simple. It’s my job, and that hasn’t changed at three companies. [laughs]
ROB: That’s a critical job, for sure. I would be remiss not to mention the reason this is an Inbound episode is because you are, in fact, moderating a session for Inbound. The session you’re moderating is “Long Live Forms, All Hail Chatbots: The Epic Debate of Booking Demos.” Inbound is in October this year. I think it’s usually Labor Day week, if I’m not mistaken, but things change in a pandemic. Tell us about that session, what you think you’re going to talk about, and especially how you’re thinking about moderating that session.
KEN: I’ll talk about the moderation aspect, because it speaks to who I am as a person and my temperament. Whenever folks get into very sensational language or subjective language, I like to systematically remove that and dive into the concrete, the nuance of what they’re talking about and why it’s effective.
For instance, if somebody says “All hail chatbots, chatbots are the future,” I’m not going to give them a response. My first instinct is to give them a question of, for whom are chatbots correct? And what other marketing stack do they use? And how are they going to measure their effectiveness? That’s how I’m planning on moderating things, by having these specific questions to get to the bottom of what use cases are each appropriate, who they’re appropriate for, at what level of business maturity, etc. I want to make both people frustrated to get the most out of them. [laughs] I haven’t talked to them about that, but now they’ve heard. That’s my style of moderation. That’s how I talk and that’s how I do business.
As far as forms versus chatbots, I go back to when I talk to clients who might come in for inbound, and we convince them they need to do an outbound hybrid on LinkedIn. Or they come in for only appointment setting and they want 10 SDRs tomorrow. I’m like, “You’re so niche, and there’s this clear keyword opportunity that you can own these terms and have a better ROI. Why are you hung up on that?”
There’s no right or wrong answer. I’ve actually used chatbots effectively, and I think forms and demos are perfectly appropriate, especially for a self-serve model. So chatbots have their place, forms have their place, but let’s dive into the nuances of it to parse that out. That’s my philosophy.
ROB: There’s a certain attention to that at any sort of conference. I know HubSpot goes to pretty good lengths to make Inbound not all about them, but it is to an extent still about them, and they will hop up there and talk about what they’re doing, and they’ll certainly talk about it in terms of their agencies, their clients, and the customers they’re looking to acquire. They are very visionary in terms of looking outwards, but inevitably, they’re also going to unveil some new toys, some new shiny objects, and it will be easy for that to be the topic of the next year, the chatbots – you name it, really.
KEN: Yep.
ROB: What are you hearing from the ecosystem? Is there anything, whether it’s on the agenda at Inbound or bubbling up through the product roadmap, and even outside of HubSpot in the broader lead gen space, what do you see coming that’s important? Certainly that isn’t a shiny object, because the shiny objects are in service of an objective, as you highlight.
KEN: While we’re on this topic of qualifying leads and once something’s in the pipeline, helping sales ops with their objectives and making their lives easier and helping them be more effective – and shout out to Chili Piper. I’m actually very intrigued by these softwares that are, once somebody fills out a form, qualifying them programmatically, and then based on that response, immediately notifying the correct rep. I’ve even seen softwares that will allow somebody to live video chat right after they’ve gotten qualified on the form.
Those kinds of technologies that remove friction – and again, chatbots can do this, forms can do this; you can integrate both with these other softwares that I’m describing like Chili Piper – those are the things that I’m interested in. Sales ops is, I think – you see these crazy valued companies. I think that’s the future of this stuff. Taking the friction from that person who’s a user that might be a lead, quickly and programmatically qualifying them, and then diverting them to the correct part of your sales process or person or folks on your sales team and reducing that friction.
I think that’s where a lot of opportunities get lost. It’s the classic somebody taking 72 hours to follow up with a lead that’s inbound. Why? And the same thing as sending the templated email. That’s also played out. People don’t want that. They need a hybrid of both. That’s what I’m excited about and what I’m hearing and seeing.
ROB: That’s really, really interesting. You may know their product a lot, you may know it a little, but when I speak of shiny objects, one of those shiny objects out in the world is AI and machine learning, but it also seems like this area where Chili Piper is playing could perhaps be a legitimate application. Are they looking at the history of the rep, the history of accounts, the history of places where they’ve been effective? Is that part of the routing of how they’re getting the right reps to the right leads?
KEN: Yeah, the cool thing is that they plug directly into the CRM. HubSpot, let’s say you have a rep assigned to certain accounts based on – native to HubSpot, within HubSpot, let’s say if the person comes in and they typed in “SEO” for their focus, or it includes in the form XYZ terms, then they can automatically say, “This person is qualified as a mid-market opportunity who has X, Y, and Z criteria. Give them to the rep based on our different filters that we’ve created within the CRM.”
And then pushing it to the email address of times that are open for that rep in an automated fashion. We’re talking about logging into something, back and forth emails, a form for somebody that might not be qualified – all these components are broken down into very seamless automation. That is what I think the uniqueness of their platform is. Those kinds of automations. There’s lots of platforms that do one-off of each of those thing, but it’s the fact that it’s seamless and it directly integrates with the CRM. That’s where I think the benefit is.
ROB: It’s almost a way to see how the things that they’ve announced over time, the tools that get rolled out over time, how it’s accretive and how it starts to come together. Something like scheduling has been in some CRMs for a while. I recently logged into a CRM of one of our clients, and I was in there because they emailed me. I looked it up and they have our number of employees and our revenue. I’m like, man, I don’t think I’ve seen that in someone else’s CRM before. How’d they get that? Because we’re a vendor. They’re not going to go in and enter that data on us. That was entered for them.
KEN: Exactly.
ROB: You combine that with – you have some rules engines, you have some AI. It all comes together in a pretty meaningful way.
KEN: I was going to say, that’s so spot on. It’s that accumulative knowledge put together in a way that’s seamless that’s the benefit. As you mentioned, calendar scheduling tools, integrations with CRMs, those have been around for a while. Even certain routing has been around for a while around automation of sending certain things out based on criteria.
But the strength is really in the nuances of those experiences, like when somebody fills out a form, prequalifying them based on their responses in real time. How many different form softwares haven’t taken advantage of that very simple opportunity that saves the sales folks so much time? Me and Alex, we’re still selling. Every 30-minute call that we do is a pretty big part of our day as executives. So if we can, without even thinking about it, take care of that, have them go through and get that messaging out that they need within a really short period of time, we dramatically increase the chance that that lead will close without lifting a finger.
ROB: It’s really interesting. It’s really meaningful. I think something that’s also underestimated – in a lot of our processes that we document out, we put a lot of emphasis on humanizing the language of templates. I don’t know if anybody’s doing some good work around that. That is the hardest thing to do, but I daresay it might be one of the most important things to do: to write templates that don’t sound like templates.
KEN: Yep.
ROB: I need tools for that, I think.
KEN: We have lots of SOPs that we’ve attempted to do, and thank goodness that every software, even Gmail, allows you to do templates that you can drag and drop and place. But I’ve also been toying around with Conversion.AI to write these scripts based on inputs that we give it, but over time it obviously learns what we’re expecting.
That has been a bit of a game-changer in terms of templates as far as email follow-ups and responses with prospects. Or even in our SEO work, making sure that we can do optimizations at scale without having to burn out the strategists or charge these companies an ungodly amount of money. I am very fascinated by continuing to tweak and make automation work for us, and machine learning but without losing that component of human that all of us still look for.
ROB: Super sensible. Ken, when we zoom back a little bit, across your founding journey, across your merging in with RevenueZen, what are some lessons you have learned on that journey that you might go back in time and tell yourself, if you had a chance to do them differently?
KEN: What a question. Something I chew on regularly. I think the first would be that – Alex, our current CEO, my good buddy, has hammered home a lot that you can create a line of best fit, of effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity. I was so focused on the effectiveness, being 99.9% effective, that I forgot about that aspect of “I’m only ever going to be able to help X amount of people, and I actually can’t help them that well because I’m personally burnt out from doing too much work.”
I think that’s a trap that creatives and agencies often get into, which is that we’re so heads down on the custom, we forget about the scale and making it efficient enough to come down at a price point that’s affordable to a broader market. So that’s thing #1. Again, took a coach and a lot of money and a few years to learn that.
The second thing I would say is when I go on a discovery call and I set the tone with the prospect, I tell them, “This is to make sure we’re a good fit.” Salespeople have been saying that for years. Used car salesmen say that. But we’ve taken that in as a value of the company. I am so quick to disqualify in our CRM, in the pre-opportunity stage. That just saves headache for the strategists, it increases the lifetime value of our clients with us, and it’s just better for our reputation. Good fits, good case studies. So that's the second thing: disqualifying them.
I would say the third thing is the benefit of really good partners who complement your skillsets. As a solopreneur in the beginning, I think I had to learn a lot of hard lessons myself and chew on a lot of hard things without the aid of somebody. Whether it’s a mentor or a co-founder or a really good book, just being insatiable about learning and getting help from others, external help, is invaluable. You literally cannot calculate the time and headache that it’ll save you.
ROB: Disqualifying almost seems like a subset of an SOP. What I mean by that is if you have to look at every lead that comes in and you have to think about all of their constraints and you have to say, “This person’s in a closet by themselves and they haven’t built a product yet, and they have $1,000 a month that they want to spend on inbound; what can we do for them?”, you’ll kind of lose your mind trying to fit yourself to that opportunity, versus understanding when to say no, and maybe even sometimes “Here’s someone else that would be a good fit for you to work with” and focusing on the things you do know how to solve. It keeps you from overthinking and getting paralyzed by choice, really.
KEN: Ain’t that the truth. Preach. Part of that, not only will we say this business/person is not a good fit, but what could we give them or how could we use the network effect to create value and have them go give a referral? So we do have templates of like “You’re not a good fit, but here’s some standard resources and here’s a good one of our vendors as far as our partner program that we partner with.” That’s exactly right. A good ICP defined, having that defined will save you a ton of headache and make your marketing better.
ROB: As we round the corner, Ken, I can’t help but highlight – you’ve mentioned a couple of times working with a coach and paying some real money for it. I know what that’s like. How did you go about finding a coach that worked well for you, and to an extent justifying the cost?
KEN: I’ll start with justifying the cost. For me, I audit my time, and I audited my time in terms of how much dollars it was likely to bring in based on the activities. I started to hit this ceiling. Like, “There are all these operational inefficiencies that are holding me back, and I don’t actually know how to solve them. The problem of why this is a bad thing, I have no clue. I guess I could learn about this or go get an MBA, but I’d rather just expedite that by paying somebody.” The ROI for me I knew would come because I knew I had a good system. I trusted in my “product” back then.
But as far as knowing who was the right person, I always tell people to look for somebody who’s done it multiple times but isn’t so far ahead of you that they can no longer relate. I wouldn’t want Jeff Bezos as a coach, even though he’s clearly taken over the world. So this guy was a former founder three times over, but currently just wanted to give back. I mean, he charged money, but really it wasn’t that much compared to the market and his expertise. I did a little bit of research. I got a beer with him.
Those two components – he’s done it before, I can sit down and have a conversation, and he’s not too far ahead of me in my industry in the service business to be checked out and just in it for the money. I think if you look at it from that perspective, it’s often worth it. That’s what I would say.
ROB: That’s a great point also. Price is significant, but it’s not always an indicator of quality. When I was interviewing coaches, I talked to – might be a wonderful guy, but he was a coach in a box. He literally had a box with a coaching methodology, and I think he was doing a career change. He was actually more expensive than the guy I ended up working with, who coaches execs of SalesLoft kind of legitimacy. SalesLoft probably pays him a lot more in total. But the credibility did not always correlate with price, is my point there.
KEN: Hundred percent.
ROB: Ken, when people want to catch up with you, connect with you and with RevenueZen, other than online for Inbound in October, where should they go to find you?
KEN: You can check out either my or Alex’s LinkedIn. Alex Boyd and Kenneth David Warren Marshall II, a.k.a. Ken Magma Marshall, on LinkedIn. RevenueZen, we’re building a new website, so if you go to revenuezen.com any time in the next quarter, we’ll have a lot of goodies in our Resource Center. That’s always a great place to start.
I’ll say it now and I’ll say it until the day we sell this thing or we keep doing it off into the future: I am always geeked to jump on a call with somebody who isn’t our ICP to have a strategy conversation. It’s not a sales pitch. It’s me in real time, fixing stuff on your site and your pipeline and your methodology. I could do this just with my brain because I’ve been doing it for a while. So it’s always good to get in touch, regardless of if you think you have the money or need SEO. I’ll give you something to walk away with every time.
ROB: That sounds like a YouTube channel. You let Ken give you help for free and you just agree it’s going to be on YouTube in real time.
KEN: I used to do that. That’s how I used to prospect. That’s how I got my first few clients. I would do a real-time, off the top of the dome analysis of their site and fix three to four things. I’d give it to the developers, not even the marketing contact, and the developers would be like, “You increased our page speed by like 60%. How did you do that? Aren’t you an SEO provider?” I’m like, “Exactly.” [laughs]
ROB: Excellent. Thank you, Ken. Hopefully we can meet up in the skin at Inbound some year when it’s back in person. I wish you and the RevenueZen team all the best. Thank you for coming on and sharing.
KEN: I would love that, Rob, and you’re welcome to come to Brooklyn any time for a beer. Cheers.
ROB: Brooklyn’s awesome. Cheers.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Josy Amann is Co-founder at Media Matters Worldwide, an analytics-driven, brand-power-focused omnichannel media buying, and planning agency serving B2B and B2C clientele. In 2005, Josy and her co-founder left a large agency where they had been providing media buying and planning to start Media Matters – with no money and a two-pronged plan – to get their own clients and to freelance with other agencies. Their first client was a “gift” from their prior agency. Josy says referrals sustained the agency for the first ten years. In 2019, MMWW hired a leadership team to help scale the business, to be able to serve larger clients and to meet the variety of technological demands. Completely remote from day one, MMWW tripled its employees from 20 to 60 in two years – during Covid!
Omnichannel marketing encompasses both traditional and digital advertising. Traditional advertising includes linear (scheduled broadcast) TV and radio, outdoor displays, direct mail, and print. Digital advertising may involve:
- Programmatic purchasing (using automated technology to buy advertising space)
- OTT (over-the-top) delivery (customized, precisely targeted content on online streaming channels, CTV [cable TV], digital radio), or
- The utilization of banners, videos, and social media.
In this interview, Josy explains that digital outdoors has increased in importance because this adspace is:
- More available than in the past,
- More trackable, and
- Can be purchased in dayparts as is done on TV . . . increasing efficiency and reducing costs by buying the time and location that reaches your target (commuting?) audience.
Josy says buying advertising to promote brand power affects strategies, the types of media purchased, “and even sometimes the audiences.” Josie finds the need to adapt to constant technological change is both a challenge . . . and exciting . . . and notes, in particular some current issues that will affect her industry.
Internally, the MMWW media team leads the overall strategy of the business and provides thought leadership and communications planning by:
- Consulting with clients to define target audiences
- Researching where the audience lives and how they consume media
- Determining what the client can afford and the most efficient way to use the client’s budget
- Establishing a strategic messaging framework that seamlessly aligns audiences with the messages, types of media used through the consumer journey, KPIs, and client goals
- Traditional media (which requires relationships with channel representatives nationwide) and
- Programmatic and social media (which requires experience on all the different platforms).
- Purchasing a client’s strategic mix of:
- Utilizing analytics and attribution reporting to ensure the interrelationships between the various media channels are supportive.
Josy can be reached on LinkedIn or on her agency’s website at: https://mediamattersww.com/.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Josy Amann, Co-founder at Media Matters Worldwide, headquartered in San Francisco, California. Welcome to the podcast Josy.
JOSY: Hi, Rob. Thank you so much for having me.
ROB: It’s wonderful to have you here. Why don’t you kick us off by telling us about Media Matters Worldwide and what your superpowers are as a firm?
JOSY: Superpowers, I love that question. I always tell my kids, “Focus on your superpower, focus on your superpower!” [laughs] Media Matters Worldwide, we are a media buying and planning agency. We’ve been in business since 2005. We are buying omnichannel media across all different types of businesses. Half our clients are B2B, half are B2C. But we play in the media buying and planning space and the analytics. It’s kind of the dorky side of the business.
ROB: [laughs] Perhaps dorky, but very important to get right and also probably quite easy to do wrong. When you say omnichannel, right now in 2021, what channels are encompassed in “omnichannel”? What should people be thinking of?
JOSY: The landscape is shifting very quickly, but omnichannel traditionally means traditional – how you think about linear TV and radio in your car and outdoor and direct mail and print – and then everything digital under the sun. It can be programmatic media, it can be OTT or CTV or digital radio or banners or video or social media, all of that. Omnichannel is truly everywhere where you can possibly consume media, we are buying it.
ROB: I know even out of home is getting very digital these days. Is that increasingly in the mix, or is it static but different formats? How does that fit into the puzzle?
JOSY: Digital outdoors is much more in the mix because it’s (1) more available, (2) more trackable, and (3) you can serve up ads on digital the way you do on TV. So you can buy dayparts. If you just want to buy when people are going to work and coming home, you can buy that. It’s little ways, a little bit more affordable and more targetable.
ROB: That absolutely makes sense. You look at these digital billboards, and sometimes I wonder – I’ll see a local restaurant advertising that they’re hiring, and I don’t even know how the economics of that work, but I suspect maybe there’s a branding component to it as well beyond just the hiring. But it’s a little crazy to think about a little seafood restaurant running a billboard ad to hire somebody for their kitchen.
JOSY: Yeah. You asked about superpower, and brand performance I would say is our superpower. Thinking about, exactly to your point, a restaurant trying to hire someone, that’s really lower funnel type of advertising. That’s very pointed. It’s not trying to say “We’re the best restaurant in the world.” We’re trying to get someone in the door to get hired. That’s brand performance.
Brand is a whole different world of types of media you buy, the strategies behind it, even, sometimes, the audiences. So linking those two and providing analytics, providing the thought leadership and the strategy behind that – that’s our superpower.
ROB: Someone’s got to be a superpower. That sounds overwhelming. That sounds like a lot of different goals, a lot of different channels, a lot of different objectives to pull that together. How do you structure your team to be able to manage that range of channels, of thinking, of objectives, even just picking from the menu of options for a given campaign?
JOSY: That’s a good question because that has evolved so much over the last 16 years that we’ve been in business. Structure of the teams is that you have to have your media team as the overarching strategic group.
Part of that media planning team is comms planning. They are setting up that framework. They’re going to clients and saying, “Who do you think your audience is? Let’s think about it in a media buying landscape. That might look a little bit differently because we have different targeting abilities and things like that. Let’s set up that messaging framework that aligns the audience with the types of media, with the messaging, so that everything is aligned through the consumer journey.” We’re thinking about how these people are consuming media. We’re thinking about what messaging aligns with them, and that could look very different for the audience. So that comms planning team is really in charge of heading up that overall strategy.
The media department as well leads overall strategy of the business; however, underneath that you have to have people that have traditional buying experience, that have the relationships with all of the different stations in the country. You have to have programmatic media buyers and social buyers that know all of the different platforms. So it’s a really, really specialized skillset of people we had to hire along the way. Programmatic media is new to the scene – what, seven years ago now?
To keep a media buying agency in-house and really have all the chops in-house takes very specialized people to hire. But you have to have that overarching media team that brings it all together.
ROB: Talk about the relationship side a little bit, because that sounds almost counterintuitive. We’re all used to just firing up our web browser, we go over to Facebook, we push some buttons, we have a campaign that lets us do the same thing. And then you’re talking about TV, you’re talking about radio – I’m sure you’re even talking in some cases about print or detail newspaper – and needing a relationship to get that work done. What does the structure of that industry and those buys look like? It’s a different animal, for sure.
JOSY: Yeah. There’s a lot of nuances to media planning, and a lot of it has to come down to budget and audience. Doing the research, getting back to that at the beginning part comes planning. To think about where your audience is living and how they’re consuming media is Step #1. Step 2 is budget. What can you afford? You can’t run nationally TV if you don’t have budget north of $80 million. So you really have to start thinking about the most efficient way to spend your money, but also aligning with the audience’s media consumption habits. That’s the relationship that’s really the most efficient. Then when you’re talking about KPIs and goals and all of that, all of that has to align as well.
ROB: That budget part I think brings us to an interesting intersection. It sounds like a lot of moving parts. It sounds like I have to have a big budget to play in this game. Maybe it helps, just for context, for us to understand and think through a particular client or two and what an overall campaign looks like for an example client. What kind of messages do you have, where, to facilitate that overall buyer journey?
JOSY: A typical client could look like – I guess it would be pretty different for the budget ranges. We have some clients spending $10 million a year; we have some clients spending $100 million. That looks pretty different.
The $100 million might have a lot of TV that’s happening, linear TV. A lot of connected TV. A lot of video is great across all different audiences. Then you might have a layer of programmatic media, especially doing a lot of private marketplace deals or retargeting, and then 30% of the budget could be social, 20% could be search. It’s broken up to support each other.
There’s a relationship between media that supports each other, and that comes through when you’re doing analytics and attribution reporting, looking at the relationship. If you run a CTV campaign, you’d want to see your organic search and your paid search lift. Seeing that relationship between your paid channels is really, really important as well.
ROB: That definitely helps us understand how you can keep eyes on it, because there’s a lot at stake, and what a tremendous responsibility as well to be managing that sort of budget for a client.
What is interesting to pull on here – you mentioned the relationships on that traditional media side. You’ve been doing this thing for a while. Take us back a little bit in time. What led you to start Media Matters in the first place, and what does that origin story look like?
JOSY: It’s always a funny one to me a little bit because I’d just moved to San Francisco from New York. I had no idea what I was going to do. I didn’t even have an interview yet. A girlfriend of mine from college called me and she said, “I have this agency that you should go interview for. The boss is great.” I said, “Okay, let me go do that.”
Went to go interview at Lowe & Partners, big holding company, and I had no idea what I was even doing there. I thought I was getting a job in creative. I had no idea what media was. I got the job. Not sure how, but I got the job. [laughs] That was my entrance into media. From there, I worked at the big holding companies where it’s a very different life. It’s great in your twenties. You work an unbelievable amount of hours, and I learned a lot, fast.
But then I realized, “I’m 29.” I’d gotten married a few years earlier. I wanted to have children, and I couldn’t see how that was going to be possible in the big agencies. I had met my business partner; we’d worked together at an agency for four years. We had a really, really good balance of our backgrounds and also a balance of the way we think about the world. We both talked about it for years. “How are we going to start our own agency? What is that going to look like and how are we going to build an agency that we want to work at and can work at, having families and children and all of that?” That was really the biggest impetus.
ROB: Wow. What did those first few years look like? I think all statutes of limitations are over on this. Did you have some clients that were ready to follow you away from the holding company world? How did you scrap together those clients that made it make sense to make a run in those early years?
JOSY: We had a two-pronged approach. One was to get our own clients and the other was to become a kind of a super-duo of other agencies. We worked for a really large agency and did all of their media buying and planning. That was a great way to get involved and get billings up, because we came into the business with nothing. We didn’t have any money. We didn’t raise any money. We didn’t have any money from family. [laughs] We just had the shirts on our backs and that was it.
So that was one approach, and the other one was getting our own clients. Our boss that we had worked together with at that agency, Roger Becker, ended up giving us one of his clients that I had worked on. He said, “You guys are starting your own agency. Have this client. You guys would be a great fit for them.” That was really kind. Really, it was the kindness of him getting us our first client and then the freelancing option.
ROB: That’s wonderful, and I think that is one of the stories of, overall, the marketing and agency industry. There’s not a lot of room, I don’t think, for sharp elbows. It all comes back around. All the people flow through the industry and you end up being tag teams more than enemies.
One of those transitions that a lot of agencies struggle with from the early stage is getting from – a lot of agencies will come up and do those sub-deals for other people. A lot of agencies will get an occasional referral. But at some point you have to sharpen the tools and go out and hunt the elephants yourself. What did the development of that capability look like for you all?
JOSY: Definitely developed through the years. I’ll tell you, referrals have been our best friend. Very, very lucky to have wonderful people surround us, our entire experience.
Really early on, I guess I wouldn’t say it was that hard, but it was a little bit hard being a woman in business, starting your own business, back then. We were very careful early on to have our website, and we didn’t really want too many pictures of us on the website. We wanted the website to look a little masculine. Our logo looked masculine at the time. So we hid that until the last minute, till we could show off and actually go to a meeting and show them we know what we’re talking about. That was tricky at the beginning.
But then once we got clients and built those relationships and they saw, I think most of all, that we were authentic and we were not salespeople and we really cared about their business and cared about media, that took hold. So I think the referral side of the new business development is what sustained us for the first 10 years.
But after then, I think you get to a certain size and you have a lot of people on payroll. We have over 60 people. Even five years ago, we were at 20 people. You have to start thinking a little bit differently. If you want the larger clients, business development starts to look different.
ROB: Is that something you’re still largely handling? It can be one of those challenges you see sometimes; for a services organization to scale that business development away from the founders can be challenging. How have you handled either scaling yourself or getting someone else up to speed?
JOSY: We made a decision early 2019 to start hiring a leadership team. It was a huge investment in general and a big leap of faith that this type of model could work, because we were so used to being the Josy and Taji show. We did that. We hired a leadership team, and they are phenomenal. It was 100% the right thing to do, and they are responsible for the new business development.
We still show up for the pitches. We still are I guess the face of the agency, but they are the substance and what really leads all the new business development now. It’s just been a wonderful transition to have more of a team in place for that.
ROB: Some things are easy to hand off. If someone else wants to build a deck or something like that, have a nice day. Some parts of that transition, though, are a little bit harder to get your hands off. What are the pieces that were the last to leave your hands and your calendar, if you will?
JOSY: Hmm. I think it’s managing the decks, managing the flow of conversation. We were so used to being so closely tied to that; that was really hard to let go of, that control. But once we did, everything became better. [laughs] Better than it was before. I was just so thankful.
ROB: It sounds like a relief. It sounds like an opportunity. Goodness, even what you’re saying about going from 20 to 60 people requires a leadership team, but it’s even a little bit messy no matter who you’ve got on the train. How do you think about scaling the organization, scaling culture? How have you been able to triple the company without breaking everything?
JOSY: Yeah, and that tripling has happened in two years. [laughs] It’s been a wild, wild ride. I think the honest truth is always be looking at your architecture. We went from a place where our agency – and I know, Rob, you have a background in analytics – we would have a client that would have one or two analytics people on their account. They would basically do everything. They’d pull all the data, they’d help with the data viz, they’d do all of that.
Now we need three people to do that job, one, because the technical side of the business has gotten a lot more fragmented and hard to manage, but two, working on bigger clients, you have to have a different architecture to support them.
Again, I go back to our leadership team really taking a close look at their departments and how they’re set up. And we’ve had to reengineer that, sometimes in six months’ time because that growth was so fast. Having that strong structure is what I think makes you build for scale. And being flexible in that structure, because it might have to change pretty quickly.
ROB: Absolutely. That makes sense. It sounds like it’s still probably a whole lot to think about, but at least you’re able to think about that structure and not as much about the decks anymore.
JOSY: Yeah, that’s true. [laughs]
ROB: Josy, as you reflect back on the journey so far, what are some key lessons that you have learned in building Media Matters that you might tell yourself to do a little bit differently if you were starting over?
JOSY: One of the key pillars of our agency – I don’t know if it’s really a lesson, but I think it’s a lesson to other business owners and agencies – is that true transparency and honesty will keep your business alive. Over the last 16 years, there’s been a lot of ups and downs in the market, in our company, in our lives, and to weather those storms, the honesty, the transparency, but also what we were just talking about with the team structure, the flexibility and being able to adapt and evolve – and we’ve learned that in the past two years with COVID – to scale a business during COVID… [laughs] It’s like a double whammy.
I don’t know if I would’ve done anything differently, but that would be my biggest advice for people starting out. Remain flexible. Don’t be tied too closely to things, and be honest and transparent with yourself, your clients, and your employees.
ROB: Absolutely. You didn’t really harp on it too much, but the mix of media that you have been handling has changed remarkably over the life of the company. If you’re starting something early to mid-2000s and up until now, you didn’t have social media. How people even used pay-per-click was remarkably different. The quality of what you can buy and display and how you buy and display has changed dramatically. If all you were doing was calling up TV stations and newspapers today, you’d be – somewhere else, is what I’ll say. You wouldn’t have 60 people.
JOSY: Out of business. [laughs] It’s remarkable. Our industry is so cool. The second you think you have a grasp on it, the second you’re wrong. It’s about learning and moving quickly. It’s exciting.
ROB: For sure. Something I think you bring to the table that’s also interesting is a lot of us are kind of new to this working from home and building a company remote, but you have been distributed for a little while. What are some of the key tools and key cadences and ceremonies that you have found to be essential to building the kind of company you want to build, but not to meet everyone in an office?
JOSY: It was built out of stubbornness. My business partner, Taji, and I live 40 minutes from each other. I was not going to commute to Marin; she was not going to commute to the city. So it was really out of stubbornness that we were going to figure out how to work from home, and that’s how it started.
Then everyone we hired after that point wanted to work from home, loved to work from home, loved the culture of working from home. So for us to grow organically since 2005 till now as 100% remote always, and we’re hiring people across the country, we’ve always had the true culture of loving working remote. I think that’s different because a lot of people are trying to get used to working remote, or companies are struggling with hybrid. You have the “us versus them” mentality, the people in the office and the people at home and how they’re going to solve for that.
When you have a culture that’s always been remote, it’s a whole different world. I think the advent of video and Slack and all the collaboration tools have really helped that throughout the years, but also, especially pre-COVID, getting together in person and really spending the time with each other, whether it be a new business presentation or a client QBR, whatever it is. Getting together in person whenever we can, it lasts forever. It really does.
ROB: What does getting together look like for you? Has it been visiting people in different places? Has it been getting everybody together in one place? How does that work?
JOSY: It’s hard because a lot of our employees have families, so getting everyone together in the same place – we’d have to plan it years in advance. [laughs] I would love to do something like that. But it usually looks like either regional hub parties – we might have one in New York, we might have one in LA, Seattle, wherever it is – and then people will drive in for those hub parties, or it looks like “Hey, we have a client QBR or new business. Please fly in” and we all get together. It’s a little bit more fragmented instead of having a whole company thing, but it works.
ROB: It’s interesting to hear what different people are doing. Maybe the good news of where we all are is that we’re going to hear a few more people with ideas, best practices, trying things and all of that. I’ll certainly say it’s been strange adding people to our team that I’ve never met. But it keeps on happening, and you’re probably used to it.
JOSY: Yeah, we are. It is really strange, especially when you meet people in person for the first time after working with them for years and not seeing them, and then they’re taller than you thought or whatever. [laughs]
ROB: I think that popped up in my LinkedIn feed the other day, an article on “You look taller on Zoom” or something like that. We know what that’s like.
Josy, when you’re thinking about what’s next for Media Matters Worldwide and the areas of marketing that you touch, what’s coming up that you’re excited about?
JOSY: I think the whole media world is changing yet again. Deprecation of cookies, how we’re thinking about personalization with our audiences, and just even the media types in general – a new social platform will be invented in the next year or so. So really thinking about how to make authentic – and I always go back to transparency and honesty, but it’s true for brands, too – how to be truly authentic with your customers.
I think that is the biggest struggle for brands, and they’re missing the mark, some of them. But some of them are doing an amazing job, and that’s because they’re getting to the root and doing the research about their audiences and really figuring out what makes them different and what makes them excited and thrive.
To me, figuring that piece of the puzzle out, having the research tools, having the analytics that pull it all together, and the artificial intelligence that’s involved in advertising now – that to me is all really exciting.
ROB: There’s a lot going on there. How do you keep those data people and data tools together? It’s a lot to wrangle. It’s a lot to bring into one place. What’s in your toolkit?
JOSY: It is. We have an amazing analytics department, and that’s our toolkit: their knowledge, their understanding of the market. But also obviously all the technology that goes along with that. And it looks different for every client because a lot of clients come to you with their technology that you have to integrate with. There’s a lot to unpack with new client relationships and how to integrate their technology into yours, and really how to make things as seamless as possible. That’s the tricky part.
ROB: That’s right. When you’re talking about the budgets, I’m sure there’s many a data lake that you have to feed into, many an internal analytics team that you’re accountable to as well.
JOSY: Exactly right. I love that you know “data lakes.” [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] The data lake where you put the data and nothing ever comes out, maybe.
JOSY: Very murky.
ROB: Makes absolute sense. I think it’s very relevant what you said there, Josy, about that transparency. In services, we have technology, we have tools, we have things that we’re buying, but a lot of times what they’re buying is people. I congratulate you also for being able to scale having what I would perhaps strangely say is buyable people. You have people on your team that clients can buy into that are not just the founders. That’s a real challenge to get past.
JOSY: Yeah, it’s something that happens organically, and only with the vision of hindsight can you say “That was a great idea.” [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] Josy, when people want to connect with you and connect with Media Matters, where should they go to find you?
JOSY: They can find me on LinkedIn, or go to mediamattersww.com.
ROB: WW. Worldwide, right?
JOSY: Worldwide.
ROB: Excellent. Josy, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It’s good to meet you in this remote way, like you talk to your team all the time. Someday we’ll all get out of our houses again. We’ll figure it out.
JOSY: Yeah, I’d love to meet you. Thank you so much for having me today.
ROB: Sounds good. Thank you so much, Josy. Bye.
JOSY: Have a great day. Bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Julie Koepsell came into Horizontal Digital as President of the North America division in December 2020 at a time when, due to Covid, the company was “fully remote.” Horizontal Digital is a 17-year-old global, “experience forward” consultancy that puts people at the center if its efforts by creating deeper, end-to-end-connected, seamless, relevant, and personal customer relationships that boost client ROI. Because Horizontal is a boutique consultancy, clients get a “very high touch experience.”
Julie says it is important for leaders to “listen.” One of the first things she did after joining the company was to connect one-on-one with all 50 division employees. Due to continued growth, the division has hired an additional 150 employees over the first part of this year. Globally, the consultancy has 500 employees.
Many of Horizontal Digital’s B2B clients sell through multiple distribution channels and dealer networks. The desired push-pull challenge is complex – companies want their dealers to recommend their products . . . but they also want customers to ask for the company’s products. Horizontal Digital strives to:
- Create promotional programs that build meaningful relationships with end customers so those customers will go to dealers and ask for a company’s products.
- Build a martech stack so the customer journey experience is cohesive from sales and marketing through digital POS, web and experience portals, and customer service. The goal is to understand what customers want, anticipate their needs, and grow relationships “at a life level.”
- Provide client education and get client employees to understand the need for internal changes related to demand generation, customer experience, or “internal digital transformation” initiatives . . . and help them understand how those changes will be implemented.
She says, if a company’s message is properly set up across all channels, companies can simultaneously control expenses and grow revenue . . . customer lifetime value is increased, customers will advocate for the company, and there will be an increased opportunity to cross-sell and upsell.
Julie is passionate about providing women with the opportunity to advance, especially in technology. She believes it is important, as the Horizontal Digital grows, to build the infrastructure and internal scaling to support that growth, to “create an amazing employee experience,” and to make sure clients’ experiences with Horizontal Digital surpass their expectations.
Julie can be found on her consultancy’s website at: https://www.horizontaldigital.com/ .
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Julie Koepsell, President – North America at Horizontal Digital based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Welcome to the podcast, Julie.
JULIE: Thank you, Rob. I’m so happy to be here.
ROB: It’s awesome to have you here. Why don’t you tell us about Horizontal Digital and the journey the firm is on, where you specialize, and what we should know about it?
JULIE: I’d love to. Horizontal Digital is an experience-forward consultancy. We operate as a boutique consultancy, which really means that our clients get a very high touch experience from us. And we do it with global teams so we can actually deliver at scale, which is pretty unique.
When I say that we’re experience-forward, what that means is that we put people at the center of everything that we do. More specifically for our clients, we help them build deeper relationships with their customers so they get better ROI, and we do that by creating end-to-end connected experiences that are seamless, relevant, and personal.
If you consider that customer journey, we are able to deliver a cohesive experience all the way from sales and marketing through digital POS, web and experience portals, and then customer experience, and we do that so we can better understand what they want, anticipate their needs, and grow the relationship.
ROB: Got it. A lot of the services you’re talking about are things that a lot of people are in the business of, but it seems like what might elevate that to the level of a consultancy is the holistic, the big picture, the customer journey not in the sense – some people think of customer journey like “I’m going to send you different emails depending on where you are in the purchase process.” But it sounds like you’re talking about more at a life level.
JULIE: That’s absolutely right. Through the entire experience that any brand has with its customer.
ROB: If we zoom in to that just a little bit, is there an example of a client, some touchpoints, what my experience might be in a client that Horizontal has been involved in?
JULIE: A lot of things actually come to mind. One of the things is in our conversations – we had a conversation yesterday with a prospective client who is thinking about how they can digitally transform their business. They’re selling through multiple channels; they’ve got distribution channels. They want to make sure that they are building relationships with their end customer so the customers are going to the dealer and asking for them. Through that entire process, they’re going through an internal digital transformation.
So not only are they working to make sure that they are building a martech stack that enables them to deliver the experience that they want to for their customers, but they also have a lot of internal education that they need to do to make the case for it. There’s a lot of misconceptions about what that actually means in terms of whether you’re talking about demand gen or digital transformation or customer experience. So there’s a lot to it in terms of not only how you’re building your technology stack to deliver that experience, but also how you’re going through the change management internally to make sure that everybody understands why you’re doing that.
ROB: I know you said prospective customer, so I don’t want to pull too deep into the identity here, but you said dealer. Is this some sort of vehicle? Is there some kind of picture you can fill in to help us contextualize?
JULIE: Yeah, a lot of B2B clients right now are selling through dealer networks. What they really want is the end consumer to go to the dealer and ask for them. They want that push-pull, where they want the dealer to be recommending them, but they also want the customer to be asking for them. And then ultimately, they want to make sure that the experience the customer has, if they come to their website or through any other experience, is seamless, anticipates their needs, is transparent, and is really meaningful. Because at the end of the day, customer experience is really what lends to long-term loyalty.
One of the things that we talk about a lot around here is that two-thirds of customers actually switch brands not based on prices or features but because of the experience they have. That’s really the holy grail of business today.
ROB: Absolutely. It’s interesting that why you were involved as a consultancy instead of an agency is – I’m going to say something that could be wrong, but if I’m thinking about a car, if I’m thinking about a snowmobile, if I’m thinking about a motorcycle, if I’m thinking about a dealer of just about anything, digital creates the opportunity for an ownership experience. It creates an opportunity for that relationship to start when I announce a new product. It’s much more long-term than “Did I show up at a dealer? Did I ask for this thing or not?” My journey may start with my previous ownership experience with that product. How does that tie in to digital?
JULIE: That’s exactly right. And if you can set it up properly across all channels, you can actually control your expenses and grow your revenue at the same time because you’re increasing that customer lifetime value. Not only that, but they’re also advocating for you on your behalf, and it creates – I think where you were going is the opportunity to continue to cross-sell and upsell.
ROB: Right, because you’re talking about digital platforms, you’re talking about customer experience, you’re talking about social listening to an extent, probably, social customer support, all of those different lenses. Absolutely makes sense.
Julie, I think something that is perhaps interesting and unique to your story is the difference – a lot of our guests are founding partners, founding CEOs, and you have a unique story of coming into a business that is successful with an opportunity also to continue making it more successful. What is the background of Horizontal and the origin story there, and then also your personal journey into the firm?
JULIE: Horizontal Digital started about 17 years ago. Chris Staley and Sabin Ephrem started the company. I’m going to use a term that you used earlier in our conversation, Rob – it’s been a rocket ship ever since they started. It’s such an inspiring and amazing story about what they’ve built, and it’s a true testament to the way that they have run their business, the vision that they’ve had for it, the way they invest in talent, and the way they understand technology and what our customers want.
Because it’s a relatively tight community, I’ve known about Horizontal Digital for years, and I actually ran into them at a conference at Sitecore Symposium about three years ago. They were sponsoring a panel about women in technology, and I was actually sitting on that panel, and I got the chance to meet them. I’ve always had great respect for what they do. They’ve built an amazing culture here.
So I was excited but a little bit hesitant about a year ago when they first reached out to me. I was happy with what I was doing, but as I started talking to them, their ability to deliver globally at scale and yet have a company that feels like a tightly knit family was really inspiring to me. In addition to that, I’m really passionate about advancing women, and particularly women in technology, and they’re very supportive of that.
What we’re really trying to do here is to create an amazing employee experience. We talk about being an experience-forward consultancy, and experience-forward is really about – I mentioned this a little bit ago – putting people at the center. In addition to how we do that with our clients and their customers, it’s also got a couple other pillars for me.
One of them is making sure that the client experience that our clients have with Horizontal surpasses their expectations. Certainly we expect to deliver on their business needs, but also we want that experience that they have with us to bring a lot of value and, frankly, to have them enjoy the experience along the way.
Then the third pillar is – and I just mentioned this – employee experience. Talent is the most important asset that we have in this business. I believe that if you create an amazing employee experience, they will in turn create an amazing experience for our customers, and then that result is growth. So I joined this company with the aspiration of making Horizontal the best career experience that our employees have.
ROB: It’s a particular challenge. I’ve seen leadership elevated from within, but how did you approach that process of coming in with a requirement to lead, but also with – you said you were familiar with the firm, but there’s a different familiarity that comes when you’re actually on the inside every day. How did you balance the movement into leading with the need to acclimate?
JULIE: That’s such a great question. What I appreciate is all the conversations that Chris, Sabin, and I had in advance about how we were going to do this, approach this. They’ve been unbelievably supportive every step along the way.
But the most important thing to do when you come into a company in a leadership role is to listen. I came in in December, so everything was fully remote, and when it’s fully remote, I will tell you it takes so much longer to build that rapport and trust with people because you have to be so purposeful with every experience you have via whatever video technology you’re using rather than just running into people by the proverbial water cooler.
So I very purposefully did a series of – I think I did more than 50 one-on-one introductions with people. I joined each individual team meeting. We actually hired Gallup to do an employee engagement survey. We went on a listening tour to start to understand what the needs of the team were.
One of the challenges is coming in and listening. You get excited and you want to make change, or you want to advance the ball in whatever way you decide to do that. Finding the balance of moving at a pace that feels like you’re making progress, but not going too fast that you aren’t being thoughtful or purposeful and you aren’t damaging something in the organization – it’s a tough line to walk, I’ll tell you. I actually made a few decisions probably quicker than I should’ve, perhaps should’ve moved a little faster on some things. But it’s kind of one of the things that I love about it: it’s a learning experience every step of the way.
ROB: What I hear in there is a recognition that sometimes there are not shortcuts. There’s no shortcut – having 50 one-on-one conversations, by some people’s reckoning, that doesn’t scale well. That doesn’t look like an org chart. That looks like 50 one-on-one conversations. Are there any other aspects of getting in and rolling up your sleeves and leading that maybe didn’t scale well, but yet were key to getting into the role?
JULIE: That certainly was the big one. One of the other things that I am doing around here is weekly having a session with about five or six people from different teams within the organization, and I purposely do it with five or six people because I want it to be small enough that people feel like they can speak up and yet have enough people that I feel like I’m making some progress and getting a group together.
So we get together once a week, and I call it “bring your favorite beverage.” We get together and we introduce ourselves and we talk about non work-y stuff. And sometimes it turns into work stuff. But what’s been really interesting is since the pandemic started, we’ve hired – gosh, it’s got to be closer to 150 people by now. So not just do I not know a lot of people, but a lot of people don’t know each other.
One of the things I know – and this isn’t specific to Horizontal Digital, but in general – people really miss that sense of community, and people miss the culture. I don’t think that means they want to come into the office every day necessarily, but they want very thoughtful and meaningful and purposeful moments of connection to build and feel the company culture.
So we try to create opportunities to do that. And selfishly, I want to create opportunities where I can get to know people on a personal level because I believe that my job is not to tell people how to do their job, because they’re all quite capable. We hire amazing people. But my job is to support and enable them to do their job, and I can’t do that if people don’t know me and feel like they can trust me and are willing to come talk to me.
ROB: It seems to me that with you coming into the firm and that degree of growth, it almost seems like the company as a whole discovered another capability, another core function, another gear. What do you think is driving that engine so remarkably?
JULIE: Well, there’s a couple things. Companies understanding the importance of building an amazing customer experience and digital transformation is certainly a thing that’s happening beyond our company. That’s an industry-wide movement that’s happening, so that is a big part of our growth.
In addition to that, I have to give the owners a ton of credit because we are independently owned, and their ability to drive the vision for where we’re going and see ahead of where we are today, and their willingness to invest in that, is something that I’ve actually not experienced in over 25 years in this business. I think that’s another thing that sets us apart and truly makes us unique.
And then again, back to the idea of community and relationships. I believe that relationships are at the center of everything, and when you do a great job, like I was talking about – if we create an amazing experience for our clients, then we’re going to grow through that as well. There’s just a lot of things that Horizontal Digital is doing right that also made it really exciting to join, and I joined and I’m just trying to continue to build on the momentum.
One of the things that we talk about a lot around here is not only keeping up with the pace of growth – because there is an all-out war for talent right now, especially in the digital space – and creating an amazing employee experience, but also, we have to make sure that as we are growing, we’re building the infrastructure and scale internally to enable that growth.
ROB: One of those key things you mentioned very close to your heart and your passion – it seems like it’s really hard to create a substitute for having women in very visible and top-level senior roles. That has to echo down through the organization. It has to be authentic. You can’t do it in this demonstrative way. How have you thought about it? You’ve obviously had to structure for growth and refactor the organization probably a few times in the pandemic time. How have you thought about the thoughtful, intentional establishing of women in leadership as well over that time? How do you do it well?
JULIE: That’s a good question. I think the important thing is to meet people where they are. And I am all for advancing women, not at the expense of men or anybody else. I believe that all boats rise with the tide. But I think understanding where people are in their careers and their lives is super important, and then meeting people where they are.
There is no delineation – in my life, anyway, even prior to the pandemic, there was no delineation really between work and life because when you’re passionate about everything that you do, it all kind of melds together and you’ve got to try to figure out ways to make all of it work. I think the pandemic has exacerbated that, and I think it’s been really hard. This is not me; this is clearly very much out there, but it’s particularly difficult for women, and moms in particular, which I am as well.
So understanding that and making room for conversations around that and – this sounds so simple – asking people how they’re doing. Talking to people about their personal lives. Making sure that you are bringing empathy and listening in all those conversations. It seems like things that sound so easy, but they’re also the things that are really easy to forget about in the pace of everyday stuff.
And particularly, again, if you’re not just seeing people in the hall in passing, you get on a call with somebody, you’ve got a half-hour, you’ve got a list of things you’ve got to cover off on, and you want to dig right into that list – when what you really need to be doing is making sure that you’re taking time to check in with people on the human side and see how they’re doing. Because everybody’s at a different point in their journey.
ROB: Right. That really is one of those superpower advantages. When people know that you care, when they know that on some level you know the names of the people that are important in life – I will fully confess that I have places where I write this stuff down. There’s a lot of things I don’t write down, but I write down people’s names and what’s important to them because I don’t want to leave – I still care. I care enough to write it down. I care enough to ask about it.
JULIE: Yep.
ROB: It makes a difference in where people work and where they stay working.
JULIE: I agree with that. I think it was Maya Angelou that said people will forget what you said, but they’ll remember how you made them feel.
ROB: Yes.
JULIE: I think the fact that you make an effort to remember somebody’s name and something personal about them makes people feel seen. And that stuff is really important and can’t be underestimated.
ROB: As you mentioned, that war for talent is real. It’s really excellent, I think, that in Minneapolis, you’ve been able to sustain and grow as an independent business. I’m sure the owners – how many people do you have on board now? I think LinkedIn said over 200?
JULIE: Yeah, globally it’s nearly 500.
ROB: You don’t get to that level without a few people coming in and offering to write you a nice check. So there is some intentionality in staying that way, and that also feels very authentically Minneapolis. A lot of the Midwest, I think, has lost some of their anchor tenets. It’s a city that seems to have some businesses that they’re proud of, and it seems like you get to be a part of that.
JULIE: Yeah, and I’ve done the other side of it, too. I have done the being part of a holding company. At this point in my career, when I made a decision to come here, it was very purposeful because the owners not only fully own the business, but they’re very involved in the business, and they care very deeply about it. Like I was saying, they’re willing to invest in the future and have vision for where we’re going to keep going. That’s what drives the inspiration, I think, for a lot of the team in terms of the longevity of careers here.
ROB: Wonderful. Julie, this is not even your first time, as you mentioned, running a shop. What are some things you have learned along the journey that you would maybe go back and tell yourself to do a little bit differently if you could reset?
JULIE: I think about that question a lot because I have twin girls, and it’s really important to me that they have opportunities that I didn’t necessarily have. One of the things that I am already talking to them about that I wish I had done more of is just speaking up. Over the course of time I have learned how to ask for things when I need them, and I wish I had started doing that sooner – whether that’s asking for the next role or asking for mentorship, asking for help – not easy to do, really important – admitting if you might feel like you’re in over your head, and having the courage to call out bad behavior when you see it, making sure that you’re listening to your instincts.
All of those things, I feel like I wish I would’ve learned a little bit sooner, and I would encourage people to absolutely do. I’m constantly saying to everybody here, every time I get a chance to address the company, I’m always asking them to please reach out to me. I don’t care what channel it is, whether it’s Slack or you want to text me or email me or call me, whatever it is. But I really want to hear from people because the only way that we’re actually going to make this a truly amazing employee experience is if we understand what’s going on in the minds of our employees. So I think it’s really important to speak up.
ROB: I think that’s super helpful. I think that’s great for your girls. I think at least a lot of us want to work in a workplace where that is the default behavior. There may be some generational baggage there; I don’t think my grandparents wanted that kind of job. But I think about my team, and if someone’s going to say when they’re in over their head, if they’re going to ask for help, if they’re going to ask for where they want to go next and help me participate in their future, it seems like that’s what a lot of us want. And we want more people to want those things so they can get out of the jobs where they can’t have those things.
JULIE: Rob, you may be a lot younger than I am, I don’t know, but I will tell you I was raised “Don’t question authority. You don’t ask questions. You do as you’re told.” So it took me a long time to try to find a balance with that. I think as a society, that is changing, but I think it’s a really important thing to continue to remind people.
ROB: Yeah, and it’s our opportunity to build workplaces that differentiate by being that kind of place. It’s a tremendous opportunity there.
JULIE: Absolutely.
ROB: Julie, as you’re looking forward for the future not only of Horizontal Digital, but also in overall experience for brands and their customers together, what are you excited about, looking into the crystal ball?
JULIE: Broadly, I’m just excited about where technology continues to take us and the opportunity to really, truly create amazing experiences. Not only am I trying to help our clients create amazing customer experiences, but I want to experience that with all of the brands I engage with as well. So I get really excited about the pace technology is moving and how that’s becoming better and better.
As it relates to Horizontal specifically, I’m not even a year in yet, so I’m really excited about the momentum that we continue to have, and again, the way that our founders are willing to invest. But I also hope that in many ways, this year is a building year for me. We set the benchmark on employee experience. We’re hiring some new key talent. We’re continuing to evolve our capabilities. So my hope is that we can continue to take this to the next level in terms of building a vision that the team gets really excited about, continuing to foster and grow the talent, and then building the infrastructure to scale and grow.
Beyond even what we’re doing for our clients, we also want to make sure that we’re doing purpose-driven work that people are getting really excited about as well, so we have an organization called Horizontal Cares where we give back to our communities. I’m excited about all the opportunities that we have to build community with our employees, with our clients, and with the broader community within which we work.
ROB: Horizontal Cares sounds like one of those things that I think any of us would probably wish we had started sooner within a firm. How do you think about allocating resources to that? Is there a rule, is there a budget? And where would you think about starting if you were even quite small?
JULIE: Oh, that’s such a good question. This started prior to me being here, but you get a few people together who want to change the world and anything can happen. To this point, it’s pretty scrappy and entrepreneurial. We do internal fundraising efforts and look to our employees to help us figure out where the need is in our communities.
I will tell you we are looking for how we can take this to the next level in terms of scale, so that is very much on the horizon for us and one of the things that I’m excited to work on.
ROB: One thing I think probably that comes up repeatedly – it happens in every growing firm, and probably especially for you and Horizontal – is thinking about what types of either new capabilities you’re going to say no to versus what you’re going to say yes to, and what opportunities you might have taken on three years ago that don’t fit with the firm anymore. How do you think about the things you say yes to and the things you say no to?
JULIE: Boy, that’s a good question, and it’s an ongoing conversation that we have at the executive level.
ROB: Has to be.
JULIE: Of course, you want to make sure that you are continuing to be relevant to your clients and to your future clients, and at the same time, we also have to be really purposeful and thoughtful about not biting off more than we can chew at any given moment.
When we are making sure that we are hiring as quickly as we can to keep up with the demand that we have – everything’s a balancing act, Rob. It’s a balancing act with where we are adding to our capabilities to make sure that we can not only deliver on the work that we have, but then build the future. So really, it’s an ongoing conversation, but again, that’s one of the things that I get really excited about because the owners here are so well-entrenched in that and willing to place bets where they think it makes sense to place bets.
ROB: It sounds like a wonderful journey to be on, an excellent season to be there, in spite of everything everybody’s been facing over the past little while. We still have some rough waters around us, but it sounds like you’ve been able to help Horizontal to be part of the bright spot in your life, and for some other people as well. Thank you for hopping on and sharing that journey. I do appreciate it.
JULIE: Thank you for having me on. It was really fun talking to you.
ROB: Sounds good, Julie. Be well.
JULIE: Thanks.
ROB: Bye.
JULIE: Bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Ten years ago, Ryan Frederick, became a partner at AWH, a now 26-year-old firm that builds net new software products, solves data problems, and integrates systems across platforms and products (phones, the web, Internet of Things [IoT] devices).
The client mix is split in thirds:
- Funded startups building disruptive products to capitalize on unique opportunities
- Midmarket companies (manufacturers, distributors, or nonprofits/social enterprises) who don’t have much technological knowledge or “horsepower” and a one-time or only sporadic need to build a “digital fix.”
- Enterprise clients that need prototypes and proofs of concept for corporate innovation initiatives (e.g.; leveraging blockchain technologies, integrating machine learning, and utilizing artificial intelligence). These companies have the resources to build the needed system but need guidance on how to approach a problem and what needs to be done. To ensure the best outcomes, AWH consults with clients and establishes advisory boards to iteratively build products that resonate with customers and provide value.
Ryan started out his career as a software developer but migrated to the “business, human, and creative side of things” – because he was interested in utilizing a more complete mix of skills. In this interview, he talks about how developers have been maligned in the past for not caring about the quality of the code they wrote. He admits that a lot of bad software was written when developers were a “background assembly unit” and the practice was to “slide the requirements under the door” and direct developers to build what they were told to build.
Ryan says today’s developers, designers, and QA professionals demand interesting, challenging, impactful work and need to be involved from the beginning – in defining the problem and in the planning, design, and user experience processes. Losing team members mid-project destroys process, teamwork, and collaborative continuity and chokes progress as “replacements” need “ramping up.” AWH’s focus, particularly in the last 5 years, has been on creating an environment where team members feel valued for their work – in order to “get and keep the most talented, capable team” possible.
AWH often works with funded startups that often come up financially short at times where continued development is critical. To address this problem, AWH formalized an internal financing mechanism where AWH lends monies to cover continued development work in exchange for client royalties or equity. Ryan says AWH has done this 20- or 30- times, not so much by choice as by necessity. A few “loans” have “gone south” – but the company, to date, has accrued royalties or client equity of almost $2 million.
Ryan authored The Founder’s Manual, an experiential exposé of things Ryan has seen work . . . and not work . . . in the development world. His second book, Sell Naked, covers his experience over the past 10 years of owning and leading a professional services firm. Ryan says a lot of service firm representatives sell “propaganda, paraphernalia, and crutches” and 999-slide capabilities decks rather than starting with an open, authentic conversation about client needs. He says, “No prospective client cares about how awesome you are until they believe that you understand their problem and that you can . . . help them alleviate the pain of the problem. He also explains the informal proposal email process his company uses to quickly and effectively close contracts.
Ryan can be reached on his company’s website at: AWH.net.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Ryan Frederick, who is a Principal at AWH based in Dublin, Ohio. Welcome to the podcast, Ryan.
RYAN: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
ROB: Wonderful to have you here. If we’re looking up AWH and what you focus on, it says “building great digital products.” But why don’t you give us the big picture of AWH and what that specialty really means when you talk about building a firm around that?
RYAN: Essentially, we do one thing, and that is build net new software products for clients across the spectrum of startups to midmarket to enterprises. Around the building of net new software products, we also do a fair amount of data work, solving data problems, data plumbing to support those products, integration work – because rarely do software products now exist on their own without talking to other products and other systems – and then we do a fair amount of product consulting as part of it, too. We help clients establish customer advisory boards, for example, to be able to work iteratively in building a product to ensure that it resonates with customers and they find value from what’s getting built.
So some wrappers around that core of building software products, but at the core, we build net new software products that run on phones and the web and IoT devices and various places for lots of different purposes and to solve lots of different problems. That’s our day job and how we butter our bread, so to speak.
ROB: Got it. Is there a typical sort of firm, a sort of client that’s looking to engage you? Are we talking about seed stage funded companies, are we talking about enterprise, are we talking about all of the above and then some?
RYAN: Our business is mixed in about thirds. About a third of our clients are funded startups trying to build a net new disruptive product in many cases, where they’re going after a space and a problem or to capitalize on an opportunity that is fairly unique; otherwise they probably wouldn’t be starting a company around it.
About a third is midmarket clients. Those are manufacturing companies, distribution companies, and in some cases nonprofits or social enterprises that are trying to become more digitally capable. Often, they are digital laggers. They don’t have the technology teams, if any technology teams, and they need things like customer portals built and they need design tools built and they need customer apps built, etc. So in the midmarket, it’s really I would say them becoming digitally capable if not exceptional to fuel their growth. If they’re a $50 million company, how are they going to get to be a $100 million company? If they’re a $200 million company, how are they going to get to be a $500 million company? And that answer now is almost always digital and technological in some way. So that's where we typically play in midmarket space.
Then with enterprises, most of our enterprise clients and engagements are around some sort of corporate innovation initiative, trying to figure out how they’re going to leverage blockchain, what they’re going to do with machine learning or artificial intelligence. Then we engage with them to build some prototypes and some concepts, and they’ll then take it and run with it moving forward. We don’t want to, in the enterprise space, do a lot of uninteresting work. We want to be able to stay true to our DNA and our desire to build interesting things, because frankly, that’s how we keep really smart, talented people – because they want to build interesting things. So we tend to shy away from enterprise work that is just “upgrade something that’s been running on a mainframe to something that’s now modern.” We tend to stay away from that sort of stuff and focus more on the corporate innovation stuff inside of enterprises.
ROB: Obviously, with a new company, I can certainly understand how they would look at what they need to do and say, “We don’t know how to build technology. Let’s call up Ryan and his team.” What do you think is the missing ingredient, perhaps – when you get to the mid-stage in an enterprise, I would imagine in a lot of these cases, you’re talking about standing up a team of two, five, ten people to accomplish something that you would certainly imagine could be in the reach of such a company. What do you think it is that keeps them from sometimes even building that capability, or wanting to, when innovation is so important?
RYAN: I think it’s different between the midmarket and enterprise. In the midmarket space, clients will engage with us because they don’t have much technological knowledge or horsepower. They also don’t envision getting a substantial amount of it, either, because if you’re a bolt manufacturer, there is a point where technology needs to serve you and you need to leverage it, but you also then don’t need a team of 10 technologists running around that you’re paying a ton of money to not do anything of consequence on a daily basis.
Most of our midmarket clients build one software product that would be considered a custom software product. They build one of those in the entire history of their company. If you’re a $50 million company and you need to build a customer app for ordering or what have you, it’s probably the first time you’ve ever actually built your own software product, and you probably aren’t going to have to do it again for a very long time because you’re filling a gap that has now become so painful that you have to address it. But you’re also probably not seeking to run around and build a bunch of new software products.
That’s the reason the midmarket clients often don’t have their own teams and don’t have a desire to implement and build out their own teams, because it’s sort of a moment in time for a midmarket client.
ROB: It’s not as much of a sustained need, but it comes in bursts, and they need to know who they can trust to come back to it time after time, even.
RYAN: Yeah, absolutely. But they are moments in time where there’s a problem that has to be addressed, and then once it’s addressed, the pain has subsided for some period of time. Enterprises are a little bit different, and that’s why we mostly focus on innovation work inside of enterprises. Most enterprises have IT, design, product capability, either internally or through staffed augmentation or contracting firms. They have more people and more resources than they know what to do with in most cases, frankly. That’s why we don’t really want to play in that area, because it’s just not that interesting to us.
But we will come in, and enterprises often use us as like a special projects firm, where they’re trying to figure out, “We’ve got this problem; our existing team doesn’t know how to address it. We need help figuring out how we approach this problem. What’s the right technical solution? What’s the right digital solution? What’s going to add that value for the business, and what’s going to align with our customers and our users?”
We do a lot of enterprise work, frankly, where we’re just helping them concept things from a design perspective and a problem statement perspective and to build out customer advisory boards. There’s a lot of cases with enterprise clients where we don’t write one line of code and we have no engineers from our team actually engage with enterprise clients. It’s more about helping them figure out what the right thing to do and the right thing to build is in the right way than it is actually doing a lot of wrenching on the product behind the scenes, if that makes sense.
ROB: For sure. Ryan, it looks to me like you just might’ve celebrated a 10th anniversary for the company.
RYAN: I did, yeah.
ROB: Which is pretty exciting. Congratulations. If we rewind 10 years, how did you end up in the direction that the firm is in now? What led you to start it in the first place?
RYAN: The firm’s actually been around for 26 years, and I joined 10 years ago as a partner. I was coming down off of something else, and I was looking for something to do, frankly. I reached out to my network and said, “Hey, I’m looking for something to do,” and my now-partner Chris said, “Why don’t you just come here?” I said, “Oh, didn’t know that was on the table.” We talked for a few weeks, discussed what that might look like, and then we came together around it.
I think the biggest evolution for us as a firm has been that software and data continue to eat the world, but you have to pick and choose where you want to dig in and where you want to leverage your team’s expertise and experience. For us, we could be doing lots of different things in and around technology and software products, and we’ve said we’re going to focus on building net new products. That’s surfaced well because we really want to make sure that we’re adding value for our clients.
We also want to make sure – and this is becoming increasingly more important – that we’re adding value for our team. Our team could work anywhere besides our firm, because developers and designers and QA professionals, everybody in our team is desirous and a value to work at, I don’t know, 100 million other places. So. for us, we have to be way more intentional about creating an environment that they feel valued in and that they can ply their craft in and that they can do exceptional work on behalf of our clients.
That’s been a significant evolution. The days when you could get a developer or designer and hang on to them forever just by virtue of staying in business and continuing to have a paycheck deposited into their account, those days are gone. If you’re not doing interesting work that they find challenging but also impactful, you’re probably going to have a turnstile of team members. As a services firm, a turnstile of team members is one of the worst things you can have happening and going on because you have no continuity of process, you have no continuity of teamwork and collaboration. Client projects get upended because somebody new has to come in and get ramped up, etc.
So our focus, especially over the last five years, has really been on how we get and keep the most talented, capable team that we can. Everything else is a derivative of that.
ROB: Any one of those sharp developers or designers can go out and get into a bidding war and they can pit Google against Amazon, and it can ring the cash register if that’s their priority. So it certainly has to be something different.
I am a bit curious; if I’m looking at your background a little bit, it looks like you come from, pre- and maybe even with AWH, more of a sales background. Is that fair?
RYAN: Yeah, I started out as a developer and then realized I didn’t want to write code every day. I then migrated over to the business side and then got fortunate and hooked up with a startup fairly early in my career. I was the third person into the company. Learned a lot about business and also how to build software products. It was a software company. We had some success with that. The company ultimately got sold, and then I started another company with the investors that were behind that one. We had that for a short period of time because we ended up getting an offer to buy that, so we sold that one.
I enjoy the technology aspects of things, but for me personally, I enjoy the human side of it and the creative side of it more than the analytical bits and bytes side of it. So I migrated over to the business side because I wanted as much of each side of the brain as I could get on a daily basis because that was the most interesting to me.
ROB: And that early background as a developer helps put everything in perspective. I was certainly wondering – I come from a software development background; I have a pretty good understanding of what it takes to motivate and retain software developers, and what you were expressing resonated with me and showed an empathy for that developer mindset. If you came from purely a sales background, I was going to ask how you came by that understanding, because it is deep, it is resonant with my own experience. Having your feet in the technology early on helps tie it all together. It’s a really fascinating journey.
RYAN: Yeah, absolutely. Developers are often maligned for not caring about what code they write and what the application is and what problem the application is solving, etc. That’s true to some degree, but my experience is that most developers actually do care about what they’re working on and why they’re working on it and what the problem is and what the value of the software is going to be. I think coming from a developer background initially, I have a little bit of empathy for their perspective and their role.
It’s also been the case where in a lot of organizations, developers are treated as the assembly line in the background that “We’re going to slide the requirements under the door, and you just write code against what we tell you to build.” That’s how a lot of bad software products got built. And now we realize, if you’re going to build great, successful products, developers need to be involved from the beginning. They need to have as much context as they can have. They need to be part of the planning process. They need to be part of the design, the user experience process. This is not you figure out what to build and then pass it off to the development for them to build it. We discovered that that really didn’t work, even though that’s what we kind of wanted to have happen.
So development, even as a craft, has evolved too. It’s certainly less cookie cutter, and it’s become valued to the level that it always should’ve been valued and not some smarter people than developers figuring out what would need to get built. Developers are now at the table, working with the other members of a product team to figure out what should get built.
ROB: I’m interested; you mentioned that a significant portion of your business is in early stage. I note that you also invest in companies at times. I think a thing a lot of services firms face when they’re dealing with early stage is they get asked to invest some portion of their fees into their clients’ companies, essentially. As someone who invests and has a services firm serving these companies, how do you think about those tricky conversations? They’re challenging, I think, from a valuing the client well perspective, from what you communicate, how it’s perceived, all that.
RYAN: Absolutely. They’re tricky conversations. My base position is a services firm should never discount services and should never trade services for equity unless there are special circumstances and there’s awareness of the client and what they’re trying to accomplish and there’s good reason to do so.
With that said, we got into a situation – we have formalized our work then and now because I didn’t want to do it haphazardly. To your point, if you’re going to have clients that are early stage companies as part of your client mix, the question around services for discounts, services for equity, services for delayed payment, etc., it’s going to be a real and present thing that you’re not going to be able to avoid.
We got to the point with a client a few years ago – probably five years ago, maybe six now. They were a funded startup, but they were in between funding rounds, and we were working on their product, and still are their outsourced product team. They said, “We’re not going to be able to raise our next round if we don’t continue to work on the product, i.e. if you guys don’t continue working on the product.” So we were at a crossroads.
We said, well, we can either stop working and they can go out and see if they can raise more money with the product where it is. If they can’t, that means the whole thing comes to a screeching halt, so that’s not a really good outcome for anybody. Or we can continue to work and we can essentially finance the work until they raise their next round of funding and then we get paid back. We thought that was the better option, so we actually put a promissory note in place and we financed the work under the framework of this promissory note. It all worked out and it all played out as we hoped that it would.
We’ve now done that probably 20 or 30 times over the last couple of years, where we’ve actually put a financing mechanism in place with some clients. I would rather have not done it, but I’m glad that we formalized it and we didn’t treat it haphazardly, because you’re talking about real money. Services firms are cash flow monsters. You pay your team to show up today, to ply their craft, to do their work, and then you collect from clients at some point in the future. By the very definition of that, every services firm is a bank.
If you then pile on top of that some clients need extended terms and relationships, like we’re talking about, you’d better at least treat that dynamic and those monies and that relationship as formally as you absolutely can so that everybody knows what’s at stake, what’s happening, who’s committed to what, who’s on the hook for what, etc. We now have this little financing arm inside of the firm that we’ve now financed and in other ways taken royalties or actually taken equity in some clients, up to at this point almost $2 million.
I would rather have not done it, frankly. But we didn’t really have a choice with one client, and then over time, we’ve now had a couple dozen clients that have gotten into a similar situation. And knock on wood, most of them have gone well and progressed well and the deals have made sense. We’ve had a couple that have gone south, but from a percentage perspective, it’s mostly gone okay. But it was really out of necessity less than it was out of “Yeah, we’re stoked to do this.”
ROB: Yeah, it’s challenging. It sounds like you’re looking at a way to be a good partner to a company that trusts you to be a good partner in other ways. But that’s a two-way street, and that’s not to be trifled with either.
You’ve been sharing all along some good lessons, but I think it would be remiss not to mention that some of these lessons, you have written down and put into book form. What led you into the path of writing and publishing? Tell us about what you’ve been sharing lately, book-side. I see a 2021 date on one of your books on Amazon, even.
RYAN: Yeah. I was just writing notes and thoughts down, and I got to the point where there was enough of it where it seemed to be the construct for a book. That was the first book, The Founder’s Manual, about providing some experiential exposure to things that I had seen work and not work. I said, “All right, there’s no point in jotting these notes down over time if you’re not going to do something about it.” So I then reached out to a publisher who had worked with somebody that I know, and I said, “Hey, I want to do this book.” They said, “Okay, we’ll do it with you.” The first book is not a super long book. It’s been relatively well-received. My publisher would like me to get better at selling books now than just writing books, so that’s always an interesting conversation with them. [laughs]
The second book was really the same thing. After I finished the first book, I started writing down notes about my experience as part of AWH the last 10 years. This was my first time owning and leading a professional services firm, so I learned a lot over the last 10 years. I saw some things work well that we tried, and I saw some things that were just abject failures that we tried. I’ve gotten to know people that also run and lead other professional services firms, and professional services firms are a tricky beast to make work. There’s virtually no scalability. Your people are your product. You’re selling time. To forecast where the business is going beyond like three months is almost nonexistent.
And most services firms, because of a lot of the things I’ve just mentioned and more, have a really hard time growing and becoming what they want to become. One of the epiphanies that hit me was, it is really easy to start a services firm. All you have to do is say, “I’ve got a craft. I’ve got something that I can help people and companies with,” and you put up a site and boom, you’re “in business,” so to speak. But the challenge is not starting a services firm; the challenge is, how do you grow a services firm? That’s a very different animal than starting one. Super easy to start, very difficult to grow.
ROB: I may have to pick up that. I can get the Kindle version. I have some credits I can use on the Kindle version of Sell Naked, and I might have to go grab this myself. What’s maybe one of the key principles you’d pull out of that book as a teaser for folks who might be thinking about picking it up?
RYAN: There’s a couple that I would say. We titled it Sell Naked for a reason, because that’s one of the chapters in the book, and the publisher felt like that was the lead chapter. The theory there is I see a lot of business development people for services firms, either leaders of or business development representatives at services firms, who sell with lots of propaganda, paraphernalia, and crutches. They’ve got these capabilities decks that are like 999 slides. They have these elaborate portfolios, etc. And in some services firms, I get it. Those make sense.
But I think by and large, for a lot of services firms if not most, those things are just crutches because what those do is force people to focus on the tools and the propaganda and the paraphernalia rather than going in with a prospective client and sitting down and having a very open, authentic, transparent conversation about “What are you trying to accomplish? Are we a fit in any way to help you accomplish that? And if we are, now let’s start peeling back the layers.”
But if you go in with a capabilities deck and propaganda and all this other stuff, you’re delaying getting to the crux of the matter while you pontificate about how awesome you are, and no prospective client cares about how awesome you are until they believe that you understand their problem and that you can share some insights and some value that might help them alleviate the pain of the problem. So I think people get selling services mostly wrong, I guess is the sum of that.
ROB: That sounds very aligned. I can certainly understand especially how a peacocky sales culture and teams of very capable developers and designers – that’s probably more oil and water than most organizations. But I think most people, outside of a very slick sales organization, appreciate that genuineness, that straightforwardness, building the connection and trust, more than building a shiny deck.
RYAN: Yeah. I think the other thing we have figured out and that we do is we also don’t do elaborate proposals. When a potential client says, “Yeah, we’re interested in engaging with you,” then we send them – truly, and in the book I actually put some of the copy that we use, and the format – we send the client a bulleted list of the essential terms of engaging together. I call that estimating informally or proposing informally. The last sentence in that bulleted email is essentially, “If you’re comfortable moving forward, let us know, and we will take this and wrap it in an SOW.”
The reason we do the informal emails to engage is because there’s no point in spending hours and hours and hours on an elaborate proposal when the prospective client is only interested in really two things at that point: how long and how much? If you’ve built enough value and enough credibility to that point, you don’t need an elaborate, flowery proposal reiterating how special of a snowflake you are. Just get to the point and then engage formally by sending them an agreement to actually engage.
Because if a prospective client responds to that informal proposal email saying, “I think we’re good to move forward,” guess what? You just got a verbal that the deal is closed. But if you send a big, elaborate proposal asking people, “What do you think? Are we in alignment?” and all of these things, you’re still trying to build value when that ship already sailed. Does that make sense?
ROB: Oh yeah. They don’t even know what they’re saying yes to in a giant contract. They might float it over to procurement before they say yes to a dang thing in the enterprise context. There’s a lot of hazards that just keeping it human – that makes complete sense to me.
Ryan, when people want to connect with you and AWH, where should they go to find you and see more?
RYAN: AWH.net is the easiest place because they can get to me from there and of course get to the rest of our team and the great work that our team does. That’s probably the best place, and then jump off from there.
ROB: Sounds perfect. Ryan, thank you so much. Congratulations to you and the team and what you’re building together. We will look for more excellent digital products coming from you and the team for your clients down the line.
RYAN: Thanks, man. Appreciate it.
ROB: Be well. Thank you. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
In 2006, Angie and Will Scott, COO and CEO and co-founders, started Search Influence as a technically oriented search, social, and digital marketing agency, supported with tracking and attribution, and demonstrating value across very complex systems. Challenged at the beginning to find people with the needed skills, the agency outsourced its production work and developed an intensive training cycle and “robust” documentation for new hires. Will claims that, to this day, the agency’s internal-facing superpower is training and education.
For the agency’s first six years, SEO required seeding web content with relevant keywords. Will says that today’s content has to be more nuanced . . . that SEO is now “more about meeting the customer where they are in the buyer’s journey.” The agency concentrates on three verticals: midmarket healthcare (driving patient visits to individual practitioners on up to regional medical centers and, on the practice side, generating more leads), higher education, and tourism – market segments where the strategically complex buyer’s journey is characterized by “multiple systems between a customer’s first interaction with the brand and actually closing the sale.”
When the real estate market crashed in 2008, two years after Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans and decimated the region’s small businesses, the national economy took a downturn. New Orleans was still rebuilding. Tourism was booming. Medical and – in particular, elective medical – remained strong. At a time when many companies were failing, Search Influence . . . grew.
Unlike many agencies, Search Influence does not try to “do it all.” Outsourcing work that is not in its areas of concentration (SEO and paid advertising) and bringing on partners to provide services complementary to its quantitative efforts keeps the agency focused and nimble. Client websites are built by a cadre of website development partners. Early on, the agency built a process, an internal editorial team, and platforms to manage external freelancers who produced as much as 10,000 pieces of content monthly for a large direct-to-SMB digital marketing company. That creative management arm is still in place today. Angie questions whether it makes sense to try to develop “side skills” when the agency can so easily partner with “top talent.”
With its practice built around content, the Search Influence developed an internal tool, UpScribed, that morphed into an external-facing platform. Through UpScribed, other marketers (including those who are not Influence clients) get direct access to the Search Influence content team. When Covid “shuttered” a lot of New Orleans’s small businesses, the purposely overstaffed agency went to work for its clients . . . for free. That’s taking a rare, long-range view on things. The same clients they keep afloat today will be tomorrow’s even-more-dedicated customers.
In this interview, Angie, who has an accounting background, talks about maintaining organizational balance. Will identifies a valuable list of free business development networks and ecosystems available to help small enterprises. They can be found on their agency’s website at: searchinfluence.com or on their blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Angie and Will Scott. They are the COO and CEO and co-founders at Search Influence based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Welcome to the podcast, Angie and Will.
ANGIE: Thank you. We’re excited to be here.
WILL: Thanks, Rob.
ROB: It’s a treat to have you here. We don’t always get a little tag team like this, so that is an exciting change of pace. Why don’t you start us off by telling us about Search Influence and what the agency’s superpower is?
WILL: Search Influence, Angie and I started it together more than 15 years ago. We started rather technical. I had come out of a position where I was very focused on SEO, so that’s what we started with. Over the span of time, though, what we have decided our internal-facing superpower is, is training and education. Because we started in 2006, it wasn’t really easy to go out and find folks who had the skills we needed, so we did do a lot of training. And to this day, we remain robust documentation and a training cycle for all new hires.
Externally, we feel like the things that we do really well are still more in the technical realm. Our name is Search Influence, so search is a big part of where we spend our time. But we’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about tracking and attribution and how we actually demonstrate value across very complex systems.
Our top verticals in which we work are healthcare, higher ed, and tourism. And in almost every one of those cases, there are multiple systems between a customer’s first interaction with the brand and actually closing the sale, in whatever way that happens.
ROB: I can certainly think that through. We’re talking about healthcare – what part of healthcare? Obviously, it’s a journey. We’re not going to the ER here. What segment of the healthcare market is representative, would you say?
WILL: Our focus has historically been on the midmarket, so think a handful of practitioners up to say a regional medical center. Very much about driving patient visits, and on the practice side, more leads.
ROB: This is I’m coming to an area, I’m trying to figure out where I should go, or it might have an existing doctor and it’s an evolution over time of where my loyalty is going to go. There’s a journey there. There’s a journey in travel. All of that makes sense.
I can certainly see – you talked about 2006; there was I would say a lot of science around SEO, and it has evolved into art and science, to an extent. How have you thought about evolving your team and the documentation as there has become more of – I would almost say Google and the search engines have moved more towards searcher satisfaction with what they found, which is kind of an art.
WILL: Yeah, in the early days, say 2006 through probably 2012-2013, it was easier to be a little more heavy-handed, to think about content primarily as a vehicle for keywords to correlate to what people were searching for. I think in the time since then, we and any company that tries to practice SEO in a serious way have learned that the content actually has to be more about meeting the customer where they are in the buyer’s journey. And that’s a much more nuanced piece of content than one where you’re trying to have an appropriate keyword density and blah, blah, blah, and highly targeted internal links and that kind of thing.
ROB: Right on. You started in 2006; a few years in, we hit a weird economic spot and the market of search was rotating at that time as well. How did you think through and evolve through that transition to emerge healthy on the other side? Maybe it was always healthy to an extent, but I don’t know. The tourism thing was probably down a little bit if you were in that market at the time.
WILL: New Orleans is interesting on a lot of levels. In 2008, when everybody else was suffering from the real estate market crash, we were booming because it was two years after Katrina. Where everybody else was seeing people drop the keys off at their mortgagor and walk away, we were still in a heavy rebuilding phase.
Also, with the focus on medical, particularly elective medical – that was really a heavy piece for us at that time – there wasn’t much of a downturn. We actually grew through that recession.
ANGIE: Right. Our largest focus, though, at that point was medical. We were – I don’t know, lucky or saw something coming, I don’t know.
WILL: I prefer brilliant. [laughs]
ANGIE: [laughs] We almost felt bad at that time, I remember. It’s like when your baby is sleeping through the night and no one else’s is and you don’t want to say that they are. I think we would talk about if somebody asked, but we just didn’t talk about it because we felt bad. It was like, “We’re growing.”
ROB: And that’s been an echo for this year for a lot of people. This past year, this COVID, 15-16 months now, some people – restaurant industry, they’re just scrapping to get by. A few restaurants figured out how to nail takeout and delivery, and they’re doing better than ever. And then some folks in the digital realm are just doing great, growing. But it’s hard to talk about.
WILL: Totally. Sadly, we are not among them, because we did have a bunch of revenue in tourism and attractions leading into COVID.
ANGIE: But they’re starting to come back as the recovery comes.
WILL: Yeah. And we did this thing where because we were intentionally overstaffed – we didn’t cut nearly as much as we should have if we were trying to meet revenue. So we had staff and we reached out to our customers who were paused because of budget, and we created this thing – our core values spell CHARGE. We marketed it as the “Recharged Fund.” We put our team to work for free for those clients who were effectively shuttered because of the pandemic.
ROB: That’s a pretty bold move, and I wonder, when you first started doing that, how long did you think it was going to be before things echoed back, and when did you start wondering again?
WILL: A handful of weeks. [laughs]
ANGIE: Like everyone else.
WILL: I was actually out of town and Angie was responsible for shutting the office down on March 13th. I don’t think at any time until many, many weeks later we thought that it was going to be more than a handful of weeks that we were out of the office.
ROB: That was a rude awakening for a lot of us. “Oh wait, this basement setup I’m in? This is a lifestyle.” That’s when I went back to the office and I grabbed some tables and chairs and I said, “Okay, this is going to be for real. I’m bringing home a screen, I’m bringing home anything I want to see for the next few months.”
ANGIE: Right. I think everybody had that happen. We did the same thing. We plotted out a very careful schedule for everybody to be able to come one by one and meet me at the office to get any equipment or furniture or anything that they needed so that they could set up some sort of workspace once you realized this may be life. [laughs]
ROB: If we rewind a little bit, we mentioned earlier that you are co-founders. Talk about the journey that let you both into a place at the same time where you’re like, “Hey, let’s start Search Influence and drop whatever we were doing before.” What did that jump look like?
WILL: At that time, we had come from working together – we actually met at work, which is I think part of what makes it so effective for us. But what happened was we found ourselves at the beginning of 2006 still in that Katrina hangover, if you will. I had actually just exited another company, and we were looking for what we were going to do next.
We had the good fortune that Angie and I don’t have the same skillsets. Angie is a businessperson. She has a degree in accounting and has spent her whole career in that side of the businesses, whereas I, oddly enough, have a degree in architecture, but I’ve spent my whole adult career on the more creative and development side.
We saw this opportunity, especially post-Katrina, that there were a lot of small businesses that were decimated. It actually wasn’t too much unlike right now, except that the infrastructure didn’t exist for these companies to go online as they had to after Katrina.
Angie’s family runs a chiropractic clinic, and we saw them as sort of a prototype. They had been located in a place called Chalmette. They were the Chalmette Chiropractic Clinic. Chalmette is a New Orleans suburb that you really don’t hear enough about in the context of Katrina, but it flooded from two directions, and one of those directions came through an oil field. So it wasn’t just wet; it was wet and oily.
We really had to restart their business online. For a little while, the Chalmette Chiropractic Clinic was practicing out of our garage. And then, because it was 2006, we were able to build their brand rather quickly online, rebuilding them as New Orleans Chiropractic and ultimately the Maple Street Chiropractic Clinic.
ANGIE: And making sure that their patients could find them. At that point in time, it wasn’t just about cellphone service and so forth. People were searching online for where did they go, where did they set back up. Thankfully, Will had exited; I still had my current role, an accounting and HR role at a business, so we were able to not only have the time, because I had moved into consulting, but also have the funds and also the time to really get it going and truly focus on the business between both of us.
I think we were lucky and we also had an agreement that we would only start a business that didn’t require going out and finding investors or getting loans. So we were able to get it going just between the two of us and devote everything we had to it.
ROB: What sort of business were you working in together when you met?
WILL: That business morphed over the time that we were there. It was originally a website business, and then we moved into online Yellow Pages. You remember Yellow Pages, right?
ROB: I do. I sure do.
WILL: We actually put them online so that they looked like the book, which was –
ANGIE: Weird. [laughs]
ROB: It reminds me a little bit – I had a friend in the agency business who exited his agency, and what they used to do was take the corporate earnings reports and he would put them on CD-ROMs and make it look just like the real thing, but on a CD-ROM and maybe a little bit interactive. He built a good business of it. So you can never underestimate what that looks like.
You can see how that would lead adjacently, then, to the search side where you would have some of those technical chops of how to do that right. I can see the transition there, for sure.
ANGIE: Right.
WILL: It really was. I remember having a conversation with a guy who was at Yellow Pages. It was shortly after I’d exited that business and I was thinking about maybe going to work for them, and I said to him, “What’s your biggest priority for these phonebooks?” He said, “Anti-scraping technology.” He turned it around and asked me the same question: “What would be your biggest priority?” I said, “Making our data as accessible to Google as humanly possible.” So clearly, I didn’t get that job.
ROB: Yeah, there’s a little bit of a strategy delta there. But somehow those businesses managed to wander around. I knew some folks here a few years ago who were working for YP.com, which is YellowPages.com. I don’t know if they’re in there selling to car dealerships and TV stations or what they’re doing, but those businesses remain around.
There was obviously at some point a step where it made sense, Angie, for you to join full-time as well. What did it look like when you started growing the team? Who did you need to join? At some point I’m sure it came from “We’re doing this, we’re not taking investors, we’re not taking on debt” to “Hey, this is kind of a good business. We can grow it.”
ANGIE: Right. If I had to guess, looking back, I maybe spent six more months consulting within the other company. Having two of us full-time devoted to it was not necessary when you only had – we weren’t even employees; we weren’t even getting paid. So once we started having employees, you start to have to build all the processes, the handbook, the payroll. I was bookkeeping sitting at night for an hour, no big deal, super easy. But once we started having employees and growing that side of the business, that’s really when I think it took over for me.
Our first employee was actually somebody who stepped in and worked with Will really closely on what we now would look back and probably call account management, because it was strategy, and then we had – at the time we were outsourcing all of our production work. They would basically strategize with our production teams outside of the company.
ROB: Got it. That’s an interesting little strategy there. Different people still recommend, even at scale, having different percentages of the work go outside the firm and then have some burstable capacity outside of there.
I think probably one part of your journey where you’ve had to make a lot of decisions is what to add and what not to add. You mentioned you’re in three verticals now, but you could be in 12 or 20, and there’s probably some services you’ve added over time and some you haven’t. How have you navigated that decision of “We’re going to add this line of service; we’re not going to add this line of service. We’re going to add this vertical; we’re not going to add this vertical”? How have you navigated the temptation to do everything?
WILL: I think it was about 10 years ago that I coined the phrase, “If we really want to lose money, we’ll take a website client.” The thing is, there’s a very different skillset there. What we do instead is we have partners that we work with to build websites at different scales for different clients if they need them. But the things that we do really, really well are much more quantitative.
We also developed a practice around content, so much so that we built an internal tool that we ultimately turned into an external-facing tool that we call UpScribed. It’s a platform that other marketers can use to have direct access to our content team.
We had a period in time where we were the backend for a company that has been acquired – and they may still have the same name – Yodel, who was one of the big direct to SMB digital marketing companies probably between 2007 and 2013-2014. We were doing as much as 10,000 pieces of content a month for them.
ROB: Wow.
WILL: As you can imagine, we didn’t employ the writers and editorial staff to do all of that, so we built a process where we had an internal editorial team and platforms to manage external freelancers for the actual creative of that.
ANGIE: That we will use today.
WILL: Yeah, that we still use today. And UpScribed has clients using it external to Search Influence as well.
ANGIE: Because it turns out that is an agency problem. [laughs] Which is probably not a surprise to anyone. I think right now – it’s funny; I was actually chuckling inside my head that you maybe were a fly on the wall in the last few weeks, because we’ve been discussing literally writing out the services that we are going to spend all of our focus and time on. We do quarterly planning, we do annual planning. These are the services that we should be planning around, and that’s SEO and paid search. Sorry, SEO and paid advertising. I have to get my words right.
Then those other services that we do still offer, like website builds and PR and so forth, we would find really good partners if we don’t already have them. A lot of it we already have a great partner for. And to your point of what things we outsource, we outsource and partner with different people who are really good at that stuff. There’s people out there who are very good at video production. Why would we build that? That would be silly, because there’s some really great video production companies out there that we can use, and use their strengths.
WILL: And it turns out that somewhere in the last decade, people have forgotten how to do SEO. I think as everybody’s gotten on the whole inbound content marketing bandwagon, we’ve forgotten the basic blocking and tackling of SEO. Oftentimes, we’ll come across a site that has great content that’s completely inaccessible to search.
I think of myself as having grown up in SEO because back in 1999, we were using GoTo.com to try to figure out what keywords we were going to stuff into the metatags. So really, for us, when we think of the things that we’ve trained our team on historically and where we feel like we’re adding a lot of value, it’s in those places that are technical and quantitative and ultimately that we’re able to demonstrate very good return on those investments because of that tactical focus.
ROB: Has there ever been a service area that helped teach you some of these lessons? Like you dabbled in it and you realized – maybe it was websites, maybe there was something else. Sometimes our eyes get a little bit big for our appetites and we say, “Oh sure, let’s do that too,” and then we get our hand smacked one way or another.
ANGIE: I think maybe it wasn’t services and it was more so certain clients, probably, that led us down “Yeah, we can figure out cross-domain tracking for this and that,” and then you get into it and you’re like, whoa, this was a much bigger thing than we thought it was. But then you’re there and you’ve got to figure it out. So I think it was probably more the client side that drove us down some of these more technical areas.
ROB: That makes sense. If we broaden that a little bit, what are some bigger picture lessons you’ve learned along the way that if you were picking up the phone to yourself 15 years ago, you’d be like, “Hey, you’re going to want to do this. Don’t do that. Do this differently”?
WILL: This is one of those things – and I think time and maturity allow you to really look at these things in the right way. Almost all of those lessons helped us to better understand the kind of company that we want to be.
A great example is we spent about five years with a single reseller representing way too much of our business. The kind of work that they needed was much more fulfillment, much more high throughput work, and it was not as satisfying for our team to execute on. It didn’t make for the greatest work environment for some of our team for a while. And then after all that, they decided to take that business in-house, which meant that they were taking a really big chunk of our revenue with them.
I think that was a really good lesson learned. When you find yourself with too much concentration in one customer, you’ve really got to get busy making sure that you’re doing the business development work that makes them not so monolithic. I think anybody who’s ever worked with customers knows, when a customer comes to you and says, “Hey, I want to give you five times as much money,” you don’t say, “Hey, sorry, we can’t take that because that would screw up our customer concentration.”
ANGIE: Right, because a lot of people do talk about that. They say, “Don’t let a single customer get to X percentage of your revenue.” It’s like, don’t let them? So, say no? Who’s going to do that? No one’s going to do that. So really, the answer is not that. It’s when they offer that, you go and you find more of that in other clients.
ROB: Notoriously – I’m here in Atlanta, and one of the bigger agencies here for a good while has been Moxie, and they’re owned in a holding company now. But when they were acquired, at least if the street reports are to be believed, they had 200 or 300 people and 70% of their business was Verizon. Every time a new iPhone launched, they had to do all the in-store collateral, just fire drill. Are you going to say no to that? You’ve got 150 people you can put on the payroll to serve this client. You figure out how to grow out of it.
I think what is often the case with some of these reseller, these channel relationships, these subcontract relationships, is sometimes they’re selling a deal that you haven’t quite figured out how to sell yet. Was that your experience? Or did their business look a lot like business you were bringing in yourself?
WILL: It actually didn’t look like the business we were bringing in ourselves. In fact, we found ourselves with two account management teams, one that was serving our direct clients and one that was serving this reseller. And there were a couple of other smaller resellers as well, and their lived experience day to day was very different, and their understanding of the work that we did also was very different. So it was hard to move somebody from that partner account management team to the direct account management team or vice versa and have them be Day 1 ready.
ANGIE: The reseller was selling packages because you could sell them – you didn’t have to understand everything. If you have a large sales team, it is much easier to hand them a package that says, “This is what you’re getting on this month in Month 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,” whatever it is. It was the same work over and over, whereas our direct clients were much more about the marketing funnel and creativity and so forth.
ROB: So even some of those clients may have been – would it be fair to say they were a little bit smaller where the direct engagement might not make sense? Was there a delta in deal size, or was it just a matter of the relationship?
WILL: I think generally speaking, those that were coming in through our reseller partners were smaller than we would’ve approached directly.
ANGIE: Yes.
WILL: They were much more true SMB. The other thing that we talk about as an opportunity and that we try to tell new business owners about when we encounter them is that we didn’t know how many services were available for small businesses when we started this up. Things like SBA’s Small Business Development Center and all of the different networks and ecosystems.
We literally had a meeting with one of those organizations, the local big entrepreneur ecosystem entity, and we sat down with them and we were like, “Hey, you guys are doing great things here. We’d love to get engaged. How can you help us out?” As we were talking to them, they started asking us questions like, “How many people do you have? How much revenue do you have?” At the end of the conversation, they were like, “You seem like the kind of people who could really help us out.”
ROB: [laughs] Wow.
WILL: Yeah. Not the plan. But I think there are so many of those services available that smaller entrepreneurs who are coming up in that classic startup ecosystem don’t really have a sense of.
ROB: What are a couple more of those that you would say someone should at least take a look at and not miss out on? Maybe New Orleans driven, maybe more national in scope. What should people pay attention to?
ANGIE: Later on – probably much later on, I went through the 10,000 Small Businesses program, I guess you would call it. It’s put on by Goldman Sachs, and I would say that’s a really good one. And it is everywhere. They’re all over the place. They do a really great job of walking through – you don’t have to go there with questions. They assume you don’t know anything and you’re going to learn it in the classes. So that’s a really good one.
WILL: I was going to say we have a number of purpose-driven organizations that I think are opportunities as well. There’s one called the Good Work Network that tends to work mostly with smaller businesses primarily in marginalized areas, and I’m sure that there are sort of sisters around the country. There’s one called Vet Launch, which is focused specifically on veteran entrepreneurs.
I would say that there are going to be dozens of these, and if you can find one that you can plug in consistent with their affinity, the resources are going to be invaluable.
ROB: That’s a great thought, to think about plugging into the affinity. It creates that extra link. Sometimes it’s hard to ask for help, it’s hard to ask for mentors, it’s hard to ask for advice. Sometimes that linkage can be a relationship you incubate over time, but it sounds like a great shortcut you’re talking about there, about navigating through a shared interest. That’s a really great thought there.
Angie, Will, I’m sure when people want to find Search Influence, I’m sure they can search for you and find you pretty quickly. But if people want to connect to you, how else should they go about finding you, connecting with you, and keeping track of what’s next for Search Influence?
WILL: Our website, searchinfluence.com, and our blog are really great places to start. We are pretty active as a company on Facebook and LinkedIn, and Instagram as well. Those are all great places to connect with us.
ROB: It’s not to be missed. LinkedIn in some ways seems to continue in effectiveness, even though – you probably have this worse than I do – the random connections. I don’t know how you handle them. I get a lot more than I’d like to get, I’ll put it that way.
WILL: What’s funny is that I’ve been getting a lot of them – a lot of my random connections lately have actually been somewhat relevant. So if I do choose to connect with folks, I’ll say, “Hey, I connected with you because I’m interested in this thing that’s in your bio. I’m not a buyer today, but I wanted to have you in my list of connections.”
ROB: Nice.
WILL: Especially when you’re working B2B. When we’re approaching folks who work in higher ed or who work in hospitals and health systems, they’re on LinkedIn and they’re paying attention. So from a cold outreach to start a conversation perspective, I find LinkedIn to be the most effective.
ROB: Makes so much sense. Angie, Will, congratulations on building, growing, sustaining a meaningful business through making it through some challenging times and some good ones. Thank you for sharing your journey with us. It’s really helpful. I think it’s motivating, and there’s great little tips all along the way to learn from. Thank you so much for sharing.
ANGIE: Yes, thank you for having us.
WILL: Yeah, Rob, thanks for having us on. I was glad to be introduced to your podcast because in prepping for this, I came across a number of episodes that I thought were really useful.
ROB: Well, thank you. We all need to get outside our head sometimes, and that’s part of it as well. Thanks for coming on. Be well.
ANGIE: Thank you.
ROB: Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Scott Couvillon is CEO and Executive Strategy Director at Trumpet Advertising, an agency that strives to create purpose-aligned, believable ads. Scott says that companies succeed with their advertising, not only because their creative product promotion is compelling, but more so when the ads “compel an honest connection between a person and a brand.” Scott says there is a lot of talk in the advertising industry about purpose. What is more important is “What do you do with it once you’ve got it.”
Scott holds that advertising needs to be aligned with a company’s core beliefs. Organizations need to think holistically and ask, “If you put purpose in the center, how do you:
- Get the company culture aligned with that purpose?”
- Get the advertising and communications pieces aligned with that purpose?” and
- Get the customer experience aligned with that purpose?”
Advertising agencies typically work on communications – but may neglect a company’s culture and customer experience components. Focus on product characteristics does not build relationships with customers, instill customer loyalty, or keep a company’s product from becoming a commodity. Trumpet clients have a common understanding – “They will sell more product by selling that product within the context of what they stand for.” Scott explains, “Brand connection is an invitation to participate in a culture that is very intentional.”
Holistic alignment is what sells premium brands like Apple phones and BMW SUVs. If you don’t have holistic alignment, Scott says, the best you can hope for is that people will not dread the absence of holistic alignment. The product is okay . . . and the customer only hopes the experience won’t be bad.
Because transformational organizational alignment involves a deeper client-agency relationship beyond mere “communications management,” Trumpet typically engages with organizations in one of two ways:
- High-level management will bring Trumpet in to force “purpose alignment” on its marcom operations.
- Trumpet will start out working with marcom. Once Trumpet has proven itself, it uses its analytical performance to talk with the leadership team about a more holistic brand and organizational alignment.
Scott presents the example of one client, a “very profitable credit union” that Trumpet turned into “a very meaningful credit union.” “Meaning” made the credit union “even more profitable.” Although increased profit wasn’t the first goal, it was the result of the client’s focus on purpose. He refers to Raj’s Conscious Capitalism, and these “firms of endearment,” as “the companies that we don’t dread.”
Communications should be locked in with company culture and customer experience, all three driven by clairvoyance and purpose. Scott asks key questions. “What is the core belief?” “What would the world lose if this company went out of business?” and then delivers an indicting punchline to the last query: “If the answer is a product, then you’re a commodity and somebody else can do what you do. He warns that commoditization often happens when companies internalize the advertising function, communicate on self-serve platforms, and focus more on selling product than on “what they stand for.”
Scott can be found on his agency’s website at: https://trumpetadvertising.com/.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Scott Couvillon, CEO and Executive Strategy Director at Trumpet Advertising based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Welcome to the podcast, Scott.
SCOTT: Nice to meet you, finally.
ROB: Yeah, awesome to have you on here. Sometimes these things can take a little bit to schedule, but this is the moment. Why don’t you start off by giving us the rundown on Trumpet Advertising and what your superpower is?
SCOTT: I guess the thing about a superpower is normally the world can either see you running really fast or a human flying, and ours is maybe a little more backstage than that. But it’s nonetheless clear to us and to the clients we’re working with. It’s pretty simple. It’s the focus on believability and being purposeful as an organization as an underpinning for the things that we actually do every day, which for us is being an advertising agency. For them, it’s running operations and trying to grow their organization.
We just try to do that a little bit more meaningfully than I would say agencies that we’ve all worked for, and even in some cases the agency that we were 10 or 12 years ago. The idea that agencies are responsible for compelling creative is a prerequisite, and let’s just assume that all good agencies can buy media and do the analysis and reporting and optimize and come up with great ideas for that engaged attention. But there’s a difference between compelling creative and trying to compel an honest connection between a person and a brand. The most successful companies right now are doing a better job of that.
Advertising works. We know that. Analytics tell us. America being overweight and in debt, advertising is alive and well. But not every business is able to truly create the connection that allows month over month growth to be sustained in the long term. That requires a more fundamental relationship than just window to window promotion success.
ROB: That sort of strategy, to really execute it, it seems like that would require necessarily partnership from the client as well. How do you think about that and that initial client-agency dance of figuring out if they’re really interested in that level of connection and genuineness in what they’re doing?
SCOTT: There’s a lot in that. How do we proactively go after business? What is our posture or the conversation when we’re, for example, answering an RFP or an open call for agencies? The reality is that if we are dealing exclusively with marketing communications, it would be very difficult to think so holistically about the spirituality of an organization in order to bring some level of alignment between what we’re saying externally through communications and what the experience with the company is ultimately going to be if our only connection to the organization is marcom.
So yeah, frankly, it requires involvement and buy-in from the leadership team. The relationship’s got to go a couple of ways. Either we have a very legacy-oriented, thoughtful, and extremely intentional CEO that brings us in and forces us upon marcom, or we’ll work within the marketing communications sphere for a while, really prove our practical worth, that we have good ideas and good tactical execution that shows that we know what we’re doing, and then we almost use analytical performance with the leadership team to start having conversations about more of a holistic brand alignment at the organizational level, not just within communications on its own. And again, it clicks for some organizations and definitely not others.
ROB: If we can, let’s get a little bit more concrete with an example. Is there a particular client you can talk about that typifies what the engagement looks like, what the structure is, as well as the go-to-market message? What’s that look like?
SCOTT: We are not category specialists. This is a methodology and a perspective that is applicable to a very specific mindset of an organization. What our clients have in common is that they believe they will sell more product by selling that product within the context of what they stand for. They’re not constantly just putting something to buy out there; they’re being clairvoyant on what people are buying into via that purchase.
Structurally, from a relationship standpoint, we have a big financial institution in Texas and expanding out into more and more markets every year, it seems like; we work in healthcare, we work in tourism and destination management, hospitality, but what they all have in common and the structure that’s the same is by identifying the purpose of the organization – what is truly the core belief? Our industry has beaten the tar out of “figure out your why and your core motivation” and all that stuff, but what our industry has done a very poor job with is getting beyond the cosmetic application of that “why.” It’s easy to turn why we exist into beautiful brand creative, but if the brand, if the company, isn’t living that in any real way, it’s disingenuous at best and a lie at worst.
Our scopes are focused on articulating what that belief is, getting that right and bought into by every level of the organization. When we were working with that financial institution, it was very much led by really, truly an unbelievable CEO who pulled his executive team along with him and really got them all bought in. There were years of internal transformation about “Look, this is the organization that we were, and this is the organization that we are going to be. We’re going to move from a very profitable credit union into a very meaningful credit union, and that meaning is going to make us even more profitable.” The profit didn’t come first. It got relegated to a result.
That became really, really clear, because there became a spirituality at that organization that employees, stakeholders, customers, everybody was truly able to validate and then buy into. They were more than just checking account for a free toaster.
The way that process went was getting very clear on that narrative, figuring out what the utilitarian expressions of that narrative were going to be – what products were they going to stop offering? What were the kinds of products they were going to develop? Because their product offering was going to be truly a manifestation of what they stood for, not just different ways for them to make money for shareholders and stakeholders. That kind of internal, truly product holistic thinking first prior to a total renaming and a new identity, new uniforms for employees – how are we going to retrain those employees in the new spirituality of the company while we’re handing them a new shirt, as opposed to just handing them a new shirt?
That’s really how these things, in a perfect sense, go when people are buying into it wholly. There’s been plenty of clients that we’ve talked about this upfront, we’ve gone through the purpose identification in each standpoint, and it inflects in some of the product expressions and some of the customer experience in a retail sense – certainly we’re talking to it from a content standpoint in advertising, marketing, and social media stuff – but never really get invited into the inner sanctum of operations and HR practices, orientation and internal transmission to every employee at the organization.
As an egomaniac, those aren’t my favorite scopes because we’re not able to do the true holistic alignment with every element of the business with a core belief. But it’s better than just offering free shipping and extra cheese and hoping for month over month improvements.
ROB: Right. It’s necessary for you to have the conversation at a higher level in the organization, which is usually where you want to engage. Maybe not sometimes; sometimes the CMO has tons of power and big org. But when you’re talking about essentially a credit union, a bank, it’s a commodity to people, just like an airline can mostly be a commodity to people unless you are let’s say Southwest and you do the work over time to sustain a differentiator. Even when everyone else is charging you for a checked bag.
SCOTT: I think you look at the companies that get put into a very specific cohort that we pay a lot of attention to. It’s really these believable, more purposeful companies. Raj Sisodia, great TED Talk, talks about conscious capitalism, talks about these firms of endearment. It’s the ones that always get talked about at ANA and every conference in our industry. It’s the Caterpillars and the Starbucks and the Disneys and of course the Apples and Intuit. It’s that category. It doesn’t have to be consumer.
But these are organizations that are truly aligned, inside and outside, with an idea, not aligned more practically with an IP or a product or a manufacturing process. You bring up Southwest; identical equipment, flying from the exact same building as other companies. It’s as commoditized as rice. But there is an affinity and a preference for airlines that we all have and that we use for specific purposes. Yes, there are times that we pinch the nose and it’s the cheapest or it’s the only one going where I need to be, but we’re dreading that experience.
And when we go in as a consumer with dread, the best you can have is the absence of dread. I defy you to find a leadership team whose mission statement is “Let’s provide an absence of dread to the world.” That’s not going to make our stock price soar. But that’s where they’re landing, whereas Southwest, as you bring up – JetBlue I’d say is another one. They’ve got a commodity product, and they’ve really focused on the only thing that there is to focus on, which is the morality and the spirituality of the organization and allowing people to really buy into it. Their turnover is lower. Vendor relationships are better. It is an easier company to run because there is alignment beyond the practical. Don’t be late and don’t lose bags.
ROB: How disruptive – you talk about that feeling of dread. Names pop to my mind. Airline names pop into my mind when you say “dread.” What a heck of a brand. You’re the airline of last resort and of dread, but hey, it’s cheap.
But let me digress a little bit from there. Walk me through the origin story of Trumpet. How did Trumpet start and get to be where it is now? What’s that journey look like?
SCOTT: Trumpet was founded in ’97. It fell out of another agency. Just three guys took the phones and ran and opened up a new agency. That’s kind of the late ’90s agency founding story. It was a designer and a writer and an account guy, and they started with some real clients, and despite being in a Tier 3 city like New Orleans, over the years they’ve done some great work for clients like Gatorade. Not nobodies. Launched FreshDirect in New York. It wasn’t just car dealerships and plaintiffs attorneys. In fact, those are the two categories we won’t work in.
They really grew into a creative powerhouse when I was exposed to them in the late ’90s and met the founders. At the time, I was in San Francisco. I’m from New Orleans, but I was working out there for years and was loving that, and every day being the dumbest guy in the room and just trying to stay on my toes and not get discovered. But then when I came back to New Orleans, I got reintroduced to Trumpet. The idea at the time was they had amazing creative, but really not a strong, or as strong as it could’ve been, strategic underpinning. So I joined, maybe narcissistically, thinking that there was an opportunity to bring some strategic scaffolding together with the creative superiority they were wielding.
It took a while to be heard and understand it and figure out how our personalities were going to coalesce, but getting into about the last four or five years here, we were on a clip, winning advertising agency accounts like an advertising agency does, talking about case studies and making result promises and case studies that are completely non-verifiable. But we didn’t really have a perspective that made us different. We were frankly commoditizing ourselves with all of the other agencies that are able to execute, come up with ideas and get them into the market.
But the development of this perspective – and not only adding the brand consulting mindset, if not the brand consulting scope to our scopes of work with clients, but that shift of perspective to, how do we stop lying? How do we stop running ads that test well and analytically prove in the near term that they work better than the old stuff? How do we let advertising be not a short-term tool, but really have a long-term impact? And how do we stop talking about things like brand ads as unmeasurable? How do we start talking about brand ads as being really the only promise we’re making?
Advertising, when it’s seen as a trigger or stimulus for sales, if that’s how you see it, that’s what it’s going to be. That has become the most ignorable stuff in a consumer’s day to day, when they’re seeing on average 3,600 ads a day in different format. And we’re calling three from the day prior. There’s a ton of waste. Advertising agencies say, “Yeah, but the waste is so cheap, you can afford it.”
But when you look at advertising as truly an invitation to participate in a culture of a company – even when you’re promoting, even when you’re doing something of a more retail nature, but definitely when you’re doing it in a brand sense – you have to be making plain and clear what experience you’re going to have if you were to engage with this company via a product or social media visit or whatever those things may be, so that that experience can actually validate the promise we made in advertising, because that’s when you get the connection that Raj is talking about in Conscious Capitalism. Those are the companies that we don’t dread.
In fact, those are the companies that we re-purchase from. The Apple phone that costs twice as much as a Samsung is not twice as good. It just costs twice as much, but we don’t think twice about it because we have an affinity. We have a preference for that company, and if they tell us we need a watch – I didn’t, but many people did go and get one. People don’t want an SUV from BMW. They want the ultimate driving machine. They want the connection with BMW, and they just had too many kids.
That brand connection being meaningful isn’t throwaway, unmeasurable stuff. It’s frankly the most important stuff, especially when the organization sees it as an invitation to participate in a culture that is very intentional, because the leadership that’s approving the ads is also using the same idea that’s easy to capture in ad creative and doing the harder work of trying to figure out how to keep that alive or to program that into the organization itself and into the customer experience itself.
ROB: That’s definitely a very compelling challenge. I think one part of the journey that’s worth underscoring for you is – we’re always talking to the challenger, the independent agencies, not the holding companies. But you’ve got even a different perspective. Those are quite often typically operated by somebody who was there on Day 1. Talk about your own transformation from joining the agency to being the CEO now.
SCOTT: There’s been a lot of leadership and structural capitulations over the years. Let me start by saying, too, that while we were a small agency in New Orleans – at our biggest, we were under 50. We really enjoy remaining at about that 20-to-25-person range, because we focus primarily on creative and strategy and project management. We do not have PR and social media and media planning and buying under roof. Now, we have media planners, but they’re working with external groups in our network to plan and buy media and reconcile and optimize and all that stuff.
The reason for that is because every place that we’ve ever worked, when you have a media department, that media department’s mentality is kind of what every client that we win gets. And while it might be appropriate for consumer packaged goods, it might not be right for pharma or a healthcare system. But tough; that’s our media director and that’s your plan. Not all flowcharts look the same, but they could. That’s the risk. We don’t think downstream execution is unimportant; we just don’t want to subject a client we haven’t met yet to a downstream execution philosophy. That’s how you wind up becoming a categorical agency, and we’re trying to avoid that in order to fully administer the perspective regardless of category.
That said, when you see the agency that way, it’s not like you have a CEO sitting atop all these profit silos, because the only silos that are at Trumpet are really creative and strategy, and then the execution that comes from our client services division, which is split between project management and relationship management. But regardless, it’s not a very complicated business to run.
That said, the leaders of these disciplines are really empowered. The distance between CEO and the leaders of the silos is not very distant. But in order for the vision to not be lost in day to day execution, that’s really where my focus remains. Right now we’re in the process of trying to extract ourselves to the degree that we can from the day to day so that we can focus on the collective vision of the day to day. I say, how do we think a little less about the busyness of the agency and think more about the business of the agency?
Not to be cavalier, but clients come and go, but the agency is either going to be defined by our relationships and whether we’re right about to get fired or our clients love us, or we’re going to have an idea as an agency that clients are going to find valuable or they won’t. That’s really what we’re shifting to: trying to make it very, very clear, inside and out – just like we profess to our clients – let’s make Trumpet a place very clearly inside and out that our employees and our clients are all clairvoyant on our value. Because if they want it, we’ll be around for a while, and our retention increases and our connection with our employees increases the more transparent and clear we are about what’s different about working here and working someplace else. There’s no greater commodity than an advertising agency.
ROB: It doesn’t take a lot of capital to stand up something.
SCOTT: Yeah. It takes three people and a client, and sometimes not a client. And sometimes not three people. [laughs] But there’s a lot of talk in our industry right now about purpose. This should not be the 75000th purpose podcast because there’s plenty of that. What this should be is one of the few that says, what do you do with it once you’ve got it? If you take it and run it into brand ads that are beautiful but aren’t what the company is really rallying around, I think you’re frankly doing a disservice. You’re probably better off sticking in promotion land. That’s been around since the ’50s.
ROB: Oh yeah, that’s a well-trod lane as well. I think what’s interesting maybe also is stepping into that CEO role, what are some things you might wish you had done sooner stepping into that seat?
SCOTT: Actually, I’ve thought a lot about this. I mentioned this to you, but there’s a difference between showing up to work every day as an account person or a team member or director of a discipline and trying to do the whole. But I think what has happened successfully here, in my personal path and matriculation, is we didn’t miss the opportunity to shift from being in the mailroom to being an account guy to being a strategist to now being CEO.
It’s not like strategy is king now, like the ops guy takes over the CEO role and now ops is king, or the marketing guy takes over the CEO role and marketing is king. We are being disciplined enough to have Trumpet become associated operationally with an idea. There is very intentional alignment between Trumpet as an organization and the products and services that we provide. So those products and services being rendered on behalf of this portfolio of clients does not wholly define Trumpet. There’s an idea of Trumpet: how do we make companies more believable?
Advertising has a role in that, but advertising is a very narrow solution to that. Brand consulting or internal operational consulting has a role in that, but operational consulting is a narrow solution to the complex problem of how you get the customer experience, separate and apart from the company culture, separate and apart from the communications from that company, aligned with not a product, but a belief. Product innovation: awesome, you need it. But it’s a very narrow solution to the satisfaction of that complex problem. There’s three legs to that stool.
If you put purpose in the center, how do you get the company culture aligned with that purpose? How do you get the advertising and communications pieces aligned with that purpose, and how do you get the customer experience aligned with that purpose? That requires very intentional, top-down commitment from the organization, and in our case it requires us challenging those organizations to think that holistically. Advertising agencies typically just exist in that communications third.
I think we have a responsibility not to take over the whole, but to understand or to be able to provide a perspective that not only should communications be tied, locked in with the company culture and the customer experience, but all three should really be driven by clairvoyance and purpose. What is the core belief? What would the world lose if this company went out of business? If the answer is a product, then you’re a commodity and somebody else can do what you do.
But how you bring that product to market and what you stand for more spiritually than practically – you get that right and you will be more successful. Ironically, you will sell more product by talking about what that product is a means to what end.
Becoming the CEO of the organization of Trumpet has been a challenge to not just let this be, “Oh my gosh, what clients are we about to lose or which ones do we really want to get?” and more, how do we keep this idea clear and alive internally and externally so that everybody, from our employees to our partners, in whatever executional hallway we partner with networks, and our clients – that idea of Trumpet is alive in all of those conversations? So that you don’t get lost in the execution and confuse successful execution and analytical awesomeness with the idea of the company. Because that’s not the idea of a company. That’s the commodity part of advertising agencies. None of us should be bad at creative, buying and measuring and optimizing media and reporting on results. We should all be good at that. But that’s all short term. What’s the long term? Long term comes from brand, and not the unmeasurable ads.
ROB: Right, and it’s at a fractal level. Most individuals don’t want to just buy and sell ads and measure them, and most organizations would be better not to. There’s an alignment from client to organization to person that is going to put off some people who want to go in a different vision, but at least you’re not adrift without direction and just commodity all the way down.
SCOTT: And look at what the industry has done relative to that mentality. It’s why agencies have been complaining for years that they’re being marginalized. I don’t lament marginalization. I think frankly, our industry deserved it. We allowed ourselves to be commoditized. The media commission structure lived on way too long and was disproportionately beneficial to agencies a long time ago, and has just been eroding and eroding and eroding over time.
Now bring in the democratization of media buying and content development and clients can internalize a lot of this stuff. That democratization of the ability to execute elements of communications through self-serve platforms, and you don’t need IPG anymore to run national broadcasts. Ironically, the democratization of the ability to participate in advertising, from a local one-off car dealership to a global superpower, is moving businesses farther away from a focus on purpose. They’re like, “Man, this advertising thing is something we can just do. Let’s internalize it. Let’s run this with greater control.”
What winds up happening is that the distance, the separation, the space between consumers and companies is widening because there’s just less and less focus on companies being clear about what they stand for. They’re providing consumers fewer and fewer opportunities to have a referendum on whether or not they like them, so products get commoditized. You’d better lower your expenses if you hope for net profit.
ROB: Thank you for all that, Scott. When people want to find you and connect with you and with Trumpet, where should they go to find you?
SCOTT: The internet is an awesome place, so you can google Trumpet. If you just scroll past the instruments for sale, you’ll find us. But we’re not hard to find. We’re in downtown New Orleans now. We love our hometown, but we just as much love airports. We do not restrict our client base to here or really even the region. Have perspective, will travel. We’re really just looking for those types of companies that are interested in holistic alignment, if not holistic transformation from where they were to a much more intentional place of where they want to be headed, and then right size our relationship to what makes sense for the individual company.
ROB: That is excellent. Scott Couvillon from Trumpet Advertising, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing the transformation of your firm and thoughts on how we can all be transformational individually, organizationally, and brand-wise. Thank you so much.
SCOTT: Thanks for the time. Love what you’re doing.
ROB: Be well. Thank you. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Mary Patrick is CEO and Managing Partner at Jasculca Terman (JT) Strategic Communications, a 40-year-old public affairs firm that provides issue education and crisis management and builds support for its clients’ controversial legislative, regulatory, and public policy issues.
Over the past few years, crisis management has been close to 50% of the firm’s business. “Topping the list” over this past year were Covid and social issues, but the agency’s scope is broad: workforce and labor issues, leadership misconduct, immigration, environment, non-Covid healthcare, protest and rally management, and contentious leadership changes . . . anything where there is controversy or two or more sides to a story.
Organizations might engage JT at any time – when they want to plan ahead to avert potential problems, when they know something is coming and want to put the key pieces in place to manage it, or . . . when the news chopper is overhead and news media are banging on the door.
Mary believes storytelling is the most important tool in JT’s arsenal. She advises organizations to be the first to tell their stories. Even if news is “bad,” being first to talk about it provides the opportunity to better define your narrative, bring forth your mission, present your position, and paint the picture, making it “resonant and memorable.” Story “examples” showing the human-interest side of an issue are most compelling. “People remember how an issue impacts a person or a family, or I guess even the world,” she says.
JT comes with a full toolbox and creates for its clients a lot of videos (some even award-winning), infographics, animations, social posts on all platforms, vignettes, testimonials. and talking points. Stories are also communicated directly in person, through Zoom, and in written material.
The firm’s major events division brings people together with turnkey, end-to-end solutions – from booking venues and speakers, planning breakout sessions, and providing all levels of seamless, onsite technical support. Covid and “going virtual” meant the firm had to add an additional technological layer. Does the client need their event to be interactive? How will people raise a hand, ask a question, put things in the chat? What needs to be done to keep “zoomed out” audiences interested and engaged?
The most challenging PR question? What can an organization do when things have gone catastrophically bad and the story has gotten really big? Who should the organization contact directly to help people understand its perspective, its point of view, the scope of the issue, and what the organization is doing about it? When is “strategic silence” appropriate?
Handling this kind of crisis is where JT excels. Mary says there are times when mistakes have been made or things have gone bad for an individual or organization, and the entity (or JT on its behalf) has to own the responsibility, apologize, and tell people what will be done to correct the situation. . . if it wants to rebuild trust and credibility. “You can never say that it’ll never happen again,” Mary warns.
Mary can be reached on the Jasculca Terman website at JTPR.com.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Mary Patrick, who is the CEO and Managing Partner at Jasculca Terman Strategic Communications based in Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to the podcast, Mary.
MARY: Thanks, Rob.
ROB: It’s good to have you here. Why don’t you start off with a little bit of an introduction of Jasculca Terman and the focus of the firm? Where do you all excel?
MARY: Sure. Jasculca Terman Strategic Communications – and we’ll make it easy for everybody; we typically call ourselves JT – JT was founded by Rick Jasculca and Jim Terman 40 years ago this year. We’re a public affairs firm, which means we focus on issues like legislative, regulatory, public policy, areas where there might be controversy or two sides. We do a lot of educating around issues, and we do a lot of crisis management work. I would say over the last few years, crisis management has been at least 50%, maybe more, of our business.
ROB: Wow.
MARY: Big picture, to describe us, I would say what our superpower is, what we’re great at, is storytelling. That’s how we look at the world. Storytelling in all its forms and all its situations.
You can imagine, for instance, over the last year, if we are doing a lot of crisis management work, we’ve been working on COVID in all its iterations. We’ve had a lot of social justice issues that our clients are managing and trying to communicate around. Those currently top the list, but we have several crisis projects that don’t touch either of those issues – things like workforce and labor issues, maybe misconduct by a leader. We’ve done a lot of work in the immigration space, in the environment, in other aspects of healthcare besides COVID. We’ve helped people handle protests and rallies and controversial leadership changes and a whole lot more.
But storytelling is really where we excel, and we look at it, honestly, as defining the narrative on your terms. It’s about bringing your mission, your position to life and really painting a picture, making it resonant and memorable. And we think examples really make a difference, especially the human interest side of an issue or what you’re trying to do. Those are the most compelling. Those are the most connecting. Those are the things people remember: how an issue impacts a person or a family, or I guess even the world.
And we tell those stories through a variety of vehicles. We have an in-house creative director and video producer, so we produce a lot of videos – some even award-winning. We use infographics and animations. We do social posts on all different platforms. We create vignettes and testimonials and talking points. We have a major events division, and we see that as a really important companion in terms of our public affairs work bringing people together. And of course, that has pivoted to also doing actually quite a few virtual events in the last year and a half.
The other way we tell stories is directly in person or through Zoom, and of course, with the written word. We obviously put a lot of stock in what we write and those kinds of materials.
ROB: Dig in a little bit on – during normal times, and maybe coming up, what does an event that you’re involved in, that JT puts on, look like? What’s an example or a big picture, at least, of who it’s for, who comes to it, that kind of thing?
MARY: We’re working on a major event right now for a major not-for-profit that focuses on women’s issues. They’ve done this for years in person, and it draws 2,000 people. The issues around missing that level of networking and how we bring that back through a virtual lens – they have a major speaker who I can’t share yet, but they have a major speaker who we will bring in via satellite. There will be breakout rooms so people can have a little bit of that experience of networking with each other. We helped them produce some video vignettes around the women who have received grants through this organization for the amazing work they’re doing in a variety of spaces.
We’ll package that all – our team works with a variety of platforms, depending on a client’s needs. Do we need an event to be interactive? Are there places where people will be able to raise a hand, ask a question, put things in the chat? All those aspects are considered as we pull these things together.
And what we’ve discovered in the many events that we’ve been doing over the last 16 months during COVID is that interaction is important. Visuals are important. Getting a lot of variety, so you’ve got some live components and then you also have some prerecorded components. Making it as interesting as possible for people who are experiencing Zoom fatigue at best.
ROB: Got it. It really is turnkey, end-to-end. In normal times you’re talking about everything from booking a venue, booking speakers, planning for breakout sessions in reality. It sounds like a turnkey, end-to-end, and very complicated situation. And then to also have to turn around and evolve that online while you’re at it.
MARY: Exactly. I think it’s all about asking the right questions and really thinking about what it is our client is trying to accomplish with an event and managing all the logistics that go into pulling that together seamlessly, smoothly, and mainly, if we do our job right, then you’re just troubleshooting the live aspects. And putting the technology into the middle of it in the last 16 months, there’s an extra level of holding our breath a little bit. [laughs] But we’ve got some terrific people in-house who have really pivoted very well, and our event business is as strong as it’s ever been, which has been in some respects a surprise to me.
ROB: I’m sure when we dig into the crisis side a little bit, that seems like every day could be a fresh and new surprise and an opportunity to jump in. What does the life cycle of a crisis look like for you?
MARY: Everyone is different, and people bring you in at different times. We have actually worked with clients who want to plan ahead, which we think is a great idea. That’s even before the beginning of a crisis, when a client is thinking about their potential vulnerabilities and what they want to put in place so that they wouldn’t have to scramble at the last minute. We’ve come in at that time.
We’ve come in when someone knows something is coming and they’re anticipating it and they want to plan for the real event and put all the key pieces in place. We’ve been called when the news chopper is overhead or the media is already knocking on the online door, asking the client for comment or pointing out the tough issues. And we’ve also been called when a client had thought or hoped that they could manage it internally, and a couple days into it they realize that they really could use some outside expertise.
There are some wonderful, wonderful organizations, corporations, that have terrific communications staff, but a lot of the communications staff doesn’t have crisis experience. So we often work hand in hand with an in-house communications team, helping them manage the crisis with the expertise that we can bring to the table. And it starts with asking all the right questions and thinking about scope and scale and audiences and who we can try to get to, to share your story before things get really big in the media.
If things have already gotten big in the media, who do we need to reach out to directly to help make sure people understand your perspective, your point of view, the actual scope of the issue, and especially what you’re doing about it. There are absolutely times when things have gone bad for someone, or mistakes are made, and you have to step up and own them. You have to step up and apologize for them. If you want to build back trust and credibility, you have to tell people what you’re going to do. You can never say that it’ll never happen again.
ROB: [laughs] Can we highlight that and tell people that? Because some people want you to guarantee it will never happen again.
MARY: Right. We’re very careful about how we talk about that. But we do help a client put as many things in place to hopefully avoid it happening again.
ROB: I think in any firm, there’s a potential for conflicts between individual people on the team and the clients. You can imagine a marketing firm where someone’s an ethical vegetarian; they have to market for a hamburger chain. These things happen. But here in your world, where you’re talking about things where, as you say, stuff is out in the media, it seems to an extent unavoidable that your team and you – bringing your whole self to work – will have feelings about a topic that might be in tension with a client. How do you think about that / handle that? Does it impact who gets work on what client?
MARY: Generally, I think everyone who works at JT believes in this idea that everyone should have a chance to tell their story. JT is 40 years old; I’ve been there for 36 of those 40 years, and in those 36 years, I’ve only been part of probably two experiences – and it wasn’t even me – where we were working on issues that people either had a strong feeling that they could not represent a client as well, or they’d had a personal experience that made them feel they could not tell the story for the client just based on what the client was dealing with. But that’s two experiences in 36 years.
ROB: It resonates with the similar role of – not to say that someone’s charged with a crime, but the defense attorney and the public defender. There is a right to being represented fairly and accurately.
You did reference – I think it’s interesting – that you’ve been with the firm 36 out of the 40 years. It’s notable that you are not Jasculca or Terman, but you are the CEO and managing partner. How did you come to be involved? And how did you end up in charge?
MARY: When I got out of college – I studied PR and communications at Miami University, and I thought as I was studying it that what I really wanted to do is agency work. I sort of thought that was the only path. Literally maybe a month before I got out of school, I went to some presentation or lecture where someone was talking about not-for-profit PR. It opened my eyes. I started to realize that agencies aren’t the only place to practice; there are people who do PR for hospitals, for universities, for not-for-profits.
I decided that what really interested me was the not-for-profit side. So when I moved to Chicago – and this will tell you how very, very old I am – I literally went to the library to look up all the not-for-profits that had headquarters in Chicago. I sent them my letters and I pitched them and called them, and my first job was with the American Red Cross in their Midwest chapter downtown.
In my first year of being there as the Public Affairs Blood Services Specialist, the AIDS crisis hit. You can imagine what sort of baptism by fire that was for a 23-year-old fresh out of college, dealing suddenly with the safety and sanctity of the volunteer blood supply as it related to AIDS. I ended up doing lots of interviews and essentially learning, by being in it, how a crisis works.
Our job was to keep people continuing to voluntarily donate their blood, because it very, very, very much matters in terms of the health of the world. And people were afraid. AIDS was so linked to needles and so linked to blood. So that was my first taste of this issues management piece, and I really found that I liked it a lot.
So when I was thinking about a next step, I looked at agencies that were smaller and that might have some sort of political or cause-related path. I honestly, truly lucked into JT in its – I guess it wouldn’t be infancy. In its toddlership. It was four years old. It was smaller then. I really got the ability to grow and then eventually help shape the agency over the years.
And I think what keeps people there – I’m not the only one with such longevity. We have a number of people at our firm that have been there for 20 years or more. And its’ honestly because of two major things. One is the people at JT, who are incredible and brilliant and strategic and passionate and compassionate. I think that’s what really makes the firm. And secondly the variety of issues. As you said, sometimes you don’t know what you’re doing day to day. That’s been 36 years for me. I mean, I think I know some days, but there’s going to be a twist or a turn, or there’s going to be something that comes up, a new issue to manage or a new way that someone has impacted what you’re working on, and you need to address it. That variety, that adrenaline, and the people are what keeps us there.
ROB: What did that transition look like from the original partners to – it seems like they’re probably less involved now than they were initially. How did that manifest itself?
MARY: Interestingly, that’s not true. Most people assume that, and in fact, when my announcement went out when I became the CEO, we made sure that front and center, people knew that Rick and Jim weren’t going anywhere, not even partially.
They remain heavily, integrally involved. I’ve had a lot of people outside of the firm say, “Oh my God, don’t you wish you could get those guys out of there?” And I don’t wish that at all. They’re fantastic and smart and supportive, and have been very, very good to me in terms of letting me lead and stepping back from those issues, but still with a great passion and drive to do the work.
It’s been a really wonderful experience for me. I’ve worked at every level of the firm, and as – the partners would probably kill me for saying this, but once they turned 70, they really felt like they needed to take a look at what was next and how the firm should be led going forward. So I’ve been the CEO and managing partner for a little over three years.
ROB: That is excellent. Thank you for clarifying. Congratulations. It reminds me, actually, in some ways of an agency I know of in Atlanta called Nebo. These two guys started it together, and they had someone who came up through the business, and they put this awesome woman in charge as their president even though she didn’t start the thing. I think they have benefitted from it, probably much as you have. And not for nothing, I think it has also really helped their entire organization to feel like they have a little bit more balanced leadership and it’s not just two guys running the show. There’s a woman in power all the way up to the top.
MARY: I think that’s true, and I think both J and T have always been very supportive of growing people internally. And again, that’s why people stay as long as they have. I can’t honestly think of a time in the recent past where we brought someone in at a high level. Our high level people are homegrown. And even when we’re hiring an AE, it usually comes from our intern pool. When we’re adding to the team, it’s usually folks that have done some work with us.
In the past, one of our more recent hires was an intern with us, went off and did something else for a couple years, and came back. We didn’t have a job for her at the time when her internship was completed, but when we did, there she was. It’s that training and that passion and, again, working with a group of people that really support each other and have the clients’ best interest at heart.
ROB: Got it. Mary, as you reflect on that journey, your past few years particularly in charge, but certainly all along the way, I’m sure it’s been a journey of growth. What are some things you have learned in leading JT – some lessons you might’ve done differently if you were starting over today?
MARY: I’ve given that a little bit of thought. There’s so many things I’ve learned over the years – mainly, again, from my wonderful colleagues at JT, and often from clients and the issues that they entrust to us. Frankly, I say this all the time, but I actually mean it. It’s true and authentic that I’m still learning every day, because the issues we manage and the crises we work on really test our skill, can often surprise you and can certainly stretch those strategic muscles.
Obviously, over the years, social media has really changed the practice, often for the better but sometimes not so much. We’re dealing with lots of issues right now that start in social media, and it’s misinformation. In the past, you didn’t have that as much because news was supposed to be vetted. People had a news cycle to confirm or test information. Those are newer and different challenges. The shrinking traditional newsrooms play a big role in how we approach media. The whole “it bleeds, it leads” mentality and “the first to get the scandal out there” has made our jobs different and more difficult.
I guess one very key learning which is fundamental – I hope I grasped it from the beginning, but I may not have – is this idea of telling your story first. Even if it’s bad. Your ability to shape and control the narrative is very important. So whenever you can, as much as you can, playing offense rather than defense is important.
Another tried and true colloquialism around the office is that trouble fills a vacuum. We’ve learned and we’ve seen with our clients that if they put their head down and pretend something’s not there, then someone else is going to define the story for them, and it’s not going to be, generally, the way you want it to be. So again, getting out there first and defining things.
And then a mistake that I feel like I made that I learned a lot from, and I thus far have not made it again – I worked on a project once where I never met the CEO, who was ultimately going to be the main speaker at a press conference that we were pulling together. Then the press conference that we had planned got overrun by protestors. It was a fairly controversial issue that was going to be shared. The mayor of Chicago at the time was going to be part of our press conference, and these protestors really took over at our venue.
When that happened, I had no credibility with the leader because honestly, I’d never met her. So in a time of great turmoil and when there was a need for a lot of debate and conversation and decisions, she didn’t trust me because she didn’t know me. I mean, how could she, right? And so I vowed that I would never let that happen again, and it hasn’t.
ROB: That’s such a good point, too: the value of relationship with clients, the value of investing, the value of having that connection.
You do highlight something that plays very much also into the future of PR and marketing as well. I think it used to be, to an extent – and you know better than I do – most controversies that got any legs had some degree of substance to them. It almost seems like now, there are secret rooms on the internet where people just make up stuff for fun and see what sticks. Do you feel like that’s an actual trend? Is that something you think is growing or shrinking, or is maybe overblown?
MARY: Oh, absolutely. I don’t know how to judge these back room making-up-things, but I will say that we have managed a number of issues that started with literally completely false information. Just completely false. And because it struck a chord or because people wanted to believe it or something, or God help you, goes viral, it puts a company or an organization or a person in a very, very difficult place.
We’re often balancing issues of you don’t want to give something credibility by having your organization enter into the social media fray, but how far does it go before you have to do something? We actually call it strategic silence. Often, we’re going back and forth with boards of an organization, for instance, who are like, “Oh my gosh, why are we not fixing this? Why are we not correcting this?” But you can actually elevate an issue by engaging.
So we have to make sure that people understand, no, we’re not ignoring it. No, it’s not that we don’t see it. We’re actually making a decision to be strategically silent – to a point. A lot of times in those instances, we try to really think about, who are the audiences that matter most to you? Let’s make sure they know the real story.
ROB: What a tricky, tricky balance. Mary, when people want to get in touch with you and with JT PR, where should they find you?
MARY: Well, you practically almost said it. JTPR.com is our website, and that’s where you can learn more about JT and you can see case studies and clients and videos that we’ve produced and meet the team that makes up Jasculca Terman.
ROB: Wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Mary, for sharing your expertise, sharing your journey. You have really been a long hauler in building this firm up, and I congratulate you on everything that you’ve accomplished together.
MARY: Thanks so much, Rob. I appreciate it.
ROB: All right. Be well. Thanks, Mary.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Bill Durrant is President at Exverus Media, a paid-media agency (TV ads, print advertising, sponsorships, and other types of media) that serves culture-creating, growth-stage brands. The agency’s focus is not so much on big-budget, long-term brand building as it is on consulting with clients and recommending “how best to invest” to produce significant, trackable and measurable short- to medium-term results.
Bill says, “all media is performance media” and that it can be very challenging to quickly determine the effectiveness of branding efforts and traditional marketing media. To address this, his agency tries to establish a “performance mindset” and “a structure to capture things that aren’t directly trackable.”
Bill finds it exciting that today’s solutions for modeling are “significantly less expensive” than those that were available in the past. He says modeling has been “democratized” – that you can build and launch a model in weeks, update it continuously with sales and investment data, and track performance across a variety of marketing channels. Work that used to be done over a period of months by costly data scientists and analysts can be done now by utilizing a combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The agency’s name, Exverus, is Latin for “from the truth.” In this interview, Bill explains how the name reflects the agency’s values and the importance of transparency in how the agency conducts business, manages its clients’ finances, and builds, over time, trust-based and truth-based client relationships. In a typical engagement, the agency consults with growing-brand clients and follows a step-by-step process that involves:
- understanding at a deep level client needs and stakeholder goals
- curating campaigns rooted in science and best practices
- incorporating customized measurement solutions that prove campaign impact even when immediate, vendor-driven measurements aren’t immediately available.
The agency’s “roots” are in a consumer-facing infrastructure. Over the past year, B2B clients have increased as brands “tired of being bland” seek to get more involved in being “adjacent to culture, creating culture, or participating in culture” in order to increase their visibility and cultural involvement.
Bill can be reached on his agency’s website at: www.exverus.com or on Linkedin at Bill Durrant (with two “R’s.”) To make it easier to find him, add “Exverus.”
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Bill Durrant, President at Exverus Media based in Los Angeles, California. Welcome to the podcast, Bill.
BILL: Hey, how are you? Thanks for having me.
ROB: I’m excellent, and it’s good to have you here. Why don’t you start off, Bill, by telling us about Exverus and what the firm’s superpowers are?
BILL: Yeah, we do like to think of ourselves as superheroes every now and again. The first question we always get is “What does Exverus mean?”, so I’ll start there. Exverus means “from the truth” in Latin. I think that as a paid media agency, which is our area of expertise, that can extend to things as rational as transparency in how we do our business and how we manage our finances for our clients to really the crux and the core of how the agency has been able to thrive over the past several years, which is trust-based and truth-based relationships with clients, building that over time. As we think about the mission for the agency and what the agency stands for, it’s right there in the name.
As I mentioned, we are a paid media agency. We like to think of ourselves as the paid media agency for culture-creating, growth-stage brands. I guess that’s really where our superpower comes in. Our superpower is growing culture-creating brands that don’t necessarily have the eight and nine figure budgets to invest in paid media and need their dollars to work harder. That’s not only what we’ve found we’re best at, but it’s also what we’ve found gives us the most personal fulfillment as an agency team and as a leadership team within the agency. So it’s something that’s really easy to stick to, and that’s something that we’re very proud of as well.
ROB: Does that pull a little bit more then towards consumer? Or do you also see some B2B brands you would also dub as culture-creating in their own way?
BILL: It’s funny; we’ve been having more interesting conversations with B2B brands probably over the last year. So it does extend to that space, even if it certainly has its heart, and certainly our roots, in more of a consumer-facing type of communications infrastructure. But yes, it’s really interesting to see how B2B brands are now saying, “The idea of being adjacent to culture, creating culture, or participating in culture is to help stand out, to help gain association and equity from existing cultural platforms; why does that necessarily exclude us? Why does everything that we do need to be so bland, so to speak?” It’s been really fun having those conversations.
ROB: You mentioned a judiciousness required around the resources. Is it possible maybe for you to dive down into a client or two and share what it looks like to spend those budgets in a way that really has to deliver in a near- to midterm-way, where they can’t just say “We’re investing in brand, we’re investing in brand”? I assume you’re not posting Coke ads for Coca-Cola, right?
BILL: We do some work with Coke. We can’t say exactly where or how, but we do some work with some of their brands in Atlanta, your hometown. But yes, you’re right; it’s not about having that long-term branding campaign that’s on a very long leash from organizations that are used to having the discipline and the budgets, frankly, to be able to support that and not stress about what their investment’s immediate return was. That’s a constant conversation that we’re having with our brand partners, and helping them understand how best to invest.
As we think about that, there are two axioms that we like to share with our clients. Number one is “all media is performance media.” Whether it’s something that feels like a longer term-ish, traditional branding campaign, there is still a performance that’s being associated with that. There is still a short-term lens that is almost always associated with that. So we want to make sure we’re understanding that to satisfy and appease the stakeholders in their organization who are looking for those short-term or more “prove it to me” type results.
As we think about what the science tells us, what an analysis of the world’s most successful and least successful and average-success brands tells us about how to invest dollars, we know there is a huge economic argument to be made from having that kind of brand-led communications. It really comes down to how you measure it. If you have appropriate measurement in place that can measure things that aren’t as immediate as “tell me what the return on ad spend was for my campaign on Amazon,” for instance, then you’re going to be in solid shape.
So what we try to do with our clients is really understand what their needs are, what their stakeholders are looking for, and then curate a campaign that is rooted somewhat in science and in what works best at growing brands, but does that in a way that also has measurement incorporated so they can prove the impact of what they’re doing if it’s something where that immediate, vendor-driven measurement isn’t right away available.
That’s how we approach that, and it is absolutely central to our conversations with our brand partners.
ROB: Does that focus on measurability in any way impact the selection of marketing channels? You mentioned selecting for the measurement and thinking about the measurement of the channel correctly. Is there anything that’s completely out from a measurement perspective?
BILL: That’s kind of the knock on a lot of traditional media, that it’s very challenging to measure them in a more immediate way. Really what you’re looking at there is you’re trying to put a structure in place that can capture things that aren’t as directly trackable. That’s where you’re looking at, what kind of marketing mix model is my organization using? If my organization spends $10-20 million plus on media or on other important marketing channels, I may already have a marketing mix model in place. Let’s figure out how we can align with that and ensure the decisions that we’re making are able to be picked up by that measurement.
But if you’re not, then you might say “I need something that can help me understand what the impact was of a TV spot or radio spot or an outdoor ad” – all things that we know work but are really hard to pin down exactly how they worked for me exactly last month. That’s where we’re looking at more customized measurement solutions, and that’s stuff we can provide directly to a client, to one of our brand partners. We’re very proud of being able to do that, but it does require some – we’ll call it hoop-jumping.
I think that the prize is absolutely worth it, because you’ve now got a more balanced media mix that’s proven to be more effective, 100%, in driving a return for the brand. So jumping through those initial hoops around measurement and setting that up is always worth the investment of time and energy and money.
ROB: That’s such a neat area to pull in on. I do think a lot of marketers, when they hear “media mix modeling,” it sounds like a high-class tool. Is there a size of brand or a size of budget where it’s more viable? Or is it really just a limitation on thinking and it can start from just one or two channels?
BILL: I grew up in my career to some degree working with Nestlé. Nestlé has a number of billion-dollar brands and significantly more nine-figure annual sales brands. Those brands very often had access to marketing mix models, and it did feel like a high-class tool, especially at that time.
What we’ve actually been able to figure out over the last three years is that there are now solutions in place for modeling that are significantly less expensive. They’re essentially utilizing what we hear about when we hear about AI and machine learning. They’re essentially utilizing machine learning in a very efficient and democratized way where you don’t need to have expensive data scientists and data analysts running analyses over the course of months. You can now actually build a model over the course of weeks and then have that model in market and be continuously updating it with sales figures and investment figures across different marketing channels, not just media.
The fact that that’s now democratized is a huge win for brands who aren’t spending $10 million plus in their advertising and marketing efforts. We’ve actually had success modeling out the impact of a campaign that was in the low six figures for an extremely well-known national client, a Fortune 5 client that was really looking to drill down for one of their subsidiaries and understand what the impact was of their spend so that they could then scale it out further, but didn’t know where to scale it.
To be able to show this channel versus this channel versus the third channel, and this was the relative impact and this is how they all work together – which is another important element – in a way where they spent five figures to have that analysis and had it done in less than eight weeks is a very powerful example of how that works best.
ROB: It certainly seems democratizing not only for the brand, but also on even the agency side, because this sort of tooling sounds like the thing that you had to be in a holding company agency at some point, or a very large brand or house of brands, to even consider having access to.
BILL: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I grew up in that space, working with Nestlé, working in a large holding company for whom I still have a lot of heart and love, and that was the case. It was also the case back then that you really needed to be in part of one of those infrastructures in order to get strong rates for your brand. That’s shifted now as so much of our media inventory has become biddable. The standards around how we negotiate, how we manage media for clients, have changed.
It really is a golden age for the small- to medium-sized brand or marketer, the growing marketer or brand, to get into the marketplace and to be a meaningful player from Day 1 and not feel like you’re being outgunned by these massive organizations. It’s very exciting for us.
ROB: Indeed. Let’s pull on that origin story thread for a moment here, Bill. How did you go from that Nestlé, that holding company agency world, and decide to jump off the cliff and start Exverus?
BILL: This is always an interesting question to answer because there was no real one point where it all happened, which is usually the case for most agencies. It happened very organically. I had decided to shift from going full-time, working in one space, to freelancing and to working as a consultant, maybe 10 years ago.
As I was doing that, within about three or four months of doing that, I got a phone call from one of my favorite people on Earth, a client of mine from Nestlé, who said, “Hey, I’m over at Clif Bar now. We’re really shaping up how we look at media and advertising across our brands. Would you be interested in taking a stab at essentially being a one-person media agency for Clif Bar?” Of course, in my mind I was thinking “there’s no possible way I could do that,” and my mouth was somehow saying, “Yes, I’ll give it a shot.” [laughs]
That began a really wonderful relationship with Clif Bar, and that relationship grew as their investments grew and their need to grow new brands and new product formats grew. Between them and Creative Artist Agency (CAA) and their extremely wonderful, award-winning marketing team, which is now known as Observatory, I think they hit a point where the amount of work was too much for one person plus a few helpers on the side to handle.
We had a lot of built-in credibility, working with an organization that’s probably over a billion dollars in sales annually in Clif Bar, and CAA, which is the world’s best-known talent agency from a marketing standpoint. Impeccable reputation. So there was a lot of built-in credibility. There was new demand. We just made the decision – I still remember my Head of Operations saying, “We have to go for it,” driving to a soccer match one Wednesday night. And thus Exverus was born. We said “we’re really going to give this a go” about five and a half years ago now.
ROB: Wow. Congrats. A lot of companies don’t even make it that far. You’ve got a team around you now, and it feels probably pretty real.
I think the timing that a firm starts always confers some advantages and disadvantages. Your firm started around I guess 2012-2014, depending on where you are in that slow-motion window that you referred to; in performance marketing, that’s an interesting time within the evolution of the different channels. How do you think that timing informed how you attacked the market?
BILL: It did a few things. At a macroeconomic level, I think unfortunately it created a scarcity mindset because we had just gone through a massive crash in 2008. By the time I really started, there was no very clear boom and very clear recovery happening. That was a more recent thing. So there was a bit of a scarcity mindset, which took a long time to work out of and to shift into more that abundance mindset. I think that can keep you conservative, which is a good thing sometimes, in some years. In some years that holds you back. So from a macro standpoint, that’s how the timing maybe helped and maybe slowed things down over time.
As I think, too, about where the industry was, really from Day 1, it reaffirmed that even though it was much more straightforward to start a media agency and to focus on digital channels – there was much more access; it was a much more equitable system with a lot less in the way in terms of gatekeepers like there are with some traditional media – even though it was a little bit more challenging to have those other mediums in place, being media-neutral and being able to offer all media, even if we were still digital-first, was a really smart strategic decision.
As the rise of performance media has come in, and now for many organizations performance media has overtaken brand media by multiple times over – knowing that that trend was happening and having a strategy and a perspective of neutrality really helped us a lot. It helped us to build more trust-based relationships with our clients because we weren’t trying to push them into the latest fad or the latest channel or the latest tactic for its own sake. We were always trying to do that based off of what was best for their business, what was best to grow their brand. That helps build trust rather than saying “We’re focused in this particular area which is hot right now.”
So I think that can be great to be a particular specialist, even within the specialty of paid media, but I think that our timing really reaffirmed our strategy and our approach to market, and it’s one that’s seen us continue to grow and be successful into and beyond 2021.
ROB: For sure. It’s an interesting time. You got to start past the social for the sake of social, social as the source of infinite free growth, but also social as the bucket of infinite budget without accountability. It’s interesting you mentioned the gatekeepers. It’s almost easy to forget the times when if you wanted to manage let’s say your Facebook ads, there were only a handful of companies you could talk to about that.
BILL: That’s right.
ROB: That’s a whole different world.
BILL: And to see how much – at one point I was doing the Facebook ads, 9 or 10 years ago, and it was exhausting keeping up with the changes. Every three months, something minor would change that you used daily, and every six months it seemed like they were completely renovating and revamping the entire process. It was so funny to see that TV couldn’t change fast enough, print certainly couldn’t change fast enough, and here you had social and other channels that were changing so fast that it was almost impossible to keep up with them. It was certainly an interesting time to start things up.
ROB: A friend of mine used to work for one of those vendors. They had to keep up with all the changes, and they used to call every Tuesday “new bug Tuesday,” because there would be something new they had to go out and fix. You probably had to deal with the other end of that stick.
BILL: That’s right.
ROB: Bill, as you reflect on the journey so far with Exverus, what are some lessons you’ve learned along the way that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting clean, from scratch?
BILL: Things that I would do differently. I think that we were never slow to meet our clients’ needs, but we were sometimes slow to say, “This is a macro trend and we should have a whole staff around it.” One of the examples is more performance-based media.
The reason I say that is because we have plenty of team members, particularly today, who are world-class experts in performance, but a few years ago we kind of missed the boat a little bit because we thought that by satisfying our clients’ immediate needs and performance, we were doing our jobs. What I missed was that this was a strategic exercise. There needed to be a strategic team of people that were focused in the performance space.
One of the reasons why was that it wasn’t that they needed to have a particular technical skillset; in many cases we’re talking about the same media channels that can be used for very different purposes, like search, like social, like digital video and digital display. But what we were doing was missing the mindset. Those folks who really excel in performance have a completely different mindset and approach to how they manage media and how they manage client relationships to get to specific results. There’s plenty of reasons for that, which all make sense. But missing that mindset was number one in terms of what we could’ve done better, going back probably 3-5 years ago.
The other thing, too, is I think really understanding the business and the business side of being an agency leader. The ups and downs are not communicated to you when you are working at an agency in a way that’s terribly transparent, or frankly often necessary. You’re usually hearing the very big undulations of the waves. “Things are amazing. We won this huge account” or “Things aren’t great and we need to have layoffs.” Those are the types of things you’re hearing. What you don’t realize is that as an agency owner, things are up and down on an hourly basis, some days on a quarter-hourly basis.
There is a mindset and there is a psychological helmet that you need to put on to be able to manage that in the context of doing all of the wonderful work that your clients are contracting you to do. I think that is one thing that I certainly didn’t know about, and that’s something that lives alongside what all business owners learn, which is that you’re responsible now for every element of the business.
I was ready to do the accounting. That’s easy. [laughs] I went to an accounting school for college. But it was the psychological aspect of being in our business and being comfortable with the way that our business works that, if you’re someone without a very risk-tolerant mindset, might be a bit jarring.
ROB: How do you process that over time? I know certainly initially, a lot of your team, you feel like you can’t tell them a lot of the gusts. Sometimes they’ll surprise you and they’ll have a great solution, and sometimes they won’t know what the heck to do and you might just freak them out a little bit. How do you think about processing, learning some of these blind spots, those shifts that we all have to make?
BILL: That’s a great question. From my standpoint, we try to be as transparent as possible with our team. Today we actually just had our quarterly state of the union. This time we didn’t go into as much detail as normal, but we try to be transparent. “This is what’s going on. This is where we’re struggling. We’re struggling to fill this particular role. Do you have any solutions? Do you think you might be able to help? Or if nothing else, please know that we’re working on it still, because we know that’s had an impact on some people’s workloads.”
We’ll be very forthright with everything that we can. Without being obligated to or sharing specific numbers financially, we will share where we are in terms of reaching our goals and what it means to reach our goals. Is it just profit for the sake of profit? Or does profit open up new doors and new opportunities to all of us for strategic partnerships? That’s a very different conversation, and it’s one that I think our team appreciates hearing.
One great piece of advice that I got during COVID was actually from Simon Sinek, Start with Why, very famous guy. Incredibly intelligent. Everyone knows his public persona. He’s a family friend; he’s been good friends with my wife for over a decade.
We were chatting about there are certain things that we just don’t know what to do and how to move forward in COVID, and he said, “Put it on your team. Share it with your team. Do that in a thoughtful way and say, ‘I don’t know the answer to this. I’m not going to pretend that I’m the person who has all the answers all the time, and I’d love to hear what your input is and what your feedback or solutions are.’ You’ll be surprised as to what you get back. Your team isn’t necessarily thinking about your business all day long, but they are working in it, and they are people that you hire specifically for their intelligence. So see if that helps.” And it really did.
I also think it made for more open dialogue, which in today’s age of transparency is really valued by employees and by myself and the rest of the leadership team.
ROB: All such really good points in there. Reminds me of a very recent experience where for a long time, I had been suggesting a certain sort of client engagement model. I tried to communicate why, but I maybe wasn’t really getting my point across.
In a totally different conversation, I expressed a particular business goal in terms of margin – and to your point about profit margin, the key of telling people where that goes and what that gets us when you’re growing – you need cash just to be in cash reserves. You need to have good financial cushion on the business. You need to invest in growth. You need all those things. Helping them know why you need profit helps instead of just thinking you should break even and everybody should take all the cash out.
But I shared a particular goal in terms of profit margin, and I had somebody super brilliant on my team who said, “Oh, why don’t we engage more in this model?” It was exactly pretty close to what I had suggested before, but without the full picture and the rationale and the transparency, it was just hanging empty. And everybody does things better when they think it’s their idea, and that’s okay. I don’t have any problem with that. So really good point.
BILL: From your standpoint, where do you feel the line is in terms of transparency, in terms of how you communicate with team members?
ROB: That’s a great question that I’m still learning. I have typically been a tremendously private person on these sorts of things, and over the past year I engaged with a business coach about a year ago who came recommended by people who have billion-dollar companies. That was good enough for me, and I could still afford them. He’s just continued to push me on the value of what I’ll get by sharing more with the team.
Where that stands for us right now, to be real specific about it, at an exec team level, we’re talking about – in a services organization, on our services side, we’re talking about revenue per employee. We’re talking about target profit margin. We’re talking about what that actually looks like. And that’s uncomfortable for me. I could regret it. I could learn something from it. But it’s going in the right direction.
BILL: That’s great. I think we’ve probably had a very similar experience. I may not dig into some of the KPIs that you do quite as in-depth, but sharing that information can be liberating when it’s done properly, and it can show a lot of faith in the team. For me it was a great learning experience, and it was a great moment of growth starting to share that information.
ROB: I’m glad to hear and gain some comfort. The worst story we ever had on here about somebody sharing stuff was someone who had an employee suck out $300,000 in payroll taxes that they were personally liable for, and they had to drive ahead and build the business and dig their way out. But that’s a different lesson to be learned.
BILL: Yes, and I don’t necessarily think we should be giving access to the finances to everyone. [laughs]
ROB: Totally agree. Bill, when people want to track you down and track down Exverus, where should they go to find you?
BILL: Probably the best place for Exverus is our website. It’s www.exverus.com. For me, I can be found on LinkedIn. I’m Bill Durrant with two R’s. No relation to Kevin. I’m pretty easy to track down if you add “Exverus” to the end of that in the search queue.
ROB: That’s good. It’s good to know we can’t track down KD through you. We’ll have to find our own way.
BILL: Just want to set expectations.
ROB: [laughs] Thank you so much, Bill. Congratulations to everything you and Exverus have accomplished so far, and I wish you the best.
BILL: Appreciate it. Thanks, Rob.
ROB: Take care. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
- Maybe ’85. Take a 26-year-old art director who loves her work. Put her in a big agency where she is surrounded by middle-aged white guys. Strangle the agency’s creative work with politics and bureaucratic overhead. Ask a simple question, “How long can this last?” Sue Kruskopf’s answer? When both the employer’s and her futures looked bleak, it was time for change.
In 1988, Sue and the copywriter she worked with started KC Truth, with a focus on truth, simplifying the complex, and serving clients by –
- getting to that core truth about their businesses,
- stripping away all the B.S., and
- making the message as simple as possible for target audiences.
Sue says, “Simplifying things is always a lot more difficult than complicating things.” Her ideal client website is one the communicates what the company does and why they are different from everyone else . . . and does that in the shortest (simplest) way possible, which is both an art and a science.
The large companies KC Truth works with have multiple siloed business units. Sue says the way to get to a company’s “truth,” align the organization and build a strong strategy is to get everybody in the same room and listen to what they all say. When all the various departments – marketing, sales, engineering, researchers – see their part in creating the truth, they become invested in the collective work that follows.
After that, Sue believes, “Great strategy requires great creative.” Maintaining the creative resources of a world-class agency is critical to KC Truth’s work with such big, complex clients as Cargill, 3M, and some Minneapolis-based global companies. That might be a challenge. However, KC Truth belongs to a strong network of independent agencies, AMIN, which means they “can collectively buy all the tools we need.”
Sue says that building strong relationships, hiring the best people, the smartest people (smarter than you are), and treating people as you would want them to treat you are a big part her agency’s success. She supports treating clients with respect, “not trying to shove ideas down a clients throat,” and “walking hand in hand down the same path together.”
Sue can be reached on her agency’s website at https://kctruth.com/.
Transcript Below:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Sue Kruskopf, CEO at KC Truth, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Welcome to the podcast, Sue.
SUE: Thank you. Good to be here, Rob.
ROB: It’s wonderful to have you on. I’m eager for all that you have to share. Why don’t you start off by telling us about KC Truth and where the firm excels?
SUE: Thank you. First of all, we excel in longevity. We’ve been around since 1988, which in advertising years is about a million years I think, pretty much, in this day and age. We’ve always believed at our core, our mission has always been to rid the world of B.S. and get at the core truth that companies stand for. As we all know, in this day and age, truth is more important than ever before. So, I’m glad that we have stuck to our guns and had this in the foundation of our business for over 35 years, since way back in the day.
ROB: Truth certainly has a habit of falling in and out of fashion, so the longevity there is certainly admirable. If we can drill down a level, if there is a typical type of client, type of engagement – obviously everyone’s a little bit different, but what does a median client, median scope of work look like for you all?
SUE: One of the things our clients tell us is we’ve always been really good at simplifying the complex. I think anybody in our business knows that feeling when a client comes in and you’ve looked at their website 10 times and can’t quite figure out what it is they do exactly, or the word “solutions” is in there too many times or whatever else. We’re really, really good at – Truth is all about getting to that core truth about their business and stripping away all the B.S. and getting it down to the simplest thing we can determine based on the audiences we’re trying to reach.
Typically, we have a lot of big, more complex businesses like Cargill, 3M, a couple global companies that are based here in Minneapolis. I’d say that’s our core sweet spot. We’ve had experience that runs the gamut across all kinds of industries, but at this point that’s really where so much of our growth has come. Simplifying things is always a lot more difficult than complicating things, that’s for sure.
ROB: Absolutely. It’s interesting that you mention websites, because of course, that wasn’t really a thing when KC Truth started. It strikes me that the website creates a space, whereas in an advertisement of some sort – print or even billboards, etc. – you’re kind of limited in what you can say. The website has more room. It has unlimited room, which may be a curse in some cases. But it almost seems like there is a set of truths that you can put onto a website that may encompass everything you’re trying to communicate elsewhere. How does that track from the early days of the firm?
SUE: Obviously, we started back in those early days when there wasn’t any of that. But I come from the creative side of things, and I always felt there was nothing better than a great creative brief that you could really get in and dig into and you understood there was a really strong strategy there. No matter what it was, back in the day we’d always go, if you don’t have great strategy, you don’t have great creative. That’s really been the basis of what we’ve done for all of these years.
I would say even on websites, I still want to go to a website of one of our clients and be able to understand what it is that they do and why they’re different from anybody else. I still think that’s what people are looking for in the shortest way possible. There’s an art and a science to that, that’s for sure.
ROB: You take a client like 3M or – I don’t know if you work with them at all, but Metron – people may have heard the name, but it’s a very abstract thing. It’s kind of like the myth of the blind men touching the elephant and everyone has a different experience of what that elephant is depending on if you felt the elephant’s trunk or tail or leg. It’s a different thing.
How do you think about taking something like 3M and making it tangible and helping those individual places where it really does touch people’s lives make sense rather than just being a house of brands or of chemicals or products?
SUE: I think anybody out there in the B2B world knows that in most big companies like Cargill or 3M, there are multiple different business units within each one of these organizations. One of the things that we believe in, and it’s part of our foundation and our process, is that finding the truth involves getting people in a room from all different parts of the company. For example, when we work on a product within 3M, we want to get in not only the marketing and sales people, but the engineers, the researchers, the product people, getting everybody in a room to really understand the totality of the business.
What’s interesting is, especially in this day and age when people are so siloed into their specific disciplines, it’s amazing how much alignment comes from getting everybody in a room and hearing what others have to say. That’s something that we do and we believe in. You have to hear all sides of things. That helps us create a strong strategy, because everybody has been heard. So when we come back with a strategy, the engineers have played a part in it, besides the marketing people, and the salespeople had a part in it.
Everybody sees themselves in it in some way, and that’s really the magic of what we do with finding the truth. Everyone has been a part of creating that truth, so they all have a share in the collective work when it comes back. They see themselves in it, and I think that’s one of the things that we’ve found really works. You’re not trying to shove ideas down a client’s throat or anything like that; you’re all walking hand in hand down the same path together.
ROB: Right. That’s a very meaningful approach and process. If we rewind the clock a little bit, Sue, what led you to start KC Truth in the first place and take that leap? You mentioned coming from a creative background.
SUE: Yeah, I was a frustrated art director. I was at a big agency in Minneapolis at 26 years old, and I just didn’t dig the politics. The politics and all that got so much in the way of doing the work, for one thing, and it was really frustrating to me. I felt like there were way too many people involved. I think we used the term once that there were a lot of brilliant minds within this organization surrounded by a lead shield. You couldn’t get any good ideas out of the company. That was one thing.
The second thing was I was 26 years old and all I saw around me were – I hate to say it, but middle-aged white guys. I thought, my goodness. There were no women. This was back in 1984-85, and there were no women that were middle-aged. There was one woman and a few account people, but there certainly weren’t any creatives that were older. I thought, “Wow, I don’t know if this business is going to have a very long life. I’d better find a way to ensure a long career,” because I loved what I did.
So my copywriter partner and I – we weren’t making any money at the time anyway. I don’t even remember, but it was an amount of money that we thought, “All we need is a few more $5,000 projects and we’re going to be golden.” We literally quit, and we were having a good time doing a bunch of freelance. Brick by brick, things just kept growing.
We went out of business a couple times. I’ll proudly say that because I think that you learn more from your failures than your successes. We thought the account people could run the business because they were in charge of numbers and we were just going to do creative. Well, that was a false thing to believe. [laughs] All of a sudden we had no money left for rent or anything else, so I figured, “I’d better figure out the business side of this, too.”
It was just lessons learned all along the way, and I think that’s why perseverance and grit are probably at my soul. When you pick yourself up a few times and dust off the ashes, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? Next time around. So that’s what happened, and we just kept going back at it. Lucky to be here today, that’s for sure.
ROB: It’s quite a dance, that balance not only of personal transformation – which is ongoing – but also, when you look at when you started the business, of repeated reinvention. I mean, there’s just been wave after wave after wave of change in the market that, if you didn’t adjust to it, you were going to be a dinosaur.
SUE: Oh, for sure.
ROB: Even in TV advertising. I haven’t talked to anybody about this on the podcast – would love to find them – who didn’t survive the jump from broadcast to cable, much less websites, much less social, much less video and the ubiquity of video now. How have you navigated the necessary reinvention to keep the firm relevant?
SUE: Yeah, how many times have we heard that TV spots are dead and all that? Went through that probably 10 different times throughout the years. I have always tried to stay ahead of the curve in everything. I’m a very curious person. It’s one of our values at my company. I always believe you’ve got to be ahead of the game – and you’re right, Rob; that’s really what has kept us relevant for so long.
Part of that is we belong to a network of independent agencies. There are many networks, I know, like this that agencies belong to. Ours is a really strong one called AMIN. It has helped us because we can collectively buy all the tools we need. Honestly, this is where I really sound like “OK, Boomer,” but back in the day, all we had when John and I started out was markers and sketchpads we stole from the art department at the agency. [laughs] Then we had the first Mac, that little shoebox Mac. That was a huge thing going forward.
It was so much art back then, and now it’s art and science. I still think it’s more science sometimes than art. But we’ve had to stay ahead of the science game now, too. We do have all these data and media tools that really, really help us be accountable for our clients’ success. I honestly think if you don’t have that as a creative-driven shop, if you’re not proving results all the time and constantly measuring and optimizing, then you’re not going to be in business, because clients and CMOs more and more are held accountable for that.
We have always stayed ahead of the game to make sure that we have the resources of a world-class agency at our fingertips so we can work with big global clients. That’s like 35 years in a nutshell, but it really is the truth. I think that’s one part of it, and I think a lot of it is you really appreciate how important relationships are and building relationships and all that. That’s another huge part of that.
And also hiring really good people. I always do what my dad told me, which is “hire people smarter than you.” That’s what I’ve always believed in. That and “treat people as you want to be treated yourself.” I’ve always loved that we have a great culture and really good people. That’s core to being a good agency.
ROB: It’s certainly a fear some people have, walking in the door of really any independent business. You might have a bad boss in a big company, but within an independent firm, you could really be exposed to some person’s full crazy. What a privilege it is when you can be a good place to work, even for a part of somebody’s career, for that season for work.
SUE: I totally believe in that. I totally believe in finding not the best skillset, but the best mindset. It’s not who they are maybe today, but who I see the potential in the future being from that person. We’ve had a lot of people stick around because we’ve let them evolve into the position that they feel most comfortable in. Somebody that started out as an account person decided she was better doing the agency work, and now she’s Director of Business Operations for us, for example.
So, I always think you have to watch where people excel and where they’re finding their passion and their happiness and try to nurture that as much as you can. On the flipside of that, I also think it’s about making sure people don’t get too comfortable. You always want to make sure that people are continually curious and trying to do better and be better. I think that’s another side of the coin, too.
ROB: Just to take a snapshot at the moment of where we are right now, if you have a new client, a new total brand messaging package or a new campaign that’s pushing out into the world, where are all the places that you are seeing that push into now? Where are you having to manage and have your team ensure that they’re aligning that message to each place? What does it look like?
SUE: It’s crazy the amount of channels that we work in. You name it, from LinkedIn to TikTok. You have to look at every single channel as a place where a message might play, all depending on what’s appropriate for that audience. We’re like 100% digital right now. I don’t even know that we’ve done anything traditional, which is kind of ironic, in a long time. Video is the new TV, there’s no question about it.
We don’t have one niche or whatever, one type of thing. I would just say what we’re good at is being a chameleon; we can adapt to whatever channels those are to reach people. A lot of times with the audiences we work with, it’s the long tail. They might be chief technical officers, and how we find them and serve them programmatic media, for example, so we’re following them where they live. There’s all kinds of things like that. Sometimes it’s a channel, sometimes it’s following that person to see where they consume media and following them along their journey.
There’s just so many right now. Believe me, our media people can speak way more on this than I can. [laughs] I had a client say she feels like she’s got a firehose pointing at her all the time, trying to figure out what everything is, and I think that’s true. I think clients really need help understanding where they’re going to spend their money and get the most bang for their buck. There’s so many choices out there, and you need somebody that can help you wade through that and find the right audience at the right time, for sure.
ROB: I have an unsubstantiated but sneaking suspicion that out-of-home digital billboards are going to be more than they are now.
SUE: Interesting.
ROB: I don’t know if you’re seeing anything yet. I know some companies now that are doing – you see online people talk about account-based marketing, like Terminus and all that sort of thing, and people looking at buying billboards near the headquarters of the client they’re going after.
SUE: Oh yeah, I can totally see it. Especially digital, obviously. That would make a lot of sense. Maybe all the old school will come back in all these new forms, like it sort of seems like it is. Could be, Rob. You predicted it here first. [laughs]
ROB: I’m just curious. I may enjoy those sorts of things more than some people. It may just be my own interest there. We’re in Atlanta, and MailChimp is of course based here. MailChimp had this habit – they’re wonderful people, but they’re also tremendously competitive and cutthroat in certain ways. They would paint murals on buildings across from their competitors of nothing more than their little chimp mascot winking. It didn’t say MailChimp. It didn’t say anything.
SUE: That’s great. That’s a super smart idea, that’s for sure. It all comes down to the art, right? Art and science. It’s all art, too. That’s a brilliant strategy that they have.
ROB: Sue, you mentioned earlier some lessons learned. You’ve certainly survived through probably a number of them. What are some things you have learned along the way of building KC Truth that you might do differently, that you learned from or suggest someone else learns from it?
SUE: I can say what I’ve learned from, which is I don’t take no for an answer very well. That’s for sure. That’s probably my number one thing that I do.
I’d say what I’ve learned is in the early days, just to learn, I used to call up the head of another agency and tell them I really respected them and ask if they’d go to lunch with me or go have coffee with me. I learned so much from listening to them. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was an art director trying to start an agency.
When I think back on those days, I think, oh my gosh, I gained so much from going to talk to people. I wish I would’ve kept that up more throughout my life. Now I learn so much from the people that I work with and all that, but I think getting knowledge from other people that are older than me was always really smart. I do think in our business, there’s ageism that goes on, in my opinion. There aren’t a lot of people that are older in the business as much anymore, and I think they have so much to offer. I would always encourage people to have lunch more often with people with wisdom, because I think you can learn a lot from that. that’s one of the things I’d do differently.
Also, I wish I would’ve been a little humbler at the beginning, because I thought I was pretty cool having my own agency at 28. You can only imagine. I just think, God, sometimes I just wasn’t very humble. That kind of bugs me now when I think back on it. Humility I think is key in everything. Believe me, I’ve been slapped down so many times in these years. You’ve always got to be humble.
I think I learned early on, but really practiced it later, hire the best you can at every single level in your company, in every single discipline, and make sure that you aren’t being complacent and resting on your laurels ever, ever, ever, because you never can. That is for sure. You can never sit back and go, “I’ve got it made now.” It’s like, nope. The minute you do, something’s going to come along and slap you upside the face. That’s not going to happen.
Gosh, I don’t know. Those are some things that come to mind when I’m thinking about it right now.
ROB: Sure. How do you calibrate, then? There are times to accelerate the business and there are times to not overheat your ambitions of growth. How do you think about calibrating well when you need to chase versus when you need to sit on it?
SUE: I know, right? Because we’re not a huge company, and I never, ever – every agency has been through layoffs; we’ve been through very few. I can think of a handful of people we’ve had to lay off in all these years. Financially, I try to run the company very conservatively. But I’m also making sure that we’ve never, ever been a sweatshop. I said by the time my kids were six and eight, which was a long time ago, I was going to be home after school with my kids. I’ve always believed in having that work-life balance.
It’s walking a fine line, like you said, calibrating, making sure people have lives. I believe that’s where you get pure inspiration, from your personal life. You don’t get your inspiration from work. You get your inspiration from when you’re not working and your brain can wander.
It’s a very fine dance, honestly, and I wish I had an exact answer for you of how I calibrate. But I have a certain gut feeling about things sometimes. Sometimes I rely on numbers. It’s all a combination of touch-and-feel and trying to figure it out, and listening and taking advice. I’ve got a really good team of people I work with, and I love to discuss things and talk about things. I always rely on other people’s opinions. That makes me smarter.
Nothing concrete there, Rob. It’s just a touch-and-feel, and history. You always learn from what you’ve done in the past and failed or done well. It’s a constant balancing act, like you say. It’s balanced by all those different things we just talked about.
ROB: I think at the same time, though, you probably have some knowledge. You probably know almost more than you would ever think to give yourself credit for, because you’ve learned humility over time. If you were talking to someone who’s just building, setting up, thinking they’re going to grow an agency – you mentioned you can be on the conservative side, but do you have any rules or recommendations for someone to set up financially? Like cash reserves, practice – I don’t know. Do you have any guideposts you use that you think someone would do really well to listen to if they were earlier in their journey?
SUE: Yeah. I’d start out really small. It takes a lot more money to start an agency today. When it was just – I hate to say it – markers and pens, sketchpads, and the first Mac, that’s way cheaper than what you need today. Today, you need more people. The people that are good at analyzing data, media people. You really do need – if you don’t have them within your company, you need to have partnerships with outside resources that can help you. Because clients are going to hold you accountable. It’s not just about it’s a good idea; it’s got to work. Ultimately, it has to work.
I think the investment in people is the biggest expense today, more than anything else. So I think you do have to have a strong financial base to be able to have the people that can really hit the ground running. I think that’s it more than anything else. It’s not like it was, where just an art director and a copywriter could come up with some ads and go sell them to somebody. [laughs] That was easy. That was way easier. All the agencies that started back when I did – none of them are around anymore that started at the same time. You’ve got to have the really smart people or the competition is just too fierce.
ROB: Sue, it’s a good journey so far. What is next for you and for KC Truth that you’re excited about? What should we be looking for?
SUE: Oh, my goodness. As you’ve heard from probably every person you talk to, getting through this past year is like a historical milestone. Now we’re all just going through the headlines about the turnover tsunami. We’ve experienced some of that. Our clients have experienced some of that. That’s a place we’ve never been before, so that’s a whole other deal.
But I have to say, we had our first in-house meeting at the Truth Bar downstairs at our place with our clients. I think people were genuinely glad to see each other in person again. It felt so natural and so good. I just think we’ve missed relationships, and I’m looking forward to – that’s the hardest thing for me, feeling like I can’t build on these relationships with the people I’d like to see and hear what’s going on.
Now I think we’re in for a whole renewal of how important it is to build relationships in our business. Our clients need to trust us and know what we’re going to do is going to work, so you need to have a good relationship. And that’s where trust comes, out of good relationships. We all need to get back to that basic stuff. Face time not on FaceTime, but face time face-to-face, I think is what’s key. I don’t believe that as an industry, we can live on Zoom calls all the time. It’s just not possible. It’s not sustainable.
That’s what I’d say, Rob. That’s where my head is.
ROB: Did you have any hesitancy from any of your clients, or were they like caged animals ready to come out and hang?
SUE: They had to see if it was okay with their corporate people, to see if they were allowed to. There were a few other hoops, maybe, to get through. But no, not so far. We’ve only had one, but we’re going to be back to work a couple days a week soon. I think people are feeling – they really want to be back, I think. With flexibility and all that sort of thing, it’s going to be good times, I think, again.
ROB: It’s certainly new times. We brought in our team from all over the country – we’ve been hiring distributed over the past year. We started off wanting to have a team retreat, and then we realized we still had a lot of our clients local, so we invited our clients out to dinner. Everybody wanted to get out. I don’t think I had anybody who said, “No, because I’m being cautious.” For the most part they either had shots or never wanted one, one or the other, and they were ready to come out and play. Our team was all vaccinated up.
SUE: Same. Hands off the handlebars. That’s it, for sure.
ROB: Wonderful. Sue, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for sharing your experience. I think we would all aspire to build such an enduring firm that continues to be relevant well after the initial playbook was probably in the trash and burned up.
SUE: Oh yes, for sure. You should’ve seen that first portfolio. That was something, way back in the day. [laughs]
ROB: You kind of wish you could frame it somewhere in the office now.
SUE: It’s frightening, it’s frightening. Well, thank you so much, Rob. I really appreciate that. Let’s just hope we continue to move ahead in that way.
ROB: Sounds good. Thank you so much, Sue.
SUE: Thank you. Bye.
ROB: Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Beth Trejo is CEO at Chatterkick, a digital marketing agency that focuses on using social media platforms to connect businesses in a “real way” with their customers and drive to their businesses forward. Beth warns social media is complex. Time is everything on social and companies do not have the luxury of crafting content and sending it through committee approval processes. She cites studies that show that “about 80% of all businesses are not responding to their social media messages” – they only look at Facebook Messenger, skip the other places messages come in, and potentially miss out on big opportunities.
Beth believes that many companies cannot effectively manage social media internally. They may not have the time to handle the volume of content needed to build relationships. Coordinating messages across the range of platforms customers may be using adds to the challenge. In addition, businesses often do not realize that these platforms are communication channels and can used for far more than just advertising and promotion.
Beth says, “It’s a lot of time to manage a social account. And if you have seven channels and lots of content going out, that’s a big job.” Chatterkick’s role is to help clients forge strong social media bonds and execute outreach expansion strategies. These “real connections” help companies:
- build employee and customer loyalty
- gain competitive advantages
- understand and clarify what return on investment can really mean to them.
Beth explains how important it is to get employees of a company to share their employers’ content. Things that can impact employees “sharing” include:
- Are they proud of how the company portrays itself online as a business? Do they like the company’s website? Do they like the content? (Put out content that makes them proud.)
- Do they even know the content went out? (Tell them what is going out, when, and where and remind employees to share it if it is something they care about. Make it easy for them to share.)
- Do they understand the underlying technology? If they share something, who it will go to? How will they do it? What will they say? What should they say? (They may need some training.)
- Do they feel “authentic” in their brand amplification conversations? (Chatterkick believes that authentic content and real photos are what work on social platforms)
Beth believes a strong indicator of employee pride in their company and what it is doing is when they share the company’s social media content, not only with potential clients, but also with their friends and families. She has also found social media platforms to be a cost-effective way to recruit new employees – and “it’s not all just a LinkedIn game.” The biggest thing to think about when recruiting is not compensation, but the value proposition. Potential recruits are more responsive when presented with visual and digital representations of the company’s culture.” Even subtle differences can make jobs “stickier.”
Chatterkick had elements of distributed work long before Covid. Beth says remote work takes “constant work,” open dialogue, and a lot of thought about team needs, removing communication barriers, and preventing communication overload. These needs will change, depending on the teams involved, client needs, and community impacts.
Beth can be found on her agency’s website at: chatterkick.com or by email at: beth@chatterkick.com
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Beth Trejo, CEO at Chatterkick based in Sioux City, Iowa. Welcome to the podcast.
BETH: Thank you so much. Great to have a conversation with you today.
ROB: It’s great to have you here. Why don’t you start off by introducing Chatterkick and what areas of excellence the firm focuses on?
BETH: Yeah, I’d be happy to. Chatterkick was started 9 years ago. We really saw the need to help connect our business partners with real humans on the other end of logos. We use channels and platforms that are relevant, which happen to be social media, and we believe the power of those connections can help drive business forward. Some of our partners use us to build loyalty on behalf of their employees or their customers; other times, they use our support to help gain competitive advantages or really understand and clarify what return on investment can really mean to them.
We are often categorized as a digital marketing agency, which we definitely fit into that category, but really focus on the social media platforms and how they can impact business.
ROB: Got it. It might help to dig into a client as an example, because it sounds like you are perhaps more focused on the conversation aspect of social rather than the broadcast side. I might not have that quite right. Can you get us into what this might look like with a client?
BETH: Oftentimes we find that businesses don’t have the time or the expertise to handle social media internally. We started on that premise and still fulfill many of those needs today. A business will come to us and say, “Hey, we need support. We’re just posting every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, and that’s the extent of what we’re doing on social.” So, we help them develop a strategy and then execute the strategy to form those bonds from two-way communication as well as with advertising, marketing.
We’re seeing a ton of digital recruitment need right now. These platforms are communication channels, and I think sometimes we forget about that as business owners. There’s a lot of pushing of ads and promotion out there, and that oftentimes does work. But there is so much more that can be had on these platforms, and that’s where we see an opportunity for our business partners to get ahead.
ROB: That’s a great point to push in on, that substitutionary effect of content and objectives focusing more on maybe recruitment than some traditional messaging. How are clients looking at that? Is that an easier ROI for them to get their heads wrapped around, or is it just different?
BETH: I think it sometimes is easier. It really depends. There’s two things we see from return on employee engagement or digital recruitment strategies. The easiest one is “I was spending XYZ a year in the traditional ways to acquire new candidates, and I was able to save money (XYZ percentage) using some of these social tools.” Sometimes it’s just as easy and simple as that.
When it comes to employee engagement, it’s very similar to how you would measure your customer engagement on these platforms. The most manual and probably painful tracking way is to literally tag and count, tally up, who is engaging, how much they’re engaging, and digitally what does that presence look like with your team and your colleagues. Then there are other softwares and tools we can use to speed up that tracking process.
But ultimately, that’s where we see the businesses have some of the most success, because your employees are already connected to your customers. If they’re sharing your content, even if it is bleeding out to their friends and family, that’s how you know you have really proud employees that care about what you’re doing. They want to spread the word personally just as much as professionally.
ROB: That’s an excellent point. It can be such a tricky thing to thread because people really are often proud of the work that they do but can also feel inauthentic to an extent. We just had a team retreat, and one of my team’s suggestions – certainly not mine – was that the team could amplify our social content. But it also feels awkward to ask them to do that.
How do you think about helping employees to feel authentic in their brand amplification conversations?
BETH: That’s a really good question. You never want to force people to do it. I think there is a fine line. I see a lot of businesses try to give incentives or find ways to gamify that, and I do think the concept of gamifying that is interesting. I’ve seen it work. But if you want to stay authentic, the best way to do it is put content out there that maybe different business units or different teams are really proud of.
A lot of the hesitation when it comes to why your employees aren’t sharing your content, from what we’ve found, is technical. Some people are still really scared and they don’t know how to do some of the technical things on these platforms. They don’t know, if they share it, who it will go to. How will they do it? What will they say? What should they say? If you have people that are naturally not digital natives, there may be some learning. That’s the biggest barrier they’re having.
The other barrier we see is they just aren’t proud of how you portray yourself online as a business. Ask your employees: Do they like your website? Do they like the content you’re putting on social? If there’s a big gap, chances are they’re not going to share it.
Then the other thing is a lot of people miss things in your content. It’s not a matter of they don’t want to; it’s just they didn’t know it went out. There’s eight different platforms they’re following; they’re not thinking about searching you out. So, you need to make it extremely easy for them, even if it’s as simple as sending it out in your update, like, “This is the content that’s going out this week. It’s important to us because of this.” Maybe you hit up your Slack channel and say, “Hey, this post just went out. If this is something you care about, please share it.” Just little reminders make the biggest difference.
ROB: That nudge there certainly seems helpful. When we’re talking about recruitment, I’ve seen billboards for restaurant jobs; I’ve seen online ads for executive jobs. Is there a sweet spot for you? Is it more in a B2B context, white collar? Is it consumer and retail and that sort of thing?
BETH: I think the beauty of it is we’re doing everything from filling food processing manufacturing jobs to high level white collar leadership positions. Again, if you just think of these platforms as communication channels and not as solutions, different strategies definitely work on a lot of the platforms, honestly. It’s not all just a LinkedIn game when it comes to recruitment.
The biggest thing that businesses really need to think about is, what is the value prop you’re putting out there on the job? So many people are still using the “We’re looking for an energetic self-starter.” When you are in a very high demand employment category, you have to offer something different. You have to find that one little thing that makes your company unique as an employer brand and lean into that, because that is what will attract the right type of candidates and the ones that maybe you’re having a hard time finding in other traditional ways of recruitment.
ROB: And it’s not going to be as transactional, either, as the “We have $13, $15, $20, $25, $30 an hour jobs,” because what you lead with is what you get. You’re going to get someone who’s chasing a dollar and they’ll take $5 an hour more somewhere else when they can find it. You’re leading with who they can be and become.
BETH: Right. If you really have it dialed in – some of the employers we’re working with that are recruiting both production type jobs as well as leadership positions really have a visual and digital representation of who they are from a culture perspective. Those little, subtle differences oftentimes will help make jobs stickier.
It makes a big difference when it comes to – you’ll get that passive candidate that’s sitting in front of their TV watching movies. Your job has to be positioned well enough that they will take action. Very different than if they’re searching on Indeed and actively trying to find a job. That’s where social media is extremely powerful. It’s that “Would you go to a job if you didn’t have to work nights and weekends?”
One of our best performing ad’s copy units says something along the lines of “If you can’t name one reason you like your job, it’s time for a different job.” It’s funny because we could put every incentive out there. You’d think that’s what would really drive people – sign-on bonuses and all of these very attractive financial rewards – but that one is the one that actually gets the most people to apply.
ROB: That’s really, really interesting. Beth, you mentioned that Chatterkick’s been around about 9 years. Take us back a little bit and maybe share, how did the business start? What led you to take this dive?
BETH: I did not come from an agency world. I created an agency that I would want to work with. Prior to starting Chatterkick, I was at a regional Chamber of Commerce. I was an account management position where I would go out and visit with businesses and literally ask them, “How can I help you on behalf of the Chamber?” What that led to is a lot of answers that fit into buckets of they needed to communicate with their potential employees or their potential customers.
They were kind of stuck at that time – this is 12 years ago, probably – about how to navigate the digital trends, how to understand the power of their website. I saw these conversations and they were happening more and more and more, and people were looking to me for the solutions, and I was saying, “Okay, there’s Facebook. Try it this way,” plug and playing all of the different platforms.
I was also in in-person meetings – committee meetings, coffees, lunches – and was watching the purest and oldest school form of social networking, handshakes and connecting with people in real life and forming relationships. I really saw the power of that. I was taking that same model and helping businesses move that to the digital world.
That really was the premise on how Chatterkick was born, and why I still believe in that power of a real person on the other end of some of our digital elements and platforms. I think that is a differentiator in many categories today.
ROB: And your clients will certainly see that as well when you have that personal touch, that personal handshake – although some of that has been limited a little bit over the past year, limiting even for teams. Have you been able to get together with clients? Has your team been separate? How have you thought about that personal touch when the physical touch has been maybe easy, maybe not easy to find?
BETH: We’re a remote team anyways and we’ve had different elements of remote over the last 10 years. But even in the last 5 years, we’ve definitely hired team members in different markets, and our clients are all over the country. So that wasn’t a huge change, but one of the biggest changes that we had to overcome was our content captures.
One of the ways that we’re a little bit different than a lot of agencies is we believe that authentic content and real photos, regardless of the type of business you have, are the things that work on social. So, we include that with every engagement, whether they’re in New York City or in the Midwest. That content capture – and this is content specifically designed for social media, so it’s a little bit different than a commercial photo shoot – but we had to reconfigure what those looked like when the pandemic hit.
What we ended up doing was we did them virtually. It was almost like a podcast episode, and we would take the audio and use it for content. We would take the quotes and use that for Instagram stories. We would take screenshots of the person and what they were saying and develop that for thought leadership pieces.
It ended up working well for a lot of our businesses that couldn’t have people onsite even if they wanted to. It still allowed us to get that real content from the leadership team and from the employees working at the business without having all of the work on them to source up the photos and the pieces of content that work on the platforms.
ROB: You’re in this somewhat unique – not completely unique, but relatively so – position where being distributed was nothing new to you. What have you found to be some of the key factors to making distributed work and cadences of gathering, if there are any?
BETH: We were just having these conversations internally, too. I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned about remote work is it’s constant work. You need to constantly be thinking, “How can I help my team? How can I remove communication barriers? How can I help prevent communication overload?” Because that is also a real thing that happens with everybody online all the time.
So it’s a constant conversation that we have, and I think it’s going to continuously change on what that looks like depending on the team we have, depending on the client’s needs we’re addressing, and the different parts of what our communities look like. Some of them are wide open right now and others are a little bit less. What does that look like for different thresholds and tolerances of gathering right now? An open dialogue and communication is really where we’re starting.
We did open our office. We have one primary office that is almost like a co-working flex space that we’re keeping right now to let people come together locally if they would like to. We’re kind of leaving it in their hands. And then our remote team, which is probably 60% of the total workforce right now, are welcome to go to co-working spaces, but many of them are still working directly in their home.
ROB: That’s such an interesting dynamic even in and of itself: who chooses to go out and work somewhere and who chooses not to. You see trends emerge, but it’s so much deeper and more complicated than that for everyone’s situation.
BETH: It really is. I think just having the mindset of flexibility is really important. I know I like that. Like, “My house is going to be quiet today so I’m going to work from home,” or on the other side of that, “My kids are going to be around and having their friends at the house, so I want to be at the office today.” [laughs] I think that is really nice to be able to offer and have that flexibility on where you work, because your days all look different too.
ROB: Absolutely. Beth, you mentioned how this thing started. What did it look like when it started to grow? How did you think about what goals were key to bring on, when it was key to maybe bring on someone else essential on the executive team side, that sort of thing?
BETH: I have an interesting story. I started out myself, and I had an administrative partner who was more than just administrative. Almost a key executive that was able to help me ramp up the business. She wasn’t working full time in the business; more of a support system.
I am great at speaking and leading teams, but the details are not necessarily my friend, especially as it relates to starting a business. So, she was really able to come in and help align some of those weaknesses and things that slowed me down. Because when you’re starting, you need to get customers. We ended up landing a pretty large customer in the beginning. While I thought I would be cold calling all day long, I was really working directly servicing customers.
Then we had an intern come in and hired her full time. That was our first full-time employee. It was one of the scariest things I had to do as a business owner, especially at that time, because it is scary to hire someone. Once we got to a three-person team is really where I felt like we could gain a top of opportunity and momentum. We were all on the same page. We had our defined skillsets. We were able to move quickly and adjust quickly and get a lot accomplished during that timeframe.
Actually, when we scaled, we kept that model and, in some regard, reverted back to these three to four people dynamic teams that surround each of the customers. In social, time is everything. You don’t want to spend 4 hours creating one Facebook post and then send it to four copywriters and approval process. Overwork is a thing when it relates to content. We didn’t want to have these two silos like traditional agencies have in some regards of creative on one side and execution/implementation. It was too many account management barriers.
So, we created these teams that can work quickly on content and have those conversations on a regular basis. If someone needs to change copy a little bit or an employee is no longer there and they need to take them from the website, that can happen a lot quicker than trying to make it through four different departments and leadership teams.
ROB: I think that’s a great takeaway, that pod approach. You’re not having some sort of interchangeable copy team trying to learn brand voices they haven’t seen in 6 months. It makes a ton of sense.
As you reflect on the business so far, what are some other lessons that you have learned where you might have course-corrected sooner in the business if you had learned these lessons sooner?
BETH: I think one thing that has always been challenging for me – and it still is, and it’s one of those things I continue to work on – is I often avoid conflict. Because of that, I’ve probably avoided tough conversations a little too long, whether that’s with clients or team members. Not addressing things in a fast and immediate fashion has let things dwindle and bubble up in ways that never really was my intention, but I have noticed that can really impact the organization, again, on both the customer and the employee side.
That’s one thing I am continuously working on, being able to move into an area of conflict in a quicker manner and address things – still kindly and not trying to be a jerk, but sometimes those tough conversations are the ones you need to have the most.
ROB: It’s definitely a balance in there somewhere. We all know the stories of the closely held business where the person in charge is just kind of a maniac.
BETH: Right. [laughs]
ROB: How do you reflect and find those moments where sometimes it’s time to let something go a little bit, sometimes it’s time to lean into it and address it?
BETH: Oh man, if I had the answer to that, that’d be awesome. That is something that is really hard. I think a lot of agency leadership struggles with that because, you’re right, you don’t want to make hasty decisions, either, and you need to have the right information. But sometimes you won’t have all of the pieces of the puzzle to actually make a decision. Sometimes you’ve just got to move on with it.
I have looked at some awesome models out there, like “Is it urgent? Is it immediate?” and better prioritizing and planning on that decision-making, but it’s still tough. [laughs]
ROB: Sometimes we just need to know that, too, and that helps to know that it’s tough for us, absolutely.
Beth, as you reflect on what’s coming up next for Chatterkick and your clients – I feel like we’re a little bit away from the new and exciting channels conversation for the most part. It used to be the channel of the month or the week or the year. There are still new channels, but it feels like it’s less about the flavor of the day. What’s coming up that you’re excited about?
BETH: This is probably a unique answer, but I’m actually excited that some of these platforms and the people that are using them – businesses, agencies – are reverting back to “Maybe we should look at something a little bit simpler,” or “Maybe we need to answer all of our reviews in our comments” or “Maybe we do need to take a stand on something that’s important to us as an organization and put it out there into the world, or showcase our people more.”
I think that is exciting to me because I’ve seen things become so ad-heavy, so commercialized that we forget who we’re talking to. We always talk about, “Would you click on that?” I mean, how many times do we as businesses put content out there and say, “I wouldn’t click on this. This doesn’t look interesting to me”? There’s an element of that that I think we forget about.
I have seen the trends of people – and there’s data that supports it – that businesses are looking for customer experience and forming those intimate relationships with their customers, and that wasn’t always the case, especially in the consumer goods category or the fashion industry. But there are brands that are doing it really well, and they’re seeing market share shifts. That is what really excites me because I really do think we want to know what our lipstick brand is all about. We want to have that information so that we feel like we can narrow our choices when it comes to products or services, both in the B2B and B2C space.
ROB: It sounds like it ties back a little bit to that differentiated hiring conversation. We’re in, as you mentioned, various stages of reopening from COVID. We have companies that need employees, we have companies that are trying to reacquire customers, we have new entrants. It seems a little bit like the transactional commodity value prop. Maybe for the moment it’s even being a little bit priced out of the ad mix. Everyone needs the same ad space, the same inventory.
BETH: Yeah, I definitely think that. I see, again, businesses taking a step back and saying, “We have 500 priorities today” – small businesses as much as large entities. “How are we going to prioritize what really matters to our customers, what matters to our teams that will be supporting these customers? Is what we are selling or telling a good use of our time, and does it reflect what we’re about?” I have noticed that shift a little bit.
I’ve also noticed people ignore that, and they’re struggling when there’s a crisis. They’re struggling when some of their employees post something bad about them. They’re struggling when they get a negative review. If you can’t get ahead of it, you’re going to be in that scenario where you’re constantly playing defense. I just think that’s a hard place to be in the digital space.
ROB: Absolutely. When you’re talking about employee reviews, is that more Glassdoor or more Yelp?
BETH: You see it across the board. You see it from people posting on their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts to people posting on your employer review sites – Glassdoor, Comparably, Indeed. But then you also see it coming in your comments on your platforms. Maybe it’s on your Instagram post, maybe it’s on your LinkedIn post.
The statistics still say that about 80% of all businesses are not responding to their social media messages, and I think a lot of that is because they’re just checking Facebook Messenger. They’re not checking all the other spots that these messages come in. I always tell our partners, Step 1 for ROI is just answer your digital phone. You have to be there, you have to respond. It’s just the way that people want to communicate these days, and if you’re not there, you may lose out on a big opportunity.
ROB: That’s an interesting rise that you’re alluding to. The consumer-facing social is what we’ve historically thought about as social, but it almost seems like businesses that are smaller than would usually need a CorpComms department now have a CorpComms function to their social.
BETH: Yeah. We see that even with businesses that never thought they would be – their audience isn’t on Facebook, their audience isn’t on Instagram. What they don’t realize is they’re in different mindsets. Go grab your customer’s phone. Is Facebook eating up their battery? Are they on Instagram? Chances are, they are. They’re just maybe not in that same mindset, or maybe they’re looking at it differently.
But if you’re not there to check the messages, you can miss big deals or customer service complaints or just contact requests that don’t get followed up with. They’ll come through those channels, oftentimes.
ROB: That sounds more than a little bit overwhelming, but I’m guessing that’s why people call you.
BETH: [laughs] Right, exactly. That’s the other thing we have really tried to educate people on over the last 9 years. I understand the allure of “This is an intern’s job; let’s go grab an intern. They can do all the things.” But if you’ve ever done all the things, you realize the width of how many platforms and how different the platforms are, and then the depth and how many steps need to happen before one Facebook post or one LinkedIn post goes out.
So, I think it’s really important for leaders and executives to understand that this isn’t just a simple thing anymore from a technical perspective. It’s a lot of time to manage a social account. And if you have seven channels and lots of content going out, that’s a big job.
ROB: Absolutely, it is. Beth, when people want to get in touch with you and with Chatterkick, where should they go to find you?
BETH: They can go to chatterkick.com. It’s spelled just like it sounds. My email is pretty easy to access; it’s all over our website, but it is beth@chatterkick.com.
ROB: Sounds great. Beth, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, for sharing the Chatterkick journey, for sharing the fits and starts of reopening and all that means for teams and marketers and businesses as well. It’s been really helpful.
BETH: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
ROB: Thank you, Beth. Be well.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Brandon Edwards started his career in the issues management / crisis / grassroots / public affairs-focused healthcare division of a multi-industry, multi-practice Santa Barbara agency. In 2009, a toxic rift developed between Brandon’s growing medical services division and the rest of the faltering agency. Brandon and his division associates bought out their piece of the business and formed ReviveHealth. It took almost 6 years to go from being issue based to what it is today – a full-service. integrated, all audiences, all channels firm serving B2C, B2B, and B2P, the business to physician/provider side.
Santa Barbara was “an extremely high-cost market” with neither a strong employment nor a strong healthcare base. In 2011 decision was made to move to Nashville, TN, which Brandon refers to as “the Healthcare Capital of the World.” He cites Tennessee’s central time zone, big airport, abundance of talent, and lack of a state income tax as major incentives for the move.
Brandon feels his agency has a “good business moat” – healthcare is an extremely complex business with major regulatory impacts. Even if generalist firms are good at strategy, they won’t be able to deliver in-depth, healthcare-specific strategies or may lack corresponding creative skills. Firms that specialize in “creative” have the potential to propose solutions that could “send you to jail.”
In this interview, Brandon explains how too many medical organizations try to bring customers in through “the side of the funnel,” perhaps by marketing heart surgery to people (who may or may not have a heart attack in the next two weeks). “That’s not how funnels work,” he says. “You need to bring them in through urgent care, primary care, preventative care, diagnostic care – some percentage of people that start in the top of that funnel are going to end up needing other services, whether that’s PT or surgery of some kind, and all of the other attendant care that comes with it.”
What makes an agency in this niche market work?
First, Brandon says, “You have to start with the right people that have the right talent and the right knowledge base.” Even then, it can take 12 to 18 months for a new hire’s skills to become a “mature practice.” Strategy has come from a deep understanding of the healthcare business. To be effective, creative work, which comes from outside of healthcare –needs to be interesting and provocative. And process? “Healthcare is not a hobby,” Brandon says. HIPAA restrictions dictate everything the agency does, including information architecture, how information is shared with clients, and marketing campaign design.
One early strategy core to the company was the idea of “being built to be sold,” merged, or transferred to employees through an ESOP (Employee Stock Option Plan). The intention was to always keep the firm as if it were “for sale tomorrow,” which informed hiring, compensation, professional development, branding, business development, and marketing decisions. Profits were consistently poured back into company growth. The agency did not expand by adding offices. Instead, it invested in hiring to expand and deepen capabilities, increasing offerings, and buying the tools, technology and data needed for “doing the job” now and in the future.
ReviveHealth was recently bought out by IPG, Weber Shandwick, which Brandon says has been and continues to be “a really positive experience.”
From the beginning, he built to sell . . . and then, he sold. All it took was sticking to his plan and “little luck”
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Brandon Edwards from ReviveHealth based in Nashville, Tennessee. Welcome to the podcast, Brandon.
BRANDON: Thanks for having me.
ROB: Why don’t you kick it off by telling us about ReviveHealth and what the agency’s superpowers are?
BRANDON: Revive is a healthcare-only agency. We’re healthcare focused. Located here in Nashville, which a lot of people know for country music, but it really is in many ways the healthcare capital of the world. It’s a pretty phenomenal healthcare city. While we founded the firm on the West Coast, we relocated out here to Nashville in early 2011.
Our superpower is really helping healthcare brands thrive. It’s helping healthcare brands that want to lead the way. What we mean by that is really bringing to bear the full spectrum of marketing communications in the truest sense of the word “full-service” in a way that is very strategically focused on what we view as an underserved segment of healthcare. Most healthcare firms are dominated by pharma or government or med device; our clients really focus on the provider sector of healthcare. So hospitals, health systems, large physician enterprises as well as health tech and health services.
ROB: It’s an interesting place to get into. I think there’s probably some interesting stories around the conviction to move. How do you go about saying, “I’m in California” – it’s like the opposite of the Beverly Hillbillies. You’re like, “Tennessee is the place where we gotta be.”
BRANDON: It might be the opposite of the Beverly Hillbillies, but I’ll tell you the people from Tennessee are probably tired of Californians moving here. There’s no state income tax in Tennessee. It’s a huge growth market, and yet everywhere Californians go, so go property values. We drive up home values in a very unflattering way.
The story is actually kind of interesting. We started in California. I’m from California, my wife’s from California, we founded the firm in California. We started the firm September 1st, 2009, and we all remember what was happening in 2009. The recession couldn’t have been any worse.
If you think about the unique aspects of headquartering a professional services business, particularly one that is highly specialized in healthcare, we were located in an extremely high-cost market without a strong employment base – without a strong healthcare base, actually. All of our talent was going to have to come from somewhere else. In 2009, no one could move to Santa Barbara because they couldn’t afford to buy a home there if they couldn’t sell their home. No one could afford to sell their home. If they were married or had a partner, that person couldn’t find a job in Santa Barbara.
So, we really reached the conclusion that for purely strategic purposes, we had to go where the talent pool already existed. We considered a couple markets, but it wasn’t even close. Nashville was far and away the lead for us. It has a big airport, central time zone, really easy to get around, and has an incredibly deep talent base.
I didn’t initially know I was going to move my family here. We thought we’d open an office and staff it. My wife actually suggested we move here. I’d been on the road 150, 200 nights a year for our whole lives, and I think the entirety of her pitch was “If we move to Nashville, you’ll get to have a lot more dinners at home and be with the kids more,” and that was it. She’s a rare person that volunteered to leave Santa Barbara.
ROB: Yeah, that seems like a direction that a lot of people wouldn’t go, except what you said: to an extent, you were a frontrunner. I imagine this past season, you read about what’s going on with real estate prices, and basically everywhere is functioning as a suburb of the California real estate market. I think you might’ve beat some of your friends to Nashville.
BRANDON: Yeah. We were maybe the front edge of the wave in the summer of 2012, and now the wave is in full force. It’s everybody relocating here. It’s California, New York, Chicago, big cities fleeing to a slightly smaller city, but a city where, again, there’s no state income tax. From an affordability standpoint, it’s a very different animal.
ROB: When we think a little bit about your specialty, Brandon, what is it? What are the distinct needs both from a strategy perspective as well as a channels and distribution perspective of this healthcare group specialty market?
BRANDON: It’s a very nuanced segment. On the one hand, I think we feel like there’s a good moat around our business from the standpoint that generalist firms can’t really parachute into a highly specialized area like this and deliver the same kind of value and strategic counsel that we can. So our competitive set is a bit more limited.
You also tend to attract people who have more specialized careers. In some ways, from a recruitment standpoint, it’s self-selection. My phrase for it is “healthcare is not a hobby.” It’s an extremely complicated business with an intense regulatory overlay, and it also is highly emotional for people. I think maybe finance is the closest area to it in some ways because of all those factors.
From our standpoint, the tradeoff that most clients had before Revive was they could pick a firm that could really help them with strategy, but that firm was going to suck at creative. The flipside is you could hire a firm that was really creative and interesting, and some of the work they were going to propose would send you to jail.
Being able to bring together this deep understanding of the business so that the strategy is rooted in a deep understanding of the business of healthcare, how the organization is going to make money if you keep its mission alive, coupled with creative that largely comes from outside of healthcare so that we have fresh ideas and really interesting, provocative, and effective creative, was really not a value prop that existed in our industry 12 years ago.
ROB: It would seem to me that part of that story of being able to bring in those outside folks, those new perspectives, but not going to jail, also plays into process a little bit. How have you thought about the emergence of process, of getting that regulatory overlay and consistency across the organization?
BRANDON: First, I think you have to start with the people part of it. I promise I’ll answer your process question, but if you don’t start with the right people that have the right talent and the right knowledge base, my view at least is there’s no process that’s going to save you from that.
When we look at more senior level leaders in the firm in particular – I would say even mid-career and up – we look at people who already have a pretty deep established understanding of healthcare. If you bring in someone who’s never touched healthcare and they’ve been in business for 15 or 20 years, I defy anybody to sit and explain HIPAA to someone in a way that’s going to make any sense to them. There are so many aspects of the industry that normal people just cock their heads and say, “That doesn’t make any sense.” It’s like, you’re absolutely right, and it’s just the way it is.
So I think it starts with people. From a process standpoint, you still have to have process and safeguards. We do extensive HIPAA training. HIPAA and the restrictions around use of data dictate everything about our information architecture, how we share information with clients, how you design marketing campaigns that can be effective and still be well within the bounds of those. So you really have to think through the processes in terms of not just what you do in a normal agency to get good work, but to get good work within the guardrails of what’s allowable in the healthcare industry.
ROB: That seems like a totally different mindset, and I can see that domain expertise from the experienced voices helping to train and bring up the next wave of talent.
One thing I’m curious about – the timing of your focus in the space seems impeccable. The narrative of this past 10-15 years of the consolidation of the healthcare groups, the rise of these regional healthcare-group-sponsored office parks – it’s a real thing. I see it all around me. How did you end up at the right spot on that wave? It could’ve been easy to be too early and easy to be too late.
BRANDON: Yeah. I would love to tell you that it was incredible wisdom and vision on my end, and that just wouldn’t be true. [laughs] I wish that’s what it was. There were a group of us that were in another agency. We were essentially the healthcare practice, a place where I was a minority owner, and it was a multi-industry, multi-practice firm but had built up and created this healthcare presence within that firm.
But that firm was very focused. It was essentially an issues management / crisis / grassroots / public affairs firm, so the healthcare practice we had built was very focused on those kinds of services and that kind of work for clients because that was the firm’s positioning. And I think it was the right positioning for that firm.
We got to 2009 and the rest of the firm outside of healthcare shrunk dramatically. Remember, this is the same time that the ACA was being debated and passed. This was the same time that there was going to be a substantial need for all kinds of expertise in the healthcare space, including marketing communications work.
I think unfortunately, when you’re in an agency that may be struggling a little bit – what do they say? Character is revealed by difficult times, not created by it. I think what was unfortunately revealed in that moment was a somewhat toxic culture in the other agency.
So, when we looked to buy out the healthcare practice and form Revive, we really viewed it as an opportunity to go from being a healthcare practice in a diversified agency to becoming a healthcare agency, as well as an opportunity to really diversify the offering into truly full-service integrated marketing work. For us, there was this really great established base of clientele to work from and help to fund that expansion, but what started was a journey that took I would say 5-½, almost 6 years to go from being issues-focused to being a truly full-service integrated firm.
ROB: From a channel mix perspective, you mentioned a PR and comms legacy; what does the channel mix look like today, and where is it heading within the healthcare space?
BRANDON: I think the simplest way to put it would be it’s really all audiences, all channels. We’ve gone from planning for earned to planning for earned and social to planning for every stripe of media and every stripe of channel and bringing in people with integrated planning backgrounds, bringing in people that are deep in digital and social and traditional. We actually plan and buy our own media across all channels. Very unusual for a firm our size.
But one of the interesting nuances working with media buying, for example, in this space is that most media buying firms really want to buy large campaigns on a regional or national basis, and hospital media in particular is bought almost exclusively on a local community basis. The joke is if you go to work for a big brand, you’re going to spend $50 million in $5 million chunks; if you go to work for a hospital, you’re going to spend $5 million in $50,000 chunks. It takes a very different structure and thought process to create the media function. And that’s just one thing. You still have to think about all of the creative and all of the different areas.
We really think about all audiences, meaning we’re looking at consumers, we’re looking at current and past patients, we’re looking at employers and brokers, we’re looking at physicians and board members and donors, and then the people within those hospital or healthcare organizations that are purchasing from our health services and health tech clients as well. We really have both B2C and B2B as well as B2P, the business to physician side. It’s really a robust channel and audience mix.
ROB: It’s a really fascinating mix, and it reminds me, as you talk about the regulatory overhead, I could see somebody 10 years from now – you mentioned Fintech earlier; I think various dimensions of Fintech seem like they’re positioned both for some real growth versus synthetic growth, but also probably a good bit of regulation ahead. I think if somebody has a brain for that sort of thing, they might do well to start navigating the legality. There might be a good practice there.
BRANDON: I’m sure you’re in the same boat; I talk to a lot of younger people that are interning or are interviewing with us or whatever it is, and I think there’s this tendency when you’re younger to think about the sexy things, whether it’s gaming or sports or whatever it is.
Yet I believe in many ways, the best way to create a career that’s going to maximize your value is to find these industries where you can develop indispensable knowledge. I think healthcare is one. I think finance is another. I think maybe once upon a time, defense department type work was. Maybe higher ed. There are some industries that require an incredible amount of focus, and perhaps the skillsets aren’t as transferrable between working for one set of consumer products or CPG or whatever it is, but boy, it sure is value-creating for you from a career standpoint.
ROB: Brandon, to switch gears a little bit, one part of your story I think we would be remiss not to touch on is the experience of being acquired. Many firms have that wish, but I think I heard recently maybe 1 in 400 agencies will actually ever be acquired. How did that process commence? Was that something you engaged in intentionally? Were you just sticking to your knitting and somebody took notice of what you were doing?
BRANDON: We have a lot of flaws as an agency, just like any group of people does. But not being strategic and thoughtful isn’t one of them. In our very first strategic plan, September 1st, 2009, when there were four of us, the strategic plan says “Revive is being built to be sold.” There’s a little asterisk next to “sold” that says “It’s not really about sold; it’s about merged or an ESOP to employees or whatever.”
But the thinking was, and I think a lesson learned perhaps from previous agency experience, is the worst thing you can have is an agency that you need to sell and can’t. It’s a bit like owning a home. They always tell you when you’re younger, don’t have the most expensive house on the street. You don’t want to own a house you can’t sell. And most people love their home – of any day they own it, the love it the most the day they put it on the market because they’ve done all the things to make it beautiful and have curb appeal. They’ve landscaped it, they’ve painted it, they’ve fixed all the little dings and scratches.
I think agencies are a lot like that. We viewed it as we wanted to keep the firm always like it was for sale tomorrow, and that meant how we hired, how we comped people, how we did professional development, how we thought about our brand, how we did business development and marketed ourselves, how we paid ourselves. We took the view that the owners would comp themselves as employees. We would not take money out of the business; we would pour everything back into growth.
So it was always about building enterprise value. We didn’t really set a timeline on it. I think maybe in that first plan we said 10 years, and honestly we just sort of made hat up because it seemed like a long time. It turned out not to be. [laughs] But we went into it with that attitude, and it became a filter for every single decision that we made for the business.
And I think in a lot of ways it helps to keep you from being selfish. It’s really easy to have a great year and think “I think maybe we should pull a bunch of money out and go buy something cool” or whatever, I don’t know. We didn’t do that. The only money we took out of the business was for taxes, basically, and our individual compensation, which was set and didn’t change much during all those years.
We would call the question every year in strategic planning, and every year the answer was “No, we’re good.” Then we get to the end of 2014. We had grown 60% that year. We had added digital content, social, we had purchased another firm, and we got to the end of the year and called the question of strategic planning, and the group unanimously said this would be the right time to look for a partner. “Let’s find someone who has been through this process of integration and can help us do this better and help us grow faster and help us avoid the pitfalls that come with going from being a single discipline firm to a really diversified agency.”
ROB: It’s interesting to hear that intentionality from the start. I think there’s probably some threads to pull on there. For instance, I think you mentioned casually ESOP. It would be good to dig into that. When you think about building from the start, a technology startup will think about issuing stock options to their employees to ensure that they get to share in an acquisition. But that’s so often incompatible with a services organization. How did you think about employee comp, sharing in an exit, that sort of thing?
BRANDON: Probably not as well as we should’ve. [laughs] I think you’d always be better at this the second or third time than you were the first time. Let me back up for a second: we had a great experience with the sale. We went about the process in a very nontraditional way. We had a great experience with the transaction. We had a great experience with the earnout with our buyer, which is IPG, Weber Shandwick.
You hear all these terrible stories from people, and I will tell you that we had none of that. we had a really positive experience and continue to. Our executive leadership team – we had no senior level departures at the end of the earnout. That’s very unusual. Just a good experience.
That said, I think we could’ve done a much better job – I could’ve done a much better job – leading up to the sale. We did not spread equity around as much as we probably should’ve. It wasn’t so much that we sat down and decided not to as just it hadn’t been a part of our plan, and by the time we went to sell, it was probably too late to make meaningful changes to the equity structure.
We had five shareholders and five phantom equity holders just before the sale, and we then converted the phantom equity holders to real equity right before the sale because that was our buyer’s preference.
ROB: What is phantom equity?
BRANDON: Think of it as another way of creating an incentive compensation structure that doesn’t represent real ownership, so it doesn’t necessarily give a holder rights to a percentage of the firm’s profit or something like that. The upside is it can be given and taken away just like a bonus would; the downside is it gets taxed in ordinary income instead of capital gains. So it’s a little bit more attractive for the company, a little bit less attractive for the holder. It may be a little bit less attractive, but it’s substantially more attractive than getting nothing.
I think ultimately, I wish we had distributed a little bit more ownership to some key people, particularly some people who really killed it in the last 5 years, but once you’ve entered into the transaction, it’s too late to change the equity structure.
ROB: And it’s definitely tricky often, and not necessarily in your case – turnover in services can be higher. You also are dealing with the multiples that you sell for, typically. They’re not the same in services as they are in startup land.
What I want to pull on a little bit now – you mentioned a couple things. If you’re building the sell, what comes to my mind is you have to be carrying decent margins on your services to be attractive to purchase. But then you mentioned that you and your partners were also not taking money off the table. I think where that probably points the flashlight a little bit is towards the question of: how do you strategically reinvest meaningful margins to build a business? I think that’s where a lot of people typically throw up their hands and just take the money off the table.
BRANDON: Yeah, and I don’t think that’s irrational. I say this as a predetermined outcome for us because this is what we wanted for our business, but to be fair, it’s not at all irrational or even maybe a negative to say, “I don’t want to sell the business. What I want is to get it to a point where I don’t have to work so hard and I can make pretty good money and it creates an annuity for me and my family.” Yeah, there’s some dangers of that, but there’s dangers in selling too. So I don’t know that there’s a right or wrong answer to it.
I think in terms of reinvestment, we really looked at it in two branches. I’ll tell you up front the one we decided not to do, and that was that we were not going to expand on the basis of offices. We were going to look at reinvestment in people and technology as opposed to places. We’ve never opened an office for a client. We’ve never been in that mode. We’ve always had as few offices as we felt like we could get away with and still attract the right talent.
So we looked at it in two ways. Early on, it was really reinvestment in hires that would expand our capabilities – sometimes deepen them, but mostly expand them. The reason I think that’s a reinvestment is very often, when you’re bringing on someone to build out a new capability, there isn’t going to be enough revenue there really to justify that hire for some period of time. Typically for us, it was 12 to 18 months from the day we hired someone to the time that was a mature capability or mature practice.
We would look at reinvestment in building out these capabilities, and that meant a creative department, that meant a media department, that meant digital capabilities, social media, content, research, all these different areas over the years.
I would say hand in hand with that was reinvestment in the tools, technology, and data that could make those people effective. What does our media department need to do its job? What does our analytics group need to do its job? And what are they going to need in the future? What do we need to do in terms of data-driven marketing, whether that’s Salesforce or other platforms that we use? All of which carry pretty sizable price tags and some of which are more difficult to monetize with clients than others.
I think those are the big two. I would say a distant third was the constant reinvestment in brand building and business development for our firm. We have spent about 5% of revenue on an annual basis from the time we had 10 people in new business and corporate marketing, brand building, for Revive to always be punching above our weight, always be growing. As a result, we’re showing 12-year compounded annual growth rates of about 25% a year.
ROB: Wow. Sounds like a good company to buy if you’re IPG. That’s good. And you’re still there, which must mean it’s also a good job.
BRANDON: I would like to believe that they could’ve bought anything they wanted and chose us. I find that flattering and a statement of confidence from them. But yes, they’ve been great to deal with, and honestly I’ve been glad to be here. It’s nice to be part of a really great company.
ROB: That’s great to hear. That’s a good acquisition story. Brandon, when you’re looking ahead a little bit, what’s coming up for ReviveHealth, and maybe more broadly healthcare marketing, that you’re excited about?
BRANDON: I think in some ways, in our segment of healthcare marketing, the pace of change is accelerating to where many of the things we’re seeing now in healthcare marketing are the things that you would see more commonly in other industries.
Typically, hospital marketing in particular trails other industries by a few years. We’re starting to see that gap close. We’re seeing a great deal more emphasis on data-driven marketing and personalized marketing. We’re seeing a great deal more emphasis on social media and social media engagement – which, given how personal and human healthcare is, is sort of strange that it’s just catching up to other industries now.
But I think the biggest shift we’re seeing is a mindset shift from hospital operators who have been accustomed to spending the bulk of their budgets on traditional advertising to build brands to hospital executives who see the power of real 4 Ps marketing that will drive volume and profitable growth to their institutions in a way that I think is almost taken for granted in many other industry sectors.
ROB: Right. That’s actually really interesting because many hospitals are massive institutions, but now they’re also living under an umbrella where there was just one location and now there’s four, and there’s an attendant group of facilities around it beyond that. It’s “Who’s the brand?”, but also “Where is my local version?” That’s what it seems like to me as a consumer.
BRANDON: Not to be too flippant about it, but I think we all drive around town and you see these billboards with “heart surgery this” and “knee surgery that.” Does anybody really buy on that basis? I mean, it’s not like you drive around and say, “That’s interesting. I hadn’t really thought about it, but my knee does hurt. Maybe I’ll have surgery after all.” It’s sort of silly when you say it like that.
To me, this industry just begs for highly targeted, highly personalized, data-driven marketing. If I get you into what we call the top of the funnel – urgent care, primary care, preventative care, diagnostic care – some percentage of people that start in the top of that funnel are going to end up needing other services, whether that’s PT or surgery of some kind, and all of the other attendant care that comes with it.
I think most hospitals have tried to enter the funnel from the side, and it’s sort of a joke for us. That’s not how funnels work, right? You pour things in the top and they come out the bottom. We don’t get to come in and say, “I just want to find those people that want to have heart surgery in the next two weeks.” It’s like, no, let’s engage people who are going to need heart surgery in six months, in a year, in two years, in three years. Look at more the lifetime value of the consumer as opposed to the transactional value of the consumer, and recognize that physicians play a huge part in it. Most of us go where our doctors tell us.
ROB: Right. It starts with being in the provider network at some point.
BRANDON: Absolutely. Who you have contracts with from an insurance standpoint, what your medical staff looks like, how effectively referrals are processed, if you provide easy access for consumers – telephone, digital, as well as other methods. It really is all 4 Ps of marketing. It is not just promotion. I think the industry was pretty dominated by promotion prior to maybe 5 to 7 years ago.
ROB: That is tremendously interesting. Thank you, Brandon, for sharing your journey. Congratulations on everything you accomplished leading up to and even after the acquisition. It’s a great part of the story to tell, and it sounds like the national marketing community is better for it.
BRANDON: We have a great team, and anybody that does what we’ve done in the last few years and doesn’t acknowledge some meaningful amount of luck is probably not being honest. [laughs] You can work hard all you want, but if you don’t have a little bit of wind at your back, it’s going to be pretty tough.
ROB: The humility is definitely welcome. We all need a little bit of that luck, and sometimes you have to survive long enough to be lucky. Coming out of 2009 is nothing to dismiss either. Thank you so much, Brandon. We wish you and your team the best. Thank you for sharing your story.
BRANDON: My pleasure. Thanks.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Bant Breen is Founder and Chairman at Qnary, an agency that focuses on optimizing and growing the executive online presence because, as Bant explains in this interview, “Every executive has an online footprint and that footprint matters,” especially for large organizations. Bant believes it takes more than telling a brand’s story through advertising or brand messaging to effectively market a brand. “People don’t want to talk to companies,” he says. “They want to talk to people.” The reputation of an individual executive and what he or she stands for and says impact people’s perception of that executive’s company/cause/enterprise, the professional and personal opportunities the executive will get, and the opportunities the organization will receive. When executives “tell the story,” that story becomes dimensionally deeper, richer, and more complex.
Qnary’s platform allows customers “to hear the voices that make up” a company/brand and to get a more dimensional view. The company connects better with both its clients and employees . . . and the story and the company become more dynamic. The agency relies heavily on technology and has created a formula that:
- optimizes executive findability and the specific topic connection an executive would have via their social media channels
- generates short form (e.g., a LinkedIn post or Tweet) or longform (e.g., a blog or video)
- grows and engages executive’s target audience
Bant has deep history in advertising. Over his career, he set up a number of technology-based units for other organizations, from Ansible (an early mobile marketing agency to the IPG Media Lab (an emerging technologies thinktank for Reprise – an early leader in search marketing). In 2010, he was inducted into the American Advertising Hall of Achievement. He launched Qnary when he decided it was time to start his own technology company.
Qnary has modules that enable executives to develop and “own” their personal webpages, an important part of “executive presence.” A client’s answers to a long list of questions enable the agency to draft and structure content and to optimize web pages to meet target objectives. The pages are structured around content pillars, a limited number of selected core topics. An example of these pillars might be
- the corporate philosophy/ company culture
- organizational purpose/brand goals, or
- on a more personal basis, the executive’s professional role and vision for the company and its future.
Bant is working hard to automate the day-to-day marketing stuff to enable companies to scale more easily and free up individuals to pursue “great solutions and great ideas.” As have many agencies since the start of Covid, Qnary has gone “digital/virtual.” Although the “spine” of his organization is digital, Bant emphasizes the importance of taking “real estate savings” and reinvesting the money to strengthen an organization’s digital culture.
Bant can be reached on Linked in, by email at bant@qnary.com, on his personal website at bantbreen.com or on his agency’s website at qnary.com.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I am your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Bant Breen, Founder and Chairman at Qnary, based in New York, New York, with offices in Spain and Australia as well. Welcome to the podcast, Bant.
BANT: It’s great to be here.
ROB: It’s great to have you here. I think I want your office configuration just for vacations, so I’m jealous of those office locations.
BANT: I have to say that when we opened up a European office, I think strategically we probably should’ve placed it in what used to be part of Europe, which would’ve been London. But I am married to a Spaniard, and if I had thought of putting the European office anywhere else than Spain, I don’t think I would be married. [laughs]
ROB: Depending on the relevance of your firm, you can argue that you really want to go to Mobile World Congress or something like that.
BANT: Exactly.
ROB: There are reasons to be there. Bant, why don’t you start off by telling us about Qnary and what the firm’s superpowers and specializations are?
BANT: Sure. Qnary is a company that focuses on optimizing and growing the online presence for executives. We’ve built out a technology that does a couple of different things. It optimizes the findability and the connection that an executive would have with specific topics via their social media channels; it generates thought leadership content for them, whether that be short form content like a LinkedIn post or a tweet or a longform piece of content like a blog or a video. It then grows and engages the audience that will see that content based on the specific topic that the executive wants to be a thought leader in.
We started the business and I think when we started it, people didn’t really know that they even had an online footprint. Now it’s very commonplace, and as you can imagine, in a world with COVID, an executive’s online presence seems to matter more than ever.
ROB: That makes perfect sense. I see you have your own personal website at bantbreen.com. Is it safe to assume that this has some connection to the firm and your technology?
BANT: Yeah, one of the development modules that we have develops personal webpages. One of the things that we’re trying to do is to help executives own their online footprint as much as possible, and one of the ways that you can do that is obviously via a personal webpage. We think it’s important for executives to develop that.
ROB: It certainly looks great. I think someone would wonder, knowing that your firm is of a decent size, how do you connect a sizable opportunity to – I think a personal website can sound small, but build the bigger picture here. What’s at stake, and how do you have such a healthy team and technology platform? Is it that executive audience where at a certain size, the executive presence has material value? Have you scaled more laterally across lots of executives?
BANT: You can visit our website, qnary.com. That’s our corporate website for sure. But I would actually say that philosophically, what we believe, and what drove the creation of Qnary, is that every executive has an online footprint, and that footprint matters. It matters in terms of the reputation of the individual executive, the reputation of the company or the cause or the enterprise that that individual is associated with, the opportunities that that executive will receive personally and professionally, as well as the opportunities the company that’s associated will receive.
The difference really is that I spent a good chunk of my career working in branding and advertising, and I think that for big corporations, I would say that one of the things that has fundamentally changed is that the idea that the brand’s story can just be told through advertising or through brand messaging is completely false. The importance of the executives telling the story, dimensionalizing that story, is of more importance today than ever before. That’s really where Qnary comes in. Qnary comes in as a tool that allows companies to do that effectively and manage the dimensionality and complexity that comes with that.
ROB: That certainly makes sense. The companies that I see that seem to do this the best figure out not only how to elevate the CEO, but how to continue elevating the next generations and next layers of leaders. Do you find that corporate clients are interested in that multilayered executive presence?
BANT: I think that if you were to go into traditional communications, you would see that a lot of comms directors really hate when any executive talks because they’re worried that the executive’s going to say the wrong thing. [laughs] But over the last I’d say decade, there’s been an aggressive push. You have CEOs for sure speaking more and sharing more. There’s a variety of reasons why that’s important, from literally just connection with employees as well as clients, but also from a technical perspective.
But other companies have looked at it from a variety of perspectives. I think the first thing we saw companies do was what got known as employee advocacy. Employee advocacy was basically the comms team drafting a tweet and then asking the bottom two-thirds of the organization to share that out with their friends and family. So it’d be like, “We have a sweeter sun-kissed orange. Tell all your friends and family about that.”
At Qnary we really feel that that kind of blatant shilling on behalf of your company will only go so far with your friends and family. It’s a great way to lose friends quickly. [laughs] But certainly what has become clear to me is that the culture and the dynamism of companies today is driven by their teams. You need to hear the voices that make up your company and make up your brand, and if you utilize technology like our platform and allow that dimensionality to happen, you really have a much more dynamic company. You have a way of telling a story that will resonate in a much more potent way.
ROB: Got it. One thing that’s a little bit curious to me that you mentioned, I believe, is there’s this element of this platform generating content underneath around these personal brands. How do you think about that intersection between the voice of the individual, and then how do you get content out that matches well with that?
BANT: One of the things that happens is that if you work with Qnary, you go through an onboarding process, which is a set of questions – literally quite a long list of questions – the answers of which are utilized to tweeze through how we develop your optimizations for your pages, but also go into allowing us to draft and structure your content.
We aim to structure our content around what we call your content pillars. One of the challenges that every person has – certainly I would say senior leaders have this more than anybody – is the talk about fewer topics, not more topics. So what we really want to do is find what your pillars should be, your core topics that you should be focused on as an individual. Then once we’ve done that and once we have the point of view of the individual around that, we set it up in our system and content starts to be developed and created.
ROB: So there’s a level where your team at a macro level has a view of the entire network of your clients, what they’re trying to represent, what the dimensions of that are. There’s probably some interaction of content creation, of curation. I would imagine it’s pretty robust.
BANT: Yeah. I think it really depends on the client. One of the pillars we could imagine will be very related to let’s say the corporate philosophy or culture of a company or the purpose, the goals that the brand will have. But then the other content pillars that we might develop for an individual focus around themselves as well as maybe their professional role and what their take is on how those areas may evolve. All three really matter.
What now seems so obvious to me, but when I started the company probably wasn’t that obvious, is that people really don’t love hearing from companies. They love hearing from people. People like talking to people. I love my Frosted Flakes, but I’m not going to spend an hour on the phone talking to Kellogg’s. But I might want to talk to some of their executives and I might want to understand how they’re thinking about their solutions and developing it going forward.
ROB: You mentioned some things weren’t obvious at first. Let’s go back a little bit to the beginning of Qnary. It looks like you had a background with a significant amount of holding company agency experience. You could’ve probably ridden that train your entire career. What led you to take it down to zero and start something new, and what did that look like?
BANT: I do have a deep background in advertising. I started my career at WPP and have been at various times part of Publicis and IPG. I really loved my time working in large marketing organizations, and I really, really love the solutions and the creative messaging that I developed.
That being said, one of the areas that I found myself focusing more and more on was the relationship between great marketing and creative and technology. In my career, I’ve been very involved with setting up technology-based units, whether it be Ansible, which was one of the early mobile marketing agencies, or the IPG Media Lab, which was a thinktank for all emerging technologies for Reprise, which was one of the leading players in the search marketing space as that was emerging.
I had not built out a platform on my own. I actually turned 40 and I had just been inducted into the American Advertising Hall of Achievement, and my dad took me out to dinner and he said, “So, now what?” I said, “What do you mean? I’m going to go back to work on Monday.” He said, “When you get put into something like the Hall of Achievement, you’ve got to go do something else.” [laughs] So I took that as, okay, I’d better action this other thing. If I was going to try to create a technology business, I’d better do it now, before it’s too late.
I’ve got to tell you, there’s a reason why these types of businesses are set up by twenty-somethings. It requires a tremendous amount of dedication, and I would say probably naivete, that you lose as you get older. [laughs]
ROB: Nothing like you’re 40 years old and having Dad push on you career-wise still, as though the Hall of Fame career wasn’t quite enough.
BANT: [laughs] Yeah. It is what it is. I love the services sector. I would say probably one of my passions right now is to find ways to allow a lot of the pedantic stuff that we all had to do to learn the trades of marketing, to automate that and to help companies scale and to allow individuals to spend a bit more time coming up with great solutions and great ideas.
ROB: I wonder a little bit, with that services background that you have, as you’re looking at product, how much do you think about allowing services to enable technology, and how do you think about when to resist that temptation and say, “No, the technology has to do the heavy lifting” or “The human factor is okay here”? It’s kind of a bionic product, to an extent.
BANT: I would say that the human side matters tremendously. But it really comes in in different points. We definitely have, I’d say, a human-enabled technology. Certainly, individuals will connect with our clients, but what we want to make sure is that they’re supported by an immense amount of technology to deliver a very robust solution. There’s no reason that we want this to be cold, faceless technology. We’re talking to people about themselves and their voice and their thought leadership, and therefore there is a level of human understanding and I would say human illogical thinking that’s required to succeed in this area.
ROB: There’s an extent, I think, to which many agency owners, many folks in the services world, have these dreams of building a product. What were some of the keys to success and things you had to maybe learn or re-learn to drive a product forward versus throwing people at the wall?
BANT: In a previous period of my life, I’d actually built my own agency and sold it, so I had built services businesses, and certainly I had built services businesses as part of larger organizations as well. The idea of building a product company and product business is different. There are commonalities, but I would say some of the big things that really hit you are the complexity of the development process and the reliability of that team and the reliability of that code.
In the early years of Qnary, we certainly made a tremendous amount of mistakes on the tech side in terms of getting the right teams in place, getting a code base that could easily be developed on top of by others. There was a lot of work that had to be done there. And then just working and building a company that operates more on a sprint-based mentality is quite different than the way you operate an agency.
I think the other side of it is that when I speak to my agency friends, it’s amazing how many people, the first question they ask is, “How many employees do you have?” Because that, in some kind of bizarre agency mindset, is the idea of success. Whereas any tech person will tell you, if you have a lot of employees, you’re probably not that good of a technology. You see companies like Instagram; I think they had a billion users and they only had 18 employees or something like that, a crazy number like that.
ROB: Sounds about right.
BANT: It’s the same kind of mentality on the tech side. You really want to make sure you’re building a business that is not person-heavy.
ROB: Understood. You’re at this intersection of you’ve got some creative, you’ve got some measurement, you’ve got some technology, and you’re in New York City as your starting point. I feel like there are different industries pulling on each of those pillars of talent that would try to convince those folks that there’s more prestige in what they’re doing. Yet there is this solid core of New York tech companies that I think doesn’t get as much credit just because there’s so much going on. There are so many high points that it’s not this singular technology, as it might be in San Francisco, this singular industry. How do you think about pulling talent in a city with so much going on?
BANT: I guess probably a couple of years ago, that would’ve been more of a real question mark that we thought about a lot. But now, especially after the last year, our team is all over the place at this point. Whilst our offices in New York have been open again since last summer, I’d say maybe 10% of the people go in. Many of them have moved back home or are working remotely. We’ve actually essentially ended up restructuring the whole business to be a remote work company.
The spine of the business, the culture of the business is now all digital. All of the events, all of the meetings, everything is all based digitally. So I worry less about the New York, the geography, now than I used to.
I would say New York is a great place. I know people get fearful about what’s going to happen in New York after COVID or whether people will come back. I’m absolutely sure people will come back because, as I’ve learned with Qnary, people actually like people. People want to be with people. And there’s really no city in the world you can do that with that’s better than New York City.
ROB: I’m certainly ready to pay a visit again when I can. With that decision to go distributed, when did you reach that decision within the past year or so?
BANT: On March 13th of last year, we went virtual. The offices shut down; everybody headed home or headed wherever they were going to be. As the pandemic continued to develop over those early months, we just basically said, “Look, we’re going to be virtual.” What happened was we internally spent a lot of time on thinking about how that would impact the culture of the business and reinvested a lot of the money that we would’ve spent on things like real estate into culture and building a digital culture.
I think if you talk to bean counter-driven companies, they loved COVID in a way because they have used it to rationalize the reduction of real estate costs for their businesses. But what I’ve found is that if you want to make this work, you have to reinvest quite a bit back into culture and building a digital culture.
What I mean by that is we have things like a meeting called Bird Food, where instead of catering it in to the offices, we actually now make lunch available to people wherever they are. They receive whatever the “bird food” of the day is going to be for the meeting we have. There’s a water cooler meeting every morning; it’s a 15-minute meeting for anybody in the company that wants to attend and just talk about anything they want to talk about, really. The topics can be anywhere from “What do you think of the new show?” to “What do you think of that shot that was made last night in the final four?” or whatever. Very water cooler talk.
Our thought is that as more and more people do return to the office, we’re going to keep the spine of the business digital. We’re going to continue to keep these meetings digital and people that are in the office can just join in digitally. They can be together, but it will be connected digitally. No one wins if they force their employees back to an office. Nobody wins. The company doesn’t win, the people that are forced back have tremendous anxiety, and thirdly, I think we all have to realize that a year has passed. People’s lives move on. You have to be aware of the fact that with that evolution, you have to try to make the business and the culture of the business incorporate with the lives of the individual. Take more of a holistic view of the human.
ROB: Do you have any view of a grand gathering of your global Qnaries? Or do you think that it may be that everybody’s never quite in the same place again? You may have already had some gatherings and some habits around that with your global footprint.
BANT: We have what we call a “Qnniversary.” It’s kind of the official start date of the business. That operates as like an annual coming together of the business. That’s in November of every year. We’ve talked about expanding that as COVID permits, and probably doing a larger event in the summertime as well, but knowing exactly when that will be really depends on what happens with COVID.
ROB: I hope we’ll all be sharing what we learn about this. I think there are a lot of newly distributed companies, including – we certainly are. Bant, when you think about what’s coming up for Qnary and this personal executive marketing, what are you excited about?
BANT: I’m very excited about a couple of things. Some of the things that we’ve rolled out, actually, in Q1 include a real heavy push into video for our clients. We’ve built out a way to deliver video solutions for our clients in a cost-effective manner. That’s been the challenge. There’s been tons of people trying to do video, but the costs have been astronomical for individuals and for executives. We rolled that out in the first quarter, which is great. You talked about the personal websites; that whole development module was rolled out in Q1 as well.
In Q2, what you’re going to see is a second iteration of the machine learning that sits behind the scenes in our solution. I’m really excited about that. I’ve spent the last 4 years of my life researching the latest, greatest, coolest in the world of AI in terms of marketing, and I’m really excited to apply some of the things that we’ve learned in terms of content creation, measurement, growth and analytics, things like that.
ROB: We’ll have to look forward and see what that looks like. I’m looking forward to seeing it. We can see it probably many places, including on your own site. Again, it’s always great to be able to eat your own dog food.
BANT: Absolutely. [laughs]
ROB: Bant, when our audience wants to connect with you and with Qnary, where should they go to find you?
BANT: You can find me in all the places we’ve talked about. Certainly you can also reach out to me on LinkedIn. But you can go to qnary.com. That’s our corporate website. And then obviously, bantbreen.com. But you can also just write me at bant@qnary.com and I’m sure to get back to you.
ROB: Very solid. Bant, congratulations on thriving through the pandemic. We will all look forward to helping jumpstart the New York City economy as we get back on planes.
BANT: Hallelujah!
ROB: And we will look for big things in video and beyond from Qnary and the global team.
BANT: Absolutely. Thanks, Rob.
ROB: Thanks so much, Bant. Be well.
BANT: Cheers.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Will Cady heads the Creative Strategy Team at Reddit, which he describes as a platform of more than 100,000 different, intent-driven, purpose-driven communities representing 100,000 distinct cultures . . . and an “incredible petri dish of niche subcultures that are emerging and influencing or becoming mainstream culture.” He says that “people go to Google to search for information . . . and to Reddit to search for what other people have found.”
Reddit’s Creative Strategy team sits between these “very curious” subculture communities and the brands that want to find their place in these communities. Will says the Creative Strategy Team’s mission of “turning curiosity into understanding” runs both ways . . . 1) brands need to understand the different cultures on a deeper level to know what is coming in the future and 2) Reddit need a deeper understanding of the brands and how they meet cultural needs of the different communities.
He explains. “Brands are made up of humans” and, when these humans tell a story, they gain the ability to build powerful connections and customer trust. He says Reddit is a place where brands can be proud, vulnerable, ask forgiveness, explain changes in how they do business, find out what customers want . . . and to bring something to a community that was never before available. He says marketing today is not “going in the direction of building trust” . . . Building trust is already a critical component of today’s marketing.
Reddit is best known for the AMA, where people present their “positions” and invite people to “Ask Me Anything.” For brands, an ad looks like any Reddit post, but is delivered to an audience of people who go to pre-selected communities. This “promoted post” can host text, an image, a GIF, or a video.” The upvote and downvote mechanism is optional. Comments can be on or off. Will uses origami as a metaphor for this, where the promoted post is the piece of paper . . . which can be folded into any shape. A brand can engage Will’s team to create promoted posts. However, the platform has been built to be incredibly rich in capabilities, but at the same time, simple, for those who want to go the “do-it-yourself” route.
The opportunity to use promoted posts to research market trends or test user perceptions is huge. Will provides this example: Chipotle had observed the variety of trending diets (paleo, keto), announced that it was developing “Lifestyle Bowls,” asked the groups following these diets what ingredients they wanted, and then launched the bowls, thanking those who had commented for helping to make the product “right” . . . with resounding success.
Will’s personal history touches on music, mysticism, and marketing, all of which, he says, center on knowing, studying, and playing with what moves people. In addition to leading the Creative Strategy Team, he teaches meditation, reads tarot cards, and jams with musical groups . . . a bow to his 15-plus years as a professional musician. He used Reddit as his “secret weapon for learning” and a way to promote his music long before he took his first position with the company. He says the Reddit of the years from 2013 to 2016 “felt a little bit more like a Wikipedia or a Craigslist . . . (a) ubiquitous part of the internet, but it wasn’t a business.” When he started working in sales at Reddit, the company did not have a viable ad product . . . the new and very small sales team had to build it.
Today, Will sees Reddit as a hybrid of tech and media, a bellwether of social trends, and a place for brands to build relationships with their customers. In order to move forward into the future, media, tech, marketing, and businesses in general will need good answers to three questions:
Why are we here?
What are we doing for humanity?
What are we doing for the world?”
Interesting questions for all of us.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by our guest, Will Cady. Will is the Head of Creative Strategy at Reddit, and Will’s based in Los Angeles. Welcome to the podcast, Will.
WILL: Thank you. Thank you for having me, Rob.
ROB: I think everybody probably listening understands and knows Reddit on some level, so I think it would be interesting to understand your role within that Reddit world.
WILL: The creative strategy team at Reddit, our mission is we turn curiosity into understanding. And Reddit, if nothing else, is full of curiosities. As a platform with over 100,000 different communities representing 100,000 distinct cultures, it’s proven to be this incredible petri dish of niche subcultures that are emerging and influencing or becoming mainstream culture.
What the creative strategy team does is we sit in between the community and the brands that want to activate and find belonging, find community on this platform, and we really provide understanding going both ways – understanding for those brands to look at all of these different cultures and understand them at a deeper level so that they can find their place, they can understand the future that’s coming, and then also Reddit user behavior, they’re very, very curious. They seek. They don’t scroll. They’re there for a reason. We want to pair that curiosity with a deeper understanding of the brands when they come in to talk about how their products, how their services are really meeting the needs of the cultures of the different communities that people are a part of.
ROB: That’s a fascinating place in the ecosystem. I love how you said that people seek. It really resonates with my own experience with Reddit. There’s a lot of sites that you can go to and if you’re not logged in, you don’t feel like you’re missing much. But if you’re not logged in on Reddit, I feel like you’re missing the world. It’s not even like some sites where they feed content to you and you feel like you’re being fed to an algorithm. It really is feeding curiosity.
I think it would be interesting for us, Will, also to understand – I think you have a very interesting journey at Reddit yourself. Talk about how you came into this wild world of Reddit and what your own career path has been within the organization.
WILL: It’s a long and winding and strange journey. My career, by my expertise, I sit at this strange nexus point between music and mysticism and marketing. Today I’m leading the creative strategy team, also teaching meditation, doing strategy reports, doing tarot readings, all of the above, jam sessions and whatnot. For me, they all actually really come together in a very coherent way, which is not expected, but it’s interesting.
You look at music and marketing and mysticism. You look at all of these things, and really what they are at their center is knowing what moves people and studying what moves people and playing with what moves people.
I spent about 15 to 20 years as a professional musician, building a meditation practice and all that, and when I moved from Boston to Los Angeles, I started to realize when I stepped into digital media at a music publisher magazine that there was a lot I had to learn about what resonates in culture. What actually catches and reverberates and becomes movements, becomes these really big mainstream cultural ideas. I got really, really fixated on that. I started to really longform my experiments with this.
And I would always go to Reddit. Reddit was kind of my secret weapon for learning. It’s how I discovered teachers like Alan Watts. It’s how I promoted my music into different communities that utilized some of these audio lectures from Alan Watts. I saw my music videos go to the front page of Reddit All, all the time, and really drive hundreds of thousands of listens in a moment.
As a marketer, I would always think, how can I understand what we’re really trying to achieve here through the lens of the communities that this brand is trying to reach on Reddit? And then if I’m really lucky, how can I find a way to get this content that we’re creating for this brand in front of the Reddit audience?
At that time – this is about 2013 to 2016 – it’s surprising how different media was, even really not that long ago. But looking narrowly at Reddit, Reddit felt a little bit more like a Wikipedia or a Craigslist. It was this ubiquitous part of the internet, but it wasn’t a business. It wasn’t something like a Facebook or a Twitter.
I saw that Reddit was starting to hire some folks, and I knew. I knew that there was this incredible power on the front page of the internet that a lot of people around me in the media industry didn’t really understand. So it was really a no-brainer for me to take that job, and it was an exploratory role. It was like, let’s see what the Los Angeles market can be and do for Reddit.
I started as a salesperson, and I was one of a very, very short list of people representing Reddit in a massive market. We basically said yes to every email and phone call that we got. We took all the meetings. We found that Reddit has a lot to offer everybody. If you want to do an AMA, you want to do some research in terms of market trends or user perceptions – all of these things that are around advertising, Reddit has value to add.
We didn’t have, really, a viable ad product in 2016. We had to build it. We’ve built a great platform now, but in that time in between, we really had to tell the story: “Listen, this is the most influential audience on the internet, and your brand’s got to at least be listening to it, if not speaking to it. So let’s keep talking. Let’s figure out a way to build a partnership.” That became the basis of the playbook that is a massive part of the brand partnerships operation and is serviced by the creative strategy team.
ROB: It’s interesting; you started down this path. You mentioned the AMAs. When a marketer wants to think about the entry points to marketing on Reddit, obviously there are organic avenues – which you may enter at your own peril. When it comes to you, your team, what sort of entry points are possible on a self-service approach and what kind of entry points are a little bit more structured?
WILL: The AMA is a really good metaphor for how to do Reddit in general because it’s a conversation. It’s a dialogue. You’re coming to the platform, and when an AMA is happening, it’s a live experience. It’s an exchange between you and the community, and it’s really based on this idea of being human. There’s this thrill.
It’s so funny that it was so massive on Reddit so early because even though it’s text-based, it’s very fresh and relevant to some of the experiences we have right now where if it’s a celebrity – John Boyega or Chris Pratt, Hosier, some of the AMAs I had the privilege to work on – the users in that thread were just so excited that they were on the same URL as somebody that they really admire and respect. You’re working with that kind of excitement to create a moment of remarkable connection that feels really authentic, vulnerable, and human, and is not the kind of thing that you would typically see in a press junket. It was unexpected and it was different and it defied the way that things felt for fans before.
Today, we do that with brands. The big truth here is that brands are made up of humans, and when the humans behind the brands show up and they tell a story, it’s a moment to foster a very powerful connection that builds trust. Brands have a place where they can be proud, they can be vulnerable. We’ve had brands come to us and say, “We have a Super Bowl commercial. Let’s talk about it.” That was the first time anybody on Reddit could say “I have a Super Bowl commercial.” That’s a moment where brands are bringing something to the community that the community of people couldn’t bring to themselves beforehand, and it created this excitement.
We’ve had brands come to the community for mea culpa. “We’re making a big transformation” or “We’re trying to explain what has transpired over the last couple of months.” It’s an opportunity to meet human to human, to recognize that there are human beings on other side of that keyboard and build trust from there.
This is really where marketing is – not even headed, it’s where it’s at right now: thinking about building trust. The AMA has been around for a long time, and it’s elegantly simple. Ask Me Anything. It represents the blueprint of everything that you can do with platforms like Reddit.
ROB: And it’s so helpful to have a coach like your team as someone’s heading into that. So the AMA is one of those ad products that’s available; what’s the range of ad products that are available to a brand who’s thinking about marketing on Reddit?
WILL: This is interesting. Talking about the team, the creative strategy team is incredibly sophisticated at these things. They’re so sophisticated that they make it easy. That’s the important lesson that I’ve definitely learned on my path. Reddit has such a depth to it that there’s so many exciting things you can do, but it’s really remarkably easy, and you’ve got to start with what makes it easy. That’s the focus of the creative strategy team. We can drive this thing at 150 miles per hour if you want, but let’s start at 20. Crawl, walk, run. Let’s do some interesting engagements here.
From an ad standpoint, the atomic unit is called the promoted post. It looks like a Reddit post. It can host text, it can host an image, a GIF, a video. You can have comments off, you can have comments on. It’s got the upvote mechanism, the downvote mechanism if you want to use that and get a great signal. And it looks and operates in the same exact way as any post on Reddit, the only difference being that through the targeting, you can control who does and does not see that media.
The way that I look at things from the creative strategy team is through the metaphor of origami. [laughs] The promoted post is a piece of paper, and we make cranes, we make boats, we make all manner of different things out of that simple piece of paper. That’s the AMA. That’s the megathread, which is a vast, longform bit of text that explains all of the product details. Really great for our car buyers and our computer buyers and our tech audience. We do conversation posts where we do something like a writing prompt, where we co-create with our users. We put web comics in there. We put videos in there and GIFs and memes. But it’s all one ad unit. So it’s elegantly simple with the potential to be staggeringly sophisticated.
ROB: When someone’s thinking about getting into this atomic unit of a promoted post, is it something they can dabble in self-service? Do they need to engage with your team? There’s certainly advantages for that sometimes, but can someone dip their toe in the water and fire up an ads account and a credit card? Or is it more complicated than that?
WILL: They absolutely can. We have a self-serve platform, an ads manager. You can jump right into the promoted post and you can select your targeting. It has great parity with the kinds of ads managers you’re going to see on other platforms. We’ve spent the last 3 to 4 years really investing in building that, and it’s a great way in.
ROB: It certainly sounds like it. When someone starts to think about how to do well on this, one thing I think we’ll think about is targeting. How should we think about targeting? What’s the menu of possibilities? Are you looking mostly at targeting people who follow a certain subreddit, people who have commented? What’s a good targeting campaign look like?
WILL: That’s a great place to dive into now because the ads manager is going to look like what you experience elsewhere. You’re going to be able to target based on interests, but what those interests are constructed by is slightly different than what you have elsewhere. It’s not a social graph. It’s not based off of people’s identity, their information. It’s based off of the communities that they go to. It’s a community graph rather than a social graph.
So if you have the interest category of auto enthusiasts, for example, that’s going to serve your ad to people that are engaging with a constellation of subreddits like “What car should I buy?” or the Toyota subreddit or the WRX subreddit. Everything from the broad interest in cars to the make and the model.
And Reddit has something that is also really remarkable here when it comes to this kind of targeting, and its intent. When you look at a community like “What car should I buy?”, when somebody’s engaging in a community like that, they’re not just interested in cars. They have the intent to buy a car. They are in the market. They are looking for that information. We have intent-driven, purpose-driven communities for everything imaginable – for vacuum cleaners and climate change and everything in between.
ROB: I’m so glad you mentioned intent because that was certainly in the back of my mind. When you’re talking about users following subreddits, it reminds me so much of the power that has made Google search so powerful for so long. It’s always been that someone was intentional in what they were searching for, and you weren’t just slicing demographics 10 different ways. It’s really piquing my curiosity in a big way.
I think something that leads us to that marketers should probably think about: what should marketers not do when they’re entering into the world of marketing on Reddit?
WILL: I love that you brought up the similarities with Google there. If Google is where you search for information, Reddit is where you search for what other people have already found. We’ve found that when it comes to the trust that people have in the information on products and news, Reddit was closer to Google than it was to the rest of social media in terms of scoring tremendously high on the trust that people put into that. Because it is a resource that people use for information.
It’s hard to find information that you can trust online right now. Reddit is a place that verifies through other people, like “Here’s my actual experience.” So whatever that life moment that you go through – and I myself have gone through so many in the last couple years; I’ve gotten married, I’ve gotten a home, I’ve gotten a juice machine. [laughs] In each of those scenarios, I was using Reddit for my product journey to really figure out, what can I trust when it comes to learning how to go through this passage?
For brands, I think they’ve got to really be cognizant of the role they should play in meeting people on that journey. There’s value in simply being there, just knowing that Reddit is on the path to purchase and that there’s an incredible amount of consideration that people are putting into that path when they’re on Reddit. And just show up. Just show up and wave your hand and say, “Hey, happy to be here. This is our product, this is our info.” It’s super simple. You can take your marketing that you’re using in other channels and put it in the right place at the right time, knowing how important this platform and this audience is. And don’t overthink that.
Then beyond that, it’s an opportunity to really engage. Once you’ve gotten some signal, place a few different bets, a few different targeting cohorts that you set up with your creative. See what’s resonating. Maybe you might be surprised, actually, at who’s engaging with your ads. Maybe it doesn’t actually match your expectations. That might be a way to step into an intersectional audience that is really an opportunity that you hadn’t considered.
Begin to have a dialogue with them. Turn the comments on when you’re ready (you can start with the comments off). Have a prompt and bring the humans behind your brand on board. Say, “This is our R&D team. We’ve noticed that you’re changing the way we think about vacuum cleaners, the way we think about home gardening.” That’s a huge space for transformation right now. Have a conversation. Show up authentically and really be there for them.
To provide a story and a case study here, that’s exactly what Chipotle did a couple of years ago. They released the Lifestyle Bowls, which were based off of the cultural observation that all of these diets were emerging, like the paleo diet, Whole30, keto, etc. We have communities for each of those, and they’re robust and very, very active. So Chipotle with their ads, they turned the comments on and said, “We are making lunch items for your diet. What should we put in it?” They stayed in that conversation and they had a back-and-forth. When they came back around, they were able to say, “Lifestyle Bowls are out and you helped us know how to make them right. Here they are.”
And the trust they earned was incredible. The call to action was very, very powerful because all of the Redditors who had participated in that said to their coworkers, their friends, their family, “We’re going to lunch at Chipotle because I’ve got to try this bowl that I had a hand in creating.” It created a cultural moment in these niche subcultures that, as the tide rose on all of these different diets, Chipotle’s Lifestyle Bowls rose with them.
ROB: It’s interesting that you mention that because Chipotle with those bowls – they actually come across as quite authentic all the way down to the store. I was at Chipotle a month ago and they had cauliflower rice, which I imagine is part of this, right?
WILL: That’s where that mission statement of the creative strategy team comes into play. We turn curiosity into understanding. At first it’s like, cauliflower rice? That’s a curiosity. It’s strange. But then when you understand the reasons for that and where it comes from and how it fits into culture, it shows itself to be a tremendous opportunity.
So what we want to do is highlight things like that early and often so that our partners have more time to develop their products and their marketing and be agile in the moment when things like that really come to bear.
ROB: All the way down to the store, that entire initiative feels very authentic, very – not to say this inappropriately in a food context, but it feels organic. It just feels right. So it’s awesome to see that stemming from the Reddit ecosystem.
When you think about the different communities – obviously this has been a big year for Reddit news-wise. You may be tired of talking about it or you may not be, and it’s not as much in the moment right now, but the entire Wall Street Bets, GameStop, crypto rotation – there’s a few news cycles on that alone. What’s interesting about that is it’s not that that movement started this year; it’s that that movement became visible this year.
Are there some other communities that you think are maybe waiting for that moment? Are there types of conversation that you think might be driving a news cycle next month?
WILL: I’m not tired of it. I’m grateful for it because it revealed a 10-year-old secret to everybody, which is that Reddit communities are staggeringly sophisticated and influential. I’ve been telling that story for a long time, and now I have a story that everybody recognizes and everybody has the full context on. Before, I was telling the story of McDonald’s and Szechuan sauce and the Rick & Morty community, or the March for Science, or some of the fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders, or when Reddit flooded a hospital ward with pizzas for a young cancer patient.
All of these really remarkable stories of Reddit doing exactly this for over 10 years, and now there’s one that really has become the shorthand, where everybody saw and understands, I think in a very intuitive way, the power of Reddit. That’s what GameStop and Wall Street Bets really represents. It’s the power of Reddit on the world stage. And we know that it’s going to happen again because this is Reddit doing what Reddit does. It’s very well-spirited. It’s the human spirit, and it’s so important for the voice of communities to be able to influence culture in this way for the decades that are ahead of us.
I think that there are quite a few communities right now that we can expect to see some similar kinds of moments from. It’s rarified that you’re going to have something that reaches the kind of stratospheric level of the GameStop moment because it was just this revelatory moment. But I think that what was learned by communities and the broader web and culture is that there are really powerful ways to vote with your dollars that we kind of understood as people beforehand, but now we have tools that we didn’t have beforehand to really have a collective impact together.
So I think we’re going to see different versions of people voting with their dollars together in other sectors that are going to be really, really interesting. In a lot of what we saw with that, people were just throwing one dollar or five dollars into the pot or something like that, and there was this sense of collectivism and what we can do together. We’re going to see that I think in a lot of other areas.
I also think there are some more subtle shifts that are coming. I’ve been keeping an eye on the sustainability communities on Reddit for some time, and there’s a whole underbelly of people that are raising their own chickens and making sourdough and growing vegetables in their backyard, and it’s emerging into this – I always look for the language. I really like this community called Zero Waste. It represents an idea that I want to live a life that is not producing any waste. It’s an aspirational lifestyle in a totally different direction than what we considered beforehand.
This community was having a discussion earlier this week about whether or not brands belong in a community like this, and how they felt about seeing brands move towards product packaging and messaging that at its best is contributing to the cause and at its worst is what you would call greenwashing. There’s an example of some soap company that had paper packaging for the soap, and when you peeled back the paper there was a plastic container on the inside. [laughs]
The sentiment that came through in that community was that they really want brands to be a part of this. They’re really, really encouraged to see that brands are stepping into changing the way they manufacture their products, that they’re making pledges to support things like community gardens and all of the different circular systems that are going to save our planet and going to save all of us. They know that brands have influence. They know that brands have resources and power, and that can really shift things the way they like to see them.
So I think we’re going to see that influence not be one of those dramatic spike moments that Wall Street Bets was, but I think over the course of the next 10 years, it’s going to be this protracted rising tide that is going to shift the way that we all think. I think that term, “zero waste,” is going to be very obvious to all of us in the future. But it’s very clear to just a niche subculture on Reddit right now.
ROB: It’s going to be probably interesting. What strikes me about Wall Street Bets is you have this intersection of democratization. You have this democratized community on Reddit, but then you have the democratization of finance, and you have these apps where you can fire up an app and make an investment.
At the intersection you’re talking about with zero waste, there will be some communities who will – you’ll probably be able to buy carbon credits and point them in places you can’t think about right now. Some communities on Reddit will love that and use that, and some will hate it. You’ll have all pieces of that out there. It seems like looking for areas where something tangible is being democratized is maybe a good place to keep an eye on Reddit.
WILL: Yeah. I don’t know if we’ve got the time to really dive into the depth of this one here, but the very nature of the way we exchange value is changing. The digitization of currencies is supporting that, and there are currencies that belong to communities; there are currencies that belong to causes. All of that can facilitate a moment where the two things I described come together. You have a purpose – zero waste, sustainability – and you have the realization of the things that we can do when we vote with our dollars together. Those can come together and create real change in the world, and we’re going to see that over and over and over again.
ROB: And Reddit’s been in the middle of that for longer than most with Reddit Gold and all that. It’s interesting how long it’s been hiding in plain sight on Reddit, is what I would say.
WILL: Isn’t it? It’s crazy. [laughs]
ROB: I think there’s one other interesting thing to pull on. Reddit has this legacy of being – it just feels techy. It may have been unapproachable for some, but now so many digital natives – you’ve been at this forefront of – this is true in a couple of cases – Silicon Valley mindsets meeting the LA media landscape. That cultural alignment, what does that look like over time? How has it evolved in your time there?
WILL: Wow. The LA/San Francisco connection is a really, really interesting one. There’s a dynamic between tech and media. When I first started, it was like this denial that media could act like tech and that tech could act like media. Vastly, vastly different things. I would say both industries were kind of looking down their nose at each other.
Over the following years, they’ve really seen a tremendous amount of interplay on the level of how the funding works and how the talent is hired and how the products are developed, and of course, the user bases. Is Netflix a media company or a tech company? It’s really at a place right now where we’re understanding that tech and media are very, very much a hybridized thing.
I think over the course of the next few years, that element that is very, very present in marketing around purpose and intent is going to come in. There are so many options when it comes to our media and there are some many options when it comes to our platforms that all of these businesses really need to think about their why and about the intent of their brand and the intent of their users, and build against that.
I think there are other centers than San Francisco, New York, and LA that are really ahead when it comes to thinking about why. They’re unexpected because they’re different voices. The voices of sustainability, for example, are not coming from metropolitan cities. They’re coming from places like Hawaii. They’re coming from different mindsets altogether. That’s I think a really, really exciting place as the soul goes back into business. Media and tech, for them to find their place in the future, and for marketing to find its place in the future, they have to have a good answer in terms of “Why are we here? What are we doing for humanity? What are we doing for the world?”
ROB: Wow. It’s such a great point to bring it down to. This has been a tremendous privilege. Thank you so much for this grand tour of how to think about Reddit for marketers, what the options are, and how to do so thoughtfully. I think the authenticity of the brand comes through in how you and your team are thinking about these things as well.
WILL: Thank you. Thank you for giving me a platform for my voice. I appreciate the time.
ROB: Fantastic. Have a great one.
WILL: You too.
ROB: Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Sandra Fathi is President and Founder at Affect, a public relations, marketing, and social media agency that focuses on B2B technology, healthcare, and professional services. The agency clients range from “startups to large multinational publicly traded companies.” B2B tech includes such things as “cryptocurrency, data, cybersecurity, supply chain and logistics, mobile application development, and cloud computing.” Healthcare includes healthcare IT, devices, MedTech. and services but stops short of highly FDA-regulated areas. Clients’ products tend to be complex but further challenges for the agency include multiple decision-makers and multiple considerations.
Sandra says people seek out her agency because they appreciate the agency’s focus on business outcomes and want an agency with “deep technical expertise.” To meet this technical challenge, the agency selects its team members based on three criteria.
- The ability to communicate verbally . . . to explain complex ideas to others, to translate expert or technical information so that non-technical layman can understand
- The ability to write in a compelling fashion, to mirror the voice of the client
- The passion to excel at customer service and have the self-driven motivation, curiosity, and interest to “dig deep” into its clients’ products and services
Sandra graduated early from high school and, after her first year of college at NYU, went to Israel for “a year abroad.” She stayed 11 years, spent 2 years in the Israeli army, and completed her degree before working for technology publishers IDG and Ziff Davis, where she produced the first internet world event in the Middle East. A job with a videoconferencing company brought her back to the US and she spent a number of years in “the agency life.”
9/11 proved pivotal for many people. Six months-of-thinking later, Sandra realized that she loved her work . . . but she didn’t love the company she was working for. On impulse, she quit to start her own agency, one where both she and her employees “would love to work” because it was “just time.” Her former employer became her first client. Her agency grew by word of mouth, the application of her marketing expertise, and “farming out work to friends and colleagues.” Within six months, she added two employees.
Today, Affect tries to keep most of the work “in house,” unless it is something they don’t do, like coding or graphic design. Over the past year, even in the face of Covid, and unlike many other businesses, the agency grew. Sandra says the agency had “terrific year from a financial perspective, even though it was such a difficult year from a personal and global perspective.”
Sandra says it is important, when faced with challenges, that organizational leaders know how to make tough decisions quickly – to “do the right thing for your team in the long run.” Otherwise, it’s like “death by a thousand cuts.” Affect employees found they could be more efficient working remotely – but are gradually working their way back to the office -- there are just some things that cannot be replicated in a virtual environment.
Sandra credits the advice of “a community of trusted advisors” for helping her avoid and navigate the numerous challenges the agency has faced. She can be reached on her agency’s website at: Affect.com or by email at: sfathi@affect.com.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Sandra Fathi, President and Founder at Affect, based in New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Sandra.
SANDRA: Thank you so much. Glad to be here.
ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don’t you start off and tell us about the specialization of Affect and where you are most effective?
SANDRA: Thank you. We are a public relations, marketing, and social media agency. Our focus is really B2B tech and healthcare. That can run the gamut. Almost every company, every organization today has a technology piece to it, and it can be everything from any type of tech or electronic gadget that you have. But we tend to go deeper and it tends to be everything from AI, cryptocurrency, data, cybersecurity, supply chain and logistics, mobile application development, cloud computing. We like to get really nerdy, is basically where we like to spend our time. [laughs]
Then on the healthcare side, it’s a lot of healthcare IT, healthcare devices, MedTech as well as services. We don’t get involved in things that are very highly FDA regulated like drug development. That’s a little bit of a specialty that we don’t fall into. But we love working with everything from startups to large multinational publicly traded companies.
Most of them, why they come to us, there’s two reasons. One, they want that deep technical expertise – somebody who’s really going to get in there, get under the hood, and try to understand the product, the market, the competitors, the value proposition, so we can then go out and evangelize the company and their products and services. You can’t really do that well if you don’t truly understand the products themselves and the pain points for the customers. Most of the products that we represent are pretty complex and have multiple decision-makers and multiple considerations, so we really have to dig in deep.
The other thing that we really specialize in is focusing on the outcomes from a business perspective. A lot of firms will talk about, “These are the activities we’re going to do for you. We’re going to do media relations, we’re going to talk to the press, we’re going to help you key messages,” and they might have outputs, like “We’re going to issue four press releases a month” or “We’re going to write 10 articles.” But the outcomes are really where you’re moving the needle for the business.
If someone comes to us, one of the first things we want to understand is, what are they trying to achieve from a business perspective? Are they entering a new market? Do they have a sales goal? Do they have a number they have to hit for lead generation? Are they pivoting their positioning? We try to match all of our activities to help drive those outcomes. The holy grail could be revenue, but for some of the clients we’re working with, their sales cycle might be 12 to 18 months depending on the size of purchase, so we might focus on a lot of the milestones that are leading to revenue – again, lead generation, traffic to the website, registration for product demos, registration for events, and of course, eventually contracts and actual dollar amounts.
We do spend a lot of time mapping to those business goals to make sure that everything that we do is really making a difference.
ROB: There’s a lot of richness in what you just said. You said it so casually that I think we missed 10 levels of detail we could probably dig into. You talk about the sales cycle and you’re talking about different points in the – I don’t know if you talk about the customer journey much, but you’ve implied it without even saying it. Maybe that’s the real magic of it: not even needing to name check it. But you’re talking about all these different points along that stream.
One thing that strikes me – you talked about technology being technical, of course, and healthcare, when you talk about some of these different types of products and solutions in that space, is also technical. I wonder a little bit, when you’re building your team, how do you find this magical unicorn of marketers who are going to understand cryptocurrency and get current on nonfungible tokens as that becomes a prominent thing? How do you filter for that talent?
SANDRA: We talk about looking for triple threats when we look for team members. [laughs] The first step starts with excellent communication overall. You’re looking for someone who, whether it’s verbal communications, written communications, any form, they are very good at expressing themselves and explaining complex concepts to others. A lot of what we’re doing is really translating, in many ways, from a technical audience to a non-technical audience, or from an expert to a layman. So we want to have great communicators.
The second thing we want is great writers. It’s one thing to be able to communicate, but also to write in compelling fashion, whether that’s mirroring the voice of the client or the company or writing marketing copy or a tweet or ghostwriting a book on behalf of a CEO – those are things that we definitely look for.
The third thing that we look for is people who are fantastic at client service. Ultimately, we are in the service industry and we are looking to serve our clients, and we have to know that we’ll do everything that it takes to make them happy so they’ll be satisfied with the work.
Those are the three core elements. Then layered on top of that, if you will, yes, we do look for people who have B2B tech and healthcare experience, and it’s great if we’re able to find them. Not everyone goes into college and says, “I’m going to major in B2B tech PR.” [laughs] That isn’t typically where their aspirations go. They want to work in the music industry or they want to work in fashion or sports marketing and all these other places that seem a lot shinier and flashier.
But for those that do, and especially for those that have what I would call an innate curiosity, people who are lifelong learners, who want to know – I’m not saying they have to do a degree – and I don’t think you can even get one yet – in cryptocurrency. But people who are interested and willing to spend the time, watch the videos, do the research, do the searches, go to events, listen to experts. And that’s more something that people come to the table with. It’s either you have that trait or you don’t.
I’m a person that every time I meet a new prospect or client, I’m fascinated by their business and understanding what the founder’s story was, how they came up with this product, how it was developed. Give me the background and what makes you different. I love that. That gets me excited. And I don’t want to be an expert just in one thing, but I want to constantly be learning and developing professionally.
That is more of what I look for. How can I find people who have that self-driven motivation, that curiosity, that interest so they’ll be willing – when they have an opportunity to work on an account that’s about artificial intelligence in the healthcare arena, they’re going to dive in, roll up their sleeves, and learn as much as they can so they can be that much more effective at their job.
It really is “every day something new.” A few weeks ago, we worked on a pitch for a prospect that was in the clean energy space. Clean energy is a big umbrella. It’s hydro power, it’s solar power, it’s wind power, it’s so many other aspects. So even when you have experience, there’s always something new and something interesting.
I think what we don’t look for, if I were to put the opposite, is folks who are comfortable. [laughs] What I mean by that is if you want to keep the status quo and you’re like, “I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I just want to stick with what I know,” then this isn’t the right place for you. But if it’s someone who is always wanting to learn what’s next, what’s new, and how to pique their interest, then it’s a really good fit.
ROB: Right. There are plenty of firms out there. If you just want to do corporate communications press releases, there are plenty of places you can go for that, and it sounds like it’s not with you at Affect.
Sandra, when you think about the background of the company, what was the origin story? What led you to jump out there and decide that you were going to do your own thing instead of the potential convenience of someone else paying your paycheck and helping you find the business?
SANDRA: I’ve always had an independent streak. That didn’t always make my parents happy as a child. [laughs] You want to have kids who are independent, but it’s not easy to parent them – which I know because I’m getting the payback now from my own children.
ROB: Right. [laughs]
SANDRA: But if I were to go way, way back, I didn’t have a traditional path, so to speak. I grew up in New York and Long Island. I graduated a little early from high school because I just couldn’t wait to get started with life, and I did my first year of college at NYU. My second year was meant to be a year abroad in Israel, and I actually wound up staying for 11.
So I did go to Israel for what was supposed to be a 1-year program and I had an incredible roommate who turned into my best friend, and we’re still very close today. One of the biggest gifts she gave me was convincing me that we needed to drop out of college and join the army. She was right. We both did. I was 2 years in the army in Israel, and when I graduated, although I did come back for a short period of time to the U.S., I wound up deciding to go back to Israel and finish my degree there.
My first job once I graduated was a reporter for a division of IDG and Ziff Davis, which, if you’re not familiar with them, are large technology publishers. That kind of started me on the path, if you will, to this interest in tech. It was very early days. I laugh about it now, but one of the first projects I worked on was a book – a printed book – of email addresses for CEOs of tech companies. Now it’s laughable, but at the time it was very cutting edge. [laughs]
I worked for that publisher for some time, and it was very interesting because not only did they publish books and magazines, but they also produced events. I produced the first internet world event in the Middle East at the time. It was really when Israel as a country was just starting to develop that startup nation mentality and reputation.
I did wind up going in-house and working for a company in the videoconferencing industry. That moved me back to the U.S., and I was there for some time. Then I wound up going to Nokia and later to one of the largest global PR agencies, in their tech division. I loved agency life in terms of the pace and working on multiple clients and getting to talk to the C-suite and really being able to see the ROI of the work that we were doing and how it impacted everything from their ability to make their quarter to their stock price to outcomes for employees or hiring. That was really exciting for me.
What was not suitable for me was the bureaucracy, the politics, occasional compromising of principles for process. [laughs] There were a lot of things about that particular experience that taught me what I want to do and what I don’t want to do. When people say, “What have you learned from your managers or great bosses?”, I feel like I’ve had both, and I have learned just as much from those that I would never wish on my worst enemy as I have from those that I absolutely adored and loved.
That definitely sparked the desire to continue this path in PR specifically, and also to build my own agency, but it also shaped very much the focus on being an employee-centric, team-centric organization, and one that puts culture ahead of the almighty profit or clients at times as well.
ROB: I know people who’ve been very much in that similar sort of organization and possibly that same organization, and 15 years after you left, I hear some pretty similar stories. You probably know some folks that are still in there. You can rest well in that decision.
Tell me about the story arc – you started the firm, and what’s the initial trajectory of going from a client to a few clients and you versus the learning process of building a team?
SANDRA: What I can say is for me, the final straw in my corporate job was actually 9/11. It was a pretty pivotal moment for me, and for anyone, really, who was impacted by that day or living in the Tri-State Area. Although, thank God, nothing happened to my immediate family, it couldn’t help but be a watershed moment where you reevaluated your life in so many ways.
As I mentioned previously, I was clear on “I love what I’m doing; I don’t necessarily love the company I’m doing it for.” [laughs] I needed to reevaluate. It took me a few months to crystallize that I wanted to leave. I had gone on vacation with my husband, and I came back to work on a Monday and I think I called him at noon and was like, “I have to quit today.” He was like, “Please come home and let’s have a discussion.” And I quit the next day.
It was somewhat impetuous. I think I had just reached that level of like “I have to jump,” and there was never going to be the best time to do it. It was 6 months after 9/11, so I do remember my boss at the time – he kind of took my hand, like a dad, and was like, “Are you sure you want to do this?” [laughs] I was like, “Yeah.”
I became very fortunate in that my former employer became my first client. I was very lucky that I was able to basically turn that into my first client. Then I slowly started getting enough work from word-of-mouth and from using my own marketing skills to promote the company that I was farming out work to friends and to colleagues. I think it didn’t take more than about 4 or 5 months before I hired my first two employees.
It was very organic. I wouldn’t say that I had a grand plan when I made the leap. I think in many ways that helped me because the pressure was not to build a grand agency, but to provide for my family and build a career for myself – but the person I was really trying to meet the standards of was my own rather than some sort of third party.
I did have a daughter at the time who was only a year and a half old. Not long after, I also had my son. So I had two young kids at home not long after starting the agency, which is always challenging. But if you want something done, as they say, give it to a busy person. Somehow you make it work.
Those first few years were definitely – I worked harder than I ever had, but at least I was doing it for myself and not for someone else. That to me was very rewarding, and knowing that I was building something that I believed in and building an environment where not only did I think other people would love to come to work, but I enjoyed, and I would love to come to work and be proud of our team and our agency and the work that we produce.
That gives you a little bit of the generation story, if you will, the inception.
ROB: That certainly makes sense and adds some color to the conversation. One thing you mentioned is I think an interesting thing to reflect on: all throughout the agency world – you mentioned farming out work, and I think that’s an ongoing dynamic for most firms that we talk to. How do you think about the balance between how much work you farm out versus when you bring a role in-house and that juggle of the full-timers, the contractors, etc.?
SANDRA: Today we don’t farm out work. We try to keep everything in-house as much as possible unless it’s a skill we don’t have, a specialty area. Like we don’t code and we don’t do graphic design, but we also don’t have enough projects per se to supply an individual like that with a 40-hour work week’s worth of work. Sometimes it is better to go to a specialist who can swoop in and work on something and provide their expertise and then hand it back to the internal team.
But overall, we really only work having full-time team members in-house. There have been years where we have used freelancers on occasion. I think with the difficulty of COVID, the entire year of 2020, we really wanted to keep everyone in the lifeboat, if you will. We wanted to take care of our people and take care of in-house – and, knock on wood, we did not have to take any negative steps. Our team actually grew. We had a terrific year from a financial perspective, even though it was such a difficult year from a personal and global perspective.
But we’ve really tried to keep full-time team members to ensure that we’re also consistently delivering the quality of work and the type of work that our clients come to expect from us.
ROB: Yeah, that step function of adding team members versus contractors. I think the biggest the team is, the more flexibility you have where you’re not trying to decide whether you’re going to overload somebody by 50% to avoid farming it out. It certainly makes sense.
A topic of the moment you touched on there: how are you thinking about reopening of business and the return to in-person versus remote work over the year ahead?
SANDRA: It’s interesting because we obviously just passed the 1-year anniversary of when the world shut down, the apocalypse. We were just talking about it as a team the other day. We literally sat as a team together on a Thursday morning in the office and we’re like, “Okay, looks like we’re going to take our laptops and go remote. Make sure you download your files, take any technology you need. We’ll probably be back in two weeks or so.” [laughs] That’s what we naively thought at the time. Everyone went home and turned on their laptops on Friday and we just kept working.
We’ve been very, very fortunate that in our business it really has not presented any obstacles in terms of being able to work and be productive from a full-time perspective in a remote environment. We luckily were also set up technologically that everyone had access. We didn’t have any issues in setting anyone up to work. As long as you had your laptop and a good internet connection, you were ready to go. So our clients did not experience any service interruption, so to speak.
We did also implement a number of initiatives to try to replicate as best we could the in-office environment, if you will. In the first few months of the pandemic, we had daily 10-minute stand up meetings. Those meetings were often more about checking in on everyone’s physical and mental health and families than they were about the work. I think we all needed that just to stay motivated and positive and focused. When we reduced it – over the summer, we reduced it to only three days a week – I missed my team. I’d wake up on the days we didn’t have them and be like, “Is this the way we start the day? I need to see everyone.”
We moved a lot of our social experiences into the online realm. For Pride Month, we had a drag queen do a performance for everyone and we did bingo with her, which was a lot of fun. For the holidays, we did some holiday baking with a professional chef from South Carolina. We’ve done trivia, we’ve done escape the room. Again, all in a virtual environment to try to replicate that feeling of camaraderie and fun.
But I think if anything, our clients have actually gained from our remote work. Everyone is no longer commuting; they’re actually probably working in some ways longer hours and more productively because they’re much more flexible in their ability to choose when they’re working and balance their responsibilities at home or just do the things they need to for self-care, whether that’s going to the gym or meditating. I think our team has actually become more productive during this time.
In terms of going back to an office environment, we have been opening our office one day a week I think since July. We’ve only had a handful of people come in. It’s all on a voluntary basis. We are definitely planning to go back to an office environment, but it will never be the same. We don’t expect to be a five day a week company. Maybe it’s going to be two days a week in the office, three days a week.
We recognize that there are things we cannot replicate in a virtual environment, and especially for junior team members, that ability to learn from your colleagues, the casual conversations, the creation of friendships at work, learning by osmosis by hearing the person sitting next to you pitch a member of the media or being called in spontaneously to a brainstorm – it’s very hard to replicate that effectively in a virtual environment. We feel that we need that, and when it’s safe and folks are vaccinated, we’ll be working towards getting back to that type of setup.
But I think if you asked anyone on our team, especially those who knew each other prior to this pandemic and worked together, I think they feel closer now than they did before. In the collective trauma we’ve all been through this year, I think we’ve gotten a lot of comfort and support from our team members, and that’s really made a difference to the unity of the team.
ROB: Sure, and it’ll be even better when those relationships can also break bread together. That’s going to be a good, good moment.
SANDRA: Absolutely.
ROB: Sandra, if you think back on the life of the firm, what are some things you would go back and tell yourself, the first day of the company self? What advice would you give to that person about the journey ahead?
SANDRA: I wouldn’t want to scare her. [laughs] There were a lot of things – you don’t know what you don’t know. I think when you are a founder of any company or you’re a risk-taker, you have to be an optimist. You wouldn’t do it if you thought you were going to fail. You wouldn’t jump off that cliff, you wouldn’t quit the job, you wouldn’t take out that loan, you wouldn’t find that partner if you thought it was doomed. So when you’re an entrepreneur or a business owner, you definitely have that optimist bent in your head.
I think that sometimes can lead you to think things are rosier than they are, or to not read the signs, so to speak. If there were things that I regretted, it was not making decisions faster, especially when they were hard decisions. Maybe there was an employee that I had a gut feeling about or wasn’t working, and letting that languish for 4 or 6 months and trying to turn things around until I finally was like, “Okay, it really is them, it’s not me.” [laughs] I was usually right, right up front.
Or COVID is a great example. The companies, especially agencies, that were hit hard, many of them were hit very hard because they did not make the tough decisions quickly enough. Then it was like death by a thousand cuts.
So I think if anything, I would say trust your gut, act quickly, and you do sometimes need to make the very hard decisions in order to do the right thing for your team in the long term.
I’ll also say that you need a community of business advisors that you can trust. You need to learn from their lessons. It can be very lonely. As the senior executive, you can’t necessarily share with your team that you’re afraid you won’t make payroll this month or that you’re watching the bank account dwindle and you’re scrambling to get a loan or a line of credit. You have to keep up that brave face, but you need supporters to help you navigate that, and navigate so many different things that come up when you’re owning a business that you don’t expect. It could be labor laws, it could be insurance issues, dealing with a landlord on your office space.
I really feel that building that community of trusted advisors and taking their advice is very important.
ROB: How have you found that community?
SANDRA: I have had a number of vendors over the course of building my business that have really been instrumental in helping me navigate crises, but also avoid crises with their good advice. It could be as simple as a lawyer who’s looking at your contracts or a great accountant who’s watching out for you from a tax perspective. Or it’s another business owner that I meet with and we share stories of the difficulty we’re having with an employee or on the hiring front and hearing their advice. Or tools and technology.
I’ll give you a really good example. We were actually a founding member of something called the With Global Alliance, and we founded it in January of 2020. Fantastic timing. It’s an international group of B2B tech agencies around the globe who all offer similar services, and the intention, of course, was to help us offer our clients access to international markets.
We started out at one of the most difficult times, and we were five firms covering 10 countries. But during the last year, we’ve grown to – I think we are now 12 firms offering services in 26 countries. But being able to get on calls with agency leaders from all over the globe and find out what’s happening in India, what’s happening in Singapore, what’s happening in China – they’ve gone back to work fully. COVID is over in Asia. Or how is the agency in Australia handling it, or what’s happening in the UK, where they might be a little behind us or the regulatory systems call for different types of actions.
It’s been so rewarding to hear from other agency owners what they’re doing, how they’re grappling with the situation, how they’re helping their teams, what ideas they have, what technology they’re using. That’s been really beneficial. More than what we initially thought the original business purpose would be, since there was less international activity for everyone across the globe, but that’s been incredibly rewarding and comforting to have those opportunities and to have those peers to be able to go to and discuss those tough issues and ask those tough questions.
ROB: All good stuff, Sandra. When people want to get in touch with you and get in touch with Affect, how should they find you?
SANDRA: The easiest way is to go to Affect.com. Or hit me up at sfathi@affect.com.
ROB: That’s fantastic. Sandra, thank you so much for joining us today. I wish you the best as we all have an eye on emerging from our homes and seeing some people. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing.
SANDRA: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
ROB: Be well. Thank you.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Steve Connelly started Connelly Partners (the defiantly human agency) in 1999 after he, as President of another agency, decided that the next time he got shot in the head, it would be by his own hand. For the first 6 months, his startup operated out of loaned office space in the backroom of another agency, Partners & Simons, Connelly Partners grew to cover all disciplines through acquisitions and organic divisional spinoffs. Today, the agency has a 42,000 square foot office in South Boston, and satellite offices in Dublin, Ireland and Vancouver. The broad, international range of the agency’s B2B and B2C clients range in size from very small to large. The agency even supports low-cost or pro bono services for creative opportunities.
The core values of the agency include all things anthropology, with subsets of empathy, studying human behavior, observing people and being able to “figure out what they’re thinking, even if they don’t know that’s what they are thinking.” Steve refers to his team as “master translators of human behavior” . . . with the ability to “read minds.” He thinks the best way to understand how to sell a product to a customer is to understand the challenges of that customer’s life. His priority is not to “get noticed.” He says, “Everyone notices a streaker, but no one wants to shake his hand” and then clarifies the thought by saying, “I’d rather understand a person, have them look at our work and say, “You know what? They get me.”
In this interview, Steve talks about people’s responses to market cycles and how, often, when things bottom out, people sit and wait for things to turn around.
He says, for him, that “the bottom” is the point:
When you attack, when you invest, when you try to grow new practices, you try to bring new assets into your company, you take a really good look at your company as it sits, identify all your flaws . . . and try to fix them. I think the bottom of the market is when you get aggressive. But to do that . . . you have to have a lot of money saved.
That funding is accrued when times are good.
In this interview, Steve talks about the post-Covid business environment. As the world “opens up,” he expects to see a surge of “revenge tourism,” with people trying to “catch up” on experiences with their families after so many months in lockdown. He says, “Everyone is pissed off about everything right now” and acknowledges that, in the not-too-distant-future the “rules are going to be applied differently,” people will “choose to live differently, work differently, open . . . businesses differently going forward.”. He concludes, “Maybe we all just need to take a breath.”
Steve believes that the next year is going to be a time of discovery. Management during Covid revealed a lot of good things about people as they worked from home, but everyone was operating by the same rules. Once restrictions are lifted, things will change. Steve believes that a unilateral “everyone will work from home” is an unrealistic money grab and notes that the office environment fosters a higher level and quality of spontaneity and organic exchange. He expects to develop a “hybrid” model to keep the best of both.
Steve can be reached by email at: sconnelly@connellypartners.com.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Steve Connelly, Founder of Connelly Partners, based in Boston, Massachusetts. Welcome to the podcast, Steve.
STEVE: Great to be here, buddy.
ROB: It is excellent to have you here. I think you’ve got a great story with your firm, so why don’t you start off by telling us about Connelly Partners and the firm’s superpowers?
STEVE: Connelly Partners was founded in 1999. The way most great agencies were founded, I was shot in the head by the previous agency I was president of, and came to a moment of realization that, “Okay, well, I’m not going to get shot in the head again unless it’s . . .”
ROB: Self-inflicted. [laughs]
STEVE: Yeah, self-inflicted. So, we started the company. I had some amazingly gracious help from people inside the industry where I got space loaned to me. I had opportunities. The thing started organically in the backroom of another agency at the time called Partners & Simons. The nicest guy in the world, one of the smartest as well. Started organically. Moved to the south end in Boston about 6 months later.
Now we have 42,000 square feet of space here. We have an operation in Dublin, Ireland. We have an operation new in Vancouver. We’re in all disciplines. We’ve either acquired firms or organically started divisions to make sure that we have all skillsets represented.
And as it relates to our superpower, I think everybody probably wishes for powers other than they have. We’re certainly very fast, but I would say our superpower is the ability to read minds, which is creepy, but I do think our focus on empathy, our focus on really observing people, the love of anthropology, the study of human behavior – I think we can look at people and spend enough time and we can figure out what they’re thinking even if they don’t know that’s what they’re thinking.
I’d love to say we have super strength. I’d love to say I’m invisible. I’d love to say all these other cool, sexier powers that you see on The Boys or in The Avengers and stuff like that. But I think at the end of the day, because we’re an empathy-based company, reading minds is something we are actually really, really good at.
ROB: That’s a good talent. And you can read the minds of the people with the other superpowers, so it works out all right.
If we zoom out a little bit, give us a picture of, if there is such a thing, a typical client, a typical engagement, or maybe an example client or engagement that helps us understand how you engage and what it looks like.
STEVE: The reality is – and you know this and everyone listening knows this – there’s nothing typical anymore. We have projects, we have AOR, we have big, we have small. We have people that have creative opportunities and we do it for nothing or low bono. We have some really big clients, great clients. We have some really small clients.
I’d say the typical engagement, though, is somebody would come to us and they’d say, in so many words, “Help us understand our customers a little bit better and more their lives.” I think so many times people in marketing jump right to trying to understand how your product can be sold, and really the best way to understand that is to understand the person’s life that you’re trying to sell to and their stresses, their ups, their downs. What are the holes they have in their life that you might be able to fill or retrofit your product’s benefit or services to meet a need?
I think we would be looked at as master translators of human behavior and where we can identify what we would call defiantly human insights that most clients can take advantage of – things that are true about humans in general that we can help our clients use to maybe better get a conversation going with a prospect.
I have a saying I’ve used all the time in this business, which is everyone notices a streaker, but no one wants to shake his hand. Our business is filled with a lot of people that believe our job is to be streaking and to get noticed and for people to see us, and I don’t have time to do juggling llamas or flame-throwing fish. I’d rather understand a person, have them look at our work and say, “You know what? They get me.”
ROB: Sure. Are we able to talk about some of the brands that might’ve been mentioned in the booking notes? I think it’s illustrative, potentially. And I do notice the list was largely consumer. Are you largely in the consumer space? Is there some B2B in your game as well?
STEVE: Yeah, we have lots of B2B. It’s just those aren’t names people have heard of. Everybody’s heard of Titleist. Certainly, on some level, most people have heard of Gorton’s and the Gorton fisherman. I think those are both great client examples. With Titleist, there’s the fact they’re the number one ball in golf. More players who are not paid to play a ball play Titleist, and I think that says a lot about – and of course, some of the greatest golfers in the world play it.
Gorton Seafood, which is traditionally thought of as a fish stick-only company, but they’re actually much more of a seafood company. With deep respect and understanding for people’s love of the sea, we’ve been able to use anthropology; that’s dictated a couple paths for us to connect Gorton’s to the sea rather than lift them out of maybe how they were seen in the past, which is more of a convenience seafood.
We work with Williamsburg Tourism, which is actually one of the biggest tourism DMAs in the country, with Williamsburg, Yorktown, and Jamestown. I was just down there a week and a half ago. Good to report to everybody, tourism is coming back. People may be wearing masks, but they’re being active and they’re outside again, and hotel occupancy was at a nice level. There were a lot of people enjoying the outside. So that’s another client.
We work for Audi in Ireland. Just finished a piece for them, or we’re just going to production there. We’re going to prepare for the reopening of the country and get people to rally around that, which is a cool assignment. We work for a big insurance company in Ireland as well. We work for Pizzeria Uno, which is a recent client here. Those are all consumer brands.
On the B2B side, we work for a company called Quiet Logistics. We have a fair amount of B2B clients, including a couple I can’t mention yet because we’re still finishing up some contract negotiations. But I think one of our biggest wins in the last year is actually a B2B medical category company that has been totally embracing our love of anthropology.
One of the things that happens in B2B, Rob, and you know this, is that people begin to try to categorize B2B as a different animal, and it’s not. You’re still marketing to a person; it’s just that person is in a work stage, work life, different stresses, and we try to figure out what’s going on in their life from the “9-to-5.” B2B is still B2P. And we get hired a fair amount for clients in that space to help figure out how to sell to people in the 9-to-5 mentality.
ROB: It’s consistent when we hear a little bit about how you think about consumer, because those brands that you mentioned – the Gorton’s world – you think about food, and there’s the lane of the flashy new product, and then there’s the very – I think you mentioned where they came from, kind of this utilitarian mode. But there’s something deeper you’ve gone to with the ocean, and Boston is certainly a good place to do that. When you mentioned that, I want to go eat some seafood in Boston right now.
There’s sort of a steadiness to how you come at those consumer brands that seems necessary. You seem to handle consumer more in the way people handle B2B than how people think about consumer. It’s so flashy.
STEVE: I think one of the things you have to do if you’re going to be marketing – actually, B2C certainly, but B2B as well – is you can’t be stuck. Everything changes every 6 months. If you’re not self-aware enough to constantly be looking at the way life shifts – I mean, we have a rather robust strategic practice here. I don’t know the number, but our strategist per employee number is I would guess much higher than most other agencies’ numbers. We have two other open to hires, so if anybody wants to passively send me some anthropology resumes, I’d love to look at them.
But I think you’ve got to be invested in the world and seeing how things have shifted. We just finished, and we’re in the process of presenting to all clients now, 9 core insights that have changed and evolved or elevated in importance over the last 6 months as you come out of COVID. Now, those are different than they were 6 months ago when we were in COVID. It’s knowing where the mind is going.
You think about the imagery of the ocean, the power and the attraction of the sea, how we are all hardwired to yearn for it – I mean, everybody wants to put their toes in the ocean, for whatever crazy reason that may be that’s anthropologically validated. I don’t know why, but everyone wants to put their feet in the ocean. Using that attraction right now, if you think about it, we’ve been locked up inside for so long, the imagery of the ocean, the imagery of the outdoors, the imagery of the air – and also, the need to protect the oceans. The oceans are under incredible assault right now. Our reverence for the ocean and respecting the attraction of the ocean, we can use all that stuff to sell seafood. There’s a goodness to the food that comes from the sea that people inherently believe. I don’t have to convince them. I just have to connect them to that part of themselves that acknowledges it. Everyone likes fish.
ROB: Right. Steve, you mentioned starting the firm in 1999, which may have looked like a good idea for about a year or so, and then maybe seemed like kind of a bad idea from the dot-com bust and the echo of that. You’ve been through the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and this COVID thing as well. As you’re looking at coming out, how does this situation rhyme with the past couple of times of duress, and how did you handle it differently coming from that lens?
STEVE: There’s a certain consistency that I have had in terms of dealing with any time you reach a market dip, a market bump, when the rollercoaster is at the bottom. Some people handle it and they sit on their hands and they wait for it to pass. They become exceptionally conservative. They become almost passive, and you’re kind of waiting for things to open back up, and you just want to weather the storm.
I would be in the opposite category, which is I think that’s the point when you attack, when you invest, when you try to grow new practices, you try to bring new assets into your company you take a really good look at your company as it sits, identify all your flaws – because lord knows we all have tons of them – and try to fix them. I think the bottom of the market is when you get aggressive, but to do that, you have to be really conservative financially. You have to have a lot of money saved. You have to be very careful that when you’re at the top of the rollercoaster, you don’t go out and spend all your money on flashy cars and nice clothes. You’ve got to remember this is a long-term thing.
Because we have been very well-managed financially, we’re able to attack at the bottom when other people might not. Now, the difference here in this particular next 6 months is that the rules have been unilaterally applied to everybody. Everybody has had to wear a mask, stay inside, work from home. We’ve all been forced to compete by rules that are consistently applied. That wasn’t the case in the previous blips. Certainly, the dot-com blip – I can go back and talk about what happened then.
But the difference now is we all have to ask ourselves: What happens when we’re all not playing by the same rules again in 4 months? When some people are going to work and some people aren’t? When hybrid is becoming the reality and other people are going to want to stay home? When there’s different requirements of people as they pursue revenge tourism, as they try to find different ways to have more experiences with their family because they feel like they have to make up for lost time? The rules are going to be – we’re all competing and stuck in the same “COVID prison” right now.
I’ll say one other thing. I had a really good conversation with an employee here a couple of days ago. In an agency meeting, he asked me when I’m going to stop being so angry at COVID. I really didn’t even know I was projecting that anger. I found that to be a really therapeutic, really good slap in the face of reality that I got, because I think we’re all angry about it. But we can do nothing about it.
I really took those words to heart. I think in the early parts of this, I thought the role of an agency leader or business leader, head of a household, head of any group, manager, coach, your job is to be positive and to get people to focus on the positivity in the long term. I think I and all of us have been beaten down to the point where we’re angry and negative. [laughs] I found that to be a really good comment. As the rules are going to be applied differently and we choose to live differently, work differently, open our businesses differently going forward, I think positivity is something I’m going to try to amplify and get people to be a little less angry. Everyone is pissed off about everything right now, and maybe we all just need to take a breath.
ROB: I think it will be good to have – you mentioned revenge tourism, and I hadn’t heard that phrase. It’s hilarious, but it’s intuitive. I understand what you’re getting at. Maybe that will be a bit cathartic. Everybody has 10 opinions about what to do each day, but some folks seem to be saying they’re going to stay locked down, and maybe that’s the hardest part. How do you get those people out and un-angry? We all need to see some people and do some things, I think.
STEVE: Yeah, I don’t know how we’re going to – I think one of the things we have to do is acknowledge that we can only try so hard. Because of the way news is distributed, because of the way people are consuming news and they’re gathering information, they are led down certain paths. For us, I think we’ll go back to basic human instinct, which is the majority of people are going to want to get out.
Here’s an example. In Ireland they’re still completely locked down. If I go to Ireland right now, I have to sit in an airport hotel for 2 weeks before I can get out, and then when I get out, everything’s closed. The challenge as it relates to tourism in Ireland is that most people, when they take their holiday, go to Spain or to France or to Europe, other countries, and they explore the way we would explore other states here. They can’t leave.
So they are now making holiday plans to travel within Ireland, and if you think about it for context, that would be like me in Massachusetts – I can’t go to Florida, as I would go every year; I have to go someplace within Massachusetts. There’s a little bit of depression that comes from that. But I’m finding people are saying, “I’m going to make the best of it,” and there’s a certain acceptance. In Massachusetts, there are amazing places to go visit and escape, and I can take some revenge on COVID. I think that’s what’s going to happen as different countries stay shut down.
Revenge tourism is real, man. Our biggest piece of business when COVID started was Four Seasons in the Americas, and I lost that business in the first 2 weeks, for obvious reasons. But I think hotels are going to start – certainly, it’s happening here in the States again, and some places, some hotel groups, destination groups that continue to spend and engage with customers at the bottom of the rollercoaster are going to see the benefit of it now that things are starting to pick up, where others are going to have to make up ground.
From a marketing perspective, that’s a little bit of an insight that’s going to be fun to observe: how fast people can catch up.
ROB: It’s going to move. It’s already moving pretty quickly. To your point about investing when things are down, I’m hearing that a lot of the rental car companies disinvested in their fleets and now, come July and August, you’re looking at $100 a day for economy class cars in some places. If folks had kept it up, they’d have a fleet to sell.
STEVE: I’ll tell ya, man, I went to Naples this past weekend to golf. I’m in the Hertz Club Gold and I’m also in the National Emerald Club. I booked my car at National in the Emerald Club, landed at the hotel with my golf bag and my clothes, and there were no cars in the road except for one little teeny tiny clown car. I’m not a small human being, but this was my only choice. I was in a state of shock that every single car was gone, or, as you said, they’ve liquidated some of their fleets.
I’m driving around Florida in this little teeny tiny thing, trying to figure out where all the cars went. They clearly didn’t invest at the bottom. I get it; I think there are financial realities. But it doesn’t change the fact that I’m driving with my knees up to my chin.
ROB: [laughs] Sounds challenging. It’s going to be interesting. I was ready to go to Ireland. I was ready to self-quarantine for 2 weeks when they were still open, I think last summer. It turned out our kids didn’t have passports yet, so we didn’t make that. But I was ready to do that drive around Massachusetts version of Ireland. Just pick a home base in the middle of the country and drive around and see it.
STEVE: When you’re ready to do it, give me a call. I followed my son some years back on a rugby tour around Ireland, and it’s a spectacular country. The people are – for people that live in a country that has two seasons, cold and rainy and warm and rainy, man, they’re happy, friendly, nice, accommodating. We had the greatest time ever, and you will too.
But I could say the same thing about Massachusetts in terms of people that are driving to The Berkshires, or for me going to New Hampshire within 100 miles. There’s so much that we haven’t seen. I think at the end of the day, revenge tourism is about getting out of the house and reconnecting with some people, and you can do that driving 50 miles as well as flying 500 miles.
ROB: Absolutely. I will look for those tips. Steve, with the journey you’ve been on, and really successfully running and growing a firm for over 20 years, I’d be remiss not to ask you about some other lessons you’ve learned along that journey and maybe some decisions you might advise yourself to do differently if you were going back in time.
STEVE: I wear a lot of t-shirts. The people here would validate that. One of my t-shirts I wear is, “Often wrong but never in doubt.” I think that’s a key categorization for people that lead firms. You’re going to make mistakes; just make them quick and move on. Once you make a mistake, try to fix it.
I see a fair amount of people that are suffering from analysis paralysis. I think that actually is because of data, too. There are so many different hunks of data out there that people can study. By the time you figure out what it is you want to do, it’s too late. I think that’s true with clients and that’s certainly true with agencies.
I trust my gut. I trust my eyes. I trust my instinct. I’m a coach by trade, too, and I think there are certain skillsets that come from coaching groups of kids and high school and college kids and getting a group of people to work as a team. Those are transferrable skillsets.
The things I wish I could do over again – that’s a trick question because everybody has a thousand of them, but I don’t really think about them. I’ll give you one, but I don’t really think about them because you make a decision, you go with the decision, you do it based on what your gut and data tell you to do, and if you revisit it, you’re going to drive yourself mad. I mean, I have a beautiful wife, I have great kids, I have a great company. Would I have gotten here if I had made other decisions? Who knows?
But I’ll tell you one thing. I’m sure no one’s ever gone way back to when they were 12 years old, but when I was 12 going on 13, I was a really, really good baseball pitcher. I’ve told this story before. Stay with me; it’s relevant. I had a choice at that time. I could’ve played on an elite team in my hometown that would’ve developed my skills, honed my skills. I would’ve found out how good I could’ve been. I stupidly at that point – perhaps not – chose not to play on that team. I chose to play on a lower level team because that’s where my friends were.
That one decision caused me to lose skills. I was never able to find out how good I was. I spent literally the next 8 years trying to find out how good I could’ve been as a baseball player, and I couldn’t play in high school baseball. I wasn’t good enough. I could’ve if I had made that choice. I did play in college, but it took me 5-6 years of training to catch up, and I was one of those athletes that the older I got, the better I was. I sat on the bench. I got on the team.
But by the time I got into my mid-twenties and thirties and forties, and now as I’m 60, I can throw a baseball better than most at any other age, still. I love the game. The lesson is, if somebody presents an opportunity for you to explore and find out how good you can be, even if it’s painful, even if it makes you uncomfortable, even if it pushes you outside your comfort zone, you take that shot and you go find out. Because if you don’t, it’s going to cost you years to find out how good you could be.
It took me 8 years to undo one decision I made when I was 13 years old. I’ve never forgotten that.
ROB: Yeah, and gladly, you do get to take that with you as you go. I wonder if it ties in a little bit – when I look at the sort of clients that you have and the way you’ve grown and the way you’re still accelerating into acquisitions, I see the sort of firm that probably easily could have been acquired three times over, or you could’ve found somebody else to run it or something else. What keeps that fire burning in you to keep the gas going on the business, to not take a big check from some sort of ownership group that comes along, that sort of thing?
STEVE: Well, to be clear, if anyone out there has a big check, please provide them with my email and contact information. No, I’ll go back to when I was 13, man. That meant that I had a chip on my shoulder. I had something to prove. There was a certain anger and a fire in me that I think has gone to the point of where I am now at 60, where I’m like, I’m not done, man. I still want to try to compete at the highest level. I want to find out how good I can be.
I think on a different level, I feel a responsibility as a company to defend the human right brain from the marginalization of it that’s being caused by technology and data. I think I feel an obligation to be a defender of all things human at a time when we’re trying to be algorithmically discounted. I think there’s an opportunity for a company out there to have a good human soul, to be a non-arrogant, non-know-it-all marketing partner that is filled with confidence but not arrogance. And I don’t think there are many companies like that.
Meanwhile, I sit in a corner of the country where there’s an opening for a firm like ours to provide a resource to a certain segment of clients that are interested in anthropology, that are interested in understanding their customers better, that are not interested in juggling llamas, that are interested in better connections.
I always like to say, too, that we as a company are a terrible first date. We’re awful. On your first date – it certainly was true with me – that’s when you’re at your absolute most artificial. You make yourself look as good as you can possibly make. You make sure that you say the right things. You’re very measured. You prepare. The first date is an artificial presentation of who you aspire to be.
You get down to second, third, fourth dates, then the real you is revealed. We’re terrible at being artificial at that first thing. If somebody asks me a question, I’m going to give you an answer. I’m not going to bull anybody. I’m not going to try to shovel anything. If they ask me what I think, I’m going to tell them. That second, third, fourth date kind of stuff – when I put on a pair of pants and go to my wife now and say, “Do these pants make me look fat?”, my wife will say, “Sure, they do. So change them.”
You have to get to a certain comfort level with a person, with a client, with an agency, where you have that kind of value conversation. I think there’s need for that, and I don’t see enough of it in the world or in our region. So I’m going to keep going till I don’t.
ROB: Sure. It’s wonderful to see that burden on both sides to be a place that is worth working for and also one that’s worth working with. There’s certainly not enough of those. I don’t talk to people with regular jobs that often anymore, but I think about the conversations complaining about them.
STEVE: We’ll see, too. One of the biggest struggles most agency leaders and most company leaders are going to have is the work from home discussion and the reality of how people like to work. Ours is a business, I believe, that’s an organic exchange, but there’s certain aspects to working from home that people have discovered, in terms of productivity, in terms of balance, that are good. How are you going to rebuild a corporate mentality and structure?
I find it absolutely mind-boggling the amount of companies that are going to unilaterally embrace work from home all the time because they said that they have been productive during COVID. And we have been. All of us have been remarkably creative in figuring out ways to manage, but we’ve all been playing by the same rules. Now the rules are going to change, and I think some people are going to do it differently. A lot of people are going to move their companies to be unilaterally work from home, and it’s a money grab. You’re going to be able to cut out a bunch of operational expenses and put them in your pocket under the guise of work from home.
And I don’t know the answer, by the way. We’re going to figure it out together here. But some sort of a hybrid model, certainly initially over the next year while we try to figure out how to keep the best of what COVID management has revealed in all human beings as we’ve worked from home – because surely some really good things came out of it – and combine that with the best of working together in an office environment where spontaneity and organic exchange can happen in ways that it can’t when you work from home.
That’s going to be fascinating. Like I said, I wish I knew the answer, man. I don’t, but I’m going to go on my rather substantive gut, and we’ll see what happens. We’ll be willing to change and adapt going forward.
ROB: That’ll be a great conversation going forward. Steve, when people want to get in touch with you and connect with Connelly Partners, where should they go to find you?
STEVE: My email is sconnelly@connellypartners.com. I get a gazillion emails. I read them all; I don’t respond to them all because I’m trying to get through them all. I think the easiest thing to do is just shoot me an email and I’ll get back to you.
I’m not a big social media guy, and one of the reasons for that – and I hope you and your audience understand – it’s not that I’m a Luddite; it’s just that I believe in honesty, and honesty is not unilaterally embraced in a lot of places. So I’m going to not expose myself in a position where somebody’s going to misconstrue something. I have been in positions where I have said something innocuous and honest and some people want to take me to task for that. The debate is exhausting, so I choose not to have it.
I’m big on LinkedIn. Our company is a big social participant. If you go to our website, to where we are on Instagram, on all social channels, you can get a feel for our culture and our people. You can get a feel for our approach and our philosophy. But if you want to talk to me, send me an email and I’ll call you.
ROB: Sounds excellent. Steve, thank you for coming on the podcast. You’ve really got a great deal of wonderful things to share. We could go on for three times this long, but we’ll put that off to another time and wish you and Connelly Partners the absolute best as we all have our revenge tourism.
STEVE: Thank you, man. I would just leave this parting thought with everybody: be as positive as you can going forward. Be a little less angry. I was reminded of that 3 days ago. It snuck up on me. I think it sneaks up on all of us. Let’s go back to trying to be a little less angry and a little bit more huggable.
ROB: [laughs] Perfect. Love it, Steve. Thank you so much.
STEVE: Rock on. Take care, buddy.
ROB: Take care. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Steve Denker, most recently Vice President of Marketing and Digital for Turner Classic Movies, chats with Rob at the virtual 2021 South by Southwest. In this interview, he gives his perspective on what he looks for when “working with agencies.”
In the mid-90s, Steve worked for Aramark at Fulton County Stadium/Turner Field, managing relationships with the brands and products that were part of that stadium experience. He observed how fans interacted with Coca-Cola and highlighted opportunities for Coke to increase sales and strengthen the link between the experience and the product. Coca-Cola liked his approach and brought him onboard to develop the experiential look and feel of Coca-Cola in a wide variety of venues.
After a while, Steve understood that Coca-Cola was large enough that it would be a long time before he would have the opportunity to manage people, explore the emerging field of digital marketing, and gain product sales experience.
He took a position with RentPath, leading the marketing and advertising outreach for apartment guide publications at Apartment.com. From 2001 to 2008, Steve worked directly with companies that “touched” the rental process . . . selling digital advertising to utilities, renters’ insurance companies, and movers and helping people find the right place to live. “Moving is an incredibly stressful time,” Steve says.
In 2011, Steve joined Relocation.com, doing lead generation and business development out of New York. He connected with an individual who owned the Beach.com domain. Together, they planned to build the world’s largest and most comprehensive database of beach and beach destination information. When heavy competition from Travelocity and Expedia prevented Beach.com from getting the desired level of traffic and sales, Steve decided it was time to move again. He values his involvement in this “failed venture.” “I can’t tell you the lessons learned from that experience I have taken through everything else I’ve done, both personally and professionally.” All that “good stuff” found its place when Steve joined a consulting firm in Atlanta. (Steve’s Beach.com partner still manages the reimagined site.)
In 2016, an old buddy from his Coca-Cola days invited him to build a marketing department at Turner Classic Movies. Steve was at TCM for 4-1/2 years. Outsiders may think large organizations have such a wealth of internal resources that they don’t need help from agencies. Far from the truth, Steve says. Agencies are important for their unique talents, expertise, efficiencies, and ability to help “execute the vision.”
Steve describes what he looks for in agencies. Once agencies get past the first cut of “Do they have the ability to do what we need them to do?”, he needs to know that they “either already understand our business and who our customers are or have the capacity to understand that in a very short period of time.” He thinks organizational leaders need to have a laser focus on what they are trying to accomplish and understand both functional and emotional business priorities.
Steve recently started thefasttimes.net, a weekly culture e-zine for Gen-Xers and wannabes, and reaching out on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and continuing in our South by Southwest series, I am speaking today with a friend, a friend of the podcast, and not an agency owner but a marketer with a tremendous history that I think we will all benefit greatly from. My guest is Steve Denker. Steve was most recently Vice President of Marketing and Digital for Turner Classic Movies. He’s based in Atlanta like me, but we are still in COVID quarantine, talking online. Welcome to the podcast, Steve.
STEVE: Thank you, Rob. Thanks for having me. It’s been great running into you at local marketing and industry events over the past probably 8+ years, and at South by. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to work with Converge and/or Bellwood Labs in the future.
ROB: I appreciate that. I think I met you one fine day when you wandered into the Flashpoint Startup Accelerator here in Atlanta in the season of Beach.com. At least, that’s a memorable moment in your career. But you’ve done a great deal of things. Why don’t you start off by running through your journey and path in marketing, to give us an idea of the context you come to us from?
STEVE: Sure, thank you. And I do remember that day when we met downtown. I started out – I’ll back the train up a couple of stops. I grew up in Philadelphia and went to school in New York and came down to Atlanta in the mid-90s for a company called Aramark that was responsible for the concessions, the merchandise, and general operations at stadiums and arenas around the country, among some other businesses that they’re in.
I started working at Fulton County Stadium and eventually what became the new Turner Field. My position really was more in an operations role, but I was responsible for the relationships with all of the brands and products that were part of that stadium experience. I was working with the Budweisers and Starbucks and Bluebell Ice Cream, Coca-Colas of the world. Any product that was looking to get in front of those fans.
It’s interesting how I eventually used that relationship to transition to a role at Coca-Cola because I was watching the fans and seeing what they were doing at every game. I had the opportunity to watch their behaviors and see their traffic paths and their buying habits and so forth. So when Coca-Cola brought a team down once or twice a season to take a look at their assets, I had the opportunity not just to nod my head and say, “Yeah, the umbrellas are faded” or “We need new menu boards,” but really share with them what was going on and how the fans were interacting with Coca-Cola and how it was part of the experience to watch a Braves game.
By putting together some plans and sharing with them where I thought they could not only accelerate sales, but also make the brand more part of the experience, I caught the attention of a few folks within that sports and marketing group, at the time called Presence Marketing. Not long after the Olympics, I transitioned over to that group at Coca-Cola and was then part of that experiential look and feel of Coca-Cola at stadiums and arenas, Disney, Universal, and so forth, in a creative capacity.
It was a terrific move. The group was run by Steve Koonin, who is just Atlanta royalty and the CEO of the Hawks and State Farm Arena. He really was bringing so many innovations to this group and to the way that Coke was marketed. I was really fortunate to be part of that team and that group.
From there, a couple of years later, I had an opportunity to go to a company most recently called RentPath. At the time it was called PriMedia. Also here in Buckhead.
What was missing at Coke at that time when I left – I think there were three things I was really looking for that were going to take a while. I was looking to manage people and learn how to do that. I felt that was a good next step for my career. That would’ve taken a while within that multinational structure.
Digital was something that, in the early 2000s, was really the forefront of what the next part of marketing was. Coke wasn’t paying as much attention to it as other companies were.
Then finally, I was looking for something that would give me real sales experience, not just internally and working with other groups, but actually selling products. Again, I thought that would be something at the early stage of my career that I would learn and use for the rest of my days in terms of working in any capacity.
So RentPath offered those and more, and I went over and led the marketing and advertising for the apartment guide publications at Apartment.com. This was early on lead gen and getting folks into and around their apartments, their living situations. It was really interesting, because it was working directly with any company that has to do with that process, whether it’s your utilities and your phone, renter’s insurance, physically moving – anything like that were opportunities for myself and my team to sell advertising to.
These were the early days of digital advertising, if you can imagine: banner ads with CPMs of $60-75 and relatively no accountability. Not even serving accountability. Forget about click-through rates; did you actually serve the ads I just paid for? That was even, at the time, a little murky. Companies just wanted to be part of it. As long as they went onto the website and saw their ad, they said, “Keep serving it.”
It was really interesting to see the growth of the industry from, again, banner ads and text ads to what it is today – particularly at that time of 2001 through 2008, when it really exploded into the framework of what we see today with data and analytics and accountability. It was exciting to see that grow.
I left for a company called Relocation.com, which was lead generation and business development out of New York. I’d spend a week a month in New York and then back to Atlanta again.
I connected with someone in New York who owned the Beach.com domain, and we had plans to build the world’s largest database of beach information. Not just every beach in the world, but hotels, vacation rentals, restaurants, activities, local information, local concierge services – really anything that would have to do with a beach destination or vacation, and build out this massive portal.
At the time in 2011, this is when people really were using Travelocity and Expedia. There was heavy competition from these other sites. We went ahead and raised some money, built a plan, and it just didn’t take off. It didn’t get to the level in terms of traffic and converting users into revenue and sales that we had hoped for.
All shook hands a few years later, back in 2013, and the site is still live right now. My partner at the time is still running it with a couple of different objectives. But I can’t tell you the amount lessons learned from that experience I have taken through everything else I’ve done, both personally and professionally. I look back at that and have no regrets on taking that business risk. I think if we had done a couple of things differently – many things differently – we would’ve had a different outcome. But again, we pivoted. A lot of key learnings from that that I’ve been fortunate enough to share with other folks.
That’s what I did after that at a consulting firm here in Atlanta and had some great client relationships with companies like PDS and a company called AGRO Merchants Group, a healthcare company, we did some work with Blackstone.
Eventually, one of my earliest relationships from Coca-Cola, a woman named Jennifer Dorian, who is a mentor and a friend and could not be a bigger rock star – she’s now the CEO over at Atlanta Public Broadcasting & Radio. She was on Steve Koonin’s team as well. I worked with her in the Coca-Cola days and had stayed in touch with her really for 20 years. We were having coffee or lunch once or twice a year just to catch up and so forth.
She at the time was general manager of Turner Classic Movies and gave me a call and said, “Hey, we’re looking to build a marketing department and expand what we’ve been doing.” This was in late 2016. She said, “Would you like to come over and interview with a bunch of people?” I did that, and a couple of months later I had moved over to Turner and had an amazing four and a half years there.
ROB: It’s quite a journey. I think it’s interesting to point out that all the way through Beach.com, and probably a little bit after that as well, you were in early on the customer journey. Moving, to an extent, is kind of the ultimate customer journey. You combined that in the digital space. You mentioned the high CPM, but the customer lifetime value is also quite high if you can get somebody into an apartment for a couple of years.
STEVE: Absolutely. That’s a great point. Not only is it part of that initial customer journey – wherever that came from and whatever company claimed to own that verbiage and so forth, it was the beginning of that – but it was also, I think, a very critical time when working with customers. I was working in industries where you really can’t screw it up. In other words, moving is an incredibly stressful time. If someone doesn’t find the right apartment, if you haven’t given them all the information – and again, we were the connector. We weren’t the apartment complex, but we were certainly helping them find that right place.
But if they didn’t move into the right place, if they found out it was an hour commute from where they worked and they didn’t realize that, or if they moved into a place in Alpharetta and their friends were all in Buckhead and they didn’t realize it was a 45-minute drive, not 10 – all of these different things, they looked back and they were upset with us and the recommendations we made.
And on the moving side, same thing. Again, it’s very stressful. If that moving truck doesn’t show up on time – think about all the things physically connected to moving your stuff. You’re trying to time everything out on a particular moving day. It could be hooking up utilities or having to be out of one place and into another. If something isn’t right and you realize that all of your possessions are now on an 18-foot U-Haul and that is broken down on the side of a road, it’s not good.
So I think it’s understanding how important it is to take care of the customer and really understand what it is emotionally they’re going through when they’re finding a place to live, when they’re physically moving. At Beach.com, it was your vacation. Most people have two weeks a year, and that vacation is very important for them to recharge and connect with family or friends. It’s an important part of your life. If somehow I was part of an organization that screwed that up, it was on me, and it was something that I took very seriously.
ROB: Definitely a lot at stake there. Steve, one thing I think you can shed particularly interesting light on is maybe your time at TCM. You have a unique perspective for a guest on this podcast. You’re kind of on the other side of the table from the marketing agency, so I think it would be interesting to explore TCM through the lens of what that brand–agency relationship can look like.
STEVE: Sure. Absolutely, I’d love to do that. At TCM, we really looked at ourselves as part of the larger Warner Media portfolio. I think every brand looks at themselves as their own business, and we were certainly no different in that we had a very clear set of objectives and goals in terms of growing our brand to the audience, making sure that people not only tuned in and watched, but also couple participate in other ways if they didn’t have TCM on cable. Now there’s HBO Max and ways to watch, but also, there are a lot of other events and other enterprise businesses that TCM was a part of.
Running all these events, I think some people from the outside may look at a company like Warner Media, AT&T being the parent, and say, “Oh, there’s got to be so many resources within the company that there wouldn’t be a need to tap into agencies.” That couldn’t be further from the reality. I’ve worked with agencies for a very long time; they bring unique talent to a company like Warner Media and particularly TCM. We would work with agencies for their expertise, for their efficiencies, and for them to help us execute the vision. They were a very important part of what we did.
We had a couple of different ways we could structure relationships. Certainly, there were some contractors or freelancers that could come in for some very small projects or very specific projects that maybe had to do with production or one part of a creative execution. But for the most part, working with agencies was something that we did, and we worked with a couple of Atlanta agencies that really knocked it out of the park for us.
On the TCM side, early on when I started, we had a product called FilmStruck, which was this amazing streaming service of independent, foreign, and arthouse films. It was the first streaming service that Turner had launched, and eventually it was shut down to make way for HBO Max. But as we launched it, we worked with Nebo here in Atlanta. This team really dove into that customer journey and what the needs were, really end-to-end, of generating subscriptions and long-term value from those users, and ways to distribute and share what we were offering and get it out there.
Again, these were not things that internally we had access to. I think a lot of us had pieces of the puzzle in our backgrounds and we had some very good folks internally that had acquisition experience, subscription acquisition experience even.
But tying it all together – if you think about every customer touchpoint from copy for the website, both the frontend and the backend, things like thank you emails, things like the weekly newsletters and drip campaigns to get people excited about new content and new programming coming, ways to reengage folks, knowing how much time they’re spending on the service and ways to get them excited about spending more time, sharing with friends, seasonal deals like “Hey, get this for someone for Mother’s or Father’s Day or a holiday subscription” – all of these different occasions to buy and reasons to stay are things that they helped us with in terms of those campaigns.
ROB: How did you think about the agency selection process? Did you have a bake-off of some sort? Did you know what direction you were leaning? Because knowing the Turner/Warner Media ecosystem – I know local shops who have built web games for Falling Skies; I know global agencies on the PR side who’ve done analytics work for TBS and TNT. So you could really run the spectrum. How did you approach that selection process?
STEVE: Right now – and this wasn’t available for a couple of years while I was there, but has come on – there’s now a database within Warner Media. Folks that work with agencies all around the country or international ones put in – it’s not a scoring process and you look for the 90s or above, but it’s more or less, “Hey, I had an experiential agency work on a large outdoor event with us. They did an amazing job. Here’s the contact information, here’s what they did, here are some pictures.” That exists now. So that’s certainly a tool that I think some folks at Warner Media are using.
When we selected Nebo – and more recently 9Rooftops, which has a great office here in Atlanta, that did some great work for us as well – so much of it is word of mouth and being in the Atlanta community, being part of AMA. That’s exactly what I did. I reached out to a good friend of mine, Joe Koufman, at a company called Setup, and said to Joe, “Listen, I’m looking for an agency. This is what we need them to do. This is an outline of the project. What do you recommend?” He came back with three or four really strong recommendations, and that’s where I started.
Then from that, we sat down with the agencies – and I’m not a fan of having agencies do work for free. I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think that’s a way to start the relationship. So we didn’t ask any agency to produce work; we really just had conversations with them to share ideas. We said, “Here’s what we’re looking to do. Come with some ideas.” Each of them got a time slot, and we, again, just had a conversation with them.
For Turner Classic Movies – and I imagine this is the case with a lot of either networks or other brands – the number one thing that I look for in an agency is that they either already understand our business and who our customers are or have the capacity to understand that in a very short period of time. Certainly the agencies that I spoke with all got it. They came to the table with ideas around that. Now, they don’t know all of our business, and that’s completely to be expected. We didn’t expect anyone to understand some of the internal ways that we connect with our audience. Those are things that as soon as we awarded the business, very early on we sat down and shared that. It may have even been at a late stage pitch that we shared it.
But we’re looking for an understanding of what we do and why we do it. If an agency gets that – because every agency we’re talking to already has the technical capabilities. There’s no doubt. There’s a ton of talent. But it’s a matter of, do you understand what we’re trying to do? And then really understanding the logistics of who’s going to be working on this and your process, the best way to establish how we communicate together, how we discuss the deliverables together, and who leads that on each side.
ROB: That’s a great client-side perspective. The empathy required, the value of reputation, the value of community engagement. It’s so interesting.
I’m in this mode now where people we’re talking about working with – people still want to get together for lunch. In spite of, and maybe especially because we’ve all been in our houses for the most part for the past year, people are like “Let’s catch lunch outdoors.” That’s in bounds for me right now; some people are holed up. But geography, it seems, is still going to matter quite a lot. At least people will say, “I want a company with a local presence.” Nobody really even knows what that means sometimes, but it’s what we want.
STEVE: Again, there’s so much talent in Atlanta. I think looking outside of Atlanta in most cases is really not necessary. The talent is here. It is really nice to have face-to-face meetings. We all know they’ll be coming back. Even now, I’ve had several meetings outside at large picnic tables at a park or a restaurant with folks. That’s really how you get to connect with people you’re working with, especially on these types of relationships where it’s really important that everyone understands what the objectives are together.
I’m just a believer in face-to-face when it comes to things like that. I know certainly working remote right now has worked for many people, and even if agencies are local, they may have folks on your account that are in other cities. We worked with a company and that was the case; someone happened to be very talented on the digital team that worked out of South Carolina. And that worked out fine as well, but it was still nice to be able to have some reviews together in person. Again, I’m such a believer in Atlanta being this epicenter of culture and talent and tech, and that’s who I want to work with.
ROB: That’s something for us all to think about as we start to emerge. Steve, you had some thoughts on some key lessons you’ve learned along your journey as a leader, as a marketer, as an executive. What would you reflect on if you could talk to your younger self about what to think about as you develop?
STEVE: [laughs] I don’t know where I’d start. That’s funny. I think looking back, Rob – and it’s such a great thing to do every once in a while, even if you’re not talking about it to other people, but just to reflect on things you’ve learned. I can think of several in particular, and a lot of them are coming out of the Beach.com experience I had, but I think some of these apply throughout my career.
Certainly engaging with customers to understand what it is they want, how they want to receive your information, when they want to receive it – you remember the beginning of that whole integrated marketing push? That’s what people said integrated was. I think there’s a through-line to everything we do now. There are so many different ways to receive information, so many platforms. But at the end of the day, if you don’t understand what your customer wants and how they’re going to react to what you’re sharing with them, what that call to action is, then I think there’s always going to be a miss. That’s something I’ve learned that I took with me from those days on throughout the consulting and throughout my time understanding our audience at Turner Classic Movies and HBO Max.
Next, I would say having someone that has either domain or IP expertise on your team or advising your team is so critical because again, that’s the type of experience – when I was at Beach, we really would’ve benefited from having someone in the travel and hospitality business being a close advisor to us.
I think we all thought because we were customers, we knew what other customers wanted, but we weren’t seeing the big picture. I was just seeing it at the time for myself, married and two young kids, “This is how I vacation so everyone probably vacations like this. This is how we plan,” not knowing that that’s a very small segment of how it’s done. So I think having that advisor or having someone baked into the company that really understands – that domain expertise is critical.
I would say probably the most important thing I’ve learned over time is just having a laser focus on what it is you’re working on and really understanding both the functional and the emotional priorities of the business. And that focus isn’t just for entrepreneurs; I think it’s just as important in mid-size and large multinational companies. It’s a challenge when you manage high-achieving and creative people. They always want to bring new ideas and new innovations to the table, and that’s a great thing. That’s what you look for as a leader.
But I can’t tell you how many times I said to my manager at Turner, “Look, this is only going to take 5 minutes” when nothing takes 5 minutes. What a lot of people don’t realize, and it took a while for me to learn, is that it doesn’t just take time away from what you’re currently working on; there’s an opportunity cost as well when you try to veer off the course – even to do something that wasn’t necessarily in your plans, but eleventh hour, something popped up and you thought to yourself, “We should add this in.”
Sometimes you need to make concessions and figure out a way to make it work, but I would say most of the time, all it’s going to do is create a distraction. It’s easy for that to happen. You could have marketing plans and then something like Clubhouse pops up and you’re like, “We need to be on Clubhouse. We should create a room and get some experts to join us and talk about our product or service.” That might be a great part of the strategy, but if that’s not what you were initially planning to do, then 9 times out of 10, it’s better to continue to focus on what it is you were doing and then work that in as your next objective.
I think that focus – I had on a whiteboard in my office at Turner the word “focus” for all 4 years before we got shut down and everyone worked from home. The word “focus” was in my office, and I saw that word every single day. Of everything that was written and erased and written and erased on the whiteboard, that was the one consistent thing. Never erased it. That was my constant reminder that nothing takes 5 minutes and that you’ve got to really keep driving those clear objectives and deliverables and not create unnecessary distractions.
ROB: Right. It’s such a good practice to, number one, not do something that’s going to blow up in your face, and number two, not discard the thing you’ve already been very intentional about putting together.
Steve, we normally wrap these conversations with a couple of different questions. I think they tie together for you. Number one is typically “Where should people connect with you?”; number two is “What are you excited about that’s coming up marketing-wise?” I think you have those things linked together where we can get a much bigger dive into your mind and connect with you as well.
STEVE: Sure. Again, this has been such a fun conversation. I would say in terms of the future and what I see, I don’t think marketers should be thinking about things ever going back to normal. I think how we play and consume media, entertainment, food, healthcare, all of this, this whole sense of community is being redefined in front of our eyes.
It’s a generational opportunity that’s going to impact customer behaviors from now on. It’s not a trend; it’s really a seismic shift that’s going to resonate across the culture and economy and all of our personal and professional relationships. It opens up an opportunity to be more creative and more innovative than ever before, and I think there’s going to be some things we’ve done in the past that we’re going to have to decide to let go. Other things we’re going to hold on to.
Those are some of the things that excite me right now. I do think as a society, we need to get a little bit higher up right now. I think we need to work on making people feel less isolated and part of a community. I don’t think that’s going to go away when people can start gathering in small groups. The pandemic has exposed a real ripple in people feeling alone, and that’s something that I think marketing can play a big role in: really helping people find their community or communities.
Personally, I’ve had a lot of meaningful conversations since I left TCM and Warner Media, exploring high growth in entrepreneurial opportunities, looking to where I can create long-term value at scale and really do good. So that’s what’s on the horizon for me in terms of what I’m looking for.
And then on the side, I started something really fun with my wife and some good friends of ours. We started an e-zine called The Fast Times. We always talk about how Generation X, which I’m a part of, sometimes gets the short end of the stick. We weren’t born with a cellphone in our hands, and we certainly didn’t save the world like the Greatest Generation. We just listened to really cool music and watched really fun movies and were latchkeys and came home to an empty house and made the microwave dinners and so forth.
So we thought, what could we do to really have some fun with Gen X and the fringe on each side of younger Boomers or older Millennials? So we created this e-zine. We’re sending it out once a week, and then a special edition on Mondays. It’s taking a look at culture and how it intersects with both nostalgia from the ’80s and early ’90s and having this modern lens on things that are happening today. It’s kind of with this smart snark, I would call it. It’s the fun voice of the ’80s, voice of that Gen X. Lots of sections in it like “We Got the Beat” and “Channel Z” and “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” all very brand-driven throughout it.
Ultimately, this may be a vehicle for sponsors and advertisers as our subscription base grows. But right now, we’re doing it – I love reading. I read probably at least an hour a day and love writing, and it’s a fun way to stay sharp and create something. Again, we’ll see where it goes.
ROB: Congratulations on that launch. Where do we go to find that?
STEVE: You can sign up for that at thefasttimes.net. Even the address is nostalgic, the .net. Go ahead and sign up and give it a shot. We also are having a little bit of fun on social platforms, on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter. We hope you like it.
ROB: That’s excellent. Steve, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for sharing. I certainly look forward to connecting back in person. I look forward to seeing what else you take on next. It seems like it’ll be a natural continuation of a really good story, so thank you for sharing with us.
STEVE: Thanks again, Rob, for having me. As I said, I really believe you’re the epitome of this. Everything that people are reading about in terms of the surge in Atlanta, in the tech space, in the companies interested in coming to Atlanta, you’re the epitome of this. You started Converge bringing in outside investment and then growing it here in Atlanta and being part of the innovative labs and teams here. This is exactly what it’s all about and what everyone is hoping this unwritten story of Atlanta is, and you are a very early author of it. Thanks for having me.
ROB: I appreciate that. You’re very kind. There is a lot of good stuff going on here in Atlanta, and we’ll keep on sharing it. Thanks so much for coming on, Steve.
STEVE: Thank you.
ROB: Take care. Bye.
STEVE: Bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Amy Balliett is Founder and CEO at Killer Visual Strategies, an agency that specializes in visual communications design – creating such “products” as info and motion graphics, data visualizations, virtual reality, and interactive content. An Inc. 5000 company for four years in a row, Killer, now part of Material, has won over 30 excellence in visual communication awards. Clients include such Fortune 1000 companies as Amazon, Boeing, the Discovery Channel, Edwards Lifesciences Corporation, and Microsoft.
In this interview, Amy talks about the “spammy” beginnings of infographics, when people slapped up on their websites images that had nothing to do with their brand. She says, a high-quality infographic visually communicates significant meaning so efficiently and effectively that little text is required. Amy notes that around 10,000 infographics are released daily . . . and 99% fail. The 1% that succeed don’t use much text, use custom (as opposed to stock) illustrations, provide proper data visualization, and clearly show attention to detail and time put into the design. The agency’s services keep evolving to meet changing client needs. The biggest challenge is “to find that one illustration style that won’t go out of style.”
HubSpot reports that “91% of audiences prefer visual content as their primary, secondary, and tertiary form of information delivery.” A visual strategy would consider the first, second, and third pieces of content a prospective client might see going into a funnel. Amy says, “Content is king . . . visual content reigns supreme, and visual strategy is content strategy, just leveled up.”
Amy recommends a 90-second “motion graphic” as the most important piece of visual strategy content a company might invest in now. That 90 seconds can be broken down into “dozens of visually designed scenes” that can be used on social media, stacked to create an infographic, or paginated to create an eBook. She notes that visual content has to be matched both to channels and to audiences.
Killer evolved over the years . . . through a pivot that exploded . . . first in a good way . . . and then not. Exhausted from the frenetic pace, the agency had never stopped to consider such core questions as: “What’s the type of client that we want? What’s the type of work we really want to do? What’s the type of person we want to be bringing on to our team? What are the values of this company that are going to drive these decisions?”
Amy hired a business coach for herself and the team (probably the best decision she ever made) and an HR consultant to help establish policies. A new focus on building a values-driven culture and hiring and firing employees and clients based on these values changed “who we were, our level of productivity, and the clients we attracted . . . our revenue went up 50% in one year.” The agency’s values are simple: Keep Learning, Inspire Others, Lead by Example, Love What We Do, Embrace Change, and Respect Others.
Amy can be found on LinkedIn at: Amy Balliett on Twitter @amyballiett. Her book, Killer Visual Strategies, available on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Killer-Visual-Strategies-Amy-Balliett/dp/1119680220), was recently awarded “one of the best marketing and sales books of 2020.”
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Amy Balliett, Founder and CEO at Killer Visual Strategies based in Seattle, Washington. Welcome to the podcast, Amy.
AMY: Thank you so much for having me.
ROB: It’s excellent to have you here. You have one of those excellent names for your firm that I think probably tells us what you do, but why don’t you tell us about Killer Visual Strategies and what the firm’s superpower really is?
AMY: Definitely. To tell you that, the best way to say it is our original name. Our original name was Killer Infographics, so even more focused on what we were doing. At the time, we really focused on developing high-quality infographics for marketing needs and things like that. Over the years, our services kept evolving based on the needs of our clients.
But ultimately, everything still lives on the foundation of what we view as our superpower, which is visual communication design. A high-quality infographic is something that you don’t have to read; instead, you can look at it and cull important information from it without diving into paragraphs of text. So everything we do centers on that. It’s about graphically representing information to efficiently and effectively create meaning and using as little text as possible. That’s really what our superpower is.
ROB: That’s interesting. As little text as possible. What do you recall in your own mind as the emergence of infographics? When did they start catching your eye? When did it become so obsessive for you that it seemed like the business?
AMY: It’s so interesting, because infographics have a very rich history. The very first known infographic was the 1600s, although you could say cave paintings on walls were the first infographics. They’ve been around forever, but around 2008 they started to be used more regularly for SEO needs, for link-building and other forms of content marketing.
I started to slowly get into them because I was heading up SEO at a company here in Seattle and really wanted to use them for the link-building value. But the company I was at never really wanted to use them. So, when I left to start my own company – which was actually a completely different business model than what Killer is today, and which had a bunch of different websites that I was marketing – I started creating infographics to do link-building for all of those websites. That was June of 2010.
At that point, infographics were this big trending thing, and everybody was questioning how long that trend would last. Everybody really thought this was something that was going to be a one-and-done trend, and by 2011 we were going to move to something else for content and content marketing. So I got on it at a time that I thought was the very end of a trend. [laughs] And it turns out it was the very, very beginning.
ROB: How has the use of infographics evolved? There was a point in time where it felt like a well-designed and executed infographic targeted at the right audience really extensively lived as a life of its own, but the fad didn’t end as a fad; it just integrated into the visual language of the internet.
AMY: That’s exactly right. The thing is, at first infographics were so spammy. People would put out content that had nothing to do with their brand, nothing to do with their website. They just really wanted to put out something controversial that was driven by visuals because today’s audiences crave visual content. They were really trying to use infographics to hook somebody and get backlinks primarily.
After that spammy part of the fad started to die down – which happened because Google kept changing their algorithm, and when Google did their Penguin and Panda updates back in 2010 and 2011, all of a sudden the big content farms that were really being fueled by infographics started disappearing from Google. As a result, infographics stopped being as spammy.
The market stopped being flooded with these really spammy designs, and instead large brands started to take notice and said, “Oh wow, this is an amazing way to connect with my audience and really get them to understand our brand, our service, our products without having to give them a big long whitepaper.” The trend was moving away from whitepapers and moving more and more towards media as a form of entertainment and education in all forms.
ROB: That’s a really fascinating evolution there. If we look at today, is there still that link-building aspect to it? Or is it more broadly about brand at this point, and about speaking to an audience coherently with your brand attached to it?
AMY: It’s about speaking to your audience coherently with your brand attached to it. Links definitely come with infographics – not like they used to. In 2010, I put out some awful infographics because I was still learning, and they’d get thousands of backlinks. Anybody would celebrate anything with the word “infographic” attached to it, whereas today, we have far more discerning eyes.
If you jump back to 2010 versus today in 2021, the fact is, media within the internet has evolved so much. There’s so much more of a wow factor in everything we see. That also has led to a heightened expectation for what a good infographic is. There’s still about 10,000 released a day, but 99% of them fail. The 1% of them that truly succeed are the ones that don’t use a lot of text, the ones that use entirely custom illustration, proper data visualization, and the ones that clearly show attention to detail and time put into the design.
But if they’re slapped together, they’re using stock imagery, or if there are paragraphs of text next to a small illustration, things like that, they’re going to fail. People are still jumping on the bandwagon because they think they’re going to get a bunch of backlinks, but if they don’t actually execute them properly, they’re not going to get backlinks, and they might even hurt their brand on top of it.
ROB: It’s good to know the danger there. In the evolution of your firm, you can see this evolution where the infographic is part of a broader visual strategy, probably with a much more expanded vocabulary. What are the elements you see now as the language of visual strategy as you think about it?
AMY: It’s so interesting. There’s this really great stat from HubSpot that 91% of audiences prefer visual content as their primary, secondary, and tertiary form of information delivery. When we think about visual strategy today, we think about the top of the funnel and we say to ourselves, what’s the first, second, and third piece of content somebody’s going to see as they’re going into that funnel?
Then we start to identify what channels those people are living on to deliver that content, and the channels and the audience define what type of content we choose to put out into the ether for the visual strategy of the brand. Sometimes it might be short form social media images with at most 6 words on them. Sometimes it’ll be a visually rich eBook where each page has at most 200 words. Other times it’s a motion graphic.
I always say to anybody who’s thinking about getting into visual strategy for their own brands, the most important piece of content that you can invest in right now is a motion graphic. That’s going to give you so much to work with. It’s usually about 90 seconds. It should never be over 90 seconds. It’s usually about 90 seconds of content that breaks down into dozens of visually designed scenes that you can pull out and use on social media. You can stack the scenes up and create an infographic. You can paginate the scenes and create an eBook. You have so much more than just a motion graphic if you invest in one. You have dozens of other pieces of content you can produce out of it.
It’s really about identifying the right content for the right channel for the right audience. I know that’s kind of the answer to all contact marketing, really, but with visual content there’s definitely different types of visual content that work on different channels. You really have to understand that landscape and choose what’s going to connect with that audience the best.
ROB: Sure, and there’s a distinction in there. Much like the graduation from infographics to visual strategies, when you’re referring to a motion graphic, what I’m picturing is that explainer video, is what some people would call it. Some people would come to you saying they want an explainer video, but I think what you’re saying is that’s not really what they want. If they just got an explainer video that didn’t consider this trend that comes and goes online but is always true, this atomization of content where you can take something and pull it apart into individual pieces that are bite-size and put them lots of places – just asking for an explainer video doesn’t get you there.
AMY: Exactly. Today’s marketers are using 12 to 14 types of visual content just to accomplish singular goals. It can never be one-and-done. You always have to consider all of the different ways you can use that content. You can create derivatives to develop even more campaigns and strategies around it. It is really content marketing. The concept that content is king, which comes from a Bill Gates article in 1999, is still true. Content is king. But visual content reigns supreme, and that’s really what we have to focus on when we think about visual strategy. It’s content strategy, just leveled up.
ROB: Right. One thing I think about in this category that maybe isn’t thought of this way when it comes out is Mary Meeker annually puts out this internet trends deck at the turn of the year. Have you run into that before?
AMY: Yes, definitely.
ROB: It’s hundreds of pages, hundreds of slides in a PowerPoint deck. If you said, “Do you want a 200-slide deck from a venture capitalist?”, I don’t know if you do. But then you look at the pieces of it, and each slide – you know better than I do – seems like it has pretty good value. It seems like it tells a story as a whole, and it seems like it builds a brand for her in whichever firm she’s with.
AMY: Exactly. That’s so spot-on. That’s the entire point. If that were 200 pages of paragraphs of content, do you think it would be given the same level of attention it gets today? Not even at all. Not close.
ROB: Nobody anticipates that one.
AMY: Exactly.
ROB: Amy, you alluded a little bit to the journey, your own journey in starting the firm. It looks from your LinkedIn like, as you mentioned, you were working in SEO. You had a job. You had someone else who was responsible for your paycheck. What led you to turn that corner and go into this process of being responsible to kill what you wanted to eat and then to eventually be responsible for an ever-growing – or maybe not ever-growing, but in many cases a payroll of people who depend on you, and it’s a lot of responsibility? What caused that transition?
AMY: It’s so odd because it’s hard for me to pinpoint an exact time. I owned my first company when I was 17. I actually owned an ice cream parlor and candy store in a summer vacation resort. It was open only during the summer, so it didn’t compete with school. That was my first foray into entrepreneurship – and I hated it, I’m going to be honest with you. I loved it and I hated it. I was working 80+ hours a week during my summer breaks my junior and senior year of high school. That gave me a sour taste in my mouth.
But then about – jeez, I don’t know how long later; maybe it was about 6 years later – I came up with an idea for a social network. This was before Facebook had opened up to non-.edu email addresses. I didn’t even know that Facebook existed yet. I came up with this idea for a social network, but all I had was the idea. I could not execute on the idea because I had zero coding skills. At the time, I was a video editor; my degree is in film, so I was doing video editing and motion picture marketing and really couldn’t bring much to the table for this idea.
I had my cousin join in on the idea, and he could bring everything to the table. He’s a full stack developer and the best designer I’ve ever met. So here’s this guy taking on the weight of the world, basically trying to make my idea come to fruition, and all I can do is try to market the idea, try to build a user base. It failed really quickly because you can’t just come to the table with an idea. You have to be able to execute on that idea. We got to a point after 6 months where it became clear that this was just way too much to put on one person.
During that 6 months, I started to learn SEO and online marketing, so I decided to pivot my career into SEO and online marketing. In that part of my career, I learned web development as well. It really just came down to I had started to stack up a series of skills – nothing that I was fantastic at; everything I was good enough at. If you’re trying to be too many things at once, it’s like trying to learn 10 instruments at once. You’re never going to master one instrument. But I was good enough at enough skills. I was good enough at graphic design, good enough at animation, good enough at development that I was finally in a place where I felt like I could do all of this on my own.
I had tested a few proofs of concept within the last company I worked at, really seeing if I could create new revenue streams for that company. Once I did, I realized, crud, I’m bringing in millions in revenue streams to this company; why can’t I do this for myself?
You get to a point where you have the confidence in your career to take that chance, but I also got to the point where I had enough in savings to take that chance. I’m not going to lie, that was incredibly important to me. I think I would not have taken the risk at all if it weren’t for having a nice safety net of cash just in case everything failed.
ROB: Amy, a lot of people have that interesting stack of skills, but they may not recognize it. They may not know how to apply it. To your metaphor, they may still be trying to be the best at a particular instrument when it’s really the intersection of several skills that is where they can be truly unique in their world. How did you come to understand that concept of the stack of skills and see it in yourself?
AMY: It was really just every idea I came up with, I started to realize, “Crud, I need a designer for this, and I need somebody to develop this.” I just started thinking about all the things I needed for somebody to execute on the work. I’m a control freak. I really am. So I started to say, “I need to learn these things myself because I can’t really give away trust too easily and put that work on somebody else’s plate.” For me, that’s really what made me realize I needed that stack of skills: wanting to execute on so many ideas, but not having the capacity to do it myself.
I’m really glad that over the years, I learned to release the reins, because every single employee I’ve hired is 20 times better than me at any one of those skills. And that’s really important. You always have to hire somebody who’s much better than you. But the fact that I’ve been able to play every single role in my company and that I have played every role, that I’ve sat in their shoes – it’s so much easier to manage everybody because I know what they’re going through. I know how long it would take me to do a task, so I can judge how long it would take somebody on my team to do that same task. I know what expectations to put in front of them, and I also know when to pull back and let them take the lead and run the show.
ROB: Right on. I’ve certainly experienced, at least in my perception – and you never know whether you’re wrong in your perception at the top; it’s always worth questioning. But when I’m hiring people within my stack of skills, I feel like I can get to a decision faster, and I feel like I almost get to be the Pied Piper a little bit. There’s a sense of trust and safety that they may feel where they felt wary. I tend to hire software developers for a lot of what we do, and there’s almost an unspoken bond that moves quickly when you can send the right signals, I think.
AMY: That’s so, so true. That’s exactly how it’s always felt. I remember when we brought on our first developer to the team and I sat down with him and I was talking about a couple of lines of jQuery. He looked at me and said, “Wait, I haven’t had a boss who knows jQuery before.” It was just this weird “aha” moment.
ROB: It’s such a good discussion, the skill stacking thing. I think I have often heard of it spoken of on – there’s a podcaster, James Altucher, and I think he talks about it a good bit. But I don’t know – have you had any good sources for these concepts? Because I think it’s underexplored, and maybe there’s a book or something that I’m less familiar with.
AMY: I haven’t necessarily dove into any books related to this specific concept, no. It really has more come through networking with the right people, getting to know more people who have faced the same types of challenges, but also, again, surrounding myself with such a curious team, a team that will never rest on their laurels. One of our values at Killer is “keep learning,” and it’s probably the most embraced value in the company because everybody’s just trying to stay on top of trends and stay ahead of trends. I think that’s also a part of it. There’s a bit of a competitive attitude where all of us want to be in the know of what that next big thing is.
ROB: It’s such an interesting through line. You mentioned that Google’s obviously changed algorithms, and it feels like they’re a lot closer to trying to provide the result you actually wanted. But there was an era of SEO that was very competitive; it was very much about tactics and how ethical those tactics were. Kind of secret knowledge. But some of that transitions well, probably, into process around visual strategy. There is always something to learn. There is always a new cutting-edge frontline of what’s working and what’s not. You have to keep learning, just like you did in SEO.
AMY: Exactly. It’s so true. What’s interesting is with SEO, you’re trying to game Google’s algorithm, for lack of a better phrase. It is really what you try to do in a lot of ways, whereas with visual strategy, you’re trying to consider so many disparate audiences. What’s going to trend for one audience isn’t going to trend for another audience. There’s not one universal algorithm to break. Instead, it’s really identifying all of the different aesthetic directions that could impact Audience A over Audience B over Audience C and so on.
ROB: It’s an infinite game, too. You can’t just go for the moment. You could position the whole thing as being there to hack the human brain, but in the context of a brand, you also have to consider how people feel afterwards and in the long run. It’s not a short game. It’s not “look at this graphic,” right?
AMY: Exactly. And you also have to consider the timeline of that campaign, because sometimes we’ll have a client where they want a visual language and aesthetic look and feel to uplevel their brand, but something that’s going to last for decades to come. That’s a whole other feat to accomplish, trying to find that one illustration style that won’t go out of style. That’s been an interesting experience.
ROB: Absolutely. Amy, as you reflect on building Killer Visual Strategies, what are some things that you’ve learned along the way that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting from scratch?
AMY: The biggest thing I’ve learned is about being proactive versus reactive. Killer was a pivot from a completely different business model, and because it was a pivot, we didn’t spend a lot of time thinking proactively about what we wanted the business to be. Instead, we just lived in a reactive state for about 3 years. We basically went from our very first quarter of work being 14 orders to the first month in our second quarter being 40 orders, and it just kept going up and up and up and up.
The first 3 years or so, we were just so exhausted by reacting to the demand that we didn’t take the time to say, “What’s the type of client that we want? What’s the type of work we really want to do? What’s the type of person we want to be bringing on to our team? What are the values of this company that are going to drive these decisions?” All of those things that seem corny initially – when you’re an entrepreneur and you want to start a company, the last thing you say is, “What are the values going to be of my company?” It’s rarely something an entrepreneur does first.
But had we done that first, I think we would have grown faster and even more intentionally than we did. Our first 5 years felt like a wild, wild west, and we had a culture inflection point at Year 5 where, honestly, almost everything exploded. And almost everything exploded because we were not a values-driven company. We had a great team; we knew we wanted to go out and get a beer with everybody, but we didn’t all approach conflict in the same way.
When you have a values-driven company, you have a set of guidelines with which to attack conflict together as a team, but we didn’t have that. Nobody really knew what our values were, even though they spelled out the word “KILLER.”
So we had to reset and focus on building a values-driven culture, hiring and firing by our values and hiring and firing clients by our values as well. That drastically changed who we were. It also drastically changed our level of productivity, the types of clients we attracted – I mean, our very first year of really paying attention to that, our revenue went up 50% in one year.
So there’s more than just the corny feelings that you get with coming up with your mission, vision, and values. When you actually truly embrace those and live those and lead by those, you’ll see a team that is so much more inspired, so much more willing to take on the hardest challenges with you. You can really grow your company by leaps and bounds when you do that. That’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned.
ROB: Was it the explosion that pushed you to this realization of the need, or was there another catalyst in your life?
AMY: It was the explosion, it really was. And that explosion was such a slow burn. That powder keg – we knew it was going to explode at some point, but we were still being so reactive that there wasn’t time to pay attention to it.
By the time it happened – we actually joke in the company and we call it “emailgate” because it all started from an email. [laughs] But we brought in the right people at that point. I hired a business coach to come in and coach myself, coach my leadership, and coach the team as a whole. I hired a really good HR consultant to come in and do the exact same thing, to really help us build the right policies in that arena. By bringing on the right experts, I was really, really lucky. I was also somebody who kept saying, “Why do I need a coach? I don’t need a coach! This isn’t a sports team!” [laughs]
It turned out that having a business coach was probably the best investment I have ever made, and I know my team feels that way too, because they saw me change as a result of having somebody really help me look at problems differently and react to critiques from the team differently. When you’re a business owner and you’re at the very top, it is extremely lonely. And when you’re in a creative firm where everybody is really emotionally driven – because to be creative, you have to bring emotion into your work. When you’re that passionate – that’s what I mean by emotionally driven – you’re going to be passionate about what’s working and what’s not in the company, and you’re going to be very vocal about that.
I used to take that as such an affront to me. I would get offended by really positive critiques, people coming to me with good ideas, and maybe I would just look at it as them critiquing me instead of an opportunity to improve in the company.
So having a coach really helped me look at that very differently and embrace the amazing feedback of my team.
ROB: I think it’s so helpful for you to share that, Amy. The perception people have is – in some cases it’s true that a cheesy coach is cheesy and cheesy values are cheesy. Sometimes I feel like I can sound a little bit needy in the course of a conversation because I will tell people about my coach and my therapist and my entrepreneurial support group. But I think we just need to talk about it. For me, those things are all healthy, but maybe there’s sort of the cult of the CEO, where we feel like we need to have all the answers.
AMY: Yes, that’s exactly it. You get imposter syndrome when you don’t necessarily have the right answers. I also have an entrepreneurial support group, and that has been immensely helpful for me. Just talking to other business owners – they don’t have to be in your same industry – and realizing, “Oh, hey, these problems exist across all businesses, not just a creative content agency, or not just a mom and pop shop down the street.”
There’s very similar problems that exist across any culture, across any work environment, and when you can get other business owners to tell you what they’ve gone through and game a solution together, it is so much better than just being in your own silo, trying to figure it out yourself.
ROB: Such a healthy conversation, Amy. You’ve really shared the journey and shared the experience. When people want to connect with you and when they want to connect with Killer Visual Strategies, where should they look you up?
AMY: You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m very active on LinkedIn. Just Amy Balliett on LinkedIn. You can find me on Twitter @amyballiett, although I’m not nearly as active as I should be on Twitter. Then you can also check out my book, which is Killer Visual Strategies, on Amazon. It was just awarded one of the best marketing and sales books of 2020.
ROB: Congratulations. I think we all needed a nice visual book along those lines in 2020 – something to think about aspirationally and not just looking into our own basements.
AMY: Right? That’s so true. Oh my gosh. Good old 2020. [laughs]
ROB: Yeah. Hope is on the way. I’m tremendously hopeful for the year, and I think probably you’re very similarly positioned with your positioning and with what people are about to need to do with you as a partner.
AMY: Yeah, definitely. I’m very excited for what 2021 has in store for us.
ROB: Excellent. Amy, I wish you the best. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I encourage everyone to look Amy up, look up her book, and I would imagine that Killer Visual Strategies probably has a solid couple of social feeds to pay attention to as well.
AMY: Definitely. Thank you so much, Rob. I really appreciate it.
ROB: Thank you, Amy. Be well. Bye.
AMY: You too.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Lewis Williams is Chief Creative Officer at Burrell Communications, an African-American-focused, female-owned agency that started 50 years ago to address the interests of Black consumers. Historically, African-Americans often have not been portrayed favorably in the media. Burrell focuses on depicting African-Americans in a positive, realistic way. The very first national-scale client? McDonalds. Other big-name organizations the agency has worked with include Toyota, Walmart, Proctor & Gamble, Google, Major League Baseball and Coca-Cola.
Majority-owned by Fay Ferguson and McGhee Williams-Osse, Burrell Communications maintains a strong partnership and affiliation with Publicis . . . and shares clients with other Publicis Groupe agencies. The agency maintains its independence, but the association with Publicis provides synergistic backup and resources.
Early in his career, Lewis was often the only person of color in an agency. After working five years at Burrell, he left to pursue other opportunities at some large, high-profile agencies. Twenty years later, Fay and McGhee contacted him and offered him his current position as Burrell’s Chief Creative Officer. Like many employees at this agency, Lewis was a “boomerang” -- working for Burrell . . . leaving . . . and then coming back. He credits his success to having great mentors, “following the green lights,” and the chip-on-his-shoulder, I’ll-prove-I-can-do-it attitude that came from being an African-American raised in the South.
Lewis has seen a lot of change. In 1971, brands were afraid to feature Black people in their marketing: “other” people might assume that the product was just for Black people. Early MTV required Black artists “to have a white person in the video.” Back then, there were a few who understood that consumers came in “all different shapes, sizes, and colors” and the issue was not about race . . . it was about reaching out to untapped audiences.
The one thing that will never change in marketing, Lewis says, is “telling great stories.” Story length varies, depending on platform – from as little as two words in a tweet, six seconds on Instagram, on up to a story line running though such an epic series as Game of Thrones. Lewis reminds us, “Every platform has a personality and expectations.” In this interview, Lewis explains why advertisers use the abbreviated, frustrating, 15-second version of an engaging 30-second spot . . . it’s not just about media spend . . . it is also because that 15-second, less-complete story, like a film trailer, leaves you “wanting more.”
Lewis has a passion for mentoring “young creatives and young people in the business.” The agency is working with The One Club for Creativity, “an international nonprofit organization seeking to inspire, encourage, and develop creative excellence in advertising and design,” and Oriel Davis, Spotify Creative Director, on a project to provide advertising training to young people. The first session was presented six months ago in New York and LA. The most recent session will involve 15 students in Chicago and 15 in Atlanta. Lewis is also serving on the public relations judging panel for the Clio awards.
Lewis can be reached on his agency’s website at: burrell.com, on LinkedIn as Lewis Williams, on Twitter, at @willmsl, and as Lewis Williams on LinkedIn.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Lewis Williams, Chief Creative Officer at Burrell Communications based in Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to the podcast, Lewis.
LEWIS: Hey, Rob. Thank you for having me.
ROB: It’s great to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Burrell and about the agency’s superpower? Where do you all thrive?
LEWIS: What’s really great about Burrell Communications, first and foremost, we are celebrating our 50th anniversary of being in business. When you think about being an African-American-focused agency – for any agency, any business, to be alive and well right now for 50 years says a lot about us. We were started in 1971 by our founder, named Thomas Burrell. He saw a need that African-Americans were being left out of the marketing conversation for big brands. So he started an agency to represent the Black consumer. Our philosophy is positive realism; we always want to depict African-Americans in a positive way in media, because so often in media, African-Americans were not portrayed in the best light.
ROB: Absolutely understood. If you look at where the firm is today, what sorts of clients are typical for you? What does the typical engagement look like?
LEWIS: It’s really great. We have national clients. Started back in 1971. McDonald’s was the very first client of the agency, and I’m proud to say they still are a client today. We’ve had them for 50 years. We have national clients; we have Toyota, we have Walmart, we have a lot of Procter & Gamble business. We really have mainstay clients. We’ve done work for people like Google, Major League Baseball. Coca-Cola is one of our present-day clients that we’ve had. As you can see, we’ve had really big-name brands.
ROB: It’s quite an impressive client roster. You yourself have been with the firm, it looks like, around 15 years. How did you end up at the firm and how has that journey with the firm emerged over time?
LEWIS: It’s an interesting story. We call ourselves boomerangs. That’s an employee that was at Burrell, went away, and then came back. I’m a Burrell boomerang. I worked at Burrell for 5 years much, much earlier in my career. Had you told me that I would come back to be the Chief Creative Officer, I would’ve thrown my shoe at you. It’s interesting; Tom Burrell himself, the founder, hired me. I worked there for 5 years, I went to other agencies – mainly Leo Burnett, which is a big one in Chicago.
I was gone a good 15 years, and I got a call from Fay Ferguson and McGhee Williams-Osse – and I’m proud to say we are female-owned. Not only a Black agency, we’re female-owned. I got a call after I’d been away from the agency for 20 years or so – not to date myself – and they said, “Hey, Lewis, we’re looking for someone to lead the agency.”
That was really special to me. You get hired by the founder, and one day you’re sitting in his shoes. Because Tom was a creative himself. He wasn’t an account guy. So I really looked at, wow, I’m going to step into the shoes of this advertising legend. Tom Burrell, again, he’s in the advertising hall of fame. It was just a great honor to have a career that comes full circle and sit in the seat that I’m in today.
ROB: That’s certainly a privilege. You’re unique in being a sizable agency of consequence, of lasting beyond the founder, and then also, as I understand it, still remaining I think independent. Is that right?
LEWIS: Yes. We do have a relationship with Publicis, but we’re the majority stakeholders. Fay and McGhee are the majority stakeholders. They have a very strong partnership and affiliation with Publicis. So we have strong backup and resources. We do a lot of work with the other Publicis agencies. We share some of the same clients. It’s good synergy at work with Publicis and Burrell.
ROB: That’s very interesting. I would imagine that you have probably seen an offer or two cross your desk in your time there to become fully part of someone. I’m sure there’s an intentionality in staying independent, because it would be very easy just to say yes to a check.
LEWIS: Yeah, you can see a lot of the big agency brands – I worked at Leo Burnett, and Leo Burnett was a huge, huge independent agency. So was Fallon. This is not pushing anything against the big conglomerates and everything, the holding groups, the holding companies, but you do lose a little personality. You lose a little bit of that individuality and culture.
When you think about that, this way we really can represent ourselves and in the community that we represent. Once you get totally acquired by a holding company, it’s just a different game at that time. You’ve got to fit into an overall much bigger picture, and you’ve got the limitations and the decisions. You’re going to have to go through a lot more hoops. Even though those decisions may be beneficial to the entire group, it may not be the best decision for you.
I applaud us being able to hold onto our independence. But even now, with a great affiliation with Publicis Groupe, they have been a great partner in helping us attain some of the success we’ve been enjoying. So I think right now it’s having our cake and eating it too. [laughs]
ROB: You mentioned having boomeranged almost from a different era of advertising. When I see “Communications” in the title of a firm, a lot of times that also hearkens to an origin in a lens of public relations, but then also through advertising. Now the world is very, very different in terms of the marketing mix. How have you seen the mix of services evolve at Burrell over your first tenure, your second tenure, and so on?
LEWIS: I’ll tell you, Rob, you’re right. It is such a different industry. It is an entire different industry. One of the things I love is to mentor young creatives and young people in the business, and that’s what’s kept me excited. This is no longer the industry I started in. It’s an entirely different industry. Like you said, communications comes in so many forms – even to the point where you look at advertising agencies and marketing people – we used to always push things on you. “You’ve got to watch this commercial. I don’t care.”
But now, in this digital and social world we’re in, and this on-demand world that we are, and the streaming and all of those things, everyone is a marketer. The influencers now. Creativity is coming from everywhere. It’s just such a unique time to be in this “industry” – and I put quotes around “industry” because what is it now? It’s a little bit of everything. All the lines are blurred, from the content makers, and even when you talked about public relations.
You see the work I’m judging for the Clios right now. I’m on the judging panel for public relations. I mean, they’re marketers. No longer are PR companies about, “The CEO said something wrong, so we need to fix it with a letter, with a press conference.” No, that’s gone away. Everyone is touching the consumer in so many unique ways where you can’t tell “what is what” now.
ROB: Absolutely. The distinction between ad, print, digital – it certainly mixes together.
LEWIS: Yeah.
ROB: As the Chief Creative Officer, how has your creative process shifted? People don’t think about it, but 15 years is right on the edge of pre- or barely social media.
LEWIS: Yeah. How old is the iPhone now? The iPhone might be 14 years old. It’s so funny, Rob – you know how you keep your old cellphones, because what do you do with them? I have my very first iPhone. It’s this little bitty thing. It looks archaic. I remember seeing the iPhone for the first time, and it’s like, oh my God, wow, we’ve gone to Mars. Now I look at my first iPhone 1 and I chuckle. [laughs]
ROB: So how has the creative process shifted with these different devices, with different audiences, with different audiences on different devices? Your audience for the iPhone in 2007 was different from the audience today, which is like everybody. Every age group, every demo is in the iPhone audience now.
LEWIS: This is how I approach it, Rob. At the end of the day, one thing that’s going to never, ever change is telling great stories. Telling stories that are relatable. You tell a great story, it will engage people.
Now, the thing is the length of those stories. Who would’ve ever thought – and I couldn’t have told you 15 years ago – that I’d be able to create a story from beginning to middle to end in 6 seconds? A lot has to do now with our attention span and how we consume content. I remember Game of Thrones. I don’t know if you were a Game of Thrones guy.
ROB: I definitely watched some Game of Thrones.
LEWIS: That was a whole thing on social media. You could only engage people for 2 or 3 seconds. But now, you can see what the event of Game of Thrones became. It became appointment television. It became hours on hours of content in the midst of where sometimes you could hold somebody for 2 seconds. That just shows you the power of the storyline.
So what I tell my young creatives and all of us: it really is about the story. The story could be a tweet. Popeye’s Chicken exploded with one tweet, and it was two words: “…y’all good?” That was a response in a tweet. So you can go to two words in a tweet, you can go to 6 second videos on Instagram, or you can go to a whole series like Game of Thrones. But at the core of that is: what is your engaging story and how is it connecting to the brand or the message you’re trying to give?
At the end of that, throw all that away. There’s so many ways to tell that story, you have to be aware of the medium that you’re telling that story in. Every platform has a personality and expectations. If you’re going to tweet something, you’ve got to put on your tweeting storytelling hat. If I’m going to Instagram it, I’ve got to put on my more visual storytelling hat. If I’m going to Facebook it, I’m thinking about more communities.
Television, a lot is still served in the same way, but a lot of this social influence is finding its way into television as well and how you tell those stories. You see it a lot with user-generated content on YouTube. So many brands. You see something went viral on YouTube; you see that clip in a brand commercial during the Super Bowl.
All of this stuff is coming together, but at the very core of everything is storytelling and how that storytelling matches the platform.
ROB: That “…y’all good?” – it’s such a concise example. It’s like the “Jesus wept” of advertising.
LEWIS: [laughs] Yeah.
ROB: “What do you mean, Jesus wept? Tell me the story here, man.” [laughs] Did you have any involvement in that Popeye’s campaign, or did you have clients looking at that and how to respond? How did you react when you saw that, or perhaps were involved in it?
LEWIS: I want to make it very clear, I was not involved in it. But it’s something which you see and you say, absolute brilliance.
ROB: McDonald’s had to start thinking about it. They’re getting to it, right?
LEWIS: Yeah, they’re getting to it. What you saw was the personality of a brand on Twitter. Social media has been very difficult for brands to navigate because social media is for us. It’s not for brands. You controlled us with making us look at TV commercials and stuff, but now this is ours. I’m following my people, I’m following my friends, I’m following my influencers, and I’m following the brands I believe in. So when you come into my space, you’ve got to really understand who I am and what I’m about.
A lot of brands still go into social media with brand voice, like here’s Mommy and Daddy telling us what we think and always pushing themselves first. What Popeye’s was able to do was create a personality and become a person. How many brands would say “y’all”? It took on the persona of a person, so it gets much more easily embraced.
Many brands still struggle with their voice in social media. How do I still be a brand, but at the same time be very relatable to my consumer? That’s a tough line to walk.
ROB: It’s absolutely tough. I’m thinking of one of the ads of the moment – and of course, the insurance companies always get deep into this world. I think what people tend to forget is they take a lot of shots on goal. They just happen to have enough budget that they can take a lot of shots with big ads. Maybe other brands need to think more about how they can take more shots at success with smaller ads.
But I think the ad of the moment that I think is even cheated by shortening is, of course, the Geico Tag Team TV ad. The 30 second version, there’s an element of storytelling there. And I will tell you – and this may just be me – when I see the 15 second version of the ad, I feel cheated. I don’t know.
LEWIS: [laughs] Rob, the reason why you feel cheated is because you love it, and you know there’s more. It’s like, “Wow, I want that experience.” The 30 second spot allowed you to enjoy and engage, and you really were into it. I smile every time I see it. Every time I see it, I smile. I love it. I don’t look away. It’s so engaging. When you only get a taste of that, you know there’s more and you want more.
But that’s good, because now I’ve got you still wanting more. It’s like, come off the stage with them wanting more, not saying, “Okay, we’re finished with you.” But also, that 15 seconds has a purpose. It’s just a reminder. You’ve got to fit into the media budget. You’ve got to make the media expand. I’ll hit you with the 30 every once in a while, and then it’s sort of like the preview. It’s the trailer for the movie. You see the trailer for the movie and you go, “Wow, I want to see that movie again.” It just reminds you that the other content is out there, that you can go on YouTube and watch it as many times as you like, if you want to. That’s the purpose of the 15.
But that’s a great way of telling you, when you really tell the story on that platform, and it’s 30 seconds in a world where people tell you they only look at it for 2 seconds, it just reenergized Tag Team’s career. People fell in love with nostalgia again and the music and so many things. It’s so clever, the generations. It says so many things in that story.
ROB: Lewis, you’ve kind of blown my mind with the 15 second ad insights on that, because you’ve left me thinking about film trailers and how some of them just try to be a bad summary of the story and some of them work harder to get you to want to see the rest of the story. Now I’m thinking about all of the ways that the 15 second cut of that Geico ad is just meant to leave me wanting more. I haven’t thought about it that way, and I’ll watch every 15 second ad through a different lens now.
LEWIS: Yeah. It has to do with media spend. 30 seconds costs more than 15 seconds. I’ve got two dollars, I’ve got to stretch it for as much reach as I possibly can.
ROB: Got it. I’ve seen at least a good article or two out there about the production of that ad, about the creative process, about giving room for ad lib and free flow, and even the career decisions around it that Tag Team made, of the ads they didn’t do. They didn’t do the “Soup! There it is” advertisement that they could’ve done. It would’ve been very natural coming off of the SNL Justin Timberlake skit (while we’re tagging all over the media map here for a moment).
Lewis, when you reflect on your journey, your career so far, and your time in particular with Burrell, what are some lessons you’ve learned that you might consider taking the time machine back and giving yourself some advice on what to do differently?
LEWIS: I tell you, man, Rob, I don’t know what to do differently. Some of that is personal or not. One of the unique perspectives I do have on this industry is that I am an African-American creative. That’s been tough, being in this industry. There’s a lot of movement to rectify that, not only with African-Americans, but women and all minorities and people of color in the advertising industry. That’s always been tough to navigate.
As far as doing things differently, just on the personal side, I wish I’d had someone to help me navigate a little bit more. One of the challenges of being in these situations is often, especially early in my career, I was the only person of color in the entire agency. But from that, you do learn a lot. You learn how to interact with people that are different from you. You learn how to not lose your culture. I think I navigated that pretty well, because being from the South, I could navigate being the only African-American in the room and not losing who you are.
Personally, there’s maybe speaking up quicker. I had this fear of losing my job if I actually said exactly what I meant. That came with experience, that came with confidence, and it came with success. You get that behind you, and then you can speak a little louder because people really want to know what you want to say.
But my whole thing I say for anybody is, there’s talent and there’s work ethic. They need each other. They really do need each other, because I’ve run into a lot of talented people without the work ethic, and I’ve worked alongside people with stronger work ethic but who lacked the talent. It really takes both. Both can take you so far, but until they really meld together, that’s when bigger success happens.
For me, I had one of those lives that I followed the green lights. I didn’t go against something. If it was a red light, I didn’t try to force it. I just followed the green lights – and I had help. I had people that believed in me. I had mentors. I like to feel like I deserved the mentorship. Somebody looked at this kid and thought, “Wow, if I can help this kid out, I can take credit myself.” [laughs] That sticks with me.
And I’ve always had an underdog mentality. First, being Black coming out of the South, being Black working at predominantly white agencies. Even working at Burrell, a Black agency, it still is a resource struggle. But when you’re an underdog, Rob, you get a chip on your shoulder. You just want to prove everybody wrong and make them eat their words. Whatever they were thinking, I want them to eat it. [laughs]
ROB: Probably quite a privilege for you now, where you are – you certainly probably don’t know everything, but you know enough to help some other folks that are coming along. One thing I wonder, coming from the other side of the table, if I’m just freelancing a little bit on the history of the agency, I would imagine early on, a lot of folks were engaging you, saying, “Can you help us speak to your audience?” Was that the earlier era?
LEWIS: Yeah, and it’s interesting how it’s changed. It’s sort of like here we are, back again. In 1971, a lot of brands were simply afraid of featuring Black people in their marketing efforts. That’s why we give huge kudos to McDonald’s. They were one of the very first people to actually show Black people in national ads. At that time – you’ve got to think about back in the ’70s – people were concerned, “Am I only saying that this is for Black people? I don’t want to piss off other people.” Things like that. You’ve got to think about that. So that’s very different.
But fast forward now and what’s going on contextually in the country now, you’re seeing people of color everywhere push for that. That’s been a very interesting thing from then to now. But there was a time that brands were afraid. They just didn’t believe in it.
But at the same time, you had people in the ’70s that felt that it should be done, but it wasn’t social pressure. They just understood that, listen, these are consumers. We’re consumers, and we come in all different shapes, sizes, and colors. They didn’t look at it from race. They’re like, “Here’s a consumer that we’re not talking to.” I remember early on this whole stigma around women buying cars, that women were intimidated, and if a woman wanted to buy a car, she should bring a man with her, because “what did women know about cars?”
I remember Subaru was one of the first commercials that had this young lady come into a dealership, and this dealer was talking to her like, “Oh honey, you don’t need to know nothing about that engine. Here’s this vanity mirror. It comes with a vanity mirror. That’s all you need to know.” And she walked out and she went to a Subaru dealer, and he treated her entirely different. It showed women are customers too.
The same thing with beer commercials. I worked on Budweiser, and I’ll tell you, back in the day, if you were a woman in a beer commercial, you had on a swimsuit or you’re a Bilbo. Now I saw this beer commercial where the woman comes home and takes off her bra to have a beer. You’ve got to understand consumers. It’s really about marketing and making your brand engage with more customers, which takes you to the bottom line.
Real quickly, I remember how things changed. MTV – I don’t know if you recall MTV – was very forward-thinking. But if you were a Black artist, you had to have a white person in the video. I laugh about – go to LL Cool J’s “Around the Way Girl” music video, and you have this white girl dancing. First of all, you’re talking about an around the way girl. “Bad attitude and a Fendi bag.” You go, why is a white girl in an around the way girl… [laughs]
ROB: I remember that.
LEWIS: It’s like, what is she doing there? But MTV said, “Unless you have a white person in your music videos, we will not air you.” It shows you how things have changed.
ROB: Right. One thing I think a lot about in this sort of conversation, part of my imagination is – we’ve talked to niche agencies, cultural agencies, but some of these agencies, and I’m sure you all in particular – it’s unqualified. You’re getting the national campaign.
What I think about, sitting on the other side of the table – you mentioned on your journey thinking about what you say; how do I think about freeing people up and creating enough room around the table for everyone to bring their whole selves to the ideas, and not cutting off the conversation way too early? Because even letting people go out of bounds I think is how you get to where you’re going to go in bounds. If you’re not even bringing your full self to the table, much less going out of bounds for yourself, you can’t get to the best ideas.
LEWIS: Rob, you’re right. I call it stretching the rubber band. You’ve got to stretch that rubber band to know where you are. It’s uncharted territory. You take these elements and you put them together. But you’ve got to know what’s on the other side of the mountain because it does a couple of things. Do you need to go there? Does it reinforce your position that you are in, or tell you where you need to go? And you may not use that information right now because it may not be the right time. But you might use it next week or next year or 6 months from now. It just lets you know.
Creatively, you would think that we should always keep that open as creatives. But sometimes as creatives, we become by nature very protective of our own ideas, or we get there and we stop. We get to a certain level. That’s what I love about how the industry has changed. I give myself credit because I’ve been able to adjust. Some of us have just become stuck, and you stay there. It’s like a musician whose music couldn’t evolve or change. But if I’m a musician, I still have my unique sound behind how I’m able to change with the instrumentation or my message with the lyrics or things like that. But unfortunately, as creatives sometimes we get stuck and we just stay there.
ROB: We just play the hits, right?
LEWIS: Yeah, just play the hits. But to your point, you stretch that rubber band till it almost pops. You know, Rob, sometimes it might just break on you. That’s okay. That’s all right because you know you got everything out of it.
It’s interesting, too, this whole pandemic world. It has us doing things that we would not be doing as an industry. All of us, the whole country, are doing things that we could’ve been doing; the technology was there for us to do it, but we just didn’t do it because we didn’t want to explore. This forced us to do things we never thought about that were always there for us to do.
ROB: That’s right. We did a 50-day road trip vacation last summer from Atlanta to Utah and back in the middle of a pandemic. It was Zoom and it was phones and it was all that, but it was there for me 5 years before.
LEWIS: It was, right. Exactly. Now we’re going to have family reunions and nobody will have to travel. [laughs] We had a little family thing, about 20 of us on the phone together. We’ve never been together, but like you said, the technology was there. It was great to see the kids come in, all over the country, at one time. It was just a Zoom call for an hour. It was great.
ROB: Lewis, this has been a distinct privilege. I’m glad to talk to someone with your perspective and experience and, let’s really note, runaway success. When people want to connect with you and with Burrell, where should they go to find you?
LEWIS: The agency is simply burrell.com. There’s contact information and you’ll see some of the work we’ve done. Me personally, I’m on LinkedIn, Lewis Williams. On Twitter, I’m @willmsl. LinkedIn, just Lewis Williams, you can get me personally.
I like to engage with, like I said, mentorship. Right now we’re working with The One Club, which is in New York, and we have a skill for young people who can’t afford to go to the very expensive advertising schools. We’re starting that in about two weeks. We have about 15 students in Chicago and 15 students in Atlanta. Oriel Davis, CD at Spotify, put this together. 6 months ago they had New York and LA, and now they’ve extended to Chicago and Atlanta. If I can be of any help, I’m always there.
ROB: That’s wonderful. I think anyone should definitely avail themselves of that opportunity. You’ve followed a great path for people to learn from. Lewis, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Although we can do all this stuff over Zoom, we’ll also do stuff in person sometime, I think. I’m going to get on an airplane at some point and see some people face to face as well.
LEWIS: All right, Rob. Thanks for inviting me. I enjoyed talking with you. Have a good time on the golf course, man.
ROB: Thank you. Be well.
LEWIS: Be well.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Esther Raphael is Marketing Officer at Intersection, an out-of-home media and technology company that uses proprietary technology to electronically paint its client’s stories on busses and city, transit system, airport, and interior and exterior “destination” walls around the country . . . anywhere outside the home where brands can deliver content, information, and wayfinding to consumers as “they journey through cities.” Intersection’s technology supports dynamic program execution and unique campaign flexibility. A Harris Poll survey reported that 69% of urban consumers are noticing “out-of-home” now more than they were pre-pandemic.
Headquartered in NYC, the agency has offices around the country, so the six-year-old agency has always had a bit of “remote” about it.
Esther was on this year’s South by Southwest panel discussing “When ‘Go Away’ Is a Powerful Brand Message.” The agency partners with Foursquare and uses that platform’s aggregated location data to display hourly traffic levels in vicinity grocery stores and pharmacies – optimizing safety by providing consumers with information on the best times to shop to avoid crowds. Intersection also partners with Foursquare on content – showing client ROI and tracking opt-in user experience data.
Intersection is best known for “Link NYC,” a product which provides “localized messaging, transit and community information, and creative partnerships with local nonprofits and institutions. Consumers have come to rely on the wealth of curated advertising and editorial content displayed on Intersection’s screens as a source of information as they travel around the city. Just as on other media platforms, advertising partners with content. “We don’t have any billboards,” Rachel says. “We are focused on being alongside a person while they’re walking around the city.”
Intersection started its first branding campaign, “Go There,” in spring of 2020, which has been “taking off” this spring. Initially, Go There was about “those first places you would visit when they opened in spring of 2020” and thinking about that feeling. The meaning has expanded to include “the places Intersection can take a brand to” . . . but also to “do something you have never done before.”
Esther says that out-of-home creative can be powerful and drive results. It can also drive “social media interaction and engagement” because of its large and unique canvas. She says, if you only deploy a mobile/desktop strategy, “you’re missing people when they’re (outside) feeling joy.” Intersection just launched its first in-house creative agency, Creative Lab, to help small- to medium-sized businesses understand out-of-home marketing campaigns.
Esther can be reached on her agency’s website at: https://www.intersection.com/
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and we are diving into our annual South by Southwest series. Of course, South by was virtual this year, so we are virtual. We can’t wait to be back next year at the lounge at the Four Seasons, recording with some awesome guests live.
But today I am joined virtually by Esther Raphael. She’s Marketing Officer at Intersection, based in New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Esther.
ESTHER: Thank you, Rob. I too cannot wait to meet you live and be there live next year.
ROB: We’ll buy you a coffee or a beverage of your choice at the lounge. It’ll be fantastic. With our South by Southwest series, on an average episode, we’re talking to marketing agency owners, founders, etc., but we find really interesting opportunities within the South by Southwest speaker ecosystem. Esther, why don’t you start off by telling us about Intersection and where you sit in the marketing ecosystem?
ESTHER: Love that. Intersection is an out-of-home media and technology company, and we have advertising products in cities, transit systems, airports, and key destinations all over the country so that brands can speak directly to consumers as they go about their journey through cities.
We know from recent research that people are more engaged now than ever with out-of-home. Think about the past year and everything that we’ve all experienced. Being able to leave your home sometimes was that moment of fresh air, that moment of relaxation, that walk around the block, running an errand. 69% of consumers that live in urban areas are saying that they’re noticing out-of-home now more than pre-pandemic, and that’s according to a Harris Poll survey. We are right in that sweet spot, right in the place where brands can speak to consumers in a way that they feel engaged and happy.
ROB: Very interesting. It seems to me, my perception, that out-of-home continues to digitize. I’m in Atlanta and we have more and more digital billboards going up. Is there even something in perhaps the technology that’s going into out-of-home, even in terms of brightness in the product that’s being put out there, that’s increasing the visibility/noticeability of it?
ESTHER: For sure. On one side we have proprietary technology that gives our partners – the transit authorities, the cities – the ability to deliver information and content and wayfinding and all these services to their consumers. Then on the advertising side, one of the things we’re most known for is our technology, allowing brands to do dynamic executions and unique campaign flexibility. It’s something we’re pretty proud of and focused on.
ROB: It’s kind of happening before our eyes, but it’s really fascinating to get an expert like you in place to really illuminate. It happens slowly but quickly at the same time.
If we tap in a little bit to your South by Southwest panel, the topic was “When ‘Go Away’ Is a Powerful Brand Message.” Take us into the details of that session and what you were sharing with the community in that talk.
ESTHER: One of the products that we’re most known for at Intersection is Link NYC here in New York. If you ever come to visit, we could take you on a market ride. We have an editorial team who is dedicated to curating content on the screens – thinking about the consumer experience as they journey through that city, not only from the advertising perspective, but from the editorial side. Our content suite includes localized messaging, transit and community information, and creative partnerships with local nonprofits and institutions. Because of this, consumers look to our screens for important and helpful information.
As COVID entered the story, we had to quickly pivot some of our content and our storytelling to better serve the community as they were dealing with this new world. We all were. One of the ways that we did this was through our partnership with Foursquare.
If you think back to one of the greatest everyday stressors we’ve all experienced over the past year, it’s getting groceries and supplies. When do you go? How do I avoid the lines? Is it going to be safe? That’s really what we wanted to solve for.
Using Foursquare’s aggregated location data, we were able to display the average hourly traffic levels for nearby grocery stores and drugstores on thousands of Intersection streets. This was designed to give consumers a heads up on the best time to shop to avoid the crowds.
The title of our South by panel was so catchy, and I think what’s really important to point out about this partnership is that it’s not about deterring visits. We weren’t telling people, “Don’t go grocery shopping.” It was more about optimizing, how do we help people do it safely?
ROB: Right. It’s sort of in theme with – I’m getting a sense as you talk about the Intersection product line – and I can certainly picture an experience, and I can’t wait to be back up in the city and I can picture those Link NYC displays. A lot of out-of-home advertising – historically, billboards, now digital also – you don’t really get an impression of it being helpful. So I wonder a little bit, how do you keep that conviction of being helpful throughout? It seems like it’s a real core of your product and something a great deal of thought goes into instead of just maximizing inventory and then throwing in some wayfinding.
ESTHER: That’s right. When we really were evaluating our product line, and right when Link came out, one of the things that we spent a lot of time thinking about was media in general. When you think about other media platforms, like TV, magazines, which is what my background is in, podcasts, even – you come for the content, and advertising is a partner in that. They’re along the journey.
The exception to that was out-of-home, and that’s what we really wanted to change. We wanted to be the first, and we were the first, to do it in the out-of-home space – creating content not only for Link, but for our entire network across the country so that consumers and people walking around the city would look to the screen for information that was interesting to them.
During COVID, of course we worked very closely with the city and with all different government agencies to put up really important, relevant, timely information – campaigns like the Foursquare partnership. But year round, we do things like events in your neighborhood, local offerings, things that are helpful, interesting, something you’d be excited to see or would be helpful to your life while you’re walking around the city.
ROB: The company has been around for a little bit now, right?
ESTHER: Yes.
ROB: How long has it been around?
ESTHER: 6 years, about.
ROB: It’s interesting, that inflection point of digital displays. As you talk about that sort of editorial approach, I’m picturing even let’s say 15 to 20 years ago, you started to see these little tiny displays pop into elevators. The philosophy seemed a little bit similar. It was a little bit of what’s helpful to you and a little bit of news or editorial content, but the screens were tiny. Now the screens are – I think Times Square, at least for a while, had room for people to spend however much money on a digital display for the attention. But it seems like the economics of these displays must be shifting radically at this point.
ESTHER: We at Intersection are very thoughtful about our screens. We don’t have any billboards. We are focused on being alongside a person while they’re walking around the city. Street, maybe exterior of buses, inside transit or airport systems, or inside destinations. We have a network at Hudson Yards, New York inside the shopping complex and outside.
We really want to be a part of your experience, not necessarily something you just pass by in your vehicle. So that’s also a very big part of our strategy at Intersection.
ROB: That’s fascinating. Again, you’re making me long to be back up in New York and back up to Hudson Yards. All in good time, and possibly quite soon.
I think one part of this conversation that may be surprising to a lot of people is your mention of Foursquare. Foursquare, formerly one of the breakout darling hits of a South by Southwest once upon a time, and still kind of useful at South by, since fractured into the Yelp-like Foursquare app and swarmed still for those who can’t keep themselves from checking in, which is admittedly kind of me.
But I think a lot of people might turn up their nose to the idea of Foursquare as something that is a thing from the past. What’s their data quality looking like, and how are they pulling that off when they’ve left the zeitgeist? They’re not the “it” thing anymore, but there have been some very interesting campaigns and studies around Foursquare that I think surprise people when they look at it.
ESTHER: We’ll have to save that for our next podcast when we bring on the Foursquare team. [laughs] They can speak more to you about their data. But we partner with them on a lot of different things. This is one of our partnerships on our content side.
We also partner with them on the other side of the business, which is showing our clients’ ROI. Foursquare has a ton of data capabilities. Based on their opt-in users who share their geographic location and allow them to collect research and survey information, we’re able to tell our clients who run with Intersection a little bit about that user experience when they see their ads and the interactions and actions they take after seeing it. Foursquare has a whole data side of their business which I’m not an expert in, but we are lucky to have them as a partner.
ROB: Excellent to hear. It’s definitely become such a key revenue stream for them, if you get in and do a little bit of homework.
One transition we’re clearly getting into a little bit is reopening. I think marketers everywhere are having to think a great deal about what reopening looks like, what things to promote, what things to hold off on. How are you – probably obviously with data, but how are you navigating this next stage where we’re not quite wide open, or not at all, or maybe somewhere in between, and how new messages enter the conversation?
ESTHER: I love this question because I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I’m one of those people who’s so social that this year’s really taken a toll on me, especially in the beginning when we thought about sitting in our home offices – which for me, it is my bedroom. [laughs] I sit in here all day. You lack that interaction with your colleagues who once brought you this tremendous amount of energy, or your friends who make you smile in a different kind of way that you really miss.
One of the things we started at Intersection in spring of 2020, but it’s coming back full force this spring, is a campaign called Go There. It was our first ever, really, branding campaign at Intersection. Go There to us has so many meanings. It was thinking about those first places you would visit when they opened in spring of 2020. Go back to that feeling. I know where it was, and I will be vain and share it: it was to the hair salon. [laughs] As I am sure so many other women would admit to. I remember sitting in that chair thinking, wow, these moments that we have taken so for granted are so special all of a sudden.
So Go There really plays off of the hope of the places we’ll return to, but then it also has this business side of the places Intersection can take a brand to, really go there to the cities with us, but also go there with your creative. Do something you have never done before. Really dare to challenge yourself and to speak to people in a different way.
That’s something I am working on for a huge launch in June, which I am really passionate about. Yes, we’re all going to turn to data, but I think we’re also going to turn to what’s inside of our hearts and makes us happy when things open, and that’s the part I think there’s so much to be said and done around.
ROB: You raise a meaningful point with your home office in your bedroom, as I imagine is quite common. I’ve stayed in Airbnbs and different places, and the ones in the five boroughs tend to be a little bit tighter, shall we say, space-wise. So I can picture things.
How has Intersection overall navigated probably having a deep concentration of your team in the city where their home office is a bedroom? And then you probably have some folks who’ve been commuting in from an outer suburb that are on cloud nine. How are you handling geography as things come back? Have some people distributed out to the winds? Is it going to be completely back in place in the office?
ESTHER: We’re figuring that all out right now. One of the things that’s so wonderful about Intersection is that it is and always has been people first, really thinking about what’s best for the employees and for the team that makes us Intersection. They’ve done the best to keep us happy from home, give us the resources, the tools. I told you before we logged on this call, IT helps you the second you raise your hand that you need help. People just seem to want to roll up their sleeves and make sure you are extra comfortable, extra productive.
The truth of the matter is, though, Intersection has so many offices around the country. We were always slightly remote. So while I am physically based in the New York office, my team was in West Coast, central region, all over the East Coast. We were always on video. This isn’t that much of a change. I think the thing that’s new for us is that people don’t get to go to the office. Sitting in your home, that’s the part where you have to personally reflect on change and think about how to be more productive, especially when there’s little children running outside your door.
But I think as a business, we figured this out long before we had to be home because of our offices geographically being located all over the map. We will come back; we’re planning a return, and hopefully it is very soon.
ROB: We are hopefully planning a team gathering in June or July, but it’s all subject to what people feel comfortable with to a certain extent.
It’s interesting how you mentioned the distribution of the company. It really reminds me, too, of some of those old TV and radio stations, the local media conglomerates with the local offices. It seems like there’s probably an extent to which you’ve been taking the lunch of the local TV and radio station. Has that been a significant factor? Were you missing that in-person salesperson in Topeka, Kansas – I don’t know if that’s even a place you’re at, but it might be – talking to the local car dealership?
ESTHER: That is exactly why we’re in all of those markets. We have offices in almost every market that we represent, and we have people on the ground going to those local car dealerships, local businesses. I think it makes Intersection feel like a small business within each city that ladders up into the unit that we are. I think it’s one of the beautiful pieces about having a regionalized business like that.
ROB: I wonder a little bit, as we get past the initial reopening, it seems like there is this – we all talk about the things we’re going to do next, where we’re going to go. There’s going to be a pent-up demand for, I think, advertisement as well. How are you thinking about inventory, and how should marketers be thinking about your sort of inventory as we move into what could be a little bit of a super-heated time for competing for eyeballs?
ESTHER: This is something that I also addressed at our South by Southwest panel, so great segue. People have been living their life outdoors in a different kind of way – working out outside, restaurants outside, dining outside, curbside pickup, walking, biking, more than ever before. Because of that, people are feeling an extreme level of screen fatigue. They’re on their computers all day, they’re looking at their phone, they’re working. When they finally go outside, they’re ready to leave that screen behind.
We talked a lot about how if you were deploying only a mobile and desktop strategy, you’re missing people when they’re feeling joy. When I get my screen report on Saturday or Sunday night, I feel such a pit in my stomach. The phone knows how long I’ve been texting people, the phone knows how long I’ve been on social media. It’s not a good feeling. [laughs] Whereas on the other side, when you go outside, you feel that breath of fresh air, and that’s where out-of-home sits.
I think advertisers have noticed that over the past year, and we’ve seen a huge shift in some business categories coming to the out-of-home space. I think we’re going to continue to see that. The out-of-home space was actually having a huge uptick in business in 2019. I imagine this little blip in all businesses in the world over 2020 and the first half of 2021 will have a quick departure and we’ll continue to see people outside, advertising outside, being a part of that journey, that experience, that breath of fresh air. Here’s to the second half.
ROB: Indeed. When people think of the future of out-of-home, I think one version they probably think of, if they think about it for a little too long, is the sort of Minority Report, screens everywhere, scanning your eyes and spamming and whatnot. That’s probably not where we’re going, and even that vision of things is probably 10 or 15 years old now. When you think about the next 5 years of out-of-home, what do you expect we’re going to see?
ESTHER: I think you’ll see more content, more and more out-of-home publishers using those screens to talk to people, to talk to them in a helpful way. I think you’ll continue to see technology improve in a way that will just blow our minds. If you think of where we were 10 years ago and where we are today, you can only imagine where we’ll be 5 years from now. I think those would be my top two answers.
ROB: Got it. One company I encountered was heavily digitizing advertising in places like NASCAR tracks. What’s going on in the sports venue side of out-of-home? Is that something you intersect with at all?
ESTHER: We have such a big network outside of sports arenas, specifically in Chicago, in Philadelphia. It’s a huge part of how we speak to our clients in those markets. If you think about fans of sports in Philadelphia and Chicago, that is a world I cannot even begin to understand. [laughs] But we do a lot of work with our partners to make sure they’re there on opening day of the Cubs. So yes, sports is way on the top of the list as it returns where you’re going to want to see more people talking to that audience. That’s a special group of enthusiasts who people want to talk to and reach.
ROB: Link NYC from a transit perspective is one of those crown jewels where there’s a sufficient critical mass of people, there’s a critical mass of network. I imagine, because you’re in these different local markets, some of the things that you see in New York start to move downstream – in other words, smaller and smaller transit networks and places become valuable to do this sort of thing. Where are the places you think we’re going to start seeing digital out-of-home content that we’re not seeing? Maybe it is in a smaller town, maybe in a smaller place.
ESTHER: Austin, we just won the Austin market. It’s such a hot market. I think you’ll continue to see tremendous growth in the digital out-of-home space and even the static out-of-home space in Austin.
We also have moved into LA, which of course is so well-known for their billboards and driving down Sunset and seeing every single celebrity pay homage to themselves on the screen. [laughs] But we have all of the transit system there, which we will also be investing quite a bit of time into thinking about what those screens look like and the type of information that is given to them.
I would say LA and Austin are way at the top of certainly our list at Intersection.
ROB: Got it. With Austin, is that primarily the transit system, or are there other adjacencies there?
ESTHER: Right now it’s the transit system.
ROB: How do you think about, then, scaling down editorial a little bit? Or is it not necessary anymore? Is Austin still big enough you can have a pretty meaty content organization around it?
ESTHER: We haven’t started Austin yet. Austin right now is predominantly static for us. We’re looking into how we bring content to all of our markets. We have Link in New York, Philadelphia, and Newark; they have a large content suite. Then all of our other digital markets – LA, Minneapolis, the list goes on – we do quite a bit of content. It’s not the same level that we do in New York where we focus on events and Heritage Month and things that are so unique and special to all things New York City.
But we’re spending quite a bit of time now thinking about how we do the same, how we mimic what works so well in New York and Philadelphia and Newark and bring that to other cities so that consumers begin to understand that out-of-home is a different kind of media, and that you should think about it, you should look at the screens in the same way you do other media formats.
ROB: Esther, you certainly put a lot of time into preparing for a conversation like the one you had at South by Southwest. What have I not touched on yet that we should be talking about?
ESTHER: One of the things we really should cover is creative in out-of-home. I think there’s this renaissance right now where you’re seeing people do things in the out-of-home space that are so breathtaking, powerful, but also effective, also drive results, but drive social media engagement, drive interaction and engagement because of the canvas that out-of-home gives you.
Because of that, we’ve just launched our first in-house creative agency. It’s called Creative Lab. Even advertisers, specifically on the regional level – or beyond; we’ll help anyone – but we talked a lot about how smaller businesses on the SMB side of the business in each of our markets want help thinking through what a campaign in out-of-home looks like. How do you do something so impactful, just a wow moment, but also that will drive results for your business? We have a team of designers around the country who are ready to go.
ROB: With that creative agency aspect, it seems like it naturally flows into the conversation around measurement. Obviously, measurement has been a little bit different over the past year, but do you have anything before then or even leading into post-COVID to think about measuring results outside of just, obviously, impressions and people in the area?
ESTHER: Yes, absolutely. We have spent a lot of time pre-COVID, but also during, making sure that our clients know the level of return on their investment that they’ll receive. We have a complete measurement team dedicated to attribution, thinking about brand awareness. If you want to measure actual store visits, if you want to measure digital event measurement – did somebody actually download my app? Did somebody actually make a purchase?
Pre-COVID, there were so many stats about consumers’ behavior and the power of out-of-home driving, for example, in-store traffic. If you look at the Nielsen out-of-home study that came out at the end of 2019, you saw this wonderful story of 39% of people noticing their out-of-home ads, 20% of them immediately visiting a business after seeing that ad, but 74% of those visitors making a purchase as a result of that ad.
There is definitely this power to out-of-home to take action. It’s one of the beautiful things of media.
ROB: It makes sense and it’s believable, and I know I find myself noticing so many more of what’s around me. I know you’re not in the billboard land and I’m not on Atlanta transit lately, but definitely seeing a lot of that good information.
Esther, thank you for sharing your insights from your talk at South by Southwest. I’m really eager – I think we all are – to meet back in person and do Austin right next year and see some of those campaigns going up there as well.
ESTHER: Sure. Can’t wait. Barbeque next year.
ROB: Oh yeah. I had a reservation for some barbeque. I have 5 pounds of the best stuff that they owe me on credit. Literally. They wouldn’t give me a refund. They just said, “Hey, come back and tell us we owe you. Bring the email.”
ESTHER: All of our South by Southwest media posts said “bring your own barbeque,” so you’re onto something. I’ll have to follow up with a brisket tonight. [laughs]
ROB: Love it. I’m inspired as well. Thank you so much, Esther. Be well.
ESTHER: Thank you. You too. Bye.
ROB: Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
John Vuong started his Toronto-based agency, Local SEO Search, in 2013 with the goal of helping small- to medium-sized businesses in North America, UK, and Australia improve digital presence in their local communities.
John had ten years in advertising and sales for print media directories with their online performance-based networks and then worked for 5 years at Yellow Pages. Through this experience, he honed his understanding of how to dig out a business’s gaps, opportunities and challenges, its potential customers, where those customers were located, what those customers wanted . . . and what businesses themselves were looking for in an agency. John explains that product characteristics, physical proximity, convenience, and/or services are only the beginning of the variables to consider in “positioning” a company. Whatever it is that a company’s customers want needs to be prominent on its website. John says, “Make it easy for people to realize what you offer.”
John believes “Google My Business” is “the biggest asset piece for the local space” – it is what sets local apart from traditional organic traffic. This link between Google search and maps is critical. Small business owners need to understand how people “shop, navigate, and search for information.” Websites at the local level need to be simple for Google to easily crawl and index user-relevant information.
Typical clients for this agency are professional service businesses (dentists, lawyers, physio/chiro, massage, and anything medical spa-ish), trades (e.g.; plumbers or roofers) and B2B businesses (e.g.; manufacturing, distribution, and e-com) – businesses that more competitive in nature, have higher revenue expectations, and have a higher lifetime customer value. John says the process of building a business takes time and work – that there are no shortcuts for things that are worthwhile.
Local SEO Search has specialists that develop SEO strategy, build links, create content, and manage social media. The agency employs web developers and graphic designers. But even with that variety of services, the agency’s focus is totally and simply on the attributes and signals Google uses to rank websites.
John’ strength is sales. Yellow Pages taught him a lot about business. He met business owners where the businesses had been in existence, not just for years, but for lifetimes. How? “They took care of their customers. They relied on word-of-mouth, referral business. They understood how to run a really good business – service, pricing, competitors, unique selling proposition, understanding all their products and services. Inside out, they knew how to run it.” John sees the internet as the “new Yellow Pages.”
When he started his agency, John had to learn how to deliver, how to hire and manage people, how to provide customer service. “There’s so much more to running a business than just sales,” he admits. John values honesty and hard work and admits that he “went door-knocking at the beginning to get clients, and it worked.” Today, he says, he’s “just looking for good people to connect with. Good, honest, real businesses that not just need and acknowledge that they need help, but they’re good people” who “have business experience and knowledge and insights on what real business ownership means.” Those are the people he feels he can best help.
John can be reached on his agency’s website at: www.localseosearch.ca.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by John Vuong, owner of Local SEO Search based in Toronto, Canada. Welcome to the podcast, John.
JOHN: Thanks a lot for having me, Rob. I’m excited to be on your show today.
ROB: Super exciting to have you here. Why don’t you start off and tell us about Local SEO Search? I think we might know what your superpower is, but why don’t you tell us about it?
JOHN: Yeah, definitely. I started this agency 8 years ago, back in 2013. My sole purpose is really to help the small to medium size businesses service their local community and really help them for their digital presence, so make them appear more visibly on search, in particular Google.
ROB: Interesting. We’ve talked to some different SEO firms, but a lot of times they’re more on that “trying to rank for a keyword,” that B2B software client. How does that work differently with local? How do the tactics and mindsets differ when you’re trying to be the pizza place somebody finds when they look locally?
JOHN: There’s a lot of different nuances. In my background – and maybe I’ll take a step back before I even start with starting the agency. I actually worked 10 years prior in advertising/sales, and I dabbled in traditional advertising/sales and print media directories, some online affiliate performance-based networks, and then I resided and worked for 5 years at Yellow Pages.
For me, I really learned a lot about local businesses, understood what gaps, opportunities, and challenges they had, and what they wanted to look for or to in an agency, or someone that they wanted to build their trust and relationship with. When I started this company, it was all about understanding them, asking the right questions, and understanding what they really, really cared about in terms of staying connected and harvesting a good relationship long term.
For me, that’s all I needed to get into this agency world without knowing how to run an agency. Working at Yellow Pages is not your traditional digital agency. It was more traditional channel print media, telephone book. But I learned a lot from a big company, how to run a real company.
In terms of local, the big thing for me was understanding who their customers were, understanding their challenges/problems, and ultimately the customers that were consuming their product or service. Fast forward to now Google and how local sets themselves apart from the traditional organic traffic, Google My Business is the biggest asset piece for the local space. How you understand and claim and verify and rank for a lot of terms to be on that prominent proximity or relevant map is so critical for a lot of these small business owners because that’s how people shop, navigate, search for information.
For you as a business owner, I feel you have to understand what your customers are looking for. The keyword gap analysis, great, but positioning so that you actually know exactly that pizza shop, what people are looking for, seeking out – is it the weekly specials? Is it the different toppings? The convenience factor, proximity, free pick-up, Uber, whatever? There’s so many different variables.
Understand that. Make it prominent on your website, and then make sure that Google recognizes that it’s inside your schema markup, your sitemap. Make it easy for people to realize what you offer that’s accessible and simple for your customers.
ROB: Dig in a little bit just for a moment on schema markup. That’s something I think some of the amateur SEOs like me out in the world might know less about.
JOHN: Schema markup is just the way you sort your information on your website so that Google can index things. It’s another way to add attributes within your website. The key about everything you do in terms of not just digital, but in your business, is to make it as efficient as possible for your customers. The more simplistic it is, easy it is – just like your sitemap on your website, making it so simple that Google can go in there and crawl it without trying to navigate five layers deep on the content piece that’s relevant for the user.
If you mark it up so it’s simple, so that Google doesn’t have a problem indexing your site, it allows you to then make it a clean transfer of information/content to the actual users and make it easy for Google to then crawl and index your site.
ROB: Thank you for digging into that. It’s an interesting through-line going back to your work with Yellow Pages. You’ve been helping businesses be found by people for longer than you’ve had a business. That’s pretty fascinating. I wonder what a typical customer looks like for you. I might’ve pulled you down a path with that pizza restaurant example, but who are we talking about for your customers, usually? Are we talking about doctors or lawyers, home professionals, retail businesses? What’s the meat and potatoes of who wants to be found locally and wants some help with that?
JOHN: Our typical persona/avatar type of client is the professional service-based type of business, whether it be dentists, lawyers, physio/chiro, massage, anything medical spa-ish, as well as trades, which are the plumbers, roofers, etc. And of course, the B2B kind of businesses – manufacturing, distribution, e-com, etc.
The reason for that is typically it’s more competitive in nature, and in a local marketplace – I live in Toronto, Canada, and it’s one of the larger metropolitan areas in all of Canada. There’s more competition in dentists than there are barbershops. Therefore, if you are in business for a higher ticket service type sale of your client – and the lifetime value of a dentist is 7 years – so the value of acquiring a customer, you want the good type of avatar, a good ideal lead nurture of a client.
Understanding that whole process, understanding who you want to cultivate, understanding how you want to portray your brand or yourself as a business cultivates the best lead source if you do SEO properly with the right company, yourself, or freelancer contractor. It doesn’t matter. If you do it properly, you should have an inbound lead flow of quality clients begging for you, for your service.
Those are typically my type of clients because of the price point, the value that they’re looking for, and how difficult it is to get new customers in any other form of media channels, from social to paid ads to traditional, tradeshows, print media, radio, television. There are so many different media sources, but I feel SEO still cultivates the best lead source of your ideal type client.
ROB: That makes sense. You started walking down a path I was interested to get into. Obviously, SEO is the name you hang on the front door of the business, but you mentioned other marketing channels. Have you engaged more deeply into paid and content and some other things? Or have you kept it pretty tight around SEO?
JOHN: My agency focuses on SEO only, but there’s pillars within SEO. We take care of the strategy; we have specialists. We also have link builders. We have content creators. We have web developers, graphic designers, social media management. But that is all attributes and signals of what Google is looking for to rank a website. Anything that is required to rank a website, that’s what we touch. Anything outside that, which is usually paid – like if you’re doing paid ads on social or Google Ads or behavioral networks, performance networks, email, that’s different. We only focus on being a full-service SEO agency that’s more of a boutique agency.
ROB: You must’ve had clients, though, ask you to manage their paid budget. How have you looked at that temptation, potentially, and said no to it?
JOHN: We have that daily, actually. A lot of clients know they need SEO, and I tell them there’s a ton of agencies that offer full-service from paid ads to SEO to content, and they break it up, and that’s fine, a la carte. I just want to be really good at one thing and do it right and be known for it. There’s different strategies, different agencies out there. I just feel there’s a big enough marketplace for being the best at one thing. If you’re known for doing it really well, that’s what people know you by, and that’s enough business to be had.
I could dabble into digital, like paid ads, and hire someone in-house and take it over, but I’m not a true believer in that. [laughs] I have to believe in it at a very high level to really be a big, strong proponent of selling it.
ROB: Right. Super-duper interesting to keep that sort of focus. You mentioned your journey, you mentioned coming through that Yellow Pages background. It almost seems like there might’ve been a journey for you within that previous role before starting the company where you started to see something shift. What was your journey from “Hey, I’m working at Yellow Pages, I’m working with these businesses” to “I’m going to go start my own business”? Because it’s a big difference between having someone who pays your bills and figuring out how to pay your own bills.
JOHN: The journey definitely is something that I feel is a mindset journey for a lot of people. When I was at Yellow Pages, I was there for 5 years. I learned a ton about sales. I had the privilege to meet with thousands of business owners, and I was being mentored by them on what it takes to a business owner. And that’s something that was invaluable at that time, for me to then pick their brain on what really mattered in not just business ownership, but in life. These people were so grateful to be ultra-curious about how they ran their business, what really made them happy, and what ultimately they wanted to do for their community, for their family, to have a good lifestyle.
That’s what resonated with me, along with, of course, selling ad space in a more dated format like the print directory, which allowed me to know that there was a gap in opportunity in the marketplace. People wanted to go with someone they trusted, or a company, but they didn’t know how to do it and what was involved. So I wanted to be that transition piece.
As you know, paid ads in the Yellow Pages was a diminishing return on investment. People were spending more than ever, getting fewer people transacting. The return on investment was lower, and people like myself were spending more time on Google to do search results. I knew there was an opportunity digitally. I didn’t know anything about SEO at that time. I just knew there was a gap in the marketplace to add an idea, and I knew there were people willing to pay for someone or something to help them. That’s all I really needed to get my foot in the door.
But it was all timing as well. I did extremely well at Yellow Pages and ads, so I was doing well in sales. My wife gave me the go-ahead, because she had a stable job opportunity. For me, it was more, look, I can go get another job, maybe work at Google, work at another ad agency or whatever – or I can try something. Basically, she said, “Go for it.”
The first couple years it was a struggle to learn how to run a business. [laughs] More so than the SEO thing at all. My strength was sales, so I was out there selling from Day 1. The first two months, I already had 10 clients. So, the sales aspect wasn’t the challenge; it was more about now I had to figure out how to deliver and hire people and manage, customer service. I realized there’s so much more to running a business than just sales.
ROB: For sure, that is an interesting part of the journey. I wonder a little bit – I don’t know if Yellow Pages ever tried this, but I know a lot of the TV and radio stations and the conglomerates around them that used to sell to local businesses tried to make this transition. They’ve been selling TV ads, radio ads, billboards to these local businesses for forever.
A lot of them tried to make the jump into selling digital advertising and selling SEO, but it just doesn’t seem like that transition worked for them. What is it that made it hard for those organizations to turn the corner where they already had the client relationship and build up that new line of business?
JOHN: I think the biggest barrier for them was they were so comfortable with the margins they had. With a big company like Yellow Pages, they were so comfortable with a directory that they billed monthly for ads where they printed an ad, and the cost was less than one-quarter of a month. I knew the cost and the margin of retaining a customer and getting them to buy ads in their asset, which was the printed book.
Now you go digital and the margins are a lot less; to get into that and then not know what expectations and profitability is, it’s going to be bad on their shareholders because ultimately it’s all about big business. For me, that’s where this was a huge gap. I’m realizing, now that I’ve been doing this for 8 years, why do these business owners gravitate towards smaller boutique companies? Because the big guys will try to cut corners for cost – not deliver on the actual results. They’re trying to do as little as possible and earn as much money as possible.
ROB: And they’re not used to doing the execution at all. You put something in a book and you’re done versus managing a relationship, actually having to do execution, having to apologize. I’m sure something goes wrong sometimes in the Yellow Pages, but not the same way – I know of an ecommerce site that stood up their ecommerce site and WordPress had a setting that said “Don’t Index Me.” That was kind of a problem for their SEO on a site migration. It doesn’t usually happen that way in print.
JOHN: Exactly. Again, digital is so multi-touchpoint and so many people need to be involved. With traditional media, like newspaper, flyer, tradeshow, radio, television, they already own their asset piece. It’s a sunk cost. So, for them, it’s all about ad spend and people. When you look at what is required for digital to perform, you invest a ton of money. For these companies that were so reluctant to spend and invest, and so comfortable with that profit margin, very difficult to get that mindset. Especially when they’re older in terms of the older generation. They’re okay with the status quo. They don’t really forward-think like what we see today. As digital agencies, we have to look ahead. We have to stay ahead of the curve.
ROB: You mentioned those first couple of years where you were learning a lot about running a business. You mentioned that you had some customers pretty early. Was there a point where it felt like you had turned a corner and you said, “Okay, we’re not just trying this, we’re doing this” and hit escape velocity where you’d built up a team now where you saw that ahead of you?
JOHN: My goal to do this was either commit, do it properly, or not do it at all. For me, my intention was spend less time in the business eventually and learn as much as I can, early days. Because I did have a family but I didn’t have children yet, I had time. I didn’t have a lot of money because I bootstrapped everything. It was like, I’ve got to figure this out. I’ve got to make this happen. I’ve got to make this work.
I didn’t really have a digital background. No technical skills, no SEO skills. I had to learn it. I had to figure it out. My background was always just sales, but then I had to learn how to manage and operations and bookkeeping and all that other stuff that I needed to run a business. But that’s the challenge of business ownership and entrepreneurship. You should always try to grow. You should always try to learn. And there are going to be tons of mistakes along the way. You have to acknowledge it, move ahead, and get better every single day, every hour.
Challenge yourself. Figure out, what are the gaps? Where are the opportunities? Talk to people and get out there and learn. There’s so much to it, and we only have a 30-minute podcast, so I don’t even know where to start because there’s so much I’ve learned over the last 8 years.
ROB: It’s such a big journey. I think you came into SEO at a pretty interesting time. SEO has an early baggage of being a gimmick business rather than a discipline business, or at least some people were very much in the gimmick business for a while. Were there any gimmicks or tactical short-term wins that you had to look at early on and either steer away from or get bit by once or twice to learn – I feel like what I would say is the best way to be found is to be worth finding, but it took us a while to get there in the SEO industry.
JOHN: Yeah. There’s so many hacks, fast ways. This is life in general, I feel. I was very fortunate working at Yellow Pages, where I met these business owners that were generationally in business – not just 5, 10, 20 years, but think about different lifetimes – 50, 100, 150 years. How did they survive without the internet? Internet’s only been around for 15-20 years, right? Google has only really taken off in 10-15 years. It’s transitioned and transformed the way we shop and our behaviors.
Imagine these businesses. What did they do so well to keep them sustained? They took care of their customers. They relied on word-of-mouth, referral business. They understood how to run a really good business – service, pricing, competitors, unique selling proposition, understanding all their products and services. Inside out, they knew how to run it.
If you take that foundation and you put it now digitally, people don’t put that much effort in the foundation of a business online. They’re looking for shortcuts. And in life, typically there’s no shortcuts. Just like any profession – not just in business and entrepreneurship, but profession as in if you’re a dentist or a lawyer or a doctor or a plumber, is there a shortcut to become one of them? Probably not. You probably have to go to school. You probably have to apprentice. You probably have to work as an associate. You’ve got to put your years in, training in, learning in. By the time you put in your 10, 15, 20 years, then maybe you have enough savings to start your own business.
But now, with internet and with a lot of social media and videos and podcasts and everything, people find that it’s easier for knowledge and information to be transferred. You can access information at your fingertips. There’s so much information and intel at your disposal. However, there’s not a lot of experience at your disposal. A lot of people think there’s easier ways, faster ways to earn a living, and they get bitten by these videos or ways to do it.
Just like a sports athlete, I’m all about mindset. I’m all about habits. If you look at one of the top basketball players – Michael Jordan, LeBron James – or Tiger Woods – how many years of training did they have to harvest? How many hours, how many years of dedication from help, practice, failures, to actually become that? People forget that in terms of business, and that’s why in the first couple years of business ownership, a lot of people fail. They watch a video, they read a book, they listen to a podcast, and they purchase something on Wix or Squarespace or Shopify and build a site thinking, “Now I have a business.” But they don’t have business experience and knowledge and insights on what real business ownership means.
That’s the gap that I’m saying. In terms of what I’ve seen over the years, I’m more a mature business now because I’ve learned from the type of clients I want to work with versus the type of clients that are not even real business owners yet because they’re not profitable or they don’t know how to run a business. I don’t want to train someone how to run a business to be working with them, if that makes sense. People that are starting off or have an idea aren’t my clients.
ROB: Right. Those clients tend to go away. It’s a great point about the athletes and about the experience. I think I heard you mention before “I didn’t have kids yet,” which makes me suspect you may have them now?
JOHN: Yeah.
ROB: So I think because you have experience, you don’t have the time you used to have. Tiger Woods isn’t as young as he used to be, and at one point he had to retool his entire swing to stay competitive, and there are still things he changes in his game now. Because he’s not as young as he used to be, now he has to heal two broken legs, I think. That’s what I think I saw, I don’t know. But he’s going to figure out and adapt, and experience is going to be the thing that gives him what maybe having raw energy and pure physical prowess gave him early on. We still have to work all those muscles. But it’s a great point, a great analogy.
JOHN: Yeah, ultimately it’s mindset, right? What you feel will be what you want to do for a very long time. A lot of business owners are in it for the wrong reasons. They’re chasing money or chasing fame and glory or trying to be the best, but they don’t put in the work to become it. Business ownership is the same way. SEO is the same way. Digital ad agencies are the same way.
I’m not selling a fake promise. I’m being authentic in terms of the journey. I want people to realize how long it takes, what’s involved, and let them make an informed decision. The more you’re up front with any transaction or interaction you have with your customers, the more likelihood they’re going to stay with you for the long term.
ROB: You’re still doing it. You have more people, you have in some ways more opportunities, but also more problems. So, what is it at this point that makes it worth it to you?
JOHN: I’m really just looking for good people to connect with. Good, honest, real businesses that not just need and acknowledge that they need help, but they’re good people. The challenge with digital agencies – and again, I’m not your traditional agency coming from the ad world. I come from Yellow Pages, and that’s all I built my business around. Long-term trust in clients that have a problem, fixing the problem and answering it. It’s not rocket science, but it’s very simple.
People overcomplicate things with funnels and landing pages and different ways to try to cultivate new clients. I’m the type of guy that just went door-knocking at the beginning to get clients, and it worked. These things that really foundationally set these business owners apart when they first started still apply. People are always looking for shortcuts; there’s no shortcuts.
ROB: And it turns into – generically, not speaking specifically to the business – saying you’re in the business of helping good people achieve what they want in their business in a way that you’re skilled and enjoy. Isn’t that what I think most people want from their work?
JOHN: Not only will I give it all my best effort and my team will do what we possibly can for all clients, I’m trying to cultivate good, ideal customers that you want coming to you and positioning yourself as a thought leader. So, for me, I think a lot of business owners need to realize why they’re in business, who they want to go after as their ideal type of client, and then focus heavily on that versus trying to take anything they can.
Yes, maybe when they’re first starting, you’re doing that because it’s like survival mode. But then you realize as you mature in your business what you really want to be known as. Who do you want to cultivate as an ideal customer? Just have fun. A lot of people forget about why they started the business in the first place.
ROB: That’s great advice, John. You’ve shared a lot of good lessons along your journey. Is there anything else you can think of – a key moment, a key decision you want a do-over on if you could? Obviously, we can only move forward, but if you could change something on the journey?
JOHN: For me, I wouldn’t, actually. Even though I made a ton of mistakes – I mean, I still make mistakes every day. I’m learning. I’m constantly eager and I’m hungry to want to be better. I don’t have to be the best, and that’s okay too. I’m always trying to get better. I know there’s gaps in the agency. I know there’s gaps in client expectations, and we can do more. I’m all about generating more value for my customers, taking care of my clients, taking care of my staff, and being a better human and living a better life of joy and happiness. If I’m enjoying that entire journey and process, that’s what being a business owner should be about.
ROB: That’s fantastic, John. When people want to find you and Local SEO Search, where should they go to find you?
JOHN: They can check out my website. It’s www.localseosearch.ca. We’re located in Toronto, Canada, but we service clients all across North America, UK, and Australia.
For us, it’s all about helping good people and informing them with decisions and letting them decide. I equip people with insight and knowledge, and they make their own decisions of who they want to work with and what they want to do. But just be informed. I think that’s the biggest thing about SEO. Know what you want and go out there and be realistic, because there’s experts or a lot of information out there; you just don’t know who to trust and what that really means.
ROB: When one goes to Google and types in “local SEO search,” I can affirm that you’re proving your craft. You are the number one organic result for “local SEO search.” Not only that, there’s like four or five ads above you, which means people really want that spot. It seems like there’s some evidence here that you can do your job, John.
JOHN: Thank you, Rob.
ROB: It’s pretty cool. And you’re above people like BrightLocal and folks who would really like that slot. That’s pretty impressive.
JOHN: Yeah, Whitespark, BrightLocal. All of them have their own business. I feel just stay the course. It’s a long game. Have fun, enjoy it.
ROB: Sounds good, and we shall. John, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It’s been great to hear your own journey and wisdom from it.
JOHN: Thank you, Rob.
ROB: Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
John Limotte, Founder and CEO of Mustache Agency, started his career as a film producer making indie and arthouse films. When that business became more difficult (impacted by, among other things, the rise of the internet), John looked for a way to use his skills doing something that looked more like a real business. He saw potential in the field of marketing for “more cinematic . . . epic . . . more longform storytelling.” So, he started a very small video production agency and took jobs one by one to see where things would go.
Ten years later, Mustache is a creative content agency with client services spread across three lines: integrated campaigns, video production and post-production, and social. The core of the agency’s work is content and digital content, with a focus on storytelling and creating epic, engaging video content . . . doing high-quality, cost-effective work. Even from the early days, the agency produced hundreds of videos a month. The client “playlist” includes such “big names” as Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon, a lot of tech disruptors, Instacart, Grammarly, and YouTube.
When Mustache works with Facebook and Instagram, the agency gets the “inside scoop” on their best practices, new products, what’s working on the platform, and how to tailor content for the platform. John says the agency is learning from the platforms “how to hack them,” but then admits that the only real hack is creating “really good, sticky content.” Working on those platforms has increased the agency’s effectiveness and provided the opportunity to work with the digital disruptor brands that heavily advertise on those platforms.
John says the key to his agency’s success is “hiring good people who are passionate, have expertise, and know what they’re doing; keeping the focus on high level storytelling; and demanding that whatever content goes out still moves the needle.” He says, “There is no hack. There is no foolproof system.”
You need to think about who your audience is, you need to think about who you are, and you have to think about what you want them to do and the best way to get them there, and you need to do that . . . through content and storytelling. You still need a hook. You still need to make people laugh. You still need to tell a story, have a journey. Even as the formats and the aspect ratios change, those things remain the same.
Mustache has never focused on a single vertical. John sees a lot of upside for his business across a wide variety of verticals. Why? John says industries today are evolving in the direction of increased video content . . . especially since COVID. He sees another upcycle and no end in the demand for and consumption of content.
John is best reached on his agency’s website at: mustacheagency.com.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by John Limotte, Founder and CEO of Mustache Agency based in Brooklyn, New York. Welcome to the podcast, John.
JOHN: Thank you, Rob. Nice to be here.
ROB: It’s excellent to have you here. Would rather be up in New York, but we can talk about that. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Mustache and where the firm excels?
JOHN: Sure. Mustache is a creative content agency based in Brooklyn. We essentially offer three lines of services: integrated campaigns, video production and post-production, and social. Our clients are pretty evenly spread across those buckets.
But at the core of everything we do is content, video content. We came up as a video production company focused on storytelling and creating epic, engaging video content. Eight or ten years later, depending on when you count the start date, our focus remains the same and it continues to be what we do best.
ROB: It seems like you’ve really had the privilege to work with some clients that others would dream of. How do you make that jump from starting with – I don’t know if it’s you and a camera or what it looks like, but how do you start punching so heavyweight to work with some of these big names? You can run off whoever you’re comfortable talking about.
JOHN: Our first client was a plaintiff’s law firm in the Bronx, and we were doing some pretty tactical digital marketing and $1,000 videos for him. We dubbed him “the King of the Bronx” and did a lot of man on the street videos of him because he was a true man of the people. From there, it’s evolved greatly.
These days we’re working with everyone from Facebook, Google . . . Netflix is a big client of ours, Amazon, a lot of tech disruptors, Instacart, Grammarly . . . we do a lot of work with YouTube. How we got there is a great question. I wouldn’t say that it was any sort of thought-out path. Some of it is just, I think, good fortune. But from the beginning we were focused on content and digital content, storytelling, video storytelling, and just doing that really, really well and cost effectively in a model that was outside the traditional agency model back in say 2012.
With that focus, a lot of these companies just found us. We did some viral video campaigns, some YouTube campaign. We were doing some episodic web content that got some attention. In a lot of cases, being in the content business led to the work proliferating because we were creating, even from the early days, hundreds of videos a month. From there, word got out and eventually we found ourselves working with some of these bigger companies.
I should say those are not retainer clients; we would be at an entirely different scale. These are all giant organizations that work with tons of companies in different niches and different capacities. So, it’s the biggest companies in the world, but sometimes they’re just small little campaigns that they hire us for, and we’ve been really fortunate that they do.
One thing I’ll add about that, too, is that for us it’s created a kind of virtuous cycle. When we’re working with Facebook and Instagram and we’re talking about best practices, new products, what’s working on the platform, and how to tailor content for the platform, we’re learning from the platforms themselves how to hack them, really – although the truth is, there’s not a lot of hacks except creating really good sticky content. But there are a lot of things you can do that we learn from them, and those make us more effective. I think that led to more work with the digital disruptor brands that are doing most of their advertising on those platforms.
ROB: It’s interesting because Instagram really has the visibility to look at every video that’s made, just about, and decide who they want to work with. It’s a pretty high compliment.
One thing I want to pull on a little bit is that you mentioned even early on having hundreds of videos in flight at a time. That sounds overwhelming to me. I wonder how you’re able to keep track of all of that. I know a bunch of people who have started video agencies, and not many of them that I know have crested that 10-20 person range. So, I wonder if there’s some key in how you manage that scale and beyond that has helped you make it over the hump.
JOHN: I will say that scaling great creative at good pricing is the bane of our existence. It’s a challenge that you never win, in a way. It’s never over. There’s always the quest to do more and to do it better and to do it more cost effectively. I’ve never had that feeling of like “Oh, we cracked it. We’re good.” It’s just something that you have to continually be working at. We have a lot of smart people who spend a lot of time thinking on this problem and what kind of systems, what kind of processes.
But again, one of my themes is that there’s no hack. There’s no foolproof system. There’s not some proprietary technology that we’ve developed. At the end, at the core of it is hiring good people who are passionate and have expertise and know what they’re doing, keeping the focus on high level storytelling, and demanding that whatever content goes out still moves the needle.
People often ask me why we never focus on a particular vertical because we’ve always moved across verticals. I think for us, the question is easy because our focus has always been content, storytelling – just focused on that. We’ve built up a lot of expertise around that capability. At the same time, as I said, we’re always working on the best workflow, the best system, the best structure. We’ve done a couple of reorgs over time as we gain new insight.
We’ve also benefited from the fact that it’s been organic. It’s not like we started Day 1 making 100 videos per client per activation. I think much like the industry itself, it started with a TV 30 and then a couple of cutdowns, and the business has grown from there in terms of iteration and scale. We’ve had the good fortune of growing – from there it was 10 deliverables and then it was 100. Every client is different. Every circumstance is different. It’s not like you need 100 videos or you need 10. But generally speaking, the numbers have gone up, and they’ve gone up steadily so that we’ve been able to adapt and adjust as the volume and the needs increase.
ROB: I think I have an idea, but for all of us, including me, what is a cutdown?
JOHN: Basically just taking a 30-second spot or a 60-second spot, whatever the longer form of the content might be, and cutting it into smaller pieces – 15s, 6s, and so on.
ROB: Got it. I think we’ve all seen that and now we know what to call it. It seems like one key may also be your involvement on the social side. With that as a line of service, it seems like that would give you insights into not just the overall raw performance of the content, but more specifically, you can get into the metrics and look at the performance of the content with the audience it was intended for as well as uncovering unexpected audiences. It seems like that would feed back into strategy. Are the platforms giving you the metrics you need to draw that sort of insight?
JOHN: The clients are mostly pretty proprietary in terms of the platforms themselves, but you’re able to track in social and digital performance yourself and see how things are working. When we’re working with brand clients, often they’ll share with us the data and the results, so we’re also able to see from that.
So yeah, it’s been a tremendous feedback loop. In some ways we came into this with a very non-data, very intuitive approach, like “What is an insight that feels resonant? Let’s tell a story about that in a way that to us feels compelling and impactful.” You never lose that eye towards the content, but then once you start working in social and you start getting more digital execution and getting that information about what’s working and what isn’t and you start being able to test different things and different hypotheses about content, then you’re approaching it from both sides. You’re using both your intuitive instincts around content and storytelling and you’re able to look at the data. I think that’s a pretty powerful one-two punch.
ROB: For sure. John, if we rewind a little bit, go back in time even before that plaintiff attorney client, what was it that led you to take this jump and start the firm in the first place? Where did Mustache come from?
JOHN: It was born somewhat of desperation, to be honest. I was a film producer back in another life and I was making indie films and arthouse films, the type of things that would go to Sundance and South by Southwest and hopefully find a distributor for it. I loved the business, but it was changing and becoming more difficult. Actually, with the rise of the web, that began to threaten that business in some respects, or at least in the form that I knew it.
So, I started thinking about where else I could apply my skills. Is there something that more resembles an actual business? Film has this magical fantasy element to it where you’re inspired by a story and you make it and hope that the world loves it. I was certainly drawn to the fact that there is a business that rewards creative and content and needs good stories. Especially at the time, in 2010, it felt like there was a real opportunity for more cinematic and epic storytelling, more longform storytelling. There was some minor identification of an opportunity and a shift.
I think it was that combination of me looking for something new, seeing that there might be a place where this thinking might resonate, and then just starting in a very small and taking it job by job way and seeing where it went.
ROB: It seems like very good timing. All of these video platforms emerged, and coming from a different perspective, you kind of got to take on being a video agency digital-first, where people probably had more TV experience. It’s really interesting timing there, especially as all these video platforms have come around.
I think we all know the key video platforms that we talked about and how Twitter has become, to an extent, a video platform, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc., and then TikTok is in that conversation as well. Is there anything emerging that maybe is not quite in the mainstream conversation that we need to think about?
JOHN: I’ll say this. As I think about where the business is going, I feel somewhat stunned by the level of change that I think is upon us and the level of acceleration in technology and platform adaption and adoption.
Every industry is moving towards, and evolving very quickly, especially since COVID, in a way that supports and needs more video content. If you think about obviously e-comm and omnichannel thinking around e-comm, if you think about the medical business, healthcare, it’s becoming online and more digital. Work from home, IoT, driverless cars are going to need content inside them.
I don’t have my eye on anything new so much as trends that we’ve been tracking for a while just exploding, an inflection point on those trends, and the need for content. I think a lot of people think content’s had a great run. People have been saying content is king for 15 years now, it’s a cliché. But the truth is, I feel like we’re ready for another upcycle in the demand for and consumption of content. I just see no end there.
So that’s our focus. Does that answer the question? It’s not exactly something new, but it’s what I’m thinking about.
ROB: I think so. One thing that strikes me as you get into it is the absolute explosion of different formats and lengths. When you talked about the cutdowns earlier, it used to be a 30-second ad was normal and you knew the aspect ratio. But now you have square, portrait, landscape. Do you want 5, 10, 30 seconds? Are you injecting this ad in the middle of somebody playing a game? Where is this thing going? It seems like that continues to shift. You don’t have to worry about Quibi, but you might have had to on ads that had to be able to be rotated to different aspect ratios.
JOHN: We had to. Quibi was a big client of ours. [laughs] So yeah, we were very much up in their business and we did social for them. We’ve been thinking about these things for a while, and I think you’re right; it’s sometimes overwhelming to think about the proliferation of formats and lengths.
Two things I’ll say about that. One is that the core of what we do remains unchanged. You need to think about who your audience is, you need to think about who you are, and you have to think about what you want them to do and the best way to get them there, and you need to do that, at least for us, through content and storytelling. You still need a hook. You still need to make people laugh. You still need to tell a story, have a journey. Even as the formats and the aspect ratios change, those things remain the same. At a certain point you realize that it’s helpful in some ways because you’re like, okay, it hasn’t changed that much. We’re still doing essentially the same thing; we just need to make sure we have the expertise we need across these platforms, whether it’s Twitter or Amazon, so that we know how they speak on those platforms.
It also brings me to one other thing I like to talk about. A lot of times you’ll hear people say with the amount of content becoming so overwhelming, people’s attention spans have shrunk and people don’t have time or interest in anything longer form. What you used to have to tell in 60 seconds and then 30 and then 15 and then 6, now you have to tell in 3 or the blink of an eye.
I don’t think that’s true. I think there is an element of having to use the right format and length, the right platform, but you just need to think harder about how to make your content break through, about a hook, about something to get people’s attention. Sometimes and in some ways the answer might be longer form content. I certainly reject the notion of a race to the briefest, shortest form content possible.
ROB: Certainly understood on that. I’ve heard some conversations on how quickly you have to hook someone. Maybe they’ll stick around, but do you have to set the hook sooner to earn the rest of their attention?
JOHN: Well, that’s true. It’s true because people’s thumbs are moving. Attention spans have changed. I do think that notion is very true. You do have to hook them because otherwise you’ll lose them.
ROB: I appreciate that I think you’re holding strong to the value of, as you mentioned, storytelling, of creativity. It reminds me a little bit of these rules in the world of standup comedy. I think you’re supposed to make them laugh every 6 seconds, and if you don’t, then they’ll not like you, and if you do, then they probably will like you. But then you have Dave Chapelle. Dave Chapelle gets to be himself, and he’s not going to make you laugh every 6 seconds, but he has his own style that is nonetheless extremely popular.
JOHN: I think that’s a great point. The rules may be true and relevant, but the real artists break free of them and are able to operate outside them. Some things can be true and not true at the same time, and I think it’s true whether it’s the comedy rules or the rules of advertising.
ROB: Indeed. John, looking at your background, looking at how you built up on the film side, I think that’s interesting. This is not your first rodeo, starting a business.
JOHN: That’s right.
ROB: You did that, you started over with Mustache; if you’re looking back at what you’ve done, what have you learned that you might do differently if you were starting clean?
JOHN: It’s a really interesting question. I often think about myself say 10 years ago, and I often come to the conclusion, “What a dumbass you were 10 years ago. You really didn’t know anything. If I had just had all the knowledge and experience then that I have now, I could’ve done so much more.” I think that’s true now, but at the same time, all the experiences, all the choices, they were all made in a way that I’m happy with the way they played out. So, there’s no one thing that stands out.
I will say, though, one thing does stand out and that’s diversity and inclusion. I think we’ve all come to understand the importance of that, and it’s something that’s been on my radar from the beginning of Mustache, but I didn’t give it the attention that I should have in the early days. What I would say is it was very existential. You’re young and you’re hungry and you’re small and you’re desperate for any work. If someone wants to work with you, you’re like, “Yeah, that’s great. Let’s go.” So you’re less discerning. I had less time to think about it and really plan and do the work.
I feel like maybe that is one thing that if I could go back and talk to myself 10 years earlier, I would’ve given myself that one bit of advice. I’ve found once we’ve done that, as we’ve done that over the years and gotten better at it over the course of the last 10 years, how beneficial it’s been for the work and for the clients and for the culture. So that’s something.
ROB: What did the steps look like to start to turn that corner? I think we all understand the tyranny of the urgent, the “I have to solve this problem now. I need to hire this creative by next week or next month” or whatever it is. What did you put in place to get more intentional there and maybe recruit some people you might’ve otherwise overlooked?
JOHN: That’s really interesting because it never ends, especially in our business, which tends to be really fast and furious. A good chunk of our business is project-based. So, in some ways it’s the realization that the perfect moment never comes. People talk about wanting to have kids but they’re too busy, and they keep telling themselves they’re too busy. People will say to them, “It’ll never be the right time if that’s how you think about it.”
That’s how I think about this. There’s never a moment where I’m like, “Okay, I’ve checked off everything on my list. I’ve got it completely under control. Now I can sit back and do it right.” It just doesn’t happen. You have to prioritize things and move things around. You have to do the things that you have to do, that feel like imperatives.
I think for me, that was the shift. It was like, we’re never not facing a client rush/crisis/huge opportunity that I have to focus on because we need to get it. What I had to do was figure out within that context how to move forward anyway with the things that matter. I think once that switch flipped and we were like, we’re going to start building that into every choice and everything we do, then we started getting the results that that kind of work suggests.
ROB: When you’re on that topic, it makes me think back – we had an agency we talked to on this podcast at South by Southwest a couple of years ago. They’re a neighbor of yours, but that doesn’t mean you’ve heard of them just because you’re in New York. The Soze Agency. Are you familiar with them?
JOHN: Yeah, yeah. Isn’t it a freelance style, like a loose affiliation or collection of creators or something like that?
ROB: I believe they call it a co-op. When I first heard it, it rang as a very Brooklyn thing to say that you were a collective and whatever else.
JOHN: I love the Keyser Söze reference.
ROB: They’re super, super intentional in this area, and I really have appreciated following them since they were on the podcast. But they have an equity model that is interesting. I think they’re going to opensource – I don’t know if they will or not. I don’t mean to speak for them. Everyone vests in ownership, but then they don’t take it with them when they leave, so it goes back into the pool and everybody gets to share.
JOHN: Yeah, it’s very interesting. I’ve thought about that over the years and struggled with how to pair that with the imperatives of running a small business in an epically fast-changing landscape. But I think it’s really interesting, and I’ve certainly spent time thinking about if it could work, how it could work, what the problems are. In some ways, Mustache was a dictatorship in the sense that if I saw an opportunity or wanted to make a change, I just did it, and there’s nothing faster than one person deciding to do something. And that speed was critical at times.
But on the other hand, there’s things that might’ve been lost, good choices and good opportunities that might have been missed because we didn’t have a more collective style. So, it’s a real head-scratcher in some ways. I see the upside; I get stuck on some of the downside. But I think there’s something there and I think there’s a future there. I just don’t think I’ve figured out how to crack it exactly.
ROB: Someone’s going to have to pay some lawyers some money to figure it out, and that’s a trick too. I think what’s interesting is I have been previously very much in tech startup land, and there’s a model there that’s predicated around growth and around increasing valuations and giving equity. It just doesn’t apply in a services firm. You can’t hire somebody and give them 1% and then have them walk out the door a few years later. Then your cap table is just a mess. You can’t keep giving people this promise of the unlimited upside. When a company goes from a $10 million valuation to a $100 million valuation, they can get away with giving away smaller and smaller chunks in a way that would seem silly in a services firm.
JOHN: It’s interesting you say that, Rob, because as you were saying, it also occurred to me that the valuations matter. If you have a billion dollar pie, it’s a lot easier to split up.
The other thing has to do with margins. We’re in content/creative. It tends to be a very low margin, tight business. If you’re not in the tech valuations, you at least need to have a business model that’s geared towards really high margins, really fat profits, because that gives you a little more leeway to do things. And maybe that’s self-serving in some way, like if you implement the model, you’ll move towards a space that is more profitable. But I think you need one or the other. Those valuations or you need to be in a business that’s not razor-thin margins, I think, to make it work.
ROB: It’s good to have the conversation. I hear from some people who say a services firm, you want 20-30% margins. I don’t know how that holds up, but I think what you’re saying about setting the sights high – it just gives you more freedom to execute. I think that’s what you’re hinting it. We went all virtual, and if your margins are good, when you have people coming from six different cities, you can talk about flying somewhere and meeting up.
JOHN: That’s right.
ROB: If you don’t have good margins, then you say “We’re all going to hide in our caves and never meet each other.”
JOHN: [laughs] That’s right. So true. My reality.
ROB: [laughs] John, when people want to get in touch with you and with Mustache Agency, how should they connect with you?
JOHN: Our website is the best place to start, mustacheagency.com. There’s plenty of different ways you can contact us from there.
ROB: And people should go to that website. It’s very visually stimulating. I think it puts your work in a very good light.
JOHN: Thank you.
ROB: I’m glad the work has gone into the front door there as well. Sometimes it’s hard to spend the energy on yourself.
JOHN: So true.
ROB: Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, John. I think it’s been helpful to learn from your journey and helpful to think about the areas of business, the lines of business you’ve chosen and how they synthesize together and where all this video, and particularly advertising, is going in the digital land. I really appreciate it.
JOHN: Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.
ROB: All right. Be well, John. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Ashley Logan is the Founder and CEO at Yakkety Yak, a full-service purpose-driven content marketing agency that provides blog writing, social media marketing, video production, and website design and development for brands and organizations that want to make the world a better place.
Ashley says that the agency’s “sweet spot” is content creation and storytelling. She believes alignment with the greater good and “giving back” are two things that are necessary for changing the world. “You have to be purpose-driven,” Ashley says. “You have to stand for something.”
A writer from age 5, Ashley graduated with an undergraduate degree in creative writing and landed a job selling for a private label candy manufacturer. She was “a creative person trapped in a corporate world.” As she traveled around “slinging candy,” Ashley saw that widely different companies used the same words talk about themselves in the “digital space.” She decided she wanted a “bigger ticket” career and moved to commercial real estate.
To appease her creative drive, Ashley volunteered and created content for nonprofit organizations. Social media platforms were just starting to rise. She wondered, “How could you turn those social media engines into a marketing machine?”
In 2012, Ashley finally understood that she needed to combine all of her “passions for business, storytelling, content, and nonprofit work.” She went back to school to pursue a master’s degree in Journalism in a program renowned for teaching people how to write for target audiences.
Ashley officially launched Yakkety Yak in 2014 and took clients as they came . . . until she realized she could no longer tell stories and work hard for jerks. The agency now maintains a focus on content and storytelling for a far more restricted clientele:
- Organizations that “do good” (nonprofits),
- Have, as a component of their organization, the intention of “giving back” (perhaps a part of the company raises funds to donate to non-profits), or
- Are amenable to adding a “do good” component to their organization (Yakkety Yak works with these organizations that do not yet have a purpose-driven mindset to help them define and build that “piece” into their company culture).
Ashley thinks it is important for its clients to inform people of their “contributions to the greater good” by “putting it out there in your story, putting it on your website, weaving it into your social media, holding your teams accountable, and shouting it from the rooftops.” She thinks high quality video will become an increasingly more powerful marketing vehicle.
Ashley is working with a designer to “revamp” Yakkety Yak’s office space with improved ventilation and flexible seating and intends to “open the doors” after Memorial Day. Ashley sees “the new office” as a safe place where “people can come and work if they want to escape” and gradually get people back together with flexible hours and a combination of in-person and remote work. She misses the “vibration” that comes from having a “team all together” but also notes that COVID has done wonders for work-life balance.
Ashley is best reached on the agency’s website at yakketyyak.com, where visitors can find links to all of the agency’s social channels.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m excited to be joined today by Ashley Logan. Ashley is the Founder and CEO at Yakkety Yak based in Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to the show, Ashley.
ASHLEY: Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me here.
ROB: Absolutely. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Yakkety Yak and what makes the firm unique?
ASHLEY: Yakkety Yak is a full-service content marketing agency based in Chicago. We do everything from blog writing, social media marketing, video production, website design and development – basically any mechanism to help our clients tell their stories, we work with them. I guess what makes us unique is that we focus on working with brands and businesses that care about doing good. We’re a totally purpose-driven agency working with brands and businesses that want to make the world a little bit better.
ROB: What does that look like when we actually get down to a client? What does a client look like who has this purpose-driven focus? Are there maybe some examples you can share of how they’re getting out in the world?
ASHLEY: Absolutely. That can be nonprofit organizations, of course. They fall into that category. We work with many patient-facing organizations like the American Migraine Foundation, the American Brain Foundation, and other brands in that category. But purpose-driven doesn’t have to be nonprofit; it can be an organization whose culture focuses on giving back. They have volunteer events where they donate proceeds to a nonprofit organization.
Ultimately, that alignment with a greater good is our sweet spot because one, it helps with storytelling, but also, in this day and age, giving back is such an important part of changing the world, making it a little better.
ROB: Finding that sort of specialization and alignment can sometimes be a journey. How did you come to focus on that as a specialty?
ASHLEY: That’s such a great question. When I founded the agency back in 2014, we didn’t have the luxury of selecting the types of clients that we worked with. I’m sure you’ve heard this a lot with your guests. We worked with some people that we probably didn’t want to work with. Ultimately it came down to that if we’re going to tell stories and work hard, we don’t want to work with jerks. [laughs] So we didn’t. We stopped working with jerks, and that’s it in a nutshell. Is that terrible?
ROB: No. I mean, who wants to work with jerks? I don’t know anybody who says they do. I haven’t heard that strategy yet. I’d be fascinated if we have somebody listening who has a strategy built around working with jerks and charging a premium for it. I’m here for that conversation.
ASHLEY: [laughs] I love it. So that’s really what it came down to. We also help businesses who don’t have a purpose-driven mindset to build that into their company culture. Maybe they came to us and wanted to think about “How do we put our story out there in a way that has more employee retention, that we can attract more visibility from our clients?” We always say you’ve got to be purpose-driven. You’ve got to stand for something. So, we’ve also helped coach our clients into getting into this space, too.
ROB: What does that transformation look like? Maybe an example of where a company was starting. The purpose is usually there, much like your own firm; you just have to find your way to it.
ASHLEY: That’s exactly it. Just setting the intention, putting it out there in your story, putting it on your website, weaving it into your social media, and holding your teams accountable too, and just shouting it from the rooftops. That’s especially applicable to clients of ours that aren’t necessarily nonprofits but are doing something to give back – make sure that their employees know about the work they’re doing at an executive level and then down to a grassroots level. A little bit less in COVID time but coordinating fundraising events or teambuilding events around giving back.
ROB: It sounds like it would almost pull you towards being involved in – if an organization didn’t have core values, you might not even be working on marketing. You might be working almost on their internals before they get to the externals. Do you end up getting pulled in that deep?
ASHLEY: Sometimes, yes, we do. But I think that primarily our sweet spot is in the content creation and the storytelling. That’s where we really like to be. Certainly, we will help clients define their brand strategy, and that includes core values and messaging. But we definitely like to focus on the story element.
ROB: Understood. You talked about not having as much of a focus when you started, but let’s even go a little bit further behind that. What led you to have the sort of audacity to create your own job and create some other jobs along the way? How did you get into that lane?
ASHLEY: I love that word. I love the word “audacious.” Let’s see, I’ve been a writer for my whole life, ever since I was in kindergarten, I think. I won a Young Authors contest for a short story I wrote called “Crystal Met the Ogre.” I still have it. Kind of funny. But I’ve been a writer my whole life, and I loved to tell people stories, but I also had a knack for business and trying to create processes and connect people.
After I finished my undergrad at University of Tennessee – I was a creative writing major; I worked at the school paper – I ended up in a sales position. I wasn’t expecting that I was going to be in sales, but also that I was going to like it so much. I started off working for a candy manufacturer based in Chicago. It was a great experience. I was 22, had half the country as my territory, was flying all over, slinging candy. But I wanted a little bit more of a high-volume sale, and I moved into commercial real estate.
Through that experience, I was a creative person trapped in a corporate world and interacting with people at the C level. What I found was that all of these brands and businesses didn’t know how to talk about themselves. They were all innovative. Every single one of them called themselves “innovative.” All of them called themselves “streamlined.” I realized it was a problem that in this digital space, people didn’t have the words to differentiate themselves from one another. You could close your eyes and hear across multiple industries and see people using the same exact words to describe themselves, with no differentiation.
So that was an observation. In the meantime, I was volunteering for nonprofit organizations in Chicago and helping them with content creation. This was that sweet spot when social media was just starting to go from being that you needed a .edu email address to that anyone could sign up for Facebook at this time. How do you turn those social media engines into a marketing machine?
I cut my teeth on that through nonprofit work and ultimately decided that I was onto something and needed to combine all of my passions for business, storytelling, content, and nonprofit work. So I left my career in commercial real estate and went back to school to earn a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. They have a great program for writing for a target audience. I simultaneously founded Yakkety Yak, and the rest is sort of history.
ROB: That’s a great upscaling moment on the writing there. I like that. I wonder a little bit – I’m just going to pull on a thread here that’s a little random, but we’ll see where it goes – if you don’t mind me asking, what was the candy? Who were you selling to, and what made it desirable for them to buy this candy?
ASHLEY: [laughs] It was a private label contract manufacturing. That’s what we pitched. I worked with Cost Plus World Market and Harry & David, and we were doing premium toffees. We would produce it for them under their own private label brand. Coming from Chicago, we’d make the candy and then it would be in like a Harry & David package, for example. They also did those really beautiful Christmas candies, ribbon candies. That was it. No chocolates and no gummies, but pretty much everything else.
It was cool. There was a factory. The CEO of the company gave me my first job out of school, tolerated me, trained me in sales. He actually passed away a couple of years ago, and he just made such a positive impact in my life, giving me this opportunity. It was pretty cool getting to walk through the candy factory and make friends with the factory workers and be part of creating something from end to end.
ROB: That’s very cool. Those are typically, in my reckoning, pretty high end, nice candies. It’s a creative process. It’s not what it sounds like at first when you say sales. I think we all sometimes miss doing tangible work, something you can put your hands on and something you can see sitting on a shelf.
ASHLEY: Yeah, it was cool. And it was fun. It was my first experience in business. We would go to these candy conferences, and I was the youngest by far. I was the only female, interacting at Happy Hour with the good ol’ boys who’d been in the business for 40 years. It was fun. It taught me a lot about how to defend myself. It taught me a lot about how to keep composure as a woman in business and overcome challenges. That experience grew me really well for commercial real estate, which was a little bit more of a cutthroat type of industry.
ROB: Right. You went from a boys’ club to a mean boys’ club.
ASHLEY: [laughs] I did.
ROB: Even trickier. Maybe a little bit gentler in a more creative space. But I think what’s interesting is the through line is, as we all know as an agency owner, you are selling, but it sounds like a common thing across your sales experience is you’re really helping people get what they want – which is much easier than trying to convince them they need something they’re not aware of.
ASHLEY: I think so, yeah.
ROB: Very interesting. Ashley, as you reflect on – you said 2014 was the starting of Yakkety Yak?
ASHLEY: I have two dates. 2012 is when I founded the agency and I went back to school, and I had a few very small clients at the time. But 2014 is when I hired my first employee and Yakkety Yak became my full-time job. So I use that as my real date.
ROB: Got it. Over the course of that 7+ year time, what are some things you’ve learned that you might do differently if you were starting from scratch?
ASHLEY: That’s a great question. My journey has been really interesting. I built the agency from scratch. I had no outside investors. I’m pretty risk positive; I’m comfortable in a space of jumping and leaping to the next level. It doesn’t make me nervous. I don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on mistakes made because I do believe that every experience leads you to the next, and you’ve got to build upon it and take with you the tidbits that help make you stronger.
For example, looking at my career trajectory, the candy business, while I knew it wasn’t my life’s passion, that sales experience helped take me to the next level. Any adversity that I faced in commercial real estate, I took that with me to become a founder and CEO and be gutsy as hell.
But one thing that stands out for what I would do differently is I think in the area of hiring. I have worn every hat in the agency, and I wish that I’d had more help sooner because that would’ve helped me scale faster.
I haven’t mentioned this part yet, but I’ve got three really little kids – and a COVID baby. It would’ve been great – when my second son was born, it was 2018; I was 38 weeks pregnant, and I had an employee resign, which meant that I was not going to get any maternity leave. I had my baby on a Tuesday and I was back to work on Monday. If I had built a deeper bench, then I would’ve been able to have a little bit more balance early on.
ROB: What do you think it was that prevented you from building up that team?
ASHLEY: I think when you’re an agency starting out and you’re competing in a market like Chicago – we have some major players here. I’m going up against, from a benefits standpoint, a salary standpoint, and a credibility standpoint, some powerhouses. It took a little bit of time to earn some credibility and name recognition. People, I will say, do remember the name Yakkety Yak, so I am proud of that.
Recruiting top talent takes time and building up a team and building that referral network where people say “Hey, that’s a place where I really want to be and where I want to work.”
ROB: Got it. What were your first couple of hires when you went from a team of one to a team of more?
ASHLEY: Oh gosh, one of my first hires was – and he’s still one of my favorite employees; he moved back to California and is doing some really great things right now – a graphic designer. I had the way with the words, and I was bringing in the business but also doing a lot of the content creation, and Curtis was doing the graphic design elements.
And then support from a writing standpoint, so I eventually started to be able to outsource that and build a team. I shouldn’t say outsource; I mean delegate. That’s the word I mean.
And finally, 2018 was a breakthrough year for me where I finally was able to build – we had more than 15 people. Now we’re a team of 20. It’s great to have such amazing talent at the agency now. I wish that I had done that sooner. But when you’re bootstrapping your own business, it’s kind of part of the deal, I think.
ROB: Congratulations on that growth. You mentioned a COVID baby, so I’m sort of expecting, by your story, that maybe you did get some maternity leave this time around?
ASHLEY: [laughs] I didn’t. Well, lesson learned from the second child, but we were in crisis – not crisis, but I didn’t think that it would be good for me to have no visibility to my team when we’re all suddenly working remotely and in the middle of a global pandemic. So, I made sure to still be around for internal purposes, but I did remove myself from some client-facing work for a period of time. I had my baby Memorial Day weekend, and by Labor Day my clients were seeing me on the regular again.
ROB: Got it. I can definitely see a case for visibility to a team in a time where everybody’s in uncharted territory.
ASHLEY: Sure.
ROB: Where are you and your team in terms of office? Did you have an office, do you have an office? Are you going to have an office? Are you keeping the same geographic footprint moving forward? How are you thinking about physical space in the context of Yakkety Yak?
ASHLEY: That’s such a great question and something that’s so relevant right now. We have this awesome office in a loft building right near the train station, Union Station in Chicago, and it’s great. I love the space. It’s got that brick and timber feel, lots of natural light, open area. But we jammed a lot of people into that space.
I’m currently working with a designer, Lauren Ashley Allan. She’s a really awesome up-and-coming designer. We’re revamping and rethinking our space so that it is comfortable for people when we return to work. Flexible seating options is what we’re focusing on, in addition to little booths so that people who are a little more conscious or want more privacy can work in a confined space that has ventilation.
The goal is that we’re not going to mandate that the team come back to work, but we are going to open our doors after Memorial Day, and I’ll be there and give people a place that they can come and work if they want to escape and gradually start getting people back together. I think what I’ve been noticing is I miss the vibration, like the good vibes that come from having a team all together. So, we’re putting some thought and intention into how we’re designing the space, and we’ll move forward from there with some flexible hours, combination of remote work and in-person.
ROB: Right, but you’re probably not going to have folks moving to Portugal and being fully remote, that you could think of?
ASHLEY: I don’t think so. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] It sounds like you’re being very intentional about your space, which is compelling, and it sounds like even within the office environment, you’re really differentiating that work environment. Knowing Chicago, knowing where you are, you have a benefit of accessibility and transit and that urban lifestyle for those who choose it. And obviously, in Chicago, you can get into the city from very, very far out on a train if you want. And then not knowing the specific block you’re on or whatever, during normal times, there’s probably a good vibe, good places to grab lunch together, grab Happy Hour together. It’s not just some nameless office park.
ASHLEY: Right, exactly. That camaraderie is just important. I really felt for people – especially those who are in there, mid to late twenties, single, living by themselves, and stuck at home during COVID. That’s a lot for people. I think that we’ve got a lot of healing to do as a country when it comes to finally starting to emerge back into everyday life.
I want to be there and I want to create a safe space for my team to come in and get work done and feel welcome and safe and so we can continue doing the excellent work that we’ve been doing and build off of that energy.
ROB: That sounds excellent. How’s your team thinking about that? I know everybody’s all over the spectrum, at least from people I know. Some people would be in a closet together tomorrow and some people are waiting until they get a shot or even longer. What’s the range of what you’re seeing?
ASHLEY: A range, you’re exactly right. I’m giving people space to make the decisions on their own for now. We continue to check in on it. I’ve said that in 2021, at this point, we’re probably not going to do a mandate to go back to work. But we will open the doors and encourage people to come in if they want to.
The beauty of the transition that’s taken place from a remote workforce standpoint is that now we see that we can work remotely, that if you’ve got to coach your kid’s softball team in the afternoon, you can work from home, and that’s going to be fine. We’re going to be able to connect, and no one’s going to miss anything. I think this has done wonders for the work-life balance, and I hope at least at Yakkety Yak, that’s a trend we’re going to really continue to let permeate our office culture.
ROB: I love the intentionality of it. I’m a little bit jealous. I’m a little bit more of a “ready, fire, aim” sort of person. Over the course of the past year, the last four people we’ve hired have all been remote, and we’re going to figure it out later. I’m hoping that late fall/early winter, we’ll get together and visit one of our team who lives down in Chile. It’s completely different. Walking away from the office and loading the furniture into our basement kind of made it real, you know?
ASHLEY: How did that feel for you?
ROB: I am very comfortable with the change. The thing I don’t like in my basement is there’s no people there. There’s fresh air and light. It’s a little rustic, shall we say. I do miss the getting together, but if part of it means that instead of being in the office and doing little things, we get to do something more pronounced like spending a week in Chile and getting some different gatherings, I’m interested in it. It’s a change of pace for sure.
Ashley, when you think about the future of Yakkety Yak, the future of marketing and how you’re working with businesses that give back, what are you excited about in the future that’s coming up?
ASHLEY: I couldn’t be more excited about video. We are doing some really, really, really incredible work when it comes to especially the patient space, telling people’s stories about how they’ve been impacted by various health conditions, diseases, disorders. I love using video as a mechanism for storytelling, regardless of the target audience. There are so many cool things now with TikTok and how to use visual elements to show a progression, and people are doing that every day in their homes as amateurs, and how that’s going to translate to professional level videos I think is something that is so cool and something you’re going to see exploding in marketing space over the next 18 months.
ROB: One thing I wonder about, if you have an opinion on it, is when I think about audio and the way it’s going, I see a lot more attention going into the sound on versus sound off experience and accommodating people who might be muted. What direction do you see that going? Are we going towards where every video’s going to adapt, or are we going to where we’re assuming that so many people have some sort of Bluetooth headset in that they’re going to have audio on? How is that trending?
ASHLEY: That’s a really great question. I’m going to answer it in two parts. One, I think that the pandemic has shown everyone the importance of quality A/V, like when you can’t hear someone on Zoom or there’s a delay in a recording when you’re watching things virtually. I think that high quality video and audio is something that’s more of a priority than it’s ever been.
With that said, I think it depends on the platform. We wouldn’t necessarily, for a virtual fundraiser or virtual event, have all of the text scrolling at the bottom of the experience, but when it comes to ads and what’s happening when people are scrolling through Instagram, I think it’s absolutely vital to have the words there because people are scrolling through Instagram in their beds at night when they’re not necessarily wearing headphones and they don’t want to wake up their partner, or they have babies that they’re feeding and don’t want to scare the babies. That’s my personal experience, but I think it applies across a multitude of scenarios.
And people are multitasking, too. They might have one window open or be on a conference call or a Zoom call and scrolling through Instagram. You can’t have that dependence on the audio in those scenarios.
So, when it comes to social media, the text is vital. When it comes to other experiences where you’re holding people’s attention for a little bit longer, then I think you’re okay without it.
ROB: Very, very interesting. Thank you for illuminating the topic. Ashley, when people want to find and connect with you and with Yakkety Yak, where should they go to find you?
ASHLEY: Our website is the best spot to find us because you’ve got links there to all of our social media channels. You can find us at yakketyyak.com. The spelling isn’t necessarily intuitive.
ROB: How did you choose the spelling of Yakkety Yak?
ASHLEY: [laughs] I don’t know. I think it was probably the domain that was available at the time. But it was important that we were Y-A-K and not Y-A-C-K, so we went from there.
ROB: Perfect. Ashley, thank you so much for joining the podcast and sharing your experience. I definitely wish you the best as you get that revamped office up and humming and get everybody back working together in person.
ASHLEY: Thanks, Rob. I really appreciate your time today. This was fun.
ROB: Thank you so much, Ashley. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Carl Fremont is CEO at Quigley-Simpson, a direct marketing/direct to consumer marketing agency with its roots in longform television infomercials. The agency has pivoted numerous times from informercials to shorter form direct response TV to full-service media with a focus on digital marketing.
With an almost 40-year career in direct marketing, Carl joined Quigley-Simpson. Six months later, Covid sent the company virtual.
In this interview, Carl reflects on the history of direct marketing. Twenty years ago, the required tasks included setting up call centers, and providing fulfillment, pricing, and promotion strategies for a variety of products. In today’s digital world, the agency helps clients determine how to sell their products in different digital marketplaces and the mix of creative and messaging content that will be most effective. Carl explains that over the 18 years this agency has been around, it is well grounded in “in driving sales and building relationships with our clients’ customers.”
While the pandemic has increased many clients’ focus on direct sales and short-term revenues because they are trying to “catch up,” Carl says that a business will eventually fail if it doesn’t also invest in building its brand image and association.
What is the right investment balance for building brand awareness, association, consideration, guiding the purchase journey, driving revenue, and developing customer relationships? Carl says brand marketing is an end-to-end process. A careful analysis of data is the only way to determine the right investment balance to optimize the consumer journey and build a brand for the future. It takes a lot more investment and effort (and even bravery) to invest in a brand’s image than to go straight for sales.
The balance of long-view brand building and quick sales requires a corresponding strategic balance of creative and messaging content and presentation. Every brand is unique . . . and the balance may change over time. Carl believes that brands need to be flexible – to have the ability and willingness to adapt and adopt new ways of working and thinking – if they are to survive and thrive. “Every year is a new opportunity and a new way to accelerate growth,” Chad says.
Today’s brand-building is not just about touting a product’s features and benefits. Winning the business is now “deeper” than “What will this product do for me?” Customers are asking such questions as, “What is the purposeful meaning behind the brand?” “What does the brand mean from a social side?” How is it giving back?” “What does the brand stand for?”
Chad can be reached on his agency’s website at Quigleysimpson.com or through LinkedIn at Carl Fremont.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Carl Fremont, CEO at Quigley-Simpson with offices in both Los Angeles, California and New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Carl.
CARL: Thank you, Rob. I’m thrilled to be joining you.
ROB: It’s excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Quigley-Simpson and where the firm specializes?
CARL: Sure, that would be great. Quigley-Simpson was founded 18 years ago by two entrepreneurs, and the co-founders, Renee Hill Young and Gerald Bagg, are still involved with the company. Its roots are similar to mine. It’s in direct marketing. Today we say direct to consumer. I don’t know when direct marketing got out of fashion and turned to direct to consumer, but we were really one of the first direct marketing/direct to consumer agencies.
Our heritage, believe it or not, is in infomercials, in longform television. We pivoted. We pivoted many, many times and continue to do so, from longform infomercials to shorter form direct response TV to full-service media, in particular focused on digital marketing. So, our roots are very much grounded in driving sales and building relationships with our clients’ customers.
But we’ve evolved as the industry evolved because we needed to. Today, we’ve taken that heritage from direct to consumer, direct marketing, and applied it in a digital world. Twenty years ago, that meant arranging for call centers. That meant product fulfillment, price, promotion of different products. We’re still doing the same thing, but in a digital world. What that means today, to correlate, it’s how you sell your products on different digital marketplaces, like on Amazon or Walmart or Kroger, and using a plethora of different channels to market, including the creative and the messaging.
The one thing that distinguishes us is that we’re not only focused on the revenue creation, but on the brand as well, which is why we say our value proposition and what we stand for is both brand and demand: building the brand’s image and awareness as well as driving performance, driving revenue. It’s the balance of those two, between building the brand’s awareness, building the consideration, all the way through the purchase journey through to driving revenue and customer relationship marketing. So, it’s really an end-to-end way that you look at brand marketing today.
ROB: It’s really fascinating. Much as you’re saying that direct marketing made its transition into direct to consumer, I think at some point B2B marketing stole the show from consumer marketing when it comes to the customer or buyer journey. It seems like consumer products have been the original home of the buyer’s journey.
How do you think about that journey when you’re really talking about – you’re probably involved in making sure product ranks well, lists well, looks great on Amazon, but you have to start with that awareness. How do you think about connecting the dots where you’re going to make somebody aware of something that eventually they’re going to see on Amazon and buy? What are the approaches?
CARL: That’s a great question. Today, as we know, especially with COVID and the pandemic and what’s happened the last year, it’s hastened the way in which we’re marketing brands today. There’s even a greater focus on the short-term revenue to make up for where we were. Many brands right away focus on that marketplace, on creating the direct sales without thinking about how they build the brand. At some point, Rob, you will hit a proverbial wall. You will reach a point of diminishing return on sales if you haven’t built the brand and the brand association.
So, the question, and what we help our clients determine, is what’s the right balance for building that brand’s awareness, association, consideration, and the demand side? As we all know, it takes a lot more investment and effort to build and sustain a brand’s image and awareness than it is in a direct sales capacity. In the short-term world which we are faced with today about driving revenue, it takes brands greater investment and bravery, actually, to build that brand’s image.
What we do is help through data and analytics to determine what that right balance is between investing and building that brand’s image or awareness to driving demand. How do you do that? It’s both in the investment in media as well as the creative, the messaging and creating the right balance. There’s no magic formula. Not one brand is like any other brand. Each one has its own unique situation for determining that right balance between the brand and the demand side.
But using a number of data sources – looking at sales, looking at the marketplace, competitive insights and intelligence, consumer insights – all of that, bringing that all together, plus in many cases some primary research that’s done, helps us with determining that right balance, the correct investment level between the brand and demand side.
And as we know, Rob, nothing today is static. Everything is very dynamic. We may determine up front the balance between investing in the brand and the demand side, but that balance may change over time. It means also that because you have a message and efforts that are focused on sales and driving sales, it doesn’t mean that the brand’s image should not be well represented in that as well. So, it’s not only looking at an investment; it’s incorporating a brand’s messaging and image even when you’re doing more direct sales.
ROB: Perhaps we can get a little bit more practical here, Carl. I recognize that every brand’s a little bit different. Is there a brand you have worked with that you can speak about that might be an interesting example of this combination of the market research, establishing the brand, and not overharvesting the low-hanging fruit, but really building towards a good robust, long-term pipeline of demand?
CARL: Sure. I’ll talk about it from a category side because I don’t want to talk about a specific client per se. But from a category side, there’s a category I’ve been personally involved with for decades, which is in the consumer credit card industry. As we know, it’s a highly, highly competitive marketplace. There are a plethora of cards and choices and opportunities.
Building the brand’s image and building the association that “that piece of plastic is right for me” is really critical in building that audience base – but not only getting the share of mind, but then the share of wallet. That’s a very highly competitive category. In many cases, the brand features and benefits are very similar. All you really have to stand out and build that long-term value proposition is your image. It’s what you stand for. It’s how you relate to a consumer.
And that’s where there’s a lot of research and insight that goes in. How do I connect someone to the right card, the right consumer experience that is right for them? If you go at it in the credit card by just the offer, you’re not going to get that share of wallet. You may not win over their long-term hearts. You’re just going to acquire them, but they’re not going to have the longer-term value to you. It’s creating that association that that card not only has the right features and benefits, but I associate to its image, I associate to the values that are behind it.
And I think today, brands need to go beyond just their features and benefits of building a brand’s image. Today that also includes building purposeful meaning behind the brand and thinking about what the brand means from a social side. How is it giving back? It’s not just about creating that image and awareness and association. It’s purposeful marketing. What does the brand stand for, for me? I think today with so many different social issues that we’re encountering, especially in the past year, having a brand stand for something is very important for consumers.
ROB: That’s a really interesting conversation there. I’m in Atlanta; some folks here – I think an investor, and I think also Killer Mike – were involved in standing up Greenwood Bank. When you think about financial products, there aren’t really very many products that can differentiate themselves by saying they’re going to serve an underserved community and actually show it and mean it.
Something I want to pull on that’s interesting – maybe this trend is real, maybe it’s not – it seems to me that the marketing world is moving in your favor, is what I would say. It seems like we’re moving more and more away from considered purchases and more into habits. That’s kind of what you’re alluding to with the credit card. But our phones have switched more from a considered purchase to a habit of what phone I’m going to acquire with regularity. Or I even think in a completely different market about the cloud computing market. Amazon Web Services and Google, they’re advertising, but they’re really advertising for a share of your habit, a percent of where you’re going to spend your money on your IT infrastructure.
Have you seen more and more things shifting? Even with television, televisions are more of a habit than a considered purchase, I would say, now.
CARL: Oh yeah. You mean the actual television set?
ROB: Yeah, it’s $200 and now $1500.
CARL: I just bought one in a big box place – I’m not going to say which one – that was shockingly $100 for a 24-inch television. Who would ever think you can buy that? All of these consumer electronics – and we just had CES, so it’s a good time to talk about it – they’re utilities. They’re part of our connected lives. Just as you talked about the phone, we know for years now that the phone is part of our connected life. It’s not obviously just about making and receiving calls. It is connected to our life and how we shop, of course how we communicate, importantly how we receive news and information, how we socialize with our friends and colleagues. It has become a utility.
The television is the same way. Now that we can stream, it’s certainly a big entertainment, but with streaming opportunities, we can narrowcast, and that’s what’s happening. It’s mimicking in some ways cable, but it’s all on demand where we’re narrowcasting even further information that is important to us.
So, there’s a blending of all of these utilities, too, all these devices. Over time – we’ve been talking about the Internet of Things for many years now, but it very much so will become part of our everyday lives.
Now, the question is, getting back to marketing, how do brands participate in it? What is the brand role? Is brand’s role this traditional just pushing messages out on all these devices? Does it contribute any value in any of the content that gets streamed? How do brands enter into this in a way that doesn’t seem obtrusive, but seems complementary to what we’re doing – the habits, as you said, that we have?
As consumer electronics, consumer behavior and the way we’re engaging with content has vastly changed. It’s been doing that for years; it’s just been accelerated because of the pandemic. With the way we shop also, that behavior has been changing for years but now is being accelerated. All of this is coming together. The devices, the way we connect, whether that’s through brick and mortar or through digital, through the way we receive entertainment and news and information to the way we shop – all of that is merging together. It’s all coming together, and in some ways, Rob, it is a little “back to the future” for us. When we started doing infomercials, they were entertaining and you were able to shop through them. So, there’s a little bit of lessons learned from the past as well.
But all of this is coming together and merging together. What brands are now faced with more than ever is, what’s their role in all this? How do they play within all of this? Because the models have been turned upside down.
ROB: It’s really blinding, and it’s interesting – YouTube is the new infomercial in a lot of cases, which is such an interesting shift.
I want to pull on something else that you mentioned. You mentioned the firm itself is 18 years old. How long have you been with the firm? Were you the first transition away from being founder-led? Or what did that look like for you?
CARL: That’s a great question. I joined a year and a half ago, and I had no idea, like everybody else, what was ahead. After 6 months of being in LA and mostly focused in our Los Angeles office, everything turned upside down. I literally believed, Rob, that we would be back together in 2-3 weeks. None of us had experienced in our lifetime a pandemic, so there was no rulebook. I really thought we’d all be back. We were, like everybody else, improvising as we went. We had no rules. We didn’t see it coming, so we didn’t plan for it. It just sort of evolved and happened for us.
So, I joined a year and a half ago, and certainly the last almost year now, being it was March that we had our work-from-home policy that went into effect and have been following pretty much ever since – never really thought that.
But for me, Quigley-Simpson was a big comfort zone because my roots and heritage or where I’ve spent a vast majority of my almost-40 year career (September I mark my 40th year) has been in direct marketing and direct to consumer marketing. Very much so it’s my comfort zone. It’s where I’ve always been.
I came on, thankfully, by our two co-founders to help evolve the company further. Again, the company was evolving and had many pivots long before I came, but now we have to make another big pivot. We have to continue our heritage of being nimble and flexible and adopting to the times as we always have been. And as we just talked about, the acceleration of how consumers are engaging with and watching television and other entertainment sources, how they are connecting their lives through multiple devices, their shopping behavior all have been accelerated. It has caused us to reflect on the future and look at what lessons we’ve had in the past and how we apply them moving forward.
We’re at a vantage point versus other agencies that we’ve always practiced this direct-to-consumer mindset with a heavy focus on brand and brand building. So, for us, this next pivot isn’t that remarkable because we’ve always done it. Now the question is, again, how do we take our clients along with us on that ride? Because everyone is looking at how that acceleration, that often-used and overused word of “transformation,” how do we now accelerate it even faster to catch up with consumer behavior – your behavior, my behavior, everyone’s behavior?
ROB: It’s quite a transition. People often say society to some extent has a reverence for the founders of different things, whether it’s your Edelmans or your Steve Jobs or anything like that. But beneath that, within any company, quite often the culture of both the team as well as the client relationships, there’s a magnetism. They’re working there because they like and respect the people in charge.
What do you think are some keys to making an effective transition there so that clients are not jarred and the team is not jarred by such a consequential change of leadership?
CARL: I’m nodding my head. You can’t see it because we’re on a podcast. [laughs] I’m nodding in agreement with what you said. We’re all in this together. We’re all on the same path forward. For me and for us at Quigley-Simpson, it’s about really partnering. It’s not you against them; we’re all in this together. We all are heading in the same path on that transformation acceleration.
Really doing it together and being one team and having that trust with each other that we’re going to go through it together and have a concerted roadmap is important. Now, what that entails, as I said before, is a commitment to each other and a commitment to trust and a commitment to open up on all sides – on the agency side, on the client side – information and data that’s going to allow us together to assess the market, assess customers – which is where you always begin: with the customer. We’re putting consumers in the center and building a roadmap for it.
That roadmap and acceleration of the roadmap really depends on many factors. It depends on where you are, where any marketer is in that journey. What have you done before to bring together your whole database of your consumers? Is it all together? Is it in disparate databases? What have you done to put measures in place to protect your consumer privacy? What have you done to assess through all that data who your audiences are? And what have you tested and learned along the way? What roadmaps have you put in place along the way?
That’s what a lot of this is. It’s putting together that roadmap, doing it together, and accelerating at the pace that is most comfortable for the marketer in terms of where they are. There is no one size fits all in terms of building a roadmap and accelerating. A lot of it – you used the word “culture” – depends on the culture of the organization. It depends on how fast they want to move.
Today, everything’s moving so fast and so accelerated that you really need to get together and have that roadmap established. But I believe that it first comes with a true, true partnership with everyone aligned on what the objectives are, what’s going to be measured, how it’s going to be measured, and it’s always on. We’re in a world of always on. We have been, but it is constantly dynamic testing and learning and then optimizing from there. Now more than ever, we have to be testing many different factors of the consumer experience along the consumer journey.
ROB: Carl, if you look over your LinkedIn, you’ve been on quite a journey in some agencies of different magnitudes and size. What are some key lessons you yourself have learned along the way that you might revisit if you were starting over?
CARL: That’s a great question and a good thought. For almost four decades I’ve been in this. Adaptability is always key. You have to be adaptable to the times. That also requires a great amount of curiosity. You’ve got to be looking always at every year as a new year. The brands and marketers I’ve worked with and had the most success with never look at one year as the same. Every year is a new opportunity and a new way to accelerate growth. There’s never a repeat. It’s always, what are we doing now? What’s new? It’s a constant evolution. You’re never done. You’re always evolving.
I remember saying to people who I’ve mentored and who’ve worked for me in the past, “This is the best time we’ve ever been in marketing and advertising.” Honestly, I’ve been saying that for 40 years because every year, it’s constantly evolving.
So adoptability and adaptability to the times that we’re in and being curious about what is next, being curious around data and technology and what that enables, is really how you progress forward. If you are not someone who is adaptable and adopting new ways of working and thinking and don’t have a curious mind, then you’re not going to succeed and this business is probably not for you. You need to be able to constantly be changing and reinventing every year. And frankly, Rob, that’s the exciting part of what we do.
ROB: There are a lot of things on a lot of people’s minds right now in January 2021, and I think there are some people who are holding on and hoping they can just get back to normal. I think that’s never really true. Maybe it’s just emphasized a little bit, or maybe it’s – I think this is probably a little crazier than it’s usually been. I’ll just concede that. But if it’s changing a little more slowly, you still can’t hang on. I think the folks who have tried to hang on and come out of this past year and go back to what they were doing – I don’t think that’s going to go well.
CARL: No, exactly. Now that I’ve just said things keep changing, there are some things that do stay the same, and that is great brands that tell great stories. That was definitely an art. We’ve been practicing at Quigley-Simpson, since early days of longform advertising, great storytelling for brands, and that art is on the present and will continue. It is being adapted into new forms based on technology and access to data.
But the notion of building great brands through great storytelling will be going on in infinite times. We always need to be focused on that and take that great storytelling and adapt it to new formats, new ways of consumer engagement, new technology, and making sure that we are always connecting it to the consumer experience based on information and data that we know about someone.
ROB: It’s such a great point. I’m glad you’re here to elevate the appreciation of the infomercial as an art – and I mean that, and I mean that in this way. People talk now about StoryBrand, they talk about that being rooted in the Joseph Campbell Hero’s Journey, that Star Wars story structure. But it seems to me that that’s kind of the story of infomercial as well: how do you make the person who will buy this product the hero?
CARL: Exactly.
ROB: And the product is the guide. The product is the tool. That is their lightsaber.
CARL: If you think about it, in this short amount of time from where we’ve been, in that period for the informercials, you were both telling that brand’s story and getting somebody to respond and to connect. Now, if we can take that same notion today about building a great brand through storytelling, through a value proposition, a unique selling proposition, and marry it to what matters to consumers, what’s purposeful, and connect it to sales, to driving an action – that’s what it’s about. Adapting those principles that will always be to new forms of technology, new forms of media.
ROB: That’s very wise, and I appreciate it. I’m glad you’re here to bring the perspective. Carl, when people want to connect with you and with Quigley-Simpson, where should they go to find you?
CARL: Quigleysimpson.com is the best place, or through my LinkedIn, Carl Fremont, is probably the best place. I’m passionate about building brands, so the opportunity to talk to anybody about brand and demand – I can do that all day long.
ROB: That’s wonderful. Glad you have kept an openness while you also stay curious. Thank you so much for putting that out there. Carl, it’s a pleasure to talk to you and learn from you. Thank you for coming on the podcast.
CARL: It’s been fabulous. Really appreciate it. Have a great day.
ROB: You too. Be well. Thanks.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Chad Crowe is CEO at Techwood Digital, an employee-owned agency that provides B2B, e-comm, and lead generation services for around 100 clients in a variety of U.S. industries. Founded on SEO, Techwood has over the years added paid search, branding, and some design elements and development – in a gradual transition to becoming a full-service agency.
Chad had been doing SEO and paid search in a job he loved when he met Jack Ogilvie, owner of Techwood. Jack wanted to add paid search capabilities to his organization’s offerings. How did he win Chad away from his dream job? With the opportunity for ownership at Techwood.
In the first month, Chad started changing Techwood by defining four components for the onboarding process: core values, mission, process, and value chain (how does the agency continually add value to the client?). The agency’s core values, to which any new clients or new employees have to agree to accept and focus on include:
- Have a “How can I help?” attitude. “How can I help the situation be better?” “How can I be more engrained?” This attitude promotes growth.
- Embrace curiosity, knowledge, and improvement.
- Provide second mile service. Do a “little bit more, a little bit surprising, a little bit extra” to strengthen the relationship. (Hijacked from Chick-fil-A, Chad says, this is NOT scope creep.)
- Be open and honest – with self, coworkers and clients.
- Have lighthearted fun (which requires trust) but also have heartfelt sincerity.
- Be respectful. Chad applies this to his worldview when he says respect is “something the whole world needs right now – this level of respect for everybody that doesn’t question so much as it seeks to help.”
The right clients and the right employees are people who have a “core values fit” with the agency. Chad admits that, in the past, he optimistically hired a few “almost fits” that, over time, did not work out. Today, he says he is “more intentional about slowing down” until he is convinced that the new hire is 100 % before he ever makes an offer.
A few years after Chad joined Techwood, the agency was doing very well and had great growth and a few “amazing” employees. Jack and Chad decided it was time to consider transitioning the agency to an employee ownership model. But how to do that without incurring big tax penalties?
In this interview, Chad explains how the agency set up an ESOP, or Employee Stock Option Plan, to put agency ownership in the hands of its employees. About two years ago, the agency became 100% employee owned. The cost of conversion was high, but Chad claims the benefits have been even greater. He says there are “a lot of very unique and interesting things that go on when you transition to an employee stock option plan” – among them being the opportunity to create “an evergreen company . . . where everybody can work forever under those core values.”
Chad can be found on his agency’s website at techwood.digital or by email at chad.crowe@techwood.digital.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by someone from my same hometown here in Atlanta, Georgia – Chad Crowe, CEO at Techwood Digital. Welcome to the podcast, Chad.
CHAD: Thank you. It’s so kind of you to extend an invite.
ROB: Good to have you here. You’re building something special. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Techwood Digital and what you do and where you specialize?
CHAD: We are a digital agency. We really cut our teeth on SEO as a product line. Everything we do has a core there. Then after several years in the SEO arena, we expanded to include a paid offering, so we do paid search really well as well.
Our philosophy and what we’ve been trying to do is add services as time goes on. But of course, you don’t want to blindly do that, so it’s been a slow add over the years. Last year we added branding and some design elements and development to our stack. We’re slowly becoming more and more of a full-service agency out of Atlanta, and we service a lot of clients all over the U.S. We’ve got several in the New York area, Michigan area, and out in California.
We don’t really specialize in an industry. We’ve got probably 100 clients that span lots of different industries. We do B2B, we do e-comm, we do B2C lead gen, and we take our learnings and try to focus and become really good at the things we’re focusing on.
ROB: It’s an interesting mix. Is there any common thread between customers? Or how do you end up attracting such a diverse portfolio of clients, both in terms of business as well as geography?
CHAD: It’s going to sound kind of lame, to be completely honest. As we were talking about before the podcast, we are an employee-owned agency, so really the common thread between all of our employees and all of our clients is everybody has agreed to accept and focus on our core values of having a “How can I help?” attitude and being open and honest and second mile service and all of those things.
Really, the common thread that we’re looking for through all of that is people whose values align with us and we feel like we can really successfully win. I’m sure all agencies have an onboarding process, a sales process. Our sales process is definitely extremely hands-on. Like I said, we’re really trying to focus and find people who are going to be a cores value fit that we can really, really help.
I guess as lame as it sounds, that’s kind of it. We’re looking for people who hold the values that we hold true as well, and I feel like if we’re aligned there and we’ve done our basic research to make sure that we can help you and that there’s opportunity there, we’ll have a great partnership. And that’s been what we’ve been focused on. We’ve brought in people over the years, and they just continue to flourish. As they transition to other jobs, they bring us along and we keep the previous client.
So, we’ve really been more of a referral-based growing agency for years. That’s the common thread. It’s just really focusing on who we want to be and who we want to work with.
ROB: That is such a fascinating dynamic that you mention, that employee churn in the marketing industry – if you stick in it long enough, there’s a virtuous cycle. There’s the dynamic in marketing between agency and brand and vendor that seems to ebb and flow, and vendors can also be clients while you’re at it. It’s fascinating that longevity can sometimes correlate pretty well.
CHAD: Absolutely. I’m also referring to clients. Their senior marketing person, who’s a person we interact, that person leaves and goes to another company because they’ve gotten great results and want to continue up the ladder. They bring us into a new company as well. We’ve definitely had it from the employee side. Our employee turnover is actually really low, so we see it more on the client side.
ROB: Right. I mean even more sometimes one of your clients may get tired of brand for a while and they go work for another agency, but then they pop their head back out, and maybe they actually like you, Techwood, more than they like the shop they were in for a while. But you make a great point that the best client is probably someone you helped earn a promotion by switching jobs, or you helped them success well enough that they go somewhere else and they want to bring you along and take them to the next level there as well.
CHAD: Absolutely.
ROB: With Techwood Digital, tell me about the origin story. What made you decide to start this company and transition you from whatever you were doing before?
CHAD: It’s kind of a long and fortuitous story. I’ll try to abbreviate it. I met a guy named Jack Ogilvie in college. We met through weird circumstances in that my roommate was Jack’s best friend in high school. Jack was going to Georgia Tech downtown; I was going to Reinhardt University all the way up in Waleska, Georgia. There’s nothing to do in Waleska, Georgia, so my roommate and I would come visit Jack in Atlanta. That’s how I met Jack.
It was probably 7 years after graduation – I was working for a large company in Cumming, Georgia, owning their paid presence and their SEO and working there – when I went to a tradeshow in New York and I ran into Jack. We were talking about “Hey, what are you doing? What am I doing?” Jack actually started Techwood shortly after college, so he owned Techwood at that time. He built the company on SEO and was looking to try to focus and own and be really good at the paid space and was trying to solve that. That was the piece that I brought to the table.
You’re in the Atlanta area; I don’t know if you’ve heard of AutomationDirect, but they’ve won the Atlanta Business Chronicles’ “Best Medium Size Company to Work for in Atlanta” for nearly 6 years in a row. Just a really, really good company. As we were talking, I said, “Hey, here are my specialties. Here’s what I’m doing.” He’s like, “I’ve got this agency. I really want you to come work for me and figure out the paid side.” Like I said, AutomationDirect is such a great company. I had zero interest in switching jobs.
So, we left that conference, just reconnecting and talking. Several months later, it was like, “Hey, I really think this is a great way to go.” He made me an offer to transition into ownership at Techwood, so that’s how I joined. Techwood grew from an SEO agency to a paid agency.
Several years into that, things were going really well and we had several very amazing, outstanding employees. We had these core values and this mission statement we were really holding to. The result has been great growth. Looking back, we said that we wanted to be considerate of everyone. We wanted to help everyone. We wanted to have these values that we hold dear. We were looking for the next level of that.
As we looked at that, Jack and I decided that it was time to transition the company into more of an employee ownership model. At that time, we were looking through lots of different mechanisms to do that, and we stumbled across a mechanism called the ESOP, or employee stock option plan. Probably about two years ago, we transitioned the company into 100% employee owned through an employee stock option plan.
Again, it’s just put more teeth to our core values. Every time I feel like we’ve taken a step to say, “How can we be more engrained there?”, the result has always been growth. We’re continuing to grow today.
ROB: We often get questions and curiosity on this podcast about ways to facilitate ownership. There’s a perception, I think, that it’s a very expensive process. Talk about how you thought about shouldering the cost. Did you find it expensive, or did you find it to be manageable through some tools you found along the way?
CHAD: For us, we found it very manageable. But again, it’s based on what you’re trying to do. We weren’t trying to completely go away from Techwood. I had complete interest in continuing to work at Techwood and continuing to work for the long haul. We’re working to build what we’re going to call an evergreen company, a company that we want to focus on being a place where everybody can work forever under those core values that we want.
So that was our intention. With that, the bill to actually convert it was pretty large, but I think the benefit has definitely outweighed the expense. There’s a lot of very unique and interesting things that go on when you transition to an employee stock option plan.
For instance, the company is making income, and the company doesn’t have to pay income tax on that. There’s a lot of cash left at the bottom line. When you go through the process of an ESOP, you can set out how the employees are going to purchase the company from you as an owner as well, so it’s not like I just took ownership of Techwood and said, “Okay, now we’re all owners.” The employees are definitely earning it or have earned it. On the day we transitioned, we made sure there were some people within the company that would gain stock in the first year just because we knew they’d earned it already.
The employee stock option plan, is it expensive? It’s a big bill to look at, yes. But when compared to the benefits, I think it completely outweighs it. Publix has a percentage of their company that’s in a stock option plan. The owner of Publix, when somebody asks, “Hey, do you ever regret selling that to the employees? How much money would you have earned if you hadn’t done that?”, his response to that question is always, “Probably zero,” because the mechanism has been so powerful. That’s the reason why he feels the company has grown. His response to “Would you do it again?” and “What would you have had if you hadn’t done it?” is always, “Probably nothing. Would I do it again? Absolutely.”
ROB: Ballpark, is that a four-figure bill, a five-figure bill, a six-figure bill?
CHAD: It’s going to depend on all the pieces you need to put in and also the size of your agency and where you’re going. But yeah, you could see a six-figure bill.
ROB: That’s a commitment. But I think employees appreciate that sort of commitment. I think I heard you allude to, along with that stock structure, you also have some sort of distribution structure, right? When there’s profits, you’re aligned and also distributing those to the team. Is that part of the case?
CHAD: You work through an ESOP over the course of years, and you set that out when you’re setting it up. Once the company is completely purchased from you as the owner and into the trust, the company can pay out dividends on those trusts to people who have stock. We can pay those into the form of an investment account. An ESOP is technically a form of retirement account, so it is a tax-free way to get stock as well and pay taxes when they sell the stock.
That’s always been something kind of weird. It’s like, hey, we found the employees who we want to make partners here. If we wanted to just give them stock, it always came with a big tax bill for them, so the ESOP solved that problem as well, which has been pretty interesting.
ROB: Right, it’s a very interesting solution to the problem. I think it’ll be interesting for folks to get out there and look at that option in the market.
You have mentioned core values a couple of times. It’s clear to me that core values are important to you. At what point in the business did you establish those values?
CHAD: When I came in, it was kind of a hole. Within the first month, that was my top goal. It’s just interesting; Jack and I are definitely two sides of the same coin in that he has amazing business acumen. He is probably more of the financial brains, I would say. He understands a lot more and all of that. I’ve got definitely more of a people capital. Seeing that as a whole based off of what I’m good at and where I can fit in – that’s the goal of that. It just has made it easier for us to scale.
I saw it as, how can people make decisions quicker and feel like they’re making the best decisions? How can people operate without having to go through the eye of a needle, which would be me or somebody else? How can they feel like they have a full sandbox to participate and work in?
Core values is one element of our sandbox. We’ve got four different things that are part of our onboarding process, and everything that we do really outlines what that sandbox for us to play in is. Core values is one, our mission is one, our process is one, and the other is our value chain. How are we continually adding value to the client? We’ve got a graphical presentation of how we ensure that when a client entrusts us with a dollar, we give them enough value to warrant that trust.
Those are the four things that I set up. Like I said, it’s been a hole that I saw and I said, hey, we can really scale if we would ensure we have the right people within our organization and tell them what they can do and how they can do it by saying, “Hey, don’t go beyond this line and you’re good.”
ROB: Really, really interesting. Can you run back those core values for us, just so we can digest them?
CHAD: They’re all begged and borrowed from other people, so I don’t want anybody to think that I’ve got some ridiculous insight that nobody else has. It’s pretty straightforward, and I think most people would be like, “Yeah, this is it.” But we tried to be more intentional than that.
Having a “How can I help?” attitude is one of our first and foremost ones. We go into depth and really try to define them. I’m a communications major and specialist, so I am dedicated to ensuring that the team has a unified definition of what that means. It’s interesting when you start thinking of the English language and you think of words like “love” that don’t really have a solid definition. The definition of it is whatever the shared meaning of it is. So, I really focused on not just saying “Hey, here’s our core value,” but “Here’s how we’re going to develop a shared meaning around it.”
So, a “How can I help?” attitude. We define that as in opportunities as well as in arguments or disagreements or different things like that, do we approach the problem saying “Hey, how can I help the situation be better?” That’s what we’re looking for. We’re not looking for people who are going to approach this to say, “You could do this better,” but people who are going to have that level of ownership to it and come to say, “Hey, I’m here to help and I want to make it better” and have that servant heart. So that’s first and foremost.
Second is embrace curiosity, knowledge, and improvement. We tie those all together when we talk about it because I think curiosity killed the cat and knowledge is fleeting unless it’s geared towards improvement. We want people to be curious. We want people to ask questions. We want people to seek knowledge, but we want them to do it with that goal of improving our processes, improving the service we deliver, improving their lives personally. So, we structured it in that way to make sure that we’re not just chasing questions, we’re not just trying to learn more, but we’re doing it with a very intentional intent.
Next is second mile service and one that, being in the Atlanta area, I know you’re probably aware of. Totally jacked from Chick-fil-A. The idea is that everybody loves to go to Chick-fil-A because of all the special things on top of it. Second mile service is what can we do that’s going to be a little bit more, a little bit surprising, a little bit extra to strengthen that relationship or surprise somebody? We don’t define second mile service; we try to use language and talk about how this is not scope creep. This is putting extra onto what we’re doing. It’s taking a deliverable just a little bit further so a client doesn’t have to implement it themselves, or so that we answer all the questions we can think of before they ask them. That’s second mile service to us.
Next is open and honest communication. Do you want me to keep going, or is that good?
ROB: It’s good. I do like the stealing of second mile service. What’s fascinating with that one in particular is, as I understand it, when they first implemented that program, there was even strong skepticism at the corporate level. I actually interned in the IT department of Chick-fil-A when I was in college, and that was before they got in the second mile service business.
But it took time and it took pressure within their organization to even sell that through, so it’s certainly aspirational. It’s something I think we take for granted now, but if you think about Chick-fil-A 20 years ago, it wasn’t as remarkable as it is now. And they see it in their results. They make three times more money per location than anybody else in quick service food. It’s amazing.
CHAD: Yeah, it’s ridiculous. My roommate in college, who I mentioned, now owns a Chick-fil-A franchise. During college he worked with Kevin Williams, who is one of the very few triple franchisees for Chick-fil-A. Very, very few people actually get to own three Chick-fil-As.
I actually worked for Kevin in college a little bit, and it’s interesting; you go in on your first day, you sit down in the back of the employee section – or at least, it was then – and you listen to basically a sermon from Dan Cathy on what second mile service is and the parallel in the Bible where it comes from. It was eye-opening for me in really having that servant heart and servant eyes to look for those opportunities. That was something that was important to me when I was in the position to instill a cultural element within my company.
Next is open and honest communication. We talk about open and honest communication in different ways. Like I said, because I really want to define that for people, we talk about how openness is a precursor to honesty. You have to be open for feedback. You have to be open for conversations so that people can trust you with that honesty. There is a level of openness that has to happen for honesty to happen.
Again, approaching things with “How can I help you? How can I help the situation? How can I help us be honest and straightforward?” And that heart starts with openness, and I’m going to make sure you know that I’m open for feedback, that I’m open for this. Part of that is going to be that when you give me feedback, I’m not going to jump to the “I’m offended, you suck” mentality. I’m going to jump to the “Awesome, you really care about me and you want me to get better” mentality. So, flip that a little bit, so then we can be open and honest.
We talk about honesty at different levels. There’s obviously honesty with yourself. How are you being honest with yourself when you talk about your workload? Are you really being honest with yourself? Are you putting in the hours and staying focused that you need to? Do you know that you’re slipping a little bit?
Or maybe in the COVID world, you get to work from home and so you leave the TV on in the background, so things may take a little bit longer. I’m okay if that’s what you want to do, but I want you to be honest if that’s what’s happening; your workload is not too much, it’s just that it’s taking you a little bit longer than it used to. If that’s what you need for your balance, that’s okay as long as we’re getting done what we promise we’re going to get done.
And then there’s honesty with your coworkers and honesty with clients. It just expands and goes on. We always want to be honest with results. We want to be honest with what’s happening with people’s accounts. We don’t want to sit on anything. If I have an account manager, an analyst sitting on something saying, “Hey, if so-and-so finds out this, we could get fired,” I’ll tell them, “Well, if you don’t tell them, you could get fired.”
That’s how serious we are with open and honest. There should not be anything at the end of the day that you’re worried about because you went and put it out there. I think if you don’t, you’re screwing yourself over. You’re screwing your work-life balance or your family over. You’re jeopardizing a lot of things. So at Techwood, we want to really focus on being open and honest.
ROB: Excellent.
CHAD: Next is actually one of my favorite ones. It’s lighthearted fun but heartfelt sincerity. We want to be fun. We want to be goofy. We love each other. Having fun leads to trust, and trust is just so essential to business. If you’re not having fun with the people you’re with, I guarantee you, you’re not trusting them. In order to have fun, there has to be a level of letting your guard down.
So we want to be lighthearted and have fun, but we also want to make sure we draw the line. Where we draw the line is we don’t want anybody to ever feel like we’re not being heartfelt, that we’re jeopardizing sincerity for a coworker or for a client. So yes, we want to have fun, but we’re heartfelt in that we never want to push that to a point where our clients or our team don’t feel that we have their best interest in mind or we don’t really want the best for them.
Then our last one is respectful and considerate. It’s probably one of the most straightforward ones, but we definitely want to be respectful of each other and considerate. We tie those together because there’s a level of respect that comes from being considerate that we want to achieve. Again, a proactive thing. We want to be extra considerate as a form of respect, if that makes sense. We want to think through things. We want to be intentional with things.
We want to be the first to jump on solving world problems if we can. If there’s something I can do at Techwood to help with some of the social unrest, I want us to intentionally look at doing it right now. We’ve had those conversations in Techwood and we’ve laid out different things we want to do to be extra considerate and respectful.
Again, that comes to that “How can I help?” attitude. We want to approach issues not saying “Hey, you’re wrong in this area and you need to change.” It’s like, “I hear you, I feel you. How can we help? How can we change to make it so that you don’t feel that way or so that isn’t the case?” As we talk about, I think that’s something the whole world needs right now – this level of respect for everybody that doesn’t question so much as it seeks to help.
ROB: Right. It seems like I can barely see someone trying to say something positive without getting an immediate “gotcha” follow-up. There’s a lot more we can do together.
I really appreciate the intentionality and the ease with which you work through those core values. It’s a question I try not to even ask unless I know the person is very confident and comfortable, because there’s nothing more awkward than talking about your core values and you say, “What are your core values?” and they’re like, “Um…” [laughs] That’s a tough spot that I don’t want to put anybody in.
Chad, when you look at the journey so far, it sounds like a lot of things have gone well. I’m sure some things have not gone well from time to time. Maybe not too much lost sleep, but maybe some. What are some things you have learned along this path so far of building Techwood Digital that you might do differently if you were starting afresh?
CHAD: Obviously start with core values and all of that from Day 1. Maybe not, but if Jack had started that way from Day 1, I think things probably would’ve grown smoother and he might not have ever hired me. So maybe it’s good that he didn’t start that way. [laughs] But looking back, I think that’s such a staple.
And then if I’m being more personal in my own reflections, there have been times when I hired people with speculation that an area of one of our core values might not be a good fit for them. I was like, “All right, they fit everywhere else. We’ll push forward.” As time has gone on, I’ve been more intentional about slowing down. If I’m not convinced they’re a 100% fit, then I’m not going to say “Let’s move forward.” I’m going to think, what questions can I ask and what can I do to ensure 100% before we ever make an offer?
From there, the people who have gotten their way into the organization and are not a proven fit, find a way to part ways sooner rather than later. Like I said, at every turn, when we’ve held true to who we want to be and who we are, we’ve always won. So I guess if I could change or go back and do anything different, it would be to be all-in and fight for those faster and harder every day.
ROB: That’s really insightful. It’s one of those difficult experiences where it’s easy to talk yourself into a hire, and it almost seems to me like the moment you start talking yourself into it, you should just move on.
CHAD: Absolutely. In agency life, too, we’re selling our people capacity. You’re always going to hit that stairstep approach, and there’s going to be times that are way more stressful than other times. You’re going to get behind – which has been one of the biggest things about being employee-owned. Having that extra capital to make sure we’re not ever behind on a hiring has been essential and will be really essential to growth this year.
ROB: Practically speaking, how do you know when it’s time to hire?
CHAD: We’ve got balance and load measurements. We’ve always said “Hey, once we hit this percentage of revenue increase or this amount of revenue increase for this business line, that’s another head.” That’s the way we’ve always thought about it, and we’ve always been way too late on predicting when we got there. So, this year we’ve intentionally lowered what those numbers are, not to say that that’s where we want to be, but to trick ourselves into looking before we need it. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] You’ll be a little bit happier with that, I think, and a little bit less stressed from time to time. Chad, when people want to connect with you and connect with Techwood Digital, where should they go to find you?
CHAD: They can check out our website at techwood.digital. Or feel free to email me, honestly. I’m always happy to have conversations and to make this world a better place. I really want to be an example of a “How can I help?” attitude. Honestly, anybody can email me directly at chad.crowe@techwood.digital.
ROB: Brilliant. Chad, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I can’t wait to connect in person sometime around Atlanta because we have that opportunity. But I can’t wait to connect with a lot of people at some point because it’s been a year, man. But it’s all good. Thanks for coming on.
CHAD: Thank you so much for having me.
ROB: Be well.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Melanie Querry owns Beyond Spots and Dots, a full-service advertising agency that frames its work around analysis, keeps client budgets on target, and utilizes proven marketing success in one industry to help businesses in other industries grow. Spots and Dots has been on the Inc. 5000 list five times.
In this interview Melanie discusses how her agency helps clients understand the customer journey and how prioritizing and implementing tactics will do exactly what a client wants . . . and meet budget constraints. Melanie claims that, for a roughly equivalent impression count, digital marketing can cost one-third of what traditional marketing costs. Still, all the layers have to work together. “You have to have synergy within your marketing budget,” she says.
Tactic selection and prioritization are critical, customized to meet a client’s needs, and are based on a mix of Beyond Spots and Dots’ experience, knowledge, and research.
As an example, Melanie talks about geofencing, creating a technological fence to target programmed advertising to a specific audience. Another tactic she presents is secondary search retargeting, which uses proprietary software/connections to capture someone searching for information on a third-party website and then follows that individual with ads on the internet.
Melanie informs us that “there are three satellites above us collecting every bit of data that we are doing on our cellphone, our laptops, our TVs, our computers, our desktops.” Legally, large companies (Oracle, BlueKai) can disperse that collected information. Beyond Spots and Dots is one of only a few companies allowed to utilize the information . . . which they can pass on to their clients so that their clients can target these potential customers.
Melanie wanted to be in advertising from an early age. After she earned her advertising degree, she took a job selling advertising at KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, then another with a cable station to learn “the cable side.” Melanie says these organizations “didn’t know about their clients, didn’t know about their customers,” and only focused on rating points and the number of “spots” they got. She left the cable station almost on a whim (just because it was “time”), started her agency as a media buying firm that would be “Beyond the Spots and Dots” focus of her previous employers, and took on a Pittsburgh mega car dealer as a client “for the cash flow.”
Melanie convinced the dealer to fund a digital campaign at a time when even car manufacturers were not “doing digital.” The car dealer’s business grew so significantly that it eventually hired ten people for an internal digital department. Melanie jokes that. while the dealership provided sorely needed cash flow in those early years, she was not able to “use them for profits.”
Today, Beyond Spots and Dots provides advertising, public relations, marketing, branding, and digital services. Once things are “back to normal,” Melanie looks forward to reopening the agency’s physical locations in Pittsburgh and Columbus, OH – she prefers working with clients face-to-face “120% over what we’re doing currently.” Interestingly, even with clients “everywhere,” the agency does not charge clients for its travel expenses – Melanie considers travel as a way to reinvest in her company.
Melanie can be reached on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and on her agency’s website at Beyondspotsanddots.com.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m excited to be joined today by Melanie Querry, owner of Beyond Spots and Dots based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the podcast, Melanie.
MELANIE: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I certainly appreciate it.
ROB: It’s a pleasure to have you here. Tell us about Beyond Spots and Dots. Where does your firm excel?
MELANIE: We really excel in helping businesses grow. We understand what it takes to grow. We’ve been on the Inc. 5000 list five times, which we’re very proud of, and hope to continue to be there again in the future. We are able to take our experiences and really utilize the marketing efforts and successes that we have had with various industries and apply those to other industries.
Our real growth has been in the digital world. We started as a media buying firm, so I kind of laugh and say that we do media buying with our eyes closed. However, the digital media buying is new and evolving, and we’ve been doing it for 15 years that we’ve been in business – which is great. Not many agencies can say that.
So, we really excel at implementing those tactics for businesses, but helping businesses understand where their budgeting should be. I think what makes us different is that we really stay in line with budgets for clients and on behalf of clients and rein them in when they get out of line with budgets or things that they want to implement. Something that makes us very different is while we have super killer creative and award-winning creative, we really take an analytical approach to everything we do, including creative. That’s pretty different from most agencies. Most agencies want to just be creative shops or digital firms, and we really do take a full-service approach.
ROB: Got it. Congratulations on the 15 years, on the Inc. 5000 list. Those are all things – it doesn’t pay the bills, but it is a recognition of that ongoing growth that you also seek for your clients.
You mentioned being able to transfer tactics and strategies from some industries that we might think of perhaps to some industries we might not think of having such successful digital and media tactics. Is that the case? Are there some unexpected industries you’ve found yourself in the middle of?
MELANIE: Yes. We really don’t want to put all of our eggs in one basket. We started in 2006, and in 2008 had the economy fall out beneath us. Nothing like COVID, but certainly at the time, and through those years, we learned a lot and a great deal. What we did learn is not to put all of our eggs in one basket. We pride ourselves on working in various industries.
Business is business, and while industries do have niche audiences or niche ways of advertising or marketing, there are still businesses that are being run through operations that really follow through all types of business. We have been able to successfully help businesses grow in various industries, but some of the industries that have been unique that we didn’t seek out, if you will, have been property management, for example. That was one where we didn’t seek it out. They sought us out. But we were able to be very successful with one property management company, and it filtered through to many others because of the tactics we implemented at a low cost and we were able to help them grow.
ROB: In that case, were they seeking more properties to manage? Were they seeking tenants, renters? Not to focus in too deeply, but as a means of exploring what you do.
MELANIE: Sure. Their goal is to seek out renters. They have several properties around the country, and near one of our offices – we have an office in Columbus and also Baltimore. In the Columbus market, they wanted to sell out a particular building, which was very specific, and they did it so quickly when they started working with us that they actually shut their advertising off early, but then diverted their dollars to a completely different market. That was really interesting and fun. It’s fun for us.
ROB: And probably meaningful for them. Behind the scenes, not always, but a lot of times in the real estate world, having something fully leased or above a certain percentage is a meaningful financial milestone. It lets you collateralize or sell the property. It’s a big deal beyond just filling the space.
But then on the “who you’re targeting side,” finding a place, whether it’s an office or a residence, is a customer journey. What does that journey look like, and how do you tackle people along that journey?
MELANIE: That’s a great question. You’re speaking my language, Rob. [laughs] We do take that customer journey fully into consideration when we are making a recommendation for any type of creative assets or messaging and also the placement of the ads themselves, and whether it’s a recommendation to do PR versus traditional marketing or advertising versus some kind of new media.
In targeting, it’s really fun to look at the customer journey because you have these five steps, if you will, from the point of time when someone is not even familiar with your service or product all the way to the point of no return where they have to make a decision and their decision is either “let’s do it / buy it,” whatever it is you’re asking them to do, or “let’s not.” That customer journey has steps throughout in between those two aspects or behaviors, and there are advertising tactics that make sense for certain parts of that journey.
In the very beginning, when you’re trying to just make someone aware of your product, your book, your property that you have available or whatever it might be that you’re selling, there are tactics that work better for that part of the customer journey versus the middle of the journey where they’re now aware, they might be talking to their friends about you, they’re doing their research, which is part of that journey – and then they’re trying to figure out what makes sense for them and what’s best for them, and whether or not they’re going to buy.
We utilize that customer journey for everything that we do, and we’re always presenting that to businesses to understand the different parts of the journey. A lot of people will come to us and say, “We just want an awareness campaign,” and I ask them, “Why?” That is valid and relevant, and sometimes an awareness campaign is all they want or all they think they can afford, so we help them to understand that journey so that they understand the different tactics within.
ROB: Right. It would seem deeper in the funnel, there’s some tactics you can’t afford to not do. I can imagine – and I’m just making things up here, because I don’t run, let’s say, an apartment complex – but if someone comes and they book a tour, they’re so deep into that funnel, two things seem true to me. Number one, it seems like a lot of businesses – and I’ll broaden this beyond real estate – would find it hard to operationalize the information of who has booked a tour in a timely manner. But it also seems like one of the best ways you could possibly spend your money is, let’s say, remarketing to an email list of people who have visited you in the past X months.
How do they operationalize that successfully? Or am I way off, number one? Number two, if I’m in the neighborhood, how do you help people meet some of those time-sensitive communications that would need to happen to execute on that sort of thing?
MELANIE: We try to implement new media because of the technology behind it. Depending on a business’s budget, our job is to help them understand those tactics that they can implement to do exactly what you’re asking within the budget. Based on our experience and based on our knowledge and based on research, we will help that business to prioritize those tactics.
For example, a tactic might be geofencing, which is one of the new ways of advertising through programmatic advertising. We can literally draw a fence, if you will – it’s technology for sure, but you are drawing a fence around something. We’ve drawn fences on roads before, trying to reach people driving into a college when a competitive college wants to reach those potential students. We have drawn fences around convention centers, trying to target tradeshows for particular audiences. So, the geofencing is really cool. That’s one tactic that we can utilize to grab people now.
With COVID, obviously things have changed with geofencing because people aren’t out and about and aren’t going to these big events or aren’t going to big tradeshows. That will start again, but there are other tactics. There’s another tactic that we can utilize called secondary search retargeting, and that’s one of the newest and latest and greatest, and a lot of fun to work with.
We had a company that was very niche; they were implementing services to small to medium size businesses for Mac users specifically, but for companies frankly like ours, where we have mostly PC-based computers, and we have a few Macs because we have designers, and they need their Macs. This company would target businesses that were utilizing both PC and Mac, and they were specialists in the Mac realm.
When you buy a Mac at the Apple Store, you can go online to search for companies like this to help us network the Macs with the PCs. A lot of companies are getting into this because people do like their Macs and they’re very loyal to their Macs. This particular company was able to utilize secondary search retargeting by targeting third party searches. This is outside of the Google world and outside of just your search bar in Google.
We’ve also been able to utilize on the spot, like you’re asking, secondary search retargeting for students. College students are searching online for lots of things, for different programs, for different schools. they’re searching in all of these third parties out there, and we’re able to actually tap into those searches. It’s really wild.
ROB: What does that mean? Explore the tactic with me a little bit. Does that mean you’re on something like US News, World Report, looking at college rankings, and you’re searching for something and somehow that’s able to feed back into search targeting? Where does this information come from?
MELANIE: That’s right. To give another example, probably an easier one to visualize is real estate. We have worked in the real estate realm and been very successful with that industry as well. A secondary search tactic that’s really cool allows us to target – let’s say you’re buying a home and I’m a real estate company, and I want your business because you’re buying a home and I’ve got homes to sell. But you are really hard to catch unless I can catch you through geotargeting by visiting other open houses. Right now, during COVID, we know that’s not happening so much around the country. There are open houses, but they’re few and far between. So. a different technology you can use is this secondary search retargeting.
You might be searching on Realtor.com, and if you’re searching for a home value or the home sale price, then I can capture you doing that search on that third party website. And when I capture you doing that through my technology, I can physically follow you with ads through the internet, which is the retargeting part.
The way that that’s done, to answer your question, is there are three satellites above us collecting every bit of data that we are doing on our cellphone, our laptops, our TVs, our computers, our desktops. All of our actions are being collected through this data, and huge companies such as BlueKai and Oracle now legally are allowed to spit that information back out. Companies like ours – and there are only a few companies like ours around the country that are allowed to utilize this information – we’re able to use that data of that behavior from someone like you and give it to our real estate company and target those people. It is wild. It’s pretty cool.
ROB: That’s remarkable. There’s great power and there’s great responsibility. I feel like I need to go close my blinds or something.
MELANIE: Yes. [laughs]
ROB: It’s really just what I type into the computer that’s probably the problem here. Take me back a little bit, Melanie. Tell us about where Beyond Spots and Dots came into existence. What led you to start running your own business that was not by any means guaranteed to be a multi-time Inc. 5000 company and so on?
MELANIE: As a young child, I always wanted to have an advertising agency. And I don’t know that I even knew what an advertising agency was at the time or what an agency really did, but I followed that. I probably at the time thought of more of the creative side, which is what most people think of when you think of an advertising agency. I really followed that through school. I got a degree in advertising. Back then, there were only three colleges across the country that actually offered a degree in advertising doing creative and media buying. Not many colleges and universities offered that then, but they do now, which is great.
Once I graduated, of course, at that time I learned that TV was the most complicated of all media, and when doing media buying, TV was the most complex. So, I really wanted to learn about the inner workings of TV. I graduated from college, I moved to Pittsburgh – being a Penn Stater, I got to know Pittsburgh when I was very young – and started at KDKA-TV, which was the first TV station ever. That was really powerful to me.
I worked like a dog as an entry level person. At the time, they also didn’t allow entry level employees, so I really had to show them what I was made of to be able to even keep my job. I barely made a salary at the time. I think I made more in college waiting tables than I did at my first job at KDKA-TV. [laughs] I was going to power through it.
After KDKA, I went to the cable side because I wanted to know and understand both sides of TV, broadcast and cable. One day I decided, okay, there’s never a real good time, so it’s as good as any. I put in my four weeks’ notice and I just quit. I resigned cold turkey. I didn’t take clients. I didn’t do anything like that. I just stopped one day and resigned, and the next day I said, okay, I’ve got to figure out how to start a business.
I started making phone calls to the state on how to register a business, and “What the heck is my name going to be?” When I worked in these big mammoth companies, Comcast and CBS Network, I worked with big agencies, global agencies, and they didn’t know anything about their clients. They just didn’t know about their customers. All the media buyers cared about were rating points and “How many spots am I getting?”
The name actually came pretty easy to me. Beyond Spots and Dots became the name because I wanted to go beyond that. I wanted to go beyond the number of spots someone’s getting and the rating points they’re getting. And the name stuck. The first day of the business, I went out to celebrate and I met who would become my husband, which was awesome.
ROB: Wow. Good day.
MELANIE: Yeah. He was a finance major and he helped me with the books, and as I got revenue in, I needed someone to help me with that side of it, the business side. He ended up coming on board, we got married, and now we’re a full-service firm. At the time, he was already developing websites and doing Google ads. So, Day 1, we picked up website development and Google advertising, which was really great.
ROB: What did those first few customers look like? Who did you start working with initially?
MELANIE: I made phone calls, of course, Day 1, and said, “I now have an advertising agency. I would love an opportunity to work with you and to handle your advertising.” I was willing to do what it took to get business as far as services that I wasn’t familiar with. I was willing to learn new services.
One was a mega car dealer in Pittsburgh. I had talked to them about some Google advertising, and at the time, manufacturers weren’t doing that. So, I implemented a digital campaign for them 15 years ago. In order to get their business, which was big, I needed the cash flow. They needed someone that knew digital, and it was a win-win – except that from a cash flow standpoint, I was able to use them as cash flow; I just wasn’t able to use them for profits. [laughs]
I felt that it was a necessary evil. I loved working with the general manager there, and I knew that I could help their business grow, and we did. We were able to take their business to a digital standpoint that, at the time, neither manufacturers nor car dealers were able to do. They were able to hire 10 internal people as a digital department, which was unheard of at the time. This was during the time right before the fallout in 2008, so yeah, pretty cool and definitely a good story and something that I look back on, for sure.
ROB: Right. What did the budget of a car dealership like that look like at the time for traditional media? Has their overall ad budget changed much, or has it just shifted a percentage to digital?
MELANIE: Certainly, the traditional media spend was big. It was bigger. That’s the beauty about digital; you don’t actually have to spend as much in digital. You just don’t, and you can reach – the impression count is similar by spending a third of the amount. Traditional media is more expensive on a cost per spot basis or a cost per impression basis. Our job is to help the client understand all of that and what that means and how they should be spending their money.
So there always was a bigger spend for them specifically in traditional, and at the time, of course, the digital was just really hitting. I mean, 14-15 years ago, digital wasn’t that big. You didn’t have to have it. You dabbled in it and you knew it was coming and you knew it was out there. So, we helped them to utilize some of this new media at the time.
ROB: What was someone like that spending on traditional per month? Was it $10,000, $50,000, $100,000? What’s the ballpark? Or am I even low? I don’t know.
MELANIE: This particular dealer had multiple manufacturers, multiple brands, and each manufacturer would offer them incentives, and they had budgets that they had to spend by manufacturer. So, it would vary. In general, a dealer like that could spend anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 a month. It truly varies. It varies throughout the year, it varies by the incentives the dealer is receiving, and it varies by the number of cars they have on the lot. There’re so many variables when it comes to spending for something like that.
ROB: It’s helpful even just to know a general direction. I’ve certainly seen an increased appetite for digital, and I’ve seen even new real estate developments looking for very sophisticated website buildouts and that sort of thing. It starts to make sense when you put it in the context of the traditional ad budgets. If they’ve started to turn the corner on digital, you can start to understand that increased degree of investment in some of the places – a website used to be an afterthought. You might not even have one for a development, and now it seems to be a hub of activity.
MELANIE: Sure. A website is a walking salesperson. I don’t care what you’re selling or what you’re offering, any industry should have a decent website because that’s where people go. And even social media. We find, in our experience – and I’m kind of floored by it, but it is what it is – people will go to social media. They’ll go to a business Facebook page before they ever even get to the website. Which is also very interesting in my mind.
To your point, the layering of dollars so that you can layer your tactics – your marketing tactics, your advertising tactics – the layering is what’s really critical. When you have a budget – and we’ve worked with very small budgets and have put people on TV before, even with a smaller budget. It’s all about the layering and where you’re going to run and what the messaging is, and it all works together. It really has to be cohesive. I feel like the word “synergy” is so cliché, but it’s true. You have to have synergy within your own marketing budget.
ROB: Really interesting threads to pull on there, Melanie. When you look back at the history of Beyond Spots and Dots, what are some things you have learned along the way that you might do differently if you were starting anew?
MELANIE: I wish I would’ve started sooner. [laughs] I had this in the back of my mind. I’m very fortunate to have started when I did. Today’s my birthday, actually.
ROB: Happy birthday.
MELANIE: I’m turning 45, and I’m blessed to have what I have and to have been able to work this hard thus far. I have a child now. We have a little kiddo. But prior to that, working your tail off – I wish I started sooner. I wish I’d started earlier because having the energy and not having a family at that time and being able to work the 80 hours I used to work before kids – it’s hard to do that. As you get older, it’s tiring. So, I would recommend just doing it. You only live once. I think that’s one thing.
For the future, growth. Growth is important. We plan to get back where we were. We were on a roll. We have good planning. We’ve got the tools internally to be able to expand and scale at this point. So, we do plan to open other offices. We have an office in Baltimore and Columbus right now, and Pittsburgh, obviously; that’s our headquarters. But we do want to keep growing. We want to continue to help mentor others and also continue to grow and help businesses grow.
ROB: How do you think about that office planting strategy? Is it rooted in some of your clientele having a local base and being able to be in person with someone? Do you spin up a small lease, or are you in WeWork land? How do you think about the planting strategy?
MELANIE: Part of it is a real estate strategy with respect to investing, and that’s a whole other conversation. As we diversify our own portfolio, if you will, personally speaking – and from a business standpoint – real estate is important to us.
Long term, I don’t plan to purchase real estate all over for office buildings. I do have to tell you, you kind of hit the nail on the head with respect to having an office and then working with a local client. We’ve lost business, presentations we’ve made, because businesses want an agency that’s right in their backyard.
When COVID hit, I thought to myself, does this change the way businesses believe they can do business? For example, we own our building currently in Pittsburgh, and we have an empty building right now because we have our whole staff working from home. We will keep them working from home as long as we feel that we need to, to keep everybody safe. Hopefully, that ends soon, but the reality of it is, we are doing business and conducting business all over the world from home. There are a lot of securities that go behind that, and we’re dealing with a lot of data and customers’ data and customers’ information. The security has changed, of course.
But does it change the way businesses think in the fact that we could do business – I don’t have to be right in Columbus to do business for you or to handle your native or your advertising. It’s an interesting open question that I ask myself as well.
ROB: I understand that. I think there will always be a certain scope and scale of client that you’re going to want to go see in person. When everything’s normal, there’s just a certain size of client that you’re going to win more or not lose if you’re giving them some attention in person.
MELANIE: Agreed.
ROB: I’m a firm believer in that. I agree, it’s a whole other topic that I think we’ll probably pass exploring on this podcast. Most people don’t want to talk a lot about profits, but profits are important. I come originally from a software background and now also have some services work that we do, but within a services firm, there’s only so much reinvestment back into the business that makes sense. It’s not like a software company where you’re infinitely scaling and pulling additional capital. So, figuring out what to do with profitability is its own interesting topic, I think.
MELANIE: Yeah. And to answer that, for us at least, I agree with you fully. We prefer to be in person. That is why we opened offices in Baltimore and Columbus specifically, because they are nearby; it’s quick and easy for us to travel there. I do have family in Baltimore, so selfishly, I’m thrilled to have an office there. [laughs] It’s an excuse, anyway.
Doing business in person is way better, I believe. I prefer it 120% over what we’re doing currently. And we do reinvest our profits into travel. We don’t charge our clients for travel. Our hourly fee has been the same for 15 years. We know what it takes timewise to do business. Now that we’ve been in business 15 years, we’re more efficient at what we do, so it doesn’t take us as long to do things. So, I don’t feel that I have to gouge clients. It’s just not necessary. Those profits we do roll back into travel, and we travel to our clients as much as we humanly possibly can.
I think the same goes for getting work done in person. There’s something to be said for our staff to be able to walk upstairs and go talk to the designer real quick or go downstairs and pull our copywriter in and say, “Hey, what do you think about this tagline?” There’s some camaraderie there, and that’s missing during all of this COVID. But that’s reality, and we divert, and we will – I’m positive; it’s a new year, and we will get back to where we were. We definitely will. I think the world will as well.
But as a business owner right now, you just have to go with the flow and figure out your plan and keep at it and stay positive as much as you can and be able to stay on top of it.
ROB: That’s excellent. I really do like that thought of travel as a means of reinvesting in the business. I think that’s a solid way to think about that, investing in relationships there. Melanie, when people want to find you and when they want to find Beyond Spots and Dots, where should they go to connect with you?
MELANIE: Sure. I’m a believer of connecting. I certainly have a LinkedIn page, and I appreciate when people do connect. I love to mentor, so I love when young people reach out. I probably volunteer a little too much for mentoring, but I’ll take it. I’ll do it all day long if it helps someone young who’s trying to get into the business and break through. As long as they’re a hard worker, they’re going to be successful.
Beyondspotsanddots.com is our website. You can also google us and find us. Lots of places. We have a Twitter account, Facebook page, and all the good things.
ROB: Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Melanie. It’s been excellent connecting with you and learning for you, so thank you for coming on and sharing.
MELANIE: Thank you so much. I certainly appreciate it.
ROB: Be well. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Brian Phillips is Co-founder and CEO of The Basement, an integrated (technology + creativity + measurement) B2C and B2B marketing agency with its roots in production. Brian dabbled in art and worked in architecture before he took the artistic principles of rendering positive and negative space to marketing. He explains, “The positive space, the consumer journey, is one we can see and everything works.” He believes marketers can get a lot of understanding out of identifying and analyzing negative space – the things that don’t work – and that these, too, can help define the client journey. He believes “Negative space helps define and form the positive space.” His interests today remain diverse. For the past year, he has avidly read scientific books, pursuing ideas related to how genetics might impact buying and selling.
The agency manages all media and destinations (the social channels and websites where consumers engage), extracting and analyzing as much data as possible and using multivariate testing. As an example, the agency may “cross-reference data out of Amazon” with data from its analytics platform on the ecommerce side.”
The Basement markets its clients through an often complex, multi-touch, multi-channel approach. Larger companies may have as many as 150 datapoints across their consumer journey from “high level impressions down to ecommerce platform conversions.”
Brian has found that insights gained by analyzing data about consumers in the lower funnel can provide information on how the consumer got there and what the consumer will do next. The agency measures its success through outcomes, which, Brain explains, ensures accountability.
Brian says his agency’s focus has always been on growth, but growth “has to be calculated.” When asked about his agency’s culture, he says simply, “Stay fascinated,” and then expands on the thought, adding, “Stay curious, stay ambitious, stay competitive, stay genuine, and stay fascinated.”
Brian can be reached on his agency’s website at: thebsmnt.com.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I am your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Brian Phillips, Co-founder and CEO of The Basement based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast.
BRIAN: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
ROB: Excellent to have you here, Brian. Why don’t you start off by telling us about The Basement and where the firm excels?
BRIAN: The Basement is an integrated agency, and there’s probably some backstory there of how we got to be an integrated agency with roots in a production company. It’s sad but true, but one of our greatest strengths is being able to deliver on what we say we can do. I’ve sat at many tables with brands that are unsatisfied with whoever their partners are, and sometimes it’s as simple as just being able to deliver.
I think as a production company, at the beginning that was what we prided ourselves on, and over time we’ve evolved to include that same delivery mentality against the consumer journey and a fully integrated offering of technology and creativity and measurements with the consumer journey in mind. We’ve had a lot of success with brands. We’re not afraid to talk about outcomes. Actually, we prefer talking about outcomes, and we prefer the accountability that comes with that.
We’ve been very fortunate to align with some great brands, and they acknowledge and accept our approach. It’s turned out to be very impactful for both their business and mine.
ROB: Are those brands typically more consumer-facing, or is there some B2B in there as well?
BRIAN: Mostly consumer-facing, but we do have some B2B. Certainly there are major differences there. But we really approach our work systematically and through a proprietary framework that we’ve developed. Technologies roll in, audiences roll into it, but at the end of the day we’re still performing the same services against that framework for B2B and B2C.
ROB: Interesting. Tell me a little bit more about that framework. I think you have some brands that are of a pretty big size, and their go-to-market with customers is probably very multi-touch in a way that would often be hard to measure and hard to be accountable for, but that very much seems to be what you’ve leaned into.
BRIAN: Yeah, there’s no question. It seems like the majority of our clients are that way with the multi-touch and the omnichannel approach. I think it’s important when we start talking with a brand that we’re all aligned on accountability, and where we’re going to hold ourselves accountable and where the brands are going to be accountable.
Throughout that initial phase where we’re working on strategy, we have to come to consensus on how we’re going to measure success. Measuring that success along the consumer journey is something that we work together on and then we measure against. So that becomes, in my opinion, a lot easier to have dialogue and to have fruitful conversations and collaborations if you’re aligning at the beginning. And that approach has been the core of what we do and how we build our integrated offerings.
ROB: What sorts of things are you measuring for brands?
BRIAN: Oh, man. [laughs] One of our larger brands that we work with that is a consumer brand, we’re measuring 150 datapoints across their consumer journey, and that’s everything from high level impressions down to conversions through their ecommerce platform and everything in between. At that point we’re managing all media, all what we call destinations – places where consumers engage, whether that be social channels, whether that be their enterprise websites. We’re going to build that infrastructure inside of that journey so that we can extract as much data as possible.
Then we want to analyze it. We want to understand if there’s any insights we can gain in the lower funnel that can impact how the consumer’s getting there and what the consumer’s doing next. And we’ve got case studies where we’ve seen and applied insights that were upper funnel, that were on the advertising layer, where we were able to test what type of product mix through display ads – we would run multivariate testing and we noticed that these certain product mixes with color combinations and words were effective. That then translates all the way down to the way we communicate on our website and what products we show on the website, how we’re driving conversions through the performance funnel online.
That cross-analysis is very important to us. We use and leverage a lot of technology, don’t get me wrong; technology is extremely important to our business. But at the end of the day, we want to make sure that our core teams that work with the brand are analyzing that data, and we’re looking for those insights and we’re trying to figure things out on behalf of the brand.
Machine learning is helpful. Obviously, it’s a trend and it’s going to be here. It already has changed the business and it’s going to continue to change the business. But at the end of the day, I think you still need to have humans involved in that analysis, and that’s something that we do very diligently with our clients.
ROB: It’s fascinating because a lot of marketers think about knowing how to track marketing when they can track the individual user all the way around the internet, when they can get a hard link through to conversion, that sort of thing. Certainly, you will have that in cases on the ecommerce side.
But it almost sounds like on the broader consumer/general market side – maybe they bought something on Home Depot’s website or Costco’s website or Amazon or someplace where you can’t sink into the data – it sounds like maybe you’re still pulling on the stages of the customer journey at a macro level to see what’s pushing down the funnel. Is that how you’re thinking about it? You know what the stages are, you know what people are doing; even if you can’t link each person, you can still see the echoes of what you’ve done up-funnel.
BRIAN: Exactly. That’s exactly right. Amazon’s a great example where we can get data out of Amazon and we can get data out of our analytics platform on the ecommerce, and we have to cross-reference those. We have to understand why this happened versus something else happened.
My background is kind of an interesting background, but it certainly comes from the creative side. I often talk to my team and in general about the importance of the consumer journey and looking at it very similar to figure drawing. The way that I learned figure drawing is you have positive and negative space, and the positive space, the consumer journey, is one we can see and everything works. But with figure drawing, you need to leverage and use the negative space as templates to help you define and form your positive space.
I relate that to marketing and the consumer journey in a way that says sometimes things don’t work, but understanding why they don’t work and having the measurements in place to understand and help define – that helps us define what’s going to work and what didn’t work. So we really want to look at the positive and the negative space. I think there’s an idea or a wish for marketers and agencies to say, “We just want to find all the positive and that’s it. That’s what we want to base everything on.” We try to look more holistic than that, because we think we can get a lot of definition and a lot of insights out of the things that don’t work.
ROB: It’s fascinating to hear such a – there’s sort of a disciplined line of thinking around the creativity that probably frees you up to be creative in other ways. It’s interesting how it echoes right into marketing. It almost sounds like we’re talking about planetary physics or something while we’re at it.
BRIAN: Now you’re really going to get me going. [laughs]
ROB: Oh, how so?
BRIAN: I study science. I don’t read many business books; I never did. I mean, I’ve read marketing and business books, but I’ve found that the focus on our business and the focus on science, everything from natural order to epigenetics, is something that I’ve been really focused on over the past year and a half and applying that level of thinking.
To your point, you mentioned the word discipline, and I think that’s certainly a strength of the agency and it’s something that my business partner and I have always strived for. If I were to analyze my career, I think a systematic, more scientific approach to creative is something that I’ve always done. The parallels of science and creativity are just so fascinating to me.
ROB: I think you can’t just drop epigenetics into the conversation without actually helping those of us who think we know what that is, but maybe we don’t. [laughs] Can you give a definition of what that is and maybe how it ties into, if it does tie into, your work and marketing?
BRIAN: Any of the scientists in your audience may say, “He’s completely off,” so I’ll use the caveat that this is how I’ve interpreted it. The genes that we have as humans are what I would consider more binary. They do simple on and off. They can’t define the entire character of a person. They may define the way you look, they may define other parts of your genetic makeup, but epigenetics is a newer science that is the study of the chemicals that are how the genes are expressed.
What’s so fascinating to me and what really got me interested in the concept is that these chemicals, these imprints of chemicals can become part of your genetic makeup that you can pass down to your children. There may be a certain way that you move or the way that you stand that wouldn’t necessarily be part of a gene. A gene doesn’t have that in it, but epigenetics have put that imprint on you because of the way that things have happened through your environment. That is what I find so fascinating about it – that study of behavior and getting all the way down to that science to say these behaviors can actually be explored through genes.
Tying that to marketing – I think this is way, way future-focused, but when that data becomes more readily available and people start mapping it, which they are now, how does that bring the science of genetics into the targeting of how people are buying and selling products? That is the stuff that I find fascinating and I read about.
ROB: Is this something in the neighborhood of a gene drive or something like that? Is that what we’re talking about here? Or am I completely out of the neighborhood?
BRIAN: What did you call that?
ROB: A gene drive, where they can take certain things and introduce them – like they can introduce sterilization into the mosquito population not by shooting a mosquito into a crisper or anything like that. It’s called a gene drive. Basically, they can introduce this trait into the population in this external way.
BRIAN: I’m not spending a lot of my time and energy on what they’re going to do with that innovation. [laughs] I do think that the future of medicine is going to be more tailored based on the structural variations within people’s genes. So I do think that’s going to change medicine as a potential outcome. But right now, my fascination and interest has just been the data and what happens when that source, that mapping has been done, what you do with it. It’s like Tesla having all the data of people driving their cars.
ROB: I see. So, you’re able to measure things you’ve never been able to measure before to get insight you’ve never been able to draw before, just by how deep you’re able to look into the picture.
BRIAN: Right. That’s what we keep doing as society. We keep finding new ways to extract data, and that is a parallel to the way we look at our framework and the way that we work with our clients. How can we extract meaningful data from the journey? It’s just going to get smarter and more robust, and the systems are going to be in place and the first party data is going to be there. It’s an interesting time, for sure.
ROB: You’ve alluded a couple of times to your own background and your own origin story. What is the origin story of The Basement? What made you decide to start the firm, and what have been some key inflection points along the way?
BRIAN: How far do you want me to go back? I think there’s some relevance to the first brush of creativity. For the record, I’m about 6’6” and I come from an athletic family, and I was a basketball player. There was a point in my life where I thought I was going to go play basketball. Certainly not professionally, but in college. And I was always an artist.
When I was in high school – this was in the early to mid-’90s – I met a graffiti artist from Chicago. That culture didn’t really exist in Indianapolis in a meaningful way. That culture really didn’t exist in the common culture of society. Hip-hop culture was in its infancy, really, at that time. I became fascinated by that art form.
I think one of the key powers or superpowers, if you will – and for the record, I think superpowers change over time. At that time in my life, one of the things that defined me was defiance, and I think that carried through my career, from graffiti art to wanting to be an animator when I saw the movie Toy Story. That became my goal. My dream was to be a character animator. That’s what my career set off into: how can I make animated films or shorts or whatever? I didn’t really have a definition.
I ended up in architecture, and I spent a number of years in architecture. It was at this period when the internet was becoming relevant. It was getting introduced to businesses. This was pre-broadband. Everyone was on dial-up. We were just at that point in society where the internet and how people engaged online was being defined.
Then I became really interested in creating these very rich, high-end experiences that eventually became online, for lack of a better term, engagements. That’s how my career started. I was doing that in architecture, and at one point my business partner and I met, and I was frustrated with my career and the ceiling that I saw for myself and the work I wanted to do. I wanted to work at Pixar. I left. I just quit my job.
I convinced my business partner to start a business. He was certainly more of a marketing business mind than me at the time. I was very much an artist and a producer. The combination of the two of us has worked out really well. And we left. He left McDonald’s Corporation, where he was a very successful regional marketing director, and I was this young, probably cocky kid who was doing 3D animation and interactive 3D online and virtual worlds, and we took off.
We ended up becoming one of the first digital agencies in Indiana, and from there we started The Basement because we saw a void with traditional agencies that didn’t have an understanding of digital. We saw that as an opportunity and a void in the market and serviced agencies for the first 5 or 6 years of our business as a high-end interactive studio, doing animated TV spots, doing Flash games. We made a number of video games, we made a number of TV spots, we did a number of very high-end, rich websites for consumer brands and national product launches, until we saw an opportunity.
We were really good at building the destinations and the engagement points with consumers, and we would always ask the agencies and the people we were working with, “How are we getting people here? What’s the narrative? What’s that consumer narrative and how do we extend it?” That’s where we started to take on more direct clients. We had clients that were at agencies that went to the brand side and wanted to hire us directly. It really started to snowball, and then we built a media business, and now we have a full national internal media business and analytics business, and obviously creative is still there, still a studio. We still produce a lot of work in-house. There’s a ton of content that gets produced along with consumer journey.
Being able to build that content against a very robust media strategy that’s looking at data, looking for data, that’s the kind of integration that we’ve built. In a very, very short, run-on sentence, that’s how we got to where we are.
ROB: Brian, you mentioned something that I think is very common, which is that a creative firm starts up to work on a particular practice area that other agencies aren’t focused on, and you’ll either take a referral or you’ll get white-labeled under them on the engagement – and then there’s this jumping off point that has to come around to grow more. That’s that graduation from taking other people’s subprojects and leftovers and engaging the clients directly. How did you change the mindset and make that jump in the business? Because a lot of people get stuck there.
BRIAN: I really give a lot of that credit to my business partner. We also have one of our vice presidents who took the client services part of the business. We all worked really hard together, and my business partner’s background in the agency was account service. He knew that business. He knew it very well. He’s very disciplined, and he understands how to build systems, and again, echoing the points that we made, we think systematically.
So we built systems that will hold ourselves accountable, and we made sure that we were honest with each other and collaborated. We’re transparent. I think that transparency was a very important key for us with our clients throughout. If we can do something, we’ll tell you we can do it. If we can’t do it at that time, we’re going to be honest with you and we’ll tell you when we can do it. That formula worked really well for us. I’ve always been an advocate for hiring people that are better than you, and that is what we did.
At that time we had to build a culture, and we built a culture around growth not only for our clients, but for ourselves and for the individuals that are within the company. We fostered the culture, and that culture helped organically make us better. That is I think equal weight in the success of that adoption and being able to change and being able to recognize how something needs to improve. That’s, again, been a big part of who we are.
We have a tagline, which really is the definition of our culture, and that’s “Stay fascinated.” Our culture is defined by stay curious, stay ambitious, stay competitive, stay genuine, and stay fascinated. That idea of staying fascinated is see something bigger than yourself, see something that we can become collectively. When you see something and you strive for something and you strive for growth, things need to change and things get better. That’s how we define our culture, and that’s how we were able to improve. Because I’ll tell you right now, our account service business was not great when we started. It was good. We’ve made it great.
ROB: It sounds like by being honest with yourself and with your clients – both of which takes discipline, which we said before – you were able to avoid getting yourself in the deep end in some areas and say no to the things that were too big while also growing into bigger and bigger capabilities along the way.
BRIAN: Yeah. We expanded our services along the way. Again, very, very proud today. We’ve had tremendous growth over the life of the agency, and we still plan to grow. We are going to continue to grow. Thinking of it from a biological standpoint, organisms grow to the point where they peak and they start to decay. We feel that we’re not even close to decaying.
Growth has always been a part of our strategy, but it has to be calculated. We’ve said no to things that we knew we weren’t going to be able to deliver against, and that I think is very important and has defined us by saying no to things versus saying yes to everything. That was a really good business lesson that we’ve learned along the way.
And preservation of culture, because you can say yes to things and short term you can grow revenue, you can make more money – but at the peril of what? That was something we’ve always been very protective of: the culture, the people, the dynamics within the team. Because as we recruit and we want to hire the most talented people, then you have to protect them and you have to make sure that they are in a position to do what they’re great at.
The point I made about superpowers evolving – as I got further in my career and further into the growth of business, that became part of my role and what I strive to be good at.
ROB: It’s quite a journey, Brian. Thank you for sharing. I feel like there’s a lot more we could pull on; I want to be respectful of everybody’s time. Brian, when people want to get in touch with you and with The Basement, how should they connect with you?
BRIAN: Certainly the website for The Basement, and that is thebsmnt.com. That’s the easiest way to get a hold of us. We love challenges, and we love brands that want to swing above their weight class. We’re actively looking for new partnerships. I really appreciate you taking a moment to have me on and talk about this business that we’ve built out of Indianapolis, which is not typically known for advertising.
ROB: If people don’t know, there’s a lot there. ExactTarget didn’t get as long in the sun as people might’ve wanted it to, but that was a big deal out of Indy, right?
BRIAN: Oh my goodness, yes. ExactTarget has been a fantastic story, and Salesforce is there. Yeah, things are changing. There’s no doubt. Things have definitely changed and momentum is with our city right now.
ROB: Got that Atlanta to Indy connection with Pardot and Salesforce and all that. We appreciated ExactTarget as well. It was good for our ecosystem.
BRIAN: Good.
ROB: Thanks so much, Brian. Good to have you on. Be well.
BRIAN: Likewise. Thank you again.
ROB: Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Phil Case, now Chief Client Officer, joined Max Connect Marketing after running an agency for nine years – one that consistently lost clients to this highly performance-based digital agency. One key to Max Connect’s success is that 90 percent of its 47 employees are compensated based on the performance of the campaigns it runs. At Phil’s previous agency, the sales team would work 6 months to close a new client and then hand the client over to the digital team. The digital team would complain about the extra time they had to spend running the campaign without that effort generating any more financial compensation. Aligning compensation with performance boosts the Max Connect team’s motivation to go “above and beyond” to produce outstanding results.
Max Connect’s clients are typically national or international B2B companies or companies that sell big-ticket consumer goods . . . especially purchases that involve a complex, nuanced customer journey that requires education, brand-building, and a focus on the customer relationship, and involve “a lot of datapoints.” Phil refers to these datapoints as the up to 100 to 140 “digital breadcrumbs” that people leave as they navigate a “considered” several-hundred- or several-thousand-dollar purchase decision. The agency targets audiences based on “real-time in-market data, demographics, psychographics, and online intent,” runs that data through its proprietary algorithm, and then places frequent, hyper-targeted ads in front of that audience on multiple digital channels. The goal is to provide a customer journey with a high level of detail and a “personalized touch.”
Phil notes that privacy concerns are creating an international trend toward a “cookieless world.” The immense amount of data Max Connect collects is stripped of personal information to prevent potential privacy law violations. The sheer volume of information provides an opportunity to gain the insights needed to build more specific, nuanced customer journeys and increase sales, but also to drive a company’s ability to innovate – to create the types of products and technologies consumers will demand in the future.
Phil believes most digital marketers make the mistake of assuming they know their audiences and how to reach them without any real-time analysis. Max Connect starts with identifying a client’s audience through empirical data . . . analyzing on- and off-line conversion data, hypertargeting the audience, reaching out to them through up to six different channels, and then assessing which channels are most effectively converting audiences. Phil describes this customer journey approach as both “more personalized” and “ubiquitous.”
Phil, who grew up in the deserts of Arizona, is enamored with the diverse outdoor opportunities in Utah. When the Bear’s Ears monument controversy damaged the businesses of a large number of Utah-based outdoor brands, Phil worked with the brands’ CEOs to found a 501(c)(6) nonprofit trade association to promote thought leadership, knowledge sharing, events, and roundtables . . . all to strengthen Utah’s natural resource interests and outdoor brands.
Phil’s goals for 2020 were to “be more deliberate in decision-making” and to put himself out of his comfort zone – which would give him the opportunity to “grow and stretch.” 2020s’ challenges provided that for him without his even trying. Growing and stretching remain goals for the coming year.
Phil can be reached on his LinkedIn profile: Phil Case, https://www.linkedin.com/in/philcase/ or on his agency’s website at maxconnect.com
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Phil Case, Chief Client Officer at Max Connect Marketing based in the Salt Lake City area right in the heart of the Silicon Slopes. Welcome to the podcast, Phil.
PHIL: Great to be with you.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you give us the rundown on Max Connect Marketing and what capabilities are really driving growth there?
PHIL: It’s interesting; at my last agency, I came across these guys more than a few times, and I consistently lost clients to them – a few over the last couple of years. As I was able to begin to get to know them and ultimately join the team over a year ago, I began to find out that not only did they have a uniquely digital-only focus, but it was very much data-driven with an audience-specific approach that I hadn’t really seen anywhere else. In terms of their capabilities and being able to see that customer journey, the level of detail and personalization that they provided blew me away.
ROB: What’s a typical client that you’re working with over there?
PHIL: The more complex the customer journey is – and what I mean by that is, if there’s more datapoints, if there’s more digital footprints – we think of Hansel and Gretel and breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs that we leave as we make decisions in our own lives throughout the internet are immense. Most of us probably don’t realize that. Going into a typical several-hundred- or several-thousand-dollar decision that a consumer might make, for instance, there’s anywhere from 100 to 140 touchpoints or data digital breadcrumbs that you’ve left.
What we do as an agency is harness that on behalf of the brands we work with. It could be an automotive client selling cars to a homebuilder selling homes to a SaaS tech company selling B2B software to consumer products and other brands in ecommerce. Really what unifies all of these clients across industries and sectors is when there’s a nuanced customer journey, when there’s education, when there’s brand-building, but particularly when they’re wanting to build a relationship with a consumer or a professional. That’s when we tend to really thrive in terms of what we provide on their behalf.
ROB: Got it. So, you’re in both consumer and B2B, but the common theme is this is a larger ticket, considered purchase. It’s not a “swipe your credit card right now and buy this piece of SaaS software you just saw for $10 bucks a month.”
PHIL: That’s right. It’s when you’re weighing options, you’re doing your research, and potentially when there’s a human being that you often will speak with, whether that’s via chat – you’re probably familiar with Backcountry and the guides and the experts or really gearheads that they provide at Backcountry.com. Comparing that with a car salesman or a homebuilder and a real estate individual involved, there’s typically a human touch either verbally by phone or in person or via chat. That’s when we tend to do extremely well working alongside that ecosystem.
ROB: Got it. You’ve got web traffic maybe connected to email opens, maybe connected to digital chat, maybe with some logging of calls from a representative who’s in on the sale? Is that a lot of the footprint, or what else is in that?
PHIL: No, that’s exactly right. I can get a little bit more into that, but to put it this way, when somebody in today’s world goes and purchases a car – let’s say you wanted to go get that new Mustang you’ve had your eye on. There’s about 25 points that have been somewhat standardized across an auto buying journey, and 25 steps that need to be made. Up until this year of 2020, there’s 19 of those that Google has now said “this is a digital first touchpoint.”
Before, we used to think about car buying as “I want to buy a car,” so you just show up to a dealer and say, “I have no idea. Tell me what I ought to buy,” and they get those dollar signs in their eyes and they say, “Here’s somebody that I can probably pull the wool over their eyes or sell them and guide them to what I’m going to either make the most money on or what my manager tells me we’ll get kickback on incentives.”
What’s changed now is any time somebody steps foot onto a lot, they typically have down to the VIN number what they want to purchase. They know exactly what the dealership has, and they know what they’re willing to pay because they’ve seen the invoice price. It’s a little different. So as a dealer, those 19 digital touchpoints – with 2021, it’s pushed us closer to 21 to 22. So, you literally show up to the dealership and it’s, “I’d like to buy this car and I’m willing to spend X,” and it’s a matter of will they do that for me or not?
So, it’s interesting. That’s the challenge that businesses face now. Most of that research and backstory is done with research online. Consumers come more prepared than ever, and we need to make sure that whether it’s across social channels, whether it’s across video, whether it’s just throughout the internet or on Google, you’re being seen and found and providing relevant education and really driving that individual to purchase, that you’re the right organization to buy that from.
ROB: I laugh a little bit; I shared with you beforehand that I spent some time in Salt Lake City this past summer. What I didn’t share is we were on a road trip and our van basically broke down, and we ended up purchasing a vehicle in Salt Lake City on the middle of a road trip from Atlanta. So, I’ve been on that journey in about five days.
PHIL: There you go. And I’ll tell you a little bit more on that note. Most digital marketers get it wrong, and they make assumptions about their audience that they’ll behave a certain way or that they’re a certain age or demographic. They feel like “Facebook can help me reach that audience,” so they have almost a single or maybe a dual channel approach by which they invest money in, and they say, “Is this channel giving me a return?”
We think that’s entirely the wrong way to think about marketing. We think you first identify your audience utilizing empirical data. Let the data speak for itself and let your audience be able to be uncovered as you’re measuring and counting and looking at those conversions that come across your website or on- and offline transactions. As you understand then who that audience is, we feel like you first hyper-target your audience and then you reach them through four to five to six different channels. It’s not about “Is this channel performing or not?” It’s “Is this audience that we’ve defined converting at as high a level as this other audience?”
It’s really about being ubiquitous across that customer journey and providing a more personalized approach for that individual. For instance, if you’ve ever seen Minority Report where Tom Cruise walks into the store and he’s got the new set of eyes, the Asian that he purchased from, you’ll notice that it says “Welcome, Mr. Yakamoto. Last time you were here, you bought these jeans. Can we show you this size now?” That’s really where we’re headed. We’ve gotten to that level that in marketing, we should be able to provide a unique, curated, personalized customer journey for those audiences and individuals looking to interact with you as a brand.
There’s no reason that we’re limiting ourselves by any one channel or medium. You should use any and all channels and mediums and digital marketing mix to allow you to reach that individual and develop a relationship with him or her. And that could be across anywhere on the internet. We all have different consumption behaviors and patterns.
ROB: A lot of people do look at that Minority Report scene still as being a little bit intrusive and creepy, but we see that project into the world we’re in as well. You’ll hear people certainly say, “I was just talking about this thing the other day and then I started seeing this advertisement from something else. I know my Alexa was listening in on me.” I think sometimes we underestimate how much we’ve been influenced by some prior touchpoint or how much marketers just know our demographic in the first place.
PHIL: I think it’s a mixture of both. I think there’s enough Big Data out there that we have an idea of the type of buyer profiles we’re looking at, but I think you’re exactly right; there is a lot of data collection that’s happening on any of the big tech companies you can imagine. And just to address that point, we’ve been hearing as marketers there’s going to be a cookieless world, that there’s more stringent requirements in Europe and California, throughout the United States, with privacy. Which I think is a good thing. Any data that we collect is anonymized. We’re in no way wanting to violate any PII type laws.
But because we can integrate with Facebook and Google and these other major platforms and their SDKs and APIs, we can still get very granular data among audience with anonymized users in a way that not only allows us to have incredible attribution, but it allows us to get greater insight into the traits and attributes and digital breadcrumbs that really drive conversion. So even though we might live in a cookieless world, there’s still a lot of anonymized data, and there’s other ways to work through these big tech companies to almost replicate, if not even improve, the amount of data and personalization we’re able to do.
ROB: Right. It’s almost like we’ve shifted the point of contact. If you think about a company the size of Verizon, all the different datapoints that they control, all of the different touchpoints, they may only do first party cookies on each site instead of third-party cookies, but if they can tie them together – and they certainly can – it seems like it’s really going to move the boundary to some of these media companies selling the audience through to the people who want to buy it.
PHIL: And particularly the consolidation we’re seeing in media assets. I think you’re right on. We see that – I’m forgetting the movie theater chain that’s chosen – anyway, as you’ve noticed, some of the bigger movie producers are now simply coming straight out to HBO Max. It’s interesting to see not only consolidation, but across networks and entities and as buyouts are happening, the amount of data being shared. To your point, it might all be first party data, but if it’s packaged in such a way and they can have a holistic vantage point of a particular consumer across multiple properties, that data alone is very valuable.
ROB: Right, because HBO Max is AT&T, it’s TBS, it’s TNT, it’s Cartoon Network, it’s Bleacher Report. It’s a myriad of touchpoints. They’re like a Fortune 5 company or something. They’re going to figure something out.
PHIL: And that really becomes the currency of the future. It’s data. It’s being able to not necessarily control data but have data in a way that you can draw insights that you know how to target your consumer, that you can provide more personalized marketing or touchpoints. Because we’re collecting an immense amount of data, the companies that can harness that will have not only a more specific and nuanced type customer journey and approach and they’ll sell at a lot higher rate, but it’s that data that ultimately allows them to drive innovation, allows them to drive the type of products and technology that users and consumers are demanding in the future. So, I think we’ll continue to see data be a major currency of business in the future.
ROB: Very, very interesting. Phil, you mentioned seeing your own business that you built coming up alongside Max Connect. While you weren’t necessarily at Max Connect on Day 1, what can you tell us about the origin story, and maybe the parallel journey you saw them on versus what you were doing that you learned from along that way?
PHIL: I’ll give a little bit of my background to give context. In college I studied international business and relations, and I actually for a semester did Arabic. I was working on a national political campaign for president, studying Arabic, really wanting to get into the government work. Then I met a girl who would become my wife, and when I described to her this vision of living in the Middle East and speaking Arabic and having our children in these international schools and I’d be a diplomat, she looked at me and said, “Well, that sounds incredible, and I’m really excited for you, but I probably won’t be on that journey with you. I hope you can find a girl that will.”
It caused me to pause, and as I began to reevaluate those opportunities of business, I began to gravitate into investment banking and finance. As I graduated with a minor in business, I had taken all but one marketing class and I kind of thought it was a joke. I thought, “This comes somewhat natural and it’s easy. Who would ever read the textbook?” And I don’t say that in a boastful way; I just didn’t think very much of it.
But when I looked to begin an internship and began in marketing, I was fascinated by it. For the first couple of years, I kept trying to leave to have my full-time employment be in finance and banking, but there was a moment in my career where I was speaking to a client and they said, “Boy, you must have the best job.” I said, “What do you mean?” They said, “I look forward to every week when we meet, and it’s the highlight of my week because it’s so fun. It’s exciting, it’s creative. It’s what I look forward to. You get to do this every day.”
I began to look at the solemn, stern faces and this lack of personality of those that work in the finance industry and I thought, why would I ever want to work in finance? [laughs] This is far too much fun. So, I’ve been in the agency world my entire career. My last agency, Fluid Advertising, I ran for about 9 years. I exited that at the end of last summer.
But in that timeframe, one of my passions is the outdoors. I live in Utah; we were abundantly blessed with natural assets and resources, more so we feel like than other states. We have everything year round that you can imagine. So, I’m an avid hiker, mountain biker, I love to camp, I love to get in the backcountry and long distances in. But in the winter, one of my favorite pastimes and hobbies is hiking up a 2,000- or 3,000-foot mountain at 5 or 6 a.m. and then skiing down it in untouched powder. It’s one you’ve got to be careful with because there’s backcountry danger and avalanches.
I’ll tell you this: Salt Lake suffered a major earthquake in March of this year. It was right at the beginning of COVID. Everybody’s a little nervous, and I decided one morning with a buddy that we were going to go scale a mountain and ski down it. So, we’re in the middle of the canyons and the mountains, and you would think avalanches and earthquakes don’t mix well together. I guess at 7:20 a.m. that morning, Salt Lake Valley suffered a major earthquake, more so than it ever had. There was damage and destruction. Not major as much as others, but fairly significant.
My wife was just beside herself because all she knew was I’m in the middle of the avalanche terrain, hiking, and an earthquake happens and I must be dead. I didn’t answer the first three times she called me because I didn’t really have my phone on. Finally, when I answered – she thought I was dead. So, we finished the run, skied down, I got home, and it was one of those conversations of, “We’d better go get our food storage and how’s your life insurance policy?” It was interesting; that day there was a major earthquake in the valley, we didn’t even feel a tremor where we were.
But with that context of my love of the outdoors, I helped launch the Utah Outdoor Association, bringing brands together like Black Diamond and Petzl and Specialized and Goal Zero and brands like Amer Sports – you have Solomon and Atomic and many other iconic brands. Most of them are located, at least their U.S. headquarters, in Utah. It’s incredible. I found working with these brands that the Outdoor Retailer Show had left because there was a little bit of politics there a few years back. It got very political with President Obama and President Trump with Bears Ears and land grants of what’s national versus what’s state-owned land.
It was interesting; in the midst of all that, Utah got left with a black eye and the brands themselves suffered because there wasn’t leadership. So, working across these brands with their CEOs and executives, we formed a 501(c)(6) nonprofit trade association to help these brands band together to have a voice, to speak for themselves, to be able to further develop and grow what Utah’s been, again, abundantly blessed with – not just in natural resources, but particularly with having an inordinate amount of outdoor brands here.
We’ve begun to build over the last few years this nonprofit that I continue to be passionate about, and where we’ll do thought leadership and knowledge sharing and events and roundtables. We’ll tackle industry issues, we’ll do joint marketing campaigns. It’s been a lot of fun.
ROB: There’s certainly so much to direct people towards. If people get started and have a good experience, they’re going to buy more of this gear. It makes a lot of sense. You just need to show people. I mentioned we were out in Utah and we did the Salt Lake City area and we did South Utah. I talk to people and I almost can’t believe it when they haven’t heard of some of the places around Utah because it is truly remarkable.
PHIL: Again, there’s wonderful places all over the country, but I grew up in Arizona, and in the back of my mind I always thought, “There has to be better places to live than a desert. Living in the foothills of beautiful mountains and all sorts of recreation, I certainly enjoy.
To answer your other question on Max Connect, this agency began 8 years ago. Not necessarily a parallel story, although we were competitors. But they began in an attic. Couple of people left another ad agency, weren’t being treated fairly. They recruited one of the top digital marketing minds that had done major work for Netflix and for Chevron and others. The four of them founded Max Connect, and over the process of time they grew out of the attic fairly quickly and another office building. We now have a massive space that houses about 47 professionals, most of which are doing the digital marketing efforts. It’s all in-house. We work coast to coast. We work with international clients. They’ve built a remarkable team.
The one thing I’ll say that I think is somewhat unique is that most of the team – call it 90% of all employees – are compensated based on the performance of the campaigns we run. So if you as a client are selling more stuff – more cars, more homes, more software – we as an agency compensate our team accordingly so they have skin in the game. They’re willing to go above and beyond because they know it means more in their paycheck.
My last agency, we’d bring in a great client, give it to the digital team thinking “This took me 6 months to close. This is an incredible opportunity,” and they’d moan and complain and think “Now I have to stay an hour later to run this campaign and I’m not necessarily making any more money.” Just to have that alignment, even from a financial and performance perspective, it’s been night and day. The team and the commitment and the willingness to really be strategic and insightful has been so fun to work alongside.
ROB: Is that something that you then also put out in front of clients and roll out as part of the agreement? Or is it more subtle than that?
PHIL: Some clients it’s too much for. We actually have a homebuilder that every home they sell, there’s a portion of that that goes into a digital marketing bank account by which it then funds the next month’s marketing campaigns. So, we’ve gotten down to a transaction level. But a lot of clients will say, “I have a budget of $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 a month. We’re going to deploy this with you. These are the results that I need,” and on the backend we then compensate our team with a portion of their compensation coming in terms of that performance.
So rather than make it overly complicated, we just do that anyway. But with some clients that really want to dig deep, we’re willing to structure a performance model.
ROB: That would seem to me like that would create much more interest from your team and much quicker feedback on campaign data. Some people just know what they’re supposed to spend in a month, and they spend it and then they ask questions later. Do you see a pressure towards tighter feedback loops? And how do you help equip your team with that information?
PHIL: Great point. We have a lot of clients that are on a weekly cadence. We certainly will do a full month review where we’re trying to draw a lot of insights and bigger pivots. But on a daily and weekly basis, whether that’s a dashboard we’re exposing to them that’s starting to produce those insights and data or our team – I mean, our team’s in every campaign almost daily because to get the level of results and performance, we have to.
But on a weekly basis being able to report, “This is where we’ve been able to lower your cost per acquisition and this is where we’ve begun to pivot and adjust marketing dollars and how the response has been” – it is a tighter feedback loop, but it’s one that for the client – I think we’re more used to instantaneous type, “Hey, I put money in the market. Am I getting results?” So, we’ve really structured our agency around that.
ROB: Right. You’re talking about these longer buyer journeys. I guess there’s an extent to which one week is probably rarely enough to fully measure something, unless it’s me rapidly buying a car.
PHIL: Some of the shorter cadences, we have several ecommerce and subscription. It’s been interesting. COVID has driven that industry forward in unparalleled ways. It’s experiencing as an industry phenomenal growth, and for most retail-like or brands that traditionally were selling in the, for the most part, wholesale consumer space, where there were distributors and people were buying it retail – because of COVID, what we’ve heard from big brands across the country and really the world has been, “Our traditional brick-and-mortar is down. Our ecommerce, we can’t even begin to keep up with projections. We’re 400% to 500% above forecasts.” They’re saying, “How can we pour more money into both human assets, but particularly the digital ecosystem? Because that is our major focus moving forward.”
We’ve actually pivoted as an agency and invested and put an entire team on just ecommerce alone. To put that in perspective, sometimes there’s conversions that will take – it might be a multi-week period. But we’re continually reporting on progress on touchpoints and conversions where the conversions for this week might have begun a customer journey that was the week prior. But what’s important is there’s week over week value creation and continuing to help sell on their behalf.
ROB: It seems like once the Christmas push has passed, January could be a big opportunity. How are you looking at that with clients?
PHIL: Again, there’s a little bit of some cyclical nature of the businesses we work with, and some that really take advantage of the holiday season. But the cost of inventory is even more. We’ve had some clients that have actually, because they’re not so much a Christmas gift-giving type sector, pulled back slightly in terms of their budgets because the cost per impression, the cost per click, the cost of inventory is high right now. We saw between the election – well, the election it feels like isn’t over. But between that Black Friday and Cyber Monday week, the cost of all advertising spiked so dramatically because you still were getting political ads. You had the biggest month potentially ever of ecommerce that we’ve ever had in the history of ecommerce.
So we see January as really level-setting with a lot of advertisers where it’s really just blue sky. They’re really excited because they can come out swinging. They’ve recalibrated; they’ve gotten past the Q4 push. They know that the cost of inventory, for the most part, is down. So we’ve done a lot of planning around Q1 of continuing – again, whether that’s retail – but there continues to be major consumer type opportunities as we’re building to tax-free day, as we’re building to Martin Luther King and Presidents’ Day weekend. Again, it depends on the industry, but that certainly has been a highly talked about timeframe for our agency.
ROB: For sure. Phil, between joining Max Connect and building your own agency before that, what would you look at doing differently if you were starting over based on what you’ve learned on this journey?
PHIL: It’s interesting; first in my career it was very much about how I closed that next client and making sure I was involved in most if not all interactions and really trying to provide strategic insight. I realized it was all about me. I was a leadership athlete, I’d call it. It was “How can I singlehandedly push this agency forward?” It’s interesting because we grew, but I don’t think we grew nearly as quickly as we could’ve if I would’ve not only extended trust but continued to surround myself with individuals that can do the heavy lifting alongside myself, that were likeminded.
I heard this terminology a few years ago, that it’s not so much about being a leadership athlete, but a leadership coach. How do you help develop that next generation of leaders? How do you value the team and how do you work through others? It’s about developing future leaders and helping them be totally comfortable in situations that may have been uncomfortable a year before, and really helping them in their own journey.
And that’s really where a lot of the satisfaction and retention comes about. Somebody is getting that fulfillment, there’s autonomy at work, but there’s also challenge, and they’re continuing to be challenged mentally in the tasks they’re taking on, and you’re pushing them forward. So not only do they become more valuable to you running the agency, but they’re becoming more valuable to themselves. Their earning potential continues to skyrocket, and they build that confidence. I think that’s important.
Another learning that I’d probably take away as I’ve reflected on this is focusing on the important few versus the eclectic many. So often, particularly in an agency that you’re trying to grow, it’s almost like “Hey, you want to pay us money? Great, we’ll sign you up tomorrow. Let’s go.” As you mature and as you take on bigger accounts, you begin to become more picky-and-choosy. But I will say that even with internal initiatives, just having a focus of just a few, just a handful, the simpler the better. I’ve found that the end of the row, the frontline employee, it’s hard to focus on more than just two or three things at any given moment.
So really simplifying business plans, simplifying go-to-market strategies –it’s about the right clients. It’s the bigger elephants, the mammoths that you’re hunting. It’s not about a race to more clients; it’s a race to the right clients and providing real, lasting value on their behalf.
I’ll give you an example. I used to be the kind of guy that goes to a networking event, and it was kind of like, how many people can I talk to before this day is over? And how many business cards can I collect and then follow up with? Which I now know was the wrong mindset. Now the mindset is, is there a person or two in this room that I should get to know? And that’s it. There might be hundreds, but what are the one or two relationships that I can walk out of here that might benefit her or him or might benefit myself?
I think slowing down, taking a moment, and just being strategic with the decisions, the relationships, and the initiatives within an agency or a business in general – those are a handful of things that I’ve seen time and time again have proven themselves out, and a level of setting for the next agency and doing it right. I’d hopefully take that with me.
The last thing I’ll say with that – my two words for the year of 2020, which was well before COVID was a thing, were “deliberate” and “uncomfortable.” Those were the two words I wanted to take into the year. I wanted to be more deliberate in the decisions I made, in the turns that I took skiing. I wanted to be uncomfortable. I wanted to do those things that would put myself not only out of my comfort zone, but cause me to grow and stretch. 2020 just kind of took care of itself. I feel like in the future, that’s where the growth happens, individually and with a team. So those are some words that continue to fuel me.
ROB: That’s all fascinating. It’s very interesting to think about how the tone of those first interactions or the ongoing interactions with someone in a social setting sets it up. You can have a transactional interaction with them, seeking a transactional sale, or you can go deep and it sets the table for whatever you do eventually to be deep. It seems like there’s symmetry there.
PHIL: And the best clients that tend to stick around never begin from a transactional sense. Here as an agency, the two things we do well – one of those is digital, but the other that we do just as well is relationships. If you don’t have both, you don’t have a long tenured client. You tend to have a lot more churn. You tend to not be an integral partner of their business, and that’s, I think, what clients value long term.
ROB: Perfect. Phil, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. When people want to reach you and connect with you and Max Connect Marketing, where should they go to find you?
PHIL: The only social channel I’m regularly on is LinkedIn. Profile Phil Case, linkedin.com/in/philcase/. Our website is maxconnect.com.
ROB: Excellent. Thanks for sharing your journey, Phil. Congrats on everything, and onwards and upwards for Max Connect.
PHIL: Hey, thank you so much. Great to be with you today.
ROB: All right. Thanks. Be well.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Omi Diaz-Cooper is CEO at Diaz & Cooper Advertising, a digital “growth agency” that focuses on developing tight strategic plans and transforming client websites into top-performing salespeople. Omi says that websites are no longer “set it and forget it”—they are “living things that need to be producing” for clients. Since Covid, even companies that used to have “catalog” websites have found the need to proactively nurture prospects along the customer value journey.
Engaging and locking-in relationships with customers before they are ready to purchase is essential. People may start out merely seeking information. Providing great content and thought leadership will encourage today’s digitally-empowered potential clients to “keep coming back” until they are ready to buy. Nurturing them after the sale turns them continues the client-journey as customers become repeat customers and provide references.
Diaz & Cooper utilizes data-backed optimization to build a predictable system of growth for two industry verticals – travel/tourism and online retailers. When Covid struck, travel and tourism revenues took a dive . . . and business for companies that sold things online soared. Omi agrees that “anybody who didn’t have an ecommerce store who ever needed to decided they needed one pretty quickly.” Diaz & Cooper is both a Shopify Certified Agency and a HubSpot Gold Solutions Partner.
Omi loves the travel industry and expects that it will rebound. She explains that most people who love to travel will do a lot of online inspirational research before they book. They may be looking for a unique experience or an adventure, seeking something new to surprise them, or to go somewhere where they know exactly what to expect. During the research phase, Omi says, “You have to get them to sign up for something so you can remarket to them with an email.” She recommends offering such things as destination information or tips on how to pack for a given climate to build value so people keep returning to your site. Engagement needs to be an iterative process where each stage brings opportunities to remarket. If potential customers book outside your brand’s website, it is hard to recapture the relationship. After an individual becomes a guest at your venue, remarket to them for great reviews and references.
In this interview, Omi talks about how agency focus has shifted. At the turn of the century, agencies created concepts, gave the concepts away in pitches, backed everything up with an invented rationale, and made money by handing accounts off to lower-paid junior executives, padding time sheets, or through media commissions. In the past five to ten years, the focus has shifted to consumer first, with senior-level strategy development, billing based on value provided to clients, and integration of constantly evolving technological innovations.
Omi can be reached Twitter at @diazcooperor on the agency’s website at www.diazcooper.com. The website offers a variety of audits and calls to action that visitors may find of value.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Omi Diaz-Cooper, CEO of Diaz & Cooper Advertising based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Omi.
OMI: Thanks, Rob. It’s really great to be here.
ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Diaz & Cooper and where the firm excels?
OMI: Absolutely. We really think of ourselves as a growth agency rather than a traditional marketing shop. Our focus is really on transforming our clients’ websites into top performing salespeople. How we do that, or rather our secret sauce, is really data-backed optimization.
We want to create a predictable system of growth. We believe websites are living things that need to be producing for our clients, especially since nowadays, consumers are just so much more digitally empowered than ever before. The old ways of building websites, of setting them and forgetting them, and the old ways of how you used to reach customers online really have to evolve. So, we’re kind of a bunch of data nerds who understand and love the customer value journey. [laughs]
ROB: That seems like it can be better for everyone, because so often the website is this giant project that people work on, they get the website out the door, they work with someone to get it done, they don’t talk to them for 2 years – maybe they do talk to them 2 years later – and then you rebuild everything from scratch because the universe has changed. Having a framework where the site can evolve and where the relationship between the agency and the brand can continue – I guess if you’re cynical, you’d say it looks like you’re just keeping them on the hook, but realistically, something has to change every month unless you don’t expect anything at all from the website.
OMI: Yeah, exactly. That’s why we really focus on people who are actually selling something online. We do well with lead gen, but where we really shine and what really jazzes us is seeing our client numbers go up in analytics, making more and more revenue for our clients, but also connecting them to the people who will have some sort of an enhancement in their life experience by connecting to this particular brand.
Like you said, it’s really not about those brochure sites of “set it and forget it.” It’s really about growth-driven design, and that’s driven by actual visitor data. And those things change. We saw the huge changes that have happened over the last 6 months in consumer behavior. If you had a dusty old site that you hadn’t touched in 2 or 3 years, you bet your bottom dollar that you’re touching it now.
ROB: Right. Omi, you mentioned being able to tie something back to the bottom line and measurability. Are there particular industries that you find that Diaz & Cooper engages with most often?
OMI: Yeah, we have two pretty big industry niches. The first one, believe it or not, is in travel/tourism. We’ve worked with everything from local attractions of an aquarium in Tampa that’s pretty famous and has actually been in a movie to global brands like Regent Seven Seas and Royal Caribbean. I have a lot of faith in the travel industry, even though obviously it got whacked pretty bad 6 months ago. We can talk about that a little bit later. So that’s one niche.
But again, it’s all about generating bookings online. For example, we currently have an airline client, and it’s all about generating those bookings. Then the other piece of it is more of a peer ecommerce place, so retail businesses that are selling something online through Shopify, for example. We are a Shopify Certified Agency as well as a HubSpot Gold Solutions Partner.
ROB: That’s an interesting place to be. Quite often, when people think about HubSpot, they think very B2B, but HubSpot is also a lot about the customer journey. The past couple years – certainly not this year, but the 2 years prior, we recorded this podcast at the Inbound Conference because they get great speakers in there, and the advantage of recording in person is really helpful. It makes for a great conversation.
Talk a little bit about how to think about – I think booking travel is a customer journey, much like buying a B2B product. What are the stages when somebody’s thinking about travel that might make sense to us but be not intuitive to somebody looking from the outside?
OMI: For sure, travel, and especially with more and more people doing so much research online, travel begins at the inspiration. Unless you’re traveling for business and you have to have travel and you don’t have that much choice in the matter, most people that love to travel really are looking for an experience, something unique – they either want adventure and they want to be surprised, or they want to know exactly what to expect. Either way, they’re going to do a lot of that inspirational research online.
That’s the piece where a lot of companies, like for example tour companies, have really not been doing super well in the past. I’ll give you an example. Have you ever landed in a new city and gotten out of the station and seen people handing out little flyers or little postcards for bus tours or an excursion locally? Honestly, that’s been one of the largest ways that a lot of these tour companies have marketed themselves, and they’ve really ignored that pre-travel inspiration research aspect of it. By the time someone’s landed nowadays, they might be pretty set with their itinerary and they may not even look twice at whatever excursion you have to offer.
So, it’s really about trying to capture the imagination of people who are at that research stage and then having engaging content. From there it’s a pretty traditional ecommerce journey. You have to engage them with content, you have to get them to hopefully sign up. If they’re not ready to book yet, you have to get them to sign up for something so you can remarket to them with email. And then after they become a guest, how do you remarket to them so that they give you a great review and refer you to others?
It’s really looking at everything from the time that they first think about wanting to travel through turning them into a raving fan.
ROB: It seems like it could be getting very divergent. It seems like there would be a pull. A lot of the travel booking sites would probably be trying to pull these brands into their own marketplace to book alongside their travel, to book alongside their AirBnB. But it seems to me if you’re doing that, you’ve lost complete control of the customer relationship. How is that pull working on the tours? Or is it not much of a factor yet?
OMI: It’s beginning to be. For example, I think Bookings Holdings, which is the owners of Booking.com, they realize the potential of the excursions & tours area of travel tourism, and they actually purchased a booking engine called Fair Harbor. Again, they want to have more control of that customer journey. But you’re right; that means the brand themselves loses that a little bit.
It’s really important to have a mechanism by which you can engage with the potential customers before they actually book so that they’re already looking to you for information, whether it’s destination information or whether you’re giving them tips on how to dress or how to pack for a particular climate. Whatever the case might be, it’s going back to good old-fashioned content creation and thought leadership where you really want to be able to establish that relationship before they book. Because if they book outside of your brand’s website, you’ve lost that relationship until you can capture their email again or something like that.
It’s really about providing touchpoints prior as well as throughout. As soon as they book, what are you doing to nurture them before they show up? Unless it’s like a same day thing. Obviously, every brand is a little bit different, but those basics are the same as far as wanting to figure out ways to create more touchpoints throughout the relationship so that you don’t lose that touch with the guest.
ROB: And they might even be able to capture some of the referral revenue out to the accommodations, out to the plane flights and whatnot, right?
OMI: Yeah, that’s actually pretty common in the industry. For example, concierges at a hotel, if they book a tour or something like that, they get a piece of the revenue. That’s a pretty common practice. How do we do that digitally, and how do we do it digitally effectively so that you’re not pushing things on people that don’t make sense? That’s the rub.
ROB: Got it. March 2020 must have been quite an inversion of your business, because you have this travel vertical that undoubtedly was hit hard, but conversely you have this ecommerce side of things that anybody who didn’t have an ecommerce store who ever needed to decided they needed one probably pretty quickly.
OMI: Yes. [laughs] That was definitely our saving grace, that we did have that part of the business. We had already been Shopify partners for several years and have had a lot of success with some retailers. Because yeah, literally about 60% of our agency’s revenue paused within a week or two of March, the terrible Ides of March. [laughs]
ROB: Were people looking for any sort of store to sell their thing online? Were there particular types of products that seemed to accelerate faster?
OMI: Obviously anything related to health and toilet paper and sanitation and that kind of thing. Obviously all of that was huge. But overall I think it took a little time for people who had never done ecommerce before. They knew that they needed to go into it, but they weren’t sure how to go about it. And that’s not really our core target audience. It was really more about finding more of those clients who already had a decent ecommerce shop and how do we make it better? How do we do conversion rate optimization so that they capture more of the market?
Because the behavior really changed. The behavior changed in that people were less loyal to specific brands and they were looking for bargains and looking for something that was going to make sense for their budgets. Again, yes, there were a lot more people buying online, but there were also a lot more people with less money to spend.
ROB: Right. It all flipped very quickly. We had one client who was in a different business who decided to spin up a third party marketplace for challenger and interesting food brands. You can imagine, they’re talking to all these companies that are used to selling stuff in grocery stores; now they’re not because nobody is stopping and browsing around a grocery store. If they’re going at all, they’re going to find their toilet paper and their core essentials.
The shift from March until now – at the beginning, everyone they talked to said, “No, we don’t have a store.” It has come so quickly to now they fully expect this client to integrate with their Shopify store and integrate their order history. The knowledge and sophistication really turned amazingly quickly.
OMI: Yeah. I read somewhere that the CEO of Microsoft said that we experienced 2 years of digital transformation in 2 months, and that’s exactly what it felt like. [laughs]
ROB: Oh yes, it felt like a lot of things, for sure. Omi, when you look back, tell us about the origin story of Diaz & Cooper. How did you decide to get this business rolling?
OMI: That’s actually a funny story. A little bit personal, but I’m going to go ahead and share it. I had been in the ad agency world for, I don’t know, 10 years, maybe 15. I can’t even remember. I had decided to step off the hamster wheel and freelance. I wanted a little bit less pressure; I wanted a little bit more intimate contact with my clients and all of that. I also wanted to start a family around that time.
After about a year, I was finally pregnant. I was about 7 months pregnant or so, and my husband and co-founder Todd Cooper came home from work – he was an associate creative director of a kind of large agency here at the time – and he said, “Hey, I want to quit my job too. Let’s do this for real.” So, I looked down at my pregnant belly, looked at him, looked at my belly again, and went, “Are you crazy?” [laughs] But then I realized, okay, there’s a gap in the market we can fill. Why not? Let’s try it out.
At that time – this was back in 2000-2001 – most local agencies created work in a vacuum. All the agencies we had worked for would come up with creative and then invent a rationale. Nobody was talking about data, nobody was talking about putting the consumer first. A lot of agencies were hyper-focused on getting creative awards – or even worse, as soon as they landed an account, they just dumped it off on a junior executive.
Because strategy was not valued and creative was given away in pitches, the only way agencies could make real money was through media commissions. That really misaligns the agency and the client goals. Tim Williams talks a lot about this, how with hourly billing, the agency is penalized for being efficient, so you either have to make up time sheets or just make a lot of money through media commissions. A lot of that has definitely changed in the last 5-10 years, but back then that was the status quo.
We really learned how to value what we do based on the value that we achieved for our clients, and that’s really what we wanted to do with the agency from the inception. We wanted to provide senior level strategy, access to senior level thinking to all the clients, and be able to feed our intense curiosity for new technologies.
ROB: And if LinkedIn is to be believed, it looks like he joined in early to mid 2001.
OMI: Yeah.
ROB: So you put all of your family eggs in this basket, you have a child incoming, and then you have 9/11. You’re now in your third turning of the world upside down, between COVID, the financial crisis, and 9/11. How did 9/11 and that time affect your business? And were you in travel then? Because that was another travel mess.
OMI: Yeah, it was. Luckily, 9/11, as horrific as it was, really didn’t have the long-lasting effects to the industry that COVID has had. We did have a couple of travel/tourism clients at the time. I think we had a couple of hotels. They didn’t really change a lot. That didn’t really affect us horribly.
One thing that did, though, was the real estate bubble bursting. 2008 was one that really whacked us because we were pretty deep in the real estate market. Probably 10 out of 15 clients were in real estate. So that was another big wackadoodle. We learned a lot of hard lessons.
Big agencies treat employees like cogs in a wheel, but for us they were almost like family, so it was hard to sit down and say, “Oh my gosh, what staff do we need to cut? How do we make it so that people can survive this?” That was just a big lesson in making sure that we weren’t overextended not just in terms of staff but also in terms of expenses. We had a big fancy office and things like that. All of those things really played a part in us reassessing the model itself and being able to focus more on the team and less on anything extraneous so that we could be more resilient when things like this happen.
And inevitably something will happen again. It’s almost our 20th year in business. Bring it! What’s next, world? [laughs]
ROB: Yeah, you’re still here. Did you have an office in January, and do you have an office now?
OMI: We did. This is another semi-funny story. We were ROWE Certified back in 2012. ROWE is Results Only Work Environment. Obviously, from pretty early on, it made sense for us to focus on results versus somebody spending X amount of time in a seat in an office. So we’ve been at least hybrid since 2012. By hybrid, I mean some days some people come into the office, some days some people don’t.
Back in October of last year, we made the decision that we were going to go 100% remote. We looked around and we saw that almost all the big HubSpot partners were either 100% remote or nearly 100% remote, and a lot of our clients are not even in the vicinity. They’re not traveling to our offices all the time. If anything, we would travel more to them for presentations. So we said, let’s not have an office anymore. Let’s go 100% remote. We can always do a WeWork type situation if we have to do a conference or a meeting or find other ways to meet as a team.
So we had already made that decision in October. We had already let our landlord know we weren’t going to renew our lease in the summer, and we wrote a blog post about how to measure results remotely and things like that, kind of in preparation for announcing that we were going to 100% remote. Then, of course, COVID hit 3-4 months after that, and we were already ready from the standpoint of letting go of the office. That was already in the works. So we were already ready.
And of course, we were already hybrid for many years, so all of our systems are online, our management software is online, our servers, everything. It was a really seamless transition.
ROB: Do you think it’ll be completely remote when the world comes back? Or do you think you’ll have some sort of default remote? Some people were 3 or 4 days in the office before. Do you think it’ll be 3 or 4 days remote and 1 or 2 in an office if you choose, or are you thinking doesn’t matter, probably fully distributed, maybe not even all in the same city or state?
OMI: We already don’t have everybody in the same city or state. We’ve had employees as far away as Italy. Today we work with a U.S. designer out of Mexico; I have writers that are in North Florida. So we already have people. I think the beauty is not just the flexibility for employees, that they have a much more balanced lifestyle and they’re actually a lot more productive. The real beauty is that you can get the best talent no matter where they are.
I have a very long-time employee, someone that’s been with us 10 years, who recently let us know, “Hey, since we’re going to be 100% remote, I think I’m going to be moving. I want to try out a new city.” His roommate got a job in New Orleans, and he’s like, “I’m moving to New Orleans with my roommate. Is that cool?” I’m like, “Yeah, of course. Why not?”
So I think moving forward, if we do have some sort of an office, it would probably be more one of those contracted things where you can have a coworking space somewhere. It would have to be pretty flexible because, like I said, we meet with people usually in their cities. So, it would have to be something where we could meet in different cities.
ROB: Right. Our team is very distributed as well. When our team still wants to work remote but not in their house, we may try to equip them with some sort of local coworking membership.
The bigger challenge, I think, is in relationship and team rapport. Have you thought at all, or have you done, something to bring a distributed team together and to maybe gain some of the benefit of having been in the same place, even if that’s not the norm?
OMI: Yeah. Obviously, we do a lot of video meetings. We do little celebrations online. We send each other things. Culture is such a big part of the agency. Culture is so important. But we’re playing around with the idea of maybe having quarterly live meetings in, like you said, a coworking membership type of space, and even like a retreat once a year when we can all travel again. I’m really looking forward to doing that. This is our first year, and I’m definitely itching to travel. So that’s definitely something that as soon as it’s safe for everyone, we would likely have maybe a once a year agency retreat.
ROB: That’s going to be such an interesting ongoing conversation, I think, the agency retreat. We have one employee in Santiago, Chile, and I’m hoping we all go see him.
OMI: Oh, that’d be fun.
ROB: That’s some logistics right there.
OMI: Yeah.
ROB: We’ve talked about some lessons already, but what are some things you’ve learned in building Diaz & Cooper that you might like to do differently if you were starting over right now?
OMI: I will tell you that I would’ve done the remote thing a lot sooner. Like I said, the benefits of being able to attract talent from all over the U.S. and things like that – I would definitely have done that a lot sooner. I would’ve pushed harder to go fully remote sooner rather than later.
Also, moving to more of a value or performance pricing model versus hourly billing. We did that pretty early on. If I could do it from the inception, I would’ve.
One of the ways we started when we first started our agency was we were kind of a little creative boutique, and we did a lot of ghost creative for bigger agencies. We moved away from that pretty quick, but I probably would’ve done it quicker, looking back, because we got a lot more out of getting referrals from those bigger agencies and having them rely on us for things that they couldn’t do. I probably would’ve done that sooner and created our customer base larger more quickly.
ROB: Right.
OMI: The other really big lesson – this is a plug to all those wonderful agency consultants out there – there’s some really good ones out there, like Jason Swank and Karl Sakas. I would’ve invested in a consultant sooner as well. Because you don’t know what you don’t know. [laughs]
ROB: Jason was an early guest. He was once a fellow Atlantan, although I do believe that’s not the case anymore. Not that you’d see anybody in your same city right now very much.
When you talk about, especially on the consulting and advice consultants give you there, a few different perspectives on value-based pricing, how do you think about arriving at a cost for an engagement? Do you have packages? Are you using some sort of estimated effort but then adjusting so that it’s not hourly and you can have comfort giving certainty to the client?
OMI: That’s kind of a bird’s nest. I’ll tell you that agencies will fight over this. “No, my way’s best,” “My way’s best.” We looked at the whole point system that was pretty popular with the HubSpot Partners a couple years back.
What we arrived at, what works best for us and most of our clients, is we do have certain packaged programs. However, they’re highly, highly customizable. We always, always start with a strategy engagement. It’s a limited time. It’s a value for the client. It’s not exactly a loss leader for us, but it’s not exactly a big money maker either.
What that allows us to do is, number one, see how we work with the client. Really shape where we think the account should go. Really understand what their customers’ journeys are, what needs optimization, and really be able to craft the program that will work best for them. It’s also kind of a dating before you marry for both of us. They can see what it’s like to work with us, we see what it’s like to work with them. We can see if we’re a really good fit.
And then after that, there are programs at different levels that they can sign onto depending on how fast they want to reach their goals. Everything is goal-based. Everything is all around reaching certain SMART goals that we define during the strategy process.
Then where the performance comes in is certain built-in bonuses for going beyond certain expected performance metrics.
ROB: Makes a ton of sense. No matter how you approach the price for what’s done, I think one of the big unlocks that a lot of agencies struggle with is how to define an initial structured engagement that is paid discovery that also delivers value to the clients.
OMI: Yes. And it does have to deliver value. It can’t just be a laundry list of B.S. It really does need to be strategic. And what we deliver, they could literally take it and run or go with somebody else and do it. A lot of people are hesitant of that, but I find that the approach that some of the prepackages that I’ve seen of “Well, you get four blog posts a month and six social media posts and an hour of SEO” – how can you determine that that’s what they need before you even get to know their business? They may not need blog posts. They may have somebody that does it internally and maybe you’re just reviewing and helping them out with the topic strategy and the SEO.
Until you have a good strategic plan, you’re really just checking off deliverables, and that’s not what we’re about. We’re about delivering a result, and you can’t do that unless you have a good plan.
ROB: That’s super key. This is probably a topic we could spend a lot of time on with a lot of people. It’s a lever to growth, and it’s a lever to not seeming like – you don’t want to sound like you’re asking to bill hours to fill out their RFP. That’s where it comes from, this defensive “Somebody asked me to do a thing and I didn’t have an answer for them, so it cost me time, so I’m going to throw up a defense.” But that positioning and framing towards value really helps you stand out and it helps people have some skin in the game with you while also you freeing them to go anywhere and also not wanting to.
OMI: Yeah, exactly.
ROB: Excellent. Omi, when people want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way for them to connect with you and Diaz & Cooper?
OMI: We are on Twitter @diazcooper. Also our website at www.diazcooper.com. Those are the best ways to reach us. There’s all kinds of different calls to action and website audits and all kinds of things that are of value that we provide free on our website. So that’s probably the best way to reach us.
ROB: Sounds good. Omi, thank you so much for making time to come on the podcast. You have shared some wisdom from the year, some experience, some nuggets to carry forward, some really good stuff. I wish you and Diaz & Cooper the best, especially as you are able to not only keep your ecommerce folks happy, but bring those travel clients back into the world. Sounds like a good season ahead.
OMI: Yeah, we’re excited about it.
ROB: Thank you so much.
OMI: Thank you.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
For 15 years, Leah Norton, Managing Partner at Fishhook, has been leading this communications team which focuses on “getting out the message” for churches and faith-based ministries. Leah had left her previous agency to stay home and raise her young daughters. She started working part-time at Fishhook, coming on board to build out the founder's ideas and work on long-term client relationships. Last March, with her girls in their teens and in the midst of the pandemic, she bought out the founding partner, Evan McBroom, and brought in a new partner, Shayla Kenworthy
In this interview, Leah explains the similarities and differences between secular and faith-based marketing. As an example, many churches, in an attempt to be good stewards of their resources, are more likely to try to do their own marketing. The churches that work with Fishhook soon see that bringing on an outside partner is an investment that boosts ROI. Once Fishhook is involved, assessments of an organization's mission, goals, and its communications lead to branding and marketing strategies with a full range of integrated web design, social engagement, and YouTube channel “pieces.”
Fishhook works to help churches uncover and embrace their stories and unique qualities and then to craft communications and marketing efforts that serve the congregations by bringing “hope and encouragement” to the church community. Much of what is happening in marketing in “the rest of the world” informs Fishhook's initiatives. Fishhook's goal for 2021 is to help client churches “make their communications very personal, creative, and authentic for the people they’re trying to reach.”
The agency is currently a team of seven – communication strategists, writers, graphic designers, visual designers, and web developers – and looking to hire.
Client churches range in size from 40 members to as many as 80,000. Leah says that it is important that there be consistency between people's online experience and what they would experience on campus or in the church building. Covid has increased churches' awareness of online opportunities . . . digital programs that used to be secondary offerings are often now the main focus.
Leah is a strong believer in balancing priorities . . . in being “all-in” at work, but also being able to pull away and be “all-in” with family and friends outside of work.
She can be reached on her agency's website at fishhook.us, on Facebook and Instagram at Fishhook HQ, or by email at leah@fishhook.us. The agency provides a wealth of articles, webinars, podcasts, and videos covering communications and communications planning, strategies, branding, and digital ministry at: fishhook.us/learn.
Transcript Below:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Leah Norton. She is the Managing Partner at Fishhook based in my home state of Indiana. She’s in Indianapolis. Welcome to the podcast, Leah.
LEAH: Thanks so much, Rob. It’s really a delight to talk with you today. Thanks for having me.
ROB: Yeah, it’s great to have you here. We’ve already had a great warmup conversation about Indiana winters and so on. But let’s talk about you. Let’s talk about Fishhook. Tell us about the firm and where the firm excels.
LEAH: Yeah, thanks for asking. The Fishhook team, we are 17 years old. I’ve been part of the work and leading the team for the last 15 years. Evan McBroom was our founding partner. Believe it or not, in the midst of the pandemic, in March, I fully bought him out and then brought on a new partner, Shayla Kenworthy. That’s added all kinds of interest and drama to the year in the midst of the pandemic. But it’s been good. It’s just a great opportunity, and it’s been a joy to continue leading in this season.
We have a very interesting niche. We’re a communications team that focuses on serving churches. All of our clients are churches and faith-based ministries. Evan, the founder, and I both came from corporate and agency backgrounds where we were working with incredible, large companies, organizations, and we loved that work. Loved doing communications marketing with those large corporations. For us, our faith is an important part of who we are, and we looked around and knew that churches and faith-based ministries and organizations needed more help. They needed an outside partner that would come alongside them to help them communicate and market well to serve people and to get their message out, their story told.
So Fishhook was born, again, 17 years old. What we really focus on is coming alongside our churches to help them uncover their distinct story, what makes them special and unique, and to help them then embrace that story and then translate it through their communications and marketing efforts to serve people, to bring people hope and encouragement. I would say that is really our focus.
We’re a team of seven and growing. We’re actually looking to hire. We’re a team of communication strategists, writers, graphic designers, visual designers, and web developers. We both work on the strategy side to help our churches uncover their distinct story, and then as they’re translating that into personal, creative, and authentic communications – those are the keywords we love to say – as we look to 2021, we want to help our churches make their communications very personal, creative, and authentic for the people they’re trying to reach. That’s what we strive to do.
A lot of that is online, obviously, through social efforts and web, and then in other ways as well. So that's our focus. That’s who we are.
ROB: That is a super fascinating niche, and that is one we have certainly not had on the podcast before. So I’m eager to dig in deeper here. When I think of churches and marketing, first of all, you’re talking about a completely different kind of conversion than most marketers, and that’s fascinating. [laughs]
LEAH: But there are similarities. It’s interesting. There are parallels. We want to be learning and growing with many people, but I think of inbound marketing – the Inbound Conference over the years, that community has been a huge inspiration to us. That’s just one example. And there’s so much to learn as you think about what people maybe in the more secular world are trying to do with their marketing and sales efforts, or as they’re working with employees or shareholders or trying to acquire more new customers. There’s just so many principles. We are constantly learning from what’s going on in the rest of the world and in the marketplace and thinking about how that applies to our churches and ministries.
ROB: It is perhaps the original customer journey before we got so wise in these new marketing ways.
LEAH: Right.
ROB: When I think about churches and staffing and particularly communications, it seems to me that quite often, they take the communications piece in-house. More than most functions, they try to DIY. What is it that you’ve seen in terms of churches and perhaps their tendency to DIY and how they reach that moment where they actually realize they can maybe get in a better cadence working with somebody like you?
LEAH: Great question. I think in a church setting – and this also probably applies to other nonprofits. I think there’s such a focus on being good stewards with the resources they have. A lot of times you bring on staff and you try to really be careful with the resources, the budget that you have. In a nonprofit setting, for example, you know that donors have given money or you’ve worked hard to receive grants and that kind of funding, so you want to be so careful with those dollars and those budgets and stewarding it all well.
I think more and more, our churches are seeing that, my gosh, there’s so much value that comes with outside resources, outside partners. The folks that want to work with us really see it as a valuable investment that brings so much ROI to their work. A lot of the folks that contact us or we get connected with and start working with us, they know it’s a significant investment, and we don’t take that lightly. We are so grateful for what they want to invest with our team, and we always hope that there’s lots of momentum and fruit and results that really serve them well.
ROB: What’s a typical range of members or attenders for the types of churches you work with most often?
LEAH: We get asked this all the time because I think people assume that we work with maybe the largest churches who have maybe more resources available. We say at Fishhook that we want to help every church that is connected to us, is reaching out to us. We have the privilege of working with churches across the country. Rob, we work with some churches that have 40, 60, 80 people all the way up to churches that have 60,000 or 80,000 people, and everyone in between.
For our team, that is just a blast that we get to come alongside churches of different denominations, different sizes, different locations. We work really diligently to listen to them and their situation. Who are they? Where are they located? Who are they serving? We try to be so empathetic, and like I said, to listen so well to what their situation is, and then to customize our work for that. We say we work with churches of all shapes and sizes, and we really do.
ROB: It’s really, really interesting, the range of sizes and the range of communications. There’s a whole lot of different sizes of church in the world, obviously. What you do reminds me a little bit in parallel of Dime. Are you familiar with them?
LEAH: Sure, tell me. Tell me more.
ROB: My understanding is that instead of marketing, Dime is the finance arm of a church, where you need some expertise outside of yourself. You need to have somebody in a church to do the books.
LEAH: Definitely.
ROB: There are so many stories within churches of somebody running off with the money. So having somebody guard that and even guard your ad budget as well, and use it well – it seems like it’s an expertise that is really hard to hire for within a church.
Now, one trend I am starting to see significantly – and maybe we are just extra crazy down here in Georgia, but –
LEAH: I think the whole world is crazy right now, Rob. [laughs] The whole world is crazy, oh my goodness.
ROB: [laughs] The churches that are meeting in person are starting to really hammer that message. I am seeing this on signs, I am seeing Facebook ads for churches that are saying, “Hey, we’re meeting in person.” That’s a very obvious differentiator for some people. Everybody wants to meet together. I’m not sure I would recommend it, but we will sidestep that for a moment. It’s a question of how, I think also. It’s a question of how that needs to be resonant.
But you, I would imagine, also work with some churches that are choosing not to meet in person right now, which seems to present a tremendous marketing challenge. I think we can probably extract something out to other businesses from this. How are you looking at these churches that are not meeting in person? How are they engaging new people? How are they differentiating? How do you make this “Join a Zoom call and watch our Sunday video” appealing? Or is there a completely different strategy you’re seeing that’s also working?
LEAH: You are asking some great questions, because this year has actually been an unbelievable year for all of our churches. I would say in years past, most of our churches were very focused on what they were doing in person – the experience that people would have as they came onto their campus or came into their church. There were online offerings as well, maybe either services being streamed online or available on demand or maybe a group or a class that you could be a part of online, but that was almost like a secondary offering that our churches made available for folks.
Well, we all have lived through 2020. In March, April, as our nation was really shut down, our churches were so quick to respond. Obviously, they knew they needed to close to be safe and to make that the priority, and then very quickly they made digital, their online opportunities for their congregations and communities, the main focus.
Even now, several of our churches are meeting in person; they are making that available – but all of the data that we see – I would say most of our churches are seeing less than half of what they had seen pre-COVID. They’re seeing less than half of their numbers coming back. For a variety of reasons, people are choosing to stay home and be incredibly safe. We hear our pastors and church leaders wanting people to do that. They want people’s health and safety to be a top priority. So our churches continue to make those online opportunities a high priority and are thrilled to be connecting with people in that way.
ROB: I feel like I could pull on so many threads and go so many different directions here. One thing that does fascinate me a little bit also – when you’re working with churches, because a lot of the job is on the weekend, I think many churches struggle with boundaries. When you have weekly communications that need to go out, for the sanity of your own team, Leah, I imagine you have to set some boundaries that you hold to that the client doesn’t really like. How do you think about being adaptable, but creating a cadence and a process that is respectful of what needs to go out and also respectful of your team, even if the client doesn’t like it?
LEAH: You’re right, Rob. There’s so many ways that we could take this conversation. This has become so important for our team this year, and this applies to our churches. I think it would apply to your listeners as well. No matter who you are, where you work, this year has rocked all of our worlds, and I believe it’s been a huge gut check time for every single one of us. Are you passionate about the work you’re doing?
So for us at Fishhook, for our churches – but I’m hearing this from my friends who work in all kinds of companies and organizations; maybe it’s even a friend who’s a stay-at-home mom or dad - this has been a year where we’re all feeling unsettled and you’ve had to dig deep to carry on. So for us, with our team, we’ve done a lot of soul-searching. Are we called to our mission? And how are we going to live that out?
What we’re finding through these months is that we feel more passionate about our work than we ever have, so we kind of let passion over boundaries sometimes drive us. How that looks for our Fishhook team is we try to just be all-in with our work, but then all-in with our families or our friends or things outside of work. Sometimes there is a time to run hard to meet a deadline for a client or to be available, maybe as you’re saying, on a Saturday or Sunday if something comes up, to be able to help them and troubleshoot.
But then you know there’s also a time to have rest and downtime and to step away. So we are always trying to balance those priorities. In a given week, if someone jumped in to do something to help one of our churches on the weekend, are they taking some time during the week off, or are they working shorter days or whatever? So I would say day in, day out, week in, week out, we’re trying to juggle that. We work with our folks to make sure that they’re getting to be the person they want to be, both in the midst of our work, being super passionate about our work, but also as a wife, as a husband, as a mom, as a dad, as a friend, as someone involved in their own church, in their own community.
ROB: That’s a great combination of focus on the client but also on providing that rest when it’s needed. You mentioned an interesting dimension. Even the journey of the firm is interesting here. You came into this company two years in. How did you become enticed to join and eventually even to go so far as to buy out your partner?
LEAH: Thanks for asking. It’s my own personal story. Again, I’ve mentioned my faith means so much to me. For me, I just feel like God has been at work in my life and He opened up some opportunities for me. Step by step, I was able to take those, and it leads to where I now have full-time work with this growing team and getting to do work that I care so much about. That’s a huge blessing.
I would say 15 years ago, Evan McBroom, our founder, had just started the firm, and his hope – it was kind of aspirational at that point – his hope was to serve churches and ministries. He was definitely getting some traction and taking on different projects. He is an entrepreneur. He has lots of ideas.
We had started our family. I have an 18-year-old and a 16-year-old, and I’ve been here 15 years, so I had left the agency that I’d been with for several years and was staying at home with my children. I knew Evan; we got together for coffee. The opportunity to do some part-time work at that point so that I could be at home with my daughters and to also do this work with him to start building a team – I was at the right place at the right time.
Really, our skillsets, Evan’s and mine, matched so much. He had big ideas and was looking for someone to come alongside and really help put arms and legs to that. And that’s really my skillset, to really build things out and to work on longer term relationships with our clients. He had gotten some initial projects going, and I had thoughts and ideas about how to make that work that would be even more strategic and longer term to support our churches and ministries.
For me, that is a huge lesson as a leader. I’m always looking for who is my complement, who is our team’s complement. As you’re looking for who will lead with you, as you’re looking at who will serve on your team, who brings what you need? Who complements you? We all have our different gifts and strengths, but who can come alongside you and really propel you forward?
That’s how it started with Evan, and we’ve been able to build the team. We have an incredible team. They all care so much about our mission and add so much to the work that we do, and I would say of the seven of us, we need every single person. I could literally walk through each person and say what they bring to our team that is just so important, both within our team as we work together internally, but then also as we serve and support our clients.
ROB: For the sake of the audience that may not know what a typical cadence of communications looks like for a church, what are the different touchpoints of communication that you find yourself involved in? Let’s say for a church that’s using most of what you do, let’s say on a weekly or monthly basis.
LEAH: Sure thing. For us, our favorite relationships are the ongoing ones where we really get to know – and I would assume this is true for every agency setting, where it’s an ongoing relationship. There’s trust, there’s open communication. Those relationships where you can each say whatever you’re thinking – in a respectful way, but it’s like no question is dumb, no idea is too big or too small. I just love those kinds of relationships with our clients.
Often with our clients we start with branding work. Let me step back. We do assessment work and then branding work, and those parallel together. Those are a great complement together where we’re working to understand that church, how they’re communicating. Their key audiences are often their internal staff and leaders, their congregation, and then their community – and when I say community, I mean both locally, who is physically their local community, but then also online.
So, really assessing what their mission and goals are, what they’re trying to do, and then thinking about how their marketing and communications efforts can propel their mission and vision forward to connect with either young people or families or the people of their community, whatever goals they have set out. Often we’re assessing who they are and what we see and then working on brand development with them, and then working to carry that out.
What does that look like? Obviously we’re doing a lot with our churches and their online strategy and presence, so web work and social strategies, and what they’re doing with their YouTube channel. It’s fun because our churches, more and more, are thinking, “Where is our congregation and our community at? The people we want to connect with, we want to reach, where are they at? We want to be there too.” That’s what a lot of our work is spent on: “Who are you, church? Let’s define that. Let’s define your distinct story. Who are you already connecting with? Who’s part of your congregation? And who are you striving to connect with? Where are they? Let’s build communications and marketing efforts that will help you reach those people.”
In the old days, I don’t know, the ’80s or the ’90s, when I was growing up, in a church setting you would have a bulletin which was handed to you as you walked in on a Sunday morning. You’d maybe have a printed newsletter or a flyer or a postcard. There’s still a place for a couple of print pieces here and there, but so much of what we’re thinking about now is I would say two things. Their online strategy and how they’re connecting with people digitally – what they’re making available, out of weekend services typically, but also what they’re making available every day. How are they engaging with people online, answering questions, giving hope, encouragement? What support groups or classes are available? Really, churches are doing ministry every single day of the week, and obviously, online you can do it 24/7 as well. So helping our churches really stretch to connect and be ready where people are.
The other thing we think a lot about with our clients is their experience when people do come onto their campuses, interact with them, whether through an event or a service or whatever they might be doing within their church building. Is that experience reflective of who they are, what their brand is? Just trying to make all of this consistent so that any time you interact with a church, it’s on brand. It tells their story, and they’re bringing value to you.
ROB: Brand experience all the way through to churches. Makes sense once you say it and once you think about it. Leah, when you reflect on the journey so far with Fishhook, what are some lessons you’ve learned along the way? What might you do differently if you were starting anew – let’s say in 2021, so you don’t have to assume too much about 2020.
LEAH: Is this like lessons throughout my career?
ROB: What would you do differently in building Fishhook?
LEAH: If you do Enneagram, I’m a 3. Myers-Briggs, I’m an ESTJ. So I love to achieve things. Like, what’s our plan? Come hell or high water, let’s get it done. Let’s move forward. That can be my go-to or my default. What I’ve learned along the way – and goodness, 2020 has been an incredible reminder for this – is there’s a time to really be most focused on how I can help and serve others, and a lot of times it’s time to set aside my own personal agenda or thoughts.
In 2020, as I lead at Fishhook, there are times where it’s like “But this is what I want to happen. I want to move this forward. I’m ready to go.” And it’s like, you know what? That’s not what our team needs right now, or that’s not what our churches are capable of right now or asking for. It’s not a good fit for the situation. So I have to sometimes set aside my own personal drive or my agenda.
The other leaders – Shayla, Amy, who I lead with – they are so great at processing with me what’s going on and what’s right in this situation. We’re continually thinking, what does our team need? How can we be focused on serving each other as a team in this season? We have some internal values that we try to live out. And then with our clients, what do they really need? What will really propel them forward? Let’s care for them first, let’s build the relationship first, and then we’re going to help them go fast and far, we hope.
Those are some of the things I’ve been learning.
ROB: It sounds really helpful to have those sounding boards around you as well. Leah, when people want to connect with you and with Fishhook, where should they go to find you?
LEAH: We would love for folks to check us out online, fishhook.us. We just launched a new brand experience and a new website in recent weeks. So we are really trying to get even more focused on who we are and the value we bring to our churches. You’ll have to let us know. We’d love to hear from folks what you see as you take a look. We are trying to put out more and more content, so if you go to fishhook.us/learn, there’s all kinds of content there to interact with. We’d love to hear from people.
Also, on social media, Facebook and Instagram, we’re at Fishhook HQ for that. I’m happy for people to email me as well at leah@fishhook.us.
ROB: Excellent. Leah, thank you for coming on the podcast. Congratulations to you and Fishhook. This has been great to dive into an unfamiliar niche for this podcast, but also see how much really is theoretically consistent, even though the purpose is much higher in your case.
LEAH: Rob, thanks so much for the opportunity. Appreciate it.
ROB: All right. Thank you. Be well.
LEAH: Take care.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Waylon Tate is Principal at J. Waylon & Associates, a full spectrum PR and marketing agency that provides traditional public relations, digital outreach, and advertising services, mostly for startups. He and two of his friends with their own companies have created what Waylon refers to as a “communications trifecta,” with the ability to collectively and collaboratively meet every need an entrepreneurial startup might have. Web development, graphics, and photography? The client works with Waylon’s friend Tracy at Critical Launch. Printed material? The client may work with Waylon & Associate’s inhouse printshop or with Waylon’s friend Mikey at PrintRunner.
Although Marketing and PR are quite different fields, both rely on attention to the bigger picture and the longer game. With an understanding of both disciplines, Waylon believes it makes sense for his clients to be able to get both of these experiences “in the same place.” Public relations requires an understanding of what is “warm and fuzzy” to particular network and media audiences. Waylon works closely with each client to elicit their operational definition of PR. For some, it may be no more than editorial solicitation. Others may want to reach into the influencer market, an investment which Waylon often recommends, especially in direct-to-consumer businesses, for its ability to provide the biggest return on investment.
Influencers do not have to be “big names,” so much as they are people who have “come up through the ranks and are really good at taking pictures and developing a broad network of supporters.” Approaches to senior program producers or publication editors have to include not only the topic of conversation, but also how the material will resonate with that platform’s audience.
Waylon believes the days of the promotional press releases are past and suggests that they may no longer be effective because of the intense competition for “air space.” The key to everything is communications which, Waylon says, “is all about relationships.” Relationships with the editors and the writers the agency works with have far more impact than sending out press releases. You have to think, “What does an audience want to hear about?” Waylon believes that, in the coming months, ecommerce is “going to absolutely explode into a level we probably can’t even comprehend at the moment.”
Waylon did not start his career in any form of Marketing. After completing his Master in Public Policy (capstone project: Citizens Prosecutor Attorney), he finished a prestigious fellowship in Washington, D.C., and returned to Dallas to work in the District Attorney’s Office under the Texas’s first African-American DA. When the DA left office, Waylon had a choice: to take a cushy job in corporate communications . . . or to strike out on his own. Today, his public service experience plays into a new gig that he and Tracy started: Politicize.co. Waylon explains that their success is the result of reinterpreting what PR and marketing look like for progressive political campaigns. They use the same model and flow for political campaigns as they use for marketing restaurants and storefronts. The purpose is the same: to get people to buy into a brand.
Waylon can be reached on his agency’s website at: https://www.jwaylon.com/ or on politicize.co.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Waylon Tate, Principal at J. Waylon & Associates based in Dallas, Texas. Welcome to the podcast, Waylon.
WAYLON: Thanks, Rob, for having me.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by giving us a rundown of J. Waylon & Associates and the expertise of that business?
WAYLON: Absolutely. J. Waylon & Associates is a full spectrum PR and marketing agency here in Dallas, Texas. We really dive into both of those categories at the same time, handling everything from traditional public relations like editorial solicitation, navigating all of the editorial aspects of PR, but also diving pretty heavily into digital outreach and advertising as well.
ROB: Waylon, you sit at this intersection of marketing and PR. What I’ve seen is quite often, firms will specialize in either one or the other and actively choose not to engage in the other side of the business. Why do you think that is?
WAYLON: It’s interesting that you say that, first and foremost, but my approach was always different. I think when I started my agency, I came into it with an active understanding of both of those different disciplines. Marketing definitely has its own angles and things that you need to do, and PR is a very specialized field as well.
I really wanted to enter into the marketplace myself as a startup addressing both of those needs to the clients. We work mostly with startups, and it made more sense to me, as I think it made sense to our clients, that they were able to get both of those experiences in the same house.
ROB: Got it. Nonetheless, we all have to draw lines in our business. What lines of business have you then chosen not to engage in? Particular practices or things outside of the lanes you’ve chosen to be in, and why?
WAYLON: Gosh, that’s a good question. I wish I had a better response for you. I’m kind of an all-inclusive kind of guy. To give you a little bit more of a backstory as to how my agency came out, there really is a creative hub. It’s a trifecta of communications, if you will. About 6 or 7 years ago, me and two of my best friends decided that we wanted to start our own gig. We really did create a communications trifecta.
Myself, J. Waylon & Associates, we do mostly marketing and public relations. My best friend Tracy owns another company called Critical Launch, which does web development and graphics and all of those kind of things, photography and a number of other things. My other friend Mikey owns PrintRunner. So we actually have two print shops, one in-house here in downtown Dallas and another one in a city not too far away.
We were really able to collectively meet every single need that a startup would encounter as they were going on that journey of entrepreneurship – everything from printing business cards to building their website to building out all of their social accounts and then to fully engage and build out platforms to increase their brand awareness through public relations, but also increase their on-the-ground sales through marketing efforts as well.
ROB: It’s really interesting how you’ve created specialization and focus while still serving a broad set of needs by having different entities and brands to serve those different needs.
WAYLON: Absolutely.
ROB: Public relations means a lot of things to a lot of people. How have you seen the definition of public relations evolve and maybe even refocus after some of the noise – PR has become so noisy that maybe it’s not even effective. What would you say?
WAYLON: Well, I’ll tell you this. You just hit the nail on the head. In fact, when we’re engaging with a potential new client, most of the time they don’t really understand that public relations is a very broad term. I think it’s important that we create an operational definition for each client in their own framework. What does PR mean to them? For some clients that means nothing but doing editorial solicitation; for other clients that means reaching into the influencer market.
To touch on the question that you just asked, I can tell you that influencers, love them or hate them, have become a huge need for most businesses, especially in direct-to-consumer businesses that are selling merchandise. We represent a number of bars and restaurants, and I can tell you the influencer marketing that we do has made – I will actually encourage my clients to move a considerable amount of advertising dollars into hiring influencers because the return on that investment is normally much higher.
ROB: What does an influencer look like for a local restaurant? Are these A-list, B-list celebrities? Or is it something more nuanced? Is it more of a social person with a high audience?
WAYLON: Probably the second of those. It’s not so much about fame. I think it’s so much about the peer-to-peer respect. I don’t know if you know this, Rob, but there’s certainly an underlying group of influencers in the food marketplace that are really able to capture in a different way than an A- or B-list celebrity would in that I think the public at large has become much more cognizant of how the whole influencer marketing game works, and they’re more willing to participate in an activity or maybe visit a place that they wouldn’t normally, based on what an influencer suggests rather than what a celebrity is getting paid to talk about, even though the influencers are many times paid as well.
ROB: For a food influencer, I’m picturing in my mind someone who got through half a season of Top Chef, so people got to follow them before they got eliminated. Is that one category? Or is it something I wouldn’t even expect?
WAYLON: I would think that might be one category, but the majority of influencers that we work with here in Dallas – and keep in mind, Dallas is the number five media market in the country; we have a big population here as well. But no, to be honest with you, these are people that have come up through the ranks and are really good at taking really, really good pictures and developing a broad network of supporters.
I think, again, we always have to assign definitions to these terms, and they’re forever evolving, but no, the majority of influencers that we work with have a really large following but have never had media exposure through reality television and those means.
ROB: Really interesting. I’ve never really thought about this alignment between influencer and PR because both of them require an attention to the bigger picture and the longer game. To an extent, you can measure the lift to a restaurant as to how one month was over another, but in a broader sense, much like – as you would call it, I think – an editorial solicitation, you’re not necessarily getting leads coming in or credit cards coming in that you can link back in the traditional attribution model.
WAYLON: That is absolutely true. In fact, there really is no – and this is going to sound incredibly crazy, probably, to hear – but I tell my clients, there are metrics. There are analytics. If we deploy a digital advertisement, we’re going to be able to follow that train, that sales tunnel to understand where it’s coming from. With public relations, it is a much different ballgame, and many times it’s very difficult to navigate earned media and to understand exactly how you’re getting from Point A to Point B and was it effective in placing those dollars there.
But they serve two very different purposes. For example, in March, believe it or not, during the beginning of the COVID pandemic, we launched a pretty high-end wine bar and marketplace called Trova here in Dallas. We knew going in that we were going to be up against some obstacles, obviously. But we really utilized each one of those services in a very different way.
For the public relations avenue, we built out a communications plan that was driven in understanding that there would be some media interest in “Why is this woman investing so much money into opening this wine bar in the middle of a pandemic when the city is really shut down?” There was indeed a lot of interest in having that conversation, which really increased brand awareness. We saw a huge uptick to the website and other digital sources when those articles started generating.
But for the marketing aspect, we understood that we were going to have to really pivot to different ways of getting people engaged and seeing the follow-through to purchase. Was that curbside? Was that order deliveries to go? Traditional ways of marketing a restaurant is you’re trying to bring people into the space. Well, obviously, in a pandemic when you’re mandated to not be inside of the space, you have to understand, this is moving forward; the client is moving forward with opening the space, so how do you do that from a marketing perspective? We did it. It wasn’t easy, and we’re still not easy. We’re still working through that.
ROB: I have a friend in the restaurant business, and I don’t know whether he has a very good PR firm or whether he is an instinctive public relater. You mentioned, “Why is this woman opening a restaurant and spending lots of money on it to open during a pandemic?” There are so many layers and hooks and pegs to pull on there, versus what a restaurateur might want to do is say (A) “I’m opening a restaurant or (B) “I’m opening a restaurant; here’s the kind of food I’m making.” They’re such basic stories.
How do you think about turning this factual story of “I’m opening a restaurant” into something that is worth talking about, that has a hook to it?
WAYLON: The essence of public relations specifically dealing with the media is you really have to understand the audiences of each one of those networks or publications. What we always do as PR agents is try to figure out what is the warm and fuzzy. And you have to understand that if we’re going to senior producers of morning shows or editors of particular publications, we have to explain to them in the pitch not only “this is what we’re wanting you to talk about,” but “this is how it’s going to resonate with your audience.”
There are a number of magazines here in Dallas that focus on nothing but the food and beverage industry, so the pitches that we had to them were much different than the pitches we had to really engaged podcasts or the morning shows. For the first probably 4 weeks that we deployed this communications campaign, most of those conversations really circled around her, the owner, and this journey that she was about to go through.
I think that what we found was there was a really good pickup of people that were interested – yes, there’s a new space opening up and it’s something that we want to visit, but also, I think she got a lot of support because everyone in the city understands what entrepreneurs are going through. I think they wanted to be in many ways the wind beneath her wings of making this journey that was about to take place a reality and support her however they could.
ROB: Really interesting. I’ll ask, with that level of customization going into the pitch to the publication or to the outlet, what then is the place in 2020 for the vaunted press release?
WAYLON: Let me tell you this, Rob. I haven’t sent a press release in probably 10 months. Again, I think that maybe it could be the difference in generational folks that are working communications, but press releases to me – and this is probably going to sound like sacrilege to a lot of other publicists that are going to listen to this podcast – in many ways are archaic because you’re competing with so many other brands that are trying to push whatever it is that they’re wanting to talk about.
Communications in and of itself is all about relationships. We rely much more on the relationships that we have with the editors and the writers that we work with than we do on sending out press releases. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, maybe if you’re in consumer goods and you’re creating a new product or you’re launching a brand new item, that might be a space for that, and then you put something on the wire. But for really hyperlocal communications, at least for me and my agency, we don’t really send out press releases.
ROB: Got it. Thanks for the take there. I appreciate that sort of thing. You can certainly get pitched on all sorts of platforms and all sorts of different plans to push out press releases, but that thought of “What is the audience wanting to hear about?” is a much more thoughtful approach to it.
Waylon, you mentioned a little bit of the mechanics of starting and the partners and the trifecta of businesses, but let’s step a moment into the “why.” What made you decide to put a stake in the ground and start your own business instead of being a part of joining/leading someone else’s?
WAYLON: I found my way to public relations and marketing in an odd way. I have a Master’s in Public Policy. I had finished a pretty prestigious fellowship in Washington, D.C., came back to Dallas and started working with the district attorney’s office. In fact, the capstone project that I did for my master’s project was starting what was called the Citizens Prosecutor Academy. Now, keep in mind the Dallas District Attorney’s office is the seventh largest in the country. It’s huge. They have some 500 employees. So, to be able to engage as a master’s student with such a large entity was a pretty cool experience for me.
But what it did was it opened me up to a district attorney that was the first-ever African-American elected to that office in the entire state of Texas. He was on Bill Maher and in the New York Times, something on a much bigger scale than a normal district attorney would be. I really got a firsthand kind of power worker experience with communications just in that experience alone.
When he left office, I really had two choices. I was going to go into a corporate communications job and have a cush-cush experience, or I would take that leap of faith and really jump out on my own. If I never make another good decision, that was the good one to make. That was really the way I found myself to PR and marketing.
Then it was just a really good time for my two friends as well. I think we all foresaw what was coming. We really looked internally at our own strengths and what we could bring to the table, and it made sense, for us at least, that I would be able to, as a good communicator, bring in the clients and then offer them stellar web development that I could push over to Tracy, or all of their printing needs and move over to Mikey. And it worked equally with the other two; if Tracy was developing a website for one of his clients, it made sense for him to suggest PR and marketing to me.
ROB: If one looks at your background, clearly you have that background in public service. You also have a branch of business that you work on involving political activity, and I would imagine some PR and marketing around that world. How do you think about the cyclicality of that business? The good part is you have a steady-state PR business that is operating when there’s not anything of political note to dive into, but then you have a year like this year where there’s everything political to dive into.
How do you handle that burst of activity on the political side with also trying to build a resilient and ongoing business in the traditional PR and marketing space?
WAYLON: Well, with a lot of caution and care, I’ll tell you that. You always have to approach the situation when you own your own business with, like I said, caution and care. With J. Waylon & Associates, we are a PR and marketing agency for brands in particular – storefronts, authors, attorneys, doctors, things of that nature. You never really want to trail into the political conversation when you’re dealing with storefronts specifically. So, we really wanted to separate those.
Tracy and I launched a whole other gig called Politicize.co, and you’re right; the cyclical nature of being in this 2-year or 4-year rotation, we gear up and we understand that in those crucial months, I’m going to have to pull back a little bit and let the employees work more on the marketing and PR side. We normally don’t engage with new clients during those months because I’m all about giving a stellar experience, especially in the onboarding process, to new clients.
So just making those wise decisions as to understanding your business as a whole. What does the PR and marketing agency look like on a year calendar? When are our busiest months? Specifically for us, we deal with a lot of bars and restaurants. September, October, November, we always know that’s going to be the busiest months for those businesses. The same thing with the political company. We understand, even if it’s a municipal election – that’s going to be in May, so you have to give that 3-month ramp before that. Or in a 4-year cycle, a presidential election year, you’re looking at November, so what does 4-6 months before that look like?
ROB: It’s interesting because what I hear you saying in a way is that on the political side, not that you don’t have to work for the new business, but you know that for that season of time, your new business is going to come in through the political arm. So you can spin down some of the new business on the PR side.
Overall, it’s a fascinating solution. I did some work once upon a time in a political technology startup and watched as those different campaign workers would – a campaign ends earlier than you thought, so some of them – you kind of scatter to the winds. People scatter to other campaigns, they scatter to PAC-like entities, some into local. But you have a solution where you get to go back to your business when it’s done.
WAYLON: That’s correct. Good for me, right? You always have to be cognizant of your time, and that’s something, the older I get, that I really understand – understanding how much time I need to reserve for whatever aspect of my life, be it professional or personal.
Tracy and I really brought a new interpretation to what PR and marketing looked like for progressive political campaigns. Again, I think that’s what has been our success in that market. We didn’t look at the campaign as campaigns have been looked at for many, many years. We engaged campaigns that were doing nothing but on-ground canvassing and had no digital plan of action in place, and we really approached even the political campaigns that we’ve worked on in a private marketplace approach. The campaign is in and of itself a brand, and you’re trying to get people to buy onto that brand. So what do you need to do? It was the same model and flow that we use for the clients with restaurants or storefronts.
ROB: Some of the work I was in – it was back in 2008, 2006, 2010 era. At the time, there was sort of a suspicion. Any campaign you engaged with at that time wanted you to declare your party allegiance, and it was almost outside of their frame of thought, even 10 years ago, the possibility of a neutral third party – even though as a technology firm you’re going to think about how to serve the full scope of audience of parties.
How has that trended? Are campaigns more open to something like a NationBuilder and this idea that technology can be nonpartisan? Or has it required a little bit more specialization into declaring an allegiance as a solutions provider?
WAYLON: I have to say, the elections that we’ve been able to work on thus far have been in a municipal environment, or at least a local environment. We haven’t really worked on state campaigns yet. With municipal elections, they are nonpartisan. You can always identify just through their actions, the pillars of their campaigns, what side of the equation they mostly fit on. Tracy and I were adamant from the very beginning about the side of the equation that we wanted to work on, and it’s written into the DNA of the company itself. In fact, I think the tagline is that we are “bringing progressive campaigns into focus” or something of that nature.
But I think that it would be difficult for a tech agency like you were talking about – and they are very much partisan when you get to NationBuilder and things like that and the fundraising technologies that are out there – but if you’re handling the PR and marketing campaigning stuff, even on a local level, it would just be hard to have as much passion into the campaign if you don’t believe in the cause of what they’re doing.
ROB: Right. That aligned purpose is really helpful. That’s the conversation we had with Michael Skolnik of We Are Soze up in Brooklyn back at South by Southwest about a year and a half ago. They had very passionate people in Brooklyn who were aligned to progressive causes, but fascinatingly, I think they were more beneficially ideological than partisan. They knew what they wanted to happen in the world more than they knew the party. They just happened to line up.
WAYLON: I’ll tell you this: that passion goes a long way. From the owners of those two different agencies, you see the success measured in very different ways. If we’re representing a new startup and they’re selling something to the public, of course we get really excited when we start seeing growth or they start scaling. But it’s a very different kind of excited or measurement of success when we know that a campaign is getting to the finish line and it’s probably going to go in their favor because we understand the impact of those two different things.
For a startup, you’re going to see success measured in dollars, bottom line, what does that look like? But for a campaign, there are so many ideological things that are wrapped into campaigns, and you understand that in most cases, that campaign and the candidate, should they succeed, is going to be making hopefully changes for a lot of people. It’s interesting the way we step back and look at what success looks like for each one of those situations.
ROB: Really interesting that difference in the level of passion and involvement you have. It’s hard to be so personally impacted by a SaaS product unless it’s very, very close to your heart.
Waylon, when you think about the history of the firm so far, what are some lessons you have learned along the way of building J. Waylon & Associates that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting – let’s say today or even looking forward, post-pandemic, in case you would do something remarkably different right now because of where we are.
WAYLON: I think probably the biggest lesson that I’ve learned – we had a lockdown, obviously, here for a couple of months, and it gave me a lot of time to really look back at what I’ve done so far and what I want the next chapters of my agency to look like. I think if I could go back in time and tell myself something when I first started, it would be to be a little bit more picky and choosy as to what you do.
Don’t take all of the business that comes your way just because you would have business. Really carve out somewhat of a niche into the brands that you want to represent. Just as any small business owner, in the very beginning you’re excited to have any business, whatever that may be. But the more successful that we’ve become, the more I can be a little bit more picky and choosy as to who we represent.
ROB: Where has that led you? How are you deciding what to say no to right now?
WAYLON: I daresay low-hanging fruit. This probably comes from a personal trait of mine, which is I want everything to be perfect all of the time for my clients. So it’s difficult for me personally to not give the same approach, thought, care, and attention to a $3,000 client that we give to a $20,000 a month client. So I’m constantly having to pull back and go, I need to be paid for my time.
How does that look? What kind of clients can be we bring on? Even if I fall in love with the idea or the concept, I have to make really big decisions about myself and the clients we bring on because I wouldn’t be a good businessman myself if I gave the same amount of time and attention to a lower budget client that I do to a higher budget client.
ROB: Definitely something to learn from that there. Waylon, what is coming up for J. Waylon & Associates or perhaps the broader marketing world in general that is exciting to you?
WAYLON: One and the same. I think that you’re going to see – we are already seeing this – that ecommerce is going to absolutely explode into a level that we probably can’t even comprehend at the moment. The agency is starting to bring on more clients that are in the ecommerce marketplace, which is good for us. We have clients now that have ecommerce shops. It’s really forcing us as marketers to dive deeper and to really increase the tools that are in our own tool belt, to be able to offer those services to our clients at the same level of esteem that we offer other marketing solutions and public relations solutions to our clients.
ROB: That’s exciting. We’ll look for much more through the end of the year and in 2021. I wish you and your team the best. Thank you for coming on the podcast, Waylon.
WAYLON: Thanks so much, Rob. I appreciate it.
ROB: Be well.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Joel Matthew, Founder and CEO at Fortress Consulting, started his company after his experience selling advertising at CBS radio and television. When he “could not make the sale” because the companies he approached did not want to drive prospects to their poorly-designed websites, he took action. Joel figured he could solve their problem (and his) by finding creative agencies to build content and great technical website and app developers to get out their messages. When he could not find that marriage of creative and technical in one organization, Joel founded Fortress Consulting to “bridge the gap.”
Fortress Consulting began as an advertising agency, web designer, and app developer, but settled on being a digital marketing agency. (Joel says he loves the trackability and measurability of digital.) The agency's focus expanded to include content development, video podcasting, and creating customized, tailored digital marketing strategies to drive increased traffic and revenue to client sites. Fortress serves clients worldwide in a wide range of industries but finds the “sweet spot” for its strategies and price points with companies with over $20 million in revenue.
From his seven pre-agency years in media, Joel learned customer relationship management and how to build friendships with customers. “Fortress family,” he explains. “That’s how we treat our customers and our employees.” Before COVID, he relied on face-to-face social interactions to forge strong client relationships. The pandemic has “leveled the playing field,” so that customers now focus on the “value you bring, who you’ve worked with, and your results.”
Joel continues to “show the love” for his clients by contacting them to see how they are doing and by returning to them a percentage of their marketing investment in the form of thoughtful, personal gifts. He reminds us that 80% of a company’s business often comes from 20% of its customers . . . and it’s those customers he wants to reward. While a business might need more margin in order to afford to “gift,” Joel says it's not so much about the cost of the gift as it is about thoughtfulness. He repeatedly emphasizes the importance of really knowing clients.
Income streams for Fortress are diverse. Retainer clients for digital marketing, social, SEO, pay-per-click, content, or even integrated campaigns provide long-term recurring income. “Homeruns” come when the agency builds client websites and apps. Launching a site is a cause for celebration . . . celebrating the client in much the same way as does the earlier-mentioned gifting. Expanding services have brought in new levels of clients and the ability to justifiably increase fees.
Joel can be contacted at his agency's website at gofortress.com or on social with screennames that are some combination of Fortress or GoFortress. He also started a higher education company this past year. Beyond Academics' purpose is to “discover, design, and deploy” strategies that enable higher education and lifelong learning initiatives to thrive in the “new normal.” Information about Beyond Academics, which sits in the position of a “client company” of Fortress, is at beyondacademics.com
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Joel Matthew, CEO and Founder at Fortress Consulting, based in Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to the podcast, Joel.
JOEL: Thanks a lot, Rob.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about the focus areas of Fortress Consulting? What is it that y’all are known for?
JOEL: Sure. When I first started, I struggled with how to describe it because we’re part advertising agency, part web solver, app solver. So I just defaulted to saying we’re a digital marketing agency. It’s evolved over the years. We’re heading into our 10th year in business.
The way that I would say it’s presently constructed is a lot of brand strategy, marketing, consulting, go to market strategy, but then our bread and butter and our passion lies in digital. Digital for us includes website design/development, building apps, and then customized, tailored digital marketing strategies to get our clients more traffic and more revenue to their sites.
ROB: Are there any particular segments you focus on, whether that’s a size of firm or a particular vertical market?
JOEL: Yeah. We’ve gone through exercises to try to define this. As far as verticals go, we’re pretty broad, more of a generalist approach. We’ve got clients in real estate, in legal, in technology, in retail – everything you could think of. Higher education, large nonprofit. But that’s been really where we’ve focused: trying to serve everybody.
We now have focused that a little bit more. Our ideal target are companies over $20 million because, based on the price points and based on the strategies that we like to employ, that seems to be a sweet spot for us. But we’ve got clients larger, smaller, everywhere in between.
ROB: Is there a geographic pull around the Chicagoland giant area? Or has it become pretty dispersed on that side as well?
JOEL: It’s all over. Yeah, we have clients outside of the U.S. as well now – France, Canada, all over. But I’d say about 60% is in the Chicago market and 40%, we’ve got clients on both coasts and south and pretty much all over now.
ROB: That’s such a fascinating aspect. We really haven’t talked much on the podcast about how there are so many agencies and consulting firms – and these clients you’re talking about, these are meaningful, material – $20 million in revenue is a real size client. There are probably a bunch of agencies and development partners in their local area that they could work with, and they might like to meet up for a meal or coffee. But generally they just don’t. You don’t see an agency that’s hit any sort of meaningful size and scale – I don’t see them where they’re just in their local area.
How has your journey been in finding these clients outside of your geography? How do they come to you?
JOEL: That’s a great question. I look back at my career, 7 years in media and corporate for large corporations and television and radio, and I look at what I learned at each of those places, and one of my findings of what I learned from my time in television was customer relationship management and building friendships with my customers. I really took that when I started Fortress. We have this phrase, “Fortress family,” and that’s how we treat our customers and our employees.
A lot of that is entertaining and face to face and taking them out for games and taking them out for drinks or dinner or whatever that looks like, but especially with COVID, the game has changed. That is basically off the table. So now it’s all about what value you bring, who you have worked with, what results you can show. It’s kind of leveled the playing field a bit.
So that’s how we’ve been able to attain clients from all over the country. They see what we’re doing for our clients that we started with locally, and it’s more of the thought process of “How do I get some of that?” Now especially, people who work from home, they’re virtual, they’re remote, and it’s less about taking them out to a nice dinner than it is about, “Hey, jump on Zoom, tell me how it’s going and let’s connect.”
But there still is that personal aspect where you want to know what’s going on with them in their lives or their families and what they’re about, a vacation they just took, so you have those human touchpoints as well.
ROB: Is there anything in your client entertaining – have you adopted any sort of gifting strategy or something to still show some love, even though you can’t get together? Or has it been more on the personal side?
JOEL: My wife and our CFO are not fans of this, but I’m big on gifting and going big on this. I look at it as a certain percentage of the revenue, and our clients get hooked up. I want something that’s going to impress them and something that is going to be memorable, not “Hey, here’s a branded phone charger” – which is actually what we did last year, which I still think is kind of lame.
But yeah, I want to go big for the guys that – they say 80% of your business comes from 20% of your clients. I’m going to take care of those guys in a major way.
ROB: You mentioned as a percent of revenue; even if you said 1% of client revenue is a gift, that’s a meaningful thing. How many people are on your team right now?
JOEL: We’ve got 15 here in Chicago and then we’ve got 40 guys overseas.
ROB: You extrapolate that out – this is, I would imagine, a multimillion dollar business. So even 1% of revenue is a lot of money on gifts.
JOEL: It is.
ROB: How do you think about giving the right sort of gift for the client? Is that natural to you, or by having a meaningful allocation, do you find you can give an impactful gift without knowing exactly what they want?
JOEL: It goes back to that personal aspect of knowing your customer. When Apple released AirPods, I was going to get AirPods for everybody. I found out from talking to people that some people didn’t like AirPods. They liked the Beats version better because they worked out and it was a better fit. So just talking to people and knowing your customers helps with that.
But I get a lot of joy from giving gifts and taking care of our clients, so it does come naturally. I see it as they’ve been with us for this long, and I want to make sure we take care of them and surprise them in some kind of meaningful way.
ROB: I want to take some notes on that. It’s such a good point. Some agencies you talk to keep a very thin margin and are very efficient, and they can deliver lower cost, but I’ve found that with that comes a limited ability to be generous in how you serve them and how you give back to them. So I think it’s good to think about how to run a business with enough margin to gift the customer well.
JOEL: Right. Yeah, it doesn’t need to be anything big; it’s not necessarily that you have to spend a lot of money. It’s just the thoughtfulness of it is huge. For one client who I knew was into working out, we got him $99 Beats headphones and he was very excited about it. Obviously, they can all afford it themselves, but there’s just a different element when your thoughtfulness goes into it.
ROB: Early on, when you mentioned website development, app development, there can be such a range of expectations, particularly on the website side. You can really get into some engagements where somebody has a small site and they want small changes and they expect it to be done with a very limited budget – how have you found to manage expectations on a minimum project size for web and mobile development? Has that come naturally from that $20 million minimum revenue target? Or how have you navigated that?
JOEL: That’s been a challenge for us too. Obviously, any entrepreneur knows that when you’re first starting out, you’re doing stuff for cheap just to get some experience or to build up your client base or network or portfolio, and then the floor rises and all of a sudden you’re doing a site for $1,000 and then it becomes $5,000, then it becomes $10,000, then it becomes $20,000 and so on.
It has been a challenge because, for instance, one of our clients who’s a private equity firm in LA has been working with us for years, so any time they buy a company, they come to us for all the branding and the digital assets and the websites. Three years ago, our pricing was probably a quarter of what it is now. Fast forward 3 years, now they’re coming to us and saying, “Hey, we need an overhaul on our site.” Our pricing is now 4x what we charged their portfolio companies.
But the feedback I’m getting is, “Wow, your quality has increased a ton. We can see you have people, you have a process,” so it warrants the price tag.
ROB: A lot of times that price tag grows gradually and you kind of grow into it. Has there ever been a proposal that you sent out and internally, your jaw hit the floor when you realized what you had written up and the price tag you’d put on it?
JOEL: [laughs] Yeah, I’m starting to have those realizations now more because we’ve actually grown quite a bit this year. Our average size of client has risen as we get into different services. But I don’t send anything out without the expectation that we’re going to win it and we’re going to get it. I very rarely leave a pitch where I don’t think we won it.
Not much of it catches me by surprise, but yeah, there were a couple deals this year where it’s like, hey, that’s an extra zero than what we’re used to, and it could be a game-changer if that comes in. So yeah, there are those.
ROB: Congratulations. Joel, when we rewind the clock on Fortress Consulting, what’s the origin story of the company? How did you come to start the company and what were those embryonic next couple of steps that made it into what it is now?
JOEL: I would say it was always a desire to start something and do something. I really looked up to my older cousins, who were entrepreneurs and business guys. They were my role models for starting something. That’s why I initially called it Fortress Consulting, because I wanted it to be broad enough where I could go in a bunch of different directions.
But ultimately what was the lightbulb moment for me – I was working at CBS Radio and Television; I met with five clients in a row and they were all like, “Joel, I’d love to advertise with you, but my website’s horrible. I can’t send people to this website.” So for me, that was my lightbulb moment. I was like, I have a background in technology. I know how to code. I could probably hack this together or I could find some people that can do it so that it would be a mechanism for me to get more advertising revenue.
Ultimately I started doing some research in the Chicago market for companies that could handle the creative side like an ad agency and the technical side of a web developer/app developer. I didn’t really see anybody talking about it that way. What I found in my research was there were a ton of very creative advertising agencies that were building beautiful things and creating great campaigns but couldn’t write a line of code.
On the flipside of that, you have all these great developers and tech shops that would launch a website and then just pat you on the back and you’re on your way and didn’t think about the creative side or business side of how to generate traffic, how to generate venue. What happens after we deliver this technology platform?
That was ultimately my lightbulb moment for creating Fortress. Initially our tagline was, “We bridge the gap between creative and technology.” That was how we started.
ROB: That’s an interesting mix. We’ve had this conversation a couple of times lately – the project-oriented nature of delivering a lot of websites and some applications versus the potentially ongoing partnership on the marketing side. But also, those are two different beasts. Delivering a software product or a site can be a little bit objective. It’s done and the client is a lot of times the client itself. With marketing, you’re getting outside of the client’s world and asking to get a customer or a consumer in.
How do you think about the different degree of accountability for results? For me, building a technology product, there’s a level of certainty to it, and there’s a high degree of uncertainty, I think, on the marketing side. But maybe you see it differently.
JOEL: Yeah, it’s definitely very nuanced and there are major differences. But the beauty of the way our business is set up is we have our recurring revenue from retainer clients who are on the digital marketing side or they’re doing social with us or they’re doing SEO or pay-per-click or content campaigns. Or often now it’s integrated campaigns. They’re on a monthly retainer with us. But then we hit these homeruns with these websites and apps, and those are the peaks and valleys of “I just closed this huge deal and this is major revenue on this project.”
But yeah, ultimately what we’ve been focused on lately is really defining the scope of what we do so that we have a clearer understanding of what “done” looks like – because “done” to us may be different than “done” to the client. So we’re very buttoned up on what the scope looks like.
But the beauty of this business and why I started, and my frustration when I was working in television and radio, is a client would hand me $250,000 or $500,000 to run a campaign and there would be no tracking or attribution or data or analytics. I would have to go back to them 30 days later and say, “Hey, how’d it go? Are you selling more cars?” or “Are more people coming to the bank?”, and I felt like that was such a blind spot.
So for me, that was one of the major reasons that I started Fortress. With digital, the beauty of it is every dollar they give us, I can track it and I can track it all the way down to the sale, down to the conversion. Based on the access levels that we have, I can track it from the ad to the click to what happened on the website to the actual sale. On the digital marketing side, it’s great. We’re really focused on data and analytics of proving the ROI. You gave me a dollar; I turned it into $1.50 or $5.00 or $7.00, whatever that looks like.
On the website side, it’s easier to quantify because you can see it, you can feel it. You know what your site looked like before and now you know how amazing it looks now, and you see it. What we’re getting at now more is just making that more of a celebration, a launch party for when we launch a site. It goes back to the earlier topic of gifting, making it more a celebration of “Hey, you guys launched. Congratulations. Here’s all this stuff.”
With the digital marketing campaign, it’s more of an ongoing, you’re in the trenches on a long-term basis. And we want to keep those guys on forever, but it’s a challenge for us to keep delivering quality results.
ROB: What are the core marketing channels that you and your team are focused on, and what are the things you’re maybe experimenting with right now?
JOEL: The core marketing channels – we’re really focused on content and video. It used to be “Hey, we’ll do SEO for you and we’ll do pay-per-click or search engine marketing and we’ll do social media.” A lot of it is focused on content now. We put people in three tracks, typically, on our social side. One is they’re not great at creating content and so we help them with that; they are good at creating content, so we can help them with strategy and scheduling; and then there are the guys that don’t know what they’re doing at all, and we can help them with strategy and content.
So content is really something that we’re focused on. Creating video. We have somebody in-house now who’s really talented. She’s originally a journalism major, but she’s got great skills on video as well, so now we’re starting to crank out these 1- to 3-minute videos, getting into helping our clients get on podcasts. Those are newer channels that we’re exploring now.
One of our clients that we helped launch their podcast were spending six figures a year in radio with programming and actually getting their content on radio. Since then, they’ve seen this shift to digital and podcasting and streaming, so they pulled all of their terrestrial radio, traditional radio budget and basically handed it to us and said, “Hey, navigate us into this digital world.”
So podcasting and creating content is a huge focus for us right now.
ROB: Got it. That makes sense because once you have the content, then the distribution mechanism can really vary with the client, vary with the strategy, vary over time, and vary with what’s working.
I would say amazingly, the podcast world still tends to be a little bit of a Wild West in terms of, if you’re a listener, finding something you want to listen to; if you’re a podcast host, finding guests; if you’re a guest, finding hosts. How do you look to navigate what can be a very dispersed world, I think?
JOEL: Yeah, you’re totally right. It’s almost like everybody you talk to has a podcast and it’s like, “Hey, subscribe here, subscribe there.” I talk about this with a few of my colleagues. There’s just saturation of everybody has a podcast. So now it’s, how do you make it more meaningful? How do you make it more impactful? How do you think creatively on how to deliver the content?
One of the nice things that we’re doing with this podcast that we just helped launch for a client is they have the content, they interview these high level thought leaders, and then at the end of it, they have this roundtable, almost like kitchen table talk of dissecting what they just learned or heard about. So you get to hear from the same people over and over again. I thought it’s just such a great idea of differentiating yourself in the podcast space.
ROB: Got it. When you think back on this journey, Joel, of Fortress Consulting, what are some things you have learned along the way that you might do differently if you were starting over today?
JOEL: I look back and I think everything, the good and the bad, are all learning lessons. So I don’t know what I would do differently. I think what has helped make us successful is I’ve really latched onto mentorship and putting smart people in a room and trying to learn as much as I can from them. I would probably accelerate that more.
One of the learning lessons for me that I’ve learned as our team has grown is I was always quick to hire and slow to fire, and that was a major learning lesson for me. At first it’s like, “Oh hey, you want to work for us? Cool, come on, you’re in” and not as focused on, do they fit our culture? Are they about our core values? Are they the right fit, not just with their skillset? Now we’re pivoting that into much slower to hire. They have to fit a lot more boxes to come on board with us. And then just having a shorter leash on the flipside of that too, not to drag things out that need to be nipped in the bud sooner.
ROB: How do you think about that filtering for culture? A lot of times results can be objective; culture fit can be subjective, particularly when it comes to how you do the work. How do you ask those questions up front?
JOEL: I attended a conference and I was floored because they had something called their Culture Deck. It was modeled after Netflix – they have their Culture Deck, and it is like 100 pages about what they’re about, what they stand by, what they believe. So we created ours, and we called it Fortress Foundations. It was eight things that we’re about – seven or eight things; it’s evolving.
We have it up on a poster on our wall in our office. So now we’re focused on hiring based on that. We actually have it on our website too. We’ll have people that want to come work for us see that and say, “Hey, I’m on board with this. This is what I’m about too.” So it helps with that cultural fit when you have it documented, you have it displayed, and you proclaim that “This is what we’re about. This is who we are.” You’ll start to find more of those people gravitating towards you.
ROB: What are some of those key things for you?
JOEL: It’s evolved. The number one thing is “We over me.” It’s focused on what we can build together as a team. I tell people all the time, even though I’m the owner, it’s not about me. It’s about what we can do together as a team. We’ll go further as a team than we will with me just as an individual. That seeps into how we tag-team on work together. You’ll have designers jump in and help do quality assurance testing on a website, and we’ll have developers give feedback on design. We’ll have copywriters that sit in on a sales meeting. It’s focused on teamwork.
Really, when you asked about why I started and what was the push, it was really I saw how it was in corporate America, how it was just this rat race. There was no love, no loyalty, politics and all the above. Really, I strive to create a culture and team where that didn’t exist. We’re at a good size now where it’s not an issue and we’re all rowing the same way at the same speed.
So “We over me” is one. Another one is “Family first,” which is something that is antithetical to what you hear at a business. But I really do firmly believe if you don’t have peace and happiness in your family life and personal life, you’re not going to perform at your highest when you’re in the office. So if somebody has a personal issue or issue with their kid or a loved one, I’m like, “Get out of here. Go handle it and then come back when you’re ready and you have your game face on.” I really do believe family is first. I expect everybody to have that balance between work life and home life.
ROB: It’s so valuable, and I think it really helps set apart an independent firm versus – we were talking beforehand a little bit about how people can go work for a big, big company and they can optimize their entire career around salary. That won’t always happen in an independent consultancy or agency, but they can like coming to work and they can like who they work with in a way that sometimes you just can’t on the enterprise side.
JOEL: Right, exactly. It’s interesting; I’ve hired two people that I used to work with in corporate. One was a manager level and one was more on the analyst side, more of the level that I was at when I was there. I joke around with them like, there’s a whole reprogramming process here where you don’t have to worry about somebody micromanaging you. You have authority. We’ll hold you accountable, but you have authority to make decisions, and if it’s the wrong decision, it’s okay. We’ll deal with it.
But there’s this whole corporate reprogramming that I joke around with our team about. This is a different way of doing business that I find the team really buys into. It fires them up, and it’s just a different vibe, different mindset here.
ROB: Excellent. Joel, when you think about what’s coming up for Fortress or for the broader marketing world, what are you excited about? What’s next?
JOEL: I’m really excited about the ways that people are consuming information and consuming content. I have another company that I’ve started this year in the higher education space. We’re all about how students are learning – and we don’t even want to call them students anymore; we want to call them learners and focus on lifelong learning. You can’t do the same things over and over again.
As much as the pandemic is tough on people and has forced us all to think differently and shift and disrupt, it’s a good thing overall. Businesses are adapting, people are adapting, people are pivoting. They’re innovating. I’m excited to see what comes out of this, and I think the people that are doubling down on marketing and advertising and learning more about who they are and their customers are going to come out of this 3-4 years ahead of their competitors that went into self-preservation mode and just tried to survive it.
ROB: We’re certainly entering a new season as well, because a lot of the pandemic ad inventory has been aligned with the election. Now that we’re post-election, for the most part – we’re in Georgia; we still have a Senate runoff here – but I would imagine to an extent, there’s inventory freeing up for people who are ready to double down. What have you seen?
JOEL: Yeah, that is absolutely true. I spent 7 years in the media, and during political times it was overrun with political, and political got special rates, so it’d bump out other advertisers. We’ve got several clients that were just waiting for this election to end so they could start releasing budgets and really getting after it. But yeah, that’s exactly right. There’s less clutter now. I wish there was clear, definitive answers on things already, but we’re heading into a season where marketers can really stand out and ad dollars are slashed.
I was talking to another agency owner just yesterday about it, and he’s like, “Man, all our friends in media are getting crushed. They’re getting their ad budgets slashed and people are tightening up.” But that means that it’s an opportunity for the advertisers that do want to be there to get great rates, to get placement that they normally wouldn’t have, to have their budgets go further than ever before.
ROB: Wow. That’s definitely fascinating. I take your point about – two things. Number one, there’s still some remnant political advertising going on. Number two, there’s still some uncertainty that clients are probably not ready to fully pull the trigger on until we have tremendous clarity. I would just say when we have one person who says they’re going to be the president and one person who says they’re not, that’s probably going to be the real comfort level for people.
JOEL: Right.
ROB: [laughs] Hopefully that’s about as unpolitical as I can say that. I don’t know.
JOEL: No, you’re right on.
ROB: [laughs] Very good. Joel, when people want to track you down and when they want to find Fortress Consulting, how should they connect with you?
JOEL: They can go to our website at gofortress.com. You’ll find who we are, what we’re about, some of the work that we’ve done, and what we do there. But yeah, the best way is to go to our website or follow us on social. We’re at some combination of Fortress or Go Fortress as our screennames. But the website would be the number one place to go at gofortress.com.
ROB: If people want to dig into the work you’re doing in the education space, what is that?
JOEL: I’m glad you asked. That’s at beyondacademics.com. That’s something that we’re really excited about, me and our other two co-founders, about what the future of education looks like and how that industry is going to completely change in the next year to 3 years.
ROB: Just on a little detour, nuts and bolts, in terms of structuring, how have you structured that venture alongside Fortress? Are they completely separate? Are they linked in any way?
JOEL: They are completely separate, but the beauty of Fortress is it’s almost like Beyond Academics came meetings and our copywriters and our developers and just lay out what they need. So we’re able to support Beyond Academics through Fortress, and it’s just a great relationship where essentially Beyond is a customer of Fortress, and we get to see this whole thing develop from just a concept to where we’re at now.
ROB: Fantastic. We’ll get that into the show notes. Joel, thank you for joining us. Best wishes to you and to Fortress as you finish out the year.
JOEL: You as well, Rob. Thanks very much.
ROB: Be well. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
In 2006, Carlos’s fiancée (now his wife) was approached by a client to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click). Carlos got into the agency in 2008 when the economy “tanked” and the funding for the startup where he worked dried up. From 2008 forward, the agency has been “tapped” on a regular basis by traditional (radio, print, TV) agencies needing digital services for their clients. Bloom works with a variety of different industries – retail, B2B, government agencies, and some non-profits. Hospitality, which is big in British Columbia, is currently challenged because of the pandemic. Over the years, the focus of needs has become more complex – from a “We need to be on FaceBook” to “We need to be on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Instagram.”
When asked why these traditional agencies did not develop their own digital services in-house, Carlos explained that many digital marketers who started in the mid-2000s were self-taught. They learned the craft by “reading blogs, by attending conferences, by networking with other marketers.” He says, “It takes time to build expertise and a skillset where you’re able to run big-enough campaigns.” Partnerships with Bloom meet larger agencies’ needs for solid, experience-based digital expertise and have given Bloom the opportunity to work with larger clients than they might otherwise have had.
Carlos gave a nod to Converge’s marketing performance reports by relating that the number one complaint that he hears from clients coming from other agencies is, “We get an invoice every month, we don’t know what our agency is doing, we don’t know what they’ve been working on, we don’t know what the next steps are.” Carlos notes, “You can save so much time and deliver so much better quality and end results using the proper tools.” Communication with clients is critical.
Carlos commented on the problem that good digital marketing people are hard to come by and even harder to retain. He says, “Once somebody becomes skilled at running campaigns with six-digit budgets every month, they get poached.”
In this interview, Carlos discusses how Covid has changed his business and how the marketing industry has “always been on the leading edge of change.” He is looking forward to a disrupter in the digital marketing industry because there are no barriers to becoming an expert, no licensing, and the service is becoming commoditized. What that new model will look like . . . and who will do it . . . who knows?
Carlos can be reached on his agency’s website at bloommarketing.ca – (.ca for Canada), or on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Carlos Obregon, Co-founder at Bloom Marketing based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Welcome to the podcast, Carlos.
CARLOS: Thank you very much, Rob. It’s great to be here.
ROB: I’m pleased to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Bloom Marketing and what focus areas the firm excels in?
CARLOS: We started Bloom Marketing back in 2006. Initially it started as a result of my then-fiancée, now wife. She was approached by a former client, and she was invited to become a contractor doing SEO, doing PPC. That was the first client. I joined the company two years later as a result of the 2008 financial problems. I was working for a startup, and at the time all their funding dried up as a result of it, so the staff was laid off. We were then expecting our first child. There is nothing to light up your entrepreneurial fire like having a mortgage and a baby arriving soon. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] Yeah. So, you started off in that SEO, pay-per-click; where has that path taken you in terms of the specialties of the firm now? What does a typical client engagement look like?
CARLOS: We started our agency and organically, we started getting approached by traditional media agencies wanting to build up their digital marketing expertise because invariably – we’re talking about 2008-2009. This is when they were doing radio, print, TV. They were asked by their clients, “We now need to be on Google, we need to be on Facebook, we need to rank better on organic searches.”
That led to us developing several partnerships with traditional media agencies. That became our social growth. By having access to larger clients than what we would have had otherwise, we were able to nourish and develop these partnerships. That happens still today. We still maintain most of these partnerships. That has allowed us to tap clients that we probably wouldn’t have access to because we don’t have a radio department, we don’t have a print advertising department.
So more or less, that’s been our path. We didn’t really plan it that way, but that’s how it’s been working out.
ROB: That’s an excellent path. I’ve definitely seen a lot of these traditional media purveyors – they’re used to selling TV ads, they’re used to selling radio ads. Actually, some friends of mine were involved in a company that was acquired by Gannett, who was one of these big old school media companies. They tried to equip the sales folks to go out and sell digital, and it didn’t go very well. What do you think it is in these organizations – by now they certainly could have built an in-house practice and an in-house capability. What do you think has made it hard for them to turn that corner? They really do need these partnerships. They need you.
CARLOS: I think in part it’s because those of us who started mid-2000s with digital marketing, we’re all self-taught. There were no programs in universities or colleges for digital marketing. So, we just learned as we went by reading blogs, by attending conferences, by networking with other marketers. It takes time. It takes time to build expertise and a skillset where you’re able to run big enough campaigns, where you’re able to communicate with the client. That’s a crucial part of the business, communication.
I know you’re involved in the reporting side of the tools. That’s probably the number one complaint that we hear from people coming from other agencies, from past experiences. Communication. So many times we’ve heard, “We get an invoice every month, we don’t know what our agency is doing, we don’t know what they’ve been working on, we don’t know what the next steps are.”
I think it takes time to build the marketing expertise. Once somebody becomes skilled at say running campaigns with six-digit budgets every month, they get poached. We’re all trying to make a living, so understandably.
ROB: Right. That training effect is challenging I think also, especially where you started out in some of that SEO and PPC world. I had some friends who ran an online marketplace for building products, essentially, and these two guys are running this $20-30 million a year business, and the founders are still doing a lot of the PPC because every time they get somebody up to speed, they get poached.
CARLOS: Yeah. I’ve seen it over and over again. At one point I remember one of the biggest agencies here in Vancouver, a traditional agency, their entire digital marketing team was two people. They were both entry level, and here they were running gigantic companies. [laughs]
ROB: Yeah. So, you had those beginnings in certain areas, and the marketing world has changed quite a bit since you started the firm. What are some of the more services you offer now? What different expertises are you working with clients on? You mentioned where the clients are coming from; what does a typical client look like?
CARLOS: We’re actually involved in several different industries. Hospitality is pretty big here in British Columbia. At the moment it’s going through challenges because of the pandemic. We’re also involved in retail, B2B, and we have also done some nonprofits as well as government agencies.
One key difference now is before, we would be approached and they’d say, “I need to do SEO because I need better rankings.” What I think now is the needs of the customers encompass more. Right now we get approached and they say, “I need to be on Facebook, I need to be on Instagram, I need to be on Google, Microsoft ads, on LinkedIn, on Twitter.” There’s a lot more of a whole vision of what the needs are and all these different channels the business needs to be visible on. I think that would be the main change. More than one channel, now it’s multichannel.
ROB: When someone comes to you and they want to order everything on the menu, how do you help them in that decision process? They still have to choose where they’re going to allocate more of their effort and budget, and also maybe some channels aren’t quite appropriate for them. How do you think about that guidance?
CARLOS: Again, we go back to the communication. We have an onboarding process where we meet with the prospective client or client and first we try to understand, what are the goals? Usually you get an answer like, “I want more business.” Well, yeah, but what does that look like? Do you mean more subscribers initially? Do you want more people signing up for a trial? Do you want more people ordering a sample? Do you want to get appointments? Do you want to get viewings for real estate?
When we start narrowing down the goal, we say, “You’re a business-to-business company, so perhaps Facebook is not the ideal channel if you’re selling industrial equipment. Why don’t we explore LinkedIn first, where you can target people based on which companies they work for and their job titles?” For the most part, it’s a back and forth. We agree on what the goals are, we agree on how we’re going to measure, what kind of timelines we have – because as you know, some products have a really long sell cycle, so it makes it tricky to measure sometimes.
But again, it goes back to making sure you align and you understand what the client wants and they understand what you can deliver and how long it will be. That would be more or less how we approach it.
ROB: That certainly makes sense. On this journey, you already gave us a little bit of a picture of the origin of the firm and how it sounded like your wife started the firm and then a couple years later she let you into the business.
CARLOS: [laughs] Pretty much.
ROB: How many people were on the team? Were you Employee #2, or were there some other people that had come in between the two events?
CARLOS: We had contractors from the start. I was not Employee #2 per se. I was “Person on the Payroll #2.” Up until today, we continue to work mostly with freelancers and contractors who are part of our team, but they’re not under contract. They’re not just working for us. So I was #2 on the payroll but not necessarily #2 in the company.
ROB: That’s an interesting thing. I’m going to pull on that a little bit. When you talk about contractors, what percent of your team would you say is full time versus contract?
CARLOS: I would say full time is about 40% and contract about 60%.
ROB: That’s a strategic choice, right? I know people who say that their target is 30% contract, but at the end of the day they can’t help themselves and they end up being much more towards 100% of it being full time, or maybe 10% on contract. How have you reached that decision strategically? What led you there?
CARLOS: We didn’t really choose it; it just kind of happened. People we found that were really good at what they do usually wouldn’t want to commit to working full time for any one firm. I think it comes down to quality and reliability. The contractors we work with, we know they’re never going to come and work exclusively for us just because they’ve achieved a certain level of success and they want flexibility. They want to be able to turn down work occasionally. So it just happened that way.
Now, looking back, I think it was a good thing that we learned how to work with contractors early on and how we maintained those relationships, given the changes that we’re undergoing right now. A lot of people are working remotely. Those who already have practice in working remotely, it was an easier transition. Some other ones were more abrupt. But I feel like the days of huge agencies and huge offices are probably behind us.
ROB: Is your team in any office right now or is everybody completely remote still?
CARLOS: We’re a hybrid. We do have an office, and I go about three times a week or so. But we have contractors who live 2,000 miles away from here, just as an example. We’re never going to have them in the office, and that’s fine.
ROB: In that sort of environment, how are you thinking about people knowing each other, working together, team-building? What do you think that looks like right now, number one, and then number two – suppose we’re in full regathering and getting together mode, but you’re still distributed. How are you thinking about team?
CARLOS: I’m a really social guy. I miss being able to hang out with groups of people. I really, really miss it. In some instances it’s possible to have most of our team in any one place, especially at certain times of the year or if there is something happening in Vancouver like a big conference or some reason for everyone to be together.
But I think moving forward, we’re going to have to do a hybrid where those of us who are close by might be able to meet up and be physically in the same boardroom, but I think from now on we’re always going to have people remote conferencing.
ROB: It’s definitely something I’ve been trying to sort my way through. Before, we had an office. I liked having an office. I wanted people who wanted to be in an office. And then I just kind of changed my mind. In February, we made a hire who’s an American, but in Santiago, Chile. We just hired someone in Sacramento. We’re looking at people in Chicago and Tucson, Arizona. I’m thinking a lot about how we get together, whether we have some sort of annual team event or what it looks like. I don’t quite know yet. So I’m asking a little bit for myself as well.
CARLOS: Yeah, we’re definitely in – none of us were planning for this to happen, for these drastic changes. Who knows? Perhaps next year we’ll be somewhat back to some normal, but I think especially in our industry, we’re always at the leading edge of change. Things were changing rapidly in our industry to begin with, and now with the work from home revolution, perhaps we’re going to have team members that we never meet in person.
But I don’t know if it happens to you – to me, I have people that I work with remotely and have for years, and even though I don’t see them physically very often, I feel like I know them really well. It’s like we’re buddies. So, I don’t think we’re giving up that much by not meeting everyone in person frequently.
ROB: Really interesting. It’s good to have thoughts on that. It’s good to talk to each other about that. Carlos, as you reflect on the path of the business so far, what are some lessons you have learned along the way that, if you were starting over today, you might do things a little bit differently?
CARLOS: Definitely. You know what the number one is?
ROB: What’s that?
CARLOS: I wouldn’t accept every client that comes through the door. I learned that initially because I started working in the firm in 2008, and there was a lot of uncertainty. Huge banks were going under. Huge insurance companies were going under. Everybody was kind of in panic mode. So, I started getting customers and I would say yes to everything and everyone because I didn’t know when the next one was going to be. I had bills to pay, I had a mortgage, I had a kid on the way.
Looking back, I could’ve been pickier because with some of those projects, I had no alignment. I didn’t really connect with the client. Perhaps I didn’t understand their goals, they didn’t understand me and how I wanted to deliver. Although we never really had any frictions or difficult breakups with clients, there were a lot of projects that I did not enjoy.
We’re in a free market and we obviously need to make a living and grow and prosper, but we also need to enjoy what we do as much as possible. So that would be my number one learning. Don’t accept every gig. I put it down on paper here in front of me for our chat today. That would be my key takeaway.
ROB: It’s draining on your energy, those things that you take on that maybe don’t align. There comes a point – and you probably have realized this at different times – there comes times when you’re at capacity and you end up almost having to say no to something you’d rather do, or at least scramble to figure out how you’re going to do it. It can be hard to keep the quality level high when you’re scrambling for a solution.
CARLOS: That, and obviously the contracts and the projects that you enjoy, we all do better. We’re more creative. We come up with better ideas on projects we enjoy rather than something like, “I don’t even know how to sell this product. What does the end customer want? Do I really want to be promoting this? I don’t believe in this product or this service.” So yeah, definitely a learning.
ROB: I think we all need reminders of this. It’s so easy to get off track so quickly, and then you get into the mode where you’re just handling the decision that you’ve made. Are there any tools you have found that have helped you think ahead and think about working on the business? Because you have a lot going on and a lot of people involved.
CARLOS: Yeah. I love finding new tools and experimenting, whether it be marketing automation, reporting, or analytics. You’re an expert in this industry. You can save so much time and deliver so much better quality and end results using the proper tools.
Now, as you’re fully aware, it’s a highly competitive industry. There are so many new tools. It’s hard to keep on top of it. You have to do a lot of reading, which I happen to enjoy. But we definitely love using and finding and testing new tools. I remember when I first started working in-house, running a huge technical company, I was doing the SEO for this company, for this startup here in Vancouver. It was comparison shopping. I was doing the SEO, and from one day to the next, the person who was running the Google Ads left.
The CEO approached me and said, “Can you take care of this, at least on an intern basis, while we find somebody else?” I was like, “Okay, yeah, sure.” It was a six-digit budget in Google Ads. And this was in 2005. The days of Google Ads Editor were not around yet. [laughs] We had to download all the data to spreadsheets. The campaigns were so gigantic – we were bidding on over 100,000 keywords at the time – that Excel kept crashing. Whenever we tried to do any analysis of bids and conversions, it would always freeze up.
Thinking back, if I had the tools we have now back in the day, oh my God, I would’ve done a full day of work in one hour.
ROB: [laughs] Wow. If only you could travel back in time with tools, you could take over the world. One thing I think that’s interesting that you have uncovered in your story – we’ve had guests before whose spouse is involved in the business, but they were very vague. They wouldn’t really admit it on the audio. It’s really interesting that you brought it to the forefront. What have you found makes it work well to work on a business, on an entrepreneurial venture, with your spouse?
CARLOS: We can go back even further than that. I’ll give you a little bit of background. I actually met my now wife at a marketing conference here in Vancouver. She was working for an agency at the time; I was working as in-house SEO at another company. So, we met, and that’s how it started. We actually met because of digital marketing. Then we got engaged, and that’s when she started working freelance. Then I joined in 2008. It’s been 14 years and we’re still happily married.
I can’t deny that there have been difficult times where we don’t agree and I want to do things one way and she wants to do things different or vice versa, but for the most part I think we complement each other really well. There are areas of the business – a lot of guys will agree with this – I don’t get involved in the finance. She’s the treasurer. [laughs] I like to socialize and meet people. I do a lot of the business development. It’s something that she doesn’t enjoy. We’ve made it work that way. I keep my hands off the money and the checkbook, and then whenever she gets a new lead or someone that needs more information, I usually do the communication.
We’ve made it work. Just for mental health, we work with different clients. She looks after some clients, I look after different clients. Occasionally we work on the same project, but we keep some things separate.
ROB: That sounds like a good tip in general. That’s good for division of work, I think, in any company. You want people who work on some clients and not others. You want some people to work in their area of strength in finance, and others in business development. We do that, but I think there can be maybe this pull as co-owners to have your hand in a little bit of everything. It sounds like being able to split that up a little bit has served you well just to not be all in each other’s business literally every day.
CARLOS: Yeah. When we’re at home, we have a rule of no business discussion. We talk about the kids, we talk about dinner, and we talk about vacations. We try to stay away from work because otherwise you end up working 16 hours a day, one way or another.
ROB: That makes sense. Carlos, when you look ahead at what’s coming up in the marketing world, what’s coming up for Bloom Marketing, what are you excited about?
CARLOS: I think the digital marketing agency world is ripe for disruption. I don’t know who’s going to do it, but if you recall, real estate was revolutionized by Re/Max. They completely put the business model on its head by giving realtors a lot more control of their commissions and how they split costs. I think this industry is ripe for disruption somewhere along those lines where perhaps rather than having an owner, a founder, and account managers and strategists and business development, I wonder if it could be pooling a partnership of frontend developers, backend developers, usability experts, web designers, SEO experts, PPC experts, and put them all in one company, split the costs, and somehow share revenue.
I don’t know what that would look like, but I’m hoping there’s disruption because we’re becoming commoditized. Every week I run a search on Google for “digital marketing agency Vancouver,” and every week I see new names coming up. There is no barrier of entry in this industry. You just put up your website and you say, “Okay, I’m a digital marketing expert,” and you are. It’s unregulated. It’s not like you have a license.
ROB: Huh. That’s interesting. It’s interesting to think about the different ways that we get clients and the different ways that realtors get clients. The real estate industry is set up to equip the realtor to focus on a few things and other people in the process – different people are – let’s say most real estate firms, for instance, don’t have handypeople on staff to fix up the house before listing it. They just don’t. It’s all parceled out.
CARLOS: Yes.
ROB: So, it’s interesting. What’s possible, what’s not possible? I wonder, what are the next couple steps that would prove that to be more possible and more true?
CARLOS: I’m sure there’s going to be a better way of creating a digital marketing agency business model, different than what we have right now. But if you come up with it, remember me. Call me, okay? [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] Yeah. One thing I have seen – I’ll share this; it’s been a little while since we talked about it on the podcast, but it’s come up a couple of times here and there. There is one firm that we’ve spoken with that was a co-op. They were structured as a co-op, where they were owned by their employees, and when the employees left, they gave up their ownership in the company. Soze was the agency there, out of Brooklyn. It sounds like a very Brooklyn kind of thing.
But I just swapped emails with Michael Skolnik, who’s their – I don’t know what you say – he’s the founder, I guess, but I don’t know what his official title is within that mix since everybody owns the business. But he’s going to look at open sourcing the local documents once they’ve got all that ready. I’ve got him on commitment to check in with in the new year. That may not be exactly where things go, but it is an interesting model because it does feel strange.
I guess as a founder, you take the risk. Some people would look at it and say, “Fine, you take the risk, you get the reward.” But there’s other times, I think, where you have a business that’s doing well, but its service is revenue, so there’s only so much of it you’re going to reinvest in the business. And when it’s going well, maybe it feels like it flows a little bit too much to the owners.
CARLOS: Yeah. You’re saying the co-op models – yeah, that’s one way. I’m sure some smart guy will come up with a really good business model for the 21st century.
ROB: [laughs] Perfect. We’ll keep our eyes out and we’ll keep talking about that here. Carlos, when people want to find you and when they want to connect with Bloom Marketing, where should they look to connect?
CARLOS: Our website is bloommarketing.ca – .ca because we’re in Canada I’m also active on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. That’ll be the easiest way to find us.
ROB: Excellent. Carlos, thank you for coming on the podcast. Best wishes to you and to Bloom Marketing going forward.
CARLOS: Thank you. All the best, and thank you very much for the invite.
ROB: Thank you. Be well.
CARLOS: Thanks. Bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
In 2009, Yoel Israel, founder at WadiDigital, Israel’s leading full service digital agency, was pursuing his MBA at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Israel. A friend sat down with him for a cup of coffee and said, “Dude, you’ve got to get on Twitter.” Yoel fell in love with it, set his university up on Twitter (which brought in some international students), and got a scholarship for the effort He graduated and returned to his job at Xerox in his hometown – Philadelphia – and ran a social media management side gig (Facebook and Twitter) for small businesses. When he discovered the Facebook dashboard, this finance major found that he not only got to look at data . . . he could manipulate it. He was hooked.
He learned Google Ads, started his own company, and moved back to Israel where English is the “B2B tech language. When LinkedIn rolled out lead generation in 2017, the agency took off – a “first mover advantage” payoff. Yoel explains: LinkedIn ads may be expensive, but they are powerful because of the discrete targeting capability the platform provides.
Today, WadiDigital focuses on LinkedIn advertising, SEO, and lead generation for B2B technology startups, who, most likely, have already gone through Round A, Round B funding. After 3 customers asked for cybersecurity marketing and cybersecurity influencer marketing. WadiDigital decided to build a platform. Currently, a dozen cybersecurity companies are using an affiliate cybersecurity influencer distribution platform where influencer affiliates “can manage and track their own clicks.” WadiDigital’s new platform launches in January and will consist of two parts:
- Cybersecurity clients and other cybersecurity companies can share and distribute blogs and non-gated content. Influencer CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers) can retrieve these links, share them, and get compensated based on clicks.
- WadiDigital cohosts and curates webinars where cybersecurity company experts present content for different groups of influencers. Cybersecurity companies get to showcase their expertise. Well-vetted cybersecurity influencers (who get up-to-date information at a fraction of the cost of what they would pay Gartner or SANS), can post the information and get paid. Yoel says, ” We bring them good content and they get compensated for it.”
In this interview, Yoel discusses some of the security risks individuals and companies take, when to hire and the questions to ask when you hire, and the importance of processes in keeping things going.
Yoel recommends that people follow him on WadiDigital.com, Yoel Israel on LinkedIn, (send a connection request and tell him you heard him on the podcast), and eventually cyfluencer.com, the distribution platform (again, January launch). The company will soon be hosting a cyber intelligence magazine: Cyber Intel Mag, details on all the “new stuff” to follow on LinkedIn and the agency website.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m excited to be joined today by Yoel Israel, founder at WadiDigital based in Israel. Welcome to the podcast, Yoel.
YOEL: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for having me.
ROB: Why don’t you start off by running down for us what WadiDigital is excellent in?
YOEL: Actually, our focus is LinkedIn advertising and SEO. We’re very focused on lead generation, and all of our clients are B2B technology startups. They usually have at least Round A, Round B funding. A large majority of them are cybersecurity, especially because we’re in Israel. It’s like the cybersecurity hub of the world. So, we do a lot with cybersecurity there.
We also now do cybersecurity influencer marketing. We have a cybersecurity influencer distribution platform that we’re still building, and we’re currently using but we’re building a new one right now. We do a lot of influencer marketing in the cyber space. So, we do a lot, but our focus is B2B LinkedIn, SEO, lead gen, and influencer marketing for cybersecurity.
ROB: That’s probably an underappreciated and unknown aspect of Israel for people who don’t know. In the technology space you get a flavor for that deep security knowledge and that expertise in the venture funded companies in Israel, but a lot of people may not necessarily make that association, so I’m glad we get to dig into that a little bit.
I want to pull on the thread a little bit – when you mentioned cybersecurity influencers, that’s interesting. I’m sure it looks a little bit different than what people may commonly think of as influencer marketing. What does influencer marketing look like in cybersecurity?
YOEL: We have two parts. How we got into it was a few years ago, a cybersecurity client of ours asked us if we do cybersecurity marketing. We just said no. Then two months later, a different cyber client asked us the same question. We looked around online like, “All right, let’s help them,” and we didn’t find anything. There’s nothing really for B2B for influencer marketing, and if there was one, it was more like an Upwork where they come in and make the connection and there’s nothing special about it. It’s definitely not cybersecurity focused. When a third client asked us, we decided to build it.
So, the influencer marketing, right now we’re actually developing our own that will be ready in January. We spent over $60,000 on it. It’s going to be epic. But what we’re doing right now is using an affiliate network to manage and track clicks, where basically every affiliate, which is influencers, can log in and have their own unique tracking. We have about a dozen cybersecurity companies on our platform.
There are two parts to our influencer distribution platform. One is where our cybersecurity clients and other cybersecurity companies want to share and distribute their blogs and their non-gated content, and then influencer CISOs and such, mostly in America, get to go grab these links, share it, and they get compensated based on the clicks. That’s one.
The second part that we’re doing is now we’re offering, within our pool of dozens of cybersecurity influencers, some of them are writers and they’re real experts within their space, within cybersecurity, so we’re not just writing content, but we’re also co-hosting webinars. If you were to do a webinar with SANS or Gartner, it might cost you 15 grand. However, there’s no reason to do it twice because they send it to the same audience.
What we do is set up our cybersecurity clients with different influencers every single time, and those influencers promote their content in the webinar. They each bring a different and important audience to each webinar, not to mention it’s a fraction of the price if they were to pay SANS or Gartner.
ROB: Got it. In one case you’re providing them a platform to showcase expertise alongside people they’d want to be appearing alongside, and on the other side it sounds almost like you are helping the influencer solve a problem. It’s often not really the case in influencer marketing. The problem you’re helping them solve is they want money. But in this case, it sounds like part of the problem somebody who would be sharing one of these links would have is actually that they want to talk about the industry. They want a source of good, credible content, and you’re able to connect content with people who want to share good content.
YOEL: That’s correct. We’re curating. These people are already sharing and engaging with excellent cybersecurity content that they’re sharing, but now in addition to what they’re sharing, we’re curating that content from about a dozen companies, and more are joining, that are able to then go and grab your content, and they can share it. It’s really fantastic that we make it so easy for the influencers. We bring them good content and they get compensated for it.
ROB: That’s a really interesting model I haven’t heard very much about before.
YOEL: That’s why we had to make it.
ROB: [laughs] That’s why you had to build it. Especially considering, from a product perspective, how do you think about elevating towards quality? Because that is one of the problems in the affiliate and link sharing world; it kind of has a bad reputation. How do you evaluate that experience?
YOEL: We don’t let anyone who wants to come and share links. We review anyone that wants to share a link. We go to their profile, we see all of their posts, make sure the overwhelming majority of their posts are cybersecurity related. We look at their engagement, their follower count, their work experience. So, you have to apply to be an influencer and we manually choose who can and cannot be influencers. That’s how we get rid of the junk, and then the companies, especially when our platform will be ready in January, get to choose what companies they want influencers from, if they only want to pay for clicks from what countries.
So even though you might have gotten clicks hypothetically from Pakistan, you don’t want to pay for those, so we’re not going to charge them and we’re not going to pay out our influencers that way either. We have a lot of control over it. It’s not just like “set it up and do whatever you want.” Especially the cybersecurity audience, they’re very conservative. They’re professionals. They do things by the book. By definition, they kind of need to. That’s just how they are and who they are, so we need to make sure everything is very clean and kosher.
ROB: Excellent. I love the clean and kosher. Yoel, if we rewind this business a little bit, how did WadiDigital come into existence? What led you to start the business and how did you arrive at that point?
YOEL: It was weird. In 2009 I was getting my MBA at Bar-Ilan University here in Tel Aviv in Israel, and I met with a friend of mine who’s a huge tech influencer in Israel. I wasn’t friends with him at the moment; it was in 2009, and he took me out for some coffee and he goes, “Dude, you’ve got to get on Twitter.” I’m like, “What’s Twitter?” This is 2009, right?
I really got into it and I loved it. It was a real intro to social media. I’d been on Facebook a little bit, especially from college for my undergrad when that was up and coming. But I got on and I set up my university on Twitter and they were able to get some international students. They actually gave me a scholarship, so I knew I was good at something here.
I went back to Philly, where I’m originally from, and went back to work for Xerox. On the side I was doing social media management organically on Facebook and Twitter for small businesses. Then I had a client ask me to take out ads on Facebook, and then I saw the whole dashboard and I kind of fell in love. Originally, I have a finance background, so I do love numbers and I love looking at tables of data. But once I understood that I could actually manipulate that data, I knew this was what I wanted to do for a living.
Then I got trained up in Google Ads from a friend of mine and then started my own business and started selling Google Ads. I moved back to Israel after two and a half years in Philly. That was 7 years ago, and then naturally, because everything here in English is B2B tech, I started getting more into B2B and Google Ads and then getting all-in on LinkedIn ads, and we grew from there. Once LinkedIn rolled out lead generation forms on April 1st, 2017, we went all-in and we skyrocketed, bringing in enterprise leads and business because we were first mover advantage.
ROB: That’s a good wave to catch. For a while, a long time, you would hear that LinkedIn ads were expensive and that’s all you would really hear about them. Then I think there started to be a transition at some point – I don’t know whether it was an evolution of the platform or in strategy, but you started to hear instead that LinkedIn ads were expensive but effective. What do you think fed that transition, and what was your experience in that?
YOEL: It’s definitely expensive relative to other platforms, but it’s totally worth the money. You can target whomever you want professionally on LinkedIn. You can’t do that on any other platform. It’s extremely powerful.
ROB: Talk more about that target. What’s that look like in practice to be really effective?
YOEL: In practice, if I want to target CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers) at Fortune 500 companies only within the United States and who have just switched jobs in the last 90 days so they might be looking for new security opportunities for them to secure their companies, we can do that targeting.
ROB: Got it. Does it line up a little bit with that enterprise hunting, account-based marketing mindset?
YOEL: You could also do account-based marketing. You can upload a list of companies that you directly want to target and do that too. But then they also have different target options that you can choose, like the industry and the company size within that industry that you want to target. There’s a lot of different ways – not just choosing what companies, but there’s all kinds of different ways that you can target by company and you can target by the individual based on their experience.
ROB: Got it. To justify the expense, do you look more at something that’s in a lead capture mode? Is there any place for just pure brand and awareness marketing in LinkedIn?
YOEL: Oh yeah, for sure. If you’re a startup or you’re a disruptor, people don’t know that you’re solving an issue that they don’t know they have. They’re not searching for that solution. Therefore, you can’t use Google, but you can put in front of them the solution that you provide. So, awareness is fantastic. Video is very good. It’s not necessarily good for lead generation but creating awareness videos and then remarketing people that viewed 50% or 75% of the video and then hit them up with a lead capture, you’ll do very well.
ROB: Wow, that’s an interesting direction to take things. You started this and you got this thing moving; at what point did you realize that you were going to have to grow the team and this was really going to have to be something bigger than yourself?
YOEL: When I stopped getting enough sleep. [laughs] I was working wire to wire, and then you get this really hot client. It was like, “Ugh, I’m totally full with time. I shouldn’t take them,” but it was someone you really wanted. You’re like, “Okay, now I need to hire.” That’s how it happened.
ROB: Got it. So, you just basically got to full capacity and then you said, “Well, I’ve got to do something that is beyond me.”
YOEL: Right.
ROB: Are you still in that sort of mode, or have you shifted in terms of capacity planning and hiring to some different metrics? Or do you still think about getting a little bit too busy?
YOEL: I always try to make sure we’re stretching before I do my hires. We’re already 11 people full time, and I just signed last Thursday night a huge senior, the only other person that’s worth – let’s say it’s someone else in Israel that’s got perfect English, has LinkedIn ads, Google Ads experience, worked in an agency, built a team. So, I just made a big hire, a very expensive hire, who will be starting in January. I’m continuing to grow and I’m all-in, and I’m putting up a few more job postings now. To really build up a perfect team obviously will cost us a lot of money in the short term, but I think the medium and long term will be happy.
But in general, as a rule of thumb for others that have agencies, do as much as you can, learn as much as you can, save up as much as you can, work wire to wire until you absolutely need to hire. Then hire. Too many people try to apply the 4-hour workweek before – the whole point of the 4-hour workweek is to escape the wire-to-wire working. First, you’ve got to build the business, build the revenue, and get all that. Then you can learn how to step back. Don’t step back and start outsourcing things until you’re really working like crazy.
ROB: I know I’ve certainly had that experience of hiring for the business I wish I had instead of what’s right in front of me. Have you had any either fractional or full-time hires that you’ve learned you may have made prematurely and had to pull back from it?
YOEL: I used to say I hire on personality and then I learned that’s not nearly as important. I think having a good work ethic is more important than anything. That’s what I really learned. You need people to have a good work ethic. If they have a good work ethic, they’re competent, and they really care about the quality of their work, I think that’s the number one most important thing.
ROB: How do you think about screening for a good work ethic and evaluating that before someone’s on board?
YOEL: Make sure they have a full year of working somewhere. If you’re in marketing, digital marketing, maybe a 1 year of white collar, making sure that they haven’t been fired, and calling the references – were they on time? I really think speaking to the references and making sure they actually have some full-time employment. You should be able to get it from the references. Make sure to ask difficult questions to the references. A lot of people try to be nice to references because they’re being kind with their time, but that’s really the way to know.
ROB: Not only that, but people will often give you the good references. It’s hard to get to sometimes the references you really need to understand the full picture of the person.
YOEL: Right, but you need to ask the hard questions. You’ve got to pivot it and do it like this. Let’s say Peter. “Is Peter more of an introvert or an extrovert? Does Peter excel better working alone or excel better working on a team?” Don’t say “Has Peter ever been late?” They’ll say no. You frame it as, “How many times a month has Peter been late?” Then you hear if they think or not. You get an idea. So when you frame it that way, you get a better idea. It’s how you frame the question, you’ll be able to get an honest answer.
Also, ideally, when you do these reference calls, if you can schedule a video call because then you can see their reaction. If you can avoid the telephone and do a video call, which everyone now knows how to do because of the pandemic, you’ll be better off.
ROB: That’s definitely an opportunity I’ve seen in this time. People are much less weirded out by a video call because we’re all used to it. If you had told someone you wanted to do your first screen on a video call two years ago, I don’t know if you would’ve had the level of adoption that I’m seeing with candidates now.
YOEL: Right. It’s a hiring market. Employers have a lot of leverage in a difficult economy. If someone asks for a video interview, I couldn’t imagine anyone saying no. If you really want to weed people out, find out those that aren’t willing to do a video interview.
ROB: People find a lot of ways to weed themselves out. It constantly surprises me. Someone will spend the time on a video call, but then they won’t follow up timely on the next step you ask them to do. It’s a real tell.
YOEL: It is, yeah. For those looking for employment, just a little tip: don’t forget to send a thank you email after the interview.
ROB: Man, it’s such a way to stand out.
YOEL: It’s sad. I studied finance and they taught us a lot about business. We used to send handwritten letters. I’m not that old, man. I’m turning 35 next month. [laughs] I don’t write in cursive and all that, but there’s something to it. You want to stand out, you send a handwritten letter. You’ll get that job.
ROB: I think it’s also interesting to recognize that one of the ways that I think you’re really able to make those good premium hires you’re talking about is in your choice of market. You’re not talking to somebody who’s selling a widget for $5 bucks a month. The cybersecurity market – the threats continue to grow. There’s a lot of money on the line. What are you seeing when it comes to categories of cybersecurity that’s emerging, trending? What should people be scared of that they don’t know about yet?
YOEL: Don’t worry, all our clients are B2B. We’re not selling VPNs like B2C to end users or anything like that. But everything and anything can be hacked. If you really want to be scared, to be honest, under no circumstances should you have TikTok or WeChat on your phone. They’re stealing your texts. Anything you copy in your clipboard, even when you’re not using the app, it’s sending it to the Communist Chinese Party. That’s the simplest and easiest thing you can do. I could really scare you, but I’m not going to do that. You wanted an easy answer. [laughs]
ROB: I wonder if maybe there’s a novel category of solution that you’ve worked with, a client you’ve worked with that people wouldn’t even realize was a problem or a solution.
YOEL: I don’t use Zoom. Most people do, but we use Google Meet because Zoom is hosted in China, so it’s not secure. And most of our clients are cybersecurity. A few of our clients don’t care; most of them do. There’s a lot. You have no idea. People know everything about you. They’ve watched you do everything on your phone through your camera, heard every conversation. They’re recording everything. Everything you think Google’s recording, which it’s doing legally and with your permission, imagine what foreign governments are doing and getting information on you. I don’t think anyone can run for office in a free country in the future with foreign adversaries knowing everything about you.
ROB: Right, or they can and then it becomes a security risk.
YOEL: Right. You can see that right now.
ROB: Exposing the information is actually – you do that, you can never use it again. But if you hold it over someone’s head, you can influence them for a long period of time.
YOEL: Correct. That’s what’s happening right now maybe in America with Hunter Biden, with everything that he has on him and on Biden. It’s a little worrying. But we’ll see.
ROB: You really do have to wonder. I hadn’t thought about it too much. If someone has the dirt on you –
YOEL: People don’t think about it. And they have the dirt on you. That’s the thing. They have it on me. They have it on you.
ROB: So turning over the dirt is the nuclear option.
YOEL: You don’t turn it over. It’s taken from you.
ROB: Yeah. But them releasing the information is the last play. There’s a lot in between. It’s really interesting. Some interesting trends I have seen in this world – I don’t know what you’ve seen here – is an increase – we have one client who is moving to virtualized desktops. It was an S&P 500 company and they got ransomwared, and they’re just over it. So they are deploying – all of their developers are going to be developing on virtual Windows boxes, I think on Amazon’s cloud. Virtual desktops.
YOEL: Yep, not surprising. You hear a lot more than that. I give examples of what people can do as individuals, but my clients are B2B, so it’s more like how they present a ransomware, patching solutions, things like that. Having different keys in order to access different information, using cryptocurrency and things like that. All kinds of different technologies in order to be able to prevent different kinds of penetration for IT and OT and industrial and ICS. It’s amazing. Think about it; if they take down the energy supply, you’re screwed. You have no food. Nothing gets to you. They can’t even pump the water that comes out of your faucet. Everyone’s out in the street killing each other.
ROB: We got a scary sneak preview. I don’t know what the immediate COVID-lockdown experience was for you, but you realize how overoptimized and how fragile our supply chain is. What was your experience?
YOEL: Yep, yep, yep. A lot.
ROB: What could you not get and what can you still not get?
YOEL: I have a couple old B2C clients from back in the day back in the States, and they’re ecommerce. Ecommerce was through the roof when people couldn’t go to the store. I was like, “Yo, we’ve got to up our budgets. This is amazing. Our ROI is like 5x the previous month. This will only last as long as the pandemic or until things open up.” He goes, “I can’t. My supply chain is screwed.” We had to cut budgets, and it was time to rake it in. He couldn’t supply. We had to go through and start removing products on their website. They sell beads for arts and crafts, high end beads and all that, like African beads. Just to get an idea.
And that’s not even important stuff. Then you talk about all of your medication and all that. I know we’re totally off topic, but that’s fine. All of your medication ingredients that go into medication and all of your technology and everything is made overseas, not to mention your master PPE equipment and everything. Nothing was made here at the time. Big changes have been made in the last 6 months, thankfully, for America to be able to centralize and other countries to start bringing their manufacturing back home. It’s become a national security risk.
ROB: Yeah. I was going to say, that’s a good security story as well. We talked a little bit about some things you’d learned along the way. What are some other lessons you have learned from building WadiDigital that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting from scratch?
YOEL: Starting from scratch? It’s such a simple question but I never thought of it that way. I would’ve maybe hired a little bit earlier. I would have taken processes more seriously. I never worked at another agency, so I would’ve hired a consultant that worked at another agency to give me some tips on how to do and build things, processes, streamline, and save time.
Oh, another thing I did, if you own an agency: get a personal assistant. I learned between me and let’s say one junior when it was just the two of us, only one person working under me, all my time was client-facing, and then I would assign tasks on Monday.com and she would do them. But then my other time went a lot of times to stuff in my personal life. So you can hire someone pretty cheap either locally, in my case – I hired someone on my block – or you can hire someone virtually to do a lot of the stuff you need to do in your personal life. I freed up almost an hour and a half of my time a day. That’s three client calls a day. That’s a lot more work and business that I can take on.
I only started that a couple months ago. After I got used to the personal assistant, I was like, “Why didn’t I do this years ago?”
ROB: [laughs] Right. What I have found is you start off thinking of a few things you could delegate and hand off, and then you just keep on realizing things you can hand off. There’s a freedom that starts to come when you start to think about the additional things you can take off your plate instead of having the mindset that you have to do it.
YOEL: It’s a shift. It doesn’t make any sense to people that don’t. Once you start delegating and handing things off, your life changes.
ROB: I think to some people it sounds very indulgent. It sounds like one of those first world problems of whether or not you have an assistant. But when you’re trying to build a first class business, it’s hard to imagine how you can go without it. After a time. Maybe not when it’s just you.
YOEL: But it’s not even that. I know a lot of people, they’re employees themselves, but they hire some help at home to help with the kids and dishes and cleaning and things like that, and it makes a huge difference. Then they can stay later at work, maybe earn more. And these aren’t people building a business; they’re employees. They just need some help so they can mentally recharge, so they’re not up all night cleaning up after the house and the kids or whatever or helping with tutoring with children. In a sense, it’s all a personal assistant in a way.
ROB: Right, especially now, probably, to have someone who is in your inner circle, who you know and trust their habits. In the middle of the pandemic, I’m not scared, but I am careful. The list of people I’m going to call to babysit my kids has gotten a lot shorter right now because I want to know how you’re living your life.
YOEL: Yeah, I feel you, man. My wife and I went through the same thing. There’s less babysitting.
ROB: For sure. You mentioned processes. I think a lot of us, especially the creative class, “I’m going to go start a business,” bucks at the idea of structure and process. It almost feels like rules, but it’s also kind of like having a bionic exoskeleton sometimes that can help you be a lot stronger than you would be on your own. What was it that helped you realize – was there a particular process that you realized needed to be tightened up or some experience that made you turn the corner on processes?
YOEL: I found out that one of my competitors had some processes that I wasn’t doing, and then I really looked into it and I figured out, “I need to get it together.” [laughs] I went all-in on these processes. I started making processes and spreadsheets, processes in Monday.com, processes on what I do before and after a call and everything. It’s almost automatic. I don’t think about it. It’s become a habit, and everything’s documented, and no work ever gets forgotten or unchecked by doing things a certain way. Processes are important.
But you don’t notice you need it until you either hear complaints from a client or you find out what other people are doing in the industry and you’re like, “Oh, I should be doing that. Why aren’t I doing that?” Which is why I recommended earlier to bring in a consultant, because you don’t know what you don’t know.
ROB: Right. Those experiences beyond yourself, certainly.
YOEL: Correct. Especially because I haven’t worked at an agency, so I haven’t really learned how to do that. I don’t have that experience of “Here’s how we do things, here’s how we do training, here’s how we do keyword research,” and the processes of hiring. You need other help sometimes to see things differently if you don’t have that experience.
ROB: We’ve had a couple of those sorts of folks on. There’s a couple of gentlemen, David C. Baker and Blair Enns, who co-host the 2 Bobs podcast. They’ve both been on here, and they are both consultants to agencies that just have that longitudinal visibility. Even right now, if you want to say, “Hey, what are people doing? How are people’s bookings? What categories are hot, what categories are not hot? What are people doing about office space?”, these are all things where you need some perspective.
YOEL: Right. But get more specific. I don’t follow what people do; I try to do the exact opposite of what everyone does. But when it comes to processes, you need to get specific. Don’t follow the crowd per se, unless you want to enter a rat race, but sometimes you’re straight-up missing the obvious, which you don’t even know.
ROB: Very solid. Yoel, when you think of what’s ahead for WadiDigital and marketing and maybe cybersecurity, what are you excited about that’s coming up?
YOEL: We’re trying to transition from a cybersecurity marketing agency to a cybersecurity marketing and media agency, so in addition to influencer marketing and doing those things, we’re building some reading resources, websites, cybersecurity news websites, cybersecurity TV show. We’re trying to do – that’s for a few years from now. We’re really trying to make the destination for everything cybersecurity marketing and media so if you’re in cybersecurity, you’re a fool not to work with us.
ROB: Where’s that going to live? Do we have a future parking spot domain for that, or some digital properties? Or just follow WadiDigital?
YOEL: You can follow WadiDigital on LinkedIn, but right now, cyfluencer.com. “Cy” like cyber. That’s our distribution platform. That’s going to be launched January. There’s a LinkedIn page we literally just made, and then Cyber Intel Mag is going to be where we do our cyber news and all of that. It’s a cyber intelligence magazine. And then there’s some other things I can’t really share just yet. Just follow me or WadiDigital on LinkedIn to learn more.
ROB: Got it. Is it WadiDigital.com? Where do we go to find you? We can find you on LinkedIn.
YOEL: Yep, wadidigital.com, but the best is search “Yoel Israel” in LinkedIn. Send me a connection request, tell me you heard me from here, and I look forward to following and engaging. I’m very active there.
ROB: Awesome. If we google your name, there’s a nice Google ad that runs right up top too. It’s pretty sweet.
YOEL: As it should. [laughs] Control your name.
ROB: Very good. Yoel, thank you for taking the time to share your experience. It’s great to learn about what you’re doing both within cybersecurity marketing, but also that goal and the thought and the distilled knowledge going into the platform and the media side. It’s really, really instructive.
YOEL: Awesome. Thanks. My pleasure, and I appreciate you having me on.
ROB: Thank you so much. Be well. Bye.
YOEL: Cheers.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Todd Marks is Founder and CEO at Mindgrub, an agency, consultancy, and support company that designs technology for people to transform businesses, creates enterprise mobile apps and web applications, provides digital marketing, and “unlocks human potential.” Winning Inc. 5000’s Design/Development Firm of the year five years in a row might suggest that this is a notable tech firm. Yes, but this same company has also won the American Marketing Associations Marketing Excellence Award for Best Branding Campaign. How does this all fit together?
A “high school math and computer science teacher” turned technologist, Todd collaborated with friends at his website- and eLearning-focused digital agency in the late-90s. In 2002, he founded Mindgrub as an engineering group writing code: building Flash, HTML, and CSS applications. When Apple released the iPhone in 2007, Todd recognized an important “disruption in technology,” and redirected his efforts to web application development and mobile application fulfillment. Customers soon requested information architecture, leading to larger projects.
Early on, the company ran with agency style, top-down, waterfall project management. Today, it specializes in DevOps/agile product, mobile, and web development; user experience design, testing, and emerging technology utilization; branding, digital and traditional marketing, and application support. It has redefined the meaning of “full-service” agency by reaching back to the very beginning – developing the plan, the strategy and designing the software product and pushing forward to the very end – marketing to make sure the product ends up in the hands of its target customers, and then supporting it.
The agency manages the development of a strategic blend of technical projects in parallel with a comprehensive marketing framework. The process? Identify and define application users. Analyze competitors and the market. Conduct stakeholder interviews. Test hypothetical solutions (rapid-prototyping) to build the high-level functionality requirements on the technical side and lower level functionality user stories on the marketing side. Design the software – the information architecture, the product build, the user interface – and then provide the needed support and market the product.
In this interview, Todd discusses the increasingly important role of technology in the marketing world.
In particular, marketing needs automation to effectively manage and move prospects through the customer journey.
Todd says COVID took the governor off the business. Today, the virtual workplace means the company can hire excellent talent anywhere – the company has grown from 105 employees at the beginning of the year to 155 with another 30 or 40 contractors.
Todd identifies 7 kinds of business opportunities:
- Deal Type 1: Go out and get new business
- Deal Type 2: Change orders to an existing project
- Deal Type 3: Adding a different service line
- Deal Type 4: “Support” or upselling (e.g., marketing)
- Deal Type 5: Adding a second project, same buyer
- Deal Type 6: Same account, new buyer
- Deal Type 7: An existing team member goes on long-term retainer
Todd has written and contributed to a number of books including Flash Magic, New Masters of Flash, and Web Design in a Nutshell. He sits on the advisory boards for Loyola University’s MBA program, the Maryland Technology Council (MTC) (Chairman of the Board since 2018), and the Northeastern Maryland Tech Council (NMTC). He can be reached at his company’s website at: mindgrub.com or on LinkedIn.
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ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Todd Marks, Founder and CEO of Mindgrub, based in Baltimore, Maryland. Welcome to the podcast, Todd.
TODD: Thanks for having me, Rob.
ROB: Great to have you here. Why don’t you start off by giving us a rundown of Mindgrub and where the business excels?
TODD: Absolutely. Mindgrub is an agency, a consultancy, and a support company. We make enterprise mobile apps, web applications, and perform digital marketing, and we excel at unlocking human potential.
ROB: Wow. That’s a pretty wide range. A lot of people just do the digital marketing part, but you’re also, you said, support, and also building applications. Where did you start? Were you doing all of that from Day 1? How did the business evolve?
TODD: That’s a great question. I really started the business in 2002. I had a startup with some partners in ’98-’99, and after September 11th we went our separate ways. In 2002 I founded Mindgrub, and I really focused on Flash application development at the time. It became Flex. I also did some web application development with HTML and CSS. I did that for a number of years; I worked in New York, worked for a Deloitte brand for a little bit, and then in 2008 the iPhone came out. I knew that was a big differentiator.
I was working in Chicago at the time. I’ve kind of glamorized the story, but it was a cold day in Chicago and I got splashed by a cab. Meanwhile, I was going back and forth to Maryland and it was getting warmer and warmer at the time, and I couldn’t take the winter in Chicago. The SDK was released in January 2008, and by March I was done going to Chicago. I was also teaching at University of Maryland Baltimore County, teaching instructional technology but working with a lot of technical students on campus. So, I quit my day job, came back to Maryland, holed up in my basement and started making some early mobile apps.
We started out as really web application development and mobile application fulfillment, and we did a great job. Engineers. But my clients started to ask, “You do design; can you do a little information architecture?” And I could, so I started to do that as well. Then we found ourselves growing into larger and larger projects, and we evolved from doing a lot of agency style, top-down, waterfall sort of project management to evolving a little bit more into agile.
With agile it takes a lot more planning up front, so we found ourselves doing a lot of the strategy and planning, which we call Sprint Zero, but it’s really identifying the users of the application, doing some competitor analysis, some market analysis. With those users, we’ll do stakeholder interviews, testing, you name it, and we’ll inevitably come up with a list of epics, which is the high level functionality they need, and user stories, which is a lower level functionality. From those users, we then design the software, we do that information architecture, we build it, and then we evolved into supporting it. So we have a support team as well, which I mentioned, called Aces.
Then finally that full continuum was that we’d market it. We would release software, and a lot of times these enterprise mobile apps we’d put in the store – the clients would say, “We don’t have any downloads but it’s in the store.” We said, “What marketing did you do?” “Nothing. It’s in the store.” “Did you even do optimization for the store?” “No.” Particularly, that store is not optimized. It doesn’t necessarily get crawled effectively. There’s some dark arts there that you can add some optimization for search engines. But you need landing pages, you need newsletters, you need marketing automation. There’s all these additional things.
So, we were getting unhappy seeing our clients not successful. We’ve made apps for Wendy’s and Yamahas and Geicos of the world, and they always have tons of downloads. They have millions of people in a database somewhere and they can get hundreds of thousands of downloads. But for our startups that didn’t have that marketing automation tool, they don’t have a big CRM, they don’t have a huge database of prospect users, they have to do marketing.
Long story long, we are an end-to-end agency. We do everything from planning, design, development, support, and ongoing marketing. We don’t just do it at the agency level, but we also have become a bit of a consultancy as well where we compete against the Accentures and the Deloittes of the world on that kind of channel.
I see there’s really two camps. There’s the Big Four on the agency side, WPP, Omnicom, Dentsu – and the Big Four on the consulting side – Deloitte, Accenture, Booz, and Booz started out as an accounting company and now they’re a consulting company. We inevitably play right in between. One of our taglines is that we’re a very technical agency, which is our differentiator, and we’re an extremely creative consultancy, which is a differentiator.
ROB: It’s certainly a differentiator, the creativity side. You can imagine there are probably a great number of development shops that – well, a lot of folks can’t actually deliver a functioning application. We’ll start there. But of those that can, you can see them delivering the application and saying, “Here it is,” and then you get to the customer saying, “What do I do with it? How do I promote it?”
But for you to take on that responsibility – it seems like there’s quite a shift in responsibility from “I gave you a functioning app” to “I am also accountable for people using it.” Was that a difficult transition to embrace, or was it somehow more natural?
TODD: I would say it was a little bit difficult in that we started out as an engineering group, very analytical, writing code. Marketing started out really with advertising and more around the creative marketing – communication planning, branding and identity, visuals. We could always do application visuals, but we never really tackled that advertising piece.
But marketing evolved to not just be the visual aspects of marketing, but the technical aspects of marketing. You think about the HubSpots and the Marketos and the Pardots of the world – those have only been around in recent years, and they automate the marketing process. They have APIs, and you can integrate with them and you can pull data and you can set up key performance indicators so that you can create rich dashboards to see how your marketing is performing. You can set up smart lists and you can automatically move people along from one list to another based on their interaction in your software or your marketing products. So, marketing itself has become extremely technical.
As a technical company, I saw a lot of advertising and marketing agencies getting left behind because they weren’t very technical. So we were able to come in from the technical side, set up the KPIs and the smart lists and the automation, and integrate with the API so that based on user interaction in the app, we can then progress them in the marketing automation software. That was a skill that marketing and advertising agencies didn’t have, and the piece we didn’t have necessarily was some of that design/advertising creativity.
So, we did a couple acquisitions there. We acquired a marketing company that brought communication planning, branding, and identity with them, so we were able to add that competency. Now we’re able to do really well on it because we have that full continuum. A lot of times we’ll get a customer where we’ll come in with a mobile app, but next thing we know, they then want us helping out with their website. They otherwise used a more traditional agency, but they see how technical we are, and creative, and they say, “Can you help with our website? And by the way, we have a kiosk too.”
We call that the hat trick. Wendy’s, for instance, we designed their mobile app and then we helped design parts of their website. We designed their kiosk. I don’t know if you have Royal Farms down there. I don’t know if you’re more Sheetz or Wawa, but Royal Farms is a pretty big convenience store, and they’re also a quick service restaurant with chicken based out of Maryland. Town & Country actually said they were the number one fast food chicken in the world, which is a pretty big accolade.
Needless to say, we had a hat trick with them. We designed their mobile app, then we redesigned their kiosk, we’ve helped with their website. But in that case, they were so confident with our ability that they actually gave us traditional marketing as well. They have a big campaign called the Chicken Palooza campaign, which is billboards and sheets and mugs. We redesigned their chicken icon, which is a classic.
So that’s a case where we are the end-to-end agency, but we really are end-to-end. We’re not just doing their traditional and digital marketing; we’re doing their mobile apps, their websites, their loyalty program, integrating with their backend services. And this is all in the vein of marketing, but now there’s enterprise application development that is a marketing effort. It’s meant to increase sales. It’s an app, it’s a utility function, but it is also a marketing function. We’ve gotten good at marketing.
ROB: That’s interesting. We do not have that chain, but now I’m wishing that we did. It also seems like being in that chair for marketing is helpful to stay top of mind. A lot of times if you talk about a site build or an app build, some people are always working on their app and their site, but some people are much more burst-y about it. They complete an initiative and then they stop. If you were only involved in the technology side, you might not be in the conversation at the right time when they’re ready to rebuild. somebody’s forgotten, turnover has happened a little bit, that sort of thing.
TODD: You’re absolutely right. The marketing buyers still consider a mobile app a one-off project, whereas our consulting buyers, they’re buying teams for years on end with option years to extend. Where we fill in a nice spot is that we are very technical, but we’re extremely creative, so we’re able to be that agency of record that can do it all. We’ll get large monthly retainers as the agency of record, but within that retainer, it is mobile apps and marketing automation and SEO and banner ads and web micro sites. You name it. It’s a very wide mixed variety of stuff that we can do.
Whereas to your point, just a mobile shop or just a web shop, if they’re just that technical shop, they’re considered more of a project fulfillment company and not somebody that you would otherwise give to on a big monthly retainer.
ROB: You’ve mentioned quite a range of clients. You’ve mentioned startups and you’ve certainly mentioned some very enterprise customers. Have you always had that range of client mix? Where did you start out in some of those earlier years?
TODD: That’s a good question. The first couple clients for Mindgrub were actually large clients because it was myself. I was always able to position myself on bigger jobs and bigger brands and ended up working in New York City and Chicago with big brands for a while.
When I started getting some work for the team on the web side, that started really back in 2002 when I founded the company. I always had some independent contractors, some interns, and even though I was in and out of a couple jobs at that point, I always had some freelancing work. And that was just smaller projects in my network, but not my job as the consultant or the day job I worked for, which were these bigger brands.
What changed a lot of it is when mobile came out, I’d work with these bigger brands and I jumped ship with all the contracts I had and all these brands and opportunities to go start a business in my basement. I really hung my shingle on mobile. A lot of the marketing I did was mobile, mobile, mobile, “we make mobile apps.” At the time, I also had a product company. I was trying to make a mobile product.
I got a lot of exposure to mobile there, so a lot of my network that were the bigger brands were just chomping at the bit to find mobile developers, and they got to me. So on the mobile side, we started working with really big brands. On the web side was a little smaller.
Now that we’ve progressed, we’ve always actually done more web work than mobile because most mobile apps have a web backend, plus all the individual web work. Fast forward 18 years, mobile always attracted big brands, but web after 18 years also attracted big brands. On the application side, we do a lot with the big brands.
On the marketing side, our first acquisition was just over 5 years ago, and we’ve really grown that team. I’d say our marketing team, when they’re just working direct for the client, we’ve really moved up the chain. But we’re a little bit more midmarket. Now, when our mobile and web division nets an enterprise client such as Wendy’s or Royal Farms – Wendy’s is a little different because we worked with the IT buyer. Even though we did their mobile app and helped design their website and kiosk, we were not necessarily working with the marketing department. They had it together and we were brought in.
On Royal Farms, they’re a little bit smaller of a business, so therefore we were able to come in on mobile, get the website, get the kiosk, but then they were a small enough company that the same conversations we’re having with their head of IT, we’re having with their marketing department. Next thing you know, their marketing department is asking us to do some fulfillment, and then it leads into this long-term great relationship where we’re fulfilling a lot of aspects from mobile to marketing.
So really, to answer that question, the big brands find us because of our differentiators, which happen to be on the technology side, and then they learn that we are good across the board. We are actively trying to push on our marketing side, and I know we just won eight communicator awards and five – some other. I know we’re submitting for the Webbies right now. Our marketing team and the creative team, they don’t want to be in the shadows anymore.
We’re winning all these awards, so now we’re starting to stand on our own two feet as far as the look and feel. Some of our communications that we’re doing, some of the branding that we’re doing – these were things that we didn’t start with 18 years ago, we really started pushing on 5 or 6 years ago. But because we have the experience working with big brands and they have that trust on the technology side, now we’re commanding direct marketing work.
For Sylvan, which is a really big online education institution, we did their advertising videos. For ExxonMobil, we did their TV spot. We filmed it, we used Mindgrubbers as actors in it, and there was only I think one or two paid actors that we had for that shoot. We were able to do it all in-house. It’s just amazing, some of the things that we’re able to do now. I would’ve never thought I’d be sitting on a TV commercial shoot, which I get to do now, which is super exciting.
ROB: That’s absolutely fascinating for the variety. One of my advisors was positing to me the other day – his perception was that many businesses, and particularly enterprises, were much more eager to send marketing work to marketing agencies than technology work to technology shops. How do you feel about that suggestion? Do you see truth in it? And is it shifting, if that has been the case?
TODD: You said marketing work for marketing agencies and technology work for technology. Did you mean they’re more willing to send technology work to marketing companies than they are willing to send marketing work to technology companies?
ROB: That they’ve been more willing to hire a marketing agency while still trying to build a technology capability in-house, and maybe less likely to outsource parts of that. That was the suggestion and perception. How do you see it?
TODD: Gotcha. I think you have to look at each buyer, and then when the core IP of the business is. If you had a business that was let’s say a law firm, marketing and technology is not anywhere near their wheelhouse, so they would probably subcontract both.
But if you’re an events company and that events company is more of not a platform play, they’re the coordination and they’re hosting physical events, and you’re a bunch of marketers, you’re all about marketing, but you’re not a platform event company. So you probably pull your marketing in-house, but at some point you want to go build a platform because now marketing of events is online, and you’re not in a good position and Zoom’s not cutting it anymore. You would then outsource your technology because you’re a marketing core. And even though you’re growing and you start to build some products, you still probably at that point would think, “I want to do my marketing in-house.”
Let’s say you’re the opposite. Let’s say you’re that company that realizes there’s disruption in the event space and Zoom isn’t cutting it and there’s a huge opportunity to recreate that in-person experience. You might go out and build software, and you’re not going to be good at marketing, and you’re probably not even going to try to do it in-house, or if you do you’re going to flail because you’re a software company. You build product. So, you should outsource your marketing.
I really think it goes back to the buyer and the nature of the work they do and what is core to their IP versus things they should be subbing out.
ROB: I can definitely tell you’ve thought a lot about this, about the buyers, about the organizational structure. As you’ve grown, how have you thought about helping other people on your team? It seems like you’re at a point where you can’t be the only one selling, so how have you equipped other people to think about navigating organizations and understanding buyers well?
TODD: You got it. I originated pretty much every one of our departments. Now that we’re bigger, some of those departments are being created by my other leadership. But sales, I started out, like just about every founder-led company, doing what’s called founder sales. I had to sell everything. I started out as an engineer. My first company, I was raised by designers, so I went from growing our engineering department to our design department to our user experience department, accounting, the works.
Sales was finally the last department that I had to stand up, and it was founder sales. The first thing I wanted to do was find a second person that could also sell. That individual had to be highly technical, highly creative. They had to be a subject matter expert, and then they had to also be good at business development. Then I was able to supplement helping them with the contracts piece, maybe even giving them some leads that came through our contact form. But at least they could put a solution together and basically sell the work and be personable.
As we’ve advanced, I knew I needed to have a lot more people, so we really focused on process. With any business, it’s the product, the process, and the people.
We started with the product. We identified what it is we’re going to sell. Every year we organized that list of solutions. Some solutions, maybe it wasn’t great that year. We decided, let’s not push on it next year. Other solutions have been a winner for us, we’re doing multimillions in that solution and that market is big, and there’s a huge opportunity. Then we’ll promote those solutions. Then marketing knows what they’re going to be marketing, production knows where they need to do some training, what they need to ramp up. We have solutions.
The other thing we have is for every deal, we put together a deal team. Marketing works on the outside of the funnel. They’re trying to come up with contacts that could be prospects so those prospects are qualified. In our industry, we’re looking at marketing or IT buyers. We have a budget. They probably have some pain points we might be able to identify digitally. But they’re qualified contacts. They’re making them prospects, they’re putting them in Smartlist, they’re nurturing them through events, through newsletters.
Then our BD team is interacting with these prospects and they’re engaging with them. They’re having conversations. They’re sending personal emails. They’re trying to figure out their pain points as well, but is there a solution we can provide to address their pain point? From there, our BD team then, if there is a solution, they then assemble a deal team now. They brought in the lead; they’re more than likely going to be the principal manager of that deal.
We then bring in a subject matter expert and we bring in a contracts person, and that subject matter expert is either technical or creative or potentially on project management side, depending on where their pain is. If their pain point is in speedy delivery, we need to bring in some project managers to see whether it’s feasible given our timelines and resource capacities are the moment. If it’s a technical pain point, then we bring in a technical subject matter expert. If it’s a creative pain point, we bring in a creative director to really focus on what is the solution.
From the solution then, we give them a cost to produce it, a timeline, and a resource plan. Then we close the work, and we’ve turned our products into a process. Then the thing that is absolutely quintessential is we hire just the best people. We have really good products, really good process, and amazing people, so as a result, we’ve just been commanding a lot of work. We started the year at about 105, 110. We’re 155 employees with about another 30 or 40 contractors. That all started post March.
And really, COVID actually took the governor off our business. We had amazing people and process and products, but there were a lot of things that slowed us down. Driving all over the place and meeting clients physically, we spent a lot of time and energy and money on planes, trains, and automobiles. Also employees. We had a big box office in Baltimore. We also have a bar and restaurant that we use as now a food incubator, but it was a tech incubator as well. And we have a new light manufacturing space coming online. But we thought because we have now these different facilities in Baltimore, we had to have people generally in Baltimore. In a pinch we hired a few remote workers, or we’d have a really good talent that moved remotely.
But as soon as COVID hit, I said, “That’s it, we’re just going to be a virtual company; hire people wherever they live.” We’re still trying to keep the same time zone and mostly North America, although we’re looking at some points in South America now to start growing some of our own employees – but the governor came off. We didn’t have to hire in Baltimore anymore, and it was so much easier to hire when you can hire from anywhere. We’ve got amazing talent, and not having to drive around and see our clients and get in planes, trains, and automobiles – it gave us tons of time back.
All of our numbers went up. Our sales increased, our productivity increased. Our initiatives now, believe it or not, our next training is on how to take vacation. Our team members have taken one week less this time per year, so we’re actually retraining them on how to take a vacation and how to eliminate burnout because they’ve just been so stellar.
Needless to say, that’s how we’ve done it. We focused on product, process, and people. In our pipeline, it’s very, very systematic. It’s no longer the founder anymore. Myself, I’m on the BD team. I have a couple other people that do BD, and I am trying to get out there and be an evangelist and network. When I hear of opportunities, I’m constantly growing our engagement directors – that’s what our sales team are generally called – to be subject matter experts in a core vertical.
And those verticals for us are obvious things in the Baltimore area – health, cyber, government, education – but then some not-so-obvious things for Baltimore. We’re really big into retail and ecommerce and hospitality and support a lot of brands there. We’re getting into legal and insurance. We’re starting to do some financial services. So we’re in a number of industries, and I’m trying to grow those salespeople. And then I’m an evangelist. The rest of our BD team, we’re routing them deals. They’re either coming inbound or from BD efforts.
And then one more thing, just to share this amazing – and I’m a teacher; I started out as a high school teacher. I taught at university. What people will find is I’m very apt to share these things I’ve learned because it’s fascinating. I was a technical guy, and I had to learn to build a sales team.
But we even identified all our deal types, and we have sales plays. You have your outside team that tries to go out and hunt or farm and get new business development. We call that Deal Type 1. That’s a new account and a new buyer.
Then Deal Type 2 is typical stuff. A change order. They want more functionality. We teach all of our client services team and our project managers now who work with our clients to look out for Deal Type 2. That’s the change order. You’d be surprised; a lot of times they think from leadership, “You scoped this project out. We should just be able to deliver exactly what’s in this statement of work without deviation, or shame on us.” That’s not true at all. If the project deviates – and it’s certainly not agile, because in agile you can deviate as you go – if the project deviates, work with the client. If they need to come up with more budget, or same budget but you want to swap out some requirements, the change order, it’s Deal Type 2.
Deal Type 3 is adding a different service line. In our case, we do add support at the end of every contract. We go from the initial build to then going into monthly support. That’s Deal Type 3.
Deal Type 4 is not necessarily support, but upselling to marketing, for instance.
Deal Type 5 is a second project. So we’re not just adding services and values to that first project, but we’re adding a second project to the mix. Same buyer.
Deal Type 6 for us is same account but a brand new buyer with that account.
Deal Type 7 is an existing team member now getting an ongoing retainer to satisfy all of the needs of the business. We’re trying to get everybody up to that Lucky 7 where we’re that agency of record, but it’s across the board. Everything from mobile through digital.
ROB: Congratulations, Todd. It sounds like it’s been a heck of a year. We’ve seen that same thing with that switch to virtual. We definitely made that decision, and we’re seeing good access to talent. We’re seeing that talent really appreciates when you’re willing to commit to being virtual versus where you’re asking them, huddled in their home, to think about somebody moving to where you are. I think people need some relief and they need some permission to be in their own place and thrive there.
TODD: You got that right. As soon as we realized it was going to be a virtual world, we said, “If you’re a producer, you will never ever have to come back to the office from here on out if you don’t want to.” We surveyed them, and half want to come back half the time, and then it’s like a bell curve from there. But they shouldn’t have to. We can work online. We’re very data-oriented as a business, and we found we are more efficient.
That said, we’re also more disconnected from each other. So as soon as we decided that we wanted to be an online company, we knew that we had to really invest in what that meant. We used to invest in climbing walls and game rooms, and we had a virtual reality holodeck in the office. That was some fun bells and whistles, but it wasn’t really what makes culture.
Our culture is our passion, our creativity, our technology. It’s our grit. Those were the things that we had to really reinforce that we still were about online. And then we had some of the bells and whistles too. We had Wellness Week. We’re now doing a Games for Giving, where we’re essentially donating for every step that an employee does to get them out of their chairs and moving, which is really important. We do yoga lessons, we have adventure club teams where they go on regional hikes. We’re really trying to be a full experience for our team members and to really provide an amazing culture, from who we are and our values and our mission all the way through just having some really killer programming.
We’re having fun with it because it’s a disruptive time. That’s what I tell people. With Mindgrub, why have I been successful? I did have my family back here in Baltimore. As I mentioned, I was in Chicago. It was cold there, and I wanted to come home. So I had the need. I had, as they say in the book Outliers, more than 10 years’ experience and 10,000 hours, so I had the experience. Ultimately, what was successful for Mindgrub was the fact that the iPhone came out in 2008, and that was major disruption. So that really grew us.
Right now we are experiencing another boom because it is another period in our lifetimes of major disruption. I’ve learned to really make the most of it.
ROB: Excellent teaching all the way through there, Todd. I love the way you set up and structured these things for us to learn from. When people want to find you and when they want to find Mindgrub, where should they go to connect with you?
TODD: They can go, for Mindgrub, directly to mindgrub.com. And certainly I’d love if anybody reaches out to me on LinkedIn. I think that’s an amazing channel for business networking and business relationships. As I mentioned, I started out as a teacher, and I love engagement and answering questions. By all means, I am happy to do so on email or LinkedIn.
ROB: Excellent. Thank you so much, Todd, for coming on, and congratulations on everything that’s going on – the businesses, the growth. There’s a lot to learn from here, so thank you for sharing.
TODD: Thank you so much for having me, Rob.
ROB: All right, take care. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
John Kriney, is Founder and President at OptFirst Internet Marketing, a Google Certified Partner (2010) that specializes in full-service online marketing campaigns and website, app, and landing page development. Campaign expertise includes customized search engine optimization; Google Ads search, video, display and shopping campaigns; cross-platform remarketing; E-commerce marketing; Facebook and Instagram ads for lead generation, sales, or brand building purposes; LinkedIn ads; and combinations of all of that.
In 2003-2004, John started selling after-market auto customization products in Los Angeles, CA; ranked his business first in searches for body kits and parts, and generated up to $3.5 million a year in sales. As things slowed in 2006, John sold that business. What to do next?
Seeing his success, six business owners he had worked with requested his help with their online marketing. In 2008, John moved his business to South Florida, named it OptFirst, and provided his clients with profitable conversions. He made sure they knew how much much money they were making per campaign, per campaign type to ensure long-lasting relationships. When companies wanted to focus on branding, he demanded that both the target and the success be quantified.
He admits there are three types of competitors that may steal his customers: the one-off internet whiz kid who is someone’s nephew, vertical internet marketing agencies that draw customers away by speaking the “right jargon,” and the traditional marketing agency that’s trying to tack on digital as a service. “Lost” clients often return – a tribute to his agency’s collaborative approach of “one business owner working with another.”
OptFirst was one of the first early adopters of LinkedIn direct conversion campaigns and has been running campaigns for the University of Miami’s Continuing Education Department, marketing 22 different programs on that platform for over 4 years. Because OptFirst’s efforts with the University of Miami outperformed all other universities by 90%, LinkedIn took John and a University of Miami representative to lunch. They had proved a profitable campaign could be run on LinkedIn.
John believes you need 3 channels of incoming advertising for any business . . . so they also run SEO campaigns, Google Ads, and paid social for the University. In total, the agency offers 11 different campaign types, of which SEO has the lowest CPA.
John has written 3 books on search engine optimization and internet marketing. He thought he would hand his 8-step SEO plan to clients and lose business because clients would now know what needed to be done. Providing that knowledge was “the right thing to do.” But it didn’t work that way. The 8-step book made him the “expert” for work clients did not want to do. They would thumb through the book and immediately sign his proposal.
Since the pandemic, John created “the seven steps of becoming an author” and has guided half a dozen business owners to getting published. He says “There’s no better way to control your Google presence than . . . becoming an author. When you put a book out on Amazon, there’s a knowledge panel to be claimed as an author on Google, and then you really control your first page.”
John says his “slogan” for the times is: “2020 is survive, and if you make it to 2021, then you can thrive.” He can be reached on his agency’s website at: OptFirst.com, at John Kriney on LinkedIn, and by email at: john@optfirst.com.
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ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by John Kriney, Founder and President of OptFirst Internet Marketing based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, John.
JOHN: Rob, thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. We were just chatting before the start – this is being recorded the day after the votes were cast in the election, but we don’t know what’s going on. But that’s not why we’re here. We are here to talk about OptFirst Internet Marketing. John, why don’t you start off by telling us about OptFirst and where the firm excels?
JOHN: A little background on where we excel – and I think the backstory really paints the picture of our approach to how we work with clients and what our core strategy is. I started OptFirst after I sold a business, BodyKits.com. That was based in San Diego, California. If you can remember the “Fast and Furious” days where we had spoilers and bumpers and everyone wanted to make their Honda Civic look like a Lamborghini – remember those days?
ROB: Oh yeah.
JOHN: I really got onto that trend. This had a huge demand. All the product was coming into port in California, and Michigan was a huge spot for us, as well as South Florida. South Florida was a huge demand for body kits, spoilers. So, I dove in. We kicked it off in 2003-2004. That was when it was really hot. We ranked the website first for body kits, spoilers, and all the names, Buddy Club and all the crazy names we had for those body kits.
I ranked for all those positions, and the business was doing millions of dollars a year. I think we topped off at $3.5 million. We had the volume. I could see the trend was slowing down as far as we hit 2006 and it wasn’t so much about the body kits anymore and all the Fast and the Furious movies, so the trend cooled down. I sold the business to my supplier that was bringing in containers of product into LA.
Through that process, I sold the business – everyone’s read these self-help books, 4-Hour Workweek and all these books that we read for personal development. I was literally in my fifth week of sitting on the beach thinking, “What am I going to do next?”, and it came up, I’ve got these six other business owners that, through the last few years, I’ve worked with. They’ve called and said, “Hey, my name’s Jim. I got your number from Bryan Bloom” or whoever it is. “Can you help me with my online marketing? I hear your business has grown really quick.”
By the time I gave OptFirst a name, I already had six clients paying me monthly to help them with their internet marketing. In 2008, I moved myself and my business from California to South Florida. At that point, I gave OptFirst a name.
So the backstory on OptFirst really is I’m used to working with other business owners in order to really focus on profitable conversions, make sure that they make money with their online marketing campaigns, and that eye always being on, every month, I want to show you how much money you’re making per campaign, per campaign type – make sure you’re making money so that we have a long-lasting relationship.
I don’t know about you, but I get clients that might be medium-sized or institutional, they’re large clients, and they’re like, “Listen, we just want to focus on our branding.” It’s like, “No, you don’t. You really don’t want to focus on your branding. We have to quantify what the target is here and how we can quantify success. Because if you can’t prove that you’re making money through your campaigns, at some point shareholders and board members are going to want to know. If we can just cut that out in the beginning and set up the pieces to make sure that you’re running profitable campaigns, we’ll be together for a long time, happily.”
I’ve got a local locksmith that’s been with us for 10 years straight. He knows the ups and downs of the ecosystem of SEO. Let’s say we’re just talking about that. But through the ups and downs, making sure that she ranks – just last year, she was like, “We ran the numbers, and 39% of our new business comes from our SEO campaign. After 10 years, that feels great.”
So that’s really the approach of OptFirst: one business owner working with another. I think that can’t be replicated as far as – we have two types of competitors that we may lose business to. Well, I guess there’d be three. There’s the one-off internet whiz kid that is someone’s nephew in someone’s business and it’s like, “This kid’s the smartest kid ever.”
The second is vertical internet marketing agencies. Sometimes we’ll be running a campaign for 2 or 3 years for our client, and then a weight loss specific internet marketing company will come along and they’ll speak the right jargon. They’re like, “Oh, you definitely need to go this route.” Speaking the same jargon, we’ll get clients that will try those companies out and then quickly come back.
The third is the traditional marketing agency that’s trying to tack on digital as a service. Those are really the only places that we ever lose clients to. I don’t know about you, but that’s our experience.
ROB: You mentioned different sizes of clients. Is there a trend of when you started – you mentioned BodyKits.com; it seems like one of the interesting opportunities there was – I mean, it wasn’t early early for ecommerce, but it was kind of early. I would imagine one of the opportunities there was dealing in a product that was worth shipping. What I mean by that is just that it’s potentially a higher margin item that someone understands you have to pay to ship the thing when not everybody could do Prime shipping.
So, what were those early clients? Because it sounds like your through-line, your prequel to the agency, was performance and converting. I would imagine that’s been a trendline throughout. But the types of businesses that can afford to retain you and care about converting has probably shifted remarkably over the life of the company.
JOHN: Oh, absolutely. Initially there were other old school manufacturers of widgets, let’s say. It ran the gamut. But they could see that I was moving into a larger warehouse every 6 to 9 months. What we ran into – when we started, I remember the uproar of Overture, 5 cent bids. Overture had the audacity to raise from 5 cent to 10 cent clicks. We’re like, “What? They’re ruining ecommerce! Who’s going to pay 10 cents for a click?” Obviously, that piggybacked on the whole Yahoo! infrastructure and when they really owned search.
That moved over to Google. Obviously, in 2005 Google started winning, and it has ever since been winning the search engine war and the trackability through that adventure of AdWords, which is now Google Ads, really driving ecommerce.
But what I was getting referred to is owners of products – I remember the owner of the last warehouse I had with BodyKits.com had the exclusive deal to Costco for golf pushcarts. She’d had it for like 20 years, but there’s no money to make in Costco wholesale. They make sure of it. They whittle you down. So, she had this mass volume that needed another channel or outlet in order to be profitable.
was getting people with products, and when I moved to Miami, I was like, okay, I’ve got these six clients. All I need to do is get myself out there, go to business networking groups and say, “Hey, if you don’t have a website, let’s get a website. If you have a website, let’s either make it rank or do some ads towards it.” People in 2008 in South Florida looked at me like I was crazy. [laughs] I tried everything once.
And being in South Florida, I’ve been tricked once in every which way you could possibly be tricked as far as a client-agency relationship. But I try not to be fooled twice the same way. Initially I tried everything. I even went to a Kiwanis meeting once. I didn’t know if I was invited to it. These guys were all older gentlemen, over 70. I was like, “Listen, you guys need to get back in the business game. I can see they were all retired. What you need is a website. When you get that website, let’s make it rank.” Then I was like, okay, I need to change the strategy. This is crazy talk. This is not going to work. But I tried everything.
ROB: [laughs] It is remarkable the things that you’ll try once. We don’t talk about these stories very often. You’ve reminded me – I’d almost forgotten – I had somebody invite me to talk about social media marketing analytics at a Rotary club meeting. I did that, and great people, but not the best way to build the business.
JOHN: Oh man, I’ll never forget the Kiwanis stuff. Similar to the Rotary club. I remember that fondly because I’ve got account managers and junior account managers, and they’ll be like, “Oh, no, I can’t call on that business. I can’t go to that” – I’m like, listen, I went to a Kiwanis club where everyone was over 70, everyone was retired. I still gave it 100%. In order to get business, I’ve tried everything once, and I’ve tried to be humble about it because you never know.
And I tell you what – I’ve got a funny story for you, Rob. I saw when you sent me a connection on LinkedIn that we have a friend in common. I won’t mention him yet. I think I actually, in my example, let it slip. But one of our connections in common is Bryan Bloom.
Let me tell you a little backstory. Back in 2009, I had one client that I’d had since 2006, and he owned a moving company in San Diego, and I had him ranked first for 4 years for “moving company in San Diego.” He had three trucks. He used to call me every day. If he wasn’t first – you know how there was so much jostling of Google Maps back in that day. If he was second that day, I’d get a call from California like, “Hey, John, what’s going on? What have we got to do? I’m second today, I’m not first.” Because this was his whole marketing strategy – which nowadays I do not recommend. You need three channels of incoming advertising for any business. That’s what I’ve come to and what I’ve noticed.
I had an account manager at the time say – this guy was grandfathered in at a super cheap price, like $600 bucks a month, because that’s what he could afford. He’s like, “Why do you take this guy’s calls?” I said, “Because it’s key to his business. It’s kind of a friend of a friend. Let’s just leave it.” Sure enough, he was bought out by the largest moving company in Southern California. He bought him and he’s like, “I really don’t want your three trucks. I really don’t want to keep your employees. I just want the number of your SEO guy, because I’ve been trying to get first above you for 2 years. Can’t do it. Here’s a check and give me the number of your SEO guy.” That was Bryan Bloom. I saw that was the connection we had in common.
Time went on, and Bryan and I had a great relationship. He was Priority Moving. He bought out Gold Coast. Then time went on and Bryan said, “Listen, we’ve had a great relationship. I’ve decided to sell Priority to the largest moving company in California. And he wants to talk to you.” So, Republic bought Priority, and sure enough, they became a huge client for years on end.
This one small SEO client became – I think the account was anywhere from $12,000 to $15,000. Now we were going national, we had Republic, we had Priority, we had Gold Coast, all in one portfolio. I saw Bryan Bloom as a shared connection and that brought up that story for me.
ROB: Yeah, Bryan is a connection from – you know how this marketing world works, and certainly on LinkedIn as well. You just bump into people, and especially with this podcast, end up with some mutual connections like that.
You mentioned some of those early clients, and then it shifted a little bit. What does your client mix look like now? Obviously, SEO has a tremendously local dimension to it. It also has a national dimension to it, and I’m sure you’ve been pulled in some different directions.
JOHN: Absolutely. The client mix now is – we broke bread with Google at the end of 2010. I think that’s when the real reach out was where they were like – I don’t know your experience, but SEO was always kind of like the “let’s trick Google so that we’re first, and we’re sure not going to buy AdWords.” It was a rogue specialty. I’ve been certified with Google as 2010 and I think as an agency since 2011. So that’s when we all broke bread. They invited us into the fold and said, “You have these clients; why don’t you also offer Google Ads?”
Having that SEO base is, I think, really beneficial for any digital marketing agency. If we’re ranked first – of those first six clients – and it wasn’t Gold Coast, but people would call me and say, “I’ve got this widget manufacturing company. How much?” I was like, “It’s $2,500 a month.” Half of them would be like, “Cool, I got your number from so-and-so. Great.” The other half would be like, “Why so much?” I’m like, “I have no idea what to charge you. That’s the price. [laughs] This isn’t what I do. I sell after market auto parts. You called me.” That’s what it was. Those were the core six that I moved with.
The mix now – it started with ecommerce and then getting out into the world and networking every which way. We’ve got some really cool, interesting clients. We’ve got the University of Miami. We’re in our fourth year, so we’re 4-½ years under contract with them. We do their continuing education. We’ve got 22 different programs that we market for them. Every 2 weeks, we drill down in their Salesforce – we’ve got our incoming leads and then we’ve got our closed leads, and we’re quantifying our marketing campaigns, the profitability on spend, down to the last penny.
That and a couple others are dream clients because that’s where we want to be. We’re running SEO campaigns for that client, but we’re also running Google Ads, paid social. We were one of the first early adopters of the LinkedIn conversion campaign for the University of Miami. LinkedIn for so many businesses is the dream that never has come to fruition. It’s like, “Okay, we have all these businesses on here, and we know who the marketing directors are. This should be the best place to market in all the world.”
And it never came to fruition for us until the direct conversion campaigns were offered. I think that was maybe 3 years ago. LinkedIn reached out to us and they were like, “We want to take you and your client out to lunch because you guys are early adopters and you guys are outperforming all the other universities by 90%.” We were proving profitable campaigns on LinkedIn.
So that’s what our clients look like, whether it’s lead-based or it’s ecommerce-based. We even have a great client that we’re working with called FlixLatino. It’s like the Spanish Netflix. We’re up to 11 different campaign types. We have a weekly meeting drilling down to each campaign, CPAs across every campaign. What’s interesting – and I just gave another talk yesterday morning to a group of business owners – is that when we look at the CPA across all 11 campaign types, SEO is still the lowest CPA of all of our campaign types.
I hear from businesses online, I guess there’s a lot of mixed messages in media – coming from the day after the ballots have all been cast in the last election. 6 months out of the year, SEO is dead. It doesn’t exist. SEO is dead. It’s not real. The other 6 months, it’s like, “Yo, you know where I can get that SEO? I heard that SEO is where I need to be. You know where I could get some?” It’s like a whisper in a back alley. [laughs] That’s our experience.
I’m really glad you invited me on this podcast because even in the transitioning of clients to maybe wanting to try another agency, some of the greatest friendships and assets that I have are my relationships to other agency owners. Because you wouldn’t believe it unless you spoke to another agency owner that has gone through the same thing. It’s a wild journey and a wild story to tell.
ROB: There’s absolutely so much value in being able to compare notes, and particularly realizing that there is so much business out there. It’s really rare that you’re competing for business with somebody you know. You feel like it should be the case, but it just generally isn’t. A lot of times those friendly agencies can also be helpful when you need some extra capabilities around you.
If I rewind the story a little bit, you mentioned you were in that 2008-ish era in the business, and it’s worth highlighting that was a time of some economic challenges, financial crisis, all of that sort of thing. We’re far enough into this pandemic world now where some people think we’re back where we started; some people say it’s a K-shaped recovery, where some people are doing great and some people are doing not great. How do you see the similarities and differences between running an agency now and how clients are feeling versus that financial crisis era?
JOHN: I think this really is the time – other than creating processes for how we run campaigns, I’m known for making one-off slogans. Really, I say 2020 is survive, and then if you make it to 2021, then you can thrive. I think that really encapsulates it.
This is that time that certain businesses that we work with, especially the first 3 or 4 months of the pandemic, they had to put everything on pause. The local locksmith had 18 trucks, if I’m not mistaken, on the road; went down to one truck overnight, servicing all of the businesses that are in buildings in Miami Beach. It just came to a screeching halt. How can you make lemonade? Because we’re all getting lemons. How do you make lemonade?
Then other clients, like universities, the Spanish Netflix client I was referring to, they hit the gas. Universities increased two and a half times what they were spending. And of course, the app platform went four times what they were spending.
So as an agency, you ride with the clients that you have that are stepping on the gas, and on the flipside, just working with clients that you could count on for monthly work – it sounds crass, but monthly billables – just freezing them and giving them that grace period until they got back on their feet.
This is way different than the recession because I think there’s lemonade to be made in every business. That’s the talk that I’ve had with my business owners. Being based in South Florida, I would say everywhere from May to right at the end of the summer, all the way up to September, tourism slows down. It’s really hot. People aren’t going to South Florida. Tourism really drives the whole economy. So, I was already used to playing therapist 3-4 months out of the year. It just happened to transition where that happened during the pandemic.
And I was able to really focus with certain clients on new products and services we could offer them where they could make best use of this pandemic. You may or may not appreciate this – I sat around and said, “Listen, I’m going to have half my clients step on the gas right now.” It’s like summer just happened out of nowhere. That’s the effect. I was like, “What kind of off service do I offer that I know has a lot of value and I know will really land with my business owners that we work with?”
I’ve written three books on SEO and internet marketing and been through that process myself, so I was like, that really ties into our hire and reputation management campaigns, and those campaigns really are about controlling your Google presence. There’s no better way to control your Google presence than all of a sudden under that same name becoming an author. Automatically when you put a book out on Amazon, there’s a knowledge panel to be claimed as an author on Google, and then you really control your first page.
So I was like, why don’t I reverse engineer – and that’s how I’ve done SEO and every other internet marketing service we have – why don’t I just create the seven steps of becoming an author, put a price tag on it, go to my business owners, and say, “This is a great time, while you’re slow” – I’ve always pitched this, but they’re like, “I’m too busy to put my material together.” They have material that they’ve created. “I’m too busy for that right now.” I was like, “I know you’re not busy, so how about becoming an author?”
I’ve walked half a dozen business owners through the process of becoming an author through this pandemic. That was one of the added services in making lemonade out of the lemons that we all got for the business slowdown.
ROB: And you had been an author before the pandemic? Is that right?
JOHN: Yeah, I published three books. My most recent one on Amazon is The Online Marketing Manual. It’s my least interesting book. [laughs] My first book in 2014 was my Jerry Maguire moment. I thought that I’d just figured out and reverse engineered how to make each client first. I woke up in the middle of the night, got out my whiteboard. I was like, “I have been figuring it out for 12 years. I’ve got an 8-step SEO process.” I’m writing it all over the board.
The next morning, like Jerry Maguire when he goes “I have the client manifesto!” and is putting it on the boxes – I tell my whole team, “It’s the 8 steps!” I thought that I would reveal how I’d been ranking websites for 12 years and I’d go on a big speaking tour, and I wouldn’t have an agency anymore, but it’s the right thing to do to tell everyone how to make your website first as a process.
Lo and behold, I got the book finished, I brought myself through, I wrote a chapter every night, whichever step it was, and I honestly thought – just the naïveté of being in the moment and when you really get passionate about something – I would hand an 8-step SEO plan to a prospective client. I thought, they’ll read it, they won’t accept the proposal, but they’ll know how to do it themselves. it’s the right thing to do.
They would thumb through it. Barely read it. They’d say, “You obviously know what you’re talking about,” and they’d sign the proposal right there on the spot. I thought, “Why would you hire me? I just told you how I’m going to do it.” They’re like, “Well, you obviously know how to do it, and I sure don’t want to do it. Sounds like a bunch of geeky stuff.” I was shocked. [laughs] I was like, we’re busier than ever. This is going to mess up my speaking tour. That never happened at that time. [laughs] It’s funny how one thing leads into another.
ROB: There’s so many good lessons in there. This can be a moment to look at what assets we have sitting around and to reframe them. In that case you’re mentioning you have this 8-step plan, and you twist it around and its proposals, and then I think we misconstrue what the purpose of a proposal is sometimes. The purpose of the proposal – you’re seeking to inform, and indeed, you are. But in the process, it’s also that proof of competence and that proof that they can trust you because they don’t want to do it.
And you also thought about having this knowledge of how to make a book, and you have the lived experience of using it well, and you’re able to turn that around and say “What else can you do with it?” A college can focus on how people may not want to go to their campus, or they can focus on what is probably a pretty high margin product of their online course and selling that to people who are also sitting at home and have this opportunity of time to make themselves better.
JOHN: Absolutely. So much has come out of this. So much information, misinformation. But businesses, I think we’ve finally got full adoption into the core need of internet marketing as one of those staples, those mainstreams – like the auto industry and dealerships have accepted and moved over to digital and accepted it as their core strategy. I see it now, and it took a while.
I don’t know if this happened at your agency, but initially people were like, “God, you’ve got to be busier than ever!” But I think there was this deer-in-the-headlights moment that lasted the first 3- ½ to 4 months. The businesses that had capital, that cancelled all their tradeshows, let’s say – so they’ve got this excess budget – I think there was a deer-in-the-headlights. And I still see it happen where people haven’t pulled the trigger, and I think that’s finally melting. People are like, “Our core strategy needs to move, no matter what, to digital.”
Which is amazing to me because I remember pitching dealerships back in ’08 and ’09 and looking down and saying, “5-8% of our overall marketing has been allocated to digital.” And just last year, being in a dealership and the client saying, “Hey, we’ve decided to heck with it” – this is before COVID – “we’re going to go 100% digital!” To have that and be part of the industry during that transformation, I’m just like, Wow, they’re really going to cancel their radio and TV? I’m shocked.” And only because I’ve been there for the whole history of it, and I see a lot of other industries finally pulling that trigger.
I think that the election needs to pass and the commotion around it, any which way, and then I think we see full guns blazing to adopting new agencies and moving that – I’m still working with clients that are only at 30% digital because 70% was all their tradeshows booked out. There’s an exorbitant amount of money that some businesses spend on that type of advertising. It’s amazing.
ROB: We saw the auto industry part right up front and center. We did an extended road trip this summer to my in-laws’ place out in Utah and found ourselves realizing we needed to replace our car in the middle of a pandemic in not-our-home-state. They were kind of in between. Some stuff was very digital and easy, and some stuff was still – maybe the marketing is more up to it, but the actual buying process, they were pretty old school. They wanted to see you there in person. It was not very customer-centric, but that’s okay.
Business-wise, I agree. I’ve seen what you see. We have a Software-as-a-Service product, and we also have a software-product-development-shop kind of agency, and there was certainly this – March was almost like everybody kept doing whatever they were doing. April and May, we saw a lot of retraction. But then June, and from then onward, there’s a lot of people who realize they’ve got to go full speed ahead.
We were talking before – we’re in hiring mode because people put those projects on hold for so long until they felt like they couldn’t. Maybe we’ll be in a micro version of that around the election. We’re going to spend a week, we’re going to count some votes, maybe we argue a little bit. But I think there are a lot of people who are fed up with waiting to serve their business. So, I’m definitely seeing that.
John, when people want to find you and when they want to find OptFirst, where should they go to connect with you?
JOHN: OptFirst.com is our domain. Information there. And then just like you did this morning, John Kriney on LinkedIn. I always review those and accept any connections there. I keep an open line of communication. That’s always the best way. Anyone that wants to email me directly, it’s john@optfirst.com.
ROB: Super solid. John, thank you for joining the podcast, and best wishes to you and OptFirst.
JOHN: Yeah. Hopefully you’ll have me back on the show. I’ve listened to a lot of episodes, and you’re doing a great job, Rob. I really think it’s a service to the industry getting new takes and talking to other agency owners. I really enjoyed it.
ROB: I enjoyed it as well. Thanks for sharing your experience, John. Be well.
JOHN: Thanks. Bye.
Lucas DiPietrantonio is CEO and co-founder of Darkroom, a 3-year-old creative e-commerce growth agency that launches new brands to market and grows existing brands to maturity through four robust and specialized verticals: branding, technology, video production, and growth marketing
Darkroom often serves as an incubator and marketing partner for companies so new they don’t have a brand, a visual identity, or a tech stack. “But we are selective,” Lucas explains. A typical client company profile would be a consumer-facing, consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) brand with a strong founding team and enough raised capital or the ability to bootstrap that the company could rapidly scale. Darkroom launches 7 to 9 new companies a year.
As an example, for the past two years Darkroom has been incubating an internal venture with one of its external partners: a collection of high-quality, limited edition, luxury, athleisure performance “sneakers” unlike, Lucas says, “anything you’ve seen.” Both Nira sneakers and the pre-launch site https://www.nera01.com/ go live on December 15th and are designed to organically grow the word of this shoe. A main site for the brand will target different demographics and have a different purpose.
In this interview, Lucas explains how different approaches to video affect its effectiveness. Many companies will engage agencies that are strictly performance-focused and do the creative in-house or engage another agency to do their creative work. Over time, this dichotomy results in a lack of strategic focus and content cohesiveness. Lucas claims that people come to Darkroom because the agency’s integrated production, creative, and performance team can develop a company’s content strategy, with the “two sides (creative and performance) of the same brain” operating in synchrony. The close fit between performance and creative creates a consistent “content engine” with a “feedback loop.” The result? The highest-quality-currently-available content over a long period of time at about the same cost as in in-house marketer.
The agency’s high performing, converting websites work because visual identity and marketing create a cohesive digital experience that maps onto the customer experience of other things like packaging. Lucas says everything needs to feel cohesive.
Lucas writes a number of online columns and recommends people check out his informative entrepreneur.com. He is available on LinkedIn as Lucas DiPietrantonio, on his agency’s website at: darkroomagency.com, or by email at Lucas@Darkroomagency.com.
Rob: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk. And I'm joined today by Lucas DiPietrantonio, CEO and co-founder of Darkroom based in Los Angeles, California. Welcome to the podcast, Lucas.
Lucas: Yeah, Rob, thanks so much for having me, really great to be here.
Rob: Super to have you here. Why don't you start off by giving us a rundown of Darkroom and where the agency excels?
Lucas: Yeah, of course, of course. First of all, just wanted to thank you for having me on the show, really appreciate it and excited to talk about Darkroom. This was an agency that me and my co-founder Jackson Corey, we founded about three years ago. And it's really evolved quite rapidly in the past year or so I'd say has really just become something different than what it was, but at its core we're creative growth agency specifically built for e-commerce. And we're really predicated on doing two specific things: launching new brands to market and growing existing brands to maturity. And we do that through four major disciplines which I think are quite rare in the e-commerce space: One is branding, two technology, three video production, and four is growth marketing. And I really think we found service market fit in the past like three months or so and it's just been a scale-game-since year, but yeah, it's been really interesting and fun growing the company, but you'll notice we do quite a bit. Each of those verticals are pretty robust and specialized.
Rob: I'll be eager to dig into those. The two different segments of clients you mentioned, it seems fairly interesting, especially when you're talking about that embryonic sort of brand. How do you think about when you're looking at a new e-commerce brand looking at client selection, because there's an element of, to get them somewhere you have to see something in that client that you believe is meaningful in the market.
Lucas: The brands we work with from conception, first of all, we are pretty selective with any of the companies that we do end up engaging with. But those that actually want to work with us from conception, they don't have a brand, they don't have a visual identity, or any sort of tech stack. They have an operational idea, an assemblance of what they want to do. We’ll come in and serve as their marketing partner. With a lot of these pre-launch companies, we service them almost as if we're an incubator, which is incredibly fun and rewarding to work with them on, but we are selective. My co-founder Jackson is the only person who will touch branding engagements for the firm, that’s just by virtue of having quality control over our creative output on the brand side of things. So it's minimal.
There’s probably seven to nine brands we’ll launch each year and we are pretty particular about it. Some of the formula things that we look for are CPG brand, consumer facing, really strong founding team, most often raised capital of some degree so they can eventually scale or has bootstrapped and has the ability to scale pretty rapidly after launch. That founding team needs to be strong operators and people we really believe in. We work with people as if we're investing in them. It's important for us to feel really good about the partnership. On the incubation side, that's how we really engage with companies and what we look for.
Rob: Interesting. Is there an example you can give, just to fill in some of the context here, of a brand you've kind of taken through that early launch stage that maybe we can go out and check out when we're done with this conversation?
Lucas: Yeah. There's one that's really top of my mind and really close to home for me. It's what I've been working on for the past two years or so. It's not exactly launched just yet, but it's going to be launching in the next two months so I might as well mention it. It's a sneaker brand called Nira. It's actually a Darkroom internal venture that we've been incubating with one of our partners outside of Darkroom. It's a sneaker brand we've been working on it for the past three years. It's a long incubation period, and that's just because we've really been more involved on the operational side of things to sourcing and being hands-on more or less as founders rather than just marketing partners. But what that relationship has really looked like has been coming up with the actual brand story based on the vision of the founder distilling that into a visual identity, moving to technological specs.
So we have a pretty robust pre-launch site that we're going to be launching as well as a main site, both of them are aimed at different demographics and different purposes and then we're going to be doing all of the ongoing growth initiatives. Along the way, we traveled to Italy three times . . . these sneakers are being made in Italy. They're inspired by Italian Motorsport culture. So you really get this rich vibrant marketing plan and visuals, which we've really enjoyed a fast shoe, fast sneaker, but for people who are going to listen to the podcast these sneakers are going live and our pre-launch site is going live on December 15th at nirashops.com. And, you know, that's about a month and a half away, and it's a pretty big launch that we're gearing up for one that we're really excited about.
Rob: How many varieties are you launching with colorways? And is there an angle for the collector market when you're in the sneaker land here?
Lucas: Yeah, so all of these sneakers are limited. We're only producing like a few hundred pairs of each sku, so we definitely wanted to go into this with the idea of quality over quantity, perfecting our craft. We're using some of the best craftsmen and all of Italy. We've vetted quite a few different factories they're being made in the Abruzzo region near LA marsh. And you know, each individual shoe probably touches 44 different hands and takes 48 hours to build so they're very high quality. We're launching with only seven different skus -- so not too many. they're going to be tranche out in terms of releases. But we've got so many different shoes that we've made along the way that we're hoping to release that we just can't release. So that pre-launch site that I was mentioning on December 15th, we have these really limited, beautiful sneakers, they're unlike anything you've seen, it's like an athleisure performance shoe, but it's luxury And you know, you're not going to run with it.
And it's like a suede shoe So it's, it's interesting, but it doesn't look like a common project or what you would typically expect from a lot of these USD to see brands popping up from Italy so it's definitely got its own niche. But that site on December 15th that we're launching because we have all of these prototypes it's going to be for our friends and family that we've been talking about for the past three years. And they're like, hey, when can I get a sneaker, when can I get a shoe? Like those look awesome, when can I have some more information? What we're going to be releasing is a prelaunch site aimed at just kind of growing the word of this shoe organically. So there'll be some referral structures built in, but everyone who sort of accesses that website will have an opportunity to, you know, get a free pair, but also get a prototype. So, a pair that will never release ever . . . one that is a one-on-one sneaker. I mean, you have to do a few different things to actually be able to qualify to get that sneaker, but that's how we're really going to give them back to our community who supported us early on.
Rob: That's excellent. I think you've given us a pretty good walkthrough and how you are even thinking about branding and how that would translate through to clients. You started to bridge, I think, a little bit into the technology, but e-commerce is a wide berth when it comes to technology. Paint a picture of what your range of engagement looks like on the technology side.
Lucas: Yeah, so for most, I would say probably 80% of our business is e-com and that's just because we've really built an agency that can service SMBs or larger mid-market e-commerce brands really well, because we just know that customer. We're launching our own brands in the e-com space and we know exactly what they need and know exactly what they don't need and don't want to pay for. On the technological front in e-com, your website is your storefront. It needs to be highly optimized. If it's not, you're just leaving money on the table. We build really high performing, converting websites that are also just top-notch from a brand perspective. Because we're doing your visual identity and we're also doing your marketing, we can maintain cohesion across the digital experience and how that maps onto the customer experience – like packaging. You want everything to feel cohesive.
At the simplest and most important level we're doing digital products for e-commerce brands. For ongoing engagements, we'll do things like conversion rate optimization, web support, really being that back engine driver of an e-commerce brand. And you'll really talk about me say Darkroom being an engine, or like a Ninja for an executioner for a lot of the companies that we work with because we're genuinely trying to position ourselves in that way. We have an office in Odessa and Ukraine spent quite a bit of time and money and resources figuring out the perfect market for affordable, but really high-quality labor for a lot of these brands. They’re not going to pay American engineers who are working on software, and if you don't want to touch, you know, Woo Commerce or Shopify or your headless website unless they're getting paid, you know, 180K annually plus . . . that doesn't work for a lot of SMBs.
So we've invested quite a bit in our infrastructure and overseas markets and we've worked with people from everywhere and just landed on Odessa and Ukraine as a perfect market for our use case and our needs. And you know, just for your insight – Darkroom, we did start as just a design and development agency so we've got a pretty high competency on, on the technological front. And, you know, the other 20% of our engagements are Darkroom digital engagements, where they might be more robust digital applications, things of that nature.
Rob: Yeah, you mentioned a few different platforms and there, you mentioned Woo Commerce, which some people may know, you mentioned Shopify, which is a big, big name. And something you mentioned that people may not be as familiar with is the headless situation, which it's a content system, but I assume you're building perhaps sort of a bespoke front end, but still using a backend e-commerce engine?
Lucas: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of different ways to approach that. Shopify has also become headless recently, so it just depends on like the specific needs of the client and what they're looking for. I think you're going to start to see the e-commerce landscape move more in the headless direction. Also the no-code direction, using platforms like Shogun and other sort of systems that come up for these SMB convents specifically. The digital landscape on the e-commerce front is definitely changing pretty rapidly, People want more flexibility. They want it to be easier, quicker, that’s a lot of the stuff that we do. Some people just don't want to deal with their technology, but there are a lot of brands and companies coming out with interesting solutions for clientele across the spectrum in terms of size.
Rob: You seemed to be very interested, especially in your own work, but in general, in working with non-commodity brands. How do you think about, when you're working with them, the distinction between what commerce they want to have on their site or other places they may want to sell? It seems like almost every big brand wants to be a marketplace now. I think Target even, they'll sell stuff that they don't stock – so how do you think about where your clients should be selling?
Lucas: Yeah. It's definitely determined on a case by case basis. You'll have some products that are going to do really well on Amazon or other channels and others that, we might recommend just strictly to see and try and build out that brand. For our clientele, we definitely prefer working with really strong, authentic brands, people who either really know their customer and have developed great relationships with them. And I can think of a number of different companies that we work with off the top of my head that really satiate that criteria. And the other thing is like for me, the agency is all about the people and the sort of talent that we attract and I genuinely want our people to feel happy and fulfilled on the work that they're doing. And that necessitates founders who have built great products or are doing something different or are doing something positive to really excite our staff.
Everything from there follows: you have high employee satisfaction, high client satisfaction, the retention rate goes up across the board, and you also get a great portfolio off of that work. I definitely try and look for brands that are a good fit for us. There are definitely some brands that are not a good fit for us and we'll just say that off of the gate, out of the sales process. But ultimately that's where we perform best because we're definitely a brand-focused agency. We want to see our clients succeed. Sometimes it's hard to tell a client what to do if they don't want to do it.
Rob: Certainly, I can imagine, if you have an undifferentiated product, if there's low margins, all of those things are going to reduce the flexibility increase. Now, not to say there shouldn't always be pressure to perform because e-commerce is definitionally pressure to perform, but the margin of creativity and in a low margin business can just be such a challenge. Now, you mentioned another discipline that you do work in is video production. I'm sure some clients come to you thinking the key to their entire future is that viral video that's going to get out there. Everybody's going to beat down the door to their site and buy all their stuff. But how do you guide a client’s expectations on what is necessary at what stage of the business in terms of video marketing?
Lucas: Yeah. Expectation-setting is baked into every single step of our process. It's only when you have a client who's really dialed into their goals, but is not over-projecting what they've like unrealistic expectations, where we can really sit head-to-head and come up with a strategy for success. On the video side of things people come to us because we are generating the highest quality content in e-commerce right now. And that's by sheer virtue of our talent – people we've attracted and how we're doing e-com content differently. Every e-commerce company – they’re interested in performance and performance marketing, but they'll engage agencies who are either strictly focused on performance and are not thinking about creative because they just don't have that side of their brain operating. So they'll engage your performance agency and then they'll do their creative in house, or they'll engage in another agency who's doing their creative – but these people are not actively thinking about their performance because they're just not operating in the ad account.
Or they're not actually deploying those videos, or they don't know exactly how to create videos that will go viral or will perform really well. You have this like separation between creative and performance and it makes no sense. What we've done is we've integrated our video production team, our creative team, and our performance team. Our growth channels and our creative teams operate as two sides of the same brain. What you get is this really nice feedback loop where performance informs creative and creative tests hypotheses and you constantly learn. The way our video production services work – they are meant to be a content engine for a lot of these e-commerce brands. E-Commerce brands traditionally will do things in house, they'll do a sporadic photo shoot when they need content and be like, “Oh, I need this now because we're getting ad fatigue or things aren't performing well, or we need more video content. There's no strategy really behind that.
Or you'll engage a production company every six months with a new concept and they'll execute on that. There's no cohesion with the content. If there is, it just takes more time and effort, you need an internal creative director, or whatever it might be.
Our video production service offering, you get a team that is with you from the start, they figure out your content strategy for the next six months, and then we execute against that. So you get consistent content over a long period of time and it costs you about the same as when you've got a producer director, video editor, the entire post team from pre to post – it costs you the same as an in-house marketer. So that's been one of our most popular services, which has been awesome.
On the viral side of things, sometimes we'll layer UGC some of our video that we take on set with our influencer marketing service offering, and we can definitely tap into vitality, just it needs to be done, right. And by reality is all about just experimentation testing hypotheses and seeing what sticks.
Rob: I have to ask while we're talking about production, how did in March the COVID-19 pandemic onset affect your production? How was your handling of video production shifted over the course of the past six or seven months?
Lucas: That’s a good question. It definitely took a hit at the beginning of what we were doing – just business in general, there was a little bit of a slide. I think people were really scared, they didn't know what was going to happen. There was definitely fear in the marketplace, a lot of young SMB startups were like, “Are people going to be purchasing my products anymore? Are they going to have the disposable income to do that?” There was definitely a fear. I wrote about it quite extensively in some of my columns, but what ended up happening, and I think as everyone knows, is e-commerce is really having its moment right now. So, our growth really just started popping off quickly thereafter. We were set up in such a way to help a lot of these brands who are like, “Oh my God, we need to shift, we need to focus more on e-com. Our content is now so much more important. How we're communicating online is now critical to our success.”
We were really positioned in a great way to just have those conversations early on and help a lot of our partners that we were talking to who needed some of these things. And it helped that we had been investing in video production to the past two years, built a great team off of Oliver Salk, one of my great friends and coworkers now. He's just exceptional and he's building our video production team. We've made the right choices. That we invested in all of our equipment and we invested in our studio in downtown LA. That’s afforded us the privilege and freedom of not being constrained to rentals or venturing out. We could do things really safe and protected in LA under our roof. So that was advantageous.
Rob: You mentioned your columns in passing. What are the columns, where should we go to find those, if we want to kind of read some of your perspective, are there?
Lucas: Yeah, I think the most informative one is going to be my entrepreneur column. So just going to entrepreneur.com. Honestly, searching anything about e-commerce . . . coronavirus, I'll probably pop up.
Rob: Excellent positioning there. Lucas, as you reflect back on the journey so far with Darkroom, what are some things you have learned that you might do differently if you were starting over from scratch today?
Lucas: That's tough. I don't know that I would do to anything differently per se, because they've all been pretty critical building blocks on the journey. One thing that agency founders need to understand is building an agency is incredibly tough, it’s really difficult. There's so many, and there's so many different things that go into it. Figuring out how you're going to be set up for scale is one of the early challenges I think, beyond getting clients and doing good work and all of the other things that just go into making a profitable service business. I think people sometimes underestimate the difficulty associated with it. One thing that I would have maybe done differently is, and it's tough to really say this, but I'll give you my thoughts. One thing that I may have done differently is literally just focus on one vertical so quickly.
It took us a little while to adopt this e-commerce-specific focus and change our messaging and our core competency towards this one vertical. It's no secret, I've been working in e-commerce for a while. So has Jackson, my co-founder. We both started fashion and apparel e-commerce businesses, that’s how we met – that’s how we started collaborating. But when we started our agency, we were doing work for everyone . . . we didn't actually hone in on that demographic and really become specialized. And I think there are two ways to build an agency. You either really become specialized and understand your customer and when they come to you, you're like, “Hey, we've done this for many other brands just like you and we can definitely do this and accomplish what you want.” That makes your sales process so much easier with that specific client.
Or you can say, “Hey, we do everything and you're going to have a much lower conversion rate because they're going to be competing against the other agencies that are being specialized. But you can say, we're going to learn it, you get the benefit of us doing a lot of different things and having competency in a lot of different areas and we want to be generalists.” But that, I think only takes you so far unless you're a behemoth of an agency. So, I may have become specialized a little bit sooner because as soon as we started doing it, we started to scale at a crazy pace. But again, it was part of the journey. We needed to figure out what we liked, what we were really good at, where there was opportunity, and white space in the market. For us, that just came by looking at the competition in the e-commerce DTC agency space, which now we're scaling. I think other people look at our brand compared to some of our competitors, and these are just our competitors right now and it's just a no brainer.
Rob: It's so critical. You mentioned earlier the fit, you feel like you found with your service offerings in the market and especially in startup world, they also talk about South sort of a founder market fit. And I think the journey of a lot of agencies that do well is using the market as sort of a painful tool to figure out who you are. And oftentimes, you know, it's almost like you wish there was a personality test you could take up front to help you see “Here's who you are. Here are the vertical markets that fit you. Here are the service offerings that fit you. Here are the things you wish someone could tell you.” But it seems like quite often you have to just learn some lessons along the way.
Lucas: You got to just figure it out and the only way to figure it out is by doing it and screwing up and realizing, “Oh, this isn't going to work.” When that happened, it was so many different times that now I can get on a call with someone who's vetting us and describe my service and describe why that service is better than every other agency who hasn't figured it out yet. And when you're speaking from experience and just empathizing with the customer, you know, it makes your life so much easier. It's not a sale anymore it’s just, you're providing them with a service that they genuinely really need and would be better than any other service that they engage in. And that's what a lot of my job has been. it’s been making sure the services are as value-packed as possible and building out each vertical individually. So, the branding service, the technology offering.
The technology offering is one of the best out there in the e-commerce space, because there is so much BS and noise coming from development agencies who are just flat out lying. And it becomes a really big vulnerability for a lot of e-commerce brands who engage with other agencies or freelancers or whatever it is, and they don't have consistent support. So, the development offering, that's something I've been working on past quarter. Video production, same deal, just building that engine, building it out from our foundation and making it really value-packed. The amount of deliverables and hands-on content you get from our production department right now, it's unheard of. I've had other production agencies, or honestly, some of our hires who've come from other production agencies and they're like, “Wow, you're offering this? This is crazy. How are you doing this? We should be charging more.” And I'm like, “No, I want this to be value-packed. I want to deliver crazy value to our clients.” So yeah, it's just really being detailed about the services and knowing what's going to work.
Rob: Sure. Coming from a development background myself, I can imagine. It seems like in all three of those initial disciplines you mentioned in branding and technology and video production.
Lucas: [Inaudible 28:42]
Rob: Yeah. There's a potential high element of trust, like a lot of those things don't really work until they're done. And you can show progress along the way, but I think people have probably been bitten in all three of those areas by someone taking their money and not giving them a finished product.
Lucas: Yeah. Especially in development, right. That's just always happening. Or it's like, you know, four months in, when you're supposed to have a delivered product, it's like, this is going to take a long time. Like this is going to take required 10,000 more dollars or timelines shift, or your code is just crap . . . there's so many different things that could go wrong there. And that's just all about trust, right? So now we're at a place where we've got dialed-in processes that are cut and dried. It’s like, “This is how it's going to go.” You can see it in all of our work products. You can see our portfolio and especially in the e-commerce space again, where I feel like there is a lack of creativity unless you're paying top dollar for it. Unless you have a great creative idea as a founder and you can get it done and know how to piece these things together, which is always the case and it has been the case for a while. We'll deliver a website. People would just be like, “Wow, this is incredible.” Some of our web work is we go above and beyond.
Rob: Lucas, when people want to find you and connect with you and with Darkroom – maybe see that portfolio as well – where should they go to find you?
Lucas: They can go to LinkedIn. Type in Lucas DiPietrantonio, or check out Darkroom’s website, darkroomagency.com. Reach out to us. You can reach out to me via email Lucas@Darkroomagency.com. I'm usually pretty responsive and try and reach out to everyone or get back to everyone who reaches out to me.
Rob: Super legit. Well, Lucas DiPietrantonio, thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing the story of Darkroom with us. Be well.
Lucas: Yeah, Rob, thanks so much. I appreciate you having me on here, it was fun.
Rob: All right. Thanks.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how converged can automate your marketing reporting, email info@converthq.com or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Rahul Raj is founder and CMO of 5&Vine, a fractional CMO and marketing agency that identifies industry incumbents’ vulnerabilities, market changes, and technological opportunities to enable startup brands to challenge and overtake established brands.
The agency focuses on challenger brands that have both economic and social goals, e.g., increasing financial literacy, addressing discrimination, or making organic food more accessible to the masses.
Before starting 5&Vine, Raj worked at a Canadian thermostat startup, Ecobee. The big-name competitors, Honeywell and Nest, owned the market. Their vulnerability: single location thermostats did not address the comfort of people in “different” parts of their homes. Ecobee developed a system of individual room sensors that identified temperature and occupancy so that people could be comfortable where they were, instead of only being comfortable in the “single thermostat” hallway. The technological opportunity, Bluetooth, enabled sensors located in different rooms to communicate to the main thermostat without the need for “dropping wires.”
The company had no money, no “presence,” and no awareness. It invested heavily in customer support, won converts, and curated reviews. Ecobee had 10% of the five-star reviews of big-name competitor Nest . . . with only 0.1% of the market share – which made Ecobee larger than they actually were.
Faced with a profound family tragedy, Rahul left Ecobee, interviewed over 200 companies, received 10 offers, and decided he wanted to “date.” With each company, he agreed to work for anywhere from a week to a month which de-risked the hiring process for both sides. He so loved working as a “fractional CMO” that he professionalized his “dating” and launched a fractional CMO agency.
Rahul’s “sweet spot” is working with referred clients are those who are “pre Series A to just post Series B” – those who have the financial resources to invest in marketing and are highly motivated to grow.
In keeping with his “dating” philosophy, Rahul typically works for a company for up to three days to ensure there is a personal and intellectual fit. If both Rahul and the customer are satisfied, they write a formal contract. Of the thirty or so companies 5&Vine has worked with, the agency has taken a significantly reduced financial compensation from five or six – in exchange for equity or options in the client organization.
Rahul has developed a formalized process to discern vulnerabilities that open opportunities for his startup clients to beat more-established companies.
- Use the web to research the big company’s product
- Compare customer reviews to the company’s product claims
- Buy and use the product and compare your experience to the company claims and to customer’s reviews.
Answer the questions:
- What are people yearning for?
- What is being under-delivered, and
- What opportunity exists for your startup to come up with a powerful product that will prove a market winner?
In this interview, he also notes that it is helpful to determine what has changed over time. . . and what technologies could be applied to solve problems.
Rahul spoke at HubSpot’s 2020 Inbound Conference on Go-To-Market Strategies for Startups: A Framework + Insights from One Challenger Brand to Another.
He can be found on his agency’s website at 5andVine.
Transcript Follows:
Rob: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host Rob Kischuk and I am excited to be joined today by Rahul Raj, founder and CMO of 5&Vine based in Toronto, Canada. Welcome to the podcast, Rahul.
Rahul: Thanks so much I’m delighted to be here.
Rob: It's excellent to have you here. Would've loved to meet up with you in person at the Inbound conference, which you spoke on and we'll talk about that, but glad to be on the line too, in virtual land. Why don't you start off by telling us about 5&Vine and what your agency superpower is?
Rahul: Fantastic. We are a fractional CMO and marketing agency that helps startups and scale-ups take on industry incumbents and win. We focus on challenger brands that have some type of social pursuit alongside an economic aim. Whether that be financial literacy or addressing discrimination head on or making organic food more accessible to the masses. What we're particularly great at is identifying the vulnerabilities of the industry incumbents and using that to help propel the challenger brands that we work with to positions where they either take on or take down those industry incumbents.
Rob: And you have some experience with that yourself having worked in a startup and a challenger brand before starting the firm, right?
Rahul: I do indeed. Yeah. Prior to starting 5&Vine, I was the CMO at a technology company called Ecobee. Now, when I joined that firm, they were single digit million in sales, they were focused on the B2B market with a smart thermostat. That organization had a tremendous opportunity to go head-to-head with both Nest and Honeywell in the consumer space, but they were very reluctant to do so. Obviously, both of those organizations like Honeywell, as an example, created the thermostat and are a massive multi-billion-dollar organization with a variety of product lines that essentially translates to deep pockets. On the side of Nest, they were the darlings of Silicon Valley, started by Tony Fidel, who was the principal designer behind the Apple iPhone. And so they had tremendous street credit on the design side.
And so here was this little engine that could call Ecobee in the Canadian marketplace that kind of wanted to rattle the cages of those big dogs. And, in essence, what we did was we identified the single biggest vulnerability of both of those organizations. And that vulnerability being that consumers are uncomfortable in their homes despite hiring a thermostat to make them comfortable. And the reason is that both of them measured the temperature in one spot only and it was typically in something like a hallway. Now, if you spend the entirety of your life in the hallway, outside of your thermostat, you are going to have one cushy life when it comes to temperature. But if you're like the vast majority of humans that sleep in their bedroom that eat in their dining room or hang out in their rec room, you're probably going to experience hot and cold spots.
With that insight in mind, we created what was deemed to be a room sensor. Now a room sensor measured temperature and occupancy. So, we knew which room you were in, and we could help curate the comfort for the room that you were in instead of by the hallway. The way that we framed it from a language point of view is that Ecobee delivered comfort in the rooms that matter. So, there was a sub text, which was Ecobee: for homes with more than one room. And that, that strategy of going and addressing a fundamental design flaw that existed with thermostats was the cornerstone that enabled us to take on those industry incumbents.
Rob: That's interesting. I didn't know that Ecobee story so much and, I'm just curious, how did those room sensors connect through to the main thermostat?
Rahul: Yes, it was done through Bluetooth.
Rob: That makes sense. And that really highlights it. You know, one of the things that can make a startup a success is by taking advantage of something that has changed in the market. And something that has changed in the market is Bluetooth, right? Very few people would string wires around their house to connect different rooms, to connect the sensor back to the thermostat, but with Bluetooth or even if it had been Wi-Fi or something like that, that's something that changed in the market that it seems like hadn't fully been exploited by the incumbents or even the splashy new entrants.
Rahul: A 100%. Yeah. I think that they kind of fail to acknowledge the customer pain point, failed to sort of conceive of a solution. And then it was the like solving for “how do you make that solution technically feasible.” Now that the sort of first chapter of that story. The second chapter, just in brief, was that we had no money and we had no presence and no awareness. And so what we ended up doing to get this product out into the market was that we invested disproportionately in customer support, over marketing. And so the intent was to go out and find people that had this pain point, sell them on the resolution of the pain point, which is be comfortable in the rooms that matter, but then go out of our way to deliver on support. So if they needed help with the installation, we would stay on the phone with them the entire time. We would go out of our way to do whatever it took to make sure they had an extraordinary experience.
Now, at the end of that experience, we say, if you're happy with our product and our service, could you do us a solid and write us a review. There wasn't any sort of bias towards it, where it was like writing a review that consisted of X nor was that like write a review and we'll give you X dollars. It was just based on reciprocity – doing the right thing. If we go out of our way to do right by you, could you please help us with a review? And in the end, we had about 10% of the five-star reviews that Nest had with like 0.1% of the market share. So, we presented an image to the world that we were bigger than we actually were. And then we worked like heck to close the gap between the perception and our reality and grew our sales.
Rob: That's a great point. And in your talk at the Inbound conference was go to market strategies for startups, a framework and insights from one challenger brand to the other. And I think that kind of tees into the question of how you build a business and agency around finding these insights. Because a lot of times what you have is this sort of survivorship bias where a company survives, and then you go back and you write the story of why they succeeded. But you're really putting yourself in the position where you need to have a process to uncover these insights about what the vulnerability is in the market. How do you get to that?
Rahul: Yeah, it's a great question. I think the starting point is just like web research about the product. So obviously there's a bunch of commentary that's put out by the organization about what they're great at and perhaps what they're not as great at. So that becomes your starting point and it's the hypothesis that you're trying to validate working validate. So, the next step is to go to customer reviews and seeing whether the customers substantiate the strength of that product or service or whether the company is misleading people by stating that they are better than they actually are and so that becomes the second phase. The third phase is to buy the products yourself and experience them in some way and determine whether your experience is in fact reflective of the reviews and what the company has stated or not. I think in total, that that gives you a sense of what are people yearning for that is being under-delivered and what opportunity exists for your startup to really come out with a powerful product or service and clean up.
Rob: Wow. And so you've talked a little bit about the origin story of the business, and I think we can kind of see the overall through-line, but it's still nonetheless a significant jump to go from CMO of a sort of scaled physical product startup into starting 5&Vine as a services organization. What led you into taking that jump?
Rahul: Yeah, I mean, truthfully, I did not architect this. I accidentally stumbled upon it. So, when I left Ecobee, it was on the back of a profound amount of family tragedy, five deaths in three months, murder, a suicide. My father was given three months to live, it was overwhelming. Through the negotiation of that grief, I read an adage that said you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And it resonated so deeply with me that my quest was actually to find my five. So, I went through the process of evaluating a number of jobs, and I had 287 job-related conversations, which translated into 10 offers. And with each of those 10 offers, I wanted the experience of working with them before I drew a conclusion about whether I wanted to engage full time.
So, in other words, I wanted to date. I didn't want to get married because I was aware that dating behavior in marriage behavior are materially different. So for each of them, I said, let me work with you for anywhere between a week to a month, pay me and we will essentially de-risk the hiring for both sides. So, I did this 10 times, and with each of them, I was able to make a significant impact to their business, to help them see opportunities that perhaps they were otherwise they were otherwise unaware of. And, and that was all done in a very short period of time. Now, the reframe of that experience is that I was engaged as a fractional CMO instead of a full-time CMO. And I loved the civility with which I was able to engage because I was treated almost more like a guest than a family member. Can I decided that this was such a delightful experience and the variety was so appealing that instead of taking any one of those jobs, I would just professionalize my dating and launch a fractional CMO agency.
Rob: And at what point did it become clear that you were going to have to get some more people on board? You know, obviously it’s one thing you can kind of picture making your own way kind of as a consultant, but there's another inflection point from there where you say, gosh, I need some help and even get to the point where you may have other people who are running that primary fractional CMO seat. What was that transition like?
Rahul: Again, it was relatively like a logical transition and it kind of comes back to de-risking the move. So, when I needed extra help whether it would be in PR and growth in social, in content, in design. I would initially go to trusted people in my network that I could engage on a contract. And so, I would start paying them to do the work. We would evaluate or solidify our chemistry, both personality wise, intellect wise. And it was only when the expense for that discipline became significant enough that I could make the calculus to say, I think it would be more economical to hire someone full-time than it would be to continue on contract. And that's when I started building up my team.
Rob: You make it sound so logical, but I, you can also see it, it really is kind of a steady sort of building block path to progress. Now, one thing that strikes me, particularly when you're talking about startups, a challenge that some agencies have when they work with startups is client selection. Because you have to essentially find clients that you can help, but also are financially solvent enough to not leave you hanging with open invoices. How do you think about process of choosing the right risks when it comes to clients?
Rahul: Yeah, it's a fascinating question. There's a few dimensions to the answer. So, I'd say as a general rule, what I've learned is my sweet spot is just pre-Series A to just post-Series B. And the reason for that is that the organizations have the financial resources to invest in marketing and to pay me, but it beautifully aligns with their motivation to grow. They've they need to show aggressive growth as they, in order to land financing, or if they've just landed financing, they need to show their investors that it was worth it, that they can grow at the pace that they originally promised. So that's my sweet spot when it comes to . . .
Rob: Okay. Have they typically raised seed money or have bootstrapped their way to some measure of viability at that point?
Rahul: Yes. Yes. So, it's either that, or the founders themselves have means either due to a previous success, the discipline of saving, or family means.
Rob: I see. And so, it definitely makes sense that somebody who's pre-Series A, you know, they're looking for that edge. They're looking to come into that fundraise with all of their advantages and with articulation of their differentiation and that's always an investor conversation, is what makes you different. And so, I can certainly see, you probably are plumbing some words into some investor decks along your way,
Rahul: 100%. Yeah. I've pitched X so far for the startups that I engage with, and it's been amazing to even join them alongside those pitches to help close financing.
Rob: And how do you think about customer acquisition in this way? Because it seems to me that startups are, they kind of show up, they get some degree of success. Sometimes they disappear there. It's not like targeting a Fortune 500 firm, everybody knows where Coca-Cola is and how to find them. You may have to navigate the organization to get there, but it seems to me that startups right around as they're getting to your sweet spot can be a little bit hard to find even. How are you finding these businesses?
Rahul: So, fortunately it's all referral based. There's no active prospecting, it is just word-of-mouth, because I think when you start to see a startup do well, many people ask, well, how the heck did that happen? Right. Where did these guys come from and what drove their growth? And when I'm associated with that story and whether it's helping in a minor way or in a major way – that helps generate more client work.
Rob: Got it. Rahul, you've been at this for a little bit now, what are some lessons you've learned in building 5&Vine that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting over from scratch today?
Rahul: Yeah. Great question. So I think the first is, it's something that I'm now practicing I just didn't realize that at the beginning But I employ the same first date premise that I did with the job prospects that I referenced earlier to the startup clients. So, because fit matters and it's really, it's hard to assess fit during an interview process. I'd like to start by engaging in one to three days’ worth of paid work with the client, but I don't need a contract. I just work on the honor system and I want to see whether our personality-based chemistry in our intellectual-based chemistry works. And if they're happy with the value that I've delivered and they like me, and I feel the same way about them, then we'll formalize a contract. And to me, it's not how I necessarily started, but it's what I've embraced now, it’s very different than trying to hunt for as many clients as you can and treating them all as just dollar signs to build your business. I'm not trying to optimize for money alone, I'm trying to optimize for joy, social impact and fair economic compensation so that's one of the big lessons.
Rob: Got it. It's funny how sometimes there are things we instinctively do early in our business that we don't realize we value. It sounds like you were doing this dating and then you kind of got away from it and you've realized that it wasn't just something that you did. It's actually something you did that was valuable along the way, it's an interesting journey there. Does anything else come to mind that you might adjust?
Rahul: Definitely. The second one is, thinking about the composition of your compensation. I have out of the, certainly, 30 companies that we've worked with, there were about five or six where I have taken a meaningfully reduced financial compensation in exchange for equity or options in that organization. And that is just a powerful decision to make, but it obviously comes along with a proportionate level of risk. But it's powerful because when that organization does well, its game changing, it's just game changing. So, give you one example and knowing that you're in Atlanta, this will land pretty well, but one of my early clients was a company called Greenlight Financial, based in Atlanta. Greenlight is a smart debit card for kids that helps parents teach kids about financial literacy in an era where we're no longer as dependent on paper bills. Right? So, because our transactions occur virtually Greenlight helps facilitate that conversation and that education between parents and kids using a debit card and a mobile app, and they do an extraordinary job. When I was engaged, we grew the business significantly enough to close a Series A, led by Amazon. Recently within the past month, Greenlight has closed a $215 million round of financing that values the company at $1.2 billion. Trust me that I am delighted that I took a reduced financial compensation and have a piece of that business.
Rob: Yeah, that's a great one to be in, they are certainly on their way, but early on, I think there were probably along the lines of what you were saying with the thermostat. Some unspoken kind of concerns and skepticism from the market. I know those folks, Johnson Cook, I think I know over there, I've known for a while. I think, Tim that's in charge of it.
Rahul: That’s correct, yeah.
Rob: Anyhow. They used to be right down the hall from us So, I know Greenlight well.
Rahul: Do you know TBC as well?
Rob: Yes. Absolutely. But talking about the insights, what was the insight in that payment market that really, it seems to me that the challenge would be trust. I think I had a little bit of skepticism and trust around the product when they first rolled it out the way I knew the people involved were excellent. Most people don't have that privilege. So how did you think about the differentiation and opportunity in the market with Greenlight?
Rahul: Yes, there was, I guess to your exact point, because it's trust-based, you de-risk a situation when you know someone that has used it and derives value from it. So, you need to take something that is a private experience – and most financial things are private – and you need to help make the private public, and you can do that through storytelling. And so what we did fairly early on was we had great relationships with the parents and kids that were using our product and with their permission either encourage them to share their story on social and or enable us to share their stories on social. But we did so in such a way that the storytelling was, you were exposed to the storytelling, likely from someone in your community, in your city or someone that was relatable because their kids play in a particular sports league that your kids played in. So we made the private engagement with the product or public but did so in a way that you could relate to, and that was familiar to you.
Rob: Wow. That's really intriguing and for the sake of Rahul, but as well as for the sake of your children, go check out Greenlight is a really, really cool product. I would encourage anybody listening to go have a look. I think the market is certainly validated that there is something there, there is value there, and I will vouch that there are good people working on it, so that's really exciting. Rahul, when you look ahead, when you look at what's coming up for 5&Vine, or maybe more broadly in the market of either marketing or innovation, what's exciting to you that's coming up?
Rahul: So, we're evolving our business into a venture studio model where we are taking a bigger position in companies but taking on a higher level of risk in developing their brand, their websites, and their acquisition strategies. So, in essence, whereas a venture capital firm might put in dollars and then the use of proceeds is to do those things, we are doing the same thing, except we're giving all of our intellectual capital to these organizations to help them develop and accelerate them in exchange for more material equity positions. And that to me is unbelievably exciting because there's so much skin in the game. Where our future essentially depends on the success of those organizations and I'm just so excited to unleash more of the team's talents in bringing more socially responsible brands to market.
Rob: That's interesting. And it's really interesting from a team compensation perspective, because oftentimes a lot of agencies will get into a model of some sort of profit sharing or distribution or something like that. How do you think about, is there any way you've been able to align the equity upside to the incentives of your team to kind of be staked into the long-term success of the clients?
Rahul: Yeah, truthfully, not yet. But the model that I'm exploring – but I have not yet solved for – is the venture capital model. And my understanding of the venture capital model takes into consideration is: who’s working on the business, how long are they working on that business, and then what is the outcome? And then how do you proportionately share proceeds based on agency and risk and by agency, I think involvement. And that's the trickiest part of this model is that we all know there's turnover. People leave agencies for a variety of reasons and so you want to ensure if they contributed to the success of an organization, that they can benefit from it for the time that they were involved. But the related thing is to what extent does it impact their base compensation? Because it's a risk model and the risks or the return isn't necessarily generated in the first two years, five years, or even 10 years. Right? And so, I'm trying to figure out how to structure it in such a way that it's equitable, doesn't disadvantage people, also they're still able to live fairly, get compensated fairly, but benefit from that level of upside, knowing that it's the agency that's taking on the most risk.
Rob: Right. I've been having some conversations lately with attorneys. I've been facing down a similar thing because coming from an investor-funded product business, as I have, but also a services business, which we are spinning up. What you run into, if you just follow a typical startup pattern of granting equity, not that you run out of equity, but you keep diluting people with people who are not there anymore. And on the one hand you want them to benefit from the upside maybe . . . probably . . . not at the expense of everyone, they’re not at the expense of maybe even an investor. So I've been tweaking with an idea, and I'm not sure if we're going to get anywhere with it, but if I can find an attorney who will make this format public the same way that some attorneys have made like safe notes and certain sorts of, investment instruments, they've made them public and sort of open source.
What I've been thinking is to have people vest into a profit sharing and equity pool that they vest out of, they relinquish when they leave and that doesn't fully solve things. We had an episode where we talked to Soze, which is an agency out of Brooklyn. And they, it wasn't like Monte Python where they were an autonomous collective, but they said something kind of like that. It was a very like Brooklyn kind of hippy sounding, but really compelling and empathetic way where they, nobody owns that agency, they’re a co-op I think they said. So, everybody owns the share that they own for the time they've been there while they're there and then it goes back in the pool when they leave. And so, I think somewhat inspired by that I've been tweaking with ideas and I, I don't know where I will get with it. I hope if anyone else has some thoughts on it, I'd love to hear drop me an email.
Rahul: Oh, that's fascinating. We should make sure to stay in touch on that one then.
Rob: Yeah. I think it's something that needs to be solved for, I mean, a service business with an interest in the product, which is what we are, which is what you are. I don't know how many of those there are, but I'm a big believer in letting the team share in the upside. And it's a lot easier to reckon that I think on the services side, it's here's profit sharing. but it's, it's harder when it's longer term it's harder when it's, it's something that's not, it's not divisible in the same way.
Rahul: Yeah, fascinating.
Rob: Well, Rahul, when people want to find you and when they want to find 5&Vine, where should they look for you?
Rahul: Yeah, the best way is online. Our website is 5andvine.com. It's the number 5, A-, N-, D-, V-, like Victor, I-, N-, E.com. And as you referenced earlier, it's based on the David and Goliath story where David took five stones from a river and use that in a slingshot to take down Goliath. So, he made a Slingshot out of vine. So it's 5 and Vine
Rob: That's a good, concise backstory as well. Well, Rahul, thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing your story and I'm sure the audience will benefit well from it
Rahul: Much appreciated. Thanks so much for having me on.
Rob: Be well. Bye-bye.
Thank you for listening. The marketing agency podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive to learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
John Lawson, Chief Executive Officer at Colder Ice Media, started in e-commerce in 2000 on eBay. He claims that people talked about business in Ebay chat rooms, making it “the first social commerce platform” before there was such a term.
At the time, John sold bandanas, and was pestered by constant customer questions for information on “how to fold a bandana.” So, he made a video and tracked ten thousand sales – not ten thousand dollars in sales – from that single video listing.
Today’s digital/social media was not the beginning of social commerce. John says, “No matter where you go, whether first world country or third world country, there is a central location that is a marketplace where people do commerce” and that no matter the channel, there is always a person on the other end. If you appeal to human instinct, people will respond. Commerce, by its very nature, requires human interaction and “social” should be much more broadly defined. John explains that there are social channels that many people do not recognize as social, e.g., Amazon Comments.
John wrote a book, Kickass Social Commerce, which offers universal stories of social commerce (as opposed to social media). In one story the book, he tells how Madam C.J. Walker, an African-American entrepreneur, developed a line of hair care products, marketed them to her friends, then sold them door to door, and finally had her friends set up “product presentation” parties for a cut of the sales, a sales strategy later used by such companies as Tupperware and Avon. Walker became the first self-made female millionaire in the US. John describes this as “early social marketing.”
John presented “Twenty-one Kickass Social Commerce Tactics to Sell More Today” at HubSpot’s 2020 Inbound Conference, where he talked about the phases of social that make people buy and “the flywheel of contacting, engaging, getting people to take action, and then measuring that action to create better contact.” Two key concepts he covered were:
- Identify and define your avatar, your King Consumer . . . and profile in detail a minimum of three people who would purchase your product.
- Establish a need for reciprocity. DO SOMETHING for your King Consumer that creates an imbalance that makes them feel that the need to do something for you in return.
In a candid and enlightening history lesson, John also discusses how race has impacted the growth and development of black entrepreneurship. Thank you, John.
John can be reached through “Colder Ice” on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest – almost everywhere except on Tick-Tock.
ROB: Welcome to the marketing agency leadership podcast, I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by John Lawson, Chief Executive Officer of Colder Ice Media, based in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to the podcast, John.
JOHN: Hey, thanks for having me, bro.
ROB: Yeah. Good to have you here. If we were you know, if it weren't COVID, we might meet up in person.
JOHN: Right?
ROB: We have an Atlanta episode today.
JOHN: Absolutely.
ROB: Well, why don't you start off, John, by giving us a rundown of Colder Ice Media and what you all do exceptionally?
JOHN: What I do exceptionally. I do e-commerce. Right. And I started my e-commerce business back in 2000 on eBay as a necessity. People were asking me the same question over and over, how to fold a bandana because I sold bandanas. It was annoying. So, I made a video on YouTube on how to fold a bandana.
I would give everybody who asked that question that link. That bandana video went completely viral. Three hundred thousand people watched the video. Out of that, we were able to track ten thousand sales – not ten thousand dollars – but actual sales from that single video listing. That was like a cavalcade of understanding for me as people started asking me, “Hey, how do you do videos for selling stuff online?” I'm like, “Answer questions that people want.”
That got me on stages. Finally I was like, “OK, if you need help with how to use social – the whole world of social – then that's what we did with Colder Ice Media.
ROB: That's a very fun story. I can see why someone would put you on stage to talk about it. I think within that, at a tactical level, there's some cleverness, I think probably in your attribution – because when you're talking about was not the easiest time to tie through who bought this thing. So how did you sort out that people were buying OR buying more of your product from that particular video? What was your tracking?
JOHN: We would just look at the Google tag. Google tells you where traffic was coming from and we would see YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, and I'm like, “Dude, this is crazy.: And then, like you say, back in the day, the tools were not that deep, but they would show you the views. I would see these peaks and valleys in the number of views.
The week of Halloween, the peak would be 10X normal viewership. I had no idea that Halloween would be a great time to run specials selling bandanas. And I got that kind of information just by the volume of watchers during that Halloween week. So, it's if you take all of the parts, then you start seeing trends. You can't see a trend in a month. I know people think you can, but a real trend comes over years.
When you see something happen three years, you can jump on and really take advantage of those little blips that other people are not able to see because they're just getting started. So, there's value in being there for a long haul, especially on social media.
ROB: Wow. How many YouTube channels do you have in your orbit now?
JOHN: Five. Yeah, I'm short. I will tell you one thing that I do – every time I get a new client, I create their own Google space – go out and create a Google account – because you need a Google account to create the YouTube. You're going to need that for writing or using their Google advertising. I will create that entire environment and isolate it for myself.
What we do – we can show them the value of one-to-one versus, “Oh, by the way, here's some other tracking inside of your tracking.” I'm like, “No, we're tracking this. Put this in your cart so you can see exactly what our efforts are bringing to your business.”
ROB: That makes perfect sense. You got this start in understanding on the video side, but you have this, I think, a broader intentionality around social commerce in general. How has that unfolded – your understanding from that first moment of “a video driving sales” to the broader portfolio of social platforms and tactics?
JOHN: That's great . . . I like that question. What happened with me is I got really fascinated with Twitter in the beginning. I'm talking about . . . there were like one hundred thousand people on Twitter when I joined. What was fascinating for me is that I had created this business and I left the office space and I didn't have a whole lot of conversations anymore. So, I started using Twitter to just conversate with people while I was sitting at home in my home office.
All of a sudden, it just started naturally moving into, “Hey, what do you do?” “Here's what I do.” “Oh, Ok.”
Then I start talking about what I did. The e-commerce thing just started bringing other people in that were in the same field. That made me say, “Why or what is it about being or putting your expertise out that makes people suddenly feel like you are their expert?” You hear about this – everybody today will say, if you want to be an influencer, the first thing you do is start going to places and giving your expertise, There was no playbook when I was doing this. But I would watch this happen and it would happen organically. So, you start wondering. Social is very organic. I know people think it is some technology, but it's really not. I've traveled all over the world and no matter where you go, whether first world country or third world country, there is a central location that is a marketplace where people do commerce.
In that commerce marketplace, there's always at least one coffee shop where you have social. Social and commerce go together. I tell people. Facebook was not the first social platform neither was MySpace. Actually, eBay was the first platform. Why? Back in the day, we would sit in these chat rooms while we were waiting for eBay auctions to end. A lot of people were talking about business in those chat rooms. They were a social commerce platform way before there was a term. They were doing social because social has been here since chat boards and chat rooms. AOL was Facebook, 1990.
Social has been here forever. And if you grasp what I'd like to call the flywheel of contacting, engaging, getting people to take action, and then measuring that action to create better contact . . . it goes around and around in that flywheel. And that's kind of what I talked about when we were doing the Inbound thing. It was about the phases of social that make people buy.
ROB: Let's get right into that. We were talking beforehand. We were probably hoping to meet up at the Inbound conference and record this live and in person or in Atlanta. But we're not meeting up for things like that right now. But Inbound still happened. HubSpot’s big Inbound conference, tens of thousands of people, maybe more – online. And your session there was “Twenty-one Kickass Social Commerce Tactics to Sell More Today.” And so I'd love you to dig in and get us into some of the meat and potatoes, maybe some particular things that you saw resonate back out into your audience on Social because you probably were paying attention to that.
JOHN: Yeah, I mean, the first thing I'm all about and I tell people and Ok, I get it these do feel very, "Oh I've heard that before." And that's probably the problem is that if you've heard identify your avatar, I call him the King consumer. If you can identify and get in the mind of your King Consumer, then everything that you do after that speaks to that King Consumer. Create at least one. But I say really, at minimum three people that actually purchase your product. They can be real people or they can be fake people.
Let's say you don't have your product in market yet, or you think you know who's going to buy that product when you create this King consumer, what you have to do is start thinking about everything that that consumer is into. I want you to go deep into your thought patterns about, not just what they're what they want, but what do they need, what situation are they in? How do they know how many kids do they have? What job do they have?
What are they what do they listen to? What do they say? What are some of the terminology they use? And the more you find that out, the better your business is going to be. I know when I created our business and I was selling those bandanas, I bought those because I was into hip hop and everybody in my neighborhood was wearing the bandanas. I could sell that to people in my sphere. But once I started putting it out there and getting the feedback from others, I was like, whoa, wait a minute; these aren't hip hoppers that are just buying these.
These are the bikers. Oh, wow, that's cool. Like I said, people do in the Halloween. Oh, Ok. Cool. And once I started asking my people, hey, how are you using that? How did you like that? You got to definitely go out there and ask. You have to ask. What you're going to learn from your ask are things you're never going to be able to come up with in your own mind. Things that you think when you think that your product and you are your customer – you're not. You're absolutely not. So back to the original question.
Identifying that King consumer is one of the things you have to do. The next thing I talk about was reciprocity. If you do something for others, there becomes an imbalance in them that makes them feel like they have to do something for you. That was the whole thing about me teaching people – and I didn't tell you that is the main question actually was – how to fold a bandana like Tupac. Right. And it's so ridiculous. But remember, this is early 2000s, so or late 2000.
So, the deal was in my mind, I'm like; everybody knows how to do that. But here's the deal. The people between the East Coast in the West Coast – those flyovers would watch videos and they wanted the same look and they didn't know. Once I taught them how to fold that bandana, then when they were making their choice on who to buy one from, they automatically thought about, “Hey, those guys taught me how to do it.” And just by the nature of who we are, we wanted to make the balance inside of ourselves with reciprocity.
So, I'll buy it from them. They might be a dollar more, but I'll go ahead and do it. So, you really want to think about that. That's human nature. We want to get in balance. We always do. If I ask all my friends to help me move, I know, when one of them asks me to help them move, I can't say no. That's reciprocity. Right?
ROB: And it's even more helpful in it's not just that they want to know this information. It's that the Internet to an extent and social have made it possible to ask questions that you're too embarrassed to ask your friends. So, you're bailing people out of feeling silly that they don't know how to fold that bandana.
JOHN: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Or, they don't even know who to ask.
ROB: Yeah. And that continues on out to – I think you look at the some of the beauty influencers and all these makeup tips. There are people who want to know how to do something with their makeup and they are embarrassed that they cannot. Yeah. YouTube bails us out of that. YouTube bailed me out of not knowing how to fix my toilet . . . anything.
JOHN: And think of who are the biggest beauty influencers out there – a lot of them are males. That's crazy, right? But you think these guys wanted to put on makeup and a lot of their audience maybe never did. So, who are you going to ask? Your sister? There's a whole lot I got to do before I ask my sister how to put on makeup, There’s a whole lot of steps I got to go through.
ROB: Yeah, you're probably not going to get a straight up answer right away on that.
JOHN: There's going to be some other conversation where exactly we need to have a deeper conversation.
ROB: Amazing. I like how the story it started out. When did you realize that you were going to be into this world of social and commerce and Colder Ice Media for the longer run? Was that evident right away? Or was there something after the instigating moment that really cemented the business for you?
JOHN: It was probably around 2012 2013. These guys were writing a column about eBay sellers and they asked me if I could do an interview as one of people who are eBay success stories. I agreed. We get on the phone and were doing this interview and she's like, ”You’re one of ten people we're going to feature blah, blah, blah.” But we stayed on the phone for 80 to 90 minutes.
And I was like, “Just for a feature piece, this is kind of weird.” We were just having good conversation. At the end of that call . . . she and her husband are a team and write together . . . . . . at the end of the call, they said, “John, man, that was really good stuff. I think we're going to make a multipart feature just on your business.”
I was like, “Really? That's pretty cool.”
And then he's like, “Hey, and if you ever think about writing a book, I'd help you because we've written twenty-two books and we'd love to help you.”
I was like, “Really?” I had never thought about writing a book before because I never thought I had much to say . . . or how much you need to say. But once we put the treatment together, it became my social commerce book. First. It was about social commerce, not just social media.
But the key thing was, I don't care how many people like me – I want you to buy from me. There are a lot of people out here who have social influence but couldn't get people to piss on them if they were on fire – they don't really have the ability to move people. There's a difference between having likes and having people that will buy from you. And that's the big difference to me in social media. For me, it was all about the commerce portion.
ROB: And what's the name of the book folks want to go . . .
JOHN: Kickass Social Commerce.
ROB: Excellent. Excellent. Any additional publishings of it or is it still pretty fresh?
JOHN: You know what? Here's the thing. When I wrote the book, I wrote it forever. Yeah, right. I did. I literally did because the concepts, again, of social and purchasing go together. So, I grabbed all of these universal stories. And one of my major stories, he first story I talk about is a woman called Madam C.J. Walker. Have you heard of her?
ROB: I am not familiar with her.
JOHN: Great. Fantastic. So, I could tell this story if you don't mind.
ROB: Go.
JOHN: All right. So, here's the deal. Madam C.J. Walker was an African-American, a black woman. OK, I like that better. Right? She was a black woman and she created a scalp ointment because her hair was falling out from straightening it. She created an ointment that would keep her hair healthy. And other women saw her hair from going to where she had maybe patches, bald spots, and not healthy hair to these long, luxurious locks. People asked, “What are you using?” She had created this thing in her kitchen and she ended up going from her sink and to the bathtub to create larger volumes of it to sell to her friends.
Well, the business starts growing and she starts going door to door to do sales. So that's the first part, right? You go from friends telling friends to going door to door. Her door to door sales grew so much that she realized that she was limited by the number of doors she could go to in a day, and that was hampering the growth of her base simply because there's only so many doors you can knock on. So, she came up with this great idea. She said, look, I'll get one of my clients that already buys for me to have a party and I'll go to the party and display my products at the party. Sound familiar?
ROB: Mmm-hmm.
JOHN: She was the one that created the model that today Mary Kay and Avon use. She created that and that was, again, social. You're expanding your network by using small influencers to bring their friends in and allowing you to do that demonstration. Of course, you would give them a cut for the party. Ultimately, she built a house bigger than the White House . . . and this was in 1918.
This is she is the first self-made female millionaire in America. She was ranked number six of the top 10 entrepreneurs in Entrepreneur magazine for all time, one of the greatest success stories. But I tell this story because, as I was listening and reading and researching, I realized how social media can grow for commerce because. literally, she had her own, quote “Facebook” by doing what she did with these people. So, it's universal. I wrote from that understanding . . . from that standpoint.
ROB: Yeah. You can imagine a version of a book on social commerce that would get nitty-gritty – focus very much on the popular channels, marketing channels of the day, would talk about specific ad-spending tactics – and it would have a very short shelf life. But I get the sense from talking to you that you define social channels – and you did this a little bit with eBay – you define that remarkably differently from many people. So, when we think about social channels today, what are some other channels you think may not be intuitively understood as social, but yet are extremely so?
JOHN: Hmm, that's a good question.
ROB: Because we could talk about Tick-Tock, but we don't and we can, but we don't have to. I don't think you could write a book with a long shelf life if that was your frame of mind.
JOHN: Right. Because the channels always change their rules. Yeah. But if your understanding is, no matter what their handle is, there is a person on the other end and there are certain things that we . . . we as humans are just a higher level of animals and there's certain habits that we have that we're always going to use. No matter what channel you use to get there, if you nail that human instinct, they're going to respond to it. Here's what I give you that you wouldn't think of: Amazon comments. Amazon comment, that is a social channel. There are some people that do nothing but read and post or try things and post and then they read other stuff from people. And then they respond in those posts. They do this all day long. Why are they doing that? Because that's their social world.
ROB: Hmm. Have you seen some people using Slack communities in a business context, maybe?
JOHN: Yes, absolutely. Because what they're doing now is they're getting people away – moreso Reddit. I mean, Reddit, its killer. Reddit is really killer. But a Slack community is a great way to get people that are interested in a specific topic away from the distraction that is social media, especially in an election year.
ROB: Hmm, right. Plenty of that.
JOHN: There's so much of that. And people's moods are being changed sometimes by the constant back and forth in these major social channels like Facebook or Twitter. It gets distracting. So, you get your people out from there into a nice global world that doesn't have all the noise in it.
ROB: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's almost in some cases, there's too much – If you were in a room, there are some rooms where there's too much shouting to be helpful. You can't help people who are in the middle of a fight.
JOHN: Right. Exactly. It's like it's really hard to get my attention when there's a train wreck right in front of us.
ROB: What does that pivot point look like? What's it look like? What's an example – help us kind of think through it and catalyze our thinking – of someone who's commenting on reviews on Amazon and they're selling something and it's driving – I understand it conceptually, but it's a bit abstract. Is there a concrete example you've seen where they comment on this thing because they were selling this other thing?
JOHN: Well, what ends up happening is, if you comment a lot, Amazon flags you as a commenter. Once you get that known as a trusted source, once you get that flagging, then other people that are trying to get reviews by people that have that tag or that flag will start reaching out to send you products.
ROB: Got it.
JOHN: Right. So, here's the deal. Once you recognize that people are gravitating to you, starting to ask you for your opinion, you’ve probably got something going on there. I've got a client right now that built a business – and this is so weird – around selling old music media. So, it's flipping CDs. Who buys a CD today? Why don’t I get that? I didn't get that. I get it now. He's done six figures just teaching people how to look for CDs at garage sales and thrift stores. That's just amazing to me. You wouldn't think there was a community around that before this. I just never knew. So, there are a lot of niches – there are people that do nothing but needlepoint – there's a niche for darn near everything and it doesn't take a lot of people for you to reach out and find an audience that will either purchase from you or take your recommendations and purchase other things so you can become that influencer for that thing.
ROB: Right. It's like the kind of the Kevin Kelly conversation, around a thousand true fans and there are lots of thousands of fans that are looking to be with him.
JOHN: Who did you say?
ROB: Kevin Kelly, I think.
JOHN: Who's Kevin Kelly? Wait a minute, is not the original?
ROB: It might be. Where have you heard it most?
JOHN: I'm just going to check this out because. Ok, says Kevin Kelly. Interesting. I'm thinking. Anyway, go ahead. Go ahead. I want to talk about it, Ok? KK.org got it. Technically.
ROB: Yep.
JOHN: Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Because it's funny you say that. When it first came out, I was so into that. The reason why I was into it, just to go a little bit backwards. is because I'm a huge Prince fan. When Prince left the label, he left a multi-million-dollar deal with Warner Brothers. He was like, “You know what? You can have my entire song category. I just want to be free.” And I was like, “What the hell?” Right after that, he put out his own album.
This was the early 90s, He used like a chat room, basically a chat board, to sell a hundred thousand records. Now, this is a man that sold 10 million records for just his Purple Rain album and now he's selling a hundred thousand. And he said, “You know what? I made more off that hundred thousand records than I ever made off of Purple Rain. And when that thousand true fans came out, I was like, ‘Wow’.” That is the basis from where I teach. If you can get a thousand true fans, you’re in.
ROB: That's amazing, I didn't know that story about Prince, but even in the music world, it brings me forward even to someone like Run the Jewels. Their first album, they put it on their website for free. And they kept on doing their albums for free. And now their albums are basically for free, even if on Spotify. But they were able to cut through a lot of noise and find their fans a lot faster, but still make a living and in a way that is far beyond just selling music.
JOHN: Right. Most musicians don't make their money off selling music anyway. That's why they have to tour. Yeah. They have to tour to pay for everything because, I mean, the music business is an amazing thing. I don't want to go into how they really do their business, but let's put it like this: If you sell a million records, you're probably not a millionaire.
ROB: Yeah, man. Well, John, this is this is quite a knowledge drop here. I hope that when we're back to meeting in person, people will get a chance to get out and see you and meet you and hear you. When people want to find you and when they want to find Colder Ice Media, where should they go to track you down?
JOHN: Just put in Colder Ice. That's all you got to do. Put it in your browser and I will show up I'm Colder Ice on every platform. I am one of those branding crazy people that did that a long time ago. And I'm Colder Ice on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. I don't care where you go. Pretty much I own Colder Ice except for Tick-Tock. Somebody stopped me on Tick-Tock.
ROB: Oh man, that's tough. Well maybe you can make a phone call at some point and get it unlocked for Colder Ice. The handle you reserve when you were early on Twitter, did you get another good Twitter handle early.
JOHN: Man, you are just pulling out all the good stories. But my name is so common. John Lawson. When I first looked it up, there were like eight million John Lawsons. I had the story in my head. I remember this story that back in segregation – a lot of people don't understand this, but African-Americans are some very original entrepreneurs, not because we had the entrepreneurial spirit – but you had to be an entrepreneur if you wanted to feed your family. You couldn't I couldn't walk into the regular grocery store and buy groceries back then. You had to have a black-only grocery store.
There was a black-only cab company. There was a black-only bus company, black-only hotels. All of that. Run by black people because “white people wasn't sharing.” But literally, those storefronts that were serving the black community, the day that integration became the norm, they would see their customers walk right past their storefronts to go shop downtown. They came up with the saying, “Well, I guess the white man's ice is colder.” And I always remember that: colder ice. That's the story.
ROB: Wow, I didn't know that either and you’re gracious in your history lessons. There's a lot of strong feelings tied up in that. I know. We're all trying to figure out different ways to actually be sorry and be better.
JOHN: No, we're all getting better, man. That it's all good effects on your ear. That's the great story of America.
ROB: Well, John, thank you for coming on again. I can't wait to get out and hear you share something in real life, but I appreciate you joining virtually as well. And I think our audience is better for it as well.
JOHN: This was a great interview. I really had fun.
ROB: Thank you. Thank you for listening. The marketing agency leadership podcast is presented by Converged. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting email info@convergehq.com or visit us on the web at Convergehq.com.
James Kwon is Founder and CEO of Figmints Digital Creative Marketing, a 20-person, full-service, multi-seven-figure digital marketing agency that specializes in accelerating leads to sales. The company utilizes SalesAmp, which James describes as “business development representative as a service.” SalesAmp came under the Figmint’s “umbrella” when James and April Williams, now Fitmints President, merged their two companies. (The way these two companies “came together” is described in a short video on Fitmints’ website’s About page.)
Eight years ago, when James discovered that his first chosen career in culinary arts did not provide him with sufficient creative opportunities, he started Figmints with a focus on providing UI/UX (User Interface and User Experience) web services, which he did for number of well-known companies back when few people were doing it.
In this interview, James discusses the sales process gap the often occurs because “sales and marketing typically don’t like each other” – the marketing department wants the sales team to take leads earlier, while the sales team wants marketing to push leads further along before the “hand off.”
In 2018, James was looking for a partner to better fulfill his vision for where he wanted his company to go. The synergy between Figmints HubSpot operations and North Star Marketing’s SalesAmp, a marketing process focused on building pipelines for individual salespeople, created a marketing powerhouse that far exceeded the expectations of the two merged companys’ leaders. Today, the now-expanded Figmints develops the right content for the exact right audience. As individuals respond (download information, attend webinars, engage with content, open email), the SalesAmp piece takes over with Figments’ internal sales team reaching out to prospects on behalf of clients. Over time, Figmints delivers a thought leadership, content marketing, and funnel program that nurtures customers through the client-journey until they are comfortable enough to talk with the client’s sales team.
Unlike most agencies where generated leads are handed off for follow-up to client sales/ boiler rooms (which may or may not get the message right), Figmints operates as an “educational ambassador,” running the inbound HubSpot process on behalf of its clients’ salespeople. Most of the Figmints’ clients have long, complex sales cycles. When the questions get too complicated, the client takes over.
In his HubSpot Inbound 2020 presentation, “My Cheat Sheet: How to Growth Hack Five New Companies or Offerings This Year” at HubSpot Inbound 2020, James promoted the idea that entrepreneurs should consider starting multiple companies at a time. He lists a number of reasons that this practice makes sense and lays claim to launching close to nine sub-brands, of which four or five are still active.
James is a big proponent of systems, optimization, and efficiency for everything from workflows to automated engagement to follow-up processes. He says he uses “several dozen pieces of software that combine together to make my workflow easier.” But, he admits, people are complicated. Early on, the agency experienced high employee turnover. “There is no way to love people efficiently,” he says. Today, employees stick around a lot longer because the agency invests in employee growth and meeting with them for frequent one-on-ones. He highly recommends utilizing Entrepreneurial Operating Systems (EOS), as described in Gino Wickman’s book Traction.
James is available on his agency’s website at: Figmints.com, by email at: james@figmints.com, on Twitter at Twitter.com/figmints, and Facebook.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by James Kwon, Founder and CEO of Figmints Digital Creative Marketing based in Providence, Rhode Island. Welcome to the podcast, James.
JAMES: Thanks so much for having me, Rob.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Figmints and what is the superpower of Figmints? Where do you excel?
JAMES: I like that. Figmints is a 20-person, full service digital marketing firm. Started here about 8 years ago. My personal background – I guess I’ll tell you a little bit of the story. I started in UI/UX and design. Actually, I have a degree in culinary, so that was where my creativity journey started.
Got to find out that I couldn’t be as creative in the kitchen as I’d like to be, and I wasn’t that good at it, so I left to do design work. I could be more creative in front of a computer, so I started to do design and became what I call one of the first UI/UX designers because that category really didn’t exist when I started. I was Employee #5 at CVS.com, helped them launch that award-winning site at the time. Worked at BEAM Interactive, got to work on some really high profile, awesome sites like Mini Cooper, Virgin Mobile, Deutsche Bank, the list goes on and on. Name drop, name drop.
I started the agency because I really enjoyed working with small to medium size firms. Fell in love with marketing somewhere along the lines. I fell in love with business, fell in love with marketing, just this infinite pool. Today, we’re really focused on accelerating leads to sales through a program we call SalesAmp. It’s like a BDR as a service.
What I’ve learned through the years – I don’t like the term serial entrepreneur, but I guess it describes me because we have probably four or five different sub-brands that I’ve launched. Over the years, actually, it’s like nine. But today we’re still working on four or five of them. I’ve had a blast getting to trial things very quickly, test things very quickly, trying to measure the growth very quickly. And we do that for clients as well as ourselves.
ROB: Right on. BDR, business development representative – a lot of times this is somebody who’s banging the phones, banging emails, possibly even sourcing or scraping leads or has some process feeding into that. How does that thread go from a background in UX and UI to sales assistance?
JAMES: Great question. What I love about design is coming up with creative solutions, and when I started the business 8 years ago, I realized that you get to really be infinitely creative in business itself. There are major levels you can pull within business operations, HR, people, but especially, of course, in sales and marketing that was the area that was closest to the world we were already living in, doing websites and branding and brand story.
We merged about 2-½ years ago now with another agency. The CEO there is now our president, April Williams. She had developed a system that she called SalesAmp, and we really added a digital layer as they’ve folded into our agency. That process, we think, is really transformational. We have a lot of great clients. Philips Healthcare is a client of ours. That’s probably our biggest. GE ABB is a client of ours. Lots of medium size clients as well.
But the whole idea is sales and marketing typically don’t like each other. Well, in a lot of businesses, they typically are frustrated at each other because marketing wants sales to take leads earlier, sales wants marketing to push leads further. There’s this gap that happens in the middle, and we thought this was a tremendous need. So we actually developed a process to not only develop the thought leadership, the content marketing, the funnel, but also have an inside sales team that reaches out on behalf of the client to hand-hold that prospect all the way through till they feel comfortable having a conversation with the sales team.
These larger organizations have felt tremendous benefit from having this service from us because it reduces that frustration. Salespeople are busy; they flat-out just don’t want to do it. [laughs] So yeah, we’ve had a lot of fun putting this together.
ROB: That’s really interesting, and that makes your journey make sense. If we were doing conferences this year in 2020, you and I might have been speaking face to face at HubSpot’s Inbound conference, where you were speaking. We’ve recorded there the past couple of years, and quite often we’ve talked to BDR/SDR as a service companies, but they’re usually coming more from the perspective of building lists and then banging out calls for those lists.
Do I understand that you’re actually generating warmer leads and then also pulling those leads through to some point where you hand them off in the sales process?
JAMES: Yeah. Not to give away too much of the special sauce, but for the value of this podcast, for the value of your listeners, I’ll share with you what we’ve found to be more impactful is actually running the good old-fashioned HubSpot inbound process specifically for salespeople. We run that process on their behalf – because you’re right, a lot of these outbound sales/boiler room type of “I’m going to call 1,000 people a day,” those tend to fail because they don’t get the story right. The game is just numbers, “I’m going to call as many people as possible.”
But the inbound process is all about connecting the right content, having as much helpful content as possible to that exact right audience. What we’re doing is combining both of those worlds. We want to develop that content, do it on behalf of the sales team, and then as people engage, we’re reaching out to those individuals. As people download, as people attend the webinars, as people start to engage with that content or even open an email, those are the people we reach out to.
And then on the calls, we’re actually leading them into more content, bringing them further through that journey. That I think is pretty different than a lot of companies out there that are just a roomful of salespeople reaching out.
ROB: That definitely makes sense. Where do you get to the point where you hand that lead off? Are you sometimes able to bring them all the way through to closing sale, or is there typically a point where you’re handing them off to an account executive, an AE or something like that?
JAMES: Yeah, we’re working on a program where we can bring the deal all the way to close. Of course, there’s a lot of complexities. Most of the clients we work with have long sales cycles. They’re very complex deals. You have to have some industry knowledge to be valuable there, to actually make the close or get people to sign on the dotted line.
But what we do is become educational ambassadors. We know enough about the business to be able to guide that individual, and once it becomes complicated or once the questions become a little too complex for us, we’ll immediately tee it up for that salesperson at the company.
ROB: Got it. I want to pull on one thread you mentioned earlier. You mentioned a point of merging with another agency. Quite often, especially when you get to being more entrepreneurial, I think a combination of let’s say ego and logistics and financial concerns can be an obstacle to getting together –
JAMES: Just those little things. [laughs] Yeah.
ROB: [laughs] Nobody has those problems. How did you come to this point where it just seemed to make sense to team up and pursue a whole that was more than some of its parts?
JAMES: I’m going to throw a lot of that to April, who was the CEO of this previous agency and is now our president. There was a lot of humility from the start. We met each other actually at a faith-based Christian CEO roundtable group, and we’ve known each other for a few years. That story – we like to use the word supernatural. It feels like it was more about the things that were happening, and we were going along for the ride, really, and submitting a little bit to what we felt like was the best way to move forward.
You can see that story, and I would highly recommend anybody to check out that full story, on our website, on our About page. I think there’s a 4- or 5-minute video that explains the process there. But all the work that was done to start that humble process was really from April, and I was following along.
ROB: We will look to get that video into the show notes. It’s a great point that so often, some of these roundtables, some of these accountability type groups where you open up a little bit could be a place where you open up enough to figure out how you and someone else can work better together. Makes a ton of sense there.
We mentioned Inbound, and at Inbound you gave a talk, and your talk was “My Cheat Sheet: How to Growth Hack Five New Companies or Offerings This Year.” Tell us about that talk and what some of the key takeaways and maybe even key questions were from that.
JAMES: That talk came from our merger, I’d say was really the catalyst. It freed me up to dwell and live in – I think my gifting is ideating, looking towards the future, thinking about where we could create new products, new offerings. In the past, we really only ever had time to do half to one product or offering at a time, and we’d slowly test them. I realized that this probably means we’re spending too much time trying to develop that offering before we launch it out.
Obviously, as a speaker, I wanted the title to be as provocative as possible, so I made the argument that you shouldn’t just start one offering or one new company; you should try to start five. It’s kind of an arbitrary number. Three, five, ten – you should start as many as you can that warrants – that you think is a good idea. Go and test those MVPs (minimum viable products) out there.
Very quickly into that segment, I talked about a few different reasons why you would want to do that. One, 80% of these ideas are going to fail, whether it’s a new company or a new offering. So hey, if you start five, maybe one will succeed. It gives you this massive leap ahead. It gives you this opportunity to play in this blue ocean where your competitors may not be thinking smaller, running those MVPs, making sure that you’re testing the biggest parts of the idea. It forces you not to spend too much time on it.
And then of course, you get some thick skin. After failing many, many, many times, it becomes second nature, and you start to move forward much more quickly.
ROB: This may tie together; you mentioned that your company had at one point up to nine offerings, and now there are five. Are there lessons and maybe an example of one of those that was an experiment and one that was put to rest?
JAMES: Yeah, there’s so many failures in there. [laughs] Happy to talk about it. Very early on, we built a platform for the wedding industry. Early on, when we introed video as a service, we were doing videos for weddings to make ends meet. We quickly knew that this needed to be not part of our brand, so we created a separate brand for that.
The wedding industry is an entire universe. For any of your listeners who might be in the wedding industry, it is complex and unique and special, and there’s a lot of people that you need to know and a lot of ways that you do business in it that are different than other industries – which I guess you could make the argument is true for every industry. But we quickly realized that we need a champion for this. We need a champion for any of these products that we create or sub-companies we create, and I couldn’t be the best champion for it
It did fail. We wound up twilighting the offering. There was actually a software component that was added onto it. But it was a lesson learned that the offering was a little too far away from what we do. Today, a lot of our products that we’re testing are things that we can actually use ourselves or we can use for our own clients, which makes it a little bit more – the resources make sense to allocate for ourselves.
ROB: How do you think about when it’s too soon to put an idea to rest or maybe recognize after the fact that it was a little later than you should’ve turned it off?
JAMES: I think it’s always later. In hindsight, we should’ve stopped maybe at the beginning. [laughs] But I think you realize when you run out of money, certainly. I set some ground rules. “Hey, this can’t take more than this much time” or “You can’t spend more than this many dollars” or “We want to see this many customers come in and this type of feedback.”
It’s a good example of where everything was going the wrong direction. Our feedback was starting to get worse, it started to slip way behind in the priority, we couldn’t devote as much time or dollars to it, and so we made the – I won’t even call it a difficult decision. We made the very real decision that we needed to put an official stop to that project and move on.
ROB: When you talk about feedback, some people are very numbers-driven and some people are very intuition-driven. Was that assessment of the feedback and the priority more of a gut feeling, or was that a measured consideration?
JAMES: I’d love to sound smarter and say it was very measured. [laughs] At the time, that was one of our early ones, and it was a little bit more gut, which means we probably spent more money than we wanted to or needed to. But today we have much more strict measures of when things are going off the rails or when it feels like it’s not getting the attention it deserves or we’re getting feedback from our clients. I think you need both. You need to have some soft measures, asking people what they think, scale of 1 to 10. You start to create metrics around soft measures, which I’m a fan of.
ROB: What’s another offering that maybe is a little bit further along that was an experiment, but now looks a little bit more promising? And where did it come from?
JAMES: At the end of my talk at Inbound, we created an offering that was born from this process. I give a little story about Tim Ferriss, which I’m sure you’ve heard of and maybe your listeners have heard of. Tim Ferriss is a prolific startup and entrepreneurial writer. He wrote The 4-Hour Workweek.
There’s a story about how he wrote the second book, The 4-Hour Body, and the way he arrived at the decision to write that book was really clever. Instead of surveying people or writing a chapter or anything like that, he designed a handful of book jackets and went to a bookstore – if you remember what bookstores were, they were these places people go to buy books. [laughs]
This is probably illegal, so I don’t recommend this necessarily. He took the books off the shelf and he swapped the jackets with his book jacket and he put it back on the shelf, and he stood back and actually tallied as people stopped, picked up the book, opened the book. He would give them scores – a point for stopping, 2 points for picking up the book, 10 points if you tried to buy the book. Then he arrived at the decision to write 4-Hour Body. And the subtitle of 4-Hour Body is “An uncommon guide to rapid fat loss, incredible sex, and becoming superhuman” – why would you not want to read that book, right?
But that process, since we don’t have bookstores anymore, or I don’t recommend this same sort of process, we’ve developed a similar system using Facebook advertisements and other advertisements where we create what we call fake ads. They look like real ads, but they point you to a very generic landing page that captures information and lets you know that this is coming out later.
This program, we like it a lot. We think many companies would benefit from it, and we’ve developed a separate offering just to do these validation tests. We call it BentoSpring. Bento like bite-size, spring like launch, so bite-size launch. The term “Bite-Size Launch” was taken, I think, so BentoSpring was our next best name.
We’re piloting that now. We’re getting that off the ground. I think it’s definitely still valid. But this is a great example of a product that we could use that we offer to our clients. It’s relatively inexpensive, so when we offer it, we say, “Oh, we actually have an offering we call BentoSpring.” It could be its own separate company, but it doesn’t need to be its own separate company. We have the offering out there, and if people want to engage with it, they can give us some money and do it.
ROB: I can certainly see that sort of thing – from a distance, you can see the tea leaves. Even if you told somebody, “We have a scoring system like Tim Ferriss’s. We give points for likes, we give points for comments, we give points for clicks, we give points for form fills” – the actual process of doing it could very easily be something that a client doesn’t want to do.
JAMES: Sure. They don’t know how to do it. They don’t know how to do it, they don’t have an ad platform set up. Again, this is designed even if you wanted to start a brand new company and you have two or three in your ideation phase. “Gosh, these are all great companies,” or “These are all great things that I could be doing. Which one should we do?” Well, let’s go test it. Let’s go build out a bento test and test some ads out there. Let’s see which ones are easier to set up, which ones can get the most impressions versus will see the most click-throughs.
And then you have these prebuilt ads. Once you get that up and going, you can just re-run the ads and point them to real offerings.
ROB: Exciting stuff there, James.
JAMES: Thanks.
ROB: We’ve talked a bit about your journey along the way. As you reflect on the 8 years since you took the leap and started the business, what are some things you’ve learned along the way that you might do differently if you were starting over? Maybe some broader lessons on running the show, more than maybe individual offerings.
JAMES: One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as an entrepreneur – and about myself, so this may not apply to everybody or all of your listeners – but for me, I’m a fan of optimization and efficiency. I love setting up systems. I think that’s why I fell in love with marketing. I fell in love with HubSpot because we can create these systems, we can create workflows. You can automate a lot of that engagement and follow-up and process. I use sequences every day. I have probably several dozen pieces of software that combine together to make my workflow easier.
But here’s what I found out. There is no way to love people efficiently. You cannot do it. Loving people is designed to not be efficient, or relationships are designed to not be efficient. So early on, there was a lot of friction in the business because I would hire employees and they’d stay a year or two, and I’d get frustrated when people get that millennial itch. I had somebody say, “James, I’ve been here two years. I learned everything I could. I think I’m going to leave and travel the world.” And that guy did really well.
But today, we’ve held our employees a lot longer. We’re invested in our employees to see them grow, painstakingly taking time out of the day to set up one-on-ones with every individual, more one-on-ones with the people closest to me in the leadership circle. Those are the things that have been very painful lessons, but such powerful lessons growing the business to where we are now, about 20 employees, multi seven-figure.
But that’s something I think could be its own book of lessons, per se, for loving people, caring about people, just treasuring this opportunity that I have to make an impact on their lives.
ROB: Really helpful. One-on-ones are such a key connector of that. You mentioned days. Are you doing those mostly weekly, or more often or less often? You said some people are a little lighter cadence if they’re not as close to you in the organization? Maybe you do more of a touch base on occasion?
JAMES: One-on-ones seem like such a simple answer. If I say it, some of your listeners might think, “Of course, I’m going to do one-on-ones.” But you wind up not doing it unless they’re really regimented. I recommend highly that – first of all, we run on an operating system called EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating Systems), a book called Traction by Gino Wickman.
Once you start to get into peer groups, you’ll hear the EOS model over and over and over again. So I highly, highly recommend looking at EOS because it gives you a framework for meetings, a framework for how you do business, how you set it up, how to look at finances, how to look at hiring, core values, etc. It makes the argument that every business runs on an operating system – some on purpose and some not.
The EOS model recommends doing one-on-ones at least every other week. I would say as the visionary or the leader of the company, with my integrator, who’s April and my number two, she and I meet every week and we have a one-on-one cadence there. Then with the rest of the leadership team, I meet with them at least once a month. I do two or three one-on-ones a week, and the gaps are filled with the rest of the team.
Other members of the team might have rotations with me once every 6 months, which I think is fine, but they’re doing one-on-ones with their direct reports at least once every other week.
ROB: It’s such a helpful tool. It’s so good for empathy, for relationship, and coupled with process. When we do our one-on-ones, I have a cheat sheet. I take notes. I don’t take the best notes on it, but even the simplest things of making sure you jot down the names of their family members and key milestones, those sorts of things – it’s process, but it’s process that, to your point, helps you love people well and maybe at a little bit better scale than just relying on your brain.
JAMES: Totally. 15 minutes. Here’s just a few of the questions we like to ask.
One, we always start off with that personal touch: “Hey, how’s your wife doing? How’s your husband doing? How’s your boyfriend/girlfriend? How are the things that we last talked about? I heard that you just bought a house. Congratulations. How’s that going?”
Then we dive quickly into “What’s going well? What’s not going well? What would you be doing differently if you were in my position? What information can I give you that you might be curious about in the company that you may not have regular visibility into?”
This is a key one. I love when we both share, “What can I keep doing, start doing, and stop doing?” This is a really helpful framework. Keep doing is an opportunity to say “Hey, you’re doing a great job. Love that you’re doing X. Please keep doing that. I notice that you weren’t doing Y. Can you start doing N? Also, I noticed this thing. Maybe you should stop doing that.”
But the opportunity for the other person to say the same to me – what should I keep doing, start doing, stop doing? – opens it up. And honestly, if we’d had the opportunity to do that earlier on, I think we would’ve kept employees longer, they would’ve been happier, and I think we would’ve been able to see those frustrations or those pain points that there’re bottling up internally and made decisions about those and tried to make some shifts around those sooner. It’s pretty simple. I think employees just want to be heard.
ROB: Absolutely. Much like killing a product offering, it’s one of those things you will only realize that you started doing too late.
We were talking a little bit before we started recording about taking your office virtual during COVID, so I’d imagine one-on-ones are an easy habit to keep going, but in terms of other habits and systems and things you had going in the name of the culture of the organization and connecting people, how has that changed and what are you doing differently now that you’ve embraced virtual?
JAMES: What a great question. I wear this very proudly, so I’m going to take off the humble hat and say that I think we’ve been doing really well culturally as a remote agency. We’ve been practicing going remote once a month for the last 5 or 6 years just because we’re very capable of it, and employees like going remote. We actually give all employees a day a week where they can go remote themselves. We were built to transition to remote fairly easily. We use Slack, and we have our virtual meeting rooms and things like that.
But I’m very impressed by the way April and the team have risen to the challenge and stayed together culturally. We’ve always done a Monday morning huddle with the team, and that’s continued, but we added a second meeting, a Wednesday morning check-in where we don’t do any work talk. Or typically we don’t do any work talk. We actually play a game together virtually. This has been really fun.
We do online Pictionary, we’ve played Scattergories, Taboo, Bingo. We told scary stories. It’s 30 minutes, 9:30 on Wednesday, and it’s just a lot of fun. We make it the team’s responsibility, so every team member, we rotate, they bring their game, and then they teach the game and we just play. That kind of culture has just kept us sane, I feel like, and it’s kept this rhythm of “Oh, it’s easy to keep this process going.”
So that’s been really helpful. And now, as the restrictions ease up a little bit, we’re actually starting to do the opposite where we’re trying to meet together more often and do things outside, have barbecues, bonfires, and have drinks together. We did a kayaking trip. Here in Rhode Island, we have the beautiful ocean. We’re the Ocean State, so we have beautiful water activities we can do.
So, keeping those things fresh has really helped our culture, and I feel like we’ve done a tremendous job at that.
ROB: That’s super solid. I think you are pulling towards what I’m seeing emerge also. “The new normal” is overused, but I think historically, many companies, including yours, and mine for that matter, have been default in the office. Not in the office is unique. We’re probably moving more towards default remote and sometimes you’re going to do something together. That’s kind of what you’re describing. There’s a coworking space here that has an outdoor – they have like 50 picnic tables, and it feels nice to be near people without feeling uncomfortable being near people. I know that’s kind of a weird, convoluted thing, but in our reality. I think you’re really interestingly there.
JAMES: Yeah, totally. There’s just new things that we need to consider. Like since we’re saving on office snacks, we just started to give our employees a stipend so that they can buy their own snacks or buy remote work setup that they can do. We’re shifting some of the dollars that we did spend or we have been spending over to areas that make more sense.
Those get-togethers or working together, sometimes we have a Zoom room open where we just aren’t talking to each other; we just have it open and see each other’s faces while we’re working, which is really nice. Or getting together one on one to work together for half a day and just work next to each other. Not for any particular reason or particular meeting, but just to be in the same space, which is I think helpful for your psyche.
ROB: Awesome. James, when people want to find you and they want to find Figmints, where should they go to find you?
JAMES: Figmints.com. Fig like the fruit, mints like the candy. You can reach out to me, james@figmints.com, or on our website I think we have most handles @figmints, so Twitter.com/figmints, and Facebook. But email is pretty good, website is pretty good. We’re not so big you can’t get in touch with us. [laughs]
ROB: Excellent. James, thank you so much. Maybe someday we’ll go back to conferences and hear you speak live. Until then, thank you for joining us here virtually.
JAMES: Yeah, Rob. Thank you so much for inviting me. I appreciate it.
ROB: Be well.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
David Sonn is the Founder and President of Arc Intermedia, a HubSpot certified, digital only agency that focuses on “customer acquisition using digital strategies and digital tactics.”
David ran a web development company for 13 years but found that he and his partner had become “production monkeys,” delivering a commodity and competing with offshore developers. “You never want to sell or have to build a model based on price,” he says.
Ten years ago, when people started requesting Search Engine Optimization, David found his niche. Intrigued by the ability to precisely measure results, he founded Arc Intermedia -- and got out of the website building business and into the business of building businesses.
David may have started his agency “really slow and really small,” but he didn’t start “really cheap.” He hired the most experienced SEO and paid search experts he could find, people who could lead practice area development. He says, “When you’re a somewhat small agency that we are, every person counts.” Hiring and investing in the right people is critically important.
In this interview, David provides a wide range of tips on building a strong digital business.
Marketing initiatives need to start with strategy. When clients try to tell Arc Intermedia what they want the agency to do, David says it is critically important to understand “the good, the bad, and the ugly” about that business, to get to know the client well enough to discover things of which even the client may be unaware, and to know the client’s goals – what the client is trying to accomplish – before building the strategy and implementing the strategically determined tactics.
As many people in marketing say, content is king. Marketers need to know how to leverage that content through SEO, distribution, credibility, and across social platforms.
While a variety of tactics can be used get leads, to drive people to a website, to fill out a form, to give them “stuff,” people often resist filling out forms because they don’t want the sales calls that immediately follow. David recommends giving people something of value in exchange for their personal information.
The key to building customer relationships is nurturing potential clients through broad exposure on a variety of platforms and providing a variety of (non-sale) interactions. Use marketing automation to nurture clients to help close the deal.
Clients often come to Arc Intermedia and request adding a particular tool, such as SEO, to their marketing mix. David reminds us that today’s digital marketing requires an integrated process to succeed. SEO, social presence, publication on an industry website or blog . . . these things “loosen the soil” and build the familiarity and credibility that makes a paid search or display ad work.
Customer acquisition is what “moves the needle for the bottom line of a company.” Paid search has evolved to a high level of sophistication. Precise targeting produces a wealth of data. Advertising on social platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – should be backed by “great strategy.” Knowing when to pivot, why you need to pivot, and having the ability to pivot is critical.
David describes paid search as a “sprint,” and SEO as a “marathon.” He feels that it is important for both parties to set their expectations realistically about what’s going to be accomplished when. He requires SEO contracts to be for at least 12 months – SEO takes that long to show a return. After a year, when he shows clients where they were in month zero and what has been accomplished in the year that followed, “the contracts basically renew themselves.” SEO on paid media optimized for terms and topics in high demand? He says, “It’s infinite traffic if you do it correctly.”
David can most easily be found on his agency’s website at arcintermedia.com.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by David Sonn, President and Founder of Arc Intermedia based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the podcast, David.
DAVID: Thank you. Hi, Rob. How are you? I appreciate you including me today.
ROB: Great to have you here and have a little pre-call with you before this. Tell us about Arc Intermedia. What is this agency, and how did it get started?
DAVID: Arc Intermedia is what I call a digital only agency. Why I need to make that designation is I’ve been around the block for a while, so I have experience in traditional advertising and that kind of thing, but with this agency, when I built this agency 10 years ago, I wanted to hyper-focus only on digital strategies and digital tactics.
We basically will come to a customer that needs more customers. I don’t care if you’re Apple Computers or you’re a two-man band working out of a garage; everybody needs more customers. So we built this agency on customer acquisition using digital tactics.
ROB: Got it. How long has the business been around?
DAVID: I founded this 10 years ago. Oh, by the way, we’re 10 years old this year.
ROB: Happy birthday. Anniversary, whatever you want to call it.
DAVID: Thank you. [laughs] Yes.
ROB: The digital tactics even over that time have changed a lot. What were the tactics on Day Zero when it’s you and – were you by yourself? Did you have partners in the earliest stages of the firm?
DAVID: I’m going to back up and tell you a little different story. I promise, promise, promise to get there. Before I had Arc Intermedia, back in 1996 I founded one of the first interactive firms in Philadelphia. When we went into business, and I had a partner at the time, we built websites. At the time, 1996, a lot of companies didn’t even have websites yet. There was no roadmap whatsoever. We thought this was a fantastic idea. We thought, hmm, this internet thing has a chance to stick around.
So we built a company around it without a real plan. We raised some money from friends and family and just got after it. We made a lot of mistakes, but it was all good. 13 years of success proved that out.
But I did find that when I had that web development company, we basically became production monkeys. Clients began to tell us what they wanted, what colors, this, this, and this, and we just became builders, not thinkers or advisors. When you’re in that space and you begin to try to build a commodity like that, you’re now competing against the whole world. And oh by the way, it’s really hard if you think you’re going to compete against offshore solutions on price. You never want to sell or have to build a model based on price.
I began to look at the business and say, hmm, is this really what I want to continue to do? Near the tail end of it, we began to get more and more requests for SEO, search engine optimization. We were building these websites, but no traffic was coming to them. Clients wanted us to do SEO. I began to get my hands involved in SEO, and then jointly, paid search – way, way, way back, the origin of that was – I don’t know if you remember the GoTo Network? It was the beginnings of all of it.
ROB: Oh yeah.
DAVID: I got my hands involved in the GoTo Network, and I got real excited. I’m like, look, we can build out some strategies. We have some money, and we instantly can begin to drive traffic to these websites. Then I had clients calling me up and telling me that they were getting all these sales leads and things were changing, and what was going on at the website?
That was a light bulb moment for me. I really didn’t want to be involved in the web building business anymore. I wanted to be in the business building business. I got real excited. Being an entrepreneur, I started to get that itch again. I’m like, I built this company and it’s now been 12-13 years. I think it’s time for me to bust a move into something else that I want to do. This customer acquisition piece – the part that actually moves the needle for the bottom line of a company – became very exciting to me.
Then I did, and now back to your original question, I began to explore some of these original tactics much further. I didn’t see any companies out there specializing in it. The agencies of the land, the traditional ad agencies, still wanted to spend your money on radio and TV and that kind of stuff and things that couldn’t be measured.
As scary as digital is in that you can measure right down to the penny, to the click, to this, to that, that actually was really, in some weird way, extremely enticing to me. That we could see it, we could measure it, and I could stand up and find the client and say, “I succeeded” or, hopefully not, “I failed.” But for some reason that was an incredible, incredible attraction to me.
I decided that it was time to dissolve the web development company, and I launched Arc Intermedia, but this time I decided to start really slow, really small on purpose. It was myself and Mike Maier, who came over with me. It was just the two of us, and we started the company. We hyper-focused on some of the basic tactics of the day. There was SEO; it was much different than it is today, but it was SEO, and there was the paid search and that piece.
Then as I began to see what was working for customers, the different technologies and tactics that were evolving, I began to build the experts around it. I went out and got one of the best SEOs, Ron Sansone, in the Philadelphia area, and he began to build out our search practice. From him, I added more people with SEO experience, paid search experience. Rasheed Hendricks heads up our paid advertising department, and he’s just absolutely fantastic. That piece is ever-evolving.
And then, as you probably have heard from doing many of these interviews, content is king. You need to know how to leverage content. Content can be leveraged from an SEO standpoint, from a distribution standpoint, from a credibility standpoint, from a social standpoint, all of it. You and I were talking a little bit about how we’re HubSpot certified. Katie Schieder on my team is in charge of content and content marketing, and she does a fantastic job with her team.
There’s a lot of different pieces, and I know I’m maybe sounding like I’m rambling right now, but hopefully I answered your question.
ROB: One thing I hear in there is a strong recognition and appreciation for a team of experts in the different subject areas. One thread I want to pull on a little bit that’s unique about your story is you mentioned in your previous business, the web development shop, that you had investors. We talk a good bit about investors, but what we most often talk about on this podcast is people who are proud and grateful to not have investors, and maybe sometimes a chip on their shoulder because they know other people who have raised money and have gone out of business.
What did you learn from having investors, and what would you say to other people who think they wish they had investors? You mentioned it was friends and family, so we didn’t go out and raise $100 million, but still there are entailments to that.
DAVID: There is nothing – nothing – sexy about having investors. Zero. Now, I was super fortunate that we ended up raising money through friends and family. And oh by the way, that was because no bank would touch us. When we had a plan to build a web development company back in 1996, every bank says, “Oh, that’s fantastic, but I need a 150% collateral that we are going to freeze for every dollar that we give you.” If I had a 150% collateral that I could do, I wouldn’t be sitting at that bank looking for money. That was just silly. So obviously that never went through.
But we were fortunate that we were able to do it through friends and family and a lot of people who supported us. I will tell you, there’s an incredible extra weight on your shoulders because you don’t want to fail them. In my mind there was no chance, ever, in any way, shape, or form, that I wasn’t going to return every dollar back to the people that invested in us – and then some, of course. My success was definitely going to be their success, and I was going to make sure that happened regardless, even if it meant that I was going to pay that money back personally. I was going to get it done. When you’re taking VC money, that’s a different approach and you can’t always do all of that.
But having investors is not sexy or anything that you should really go for unless you absolutely have to. Now, when I had Arc Intermedia, the one thing that was to my benefit was that I was going to start small, and I’m also now a little bit older, a little bit wiser. I self-funded my whole thing. The beauty there is, I never had anybody standing on my shoulders. I never had anybody that I had to answer to in that regard.
So my advice would be try, try, try to do it on your own or figure out a way to do it on your own or try to figure out where you can get investment from people that trust and believe and love you, and then the VC thing is separate. Last.
ROB: Right on. I think I would perceive in the web world, when you talk about the ’90s, you’ll hear a lot about some of the sticker prices people paid for pretty simple websites by our standards. You’ll hear half a million, a million, 10 million. You mention competing with offshore now and this race to the bottom. Certainly it has been cheaper and cheaper to get a pretty good website. You can pay a kid from a high school and get something pretty decent. You can pay a pro less than you would pay one person in a year for sure.
You don’t see that same race to the bottom in the marketing world. You can’t get 10 times as much marketing for the same price as you could 5 years ago. What do you think it is that keeps it from becoming a race to the bottom where some high school kid can hop out and just crush your B2B marketing?
DAVID: Because there’s so much more that goes into it. The tools now are very sophisticated with paid search and all the data you can get back and the targeting you can do, if you’re going to do advertising on social platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all that. But at the end of the day, there has to be some really great strategy in there, and there has to be the ability to pivot and the eye to know when to pivot or why you need to pivot.
Then the other part of it is the customer. Can the customer tell you what their cost of acquisition needs to be? Or can you then prove it out? For example, Rob, if I said to you, “Hey, you give me $1,000 bucks, and for every $1,000 bucks you give me, I’m going to give you $10,000 back in business,” you would do that all day long. You would figure out how many thousands you could give me so I could give you tenfold back.
To answer your question, I think that only happens if you really have the people that have the expertise and the daily eye on this stuff to really know what works. The customer acquisition piece and the journey and all the points in between, it doesn’t happen by chance. It’s not by luck, and it’s also not subjective. You used websites as the example. We can sit here and argue that the homepage needs to be a shade of blue or maroon or what have you, and maybe we’re both right. Who knows? But at the end of the day with digital marketing, either I’m driving results and giving you a positive return or I’m not. I think that’s the difference.
ROB: That makes sense. There’s infinite rounds of competition, and there’s a level of spending that’s always going to meet the value. The value of what people buy online keeps on going. People are buying more stuff online, and you need smarter people to drive those tools as you go.
You mentioned some key folks that you have on your team, and you had clearly built a team before with your web dev shop. How did you think about assembling your team differently as you were building your second business?
DAVID: This is probably an old adage that you’ve heard before, but it’s always hire slow, fire fast. Thank God, I’ve not had to fire anybody at Arc Intermedia. I’ve got that great of a team. That’s actually one of the things that I really do hang my hat on. In 10 years, we’ve never had anybody leave but one person, and it was more or less just a career change in that case. We still remain friends with that young woman to this day.
But hiring the right people on the front end and making an investment in the right people is critically important. What my process was – and I’m going to use the SEO one as an example because it’s clean and easy – I began to see in the marketplace that SEO was critically important, but I also could see that I could build a business around it.
When I wanted to go and build the SEO, I didn’t want to just hire a mid-tier person or an entry-level person or something where we were going to, together, learn it on the fly. Rather, I thought the most important or better move was to make the investment in a senior level person who had been doing it and we could build off of that person and let that person build out the practice, if you will.
That’s my approach. When you’re a somewhat small agency that we are, every person counts. We’re mean and lean and there’s no place to hide, and everybody has to be able to show for what they bring to the table. My entire team, basically, is built with fairly senior level people that I would say are experts in their field. It’s just been a much better approach than what I’ve seen others do.
ROB: How do you think about positioning? When you have a senior person, that SEO offering also has to be a little bit of a premium offering. SEO certainly can have one of the highest long-term ROIs, but it can also be one of the slowest marketing tactics to start to bear fruit. How do you walk a customer along expectations around the sticker price you need to show them to bring the team that you have to bear on SEO?
DAVID: You actually used my word, expectations. You’ve got to set the expectation correctly up front. As a joke, we say SEO is the marathon, paid search is the sprint. If you begin to lay out and set those expectations, both parties can get their head around what’s going to be accomplished when.
Part of that is, with SEO, we will not take on a contract that’s less than 12 months, and the reason being is it is completely unfair to judge us on anything less than 12 months. 3 months in, if you were to look at what we were doing, you’d say, “You guys don’t know what you’re doing” or “This is a complete waste of money.” And they’d be right, because there wouldn’t really be the return in 3 months. Wouldn’t really be the return there in 6 months.
But what you’ve got to do is look at a plan that’s been executed correctly over a 12-month period, step back and say, “This is where we were month zero. Now look where we are.” Honestly, the contracts basically renew themselves because once you can show what can be delivered with SEO – and the beauty of SEO on paid media – it’s infinite traffic if you do it correctly. If you’re optimizing for terms and for topics that are in high demand, you can drive a great deal of traffic.
And then if you have set up your customer journey correctly on the website and begin to show those conversions and whatever it may be, whether it be ecommerce or registrations or sales leads or what have you, it kind of sells itself if you do it correctly.
Now, as far as a high ticket, SEO is a very difficult industry. It’s getting a bit better, but we’re constantly up against the – I don’t know what to really call them outside of where they begin to make promises for SEO for $200 a month. We’re always fighting against that. But our price point – and you’ve got to remember it’s all labor-based, so people need to get paid. Especially when you have senior level people that you alluded to, they’ve got to get paid and you’ve got to offset those costs.
So yeah, good SEO is not cheap, but I will tell you this: look at an SEO contract for 12 months, the cost of it, and compare that to some kind of media play. Compare that to a TV or radio campaign. Or even sometimes the money we really need to move the needle in paid search just because the search terms may be very costly, and if you don’t have X amount of dollars, you’re spitting in the wind. You’d be foolish to think you’re going to get any kind of return because you can’t drive the volume to get the return. In the grand scheme of things, SEO is actually not expensive if you’re comparing it correctly.
ROB: Right, it just doesn’t track as quickly. “I did X dollars of SEO this month and it generated this amount of results.” You have to be more patient than that. We have talked a good bit about SEO. I know that is where you started, but I know you’ve also been thoughtful about layering in other service offerings to the business. What have you added in, and how did you reach those decisions of starting to embrace something where a lot of times agencies will partner on offerings they’re not ready to do or ready to do yet?
DAVID: I often find clients will come to us, and sometimes they will have a need. The need may be that they need more sales leads or they need to sell X amount more widgets. But often they come to us with a tactic in mind. For example, “We need to do SEO.” “Why do you need to do SEO?” It’s just because that’s what they’ve been told, that’s what they’ve heard, that’s what they may not be doing. They may not be coming up in the search results, so they think that’s what they need.
But really what we’re seeing today now in digital marketing is it’s more of what we call an integrated approach. It’s the SEO, it’s the presence on social, it’s the being published on an industry website or a blog that begins to loosen up the soil so that when we do finally hit them with a paid search ad or a display ad, they’ve seen us before. There’s some kind of credibility that’s been built up just because they’ve seen us in multiple places, and we’ve nurtured them along and we can close the deal.
Many of these things now work so hand-in-hand, and again, we always want to start strategy first. Don’t tell us what to do; tell us what you’re trying to accomplish. Then once we understand the goals and we’re all on the same page with the goals, we’ll build out the strategy. Then the strategy will dictate the tactics. That then leads into, what did we think made sense to bring in-house?
With SEO, the counterbalance was the paid search. We had started doing some paid search from the very beginning, but not to the level of what we’re doing today and what we needed to. That was a no-brainer, to make sure we headed up that department with paid search. Paid search is nice because people are looking for your exact service. In fact, paid search is one of my favorite forms of advertising because it’s people actively looking for what you have. You just need to get in front of them. Conversely, people who are a bit more passive or are not actually searching, we need to prospect. And the best way to prospect is through display advertising or social advertising and those kinds of things. Again, having that piece of the pie just made a ton of sense of another piece that we need to layer on.
Now, we can talk all day long about different tactics of driving people to a website, to filling out a form, to be giving them stuff, but the place that I see people now fall short of is you’ve got the sales lead; now what? The customer fills out a form. One of the reasons they don’t want to fill out a form is because they know immediately they’re going to get a phone call from a salesperson, and that’s the last thing they want. So you’ve got to look at it a bit differently. “Hey, fill out this form and I’m going to give you something of value.” I always say you’ve got to give something to get something. Maybe they fill out the form to get some kind of a free tool or a download or a piece of advice or a consultation or something like that.
But if you’re really, really going to do this and you think you’re going to get a return on that initial investment, you’d better be able to nurture. The nurture piece comes in with this marketing automation. For example, I know I’ve already said it before, but we’re HubSpot certified, and that platform allows us to do a lot of different things. We can do email marketing and we can manage the workflow all the way through. If they open this email and they click on this, we know that they’re demonstrating X interest in something, and we can then take them down the next path of providing them the next piece of content. We can nurture and we can build that relationship without the phone call, without the salesperson getting after them.
So having the marketing automation piece was something we absolutely needed to bring in because we were doing such a fantastic job with driving leads on the front end that we needed to have the nurturing piece on the back end.
ROB: It seems like you not only are comprehensive in the different services you provide, but you have to be comprehensive in your understanding of the business to be able to nurture leads along. You can get a first conversation, but to be able to nurture and build trust and credibility with somebody else’s customer is not something you can get from just an onboarding form for a new client. How do you get to that depth of knowledge where you’re actually building trust on behalf of a business that’s not yours? That’s a challenge.
DAVID: You’re right, it really is. I’ll tell you, we get down into the weeds to the nth degree of some stuff that I never thought I needed to know about, from tuberculosis testing to hospice care to minor league baseball to all kinds of stuff. If you’re willing to make a commitment to a new client – and to be honest with you, we do say no. There’s times that we’re like, “This isn’t going to be a fit for us for XYZ reasons.”
But when you finally say, “I am going to commit to you,” commit means I’ve got to learn your business, and I’ve got to find the skeletons in the closet. I’ve got to understand the good, the bad, and the ugly. Honestly, it’s a constant learning process. We often will do onboarding with a client and we’ll try to learn and glean as much information as we can, and as we launch programs, we begin to understand that what they were telling us is completely wrong. And they didn’t even know it. So there’s that piece of it too.
Also, there’s times where we’ll do pilot programs of things just to begin to gather data. I’d like to believe that our team is very smart, and we have a lot of experience to begin to make some great guesses. But at the end of the day, we’re not always right. You’ve got to look at the data. You’ve got to really look at what’s happening in a given space and then be ready to pivot and think about things completely differently than when you went into it. But it’s ongoing. There’s no end to it. I’m still learning about tuberculosis and all those kinds of things. [laughs]
ROB: It’s more and more valuable for more and more people to be marketing online. David, when you are looking at what is next for you and what’s next for Arc Intermedia and marketing in general, what are you excited about?
DAVID: One of the things I’m excited about – we’re in a horrible global pandemic, and one little tiny, tiny good thing that’s come out of this from a digital marketing standpoint is I’m now having clients who we’ve been talking to about this for a long time understand that the lion’s share of the budget really does need to start going to digital. Digital can deliver. It can be measured, and it’s the one actually bringing in the leads.
Just in this past 6 months, we’ve had a number of clients tell me that they’re going to do major shifts in their budget for 2021 more towards the digital space. Why that makes me excited is if you give me more budget, I can do more things. I can expand out that integrated approach. I can go deeper in different tactics and strategies that we maybe have been pushing for that we couldn’t just straight up because of budget. We can get after more of the content marketing piece, the content distribution piece. We can begin to see how we can tie different paid tactics to some other things that we’re doing on the site. We can also look at different offer types and incentives to help ring the bell.
ROB: That makes sense. The margin for execution on a small budget – there’s just not a lot of room for mistakes or a lot of room for experimentation. I can absolutely see where having real digital budgets is a meaningful thing.
David, when people want to track you down, when they want to connect with you and with Arc Intermedia, where should they go to find you?
DAVID: Of course, we have that wonderful website that we’ve just done some updates to. We’ve even got our anniversary video out on the homepage, so I would direct everybody to arcintermedia.com. A lot of people find me on LinkedIn because that’s a super easy way. Occasionally some people may find me over on Twitter. But I would say website.
ROB: [laughs] Sometimes we find a different version of ourselves over on Twitter.
DAVID: Yeah, I think I’m pretty good on that front. [laughs] For the most part. You won’t me on Facebook, I will tell you that.
ROB: Got it. Just have to have a shadow account to manage some of the client relationships? [laughs]
DAVID: We have a love/hate relationship. I love the data that Facebook gives us to market on behalf of our clients. I’m not super fond of participating on Facebook myself.
ROB: I understand completely. Even after they ban QAnon, who knows what’s next? Or if they’ll actually accomplish that. Who knows? Anyhow, David, good to connect with you. Good to have you on the podcast. Congratulations on 10 years of Arc Intermedia, and really of making a living going out and killing your own food for much longer than that with the web dev shop before that.
DAVID: Yes indeed. Working without a net.
ROB: [laughs] Indeed. Thank you so much, David, and be well.
DAVID: Rob, I really appreciate your time. Thank you.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Rachel Wilson Thibodeaux is Founder, Brand Strategist, and Professional Speaker at SWAG Strategy Solutions a boutique consultancy that helps clients design unique brands to “better position their offers” and market them at least twice as effectively as they were in the past. Clients include women entrepreneurs, as well as service providers and experts, people Rachel says want to make a big impact and income.
Building blocks of what Rachel connotes as “brand curation” include:
- Asking clients, “What do you most want to be known for?”
- Identifying the audience, even down to the one person who will most resonate with the client’s offering
- Establishing the most effective way to connect with that individual.
Rachel majored in finance and marketing at the University of Houston and spent the first 16 years of her career in financial services. In 2013, she left her “good-paying, good-benefits” six-figure job to chase her entrepreneurial marketing dream.
How does someone make that kind of transition?
Rachel believes that it important to communicate to your community, the groups to which you belong, what you are doing businesswise, “even if you don’t yet have a product or a service out there.” She provides a number of questions that can help build the kind of engagement which can turn into future buy-in. She says that success requires disciplined consistency in doing the hum-drum activities; e.g., making a certain number of phone calls to connect with customers.
In this interview, Rachel talks about when and how to reengage humor and the importance of sensitivity to what is going on in terms of the pandemic, social unrest, the fact that it is an election year, and concerns about the economy. When posting to social media, Rachel often posts questions she thinks will “bring a smile to someone’s face,” help them escape for a moment what they are going through, and increase “connection.” The most important thing? Know and respect your audience.
Rachel had an Ask Me Anything Live session at virtual HubSpot Inbound 2020 where she fielded audience questions about Brand Development, Positioning, and (especially) Social Media Marketing, as well as offering guidance on posting and engagement in the “new normal,” connecting with people, managing COVID impacts, and online responses to the pandemic and the changes it has brought.
She also addressed social listening, paying attention to the data available online, your audience feedback (comments, likes), and engagement to identify what works and what doesn’t, create better campaigns, and communicate better.
Rachel can be reached on LinkedIn at Rachel W. Thibodeaux, Instagram at @rachel.vswagstrategist, and on her company website at swagstrategy.com. She has a Facebook group – Brand, Sell profit – for entrepreneurs/brand-builders/experts. She offers a virtual program for strategic pivoting called “Pivot to Profit,” with a free “sample portion” (one of the five parts) available at: bit.ly/pivot2profitnow.
Check it out.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Rachel Wilson Thibodeaux, Founder, Brand Strategist and Professional Speaker at SWAG Strategy Solutions. She’s based in Houston, Texas. Welcome to the podcast, Rachel.
RACHEL: Thank you so much, Rob.
ROB: Why don’t you start off by telling us about yourself and about SWAG Strategy Solutions and what gets you going and keeps you going?
RACHEL: Oh boy. That can be a dangerous question when you ask a speaker to talk about themselves. But I am in the Houston area. I’m originally from North Texas, from the Dallas/Fort Worth area. College brought me to Houston. I’ve been here almost ever since. Not quite. I did return home for a few years after college and then came back to Houston around 2008. Even saying that is a little scary because time has really flown by.
But I spent about 16 years in corporate America, working mostly in financial services. I was a double finance and marketing major at the University of Houston, so I went in the finance route. Marketing, though, was always a passion of mine. I know “passion” sometimes is an overused word, but that word comes to mind. Throughout my corporate career, I was always still focusing on and doing things on the side that were entrepreneurial and also that allowed me to feed that hunger, if you will, in terms of the whole marketing and brand aspect.
I kept getting this pull, this entrepreneur pull, when I was still working in corporate America, and more so the last 2 to 3 years. So in 2013, I left my good-paying, good-benefits-having job, as I’ve referred to it before, because that’s how my mother referred to it as she was asking me, “Are you sure you’re leaving that good-paying job?” “Yeah.” [laughs]
Since then it has been quite an adventure. My business, SWAG Strategy Solutions, which is a boutique consultancy, has certainly evolved over the last 7 years or so. Now we focus primarily on brand development, and as I like to say, helping clients curate a brand. I use that word more than “build” because I think with curating something, more of a design comes into place. We want to help you design a brand. We want it to be very unique. Sometimes when you build something, it’s based on instructions. It’s based on a model, almost like a model home. Other homes in the neighborhood tend to be modeled after that home.
So; I’d like to think that I’m helping clients curate a brand as well as better position their offers and market better – at least twice as better. We work a lot with women entrepreneurs along with service providers, experts – folks really looking to make big impact and income.
ROB: Doubling your effectiveness is certainly a big difference. When we are breaking down brands from the big picture into some of the pieces and parts, what are the components or building blocks of a brand you think about when you’re starting to work with a client?
RACHEL: First and foremost, I usually ask prospective clients as well as clients – and this is something I’ve shared when speaking, in blog posts; I think it’s such an important question – “What do you most want to be known for?” I emphasize the word “most” because many of us are good at more than one thing. Many of us are multifaceted, multi-passionate, multi-something. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can make things more difficult in terms of really creating a brand and niching down and honing in on what you can most be effective at.
That is a key question. I think it’s important to really get foundational, if you will, and look at how you’re most wanting to effect or impact your audience. You also want to get clear on who that audience is because it really should not be “everyone” – although I know, especially with newer entrepreneurs, and sometimes not just new, we tend to think we can help the world. We want to change the world, and we sometimes think of that literally. “I want to help everyone.” But it’s important to really zero in on who is that audience, who is that group.
It helps to even get it down to thinking of one person who’s going to most resonate with what I have to offer, and how do I connect with that person?
ROB: That focus, I’m sure having that external perspective from you is helpful in even getting to that understanding because sometimes we don’t fully know ourselves.
You mentioned a little bit into your origin story, and your last 2 or 3 years in corporate America, you had this longing on the entrepreneurial side. What pushed you over the edge? It sounds like you were thinking about it, but that means you were also thinking about not doing it, and at some point you overcome that tension and you make the leap. What was that process like for you?
RACHEL: I had been doing entrepreneurial things almost throughout my career. Not quite throughout, but from different ventures I was involved in. For example, I did some consulting. I helped form a real estate investment group with three of my buddies. That happened when we were in our mid-twenties. We were kind of crazy kids, or somewhat kids, exploring real estate development.
The last 2 or 3 years or so, things had started to change at the company where I was and even in my role as well. At the time, I was a relationship manager – which I enjoyed. Even at the time when I left, I still enjoyed it, although I didn’t feel quite the same about it. The writing was just on the wall, as it often is in these situations. There had been changes in leadership; the direction of the company and our division in particular was really going in a different direction that I didn’t really like.
I often tell people, I was not fired, but it was one of those situations where I felt I didn’t really have a choice because of some things that happened, what transpired to make me take that leap. Frankly, I had considered leaving a few months before that. I actually left my last job in August of 2013. I seriously considered leaving in May because of another situation. It wasn’t the right time. I didn’t feel it was the right time.
I wasn’t totally sure it was the right time when I left, and I tell you, Rob, my eyes were glazed over for about two weeks. I was in a state of “Huh . . . I really did that. I left.” [laughs] I left my six-figure corporate job that at one time, certainly when I started and probably even during the first year or two, I figured I would be there long term. I wasn’t convinced necessarily I’d retire there, but I figured I’d be there longer than I was. It just goes to show you how things can happen.
There was certainly some fear. I say all the time, everything was certainly not perfect. It wasn’t close to being perfect when I actually left. My husband has been in law enforcement most of his career. He had just gotten back into law enforcement at that time, had started a new job. His benefits had not even kicked in. We had savings, but it still wasn’t an ideal time. But again, I felt it was time for me.
ROB: Congratulations on that. Now if there’s anything concerning in the business, you’ve just got one person to look at, and they’re in the mirror, so that’s a little bit different.
We were originally looking at connecting around HubSpot’s Inbound conference, which is a great conference. Happens every year. Normally, past couple of years, we record it live with speakers like yourself, so we always love connecting with HubSpot speakers. You had an Ask Me Anything Live session on brand development, positioning, and social media marketing. What kind of questions did you expect coming into that, and what were some of the themes of what you did hear from the audience?
RACHEL: Going in, I figured I would get questions about brands, about branding, certainly about social media. I got more questions, though, about social media, which is kind of interesting since that was the last thing mentioned. But I think it just goes to show you social media continues to be a hot topic, especially among marketers, whether online or traditional marketers.
There were several questions about social media. There were a couple of questions as well about how to navigate this “new normal” we’re in, how to manage what’s going on with COVID, things to do online in light of the pandemic and the changes that has brought about. So yeah, there were some questions along those lines too.
ROB: How do you suggest people think about marketing in – I don’t even know if there’s a new normal. It seems like things just continue to change, and we keep adapting, and you wonder what you can say, what you should say, what you shouldn’t say, and what to start doing and what to stop doing. How are you thinking about all this, and what do you have to tell the audience here?
RACHEL: One thing certainly is I don’t think it’s a good idea to ignore everything happening. I’ve seen that with some brands and marketers. Not many. Frankly, I think most are addressing what’s going on – and when I say what’s going on, I mean it’s more than one thing because we’re dealing with a number of things in this very interesting year of 2020. You’ve got the pandemic, obviously. You have this social unrest going on. It’s an election year. There’s challenges and certainly concerns about the economy. So, there’s a lot going on.
I think any really great marketer – and this is part of being connected with and knowing your audience – you have to speak to that. It doesn’t mean that you dwell on it all the time, but in your marketing, in your messaging, I think it makes sense to address these things.
I have a big sense of humor, sometimes a quirky, sarcastic sense of humor, and I’m big on incorporating humor. I think sometimes it helps, certainly. If you can put a smile on someone’s face or help them escape what they may be going through, even if it’s for a few minutes, a day or so, that certainly helps.
So, I think in terms of posting on social media, for example – and I’m also big on questions. I love posting questions. It could be, of course, related to business and related to brands, or it could be something, again, to put a smile on people’s faces. I’ve asked the question before to parents, “Have you had any brown liquor before noon today? I’m just curious,” because a number of parents I know are really going through it.
I think that is really important, and connecting even more. Obviously, connection has become a big thing, or bigger, I would say, over the last few years. I think consumers are wanting to connect more. They’re expecting more, or have been, even before this year, expecting more from brands. I think it’s really important to engage.
Social media is social. I think sometimes people forget about that. They think it’s a one-way conversation when it’s definitely not.
ROB: Hmm, so you’re saying that clear liquor before noon is okay?
RACHEL: [laughs] Maybe. You might be able to get away with it, Rob. The brown, you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to be careful about that brown liquor.
ROB: Yeah. Even on a podcast. It’s interesting – even where you went with that, the humor you used there, it’s relatable and it acknowledges the moment without engaging in humor at someone’s expense. It’s kind of humor at our own expense. I was speaking a while back with someone who’s involved in marketing at Buffalo Wild Wing, and they said with the pandemic, they basically cut – they engage in humor a lot, but they cut it all. They went transactional and they’re killing it in ecommerce now. Their best day used to be the Super Bowl. Now every day is the Super Bowl for them for online ordering, which is fascinating. They really had to overdo and redo their ecommerce systems.
But how do we figure out when it’s okay to reengage humor, how to reengage humor, how to not do so in a tone-deaf way?
RACHEL: I think what you said is key. You don’t want to offend people – at least, I try not to offend people. Now, it’s possible that could still happen, I suppose, but I don’t try to offend people. Again, this is your audience, or typically you’re speaking to your audience, so you want to respect your audience. You don’t want to be offensive.
Now, having said that, I think being bold is different from being offensive. What you believe in, what you stand on, I think there’s nothing wrong with communicating that and standing your ground on what you believe. I think you let that be your guide.
ROB: Definitely makes sense there. The Inbound crowd in particular can be a little bit more of a business-to-business marketing audience. Quite often, although you get a mix because it’s a big, big conference. When it came to social media, what sorts of questions – where do people fall on the spectrum? Was this B2B marketing, “How do you even do this?” Were there questions about emerging channels or channel selection? What were people wondering along the lines of social media?
RACHEL: I don’t recall there being anything specifically about B2B. The questions had more to do with, to some degree, posting, engagement. That came up. I answered that question in terms of engagement because it was related to – I think that was all the same question, how to engage now, given the environment. I spoke to that in terms of engaging now, giving everything, going on, and connecting with people, and the humor and that kind of thing.
There was also a question – and it threw me off a little because I have heard this term, but there’s different versions of this term. A question came up about social listening. I have heard more so of social media listening, and then there’s another version I’m not remembering right now that’s similar to that, although there’s a slight difference. So that question came up.
Social listening is really about taking data, using the data available to you online. It’s using feedback that you get from your audience, whether that’s through comments, likes, you paying attention to the comments, the likes that you’re getting, different parts of engagement, and using that. There’s one thing, collecting that data, and then the other part is what you do with it. You certainly use that data certainly to your benefit. You can use that in helping you create better campaigns, communicate better, paying attention to when you are posting, what works and what doesn’t.
ROB: That all makes sense, especially within the context of the conference. I do hope that you will be back to share in person next year. I hope we can do that by September of next year, but I guess we will see.
RACHEL: Yeah, that would be cool.
ROB: Maybe we can meet after noon so that we can choose whichever color of liquor we prefer. [laughs] It’s about creativity here.
Rachel, when you reflect on your journey, it sounds like you have honed in on some focus areas for SWAG Strategy Solutions. What are some lessons you’ve learned since jumping off on your own and building and growing the business – lessons you might do differently if you were starting afresh today?
RACHEL: Ooh. How much more time do we have, Rob? [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] We have as much as you need.
RACHEL: You absolutely learn a number of lessons. Or you should, I think, especially in 7 years or so. One lesson certainly that I’ve learned is how important it is to build or create an audience, a community if you will. I didn’t realize how important that was when I first started. When I left my job, I was on social media, I was on a few platforms. At the time I was using LinkedIn somewhat a lot, Facebook – but Facebook completely socially – and Twitter.
I am also somewhat – I like to think I’m recovering – somewhat of both an information and a political junkie. So, as you can imagine, I spend a lot of time on Twitter. But again, not as much for business purposes. When I started my business, I figured the skills I had before and that I had utilized in corporate America were transferable. And to a degree, they are.
But it really makes a difference when you have a community. That can show up in different ways, whether it’s an email list, whether it’s a Facebook group, some other group. When you have people who really understand what you’re doing in terms of business – and even if you don’t yet have a product or a service out there, you’re talking about it, you’re getting them to buy in even before you put it out there – that turns into, often, your customers, your clients, and folks who can sing your praises and help you get more customers and clients. That is certainly one lesson.
Also, consistency. Again, some things you think that you get. “Yeah, I know I need to be consistent.” But I really didn’t. Not the way running a business really requires, being really committed to doing certain things – and certain things that are not necessarily sexy, certain things that are not what you jump out of bed in the morning wanting to do, whether it’s blogging, whether it’s making phone calls and making a certain number of phone calls, whether it’s an actual phone call or a text. However, you’re reaching out to people, connecting with people, pitching, these are things that really make a difference in a business and help you move it forward. Those, as some people refer to them, revenue-generating activities – that is what you most need to be consistent about. That’s something else that I have learned more since starting my business.
ROB: That’s very consistent. I can see why HubSpot brought you in. Last year they mentioned this flywheel concept. It was a little bit forced, but basically it’s a similar thing. They talked about talking to people and building a community and serving them well, and then it turns into business. But then business turns into service. You still have to service those customers well. It turns into word of mouth, it turns into marketing. They had this flywheel effect.
I think a challenge many people have here is with consistency. Some people are very, very natural community builders. You watch them, and the moment they decide they’re going to have a new business, they’re building the community before you even know what the business is, and maybe before they do. For someone who it’s not as natural for, how do you think about getting to consistency, getting to the right audience, if maybe you don’t know who that audience even needs to be?
RACHEL: I am really big on feedback. If that’s something that doesn’t come quite naturally to you, and certainly if you’re not quite sure of what audience or what group you should be connecting to, look around at your own network, even if that’s very small. That may be coworkers. That may be subordinates. That may be even friends and family. It could be someone in a Facebook group that you’re in.
Start asking them questions along the lines of what you want to do, what you’re thinking of doing, or if you do have something that you’re working on or maybe even you’ve completed, ask them questions about that product or that idea. And really pay attention to what they say. Also ask them and the people closest to you, like friends and family, how they see you. What is it that they feel comfortable and they feel pretty confident coming to you for?
I think those basic questions, that can also be profound, can be underrated. Sometimes I think we also underrate or discount our friends and family, but those are the people closest to us. It’s not to say that that’s necessarily your target audience, but it’s a starting point just to get that feedback.
For folks who are not natural, I would say, or it doesn’t come as natural to them for building a community, you have to find the way that works for you. It may not work as well for one person to do a podcast or to create a blog. It may work a lot better for them to build an email list, to put something out there of value that they can offer free and folks jump on it because they do find a lot of value in it, and they just communicate through email. It all depends on you.
It’s not just about what you’re comfortable doing. I do think you should enjoy what you’re doing, and specifically in terms of building community. But realize it absolutely may require you – probably no “may” – it will require at some point for you to step out of your comfort zone. So, make sure that you’re balancing comfort rather than hate. You don’t want to do anything you hate, but at the same time, don’t rule out certain things because you’re not comfortable with it, you’re a little fearful or it doesn’t come naturally, as you say. That doesn’t mean necessarily that you should not be doing that.
ROB: That’s such a great distinction between the things that you hate versus doing the things you’re uncomfortable with. That’s a great point. The people that know you well are going to be able to give you good feedback because people you don’t know, so often, will tell you that your idea sounds nice because they don’t have the relationship to tell you the truth.
RACHEL: Yeah.
ROB: This is really, really good stuff, Rachel. Tell us, when we want to go out and find and connect with Rachel Wilson Thibodeaux and when we want to see more about SWAG Strategy Solutions, where should we go to connect with you?
RACHEL: I hang out a lot on LinkedIn and Instagram. Those are probably my two favorite platforms. I kind of have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, but that’s another conversation. You can find me there too. But you can find me on LinkedIn under my name, Rachel W. Thibodeaux. You can find me on Instagram @rachel.vswagstrategist.
On Facebook, I do have a group for entrepreneurs, for brand builders, experts if you will – those looking to curate a brand and to do that better and market better. That’s called Brand. Sell. Profit. It actually is also the title of my latest book, Brand. Sell. Profit. And then my website, of course. You can find the website at swagstrategy.com. And I’d like to offer your audience a gift, Rob, if I can.
ROB: Please do.
RACHEL: I’ve been talking a lot, as many people have, especially people in business, about pivoting and the importance of being able to pivot, especially in this environment. That has probably become a buzzword, so while I think it’s really important to pivot, I think there is a way to pivot. I like to think it’s better to pivot strategically.
So I have a virtual program called Pivot 2 Profit, and I have a portion of that – I’m offering one of the five parts of that that you can check out. There’s a video. It’s absolutely free, and I talk about a couple of those ways to pivot in a strategic way. You can find that by going to – and this is a shortened link – bit.ly/pivot2profitnow.
ROB: Fantastic. We’ll work to get that into the show notes. I imagine you have some excellent points there. You pivot, keep one foot planted if you move the other one. If you move both feet at once, it’s just dancing. There’s some good stuff to find there. We’ll get it in the show notes. Rachel, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on the talk at Inbound. I heard they had very, very large audiences for that.
RACHEL: Yeah.
ROB: I hope they have us back in person next year. I’d love to connect up and record live.
RACHEL: Absolutely. Thank you.
ROB: Have a great one, Rachel. Be well.
RACHEL: You too.
ROB: Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Jay Taylor is the Managing Director of Leverage, an award-winning digital marketing agency and Certified Google Partner. Leverage partners with its client brands to help them dominate their market with custom-tailored, location-based digital marketing strategies and concentrates on verticals in legal, healthcare, real estate and construction. The goal is to position a client company at the top in terms of search visibility and digital presence for each of a client’s geographic locations and practice areas.
Key to this effort is utilizing a “hybrid strategy,” embedding websites with obvious search terms and then including other less competitive, highly targeted keywords. Jay provides the example of a “Tampa personal injury attorney,” whose keywords might also include “Tampa dog bite injury attorney” and “Tampa slip and fall attorney.” While great content is essential to successful SEO, the agency recommends adding paid search, PPC, Google Ads . . . all of these combined can be “very effective.: The goal is to get a client’s site to show up once on the first search results page, and quite possibly once on the second or third pages, with a possible first position in Organic . . . AND in the paid results above that AND in the right-hand side knowledge panel.
Is that enough? Not yet.
Jay believes reputation management is essential for establishing a successful online presence and even more critical for establishing a successful search presence. Companies need to have a reputation generation and management strategy running alongside their SEO and PPC efforts. The objective is to beat competitors with both the number of reviews AND with a higher average rating. Perception: More ratings + higher average rating = CLEAR WINNER!
Jay started his career in marketing working at someone else’s agency. He studied finance and marketing while pursuing his MBA and started Leverage Digital upon graduation in 2006-2007, way too soon, he says, in retrospect. A few more years of experience at an established agency would have provided him with the opportunity to learn how run an agency, “from sales to operations to account management,” and to understand the services. He confesses to googling “how to write an invoice” upon securing his first client.
Jay gave himself a deadline of “being profitable within 12 months” and two years later started hiring staff so the agency could grow. At the same time, he shifted his personal focus from technical work to working on client strategy. Today, Leverage’s creative team handles design and copywriting, the development team handles programming and website development, and the account management team services the accounts.
When Covid-19 struck, his agency went remote. They are back in the office now, masked, and with social distancing measures in place. They meet with clients either remotely or in person, depending on the client’s preference – but the focus is always “on safety.” Jay defines agency growth more In terms of growing the size of the accounts they have rather than adding to the number of accounts.
Leverage has received a number of industry accolades and honors, including those from the International Davey Awards, Hermes Awards, W3 Awards, and Communicator Awards. In 2018, Leverage was named the 9th fastest growing company owned or led by a University of South Florida alumnus. Jay notes that it important “to focus on your strengths and be the best in your area of expertise and not try to be all things to all people.”
Jay can be reached on his agency’s website at leveragedigital.com and on LinkedIn at: linkedin.com/jaytennysontaylor
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Jay Taylor. He is the Managing Director of Leverage, based in Tampa, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Jay.
JAY: Thanks, Rob. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on.
ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Leverage. What is your specialty? What is your superpower?
JAY: Sure. We are a digitally focused agency here in Tampa Bay. We are specialists in helping our clients engage their customers at the local level with custom tailored location-based digital marketing strategies. Essentially, what that means is that whether our client has one location or 100 locations, we help them dominate each of the markets that they serve in terms of their search visibility and their overall digital presence.
ROB: With that in mind, help us flesh out that idea a little bit. What are some examples of types of clients that you tend to work with?
JAY: We have concentrations in the legal, healthcare, real estate, and construction verticals. A good example would be a law firm. Let’s say a law firm that has five different locations in five different markets. Each of these locations really needs to be front and center whenever somebody is searching for whatever the practice area may be. Let’s say they’re searching for a personal injury attorney. If their customers search for a personal injury attorney within one of the markets that they serve, we need to make sure that our client is populating at the top of the search results for that particular search within their market.
Then we replicate that for each of their markets. Again, whether they’re serving one market or five markets or more, we make sure that they dominate the search results in each of those markets.
ROB: That’s really interesting. For the example you gave of personal injury attorneys, they can be, shall we say, very aggressive marketers. I would imagine some of those search terms are pretty competitive. What is the state of the art in 2020 to get somebody ranking for the terms they want to rank for in a local market?
JAY: That’s an excellent question. Everyone tends to go after the obvious search terms. We actually try to avoid those. We try to help our clients outmaneuver their competition in terms of the search terms or keywords that they’re going after. Sticking with the personal injury example, a law firm here in Tampa that specializes in personal injury are going to, in most cases, want to target “Tampa personal injury lawyer.” That’s an obvious term that all of their competition is going to be going after. It’s very competitive, and probably not the best use of resources.
What we would recommend or advise is, hey, instead of putting all our resources into going after a handful of highly competitive keywords, let’s go after lots of less competitive, highly targeted keywords. Let’s go after “Tampa dog bite injury attorney” or something along those lines, or “Tampa slip and fall attorney,” something that’s not as obvious and not something that all of your competitors are also going after.
By having that what we call hybrid approach where, yes, we’re going after the competitive search terms as well, but we’re also going after a lot of the less competitive, more targeted search terms – and by more targeted, I mean they’ll convert at a higher rate – we are able to help our clients compete at a lower cost and also outmaneuver their competition.
ROB: That sounds like a meaningful long-tail strategy. That informs a little bit of what terms you’re targeting, but sticking a little bit into how are you targeting, in 2020 is this still a game of content marketing? Is it crafting specific pages really well? Are there supplemental non-SEO strategies that are coming to bear there?
JAY: Absolutely, all of the above. Content marketing is a significant component if we’re talking about organic search or search engine optimization. Content really is the foundation of a successful SEO campaign. We do recommend adding a paid search component. SEO and paid search or PPC or Google Ads, whatever you want to call it, combined can be very effective.
What we like to do is help our client literally dominate the search results page for each of the keywords that they target. What I mean by that is, instead of just showing up once on the search results page – let’s say they show up once in the second or third, maybe even the first position in organic. We also want them to show up in the paid results right above that, and we also want them to show up in the knowledge panel on the right hand side.
We refer to that essentially as the holy grail, if you will. We have them listed three times on the Google search results page for one single keyword. And if we can replicate that for 20 keywords or 30 keywords, that is a very effective overall search marketing strategy that consists of both organic and paid search.
ROB: Makes plenty of sense. One thing we’ve often heard when it comes to local marketing is the challenge of local reputation management, of ensuring that your contact information, whether due to a lack of maintenance or due to maliciousness, is not being shown as incorrect. Is there much of a trend around the need for reputation, or is Google getting better about that, and Bing and Yelp and so on?
JAY: Reputation management is critical in terms of establishing a successful online presence in general. I believe it’s even more critical when we’re talking about establishing a successful search presence. What we advise our clients is that you cannot have a successful search presence without also having a great online reputation.
We typically advise having a reputation management strategy in place that coincides with your SEO and PPC efforts. When somebody finds your website on Google, as an example, they see that you have fifty 5-star reviews while your competitors probably have fewer reviews than that, and they’re probably going to be somewhere right around 3 to 4 stars while you’re closer to 5 stars. Because of the volume of reviews that our client has and because their overall rating is going to typically be higher than their competition, they’re going to be the clear winner from a perception standpoint that a prospective customer might have when they find them after performing a search.
ROB: Reviews have certainly become a battleground for getting noticed. These days, some businesses almost have so many growing reviews that there’s a question of authenticity around that. How are you seeing that question of, “Are these reviews for real?” And sometimes maybe they’re even not for a competitor.
JAY: That’s interesting. One thing that I see is sometimes all of the reviews will come from people who work for the company. That’s great; it’s great to get feedback from your employees, from your staff, and it’ll give you that 5-star rating on Google in particular. That is good to a certain extent. There’s nothing wrong with getting reviews from your employees, again, getting positive feedback.
But at the same time, that’s not what your customers are looking for. If they dig a little further and they start to actually read the reviews, they’re going to quickly discover these aren’t reviews coming from other customers. These are reviews coming from employees of the company, and they’re probably not going to have much faith in those reviews.
It’s much more effective, much more powerful to have reviews from actual customers. It’s pretty obvious when a real customer is leaving a review versus somebody that is not being authentic. Sometimes you’ll see a review that’s way over the top and it almost sounds like it came straight from the owner. And in some cases it might have. It’s pretty obvious. I definitely would not recommend that.
We recommend developing a review generation strategy, having a system, a program in place to request legitimate reviews from legitimate customers. That’s the best way to handle it.
ROB: So getting reviews just becomes a process you execute as a business, just like you would pay your bills and order supplies and whatnot.
JAY: Absolutely. It just becomes a part of your marketing strategy.
ROB: Perfect. Jay, if we rewind a little bit, what is the origin story of Leverage? How did you get into this business?
JAY: It’s a pretty long story, so I’ll give you the short and sweet version. While I was getting my MBA, I figured out that I wanted to start working in the marketing and advertising industry. I got a job working at an ad agency here in Tampa and really fell in love with the work, fell in love with the day to day challenges. I was studying both financing and marketing while I was getting my MBA, so I was learning the theoretical side of marketing, but I was also getting the practical experience at my job.
This was right around 2006-2007, and then the recession hit and I said, “Probably not the best time to start a business, but I’ve always wanted to start a business.” At that point in time, I was right out of school. Really didn’t have a lot to lose at that time of my life. So, I said, “I’m going to take the risk and I’m going to do it now because it’s now or never.” That was my mindset.
I took what I learned in school, I took what I learned working at that advertising agency, and I used that to help launch Leverage. This was in 2008. At that point in time it was just me, and I was working out of my house. Bootstrapped. I didn’t take any loans. I didn’t borrow any money from my parents or anyone. I really started with a few hundred bucks and used that to purchase my equipment, purchase the necessary software. I did everything. I designed the websites, I programmed the websites, I did the SEO, I ran the Google AdWords, as it was called at that time. I did everything.
Then after doing that for a little while, I realized, “If I want to grow, I have to start to hire.” I also realized that I really enjoyed working on the strategy side of things with clients, and if I was building websites and doing a lot of the technical work, I didn’t really have time to work with my clients and communicate with my clients and work with them on developing their marketing strategy and overseeing that.
So, I started to hire and fill those roles that were needed to meet our clients’ needs and ensure that we were providing them with the best outcomes, because I certainly wasn’t the best graphic designer. I certainly wasn’t the best programmer. I went to school for business. I didn’t go to school for these things. So, I hired experts who did, and here we are. It’s been a long road, but a good journey, a fun journey.
ROB: At what point on that journey did it become clear to you that this was going to be able to be more than an experiment and a “why not?” and that you were probably going to be doing this thing for a while? What did that look like?
JAY: I gave myself one year and I said, “I want to build a profitable business within 12 months. I have to be able to support myself within 12 months, and if I cannot support myself within 12 months – meaning be able to comfortably pay my rent, buy my groceries, have food on the table, put gas in my car – if I can’t do those things after 12 months comfortably, then I’m going to go get a job.”
So, to answer your question, I gave myself a 12-month deadline and I was able to meet those goals. I was able to get to a point after that first year where I was still working out of my house, but it was comfortable. It wasn’t a situation where I felt like I was being stretched too thin. By Year 2, I was able to rent my first office. By Year 3, I was able to begin hiring employees.
Year 1 was by far the toughest, and then after Year 1, I really started to gain some traction and go from being a solopreneur, as it’s called, to building a team and having a legitimate operation.
ROB: I’m going to press in a little bit. I think a lot of people would want to know – just wondering how other people are handling work life and structure as we’re 6 months into this COVID pandemic. How did you first adjust your team structure and working patterns, and what does that look like for you now, in October 2020?
JAY: We went remote for a while, especially when things heated up in terms of the pandemic, when things got really bad there for a little while. We went remote. We thought that that was the responsible thing to do, the prudent thing to do. It was challenging because we’re a very collaborative environment. We’re in the office every day. So, it was challenging, and we really relied on technology to help us get through that. Lots of Zoom calls.
As of today, we are for the most part back in the office. We’ve altered the way the office is situated so that everybody remains 6 feet apart. Everyone’s wearing masks. It’s a very safe environment. We want everybody here so that the collaboration can continue. And yes, you can collaborate through Slack and other means, but that face-to-face interaction I feel really helps us deliver the best outcomes for our clients, and ultimately that’s what we’re here for: our clients.
So, we maintain a safe environment, but without sacrificing that collaboration that really allows us to achieve the best outcomes for our clients.
ROB: That’s really helpful context there. What are you seeing in terms of clients and their receptiveness to meet? You mentioned you have multi-city clients, so some of them I’m sure you would get on planes to talk to. Where are clients at in this day and age?
JAY: For the most part, they’re fine meeting via Zoom. We have meetings pretty much every day with clients via Zoom. It’s worked out just fine. A lot of our clients are not local. That was not uncommon before, so it really hasn’t impacted the way we do things now. But we do still meet with clients in person here at our office in Tampa if they’re local and they prefer to meet in person – of course, adhering to social distancing guidelines.
So, it’s a little bit of a mix. But I would say that our clients who are local do have a preference in some cases, still, to meet face to face.
ROB: Got it. Little bit of everything, and I’m sure it comes and goes a little bit.
JAY: And Rob, I just want to mention this. At the end of the day, we’re here because of our clients. We try to be flexible and meet our clients the way they want to meet. If they prefer to meet by Zoom, then that’s what we do. If they prefer to meet in person, then we make that work as well. Ultimately, taking care of them is our number one priority.
ROB: Absolutely. Jay, when you reflect on the life of Leverage so far, what are some things you might do differently if you were starting from scratch today?
JAY: [laughs] I laugh because that is a very easy question to answer. I would have stayed with the agency that I started with a little bit longer. I think I probably jumped in with both feet a little prematurely.
I think there would’ve been a lot of value in continuing to work with that agency, and if not that agency, another established agency to gain more experience and just learn more about the business before going out on my own. But of course, like every twenty-something, I thought I knew everything. I thought I had it all figured out. At that age you tend to be very confident in yourself and your capabilities, even though you probably don’t know as much as you think you do. I suffered from that affliction and decided I was going to do it right then and there.
So definitely getting a little bit more agency experience before venturing out on my own is what I would have done differently in hindsight.
ROB: What are some of the things you think you might have learned staying and learning in that agency environment faster than you did on your own, or you had to maybe take some lumps?
JAY: I think there were probably a number of things. I think I would’ve learned a bit more about the business itself. Just how to run an agency, and just the simple – everything from sales to operations to account management, and then of course the actual services themselves. I think I probably would’ve learned a lot more in all of those areas.
I definitely took the more challenging road, which was basically “just figure it out as you go.” I remember when I first started the agency – this was probably within a few weeks, maybe a month of starting the agency. Landed my first client, and I had to google how to create an invoice. I had never created an invoice before. Google was a great resource for me at this time. This, again, is in 2008. So I googled “how to create an invoice.” I did not even know how to create an invoice because I’d never had a reason to create an invoice before. Just things like that.
ROB: You might not even know how to get money from people. At least you knew that you needed to send an invoice, so that’s helpful. You learned some in the other agency. It’s a good start for sure.
You started off – you mentioned that 2008 timeline. I think until recently you were known as Leverage Digital. I’m sure when you mention something like a personal injury attorney, there’s probably a steady pull to get into other lines of business. I think attorneys are very famously – out-of-home advertising, buses, billboards, you name it. How have you decided which lines of business to open up and do and which ones to still stay out of?
JAY: In terms of the types of services that we offer and the channels that we focus on?
ROB: Yes.
JAY: You referenced our recent brand refresh from Leverage Digital to Leverage. We did that because Leverage is easier to recall, it’s easier to say. There’s too many syllables in Leverage Digital. Even hard for me to say, even though I’ve been saying it for over 10 years.
So, we dropped “Digital” for those reasons, and also because we feel digital is becoming somewhat antiquated. 10 years ago, it made sense to have that in the name, and now I think digital is expected if you’re a marketing agency. I don’t think there’s a marketing agency – at least there shouldn’t be – on the planet that doesn’t do digital. That used to be a unique characteristic of ours; I don’t think digital is unique to us anymore. So, we dropped it for those reasons.
But we still decided to focus on digital because that is what we excel at. A lot of agencies that have started doing digital over the last few years, they’re still learning it. They don’t really know the space yet. They don’t really understand it. There’s still a lot of trial and error and a lot of testing, whereas we’ve been doing it for over a decade. It’s in our DNA. It’s what we do. There’s really no reason for us to get outside of that and to start doing billboards and outdoor advertising and things like that.
I truthfully am not interested in doing those types of things. Of course, we could if a client asked. We always want to be accommodating and we’ll help them, but that’s not really our focus. That’s not what we excel at. I think it’s really important to focus on your strengths and be the best in your area of expertise and not try to be all things to all people.
ROB: That definitely makes sense. The focus thing, you were even able to categorize early on some of the vertical markets you work in most often. There were plenty of things we didn’t hear. Some people go deep into auto dealerships. Some people go deep into restaurant marketing, multi-location restaurants, franchises, etc. So, there’s definitely some focus there.
When we look at what’s next for you and for Leverage, if people look you up, at least on LinkedIn, it looks like you’ve got a few people that work with you on this thing. So, what is coming up next for Leverage or broader in marketing that you are excited about?
JAY: With the pandemic and some of the external factors that we’ve all been dealing with for the last year, or at least for 2020, digital channels are really becoming more competitive because budgets are shifting more and more to digital.
Advertisers are – as the example we cited earlier regarding billboards, they’re less inclined to get a billboard because there’s less people on the roads. That marketing budget has to go somewhere. If it’s not going to billboards, it’s not going to tradeshows, it’s not going to conferences – it’s going to digital. That is making digital more competitive, but it’s also creating opportunities for digitally focused agencies like ours.
We’re well positioned to help our clients compete and remain dominant players in the markets that they serve, and we’re also well positioned to help clients that we don’t yet work with become dominant players in the markets they serve because we have that expertise in digital and we’ve been doing it for so long.
ROB: That makes perfect sense. How do you think about, within the agency, scaling up? When you think about the next 25% of people you’re going to bring on board to serve your clients well, how do you think about structuring? Are you in a pod structure when it comes to clients? Do you have more departmental responsibilities and more vertical focus – this person focuses on content, this person focuses on creative, etc.?
JAY: The latter. Basically we have our development team and then we have our creative team. Our creative team handles the graphic design and copywriting. Our development team obviously handles the programming and development of websites. We have our account management team that handles account servicing.
And I’ll tell you, in terms of scaling, I’m not so interested in scaling in terms of growing the size of our agency as much as I am in growing the size of the accounts that we work with. We’re not a volume-based agency. We’re more selective about who we work with. We prefer to have fewer, larger accounts than having lots of small accounts, if that makes sense. By doing that, we’re able to provide our clients with a very high level of service. And that’s really what it’s all about for us: the level of service that we provide.
If we have lots of clients, then we’re going to have to have lots of people to service those clients, and they’re probably not going to get the same level of service because we’re managing so many different strategies for so many different accounts. By having just a few larger accounts that we can really learn and invest in and invest our resources into, we essentially are able to function almost like an outsourced marketing department for our clients. And they get the same level of service and they get the same or better outcomes than if they were trying to do everything in-house.
ROB: That’s great to think about the benefit, even for your team, of giving them the ability to focus on serving a client well rather than having to switch contexts between serving 50 clients, and maybe something slips and then you’re serving more clients not as well as you’d like to.
JAY: That’s right. I’ve learned over the years that whether a client is spending $1,000 a month with you or $100,000 a month with you, their expectations are not that much different. Everybody wants to get great results. Everybody wants great service. There’s no wrong or right way to do it; it’s just the way we do it, we’ve discovered that we want to be able to give our clients the best level of service and the best possible outcomes.
But we’re realistic and we know we can’t do that if we’re spread so thin because we’re working with a high volume of accounts. So we really prefer to be selective, make sure that we’re the right fit for them and they’re the right fit for us, and that we can deliver on their expectations.
ROB: Got it. That’s perfect, Jay. When people want to find you and they want to find Leverage, where should they go to track you down?
JAY: Our website is leveragedigital.com, and I can also be found on LinkedIn. I’m going to try to do this from memory – I might get it wrong, but I think it’s linkedin.com/jaytennysontaylor.
ROB: Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Jay, and I hope people will look you up. I learned a lot, and hopefully we all will together.
JAY: My pleasure, Rob. Thank you for having me on.
ROB: Be well. Thanks.
JAY: Thanks. You too.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
John Saunders, Founder of 5Four Digital, honed his SEO, SEM, and PPC digital marketing skills when he started his career working for an agency that provided dealership-level marketing services for automobile manufacturers. When John figured out that he wanted to use his skills for different kinds of projects and a more diverse clientele (SMBs, tech-startups), he started his own company. Today, 5Four focuses on brand identity (logo design and brand guidelines), and website design and development on Shopify, Webflow, and WordPress platforms.
In this interview, John explains how to build automated linkages that will increase customer engagement and discusses 3 “shopping” platforms: WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow.
John says WordPress was a game-changer – it made CMS (content management systems) “accessible” for people with lower-level HTML and CSS skills. The platform is flexible enough that amazing sites can be built with either the supplied templates or with custom code. A disadvantage of WordPress is that it requires the use of an extensive array of plugins for website “attributes,” and these and other security measures need to be maintained.
Wordpress with a WooCommerce plug-in works well for ecommerce, but John has found that Shopify allows the agency to more quickly scale stores for its clients. One Shopify app, Teelaunch, provides companies with low cost, high-quality print on demand products so customers can create an MVP (minimum viable product, Eric Ries: The Lean Startup,) and build their own brand for less than $1000. Another CMS option, Webflow, can produce outstanding websites. It has a slight learning curve but is easy to use and highly flexible.
Although John currently sees Webflow as ”the future,” an organization’s decision to use a particular CMS platform should be based on a number of considerations.
Through the years, John has developed systems and standard operating procedures which allow him to delegate tasks to his staff or to automate processes, so the work gets done automatically.
One tool he has found to be particularly helpful is Zapier, which provides a way to “web-hook” different websites, platforms, and apps. John uses Zapier to cross-integrate his company website contact form with Slack (to notify John that the form has been filled out), and then with Mailchimp to send a “thank you for your interest, here’s another form.” Response to that drives another form for scheduling . . . and that information is sent to Colony. John says Zapier can be used to link Facebook to Gmail, Facebook Forms to Google Sheets, with up to 10 such linkages free.
John recommends written website SOPs to facilitate task handoffs to clients if the client prefers to maintain the site.
5Four Digital was already running remotely when Covid-19 hit. John’s SOPs and integrated technology continue to keep the agency operating smoothly. Many of his team use Asana to manage tasks. He notes that not everything he has done succeeded. However, the failures often provided the tools, resources, and experience he needed for subsequent projects . . . that did succeed.
John recently started a company offering downloadable illustrations featuring people of color so sitebuilders have beautiful pictures that promote diversity. BlackIllustrations.com. He is also involved in digital education and sees a lot of that in the future replacing the traditional four-year degree.
John can be found on his personal website at JohnDSaunders.com and @JohnDSaunders on Facebook and Instagram. His agency’s website is: https://www.5fourdigital.com/.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by John Saunders, Founder at 5Four Digital based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, John.
JOHN: Hey, Rob. Thank you for having me. I’m super excited to be here, man. Thank you.
ROB: It’s excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start us off with an introduction to 5Four Digital and where you specialize.
JOHN: Absolutely. My name, of course, as you said, is John D. Saunders. I’m the founder of 5Four Digital. We focus and allocate our resources towards a couple key services. Those are brand identity, which is logo design and brand guidelines, as well as website design and development for Shopify, Webflow, and WordPress. Those are our main focus areas.
ROB: That makes perfect sense. WordPress obviously has been around for a very long time, Shopify a decent amount of time. Webflow is a little newer. How has that development of competencies happened? Did you start in one of those areas? How have you decided where to keep your skills sharp?
JOHN: Great question. I started in WordPress – man, it was at least 10 years ago. WordPress put CMS, or content management systems, on the map in regards to making it accessible for people that either have an entry level to HTML and CSS or high level. You create these amazing websites either using templates or doing custom code.
I started doing that with WordPress, and man, it was an exciting time because I started out and I learned everything I could from YouTube videos and other things like that. This was in the infancy of WordPress, so it was before they even had all these templates and themes. I was able to build a site for my mom, who’s a teacher, and we built this tutoring site. Kids were able to go on, fill out the contact form. I was able to take this idea I had in my head and make it something tangible. That’s when I was hooked.
As the agency grew, we really thought to allocate our resources toward a few key resources, and WordPress was that main one. As ecommerce started to build up and develop, I thought, WordPress is great. We have WooCommerce, plug-ins that integrate well. But I feel like Shopify was the perfect platform because we were able to scale out stores for clients at a quicker level than WordPress. So, we did that with Shopify.
Then a couple years ago, we heard about Webflow, which is another content management system or almost like a live builder, and man, I built my first site in Webflow and I was like, this is definitely the future. It’s easy to use. Of course it has a learning curve, but ultimately you can build essentially whatever you want in regards to your website, have your own custom CSS in there, and the designs and things we’ve been able to create with Webflow have been really, really dope.
ROB: Right on. If somebody has a WordPress website, they’ll probably stick with WordPress for the time being, although any given revision to a WordPress site can certainly be an entire rebuild. But if someone’s starting today, how would you help them consider the decision of whether to go with WordPress or whether to go with Webflow?
JOHN: That’s a great question. If they’re an existing business – let’s say they’ve been using WordPress for 5 or 6 years and they just want to do a refresh or redesign their site. They already have historical data or historical SEO attributes to that website, so I probably wouldn’t recommend completely changing over to Webflow unless the site was new and they didn’t get a ton of traffic. If they’re doing over 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 hits per month, we’d probably stay with WordPress and scale out that website in regards to building out a new design.
If the business doesn’t get a ton of traffic and they’re not really worried about pulling all that traffic to the new site, I would absolutely recommend Webflow. One thing I like about Webflow is a lot is the transition in regards to using the platform is easier. You can build out sites how you want.
You don’t necessarily need a ton of plug-ins, which is one of the issues I have with WordPress; you need plug-ins for a lot of the attributes you need to add to a website. It also takes a lot of constant upkeep. Every month you have to make sure the plug-ins are up to date. You also have to make sure WordPress, the framework, is up to date, and you’re open to malware and malicious attacks from people because the CMS is so popular.
The good point about that is there’s a ton of resources on WordPress and information out there. Thousands of plug-ins, thousands of resources, developers, designers. It’s an open source platform that has a lot of people linked to it.
With Webflow, it’s a little bit newer, so it’s smaller. But the level to entry isn’t as steep as say WordPress, and it doesn’t need that constant upkeep. You can build out your site, you can set up Zapier to set up web hooks between different websites and platforms, and you’re pretty much good to go.
ROB: Wow, it sounds like you’re deep on the Zapier stuff. That’s a whole other unlock there.
JOHN: Oh man, it’s like a cheat code, dude. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] Tell us about that a little bit for folks who aren’t as familiar with Zapier and what sort of directions you can take that toolkit.
JOHN: I’ll give you a precursor. The first thing is I’m a big proponent of standard operating procedures or setting up systems within the business so I can delegate to either staff, team members, or create automation. That way no one has to do it and it just gets done automatically. I’m a big proponent of that. I work from home. I have five team members on our team, and I love to have the freedom to be able to focus on big picture.
With that said, Zapier is a great way to connect different platforms easily through a platform seamlessly. I’ll explain that. For example, when you visit our agency website and you fill out the contact form, that form automatically pushes to Slack. As soon as the form gets filled out, I get a notification that someone’s filled it out on Slack with their information. That keeps me up to date.
Secondly, we set up a Zapier so that it integrates with MailChimp. So as soon as someone fills out that form, they get an automatic email response saying, “Hey, thank you for your interest. Would you mind filling out this free form?” Once they fill out that form, then they get another automatic email push that says, “Hey, great, go ahead and book a time here,” and then we’ve connected Colony. All Zapier does is just connects different apps to each other. You can connect Facebook to Gmail, you can connect Facebook Forms to Google Sheets – the possibilities are endless. I think you can do up to 10 for free and then you can pay for different Zaps.
ROB: Very nice. Thinking about WordPress versus Webflow, you get the site designed, you get it developed, you hand it over to the client – is either one of those more conducive to clients being able to manage things themselves? Or is it just the case that clients, even if you give them all the tools, aren’t going to manage things themselves to make minor changes in the future?
JOHN: It really depends on the client because they’re both very user-friendly, especially on the client side, for the most part. It’s easy to add blogs. It’s easy to update pages once either you’re using a third party platform like Oxygen or Divi or Elementor, the page builders. It’s pretty easy to use once you get over that initial learning curve. Both WordPress and Webflow have a client-facing side so that they can make updates. So that part is pretty easy.
What I like to tell people, especially agency owners, is it’s a good idea to set up SOPs, or standard operating procedures, for your clients in regards to the handoff. If you’re a web design agency, there’s one of two things you can do. You can either manage and host that website for the client, and then they pay a fee every month, or you say, “Hey, here’s a repository of my trainings on how to use the platform, how to jump in, how to add blogs. Your team can use this.”
Because sometimes you’ll build a project and give it to their staff. They might have a marketing team or a content marketing team that can create that content; they just need to know how to use the backend. So, you want to have that in your back pocket so that way when a client is like, “Yeah, we don’t really want you to manage it. We just want you to build it out and then hand it off to us,” you already have that repository of operating procedures that you can give them.
ROB: That all makes sense. John, if we rewind a few years, how did you come to start 5Four Digital? What’s the origin story here?
JOHN: For me, I was at an agency. I worked there for about 4 years. I moved up in the ranks and became marketing director. It was an automotive dealership agency, so we dealt primarily with a lot of the car manufacturers – Audi, Land Rover, Ford – at the dealership level. We would do the marketing at the dealership level. Being in that position taught me a lot because I was able to use SEO, SEM, PPC, all these different services under the digital marketing moniker. It helped me develop my skillset.
Once I did that, I got to the point where I wanted to work on different types of projects. I got kind of burnt out from the automotive side. I wanted to work with maybe SMBs, tech startups, and that type of thing. That’s when I left and I started my own company, 5Four Digital.
I was focused on more so on the product as opposed to how it looked. I didn’t need to have a fancy office or anything. Honestly, when I started, I didn’t really have much money. I was on the ramen diet, and I was saving money because I had segued from a full-time position to doing this on my own. The biggest thing for me was to really focus and allocate my resources towards providing a great product to the client. I didn’t have an office. I was working from home, and I started to build my team remotely.
When other agency owners were like, “You need an office, you need this, you need that,” I was like, instead of paying $2,500, $3,000, $3,500 – because I am in South Florida – for an office, I can take those resources and I can pay a developer, I can pay a project manager to help scale this business without having to have that burden of a physical location.
ROB: So, you were completely ready for the shutdowns this year. Did very much change for you as a business, either with how your team worked, or maybe with some of your clients when some of the COVID-19 shutdowns started to come through?
JOHN: I do want to say that a lot of people are going through a lot currently. People are being furloughed, fired from their jobs. It’s just a lot. The transition for us prior to COVID and to now hasn’t really changed much because we were already running remotely. All the platforms and things that we were using were already conducive to that environment. A lot of our team and our staff work through Asana, our task management system, and that’s what we work by. This is when something’s due, and team members can work at night, in the day, they can take the day off and take their kids to the park.
For me, ultimately you work when you’re comfortable because I feel like that’s when people work the best, and then we follow the structure of the due date within the task management system.
ROB: That makes sense. When I look at your LinkedIn profile, some people are all-in on one thing and some people have a whole portfolio of interesting things they’re involved in. What can you share about some of the other projects or businesses that you’re involved in that keep your attention and you feel are worth pursuing?
JOHN: For me it’s about building an agency that not only works well for our clients, but for us internally also. I always recommend those that have the skillset to build an agency because (1) you can help build and develop clients, and then (2) you can build your own products or your own projects that siphon through your agency ecosystem. For us, when we have an idea and we want to build something internally, we’re just taking that project or that idea and running it through our client cycle.
For example, I have a business called BlackIllustrations.com, which we launched in April, which is a platform that allows folks to download illustrations for their websites, for their projects, featuring people of color. Because I didn’t see the market have a lot of that, and as a website builder, there just wasn’t a lot of diversity in the illustrations. Now, I’ve seen some beautiful illustrations, and we’ve leveraged a lot of them online, but I just didn’t see that and I saw that opportunity.
When that happened, I put together the process, I told the team, “Hey, this is what we’re going to start building out,” and then it’s essentially just walking them through that client lifecycle. It’s almost like taking the ideas that we have and pushing them through this conveyor belt of the business and then being able to make another business that has its own separate income as an entity.
BlackIllustrations.com launched in April; we’ve already had 40,000+ downloads, over about half a million visitors to the website. I’m really proud of that, and a lot of that comes down to creating those procedures and then running it through that cycle.
ROB: That makes a ton of sense. With those different projects, you can imagine that some of them are going to thrive, some of them are going to perhaps not thrive. Some of them over time you might need to put to rest. I wonder maybe if even there’s some projects that you have brought through the process, they lived a good life, and then you put them on pause. How do you think about the lifecycle and lifespan of these internal projects?
JOHN: Essentially, for me it’s really about learning as much as I can from the process. In one example, as an entrepreneur, you know we have a ton of failures. I’m not going to act like everything I touch turns to gold.
I had one project in particular – it was a Kickstarter campaign. I was trying to raise funds for an app. This was 5 years ago, 6 years ago maybe. I went through the entire process of hiring a videographer, getting footage, walking through the process of creating this crowdfunding campaign, and it was a lot of fun doing it and experiencing it. Ultimately, we flopped because we didn’t get to 100% of the goal. I think we got to around 60%.
At first, I was like, man, I’m a failure. I didn’t do the right thing. But, ultimately, I learned a lot through that process. I learned how to start a crowdfunding campaign, how to create engaging video that converts folks, and how to leverage an audience.
So, I like to look at it as an experience as opposed to a failure, and I’m able to use those resources and those things that I came up with and allocate them later on in the next project.
ROB: Each project is its own success, even if the project itself doesn’t succeed. In that case, how fortunate to assess demand for an app. It’s an inexpensive experiment to launch a crowdfunding campaign versus building the dang app and then hoping somebody likes it.
JOHN: Exactly.
ROB: Very good. John, you mentioned some lessons you learned there. When you look back over the history of 5Four Digital so far, what are some other lessons you’ve learned along the way and things you might consider doing differently if you were starting from zero?
JOHN: I would look at delegating faster than I did prior. I think in the beginning, especially the first year, first couple years, I was trying to do everything and do it all myself. When I started the agency, we were doing SEO, SEM, Facebook ads, social media, web design, web development. It was a complete agency, full service. Which is great, especially if you have a good amount of employees, but it was just me. So I’m working with clients and one client is doing SEO, one client is doing PPC, one client is doing web design, and it’s just a lot of work, especially changing your mind and doing the different things and turning off that creative and turning on the analytical side. It was just a lot.
I started to get burnt out. One of the things I wish I did was niche down to a specific set of services. Not even niching down to a specific client set, but only offering a few core services. That would’ve helped me really streamline my process and be like, “This is the process we go through every time we take on a client” as opposed to doing all these different services myself, especially as a small agency or even a freelancer. It was just a lot. So, I wish that was one thing that I did: focus on a few core services.
Secondly, I wish I would’ve started to make my operating procedures in the initial or in the beginning. Really start to think about, “These are the core services we have. These are the things we want to offer.” But I think it just took me time to get acclimated to providing a high-quality service to clients and then documenting that process.
Then the third piece is hiring faster, hiring either a part-timer or an independent contractor in the beginning to help facilitate some of these things instead of trying to do it all myself and taking hours and hours in the wee morning trying to do it.
ROB: How did you go about finding some of those fractional or independent contractors that you could trust to do the work in a way that’s going to keep your clients happy? Did that involve the clients at all in the conversation of shifting who was doing the work?
JOHN: Great question. For me, finding great people – and again, this is a process as well – comes down to not even necessarily their full skillset. A lot of times you’ll try to find the perfect candidate in regards to their skills. I try to find a good quality designer, for example, but I also want them to be able to fit into our team dynamic. The fact that they’re fun, engaging. The fact that they get their work done, but they’re able to balance that and know that it’s an open work environment where they’ll be able to have fun and enjoy cultivating their creativity.
So, for me, it’s really finding someone that’s a good fit for the team as opposed to just focusing on skillset.
ROB: I hear a recurring passion for process. Is that something that has come naturally for you, but you didn’t initially apply it to the business? Or has it been something you’ve discovered in some way as you’ve built the agency?
JOHN: It’s definitely something I’ve discovered while building the agency. There’s a book by Michael E. Gerber called The E-Myth, another book by Tim Ferriss called The 4-Hour Workweek – those are two great reads – that talk about building a process so that you can delegate. For me, ultimately, in the agency right now I’m pretty much the project manager. I’m the one that talks to the client, that organizes the projects, that puts in my two cents and my recommendations and helps the team navigate through the buyer journey or the customer journey.
I love being in that role because I’m able to pull out of the day to day and focus more so on big picture. I’m able to convey my ideas to the team, and we’re able to implement together on what works best.
ROB: I can definitely understand that, and there’s probably some future date where you’re thinking about that second project manager role that takes that over. That’s probably a whole new round of hire. John, you mentioned in your previous agency experience that you had done some work with auto dealers. For people who don’t know, that can be a whole segment. A lot of agencies that do auto kind of only do auto. It sounds like you’re not doing much of that anymore.
One concern I have heard from people who are heavy into that space is some different constraints to the budgets of some of the different dealerships and what they want, and sometimes even the technology. What is your experience with that then, and was there any consideration of that when you decided not to focus on that as much with 5Four?
JOHN: Can you repeat the last part of the question? It cut out for a sec.
ROB: Oh, sure. How much of that distinction of the constraints of automotive clients drove your decision to focus less on that when you started 5Four?
JOHN: Oh man, there’s a lot of red tape you have to deal with. Just getting a webpage up or going through a brand discovery session, there’s so many people that it has to go through that by the time you get the thing live, it’s already dated. [laughs] It was really hard to move and grow the design and the marketing side of it because we had so many constraints in regards to the industry.
But nowadays, especially working more so with startups or Series A companies, they have a lot more freedom to move around and upward. If there’s new technology that comes out that we want to implement, you don’t have to go through three C-level executives to get it done. You can just talk to a couple people, tell them, “Hey, this is how it works,” do a small test – if it works, great. Scale it up. It’s a totally different dynamic.
ROB: I’ve also heard a number of complaints about the technology that is even able to serve the auto dealer industry. Is that true, number one? And if so, why do you think it is? I’ve heard often there’s a completely different marketing stack for that particular customer.
JOHN: I will say in the last probably 2 to 3 years, there’s been a lot of companies doing cutting-edge stuff in the automotive industry. Of course, outside of that you have Tesla, which is doing phenomenal things. But there are platforms, especially like for example Dealer.com, which is an automotive digital marketing company – they crush it, man. They do a lot of these different things – it’s almost like Google, but in the automotive industry. They have all these different solutions and resources. So, I will say in the last few years there’s been a dynamic shift.
Of course, you have startups coming out like Carvana that are doing a really great job of showcasing and making the process easier for the customer. I think the automotive industry has taken a while to understand it, but a lot of people don’t necessarily want to go into the dealership. They don’t want to go through that long process. They’re trying to accommodate this fast shifting economy.
ROB: I understand that. It’s nice that there is some future that is not really, really dated marketing stacks for that industry. John, when you look ahead a little bit, what are you excited about that’s coming up either for 5Four Digital in particular or for marketing more generally?
JOHN: Man, I’m a tech guy, so I love being a part of this process and being in this industry. Some of the biggest things I see coming down the pipeline are one-click or headless ecommerce. A lot of folks have been talking about it. It’s an ecommerce experience where you literally push one button and you’re able to purchase, similar to what Amazon has and a lot of these sites that are coming out, but it actually works across the entire internet. That’s something I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about.
In regards to the education side of digital, I’m really excited about it. As we move or shift into this new world dynamic, a lot of people are realizing that traditional college degrees might not necessarily be the best bet for us all. There are just so many options. I have my Bachelor’s, but there’s just so many different opportunities now. You have all of these educators, people like myself and yourself, who are great and skilled and adept that can create courses and teach other people our processes and the things we’re doing.
So, I’m really excited for the digital education frontier, I guess we could call it. But I think a lot of people are going to start segueing or moving towards that because it’s super affordable. You can buy $500, $1,000, $50 bucks for these courses and learn these tangible skills that can pay you well into the six figures. So, I’m ultimately excited for that.
ROB: Do you have some of your current projects or future projects in that online education space?
JOHN: Yeah, we have a few resources. My biggest thing is providing value, value, value, value up front so that way you can position yourself as a thought leader, you can gain the trust of the people, they actually take your advice and leverage it and use it, and then creating more high-level, detailed courses for those people that are really trying to dive in heavily.
We have a couple courses. We have a Web Design Studio Accelerator, which is for people that want to start their own web design accelerator, and then I have other job templates and SOP courses that people can leverage to learn and apply these skills.
ROB: Solid. The SOP courses seem like something you can even also show to your team for training.
JOHN: Oh yeah, that’s what we do. We probably have 100+ videos for our team. We have one business – it’s called IllustratorHub.com; the whole business runs on an SOP. I don’t do anything with the business. It’s automatically updated. Our team manages it, and it’s just a great platform and a great example of creating these operating procedures in your business so that way you can thrive.
ROB: Wow, that’s excellent. Looping back to one thing you mentioned earlier – and I think I let it go a little bit too quickly; you mentioned beyond Webflow and WordPress – we dug into those differences there – but you also mentioned that you do work on the Shopify platform. If you look at their stock, they’re not quite Zoom, but they’re pretty close. This seems to have been a fairly banner year for that approachable “get an ecommerce store online” platform. What have you seen in terms of either how clients are investing differently in Shopify now or people who are putting stores online that hadn’t quite gotten around to it yet?
JOHN: I’m glad you brought up the Shopify stock, man, because it makes me feel like I’m Warren Buffett out here. [laughs] I bought 20 shares when it was like $60 bucks because I believed in the company and I saw what they were doing. With Shopify, I think, like you said, this year is their year. So many people are home. They want to start a business. They want something that’s easy, that they can leverage, that they can create a high quality product.
And that’s what Shopify does. You look at some of the top stores, you have Kylie Jenner’s Cosmetics, you have Allbirds, I think Warby Parker at one point was on Shopify. You have all these major brands running through this platform. It just goes to show you that it’s made for commerce.
People that are starting out like, “I want to sell some t-shirts” can open up a Shopify store, they can integrate it with Teelaunch, and then they can have these high-quality print on demand products with their own logo, their own brand on it. It’s really low cost out of the gate. You can test and you can create this MVP, or minimum viable product, as Eric Ries would say, the writer of The Lean Startup, and ultimately you can really build your own brand for less than $1,000 bucks.
ROB: Is Teelaunch a Shopify plug-in, or how does it work?
JOHN: Yes, it’s a Shopify app. They have hundreds of products – teacups, t-shirts. They even have air fresheners. It’s ridiculous. [laughs]
ROB: CafePress used to sort of let you do this, but you were listing stuff on their site. This is your own brand store. You can have your custom underpants, whatever you want.
JOHN: Exactly. And they fulfill on your behalf, so if someone goes on your website and your shirt is $24.99, they go and buy that shirt – the app is integrated, so as soon as they make that purchase, it pushes to Teelaunch, they charge you the $12, $10 for the shirt and then the shipping, and then you take the rest for your profit. Then they ship it on your behalf to the customer, so you don’t even have to touch the inventory.
ROB: Very, very cool. John, when people want to find you and when they want to find 5Four Digital, where should they go to look you up?
JOHN: They can find me at JohnDSaunders.co. That’s where all of my resources and guides are. Also, I’m on Facebook and Instagram @JohnDSaunders, and that’s pretty much where I’m at.
ROB: Excellent. What’s the “D” for in John D. Saunders?
JOHN: David.
ROB: Excellent. Perfect.
JOHN: I have that because there’s a famous ESPN newscaster who passed away a few years ago and his name is John Saunders. So, I had to put that “D” in there to add a little difference.
ROB: Yep, I know that name. I remember that sportscaster. John D. Saunders of 5Four Digital, thank you for coming on the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast.
JOHN: Rob, thank you for having me, man. I’m happy to be here.
ROB: Thank you much. Be well. Bye.
JOHN: You too.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Ian Garlic is CEO at authenticWEB. He started his career in marketing about 15 years ago as a consultant for one of the world’s largest information companies – back when good video production required hiring high-end, expensive, technically-savvy videographers. When Google purchased its video competitor, YouTube ten years ago, Ian saw opportunity, left the information company, and started authenticWEB. As a video marketing agency, authenticWEB crafts journey-stage-specific, people-story videos designed to reach “the right customers at the right time.” The goal: to engage potential customers with emotionally riveting content to “earn their love.”
For each client, the agency develops 10 to 100 video packages from micro content to 15- to 20- minute mini-documentaries. The different types of videos they produce include:
- the overview video (most people’s commercials),
- service commercials (covering the different services provided),
- how-to videos,
- process videos (explaining complex processes so people understand what happens at different times),
- topical video blog posts (including social),
- videos covering frequently asked questions,
- About Us videos (Ian notes that “About Us” is the second most useful page on a website, an important page for conversion, and that people usually go from the “About Us” to making contact with a company), and
- video case stories.
The most effective video case stories involve interviewing a client’s customers and searching for that gem of a story that will evoke a positive response in viewers. Ian says there is no way of telling who will give a good interview and who won’t. From raw footage, authenticWEB parses different edits and formats for different clients at different stages of the customer journey. Ian develops videos content to help customers identify a client’s business as an “authority” and “a new best friend.” The agency’s clients include attorneys, doctors, dentists, and other agencies (because agencies often have a hard time marketing themselves).
YouTube: The Next TV
In this interview, Ian elaborates on the increasing importance of YouTube in marketing outreach – he likens it to “the next TV.” YouTube videos need a “to be on point, perfectly messaged, and . . . delivered at the right time.” A website only gives you a piece of the interaction data. YouTube gets all the interaction data: including total and percent view time. That kind of feedback facilitates cross-platform video and content improvement.
Online video production does not require the same high-end equipment used in the past. Ian notes that today he does his own videography and that he travels “light.” The production process is simpler, so that the focus stays on story and editing the story for the audience. Ian recommends reusing content. He explains, if you drive traffic to your YouTube videos, YouTube will increase your rankings.
YouTube’s search engine is second only to Google. A Google search will start a well-indexed video at the exact moment in the recording where the answer to the searcher’s question is provided.
Some people think they can buy YouTube followers . . . enough to get their own URL. Ian reminds us, “You can’t buy love.” Purchased followers won’t necessarily view your content, so view time is sacrificed.
Ian also discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of some of the online production tools. He can be reached on Linked in or on his agency’s website at: https://authenticweb.marketing/.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Ian Garlic, CEO at authenticWEB based in Orlando, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Ian.
IAN: Rob, it’s great to be here. Thank you for having me.
ROB: It’s excellent to have you here. I think you’ve got a very distinct perspective that our audience will enjoy. Why don’t you start off by telling us about authenticWEB and what your superpowers are?
IAN: We’ve been around for a little over 10 years. We are a video marketing agency. We do some other stuff too, but it’s all around delivering people-story video. We’re really good at finding that story, understanding how these videos have to be crafted depending on where they are in the customer journey, and then crafting them to deliver and get a response. We create anywhere from 10 to 100 video packages for clients, and then ongoing we create video, do video SEO.
Really, what we do is, like really good marketers, we help connect the client’s story to their prospect’s story and make them the authority. When someone walks through the door, they feel like already they’re their best friend and the authority, and that’s what the video does for our clients.
So that’s what we’ve been doing for about 10 years. We’ve worked with all sorts of professionals. We work with attorneys, doctors, dentists, and we’re working with actually a lot of other agencies now. We have a lot of other agencies, which is fun, because the agencies have such a tough time marketing themselves. I have that problem. It’s nice for us to help other agencies market themselves.
ROB: Fascinating. I think I heard you say 50 to 100 video packages. That sounds like a lot. Is that different formats for different platforms, different edits? Or is that just that much content? How do you put that together?
IAN: It’s a little bit of all of it. It’s different edits, different formats. You’ve got to consider where they are in the customer journey. One of the things we’re known for is our video case stories. People fly me around to interview their clients to get that story out. I don’t try to make people cry, but I kind of do. When you can ask the question the right way, you get that emotional response from your customers, and you have this powerful tool.
We get these 30-minute interviews with their customers, and parts of that story need to be used in different ways, in different parts of the journey, from early on, just to get attention and awareness, to longer form customer stories. We’re doing some 15-20 minute ones, like mini-documentaries. And then pulling micro content, little clips out of there.
Plus, we make essentially 9 to 10 different types of videos. We make your overview video, which is most people’s commercials. We make this thing called a service commercial – because most of us have different services, and we want to have a little commercial for each service. How-to videos, which are important, especially on YouTube. Video blog posts, where someone’s discussing a specific topic. Under that video blog post, I consider a lot of social posts. We just call it video blog posts. Frequently Asked Questions are a big one.
The core videos that we make besides those are micro content, but besides that, we’re really known for video case stories and About Us videos. That’s the second most useful page on a website. Most people throw up either a bio or some funny video, but really it’s a converting page. If you look at your analytics, it’s not only going to be in your top three or four pages – it can be out of there depending on what you’re doing, but it’s top three or four pages. But where people usually go after that is some sort of contact. So really having a converting video on there.
And then process videos. We make a lot of process videos because people don’t know what happens at different points. The more complex it is, the more people need to understand what’s going to happen next and how this is going to look.
When you add it all up and you do all the different points and all the different variations, it really quickly adds up to a ton of content along the customer journey.
ROB: I’ve talked to people where they feel like they’re intimidated to ask their customer to be on this sort of video. What have you found in terms of overcoming that fear? Is it ever really well-founded, or would people be surprised that more of their customers are willing to get on camera than they might ever expect?
IAN: They’d be surprised. There’s people you’d think would be great on camera that aren’t. It’s a numbers game. There’s people you’d think would be poor, but have these amazing stories. One of the other things we do is audio interviews like this and then make them into videos with pictures, so it makes it a little easier.
But it’s the timing of asking, it’s how you’re asking. One of the things I always tell people is never ask for a testimonial. I don’t even like using the word “testimonial” because that’s when people really freeze up. If you’ve done an amazing job for someone and they’re really, really happy and you ask them for a testimonial, it’s like, “Oh my God, these people did such a good job for me. I’m really nervous about screwing this up for them.” They get nervous. So, I always tell people to ask someone for their story. Talk about something specific that you know is important. That will help.
But this is the number one piece of advice I can give for anyone’s marketing: install asking for those stories into your process at different points. People want to know what the onboarding is like. What is it like right after the sales process? What’s it like if you have a strategy? What’s it like a year after you’re done with your project? Ask along the way. And you can ask the same people multiple times. You’ve got to dig for those, though. You’ve got to make it a habit.
ROB: You mentioned you have been at this for a little bit. I think you said around 10 years. Talk about the difference in – I think there used to be a perception of video as being expensive, and it’s probably still more costly than some methods of marketing. You mentioned I think a little hack in there of being able to take audio and turn it into a video. But how has your production process changed with the advance of different production equipment and tools over your time running the business?
IAN: When I started 14-15 years ago now in marketing, I was in New York, and I would hire high-end videographers. I saw that, especially when we came online, we didn’t need that high-end production. Now, I think production value is very important, but I see it inflate a lot because people are like, “I need this gear and this gear and this gear.” I’ve definitely trimmed down our production gear. Especially since I travel, I like it light. [laughs] I would say that’s the number one thing. It’s gotten lighter and easier to set up.
There’s a lot of cool things you can do now, especially with B roll, to make it interesting. So, it’s easier now to – everyone can have a gimbal, everyone can have a slider. There’s a few of these other things – you can get a nice 4K camera inexpensively. So we’re doing a lot of that stuff still, but as far as the production process, we tweak it, but for the most part we’ve just been improving how we get the story, how we edit the story, what parts need it.
I would say the biggest evolution – I started really in video around when YouTube was purchased by Google. That’s when I was like, “Hey, this is going to be a big thing. This is going to be huge. You’re going to have this search intense, and people are going to be able to find things on Google and find your video right at that perfect moment.” At that point, we still edited really well. We had a process for editing, but our editing process has evolved and evolved and evolved because now there’s so much content out there. Your video needs to be on point, perfectly messaged, and needs to be delivered at the right time.
Those are the things that we constantly improved, adding more copywriting principles into our video process and that type of thing. Those are the big ones, and then post-production has definitely evolved. We’ve evolved the post-production side and we’re constantly talking about that. What can we do to make this look different, be exciting, be entertaining on the post-production side?
ROB: There’s a lot of acquisitions that show up as sort of interesting. What do you think it was about Google acquiring YouTube that really made you sit up and pay attention?
IAN: (A) It was Google, and (B) video was just happening. There was this idea that you can get your face and your voice in front of someone using video. We can do that, but now Google was not going to let YouTube – that was doing okay at the time; it was having these moments – it wasn’t going to let it go away. Then when they started blending the YouTube videos into the Google search results, that’s when I was like, this is going to be a game-changer.
If you get a video thumbnail into the Google search results, you can be anywhere on that page and people are going to click on it. They’re going to recognize your face. They’re going to recognize your voice more often. I knew that was going to be the game-changer. Google wasn’t going to let that not happen.
ROB: In hindsight, the acquisition price was significant. I think it was around $1.5 billion or so. What I think is interesting there is there’s actually a cohort between them, Twitch, and Instagram. All of them, I think, were around $1+ billion in acquisition and all of them are probably right in the middle of what you do every day now.
IAN: Yeah, for sure. Look at the YouTube acquisition; at $1.5 billion. Of all the acquisitions, that was a steal. It’s the second most used search engine. We’re putting all of our time and effort into YouTube because it’s going to be the next TV. It already is. My son watches it. He’s 6 years old. He knows exactly how to navigate it. My niece wants to be a YouTube star. She asked me all about the stats, and she’s 10 years old. “What’s the view time? How many subscribers does that person have?” At 10 years old. Other stuff will come and go; YouTube is not going away, and if anything it’s an essential part of our life.
ROB: Just got to keep her away from the comments a little bit – but we probably all should stay away from the comments.
IAN: [laughs] For sure, for sure.
ROB: Ian, what led you down this path to start authenticWEB in the first place? What were you doing before, and what made you head in this direction, which can be a little bit intimidating at times for some people?
IAN: When I first moved to New York, I was still getting back into working in a hedge fund. Worked for one for a little bit, didn’t like that. I worked simultaneously in commercial real estate. I was trying to decide – and I worked at one of the top restaurants in the world, actually, as a bartender. Just like, “Okay, what do I want to do when I grow up?” type thing.
I was looking at the theme, and the theme was always marketing. I loved marketing, and I always loved digital. I’ve been on a computer since I was like 6 years old, which is a big deal because I’m not a millennial. [laughs] It all made sense.
So, I went to work for one of the largest information companies as a marketing consultant. Loved it, but the advent of Google and YouTube I knew was going to be a huge thing, and also, I saw them not spending time getting to know the client story and really making good marketing. Everything looked and felt the same. It really did an injustice to especially the smaller people with the smaller budgets, because at that point it was who threw the most money at that search channel or whatever.
Now, we separate it out and go, “I can serve and connect people with their perfect clients, and when they do that, they’re going to love their business so much more. When people walk through the door and they know them already, they’re going to love their business.” That’s really cool when I get that phone call. It’s like, “Man, you’re right. People feel like they know me when they walk through the door, and it changes how we run our business,” which I always love.
I knew we could do it better, so I started the agency, and yeah, it was easy since then. No, I’m just kidding. [laughs] Not easy. It’s always this endless cycle of – you get the improvement, everything’s awesome. It’s a rollercoaster. We improve with systems and stuff over the years. Spent a lot of money on consultants, spent a lot of money on a lot of information, and it really improved and created all of our systems. That’s helped a lot, but there’s always things that are going to come up.
But I always know, too, all I have to do is go look at LinkedIn one time and look at jobs and I’m like, “I cannot imagine having to go to a job.” I mean, I guess a lot of people aren’t going to a job now, but I cannot imagine someone telling me what to do. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] A couple of looks at a job posting and maybe whatever some people have to wear to their office when they go to offices and that’s enough?
IAN: Yeah. I just look at LinkedIn for a few minutes and I’m like, “Oh no, I could never do this.” I could never go for another job interview. I’m officially unemployable.
ROB: I think I heard you speak a little bit about discoverability within YouTube and video. You could sort of call it SEO, with YouTube, as you mentioned, being the second largest search engine. We’ve talked a good bit about the evolution of SEO for web on this podcast; we haven’t really talked a lot about the evolution of search on video. Is search on video still fairly understandable? Are there hacks that people used to use that are busted and gone and bad tactics to listen to if you hear them?
IAN: Yeah. There’s hacks, but unlike a website – a website you kind of get some interaction data. YouTube gets all the interaction data. Yes, keywords are still important – matching up the keywords, understanding the keywords, going for the longtail – but getting that view time – that’s why I talk about getting that reaction, getting them to take action. Total view time and percent view time are huge, huge things. So really understanding those “content hacks” of getting the view time is super important.
Those are the big ones. I actually had someone the other day like, “I think I’m going to buy followers so I can get my own” – because when you get to I think 1,000, you get your own URL. I’m like, “But if you go and buy followers, on a percentage basis you lose that view time because they’re not going to watch your videos. You’re going to have these followers that aren’t watching your videos and aren’t interacting and you’re going to lose that visibility.”
Those are some big ones. I would say those are the big things. And then always be reusing your YouTube content. One of the things I see so much that people don’t do is they don’t use their YouTube content in other places. You can email it out on a regular basis. If someone has seen it before, they can see it again, as long as it’s not just a straight-up ad, if it’s informational. Send that content back out. Those are the big ones because if you’re driving traffic to your YouTube videos, YouTube is going to reward you with higher rankings.
ROB: Got it. In some ways, Google may have seen this on YouTube first, because now in search they’ll look at where you land; if that site is running Google Analytics and you stay there longer, they’ll consider that as a search ranking factor. But it may have almost been inspired from the video realm.
IAN: Yeah, the scroll and everything. It’s a lot of the same stuff, I’m sure of it. They can’t actually tell what you read, but they can tell what you scroll through. Also, now with YouTube, they’re now indexing inside of the videos, and if you add the different parts of your video into your description with links to it, you can actually get indexed for that exact moment inside of Google, which is pretty cool. So if you answer one question in there, Google could pop it up and show – I’m sure we’ve all seen this now – where it starts the video at 3 minutes in because you answered this one question I just googled. That’s another little bit of a hack I think everyone needs to be doing.
ROB: That seems true certainly across really almost anywhere Google is doing structured meta data. They don’t collect that data for nothing, and if you see them start to add that sort of meta data – they do this for recipes, for song lyrics, for your sitemap – they’re going to use it at some point if you give it to them, it seems like. It’s great that that makes sense on video as well.
Ian, you’ve been doing authenticWEB for a little while now. If you were starting over today, what are some things you’ve learned along the journey that you might do differently if you were starting fresh right now?
IAN: I would’ve niched down faster and harder. People fight the niching down, and I think it’s more important than ever. I would’ve gone into paid ads for us faster, I would’ve been emailing my list more, and I would’ve spent more time on my sales through onboarding systems. We did a lot on our backend systems. I was always big into that. Within a couple years, we had it down to almost an assembly line. Obviously, there’s art inside of there, but it allows us to fix things when they go wrong. But I didn’t spend enough time on my sales and onboarding systems, and I’ve really nailed that down and it makes such a difference.
ROB: What made you realize that you needed to focus? Was it outside feedback? Was it one day where you realized for the bajillionth time you didn’t have quite what you needed? How did you come through on that?
IAN: All of the above. I’m constantly looking at the business as a whole. Yes, I’m the technician and I like to know a lot about marketing. I love it. I have a podcast, the Garlic Marketing Show, and I’m always learning stuff. We just did the Giants a video learning from 40 experts’ techniques. But really working on the business as a whole is a constant, constant struggle. Not a struggle, but it’s exciting. It’s like, “Hey, what can I tweak here? Where did this go wrong and how can in fix this?” That’s a big, big thing.
I’ve been in masterminds. We’ve had consultants. I’m still in a lot of groups. I talk to other agency owners all the time. And that’s another mistake I made, too: thinking early on that I needed to do this all on my own and that everyone was my competition. Now I don’t even view people inside that do the exact same thing as my competition. It’s the same thing I told my clients Day 1, and I didn’t listen to myself. We all want to work with someone slightly different, and if you market yourself right, you’re going to get that person. The more of a community you can develop around yourself, the better you’re going to be.
ROB: That part definitely makes a bunch of sense. Ian, you’ve been in this for a while; there’s always talk about new platforms, new exciting things. What is coming up for authenticWEB or maybe video marketing in general that you’re genuinely excited for and think is worth paying more than a little bit of attention to?
IAN: I still think it’s YouTube. Honestly, I think using YouTube – here’s another shift that we did. Once again, it wasn’t in production, but it was a distribution shift. I’m always looking at how we’re distributing the videos. YouTube used to be the platform that we’d put on the website and people would watch the video there. Now we’re really trying to drive people onto YouTube as a whole because we want to get them into those suggested videos. We want them to watch more of our content. They want to watch video content.
And when you’re a professional, if you’re an agency owner, if you’re any type of service business, and you get people to see your face and hear your voice on a constant basis, that is the best marketing out there because you get that mere exposure effect. They will trust you more and more. YouTube is going to keep evolving it. They’re getting better and better and better. They’re changing around the algorithms, and it’s hooking people more and more and more.
I think TikTok is evolving, and if they don’t completely screw with it with the government, I think it’s got some legs now. But as far as really marketing a business and becoming an authority, I think it’s all-in on YouTube. The other part is it’s really hard to get spammed on YouTube because there’s no messenger or anything. LinkedIn feels like it’s gotten almost too spammed. I think people are going to have a tough time killing YouTube.
ROB: Sure. It’s certainly 5 to 10 requests a day that are straight-up pitches for business, at least, in my experience.
IAN: Yeah.
ROB: Are there any platforms – you mentioned TikTok; TikTok seems promising but early for both paid and organic. YouTube is pretty mature for both. Are there any platforms that are maybe not primary for organic content that you still see as being pretty effective for paid, even if that gets into ad insertions in other digital formats? How are you thinking about that?
IAN: I honestly think TikTok for B2C, almost everyone needs to be there. If you think that moms and dads are not there, they are. They’re watching their kids and then they’re getting hooked. I think organic-wise – they have this crazy algorithm, too, that’s so good at suggesting stuff for you. I think it’s a great place also to test.
But as far as other platforms go, then moving back to webinars, I think webinars are coming back. Using Zoom in a different way, using more of this course work, and we’re going to figure out new ways to have groups on and have smaller groups. I think webinars are making a resurgence because so many people are now used to being on Zoom for a little while, where they weren’t before and they couldn’t really pay attention. Now they’re used to it and you can really control the messaging there.
ROB: Got it. I heard you mention Zoom, and I was wondering – is Zoom especially good at the webinar thing, or is it simply that the average person’s familiarity with Zoom at this point is so common that it’s not even worth trying to force them to learn something else?
IAN: I think it’s the latter. Everyone’s on Zoom all the time. I remember with GoToWebinar, you have to download software and whatever, and some of these other webinar platforms are really glitchy. Zoom, yes, it had a shutdown recently, but for the most part it’s pretty smooth. I think other things will evolve out of there and we’ll get used to them, but Zoom works well for livestreaming. I personally use Ecamm, which I love, but Zoom is easy for people to use. I think that’s the big thing.
ROB: I’m not as familiar with Ecamm. For those who aren’t, what does Ecamm bring to the table that’s worth paying attention to?
IAN: I’ve been doing a lot more livestreaming. The algorithms are really paying attention to the livestreaming. Plus, if you do it right, Ecamm allows really high quality, almost like a TV show, to your livestream. You can add text overlays really easily. You can do different scenes, you can do an intro. You can essentially be your own TV show manager with Ecamm.
I loved it. It does really, really cool stuff and makes your livestreams that much more interesting. You can pull people in, pull people out. The other day I was on a livestream with Gino Wickman from EOS and people were making comments, asking questions. You can instantly pull their questions up from the comments onto the screen, which is really nice interaction. I do love things like Zoom and livestream because of that. We’re seeing this hyper-personalization.
And that leads into the other one, stuff like Bonjoro that make it really easy to hyper-personalize videos for clients and send them to them right away.
That’s where I’m seeing things going, this interaction – because you get that feedback and then you get improve your videos and improve your content and get across a few different platforms, getting that feedback and improving your content constantly.
ROB: You’re talking about that live TV show. One thing I just started playing around with a little bit, and I wonder if you’ve seen this and how it compares – have you seen this package called Mmhmm? It’s very hard to pronounce.
IAN: Yes, I have seen it. I haven’t used it yet. I have seen it. It’s similar to what Ecamm does. I think it has a few different features. But yeah, that’s the kind of thing I think we’re going to see more and more of, because you’ve got to keep them engaged. Those tools allow you to add that to your livestream videos. It’s not just the livestream; you can keep them engaged and do a lot of those cool things.
ROB: Right. The tools just keep on getting more impressive. Certainly, at the beginning of this pandemic, some good news was it was filmed from a home, but it was filmed with a real production team behind it. But the tools keep on getting pushed down and simpler, and you start to be able to imagine producing this Daily Show-looking production just with you and a pretty simple piece of software. It’s shifting. It’s remarkable.
IAN: It is. That’s where we have to get better at the content, which is great for everyone. It has to be more about the content, understanding who you’re talking to, getting niched down and super specific about who you’re talking to. It’s not just about having video.
ROB: That’s true with search, that’s true with video, and it’s true with the production quality of the video. Everything seems to keep coming back to content and all the little tricks. You can play a trick on TikTok and get somebody to loop your video one more time than you thought by lying to them, but it’s all going to catch you in the long run unless you make good content. It sounds like that’s what you all at authenticWEB are focused on doing.
IAN: Yeah, always making it better and better, figuring out better ways to get it, better ways to deliver it. That’s what we do.
ROB: Brilliant. Ian, when people want to find you and authenticWEB, where should they go look for you, other than sending a spammy LinkedIn request?
IAN: You can send me a LinkedIn request. Just don’t make it spammy. Tell me who you are. Tell me you heard me here when I was talking to Rob. That’s a great way. Or you can go to authenticweb.marketing, check out our website, and hit me through the form there. Seriously, if you want to open up a conversation and text me on LinkedIn, go ahead and do it. Now, I do get a lot of LinkedIn messages every day that are 90% spam, so if I don’t respond to you for some reason, I apologize. Feel free to follow up and say, “Hey, I just wanted to make sure you saw this.”
ROB: Fantastic. Ian, thank you for joining us on the podcast. Thank you for sharing that journey and so much excellent knowledge, especially thinking about how to go deeper on YouTube and realizing that that ship has not sailed, that game is not over, and good content can still win there.
IAN: Yes. It was great. Thanks for having me on, Rob. I appreciate it.
ROB: It’s a pleasure. Be well.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Justin Seibert is President at Direct Online Marketing, an agency that focuses on and excels at – direct online marketing – to move clients’ ROIs in a positive direction. In this interview, Justin describes the process of developing strategies to drive quality traffic to its clients, converting that traffic into leads, and sending leads through to generate sales. Justin says the process of vetting potential clients is “very long.” Some of what the agency looks for to get a good fit:
- Medium-sized businesses provide the greatest opportunity to make an impact. Smaller businesses will not be able to get benefits commensurate with what it will cost them to work with DOM. In the case of larger businesses, the agency will not be able to move the needle as much.
- Highly niched businesses, either the lead brand or the challenger brand within a specific niche. These businesses are not “household names” unless the household is one already familiar with that particular industry.
- Almost any industry. The agency works heavily with a number of SaaS (Software as a Service) companies, higher education, and ecommerce retail and less so with everything else – from “manufacturing to finance to entertainment.”
In 2001, Justin started his career in Los Angeles, working for a company in the financial industry. The company had been highly successful with radio marketing but was looking for the next thing . . . and assigned Justin the task of figuring out how to use the internet to generate quality leads. His office was right next to the sales floor, so he got fast feedback on how good a job he was doing.
In spring of 2006, Justin moved into his basement and blogged at least five days a week, trying to get the word out about digital marketing. By October, he hired his first part-time employee.
Justin says he always liked the idea of hiring people . . . because of the positive impact it would make on those individuals, their families, and on the community at large. But, planning and timing the growth of a company, especially when there is no outside funding, is a challenge. Justin explains, There are two classifications: 1) the revenue producers (sales, marketing, and 2) the internal administrative staff. He now has the confidence to hire for those internal functions when he perceives it is best for the company.
For “client-facing” employees, Justin looks at the current book of business and the pipeline to decide which functions to hire and when. The problem is in the timing. If he hires ahead of need, he may not have the cash flow to support those new hires. If he hires when everyone is swamped, the workload increases even more because the new employee needs to be trained. Cultural fit is paramount – but not intransigent. The agency’s employees are virtual due to Covid, the culture has changed, and, in the middle of all of this, Justin has been hiring.
Two things Justin notes as important when starting an agency: 1) Know what your process looks like. (He cites Marcus Lemonis’s “People Profit Process.”) and 2) Get some sales training early on. Sales plus process is key.
Justin can be reached on his agency’s website at: directom.com or on LinkedIn at Justin Seibert (S-E-I-B-E-R-T).
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Justin Seibert, President at Direct Online Marketing based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the podcast, Justin.
JUSTIN: Thanks for having me, Rob. Excited to be here.
ROB: Excited to have you here. The name of your agency is tremendously straightforward, but tell us how that points you, points all of us, to your superpower and what you do best as an agency.
JUSTIN: I love it. I realized going into this that I’m really horrible at picking out names for agencies, but the reason that we chose it was I believe in being very straightforward. I just want people to know what we’re good at doing. What I imagined this agency and what my strengths were and what I wanted to be able to offer to clients is about results, and not about being clever, not about being funny or winning awards. It was about how we could actually move ROI in a positive direction for them? So “Direct” was really important to be part of the name, and then “Online Marketing” just being what we specialize in.
If you fast forward to today, what we do really, really well is strategizing on how to drive quality traffic to our clients and then help them convert that traffic into leads that become sales. I hate saying this because it sounds so cliched, but clients see us as trusted partners, and that’s so important in this industry, as you’re aware, just because there’s so much snake oil out there. We want to be able to be that beacon for people that they can say, “Yes, we know that our agency has us covered, and they’re acting as an extension of our team.”
ROB: Makes perfect sense. One challenge that can happen that I’ve seen when you’re setting that expectation with a client who is coming to you because they expect results – that can mean different things to you and to a client unless you align on expectations. How do you set that initial engagement and the expectation that all the leads are not going to show up tomorrow, but they also shouldn’t be waiting a year for something to happen?
JUSTIN: I think it’s really important to get on the same page up front. I speak with a lot of people, our team speaks with even more people, and we turn down partnerships all the time just because we don’t feel it’s a good fit. We have a very long process, longer than some people would like. A lot of times it’s “Hey, can’t you just send us a price list or something like that?”, and we’re like, “How can we do that when we don’t understand what your goals are yet?”
So, we spend a lot of time to understand what their needs are, who they are, to then evaluate to see if we even believe we’re a good fit. Assuming that they still think it’s a match, then we continue down that process. And a lot of times, depending on the particular service we’re talking about, we are even sending them a projection range of what we think is realistic to see if that aligns. Sometimes it doesn’t, so they choose not to go with us; sometimes it doesn’t, and they rethink if this is even the right strategy for them. Sometimes it doesn’t align and they say, “Do we really need to rethink what our expectations are?”
Because when we haven’t done that, Rob, it’s exactly what you’re talking about where we get into it – we know from doing this all the time and knowing the industry and knowing what is reasonable that we may be hitting something really well, but it’s not what their expectations are. So we really try to get that up front as much as possible.
ROB: Totally makes sense. Even within this performance and driving leads market, there’s such a wide range of customers. You can look at anything from the medical profession and elective medical procedures to local services, plumbers and whatnot, all the way through to Software as a Service and almost bleeding into potentially high-end commerce. What sweet spots do you see for Direct Online Marketing? Is there a typical client that you find yourself engaged with?
JUSTIN: There is a typical client in terms of some respects. Number one, it’s a medium size business. A smaller size business, probably for the price of doing business with us, it’s not going to drive the value that they need. If it’s a larger business, we’re not moving the needle as much. We’re not being as impactful as we’d like to be. So, it’s that medium size business, it tends to be a good fit.
The more niched they are, the better. We typically tend to deal with clients that are the leader or the challenger brand within a particular niche, where if you talk to somebody on the street who isn’t familiar with that industry, they have no idea who the client is, but if they’re familiar with that group, they go, “Oh yeah, of course I know who that is.” We’ve worked with some really big brands, but that’s not common for us. What’s common is that market leader or the challenger in a medium size business.
When you’re talking industry, we’re all over the map. We purposefully made that decision when I started the agency that we weren’t going to specialize in one particular area. Again, there’s some common traits, but in terms of industry we do a lot with SaaS, Software as a Service. We do a lot in higher education. We do a strong bit in ecommerce retail. But outside of those areas, anything from manufacturing to finance to entertainment, all the way down the line. We’ve worked in dozens and dozens of different industries.
ROB: When you say higher education, I can’t help but obsess in a little bit on that. I would imagine at the onset of this pandemic and the first year of virtual for many of them, there’s been tactical adjustments. But when they’re looking ahead to 2021, what are you looking at for the education world, and strategically how they are setting themselves up to recruit that next class in such a pool of uncertainty?
JUSTIN: That’s where the partnership really comes in. I love this question, by the way. We have to understand, how are they adjusting? Depending on what they’re looking to do and depending on where they are geographically has a big impact on what their approach is going to look like.
I’m thinking through one client right now. They’re taking students in dorms this year. They are, for the most part, not doing anything but singles, and there’s more spacing. So, they had to find more housing and had to get really creative with what they were going to do there. Or they had to turn those students into virtual, or they had to turn them away. Fortunately, they were able to find some solutions for that.
Understanding what ground rules we have to work with is really important to understand that. I think the bigger thing within the industry is – and this has been coming for a little while now – “Am I getting the value out of the dollars I’m paying for higher education, particularly if I’m taking out student loans, which could be $60,000 per year?” It’s really imperative on the schools to be able to show the value they’re getting and what they’re able to do to help students post-graduation. I think that’s what the universities and the colleges are trying to convey right now, and we’re trying to do in terms of helping more.
ROB: It sounds like a good challenge. But to your point, this is a strategic challenge that has been underway for a while, and like so many things, it has been accelerated during this time. That makes so much sense.
If I believe your LinkedIn a little bit, it seems like you have been in this industry, in this business, for a little bit. Rewind us back to how Direct Online Marketing came to pass and what made you decide to do this instead of going to work for somebody else.
JUSTIN: I started getting my feet wet and really learning everything when I was living in Los Angeles. A company in the financial industry had hired me. This was back in 2001, very much the Wild, Wild West days still of digital. I was there for a few months, and they said, “We’ve been really, really successful in, of all things, long-form radio marketing. For us to grow, we need another marketing leg. We think it’s the internet. Go figure it out.”
I had no background in this whatsoever. This was brand new to me, like it was brand new to most people. What was really awesome – I had so much latitude to try things. If you remember this, for people that know the search engine days, this was back when it was goto.com. It was the first year of Google AdWords at the time. So, everything was brand spanking new.
But what was so instructional for me was that I sat right next to the sales floor. This was all about generating quality leads. If I was sending them bad leads – I’m looking at my numbers thinking, “Hey, I’m doing an awesome job,” but if they were getting bad leads, not only was I not producing and wasting their time, but then they would start to look at my leads as a waste of their time and not put the effort they needed to into those conversations.
So really getting that feedback from them on what I could do to keep the numbers up but also improve the quality of leads – and then really seeing the fruits of my labor, where if you looked at the sales board, I could see by source what was going in there. If we fast forward 4-½ years later, when I moved away from Los Angeles for family reasons, when I started with them, they were a $25 million a year company total in revenue. When I left in 2006, they were doing $35 million a year just attributable to paid search.
I don’t say that to brag. They had a tremendous, tremendous management team, they had an awesome sales force, it was a good market. But I bring that up because if you still remember back to 2006, as crazy as it seems today, people still weren’t sure if Google and digital marketing was really a thing or if it was something that was just a fad, the way that they saw the bubble burst back in ’99, 2000, 2001.
I had that knowledge that this was a real thing, and logically it makes sense. This is direct mail on steroids. I couldn’t have been any luckier to have that as my background for when I moved and then looked at my next opportunity.
ROB: Once you decided to go in on building this business, did you have any partners early on? Or was it just you and a card table in a closet coffee shop early on? What did it look like?
JUSTIN: Absolutely. It was me in my basement, trying to keep the kids and the dogs upstairs so I could do some work and go out there and hustle. I used to blog every day, literally at least five days a week. I had to do something to get us out there and to get known a little bit and build that up. That was in I guess April/May of 2006. By October, I hired my first employee that was part-time at the time, and got some really horrible office space, but it was the only one that was correctly priced. So, it worked out for my needs. Then went off to the races from there.
ROB: Excellent. Maybe from Day 1 you had a pretty good degree of confidence from your experience. At what point did it become evident that you were going to be doing this for a while and with more people involved?
JUSTIN: That’s a really good question. I think there’s two ways to approach it. Some of this is more apparent today with the advent of the solopreneur. I don’t think that model was quite as prevalent back then. But I could do that and be a contractor, or I could hire other people. One’s not better than the other; it’s just what fits you.
I like the idea of hiring people for a variety of reasons. One, when you look back at what my dream was, I really take a lot of pride in being able to employ people and to help them make their livelihoods and to add to the local community and to help support their families. I feel very blessed to be able to play some small part in those things. So that was part of it.
But part of it, too, was there are so many things in life that I am horrible at, or at least not very good at, that by being able to bring in people that are better in those areas than me and to be able to concentrate on the one or two things that I’m okay at was helpful.
And then the final thing was, do I ever want to be able to take a vacation or a sick day? Of course, as an entrepreneur, you don’t at the beginning. But do I want to be able to do those at some point? I really can’t if I’m just doing it on my own, or it’s a harder process. So, to build out a team – we have a tremendous one these days, and really, I’ve been lucky through the years with having really great people – that really was the right model for me and for DOM.
ROB: Along that journey, have there been any pivotal hires that you realize in hindsight really helped you scale beyond yourself?
JUSTIN: Yeah, there’s been a few things that have happened. One of the challenges with growing the business, especially if you’re not taking outside money, is you’re in this position of “Do I hire now or do I wait?” If you’re basically operating off of cash, you have to wait until you have the business to be there, so then you scramble to fill that position, get there, and then go on to the next spot. As you get bigger, then you’re putting real strains on your people that are already working to the bone as much as they can, and now they have to become less productive because they’re going to train somebody up and then move on from there
It’s been a constant battle for us. It’s been getting better now that we get larger and that we have a little bit more flexibility with the things that we do. But I guess for agency or just business owners in general, what I’d share is that there are stages of the business. There are certain things, like getting our operations in order, that I couldn’t really have somebody dedicated to for a long time. That’s the type of thing where they’re not being “productive,” even though they’re incredibly important to being productive for the agency and for our clients and everything else. Everybody had to take their own pieces of that.
I would say we’ve had a few different instances where it was great to be able to get to the next step. At the beginning of this year, we changed our model up once again and broke out a new department. So we’re always looking at those areas. But I’ve been really, really lucky to have so many tremendous people that work here because without them, none of the success is possible.
ROB: That’s excellent. You mentioned outside funding. Very, very few agencies are able to raise outside funding, and arguably it doesn’t really make sense to, either, in most contexts. You mentioned within that cash flow and the challenge of stressing the team, when to hire. You have some people on the team now; how have you resolved the decision of when it’s time to add people or when it’s time to stand pat with the team that you have?
JUSTIN: If you look historically, sometimes you have your hand forced and sometimes you have that situation for yourself. When I had a little less gray hair than I do today, I remember we were a smaller company – I would guess we were maybe eight people, nine people at the time. I don’t remember the exact number, but I had two key people that were managers of the company. I got notice from the one woman in the afternoon, let’s say on a Thursday, and I go to sit to talk with the other one Friday morning, and she’s like, “Well, I have more bad news to give you.”
So, within 12 hours, I had all of my management team give notice. That was a scary proposition, and we had to learn from that and what we could do, but we got through it. I would say, as tremendous as those people are, we’re better off today because of the learning from that.
We’re at a point now, though, that there’s two classifications. There’s the people that are in some way revenue producers from the standpoint of they’re in sales, in marketing, or there’s some other need that’s not a client-producing function. Maybe a manager of a department, something along those lines. Where I’ve gotten now, I have enough flexibility that when I’ve identified that, I’m no longer scared. I just say, “I need it. This is what’s best for the company. I’m going to go do it.”
On the client execution side of things, that very much is more a function of, what does our book of business look like today? What does our pipeline look like? And then based on that, knowing which functions we need to hire when.
ROB: You mentioned having two managers leave quickly – all of your managers, in fact.
JUSTIN: Yeah.
ROB: What do you do in that scenario? You can elevate internal staff, you can try and make a quick hire – although sometimes that doesn’t work out so well – you can just eat the pain for a while and figure it out yourself. What path through did you take, and what would you do differently now, maybe?
JUSTIN: I want to think through what I would do differently now, but let me answer the first part of that, which is a combination of factors. One, leaning heavily on some outside resources, from mentors to HR teams to other people that could give advice and help us get through it. One is putting my head down in the sand and just getting through it until we can get through those different pieces. I think you always have to take a step back and evaluate, why are you there? What do you need to do differently to avoid these issues in the future? Part of it can be through hires.
But really, that was a turning point, along with going through a program with Goldman Sachs and Babsen College called the 10,000 Small Businesses. I don’t want to derail, but I came to this epiphany all around the same time of how important culture was. And shame on me for not understanding that before. I had kind of taken the path of “I don’t want to force culture down people’s throats. I really care about these people in a very deep way, but I don’t want them to feel like work is their life. I want them to have a work-life balance. So, if they don’t want to share things with me or the office, I don’t want to force that on them.” I didn’t understand how much people were looking for that culture and how important that was.
When we look at the things that led to our success and all of our growth in the last 6 years, fixing the culture to now where we have a really strong culture – and it makes hiring easier, it makes retention easier, it makes our outcome better – has been such a huge part of what we do.
ROB: I definitely understand that desire not to overwork people. But also, I think people want to come to work. They want to like where they work. They want to like the people they work with. It sounds like that’s something you’ve been able to form over time. What aspects of culture have shifted during this season of people largely being virtual, and what things have stayed the same, but maybe in different ways you didn’t quite expect originally?
JUSTIN: I was really worried about that. I think there were a couple things that helped us out. One is the fact that we have such a great team already, and we have people that are bought in and interested. The other thing – we added a lot more communication. Everybody was already used to Zoom; we’d been using that with our clients forever, so those things were pretty easy. And we’re a digital marketing agency. We’re not a manufacturer. So, switching to home wasn’t as challenging as it would be for other people.
But I think one of the things that helped us out, based on some comments and some feedback I received from the team – I think they were really appreciative of the fact that they weren’t getting furloughed, they weren’t getting their salaries reduced, and in fact they actually saw that we were hiring. We were growing and adding more people during a very turbulent time when everybody’s world was turned upside down.
I think some of those things played in our favor and didn’t really have anything to do with me figuring things out. But the big one was really just increased communication.
I will tell you one of my big worries still is I believe there’s benefit to people being in the same office and bumping into each other and overhearing conversations, and that’s gone right now, for the most part. Our offices are open; some people are choosing to come in. We’ve left it to them for now to decide whether they feel comfortable with that or not. We have a few people coming in. Most are staying home. But I look forward to getting to a point when we can continue to have some of those in-person conversations.
ROB: Absolutely. Likewise. I definitely miss that camaraderie and the knowing each other in that casual way that comes from being in the office.
You mentioned a little bit the lessons learned from that management shakeup that you had, but what are some other things as you reflect on your time running Direct Online Marketing that you might consider doing a little bit differently if you were starting from zero?
JUSTIN: Looking back, January 1, I always say “I can’t believe how stupid I was last year.” I am constantly on the move for how I can get a little bit better and how I can learn a little bit more. The one that I’ll say from an agency – and then I’ll give another one that I talk about typically with entrepreneurs – from an agency perspective, I really didn’t get how important operations was, which I sort of touched on before. It’s “We’re marketers. We’re so smart. We just figure this stuff out.” That’s a really good recipe for letting things fall through the cracks and not being consistent.
I would just say understanding what that process is going to look like – start out with it from the beginning. If you’re not one of those people, like me, that is – I’m not the person that likes setting up processes. I can do it, but it’s not what I’m naturally attuned to. But spend the time and do that. Very much the Marcus Lemonis’s “People Profit Process.” That’s the process part of that.
The other one that I talk about frequently is I wish I would have done sales training earlier. What people don’t realize when they come from another office, they worked for someone else, to then starting their own endeavors – whether you like it or not, you’re a salesperson now. You are out there building the business. Sales has such a dirty connotation in our world. People don’t like sales. They think of used car sales. But sales is really, ideally, just providing value and providing aid to somebody and being able to match that.
We don’t do hard sales. If you’re a good fit, we’d love to talk with you. If you’re not, good luck. I hope you find somebody that’s a better fit for you and hope you are going to be there. The process of sales training is just learning some techniques that work for you to make sure that you’re aligning with the person, you’re understanding what their challenges are and how you might be able to help. The business could’ve grown much faster had I done sales training earlier.
ROB: Was there any particular sales training that you went through that you found effective, or is it really almost anything is better than almost nothing?
JUSTIN: I would say the latter. I’ve gone through a few different ones. I’ve had my team go through some different ones, and I think you pick the pieces of things that you like out there. I think Sandler is a pretty common one that I got a lot out of, that my team has gotten a lot out of.
But if you look at it, I think there’s an emphasis of finding the pain, and to me it has more of a negative connotation when you think about it that way. It’s true you have to have the person understand what their challenges are and how you can help them, but I’m more of a positive person. I try to be. So I’d rather orient myself around what’s my solution to help them. That’s why I say, again, I think it’s great – some people are diehard advocates. It’s a wonderful system. For me, I take about 95% of it and just tweak a few things.
ROB: Sandler does come up a lot. I think what you’ve hinted at – a lot of marketers find themselves much more relational sellers rather than the process and pain. It can feel a little bit more formulaic than maybe an entrepreneurial marketer.
JUSTIN: Sorry to interrupt, but on that front, I think the formulaic part is really important because there’s certain things you need to do. My sales process has become much longer than many other agencies out there, but I’ve found that it’s really important for me to do because when I skip those steps, I’m not getting the right solution that the person needs or we’re not aligning on it.
So, I do think it’s really important to develop your formula, whatever it is, and practice it enough that it’s natural. I understand why people don’t like that idea, but I think that if you’re doing those things, it still can really help.
ROB: Absolutely, yeah. Feeling natural versus unnatural is perhaps one of the bigger obstacles that people do have. Justin, when people want to find you and they want to find Direct Online Marketing, where should they go to track you down?
JUSTIN: Easiest thing is to go to our website, directom.com. I’d love to connect with people on LinkedIn. That’s where I’m most active on social media. If you look me up, it’s pretty simple. I’m sure if they’re listening to this, they’ll see the spelling of my name. It’s S-E-I-B-E-R-T. I would love to connect with people there.
ROB: Sounds great. Justin, congratulations on the journey so far and the success so far and, heck, even staying in business through one and now arguably two recessions. That alone is something, but to do that with a team around you is quite a thing, and to go through so many transitions, starting from the world of Google ads being surprising to people to having to master so many more channels just to serve a customer well. Congratulations on everything so far, Justin. Thank you for sharing your story.
JUSTIN: Rob, thank you so much.
ROB: Be well. Thanks.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Twenty-nine years ago, Alvaro Psevoznik, CEO of DM Agency, was a 19-year-old Argentinian law student, designing flyers for hospitality clients in exchange for admissions into nightclubs. Alvaro found himself frustrated with Argentinian politics – which is plagued with fiscal instability, political corruption, de-motivational handouts for a large percentage of the (unemployed) citizenry, and a cycle of massive financial crises every 5 or 10 years. Alvaro’s experience was, no matter how hard one worked and saved, bank accounts could disappear overnight. This constant uproar, Alvaro says, makes it hard for people in South American countries to plan and work toward a future.
Alvaro moved to the U.S. in 2002 and went back to hospitality marketing. He claims that early adversity provided lessons that helped him survive the 2007-2008 recession (which closed some of his small- and mid-sized clients’ businesses) and prepared him for today’s Covid-19 challenges. In this interview, Alvaro talks about the importance of positive messaging, adaptability, and being “transparent” when faced with crises. He emphasizes that changing Covid-19 “rules” requires fast response.
Today, DM Agency is a comprehensive, full-service, one stop shop for digital marketing solutions. Alvaro explains that there are costs associated with trying to provide a wide range of client services—you either risk people discovering that you are not as “good at everything” as you claimed, or you find yourself supporting an expensive, diverse “stable” of top talent in order to be able to “deliver.” If he were to start over today, he says he’d focus on specific industries and doing only what he was best at doing – lead generation through online advertising.
Most DM clients are restaurants or hotels, but DM has also started to expand into the Esports -- organized, online, multiplayer video game competitions that produce $2-3 billion a year through advertising and sponsorship. Esports, Alvaro says, is huge. DM has virtual offices concentrating on Esports in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and South Florida. Alvaro has created “splinter” agency entities – pretty much the same staff/different “labeling” – that focus on specific unrelated industries in order to avoid such questions as, “What would a restaurant marketer know about marketing windows?”
Agencies often advertise that they are “bilingual. Alvaro says that DM is bi-cultural. Speaking Spanish is different from thinking in Spanish or Latino. DM understands that the Spanish community in the US is not a homogenous group – the culture of origin varies significantly by geography across the US. The agency divides Hispanic marketing into four regions: Mexico and North America, Central America, South America, and the South Florida Cuban community.
Aside from South Florida, how do cultural differences play out across the United States? New Jersey, New York, Chicago have strong Puerto Rican communities with some Mexicans and Dominicans. Mexicans as a majority are located more on the West Coast – Arizona, Texas, and California. Because the words, the accents, the thinking patterns, and the cultures in each community are different, marketing needs to be different. Alvaro hires Hispanic staff that mirrors each targeted audience – so the messages “rings true.” Google translation does not work. Neither does human translation if the culture, vocabulary, and thinking patterns of the translator are not the same as those of the target audience. Authenticity cannot be faked.
Alvaro can be reached on his company’s website – DM agency, as in digital marketing agency – dmagency.us
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Alvaro Psevoznik, the CEO of DM Agency based in Hollywood, Florida. Welcome to the podcast.
ALVARO: Hey, Rob. Thank you very much for having me.
ROB: Yeah, absolutely great to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about DM Agency and what makes DM great?
ALVARO: DM Agency is the conclusion of 29 years of evolution, learning, growing, going back to small – especially after this pandemic – making mistakes, and many other things. Fortunately, good things, I’d say. When I was thinking, “What makes us different?” I said, “Too many things.” But I want to put in three things.
Full service – I mean we offer for real a full service solution, a one-stop digital marketing solution to our clients. We can help most industries, but we realized a few years ago that we are really good and we have a lot of experience with hospitality. Mostly restaurants and some hotels. Now we’re stepping in the Esports niche and we are doing really good things in that niche.
We are a bicultural agency. It doesn’t mean that we are bilingual. You can have anybody in your company speaking Spanish but thinking in Spanish or thinking in Latino is a very different thing, and we are different because of that. We’ve got this mindset and we understand the Latino community, the U.S. Hispanic community – which is not Mexicans only, like a lot of marketing managers or marketing directors think.
These are the three things that make us different than most of the other digital agencies that I see in the market.
ROB: That’s fascinating, especially with that “not bilingual, but bicultural” distinction there. And for certain, the U.S. Latino population is not homogeneous in any way. How do you even think about bridging the gap? Because you could even get into many, many cultures beyond the Latino community. How do you find that messaging that transcends maybe some of the different cultures? There are different countries, and each country is different. We think our country is different; you mentioned you’re from Argentina. Argentina is different from Mexico, Mexico is different from Cuba, and on and on and on. How do you balance it? Because obviously, many marketers are not going to go in for a 20-culture campaign most of the time.
ALVARO: Yeah. It’s not a 20-culture either. Mostly we divide Latin America when it comes to marketing let’s say into four regions: Mexico and North America, Central America, South America, and there’s a fourth one that applies mostly to South Florida, which is the Cuban community. When we build content for South Florida, where you also have Dominicans and you’ve got a lot of Mexicans as well and you’ve got a lot of Venezuelans and Colombians, the job is a little more difficult. But since most of the community are from Cuba, we focus on Cuban-oriented content. We’re used to it. I moved to Miami 18 years ago, and the first thing I heard in Spanish was a Cuban accent and Cuban words. So, we got used to it.
New Jersey, New York, Chicago is a different thing. You’ve got a lot of Puerto Rican community mixed with some Mexicans and Dominicans. So, the message is different, the words are different, the accent, if you do some video content, is going to be different. And then you’ve got the Mexicans, which are located mostly on the West Coast – Arizona, Texas, and California, of course. The message is not that complicated when you have to target these audiences.
Now, I was talking about accents and words; there is also a cultural thing that you have to consider when you are building a message. These days we are focused mostly on digital and mostly on social media. I don’t want to go deeper into this, but I’m going to just give you a quick example. When we build a campaign for the West Coast, when we know that most of the audience is first, second, and probably third generation Mexicans, we hire Mexican copywriters, Mexican voiceovers. We adapt the message to the community or to the target audience by using people with the same background.
We do the same thing here in Miami and South Florida, and we apply the same system in other markets, and it works pretty good.
ROB: It’s sensible, but it would be completely opaque to somebody who didn’t know how to break it down so clearly into four cultural segments. I think that’s really, really fascinating there.
I want to highlight also something you mentioned about your tenure in the industry. We are here – I don’t know where we are in the midst of this COVID thing anymore. Are we in the middle? Who knows? But it is August of 2020. With your time in the industry, this is not the first set of economic headwinds you’ve seen where you’ve probably had clients react, you’ve had to think about changing tactics, changing messaging. How many times would you say you’ve navigated business through a downturn at least kind of like this?
ALVARO: I’m laughing here because it was more than once. [laughs] Going back in the day, I started 29 years ago, when I was 19. Argentina is a market that goes up and down every 5 to 10 years. You’ve got a huge crisis every 5, maybe 10 years if you’re lucky. So, I’ve seen a couple of crises in the market.
But moving forward to the States, I had to deal with the 2008-2009 crisis. It was not only a recession; it was a huge crisis. I remember a lot of my clients went out of business. They just closed their doors. We had to downsize our company and adapt the message. Back in ’08, it was the beginning of social media, and we were exploring that niche and that industry. I remember that we had to adapt the message to something very positive. People were doing really bad in those days. A lot of people lost their homes, lost their jobs. That was a huge impact, especially for mid-size companies and small size companies back in the day.
The way we did it back in ’08-’09, and now because of the COVID situation, was being very transparent. You’ve heard, Rob, this message, “We are in this together,” and it’s true. We are in this together. At some point we were so tired of reading and listening on the radio, “we are in this together,” but at the end of the day, we have to adapt to the situation and understand that there’s a lot of last-minute changes to do in your communication in businesses.
I’m going to give you a quick example. We work with a lot of restaurants. Here in Miami, we got a lot of back and forth with regulations after COVID. “You can open up to 50% of capacity”; 48 hours later, they closed the restaurants again. It was chaos. We had to adapt to that.
I feel the frustration of every restaurant and hotel owner, and I also understand, and my people understood, the frustration on the other side – customers, making plans for a wedding, for a bar mitzvah, for a vacation, and being frustrated. This is when we as an agency had to adapt our message and be very close not only to our clients, but to their customers as well.
ROB: You mentioned a greater frequency of downturn in Argentina. For those of us who are not from that orbit, what’s the difference maybe between the occasional big messes we have here, and it sounds like a more frequent – is it even more expected, perhaps, in Argentina?
ALVARO: Yeah, the biggest word that synthesizes everything is corruption, like most countries in Latin America, some countries in Africa. Argentina is a big country. It’s a rich country with poor people and rich politicians. I don’t want to make this interview a political message about Argentina, but I think it’s the situation that a lot of countries in Latin America have to deal with. Something worse than Argentina is what happened in Venezuela in the last few years. You’ve got a huge percentage of the population below the poverty line.
In Argentina now – we used to have a populist government that gave all kinds of food stamps and all kinds of help to people. At the end of the day, you’ve got a government that is supporting a lot of people that are not working. A huge percentage of the population are not working because they get a check every month in the mail. That’s what makes Argentina a country that doesn’t give you the chance to plan long term.
That’s one of the reasons I decided to move to the States back in 2002 and start from scratch. I remember December 2001, the government froze everybody’s bank accounts. Business and personal accounts were frozen. If you had $100, you were done. If you had a million dollars, “I’m sorry, but it’s in the bank. We don’t know when we’re going to return that money.”
That’s why when you move and you start doing business in markets like the U.S. market, it’s a completely different thing. You can plan ahead. Even if you get a pandemic, even if you are in the middle of this situation that we were talking about in 2008-09, the recovery is much faster than any other country I would say probably in the world. That’s one of the things that I love about this country. We can recover. We will recover. And this is not a political statement. It’s a fact. We’re going to recover sooner than later.
And I agree with you, we don’t know when this pandemic is going to stop, when the effects of the pandemic will cease. If the pandemic probably stops, I don’t know, in November – I don’t think so, but let’s say November – but the effects are going to be long term, especially in a couple of industries that I have to deal with: hospitality and tourism. It’s going to be really, really hard.
ROB: Yeah, restaurants may not be the same for a while. But there may certainly also, I think, be fresh opportunity for the ones who really iterate on their model. I appreciate the broad perspective you bring on Argentina and those differences and the downturns that you see there due to corruption. I don’t feel like it’s political. It is certainly helpful.
I do want to take a turn towards some of the aspirational things you have going on in your world. You mentioned when we were talking beforehand that you have not just DM Agency, but you have a little bit of an empire growing. Tell us about the sister/sibling agencies that you have to DM and the broader marketing ecosystem that’s on your mind on an average day.
ALVARO: Empire is such a big word but thank you very much. I like it. [laughs] When I was doing this in Argentina during the ’90s, my first customers were restaurants. The work that we were doing was really good. I had no marketing education back in the day; I was just a law student designing flyers to get free admissions into nightclubs and free drinks. Our first customers over there were restaurants. So, when I started again my business, now in the United States, back in 2002, my first customers were restaurants.
A few years ago, I realized that half of my clients were in that niche and the other half was getting confused. “Hey, you’re working for a lot of restaurants, and I sell impact windows and doors,” which is a huge niche here in South Florida. “I don’t trust a guy that works for restaurants to reach people looking for windows.” I realized that I needed a second brand.
It’s not a second agency; it’s almost the same team except for a couple of professionals that are focused, like myself, in the food and beverage industry. We created Foodie – which is a social media term that came out a few years ago – we created Foodie Restaurant Agency, basically offering the same services, a one-stop shop of graphic design and branding, social media, Google ads, Facebook ads, reputation management – which is very important for restaurants these days.
Then, with a couple of partners, and after getting a couple of licenses to operate in Latin America and the U.S. Hispanic market, we started a third brand called EsportsHQ. As you know, Rob, Esports is a huge $2-3 billion a year industry when it comes to advertising and sponsoring.
That’s basically one big team under the DM Agency umbrella and a few small teams specialized in restaurants for the Foodie Restaurant Agency and Esports for the EsportsHQ Agency. That’s how I distributed my team and our marketing. When we have to market ourselves to restaurants, we go as Foodie Restaurant Agency, and the same thing with the Esports agency.
ROB: When did you start in Esports?
ALVARO: We started back in October 2019. A friend of mine who works in a big company told me, “Hey, there’s something big called Esports.” I said, “That’s gaming. That’s what my son does when he’s bored.” He told me, “It’s way more than that.” He introduced me to the industry, and he told me there’s a huge opportunity for the U.S. Hispanic market.
As you know, there are two budgets. A national company is going to have two different budgets – when it comes to advertising, I mean: one for the general market and one for the Hispanic market. When it comes to TV, for Univision or Telemundo or all the radio stations in Spanish. That advertising money comes from a separate budget.
So, he told me there’s a huge opportunity for the U.S. Hispanic market and also for the Latin American market. I couldn’t do it by myself, so I invited him to join me. I got a couple of customers in Colombia and in Argentina, and we started this company, EsportsHQ. Because of the pandemic, some things were a little delayed, but so far we’ve got virtual offices in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and here in South Florida.
We are closing a couple of deals for Q4 and Q1 2021 with big brands that understand that you’ve got a huge number of gamers, but you have a much bigger, way bigger, number of viewers. There’s a lot of people that, instead of watching TV or watching a movie on Netflix, they are watching games now. Instead of a football game or a soccer game, they are watching people playing Fortnite or League of Legends, and there’s a huge market over there, and we are after that.
ROB: I was going to ask what the key games were right now. League and Fortnite. And then what is the marketing opportunity? Are they sponsoring teams? Are they sponsoring streaming broadcasts? What is the advertising opportunity?
ALVARO: They are sponsoring everything. There are brands sponsoring teams. They’re sponsoring players. I always use this analogy with soccer, which is my favorite sport. Or basketball. You as a brand sponsor a team. You can sponsor a player. Let’s say Adidas. They are sponsoring soccer players with their shoes or their clothes. You can run ads during a game broadcast. You can place ads on the commercials. It’s the same thing on Esports. When you are a sponsor, you can put your money in all of these different fields.
That’s what we are doing with a couple of companies we’re dealing with. They are going to sponsor a team that is huge in Mexico. They won several tournaments all over the world. They are going to sponsor and buy airtime on Twitch, which is the most relevant platform for gaming. They also want to have their own tournament, to be not the sponsors of the tournament – the owners of the tournament. This is how big Esports is becoming these days, Rob.
ROB: Wow. When you get into it, it sounds more like sports than you would ever imagine, even all the way down to the equipment. I have a friend who’s been running a company for a while called Control Freak, and all they make is add-ons for video game console controllers to make you better at playing Esports. When he first told me, I thought it couldn’t possibly be a business, or a good one, but it certainly has been for them. It’s a big, big ecommerce business.
ALVARO: It’s a big, big business. A few months ago, we were writing down a list of everything that is related to Esports, and I think we got like 95 or so different things, from sponsoring a game to mousepads. I’m serious. Mousepads, keyboards, headsets – you name it. There’s opportunity for every single industry in this niche. Like I said, it’s between $2-3 billion a year on advertising only. You didn’t hear that 2 or 5 years ago, right? This is huge right now, Rob.
ROB: Wow. I heard it from your mouth, and I believe you. Alvaro, when you look at the time you’ve been in business, you’ve got a good bit of experience. What are some things you might do differently if you were starting over today? Not that you would want to do that; I’m sure you’ve earned what you’ve earned.
ALVARO: We are a full-service agency, so we’ve got all kinds of services. If I could start over, I would focus on two or three. I can’t do it now because most of our clients like us because we give them everything under one roof. I could say now a virtual roof. But we give them a one-stop solution, so it would be really, really hard for us to change that.
But if I could do it from scratch, I would say “I want to be the best on this or that service. If you need those other services, we can introduce you to our strategic partner or we can refer you to somebody else, we can work with your agency for this or that service.” That’s one of the things that I would change if I could.
One of the learnings that I have and I’d like to share with everybody is focus on one or two niches. I know we can do ads for window specialists, we can do random campaigns for dentists, jewelry stores, liquor stores, hotels – at the end of the day, it’s so complicated because they are so different. Those industries are very different from each other. Even if you use Google ads for all of them, even if you post on Facebook for all of them, the industries are so different and the audience is different.
So, one of the things I always tell my colleagues – even we were talking earlier about my presentations at some universities. One of the things I told one of the guys that was starting his agency at the age of 22, almost the same age I was when I started back in the ’90s, is by showing that you know everything and you can do everything, you won’t keep a customer. You may seduce the customer. You may sign the customer. But in a 3-6 month period, they’re going to realize that you are not good at everything.
Or, like in my case, we pay a high price to be good at everything we do – because we are good at branding, at social media, at reputation. The high price is that I have to have very expensive human resources to have the best people on each different department.
So, make it simple. Focus on one, maybe two services that are related to each other, and keep it there. You’re going to do great. That’s what I would do if I could do it again.
ROB: Where would you focus today and why?
ALVARO: That’s a good question. I wasn’t ready for this one, Rob. [laughs] I would focus on lead generation through online advertising. I would leave social media – of course, I would use social media as an advertising platform, but I would leave social media content and engagement, reputation, web design, I would leave everything out of the picture if I could. I think this is where I would focus.
ROB: What’s appealing about those particular areas right now? Is it you know how to find the expertise? Is it opportunity to differentiate in those areas?
ALVARO: I think as an agency owner, it’s a very good source of income. When you bring your customers solid and qualified leads to their businesses, they pay very well. They don’t mind paying. The reason I would do that only is because of the good income that I would get from that.
ROB: Got it. So, at this point, you know what the margins are in different lines of business; you know if it’s just creative, do people know how to pay more for that? Maybe they don’t. But they definitely know how to pay for twice as many leads.
ALVARO: Yeah. When you bring value to your customers, they don’t mind paying. A very good lead and a qualified lead is value. That’s what they need. Out of the restaurant industry, of the few customers that are not in that niche, we work for a company that sells and installs impact windows and doors. They were struggling with three or four different agencies, and the problem was that – yeah, the signs were nice, the website was cool, everything was okay, but they were not getting leads.
When they came to us, they said, “Hey, we like everything that we got, but we have zero leads. Nobody calls our phones. What can you guys do?” So, we took over the account. That was almost 4 years ago. We built a strategy for them, and we understood where the problem was. I don’t want to go deep into that, but the thing is, we created a strategy, we understood the problem, we did our market research to understand the industry because we were not familiar with that niche, and it’s been over 3 years that we are bringing results to these guys.
What do I mean by results? Leads. The website is there. It’s cool, it’s nice. The designs are nice. The content that we put for them on social media is okay. But they are getting the leads they’re after. And especially during this pandemic, when everybody was downgrading their budgets, I told them, “Hey, do what I’m doing with my agency. I doubled my advertising budget. You do the same. If it doesn’t work out, I don’t know how, but I’m going to pay you back.”
So, these guys went from around ten grand a month to $22,000 a month, and guess what? It paid off. They had to hire more people to work for them. It really worked. So, lead generation, when it’s done in the right way, with a strategy and understanding the market, understanding the culture – because by the way, we did campaigns in Spanish and English. Not only translated from English to Spanish, but talking to people in their language, not doing just a translation. You know what I mean.
ROB: Yeah, I get it.
ALVARO: It works. When you understand the market and you tell them what they want to hear, and you come, of course, with a good offer, like affordable windows and doors, there’s no doubt that it’s going to work out.
ROB: It probably felt like a disadvantage for a while, but such an advantage now, coming from your own background – you’re here and you can find people with an expertise in the American market any day of the week, but to find people with expertise in the Latino market that want to work for someone for the right reasons, you have that credibility naturally. I’m sure it’s a hiring advantage.
ALVARO: Yeah, it is an advantage, and our customers – I am so thankful that they understand that we are not just a translator. You can use Google Translate. I’ve seen actually a lot of things in Spanish that were translated with Google Translate or from somebody who speaks Spanish in the office, but it’s translating. It’s not creating the content in Spanish and for that market. It’s a huge advantage, definitely.
ROB: Fantastic. Alvaro, when people want to find you and the DM Agency family, where should they go to find you?
ALVARO: Very simple. DM, as in digital marketing: dmagency.us.
ROB: Excellent. Thank you very much for joining us today and sharing your broad journey and experience across bicultural marketing, Esports, hospitality, and so much more. It’s quite a journey.
ALVARO: Thank you, Rob. I really appreciate it. I enjoyed it, and I hope we can do this again in the future.
ROB: Sounds great. Let’s find a good time. I’ll catch you soon. Be well.
ALVARO: Thank you.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Melissa Libby, owner of Melissa Libby & Associates (MLA), started her career in hospitality. Today, her friends call her the Restaurant Whisperer
In this interview, Melissa talks about the challenges restaurants have faced in the face of Covid-19, the changes yet to come, and the lessons she has learned in her 27 years of restaurant marketing. In recent months, MLA has helped its clients pivot to curbside delivery, takeout, and/or to serving different retail markets. Some of the adaptations? Restaurants have:
- Started low-overhead ghost kitchens/pop-ups that provide different menus from what is available in brick-and-mortar restaurants
- Converted parking lots into patios for outdoor dining
- Elevated curbside packaging and pickup to elegant “experiences.”
- Started selling off their wine cellars, offering some great wines at good prices.
Melissa advises, to further support your local restaurant, “Tip well.”.
Because restaurants typically do not have a lot of money, they value public and community relations over traditional advertising. As restaurants open back up, which clients are most likely to return for dining “in”? Turns out demographics provide no clue. Dining in is the more profitable option . . . but it’s tough to figure out who to target with the “come back in” messages. Each individual will have his or her own level of comfort and timing for when it “feels safe.”
Melissa notes that “online ordering technology is glitchy.” She has seen some improvement already and thinks it will quickly evolve to something “way better, very quickly.” Third party delivery services take a significant cut of the food delivered. So, she says, order from the restaurant, and pick it up yourself.
Melissa lauds the Georgia Restaurant Association for lobbying to get the necessary changes made to help Georgia’s restaurants survive.
When Melissa talks about the early days of her business, she says that she did not plan for success. She did not ask “What do I do if I get more clients than I can handle,” she asked, “What am I going to do if I fail?” She feels she would have done better to plan for success and to prepare for success. Melissa used a siloed PR business staffing model until she figured out that did not work for her. She then divided her staff up by what they liked to do best and where they excelled. This made her staff happier, and her organization more resilient. Now, when an employee leaves the agency, the body of knowledge connected to a client remains intact because everyone in the agency has been working with that client.
Melissa can be reached on her agency’s website at: ThinkMLA.com.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Melissa Libby. Melissa is the owner of Melissa Libby & Associates based in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to the podcast, Melissa.
MELISSA: Thank you, Rob.
ROB: It’s fantastic to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about MLA and MLA’s superpowers?
MELISSA: All right. MLA is 27 years old, based in Atlanta. Our superpower is restaurant marketing. My friends call me the Restaurant Whisperer. [laughs] That’s what we do. We help restaurants get business and keep business.
ROB: It’s quite a time to be thinking about restaurant business, because here we are in – what month is it? August, I think? I have to check my calendar – of 2020. We are still in various stages of COVID-19 lockdown. So, in this time, in August 2020, what are you seeing/doing/hearing when it comes to restaurant marketing?
MELISSA: Well, it’s a strange new world, that’s for sure. It’s changed over the past few months of what we’ve been doing, and it continues to change as things happen. But it all comes down to getting the message out to the people who want to support a restaurant, want to dine at a restaurant, or want to have takeout. We’ve helped our clients pivot to curbside or takeout or a whole different retail market. Whatever they need to do to stay in business and stay afloat, we help them with that and help them get the word out to people. And then as Georgia reopened and people were able to dine in at a restaurant, we started getting the word out about that.
What’s interesting from a marketing perspective, and something that I hadn’t really thought about – you can’t pick a demographic and say, “Okay, this demographic feels comfortable walking in and dining in a restaurant and this one doesn’t, so we have to focus on this.” You can’t say, “Older people don’t want to dine in a restaurant, so let’s market to the younger people” because that’s just not the case. What I’ve found is that there are people in every demographic that feel comfortable dining in and in every demographic that don’t. It’s an extremely personal decision, so it’s been really, really hard to figure out who those people are and how we get to them. Because with the dine-in, that is going to be the more profitable avenue for the restaurant.
There’s been a lot of that going on. A lot of messaging, a lot of safety messaging to make people feel comfortable, a lot of internal messaging to the staff, a lot of website writing, a lot of social media message crafting. It’s just been really, really challenging.
ROB: It’s interesting that you mention the dine-in diner as being more profitable for the restaurant, because I am a big fan of restaurants. I am a big fan of good restaurants. I am a big fan of many of the restaurants that show up on your website.
Even from early on in COVID – I think I felt like I was trying to do them a solid by doing pickup, but even continuing to do so, because I am one of those folks who’s probably not going to dine in at a restaurant. But what can I do as a pickup order diner to help with the profitability of a restaurant versus maybe what someone dining in and sitting down is doing for them to make them a better customer?
MELISSA: Definitely picking up instead of ordering through a third party delivery service is certainly a help to the restaurant because the third party delivery services take a pretty significant cut of the price. So, if you can go and pick it up, that’s what you want to do. If you don’t want to dine in, do that.
Now in Georgia, they’re about to let restaurants sell alcohol, so if you can order your beer or your wine – a lot of restaurants have cocktail kits – anything like that helps them. I have several clients that are selling their wine, basically, their wine cellar. And these are amazing wines that you can get at a really great price. So, do that, tip well. That’s what you can do to help. I feel like with dine-in, they get that alcohol order that they’re not going to usually get with the takeout, and they also obviously have the service staff who receive tips, the people that wait on you. So that’s what you can do to help.
And don’t get me wrong; all of my clients are very, very grateful for the people that are coming, even if they’re not coming to dine in. They’re grateful for them. So please keep it up.
Another thing – and I should’ve mentioned this – everyone is doing outdoor seating now. So that might be your gateway one day when you’re ready to dining back in, to go sit on a patio somewhere. People are turning their parking lots into patios. They’re doing anything they can to get some patio seating, and people are loving it, even as hot as it is here.
ROB: I know some places have given a temporary reprieve on allowing restaurants to sell alcohol and also in terms of compromising what is allowed for outdoor seating. Are the alcohol sales becoming something more permanent that is being permitted for pickup?
MELISSA: No, it’s COVID specific. It would be great if they would make it permanent, and I guess it’s a possibility, but that has not been discussed.
ROB: It seems like it would take perhaps – and I don’t know this industry as well from the side that you see it from – it seems like it would take a more potent restaurant lobby than maybe has formed up to now. Or is there a stronger restaurant lobby that is forming in recent years to help represent – because independent restaurants just don’t have the same leverage that let’s say a large chain has.
MELISSA: Yeah. The Georgia Restaurant Association is absolutely amazing, and they are our lobbying group. I don’t know if you recall that we got the Sunday Brunch Bill passed. It used to be you couldn’t drink alcohol until 12:30 on Sunday, and now I think it’s 10:30 or 11:00 or something. That took like 3 years or more. It’s ridiculous. It takes forever to get these things through. But the Georgia Restaurant Association and Karen Bremer, who’s the head, they are big-time our advocates from the restaurant community standpoint. They have been instrumental in getting all of these things to happen.
ROB: That’s good to hear.
MELISSA: They are definitely representing everyone. They really, really are.
ROB: When all this started, I’m sure you had some clients who were already doing online ordering, some who resisted it very much at the onset, probably some who flipped over, maybe some holdouts. What were the stages of technology enablement that you’ve seen across your client portfolio?
MELISSA: It was very interesting to watch that. Anybody that was already doing online ordering immediately took it up a notch and they were great. And then you have fine dining restaurants like Aria and Umi, and they’re like, “How am I going to do takeout? How can you take out sushi?” It goes against everything that they have ever dreamed of for their restaurant. Then a couple of weeks go by and they’re like, “Yeah, we’ve got to figure this out.”
And they did. In the case of Umi, they got beautiful packaging and they really figured out a way to create the Umi experience, even insofar as how you drive up and how you’re greeted and how you receive your food. Everything about it is very Umi-like, and it’s probably some of the more expensive takeout you’ll ever get in your life. Umi has a broad menu that you can choose from. Aria took a different stance and they do two choices a day, and they post their menu every single day of what’s tonight’s menu. Some people get Aria three or four times a week because it’s different every night. They’ve got a beautiful curbside pickup.
I guess we probably have a couple that don’t do online ordering or takeout, but it’s few. It was hard, because we had to get the technology set up, and that’s always painful.
ROB: I imagine in Umi’s case, they may have also been tracking – I think there was a sushi restaurant up in New York that went to some sort of like $800 takeout. Did you see this?
MELISSA: [laughs] No, I didn’t.
ROB: Yeah, there was a New York sushi restaurant that went to $800 takeout. I saw some very elevated packaging from Sugarfish, which is a smallish/medium-ish sushi chain, that really did elevate that experience. My own experience has really been that during this time, it has become a time for those who are in the hospitality industry to think about hospitality far more than just being in the food and feeding people industry.
MELISSA: Absolutely. That’s exactly right, and Umi is the perfect example of that. They took their current offering and put it to go. They really did. And the love and care that they give you when you’re dining in, you receive via takeout. They have now opened it for dine-in, but the takeout was such a hit that they kept that going. I wonder to myself if they will continue that when they don’t have to anymore.
ROB: I’m very much excited, especially the restaurants that have figured out how to be hospitable in their takeout and have that passion for serving people. I’m indeed curious how that will continue onwards.
You mentioned that MLA has been in the hospitality industry – you mentioned you’ve been in business for 27 years. Have you been deep into hospitality from the onset? Let me start there.
MELISSA: We have. I started the company in 1992. My background was I had a job at Hyatt. I was working in the hotel business. My contacts were already in the hospitality business, so those were the type of client leads I was getting back then. Then as ’96 and the Olympics started getting closer, Atlanta’s hospitality scene started to beef up a little bit. then when the Olympics hit, I think the whole world saw Atlanta for the great place that it is, and before I knew it, I was focusing on restaurants. I don’t think I could’ve done that when I first started. I don’t think there would’ve been enough restaurants to keep me employed. But that changed, and I was a part of it. It was awesome.
ROB: It’s amazing to stick with it for that long. I think some people start off in the serving hospitality, but they find a hard way to make it a rewarding business for themselves as entrepreneurs and they start to get wandering eyes for how to better serve other clients. Particularly, I think there’s a perception – and a reality, depending on the client – of the margins in the world of being an agency driven around the hospitality industry.
You seem to be happy to have made it work for coming up on three decades. How do you attribute that ongoing passion for the industry – and also, you’ve been able to hire people as well. You’re not a one-person show, just scraping by, taking pictures yourself and posting pictures of food. How has that worked well for you?
MELISSA: There’s no question that I love the industry, and I think that has to be – I’m sure I could go work in another industry and make more money, but I do love the industry, and I love working with the restaurant owners and the chefs. It’s a very creative group of people. It’s a very entrepreneurial group of people. I really enjoy working with other people. I love to be in a meeting and go, “Hey, I have a great idea. Let’s do this!” “Okay, that sounds good.” Boom, off you go and start doing it. It doesn’t have to run up a flagpole of approvals and all of that stuff so that by the time the idea is finally approved, it’s completely different and 3 months later. I really enjoy the atmosphere of what we do.
I feel like from focusing the way that I do and focusing my team in the way that I do, we’re just incredibly efficient. The fact that we represent a lot of restaurants makes us a huge value to the media, so they can just make one phone call and say, “I’m looking for recipes using apples” – and this is a true story; got it this morning – and I can make like eight calls and then, 3 hours later, call the reporter back and go, “Okay, I’ve got” – and this is true – “a Brussel sprout and apple salad, I’ve got an apple pie, I’ve got this, I’ve got this.” The reporter has only had to make one call and spend 5 minutes.
So, I think that’s made us very efficient. You’re right; restaurants don’t have a lot of money, but I have to say that they value public relations and community relations and communications over more traditional advertising. Because it stretches a little bit more. Their money will stretch a little bit farther with us than it would two ads that month.
It really has been – I’ve made a living. [laughs] I pay my bills, almost always on time.
ROB: And sometimes you get some good meals along the way, and that’s pretty good too.
MELISSA: I definitely do. I definitely do that, yes, for sure.
ROB: Wonderful. When we think about some of these clients – entrepreneurs, and I think restauranteurs sometimes in particular, may have a reputation of being a little bit hard to corral. When someone comes in with that need for that story, for that recipe, some of them might not even read your email until the next day.
I think a lot of people, even more broadly beyond the hospitality industry, would wonder: is there a secret? Is it that you just know so well into the businesses that you can maybe bypass the entrepreneur and go straight to a chef internally? Is it that you tend to work with restauranteurs who have their details together more? Is it that you’re sometimes able to just know things well enough that you can be a proxy for them? Or a combination of everything?
How do you tighten those lines of communication? Because everybody wants, I think, that level of execution and responsiveness to be able to pull something from an idea to a published-in-the-media message quickly. But clients may not always make that easy for you.
MELISSA: Oh, for sure they don’t. [laughs] The answer to your question is certainly all of the above. Every single client is different, has a different way that they like to be communicated with. We just have to learn, “Okay, this guy, if we text him at 2:00 it’s going to be our very best time to get his attention. This one, we’ve got to call because he knows if I’m calling, it’s got to be really important. Otherwise I’m just going to send him an email. This person likes all five things put in an email at the end of the day. This person likes everything in subject by subject email.”
We really just have to figure them out. But they all are paying us to get the word out, so if they take too long or don’t answer or whatever, I just let them know, “Hey, you missed an opportunity. This is why, so next time, here’s what we’ve got to do.” They get it.
And we also know on our end who’s fast to answer – and I tell clients this when I first meet with them about “Are we going to work with you or not?” I always say, “There is no question, the people that answer us quickly and thoroughly are the ones that get the best press. So that’s what you’ve got to do.” They always go, “Okay, okay, I’m going to do it!” And then some do and some don’t. But it’s the truth. You get out what you put in.
But if we get a last-minute request and we don’t have a lot of time, we have our go-tos because we know who’s going to respond. That’s the goal, to be a go-to.
ROB: You’ve been in this business a while longer than some of the recent shifts in the food media world. It seems like between web outlets, between review sites and increased interest in the TV landscape around food, the culture of food and interest in good food has shifted mightily. What is trending now? What is evergreen now, and what is withering away in terms of getting attention within the hospitality industry?
MELISSA: That’s a really good question, and I’m not sure, given everything going on, that I can answer that with any great knowledge. I’ve seen the food industry go through all kinds of changes, and I think that food as an entertainment avenue is here forever. I just can’t see that going away.
But I think that with COVID and the concerns of the large gatherings, and even the very tight quarters, that’s going to – I don’t want to say go away, but I think there’s going to be less of that. I think people that are opening restaurants right now for sure are not cramming tables in. They’re also not making a humongous restaurant. So, I think we’re going to see some more medium-size restaurants with a lot of space. I think we’re probably going to see some lower priced menus. Just a more mainstream, low-key, as everybody gets back into it and figures out – I just can’t imagine people opening a big, flashy, fancy restaurant right this minute.
And that’s not to say that they won’t, and that’s not to say that they wouldn’t be successful. But I think if you were making your decision today, that would probably not be what you would do. Now, there are people that are well into the planning for a restaurant that’s supposed to open next week or in a month or whatever, and they have to go with what they’ve got and use the guidelines from the state until they don’t have to anymore.
ROB: The intersection that you sit at, I’m sure that your existing clients and people getting into the industry even look to you to an extent for strategy as well. One thing you hear swirling in the restaurant industry is diversification of business model. Some people are already going into events. That’s obviously changing a little bit. Some have been going into additional retail product lines. What are you suggesting to clients as they think about where to go with technology enablement and where to go with overall restaurant business strategy, possibly diversifying?
MELISSA: One thing that’s big is the ghost kitchen/pop-up idea. I have a couple clients, Drift in East Cobb is doing a lobster roll pop-up calls Pop’s Lobster Shack. They did it kind of out of necessity during COVID. They made this takeout window – and I don’t know if you know this, but lobster was really, really inexpensive. I don’t know if it still is, but all the lobster fishermen didn’t have anybody to sell to because all the restaurants up there were closed, so everybody got lobster really cheap. I don’t know if people are noticing, but you can probably get lobster at Applebee’s right now. I don’t know.
But anyway, they started this lobster roll special called Pop’s, and it’s been unbelievably successful. We had a meeting the other day and they were like, “I think we’re going to just keep this going. When lobster’s out of season, we’ll do something else.” I already had some clients that were talking about that sort of ghost kitchen idea, where you do something different than what you already do in your restaurant, you have a different menu offering, but you don’t have the building and the huge branding and all the expenses that go along with it. You just sell it on Door Dash or whatever the situation is. So that’s definitely happening right now.
As far as technology, I think the online ordering is glitchy right now. I see it already getting better, and I think it’s going to get way better very, very quickly, and people are going to be able to, as you suggested, order merch and maybe seasonings and all that stuff in a much less clunky way than they even can do right now. I’m excited for that to happen because it’s been painful, some of these online sites that we’ve been working with.
ROB: I can’t imagine, and it sounds like you’ve had to. Melissa, as you reflect on the business as you have built it thus far, what are some things that you would consider maybe doing differently if you were starting over from scratch?
MELISSA: That’s a very good question. One of the things that I always tell people when they say, “What should I know before I start a business?” is I did not plan for success when I started. I planned, “What am I going to do if I fail? When am I going to decide it doesn’t work, and then what am I going to do?” I spent a lot of time thinking about that, but I didn’t spend any time – not even a minute – thinking about, “What am I going to do if I’ve got more clients than I can handle? What am I going to do if there are not enough hours in the day for me to do all the work by myself?” I never thought of any of that.
I spent probably 2 or 3 years running like a crazy woman, trying to hire a person here and there, do this, do that. Always that’s my first thing that I tell people: plan for success. Have some people lined up. Have some things lined up to support you if it goes well. That’s always been my best learning, because it’s like “Why didn’t I do that?”
And then many years ago – but it was still well into the business – I realized that the traditional PR business model or way of setting up your staff didn’t work for me. You probably know this, but it was always account supervisor, account executive, assistant account executive, little silos, and they did everything. They met with the client, they wrote the business plan, they wrote the press release, they sent the press release, they did everything. I realized I would come back to the office and go, “Hey, we got a new client,” and everybody would duck their head like, “Oh my God, don’t give it to me, don’t give it to me.” I was like, oh, this is not good.
So I divided everybody up by what they like to do best and what they’re best at, so now we have writers and we have media relations people and we have social media people and we have client services people. If your thing is meeting with the clients and writing timelines and writing plans and checking off lists, then that’s what you do. And if you’re a great writer and you can sit in a quiet room all day long and write, write, write, write, write, that’s what you do. It was just a huge help, and it changed everything.
And then there was an added bonus of if someone leaves, the brain trust does not walk out the door because everyone has been working on the client. So that was a big learning, and it’s something that I’m glad came to me at some point in the years.
ROB: Sure. One thing I think adjacent to that is in this case – and it’s fairly common in the PR industry – your name is on the door, and that can be a challenge in bringing in other people. How have you addressed the challenge where Melissa is quite often the person who goes out and earns the trust of the client, and your reputation is a big part of the value that you bring, but at some point your client’s going to have to work with somebody who’s not Melissa? How have you handled that scaling yourself problem?
MELISSA: It’s a good question, and it worried me so much for a long time. I felt like I had to be at every new business meeting, I had to really, really be involved and really assure the prospective client that I was their main contact and all of that.
I think the true answer is good people. I have people that have been with me 11 years, 8 years. I’ve been really fortunate to have long-term employees who are awesome, and the client just wants somebody that’s going to help them get the work done. I love client meetings, so I go to as many of them as I can. The beauty, though, is I don’t have to write the agenda. I don’t have to take the notes. I don’t have to do the follow-up. I’m just spending that hour of my time brainstorming with that client or advising that client or listening to that client.
So, I’m giving them my best. I’m giving them what they expect from me and what they value from me, but then I have a very competent person and a whole team behind that person that’s going to take care of the details. Over time, I’ve just gotten more and more comfortable with it – and that’s truly what it was: me getting comfortable with it. I think it was more in my head than it was anything else. I think the clients are fine with it because, once again, they’re being taken care of. If they weren’t, I’m sure they would say, “Melissa, you schluffed me off on this person and they’re no good.” But fortunately that does not happen.
Also, one of my key employees took on the new business development role a few years ago, so she is bonused on the new business that she brings in. She takes a really instrumental role in that, to the point where now sometimes we have to be sure that the prospective client realizes that she may not be the person that they’re going to see every day too. It’s funny. It’s kind of transferred over a little bit.
ROB: It definitely makes sense. It sounds like one of those things you find along the way; you took it from your name and your person being the reputation to when people bring in Melissa Libby & Associates, your reputation is also the people you bring to the table and who does the work.
MELISSA: Yes, exactly.
ROB: The brand is still you; you haven’t shied away from that, but you’ve expanded what it means.
MELISSA: Right. And as you’ll notice, we a long time ago started using MLA as our logo. Our web address was MelissaLibbyPR.com; now it’s ThinkMLA.com because we wanted to expand beyond the PR and be more than that, and then we also wanted to shorten it and use that MLA more. It just takes my name out of it a little bit. Just a little bit.
ROB: Perfect. Melissa, when people want to find you and MLA, where should they go to find you?
MELISSA: ThinkMLAcom.
ROB: Excellent. Even in the website, it’s changed a little bit. Or was that always the address?
MELISSA: No, it’s changed.
ROB: Very good. Melissa, thank you for enlightening us on your journey with Melissa Libby & Associates as well as the journey of the hospitality industry during this time. I’ve learned a lot, and I think the listeners will have as well.
MELISSA: Thank you. I enjoyed it.
ROB: Be well. Thank you.
MELISSA: All righty.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Chris Carr, President and CEO of Farotech, started his agency 19 years ago as a web development company, moved into SEO, and then transitioned to what Chris calls conversion science. Today, Chris says, his agency builds integrated systems that generate leads, nurture leads into clients, and then convert clients into brand ambassadors who refer new clients to the brand.
Chris says that most companies spend a majority of their time and effort generating leads – and then alternating between generating leads and reacting to the results. He emphasizes that businesses can’t depend on a single marketing platform. A properly designed system, like a flywheel, maintains consistent momentum, gains power, and generates “really great results.”
Farotech “deep dives” for 2 months into a client’s marketing, discusses a client’s unique selling proposition, compares it to customer search volumes, and applies a software that identifies first top ten relevant Google search results in a client’s market niche. Evaluating the “winners’” readability, content, content length, infographics, and backlinks yields information about what the client company needs to do to beat the competition. After Farotech understands a client’s messaging requirements for both global audiences and the client’s segmented audiences, the agency writes great, value-imbued, data-based content. Pushing data and information makes content sharable, Chris says.
The agency provides a strategic 3- to 5-year roadmap that highlights gaps and opportunities and, over time, recommends messaging tweaks to keep the client “at the top.”
One technique Farotech uses to great advantage is placing Pixel on a client’s page to track visitor conversions, optimize ads, build targeted audiences for future ads, and remarket to people who have made a purchase. Pixel is very useful for capturing “lookalike audiences,” people who are unaware of a company and its offerings, but who are demographically similar to a company’s “good customers” or similarly challenged. Finding the “lookalike” audiences for a client’s emails and for its website users greatly expands opportunities. Chris says that blog messages should be targeted, polished, and personalized and delivered at least once a week in order for the blogger to be recognized as a thought leader.
Chris says he likes to “fail as fast as I can, and then adjust and then keep going and keep going.” He believes it is very important to invest in training staff, and lauds Greg Crabtree’s book, Simple Numbers, as an effective guide for “when to cut and when to hire.
Chris can be reach on his company’s website at: farotech.com consultation. Those who would like a consultation should email: info@farotech.com. He believes most companies will find this initial consultation invaluable. “He says, We work really hard to tell you where you’re weak, where you should go from here. Even if you don’t use us, these are the three things you should be doing, things like that.”
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk. I am joined today by Chris Carr, President and CEO at Farotech based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the podcast, Chris.
CHRIS: Hey, thanks for having me.
ROB: It’s fantastic to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Farotech and what superpower you all bring to the world of marketing agencies?
CHRIS: Thanks for asking. I stared Farotech about 19 years ago. We started out as a web development company, then slowly moved into SEO, and then from SEO into what we call a conversion science. What I mean by that is when clients come to me, they usually say, “If I could only figure out my SEO, then all my problems would be solved” or “If I was only good at social media” or something like that.
What I often say is, “Hey, if you are basically wrapping all of your marketing around one particular solution, then you’re building your house on sand.” What we try to make the argument of is we build systems, not solutions. If marketing is done right and it’s turned into a system, essentially you have a system that generates leads, nurtures leads into clients, and then converts clients into brand ambassadors. And those brand ambassadors are going to be those loyal fans who create referrals for your brand.
So, the superpower that I would have is I’m going to help strategize that in the beginning of the process and help our clients get to that spot.
ROB: Where are they typically starting from? Are they just spending on anything? Are they trying to do some of these tactics that someone told them they should do, and they’re coming to you because they’re trying to be amazing at SEO even though they can barely spell it? Where are they coming from?
CHRIS: I think most people spend the large majority of their time in lead generation. They’re going to come to me saying that they might write a couple blogs. What I find is that most companies are what I call reactive marketers as opposed to proactive marketers. The reactive marketer is the idea that we live this life of quiet desperation. We have a tradeshow, so we sprint for the tradeshow, or it’s Christmas season and we need to get our products ready for that. I worked a lot in the healthcare space; certain sports change how they market.
You sprint and then relax and then sprint and then relax. A system doesn’t do that. A system is kind of like Jim Collin’s Flywheel. It just keeps spinning and spinning and spinning. Momentum turns into power, and power turns into really great results.
ROB: I think a lot of people aspire to this sort of thing, but they very quickly realize that they don’t really know what they should be talking about that’s interesting to their audience. How do you think about that? What’s an example of an industry where you’ve seen it could be hard for them to think about what to say, but in fact there is a system that can be put in play that makes a lot of sense once you get your head around it?
CHRIS: That’s a really great question. Unfortunately, I think Google tells you what to say in a lot of ways. You know your general topic; you have great products and services. It’s shocking that when you say it the way you say it and then I look in Google and I’m saying, “Hey, what you think the audience wants and what they’re actually searching for – you can try really hard to be great at your brand, but you’re trying to convert the masses on something they don’t even know about.”
What happens is I’ll sit down with a client and we’ll talk about their unique selling proposition, and then I’ll compare it to search volumes and say, “Hey, we create your messaging. These are the tweaks you’re probably going to have to make. Do you agree or disagree?” If it’s your brand, I want it to be sacred and I want to protect that, but if it’s about volume and generating leads, then we might have to tweak or pivot or move.
ROB: That certainly makes sense. Are you looking at that through the lens – I think level zero of this is you type what you think you’re talking about into Google and see what else gets suggested, but then there’s this deeper level of maybe search console and some other keywords. How do you dive down that rabbit hole and start finding out what they’re actually talking about in the eyes of their customers?
CHRIS: We develop a gap assessment right at the onset of working with a client. That’s a 2-month deep dive into a client, their marketing. It’s a 3- to 5-year roadmap to understand where the gaps are, where the opportunities are. But most importantly, I’ve got to understand your messaging and what your vision is and how you create effective messaging for not just the global audience, but to segmented audiences too.
Within that process, what we try to do is once I’ve figured out your messaging, we have certain pieces of software that before we even publish, it’s going to tell you who’s in the top 10 spots on the first page of Google, who those top 10 companies are, and what kind of content you’ve got to create to beat them. I might look at readability, I might look at the length of content, I might look at the fact that they have infographics or backlinks.
As I start to create that message, I’m going to say, we’re going to base this piece of content on data, not on hunches. That’s where we start. We start with the data.
ROB: Interesting. It seems evident that at some point you’re going to want to atomize this content, push it out into social, push it out into paid social, push it out even into – maybe what resonates even turns into some press. How do you get down to that next layer? I think there’s probably some ways where the search data is the truth and the tools you have are the truth, and there’s some places where on each platform, the audience is looking for something slightly different.
CHRIS: At the genuine level, we write content for our clients. We’ll interview our clients through a number of different ways so our writers write really great content. It starts with writing great content. That’s table stakes. You’ve got to have great content. It has to have value. I always say that it should push data and information because that’s what makes content sharable.
But then it has to go into the system. I’ll just get very tactical about it. We write content for blogs. Blogs get syndicated through social media channels. Then we’ll use paid channels to reach certain target audiences. We’ll use multiple different platforms but say it’s Facebook. I’ll Pixel on my client’s computer. We’ll find out, what are the visitors doing when they come to your website? Then I’ll be able to get your messaging to that target and then a lookalike audience as well. So now I’m reaching people that don’t even know you exist, but they are similar demographics or have certain challenges and things like that.
ROB: Very interesting. That’s been surprisingly effective for quite a while, but it kind of makes sense. Figure out how to drive the audience and then make sure you Pixel for retargeting and the lookalike audience. That combined with, maybe if you’re capturing some emails, a lookalike on the email audience, those are sometimes those core four audiences: your email, the lookalike email, the web, and the lookalike web.
CHRIS: Yeah. That’s it in a nutshell. I forgot to mention that we do – not email blasts, but we do very targeted emails.
I think the key you also want to include into that mix is segmentation. If you send one message to your entire audience, unless you have a very niche product – for example, we have a buyer persona that’s a general business; then we have SaaS companies, then we have healthcare companies, and then we have manufacturing. There’s very specific information that I share to healthcare companies that I don’t want my manufacturing potential clients to hear. It just doesn’t make sense. And I don’t want to water down a message that can be used for everybody.
I’d rather send a very segmented, polished, personalized message to a smaller audience than carpet bomb your entire database with a generalized message that doesn’t bring value.
ROB: Sure. How do you think about frequency amongst those different segments? Do you just hit each one when you have something to say? How do you make sure you’re not neglecting something too long?
CHRIS: We try to do at least a minimum of one blog a week. Everyone talks about Google’s best practices, and I think we make them up as we go along. But we found is what we call it link velocity. If you can keep up that link velocity from an aspect of at least one blog a week, usually what happens is you establish yourself as a thought leader and Google starts to recognize that.
What I don’t believe is that you should just be a mill. Don’t just publish content to publish content. What we do is sit down with a client and we develop an editorial calendar. In an editorial calendar, you’re going to know what content goes out in the next 30, 60, or 90 days. We leave some room for things to be nimble because things change, the news changes. Pandemics happen.
ROB: Yes, they do.
CHRIS: But for the most part, you want to be in a scenario where frequency of about once a week is pretty good. Especially if you’re sending out email communication as well, you don’t want to be blasting people every day. It’s kind of funny; I have a cellphone, and I also ride a bike. It’s just something you do when you’re old to stay in shape. I bought my iPhone case from a company called Rokform. Probably shouldn’t have said their name. Anyhow, the case is really awesome. Connects to my bike. Really, really awesome.
But the fact that they feel like they need to email me every single day is beyond annoying. It went from me being a loyal fan to me being like, dude, I’ve got to get around to unsubscribing, but I shouldn’t have to unsubscribe because you should know your audience better. Like, how many phone cases are you going to buy in the next 5 years of your life? Two? One? Just a pet peeve, but it relates to the frequency of communication.
ROB: Yeah, our own experiences certainly inform those conversations around frequency. I’m sure a lot of people can relate. You buy a pair of shoes and then a week later they’re like, “Do you want some more shoes?” It’s like, I am not that customer segment. I am not the weekly shoe buying guy. I buy a pair of shoes about every 6 months, and if you want to retarget me in 6 months and ask me for some shoes, I’ll probably buy some.
CHRIS: Yeah, you should be talking to my wife. [laughs] That’s my wife’s rhythm, about one pair a week. But for me – yeah.
ROB: Different customer segments. There it is.
CHRIS: Big time.
ROB: Chris, you mentioned that you started off not really even intending to start an agency, starting off in web development. What made you realize that this was actually going to be a business that was viable, that was going to stick around for a little bit?
CHRIS: Started the business about 6 months before 9/11. I was working at a private company called Vanguard. They’re an investment company. I was trying to get into IT there. Thought I wanted to be in IT; what I really wanted is marketing. I got that job, and then 3 days later, 9/11 happened and they said, “Hey, we’re going to have to put you back at your old job.” I was a phone jockey. I was a registered rep, and I was talking to people on the phone at a call center like 8 hours a day. It was at one of those spots where I’m sitting in the parking lot like, “I just don’t want to go in there.”
Anyhow, 6 months later, 9/11 happens and I have no wife, I have no kids. It takes me a whopping $1500 a month to pay my life and my bills. I was like, “You know what? Screw it. I’m just going to go out and do this thing.” Started the business. Got immediately gobbled up as a consultant for a couple years, working in a marketing company that specialized in pharma, and then 2 years later went on and started the agency.
How do you know it happens? You don’t. It’s funny; my business partner was texting me this morning and talking about payroll and he’s like, “I think I have kidney stones.” [laughs] You never wake up and feel like, “Wow, this whole agency this is just a dream. There’s never a bad day.” We started a dream, wanted to do this thing, created a product, got a client. That client led to two clients. Two clients led to more employees. More employees led to more clients. You just wake up one day, 19 years later, 150+ clients, 50 employees, and you’re just – I joke around that it took 19 years to be an overnight success.
ROB: [laughs] It becomes a lot of mouths to feed. I think one of those temptations for many folks in the agency world is to maybe look a little bit jealously at their SaaS clients. Of course, the grass always looks greener on the other side. How have you looked at that? “Man, it would be nice to have a product with 90% gross margins and the money keeps coming in.”
CHRIS: Yep. Well, be careful what you wish for, because I have SaaS clients, and they say, “Getting them to buy the software is the easy part. We make all the money in the service.” I’m like, dude, I’m a service company that wants to build a product. You’re a product company and you want to start a service. [laughs] Dude, you don’t want to talk to people. It happens.
One of the things that’s very interesting in the SaaS space is if you don’t have VC funding or you don’t have a pretty good cushion, marketing is scary. What I mean by that is – I use the analogy of Photoshop. Photoshop would sell for anywhere between $300 and $500 back in the day before SaaS was actually SaaS. Do you remember Photoshop before it was SaaS?
ROB: Oh yeah. I remember people asking who was going to buy Photoshop on a monthly payment when you can just buy the shrink-wrap or the download.
CHRIS: Yeah. Honestly, I think most of it was just downloaded illegally anyway. It was terrible. [laughs] It was the early 2000s. Napster was there, and software was not free. But yeah, nothing like going on a podcast and admitting illegal activity, right?
ROB: “I have a friend.”
CHRIS: I have a friend, right? [laughs] It was a decade ago. But let’s say you go out and buy the software and it costs $500 bucks. Now you’re like, “We’re going to lower that barrier of entry and make it $19.99. No one’s going to cancel on us because we got them for $19.99.” I’m like, that’s like $480 in cash flow that you don’t have right now. It’s going to take you 30 months for you to reclaim that other $500 bucks. It’s awesome in the aspect of you’ve eliminated your barrier of entry, you stay competitive and stuff like that, but cash flow is king.
I have SaaS clients, and the number one thing I’m looking for is, are you sustainable? Because if you don’t have that core number of clients, man, it gets scary pretty quick.
ROB: Right. You being in Philadelphia, I know there are some investors there, but it’s not the Bay Area and it’s not even New York, I don’t imagine. That services dimension of it can be a function of SaaS survival in a non-VC-heavy market.
CHRIS: Yeah. It’s a critical call to make. How do you want to live? Sometimes you’ve got to do the service until you can just be product only. And I respect that. I respect anybody who’s going to say, “I do what it takes, and when the landscape changes, then I’ll pivot.” I can respect that.
ROB: Oh yeah, I’ve certainly been down that path. It’s hard from a pride perspective, and I’m sure we all get told what we’re supposed to be when our company grows up and how it looks and what you’re not supposed to do. Sometimes practicality and eating that pride – and also just realizing who it is that you want to be instead of who it is that other people want you to be is such a key step.
CHRIS: And then you’re also worrying about – I think there’s a phrase that says for every level, there’s another devil. What happens here is that you switch out of that service-based model, you’re basically just a SaaS company from the regular sense of the word, but then your whole day is lead generation, lead nurturing, and then most importantly – which is something you didn’t have to worry about before – you’re always worrying about retention. It’s one of those things where when a pandemic happens, you might be the first thing that goes. And that’s a scary predicament too.
I remember specifically, our company hadn’t taken a hit. We thought we were going to take a hit. My business partner – he’s the COO, but he also does the CFO type stuff – came to me with this long list of everybody that we buy from, and he’s like, “This is the list of the people that can go. They’re what I would call ‘nice-to-haves.’” That’s a scary spot to be in if you’re SaaS.
One of the things from a SaaS standpoint is the same thing I say to people that are in employment. Make yourself unfirable. If you are a SaaS product that lives on the periphery of “nice-to-have,” you’re nice to have, but you can also be very forgettable.
ROB: That’s true on SaaS. I think there’s an extent to which that’s also true in services, though. You can have a contract, but when March 15th, 2020 hits, if a client comes to you and says, “Hey, we’re going to be done for a while,” what most people are going to do and what’s probably prudent is to say, “Okay, I understand. Let us know how we can help you.” You’re not going to fight and be like, “You’ve got 9 months left and another $90K on this contract, so you’ve got to pay up, bud.”
CHRIS: That’s where, for us, we always have a roadmap. The roadmap is even clients who say, “Hey, we’re not seeing the results,” I’m like, “Great. We charted this roadmap together. Where did we go wrong? Where do you disagree? Because you agreed to the same roadmap too. We might not be where we’re at right now but look at where we’re going. If you don’t believe in where we’re at now, do you believe in what’s a mile down the road?” If they say yes, then you say, “Let’s journey on this together. I’m on this journey with you.”
I want to be in a scenario here where I can be very vulnerable with you and just say, “Where are you suffering? Which part of this process isn’t working, and what can we put a little bit more energy into?” as opposed to cutting the cord. I think one of the things we try very hard to do is to not be a vendor. We try to be a partner. I hate people that overuse that, but that’s exactly how it works for us.
We have clients that are like, “We’ve got to do another advertising campaign, and I forget what we said about this, this, and this. Farotech, what do we say about that?” I’ll be like, “Dude, it’s your company. You don’t know what you said about that?” I mean, it’s an honor and a privilege, but you become so ingrained in who they are that they forget what’s been said about them, what they even say about themselves.
ROB: Makes sense. Chris, you’ve given us some nuggets already, but if you rewind and think about the 19 years of the company, what are some lessons you’ve learned along the way that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting afresh in 2020?
CHRIS: I got this questionnaire from you before we started talking and I knew this was coming, and it’s so funny – I told my assistant, it matters what day it is. Literally, I consider myself a lifetime learner, but I also say that those last 19 years, I’ve Forrest Gump’d my way to this spot right now. Meaning I like to fail as fast as I can. Everything I’m saying here sounds cliché, but I like to fail forward, I like to fail as fast as I can, and then adjust and then keep going and keep going.
I think the number one lesson that I’ve learned is if you just keep on swimming, if you just keep on pushing through the hard times, usually what happens here is the sheer diligence is enough. Especially in the service-based industry. In the product-based industry, it can be a little bit tougher because of competition.
ROB: Sure. Those landscapes can change and there’s things that can happen. It doesn’t matter how much you keep swimming; you’re not going to rebuild your Groupon competitor today and have it thrive like crazy.
CHRIS: I don’t think Tom from Myspace is going to make this dramatic resurgence against Facebook. I think at this point Mark’s got him.
But for the most part, I’ve seen two economic downfalls. Now I’ve survived through a pandemic. We signed our first million-dollar client; a year later, we decided to part from that client. I had all the staff from that client that I refused to let go of, and I tried to be a solider and say “I’m going to sell my way out of this,” which I failed miserably. They ended up hating me on their way out anyway, even though I’m putting their salaries on my credit card. It’s terrible to say – took me almost 7 years to dig out of that hole of salaries.
However, I would do it again because of the things I’ve learned. Nothing would have forced my hand like reaching the bottom of the barrel. That’s just the way it is.
ROB: Right. It’s not that you would do it that way again; it’s that doing it that way taught you more about the next time.
CHRIS: Oh, I’m sorry, yeah, I wouldn’t say I’d do it again. I’d say I wouldn’t change it. In other words, unfortunately I feel like God wanted me to take this road so that I could – I don’t think I would’ve learned if this didn’t happen to me.
ROB: Yeah. How do you now think about that alignment between the team that’s working on a client, the revenue and team – you never want to think about when to cut the line, but there’s a very tight alignment between revenue and staff in a services business.
CHRIS: Yeah, we had to hire a consultant. Right now we use two different companies. One is called CEO Think Tank, where we run all of our numbers through them. The other one is called Simple Numbers. Simple Numbers is this really advanced accounting and virtual CFO service. They look at our numbers. We live and die by data of utilization rates, of client growth, of sales growth. There’s a balance between knowing who to have on your team and when to have them on your team and stuff like that.
We have an exceptionally high retention of employees, which has been wonderful, and that – I don’t know how to describe it. Training is probably the most expensive part of an agency because we do what we believe is some radical things, and you can’t just pull a geek off the street and say, “Hey, guess what? You have an account now.” So, investing in people, investing in training has made a big dividend for us.
When we look at the numbers, we’re really hard and we really push back when the numbers say your staff is bloated. We get that a lot. We have more staff than work. We get that a lot, but our pushback is that the more trained our staff is, the better job they do. The better job they do, the more clients stick around. And when you have a retention rate of clients in the 90s, you don’t have to sell as much because your clients stuck around.
If you bleed clients, you might think you’re saving money because you have fewer employees, but you’re spending way more in sales and marketing to try to get new clients that just fell off the bus. My analogy is falling through, but you get my point?
ROB: Yeah. Simple Numbers – is that Greg Crabtree and the labor-efficiency ratio and all that jazz?
CHRIS: Oh yeah, you’re from that area. I think they’re from down that way, aren’t they?
ROB: I think he’s over in Alabama. I could be wrong.
CHRIS: Yeah, he’s a total rock star. Read the book. The book, to me – it’s called Simple Numbers, but it could’ve been called “Simple Greek.” I require a business partner who can read that stuff. I pay someone to do my taxes. I pay someone to read my email. [laughs] All I do is talk marketing. They show me the numbers and they show me the stuff, and then we make decisions from there. But for the most part, if you trust the data, it all comes out well in the end.
ROB: That makes sense. People should definitely dig in, read it. It’s a good guide. When to cut, when to hire. All helpful in there. Chris, when people want to find you and Farotech, where should they go to find you?
CHRIS: They should go to farotech.com. You can email us if you want to get a consultation. It’s info@farotech.com.
One thing I will say is that if you reach out and we do a consultation, this is not a glorified sales pitch. You’re going to learn more about your business in an hour than – we try really hard to bring a lot of value to the client as opposed to just using that as an opportunity to market and pitch our services. We work really hard to tell you where you’re weak, where you should go from here. Even if you don’t use us, these are the three things you should be doing, things like that.
ROB: Fantastic. We’ll put that in the show notes. I hope people will reach out. It has been a pleasure, Chris, getting to know you and Farotech. Thank you.
CHRIS: Thanks again.
ROB: All right. Be well. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Jay Owen, Founder and CEO at Design Extensions, started building basic websites at age 17. He worked for a number of years as a “solopreneur,” hiring contractors as needed, and, as a company, made as much as six figures. When the economy collapsed in 2008, Jay’s business was still doing well. He looked around. People were losing jobs. Things were in crisis. Idea? He’d create a full-time job for somebody. His StoryBrand Certified Agency and HubSpot Goal Partner has been in business and growing for over 20 years.
Today, Design Extensions employs about 20 people, a great size because Jay has been able to create scalable systems that don’t break with the absence of one person. In the past 5 years, following Mike Michalowicz’s book, Clockwork, the premise of which is that there should be no one person in which the company is dependent, Jay has “replaced himself” at every level. The company can now survive, even if Jay is gone for as long as 30 days.
Jay says, “A lot of business owners find marketing very confusing and expensive,” and it often does not work. He explains that the agency’s job is not to build websites, put pixels on a screen, or write good content for clients. Applying Design Extensions’ proven growth strategies to clients’ businesses helps them grow – by clarifying their messages and developing and executing effective plans, the agency enables clients to gain attention and acquire customers. The agency plans to add a consultancy arm to provide coaching and strategy direction, to make sure businesses have clear growth plans for both marketing and business fundamentals.
In this interview, Jay recommends a number of books that have been pivotal for his agency. The agency’s messaging is built around Donald Miler’s “StoryBrand,” as described in his book, Building a StoryBrand. Jay says that most people talk about themselves too much when they should talk about the customer’s problem and how the company’s solution can help the customer win. The customer needs to be the hero of the story. When Design Extensions changed the message on its homepage to align with StoryBrand concepts, incoming leads doubled. Telling the one thing that makes a company “special” is rarely all that special. Three unique things can become very special.
Kim Scott’s Radical Candor inspired Jay to have the courage to “be exceptionally clear with where improvement needs to happen,” as long as that correction was paired with caring immensely for the individual. Jay believes it is his “responsibility to create a space where people can fail without failing catastrophically.” Little failures will make people stronger. Gino Wickman’s Traction provided the framework for the processes, procedures, and systems needed to make his business scalable and long-lasting. His final hiring interview, from Dave Ramsey’s EntreLeadership, involves Jay and his wife taking the prospect and spouse to dinner.
Jay’s book, Building a Business that Lasts (Without Sacrificing Family) is currently available on his website, jayowenlive.com, for the cost of shipping and handling. He has a podcast of the same title available on that website and he is on “all the social media.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Jay Owen, Founder and CEO at Design Extensions based in St. Augustine, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Jay.
JAY: Thanks for having me, Rob.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you tell us about Design Extensions and what superpower you all bring to the marketing agency world?
JAY: Absolutely. I find that a lot of business owners end up in a situation where marketing is very confusing and expensive. They’re not going to waste a lot of time and marketing on money that doesn’t work, so what we do is help them clarify their message and then put together the right plan and then execute that plan so they can get attention and acquire customers. We’ve been doing that for the past 21 years, and we’ve grown every single year. We love taking those same business growth strategies we’ve used for ourselves and applying those to other businesses to help them grow. That’s our focus.
ROB: You’ve kept the pitch pretty tight. I think that speaks to what you might be able to do for someone else. And 20 years is a while to keep the same business operating, and particularly in the marketing world, where things keep on moving. What are some of the constants that have been true throughout the life o the company, and what are some of the changes you’ve seen that you’ve been able to incorporate into your own story?
JAY: Gosh, so much has changed over time. When I started this thing, first, I was only 17, so I had no idea what I was doing. I was just building basic websites at the time. If that’s all we still did today, we would probably be in pretty big trouble as far as the company goes. Plus, that first year I only made about $5,000 in total revenue, and that wouldn’t work these days. [laughs]
A lot has changed. This is probably one of the most dynamic industries that exists with regards to the speed of change. When I started this business, AltaVista was one of the leading search engines. Yahoo was the king of the internet. AOL was a monster player still. Now the landscape is totally different. There were no iPhones back then. There were no mobile sites. You couldn’t have an application on the web. The idea of having a Software-as-a-Service business online was not a thing.
All of that has changed over time, and we’ve just had to adapt with it. Ultimately, it’s rooted in what our mission is. This is what I tell our team all the time. Our job is not to build websites for people. Our job is not to put pixels on the screen. Our job is not even to write good words for them. Our job is to help other people grow their business.
Now, that often looks like some of the things that we do, like help people clarify their message so they can have a clean, clear message that actually gets attention. It looks like building websites. It looks like running marketing campaigns. It looks like developing applications. But the root of it all is, are we helping people grow their business, yes or no? If the answer is no, that’s not a service we should offer anymore. That’s really been the guiding light, that clarity of mission over time. But gosh, I’ve learned a lot along the way.
ROB: Absolutely. Is there maybe a service that you did stop offering with that degree of clarity where you came to a moment and said, “We shouldn’t do that anymore”? Is there an example we could look at?
JAY: It’s funny because there’s one specific one that just happened recently. We’d not been offering this service for a while, but my office admin was going through some expenses and cleaning out some company stuff and said, “Hey, do we need this ‘print@designextensions.com’ email address anymore?” We’re not really doing print work anymore.
We used to do a lot of print work back in the day, and print is still needed sometimes; I’m not one of these digital marketing guys that believes all of traditional marketing of print and billboards and radio and TV are useless. They’re not useless. They have a place. They’re often overpriced, but that’s a different situation. But we don’t do that at all anymore. We don’t print materials for clients; we’ll send them out if they need to be. So that’s a service that we ended up cutting. It wasn’t in the best interest of us or our clients and it doesn’t exist anymore for us.
ROB: Even though in a moment, it might be the most reliable time to reach somebody with some direct mail.
JAY: Yeah, I’m not opposed to direct mail at all. There’s plenty of opportunities for these kind of things, like I said. It just didn’t align correctly with our vision as a service. But with that said, we might help somebody craft the message that’s going to go on their direct mail.
For example, one of the biggest problems most people have is they talk about themselves too much. Really what they should do is talk about the problem that their customer is encountering and how their solution is going to help them solve that problem and help the customer win the day. We often want to position ourselves as the hero of the story, and really the customer needs to be the hero of the story.
So even with something like direct mail, just changing some of the words that you use on those postcards or flyers or brochures can have a massive impact on the outcome. That’s where our focus is more on versus actually producing the deliverable in that case.
ROB: You mentioned that “hero of the story” language and framework. That’s definitely become more prominent. It’s strange, because it’s the most timeless of stories, but it’s become much more prominent recently. Have you seen an evolution in understanding of how to build a good story over the life of the business?
JAY: Yeah. I’ve always said that everybody’s selling something; it’s just a matter of what. Our job is to understand that and help tell the story to basically get the customer to buy. But over time, one of the things that’s been hugely helpful for us is a framework called StoryBrand by a guy named Donald Miller. He wrote a book called Building a StoryBrand, and we use that framework in our messaging now.
It’s stuff that we essentially already knew, and they’re not totally new ideas. It’s just a matter of packaging it together in a way that’s so clear that it really, really works. We started using this framework for ourselves, and just by changing our messaging on our homepage, we doubled our incoming leads. When we found that out for ourselves, we thought, “Hold on, this works really well. We should do this for everybody.”
So now we’re actually a StoryBrand Certified Agency, and that’s one of the power cards in our deck, if you will, of things that are really helpful when we’re helping a company grow.
ROB: It’s a big name behind that. I think sometimes when agencies look at that sort of program, they worry that if they affiliate with that instead of maybe cultivating their own secret sauce, they’re going to become a commodity. How have you looked at using the StoryBrand to elevate rather than reduce value of what you do?
JAY: Great question. I think I have had those same concerns over time, and there certainly are pieces of the puzzle that we go, “Hey, this is how we do it that’s exclusive to us.” But I’ve been in business long enough to know that there’s only so many ways that a wheel’s going to go around, and sometimes you just need a clear plan on how to get that done.
I think a lot of companies, regardless of whether they’re a marketing agency or any other type of business, are looking for that one thing that differentiates them. I think that’s a mistake because I think it’s very rare that one thing differentiates a company. What I do believe is that if you take three unique things and put them together, it becomes very special.
For us, for example, three of our uniques would be something like we’re a StoryBrand Certified Agency, we’re a HubSpot Goal Partner, and we’ve been in business and grown for over 20 years in a row. If you combine those three things together, there’s only about three or four agencies in the entire country that fit into that model. That’s where there starts to become a uniqueness.
And just because we’re tied onto the HubSpot bucket for one thing or tied onto the StoryBrand framework for this thing, I don’t think that makes us a commodity at all. I think that it’s a combination of knowing how to use those things across multiple areas that actually gives us a lot of strength, and we can take strength from multiple other experts in order to make that happen.
ROB: I’ve heard that referred to sometimes as talent stacking. To be able to take that large Venn diagram with big circles – there’s even a decent number of agencies that have been around for 20 years; not a ton, but some – but some of them are still trying to sell you on 15-year-old SEO tactics, and that might not be such a good idea.
HubSpot also gives you potentially the differentiation of some of the different levels. Is that something you’re conscious of as you’re building the business? You’re not going to drive a customer to something that’s not helpful to them, but some eyes on when you’re ready to level up the HubSpot to show that you have been even more successful than some people with HubSpot?
JAY: Yeah. The other thing too, though, is I will drop either one of those things if I don’t think they’re the best for our customers anymore. HubSpot, for example, we were a HubSpot Partner years and years ago, and it just wasn’t the right fit for our client base at the time. We ended up dropping it and using other tools that we piecemealed together.
Now we’ve come back to it, and HubSpot’s changed a lot over the years too. Now they have a great free entry level product, so we can put lower end clients on it that might not be ready for a very expensive marketing suite where they’re paying $1,000+ a month just for their software, but they can enter on the free level and it works really well.
Ultimately, for me, we’re going to use whatever tools or services we think are the best fit for the client. I always tell my team, I couldn’t care less how we did it before; all I care about is what the best way is to do it. We’re going to develop what we believe is the best practice across all these different disciplines, and we’re going to keep doing it that way until we find a better way. And as soon as we find a better way, we’re going to change it.
That’s how I operate. If anything, I have to temper that a little bit because I am very comfortable with change, and that can be disruptive for a team if you don’t give them some stability over time.
ROB: It’s that balance of both change, but also there’s probably an inversion point that you’ve had to go through in the life of the business. There’s one point where in order to grow things beyond yourself, you have to define a process and have somebody follow it. And then there’s a limit where you now have people who understand these tools better than you and have to be able to come to you and come to the organization and recommend change and a better way to do that.
How do you think about getting that expert feedback from your team back into the agency, now that you’re a couple of steps up in scale?
JAY: I like how Andy Stanley puts it. He says as organizational authority increases, individual competencies decrease. I think you could also say as an organization’s size grows, even if you were the one who did all the things at the beginning, which I was, at some point you’re no longer the best anymore. It’s funny because it’s an interesting transition where – I used to always sell clients back in the day that they got to deal with me the entire time. That was the pitch. The pitch was, “Hey, the great news is you don’t have to deal with a sales rep who’s going to hand you to an account manager who’s going to hand you to a team who’s going to do all these things. You can deal with me from beginning to end.”
That was a true advantage at the time, in the same manner that now it’s a true advantage that you don’t get to work with me anymore. [laughs] Because my best and highest gifts are in overarching strategy; they’re not in building a website for you. And the proof is in the pudding because the websites we produce today are a thousand times better than anything we produced 5 or 10 or 15 years ago, and I have nothing to do with them anymore.
I think that’s the big challenge for a lot of entrepreneurs, especially agency owners, I find, because many agency owners started as a professional in the craft. They were the ones who put the pixels on the screen. They were the ones who wrote the words. At some point you have to transition from being the marketer to being a business builder, and those are different things.
ROB: You indeed mentioned that you started as an individual contributor building websites, and then it morphed and evolved. At what point did you realize that maybe this was going to be a company that could employ some other people and was going to be a long-term thing instead of – I think we start off building websites sometimes – it’s a thing you can do. When you’re 17, you’re like, “I’m going to do this for the next 20 years.”
JAY: Right. For me, years ago – gosh, I guess I was probably 21 – I’d just gotten married. I got married pretty young. The company I think at that point was making about $25,000 a year. I was waiting tables on the side and also going to school, and my wife was doing the same. I didn’t think I could make it work. I didn’t think it was going to be a full-time business. I thought it was really a hobby to some extent, just based on the dollars I was able to bring in.
I went to work for my uncle in that season because he ran a successful insurance agency. I thought he would fade out, I would fade in, and why not? It was kind of a silver spoon. It seemed like a good idea. He’s got a black Mercedes and a house in the mountains and a house towards the beach. “I would like to have that,” so my 21-year-old self said.
But I worked for him for 6 months and hated the insurance industry. One day I came home, and I knew I’d married the right woman when I came home, I was kind of upset, and I said, “Babe, I could do this, and I probably could make a lot of money at it, but I think I’m going to hate it my whole life” and she said, “So quit and do what you love.” I remember that season going, “I wonder if I’ll ever have enough work to keep myself busy a whole week.”
But what I didn’t understand at that time was the difference between owning a business and owning a job. What I really owned at the time was a job, not a business. I didn’t pay myself very well and I didn’t have very good hours, and I had the opposite of what most people want when they start a business, which is time, money, and freedom. I had none of those things.
It took time for me to finally get that working as a solopreneur, if you will. I used a lot of contractors eventually and had my own thing. It was working pretty well. I got up to a point where I was making six figures as a company and feeling pretty comfortable, but then the economy collapsed in 2008. I’d used a lot of contactors but never had a full-time employee. I looked around, and people were losing their jobs everywhere and things were in crisis.
My business was actually doing pretty good, because it turns out people need marketing in downturns because they need to get attention and acquire customers. I thought, “I think I can make a job for somebody. I think I could create a full-time position and pay somebody as a W-2 employee.” That was a big change for me at that point over using contractors. So, I did. I created a job. I did a really bad job at knowing how to hire or fire or do anything else, but I learned along the way.
And now we have a team of about 20, and it’s a great size because – I always said I never wanted to be more than 10 people, but I realized at some point a couple of things. In order for me to create scalable systems that didn’t break when one person was absent, I had to be a certain size to pull that off, and I also had to be a certain size so that when one person went on vacation, I didn’t get two jobs for the week. There were years where I dreaded the summer because I’d have one person go on vacation and I’m like, “Great, now I have two jobs this week” – which is fine; I’m not scared of the work, but it gets exhausting after a while.
Now it’s very different because we’ve worked really hard the last 5 years to make sure there’s no one person the company is dependent on, including me. We proof tested that about a month or so ago. I took a 30-day RV trip with my family and didn’t work the whole time. That’s a big barrier of success for me, even more so than anything money can provide. Once you lose money, you can always go get more of it, but once you lose time, you can’t get any more. Especially with my kids growing up fast, that was a big deal for me. That’s kind of the story of growing it over time.
ROB: When’s the next trip?
JAY: Next year. I plan to take the same amount of time off pretty much every year. I don’t know if we’ll do an RV trip every year, but I think it’s healthy for the business for me to take that amount of time off. The idea actually came originally from a book called Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz. Same guy that wrote Profit First. It’s called Clockwork, and he basically says an owner or a founder needs to be able to leave for 30 days and the company keep functioning, because typically most companies go through a full cycle of business in 30 days. It’s the only way that you know that you’ve actually replaced yourself at every level.
The company becomes more valuable, number one, but it also protects the team as well, because what happens if I walk out and get hit by a bus? Does the company collapse in 2 weeks because there’s no figurehead anymore? If so, I didn’t do a very good job of building a business that lasts for them, and ultimately for my family as well. So that’s how I think about it.
ROB: Excellent. What was the timeline from when you decided to take that trip and maybe when you started telling people, and then when you actually took it? What was that timespan?
JAY: I planned the idea of it before the pandemic, first of all. [laughs] Last year I read this book Clockwork, and over time I had been working my way up to being able to take more time off.
First of all, I love the work that I do. I don’t need to get away from it. But I do. I say I don’t need to – a lot of entrepreneurs are like that. We say we love the work that we do. I love to work all the time. That’s great, but our brains actually do need physical rest. That’s why we often have these bursts of ideas in the shower or while driving or right before we fall asleep or right after we wake up. There’s real science behind this stuff. Our brains are able to come up with things that they wouldn’t otherwise come up with when we give them the space to do it.
So last year I read this book Clockwork and I thought, “All right, I’m doing that. I’ve done 2 weeks, so now I’m going to take a full month and see how that works.” My plan was to do that around this time of year this year. I actually ended up taking it earlier because of the pandemic, believe it or not. We sold our house right at the beginning of the pandemic; we have a new one that we’re building. So, we had about 3 months where we had nowhere to live and I thought, “This is the time. I’m just going to do it now.”
I’d like to say there was some kind of grand plan. I had told the team that was my intention this year and I needed them to be thinking about that, because every time I leave, one of the questions – even if it’s just for a week – I always tell the team, “If there’s anything you get to where you go, ‘We need to wait till Jay gets back before we can do X, Y, or Z or before we can decide this or figure it out or whatever else,’ that’s a problem. Whatever that is, write that thing down, and then we need to fix that so that it’s no longer dependent on me.”
I think that mentality has been a huge driver for our growth. What happens if I’m not here? How do we grow the company? It gives everybody else the opportunity both for success and failure, and that’s one of the big mistakes I think a lot of leaders make: they don’t want their team to fail. But when you think back, how many things did each of us learn from failure? The answer is a lot.
I believe it’s actually my responsibility to create space where people can fail without failing catastrophically. I don’t want people destroying the company, obviously, but some little failures here or there are good for everybody.
ROB: That’s such a good lesson there. When you talk about mistakes or maybe things you’d do differently or things you’ve learned from, what are some other things you’ve learned along the journey of building Design Extensions that you might do differently if you were starting it up today?
JAY: Two big things come to mind. The first is however much time you think you need to hire the right person, you probably should quadruple it because it’s so important to get the right people in the right seats. When we rush to hire people because we’re in some kind of super busy mode or whatever it is and we think we need to fill a seat, I almost always mess that up. Patience in hiring has been a hard one for me because I’m a very fast mover. I’m like, “All right, let’s go. You seem like you could figure that out. Let’s make it happen.” So I’m very patient in hiring.
The other thing for me personally – this is more of a personal weakness – is being willing to give direct and candid feedback early on. Some people don’t have a problem with this at all, but I do. Ultimately I’ve realized that it’s because I want people to like me. I want to just be one of the team. I want to be everybody’s friend. I want that so bad that at times, I’m willing to not be clear enough when there’s problems, and that is a massive mistake. It is not in anybody’s best interest.
So, I’ve had to really work hard at that. A book that really helped me with that was Radical Candor by Kim Scott. She talks about this idea that you can care immensely for someone and be exceptionally clear with where improvement needs to happen. Those things are not counterintuitive. But some people fall off one side of the cliff or the other. They’re either exceptionally clear, but they don’t seem to care about the people at all – and she calls those people “obnoxiously aggressive” – and the other one, which is where I tend to fall off the cliff, is you show that you care deeply but you are not as clear as you need to be when there’s problems, and she calls that person “ruinously empathetic.”
Which is interesting because when I was younger I wasn’t empathetic at all. I had no empathy. I think through almost 20 years of marriage and five children and 20 years of business, you start to develop – you’ve walked through enough fire that you do have more empathy for people. But the danger is believing that trying to be super kind to them at the expense of truth is going to be helpful for them, and it almost never is. Not for them, for you, or the company.
ROB: It’s really good to share both sides of that on Radical Candor, because I think some people have heard it and run into somebody who maybe learned too much of the wrong lessons from it. It’s always good to go back to the source and process through these things through our own filter.
You mentioned this situation where things are really busy and you really need to hire someone, and you’re talking about taking longer to make that hire. To do that, how do you manage the onslaught of work in that season while taking the time you need to make the right hire?
JAY: I think a lot of it comes down to being able to think far enough ahead. If I need to hire somebody, the chances are I needed to be thinking about that a month ago or 2 months ago. So, taking the time to evaluate what the issues are for the company and plan for that makes a big difference. I think most people can wing it. If you’re scrappy enough and smart enough, you can probably wing it to about 10 people and a million dollars in revenue, but after that things start to fall apart really quickly.
For us, one of the big things that helped was a book called Traction by Gino Wickman. I know I’m throwing a lot of books out – which ironically, I used to never read because I’m dyslexic. But they’re really, really a helpful framework.
I am that traditional entrepreneur that really has a problem with process and procedures and systems. I feel like they’re a cage for me. I feel like they’re very corporate-y – but they’re not. They’re required in order to build a scalable business that will last. Traction gave us the framework for that, and as it relates to hiring, what happened is because we set these annual goals and we have these quarterly planning meetings, both as a leadership team and as a full team, we can see ahead of time what the issues are, when we’re going to need to hire, and plan for that accordingly.
Right now, we’re working on hiring a new role, and we’re just willing to take the time for it. Matter of fact, one of my team members the other day was like, “We could probably cut that last interview to speed things up.” I’m like, “Nope, not doing it. I’m not cutting the last interview.”
I even go to the extent – this sounds kind of crazy, but it’s actually great – I stole this from Dave Ramsey out of the book EntreLeadership; I will do a spousal interview at the end. It’s not what it sounds like. Basically what happens is my wife and I will go out with whoever the team member is and their spouse, assuming they’re married, and we’ll just have dinner. The idea behind this is be with somebody in an environment that is not a traditional interview, because most people, including probably you and I if we were in that scenario, exaggerate and are moderate liars in interviews because we just instinctively are trying to put on our best self.
When you see people out in the real world at dinner or something, they can still put on their best self, but you start to get a picture. I also think it’s important to realize that when you’re hiring somebody, if their spouse is like a monster, you might be bringing that into the company too, and you’ve got to be aware of that.
ROB: You’ve mentioned a lot of books. I think there may be one other book you haven’t mentioned yet. I do believe you have a book of your own that we should know about.
JAY: Yeah, I do have a book. It was one of those things where everybody kept saying, “You should write a book. You should tell all these stories and put them together in one single plan.” I never felt confident enough to do that, but I finally did it. It’s called Building a Business That Lasts. My podcast is actually by the same title.
The idea is, what does it take to build a business over time? Most businesses fail in the first year. The vast majority do. Many more fail within the first 5 years, and very, very few make it to the 10-year mark. So on the podcast, for example, I interview people that have been in business for 10 years or more, and selfishly, I learn a lot because I get to talk to other business leaders and entrepreneurs and hear their stories.
The book is just my story, my framework of how I have made that work, and the subtitle is important to me, too. It’s “without sacrificing family,” because I’ve seen plenty of people along the way that have grown great businesses at the expense of all of the people around them, especially those closest to them. I probably have risked that at points, but I’m doing my darndest to try and stay married to the same woman my whole life and have kids that grow up and are as well-adjusted as they can be in this crazy world.
ROB: For sure. That is excellent and noble and worthwhile. Where should we find that book?
JAY: You can get a copy by just going to my website, which is jayowenlive.com. There’s a button right there that says, “Get Jay’s Book.” We actually have a free offer right now; you just cover the cost of shipping and handling and we’ll send that book out to you. Also on my website is my podcast and other materials that might be helpful if you’re looking to build a business to last.
ROB: Excellent. Jay, what’s coming up next for you and Design Extensions that we should be looking forward to you hearing about?
JAY: Great question. We are adding a new wing onto the company over the next couple of months and into the next few years. We’ve always been an agency. What I mean by agency is we do the work for you. But what I’ve found over time, especially in this new economy as people are starting new things, is they might not be able to afford the agency. They might want to be able to do some things themselves. They might even have some team members in-house that can do some of those things, but they need some guidance along the way. They need a guide who has been through it before and knows how to help them make those things happen.
We are in the process, in the very early stages right now, of building onto the agency a consultancy. I see those two things overlapping. The idea is essentially for us to be able to provide coaching and strategy around building a business and making sure you have a clear plan, not just for your marketing, but for business fundamentals as a whole.
I run a marketing agency, but you can hear just in this conversation we’ve had how many things we’ve talked about as it relates to hiring and firing, teambuilding, how to keep yourself sane in the midst of it all. So. we’re going to be building a consultancy on top of the agency. Both of those things, though, really feed well into who we are as a company as a whole, which goes back to that mission of helping other people grow their business.
ROB: Fantastic. Jay, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. We know where people should find your book; where should they find you and your firm when they’re looking to find you, online or otherwise?
JAY: They can still just go to my website. That’s the main place I want people to go after this interview, jayowenlive.com. My agency is linked to on there, the podcast is linked to on there, the book is linked to on there. Depending on who they are and what they need, those are great places to check me out.
And obviously, I’m available on all the social media, so wherever you happen to be, LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram, I’m out there. If you want to connect, you can always find me in the DMs on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn.
ROB: That’s excellent. Jay Owen, Founder and CEO of Design Extensions, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It’s been a pleasure.
JAY: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Rob.
ROB: It’s a pleasure. Be well. Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Kevin Hourigan is President and CEO of Bayshore Solutions, a digital agency that started in 1996 as a branch of a managed services provider – a 3-member team building and maintaining client networks. Two years later? Thirty employees.
Decades ago, one of the Kevin’s engineers developed a company website and asked 100 of the company’s clients if they would be interested in a 3-page website for $500. Client responses were either “What’s a website?” or “We’ll never need one of those.” One client agreed to give it a try. That $500 website cost $5,000 to build, but two years later, in 1998, clients came begging for websites, which were now more profitably priced at $7,500 and up.
The company failed in its attempt to go public in the late 90s and survived the dot com crash in the early 2000s. Its base of paying clients plummeted 90%. In response, the company slashed its staff from 225 to 12 in a year. Larger agencies, the ones Kevin considered as his mentors, the ones that went public . . . failed. Bayshore Solutions is one of only 2% of the digital agencies that survived the dot com collapse.
When Kevin realized that what he had left of the company would never again be “an aspiring dot-commer on the verge of going public, spending money like it’s going out of style with clients spending money with us like it’s going out of style,” he knew it was time to rebrand. He wanted the new name to be “agnostic,” that is, not tied to any transient technology. Bayshore Web Development could become obsolete. Baysore Solutions, on the other hand, would not be tied to any here today, gone tomorrow technology.
For almost 25 years, BayShore Solutions has helped clients create advertising campaigns that drive qualified traffic. It designs and develops powerful stakeholder-targeted websites with the right marketing mix to help its clients succeed. The agency markets itself as a digital expert, applying strategies horizontally across a variety of verticals, transferring experience from one vertical to another completely unrelated (and non-competing) vertical. Every solution is unique, with a balance of the “bleeding edge of new and the tested, tried, and true.” Around 90% of implementation strategies are things Bayshore KNOWS will work. The 5 to 15% that is experimental will vary depending on the phase of an industry’s business cycle.
After Kevin had excellent experience working with a CEO coach, he decided to let his leadership team hire an executive team coach. The result? Tighter vision and a better definition of core values (working together, winning together, and solving problems together), with the team all learning together, rather than receiving the information from “an informed Kevin. He says, “Having a team coach, we’re hearing the same thing at the same time.”
In response to the impact of Covid-19, Kevin explains that his company has reduced unnecessary expenses and increased its marketing budget by 50%. He says the company’s strategy is to market and sell its way through the crisis, rather than trying to cut its way through. The results so far? Leads are up, traffic is up, and sales have met December’s forecasts. He plans to continue operating this way and says the agency’s next 90-day plan is to remove unnecessary operational expenses and reinvest that money in sales and marketing efforts.
Kevin can be found on his agency’s website at: BayshoreSolutions.com or by email at: kevin@bayshoresolutions.com
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Kevin Hourigan, President and CEO of Bayshore Solutions based in Tampa, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Kevin.
KEVIN: Hey, good morning, Rob. Nice to be here.
ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Bayshore Solutions and where you are excellent?
KEVIN: Appreciate that, Rob. Bayshore Solutions, we’re a company that’s about to celebrate our 25th year of providing services to our clients. I think what makes that special – we started this company in January of 1996, when America Online or AOL or however you might know of them was still on Version 1, and many people were still just getting introduced to the internet.
As a digital agency, we’ve probably been around more than probably the top one percentile of the industry’s experts. For almost 25 years, we’ve been helping our clients design and develop the correct website that’s going to speak to their primary stakeholders as well as creating the advertising campaign that’s going to drive qualified traffic and help our customers grow through a combination of the right website to the right audience with the right marketing mix. Enjoyed 25 years and still having fun at it.
ROB: That’s remarkable. Congratulations on those 25 years. If we rewind to 1996, what do websites look like, and what do your scopes of work look like at that time?
KEVIN: It’s too funny. I love telling the story, Rob. In January 1996 when we went to market, this was a new division of a company that I had. Back then, we would be what you might call a managed services provider or your outsourced IT department. But essentially, my company at the time really helped companies manage their computer networks – which, back then, there was no cloud; they were all in some kind of closet in the corner of a company’s office space. We managed their servers, their desktop computers and things of that nature.
One of our engineers was getting into web design and built our company’s website and wanted to see if we could do the same for a couple of our clients. I told him I don’t have any blockers to it. I wasn’t super excited about the idea, but he was knocking on our clients’ doors, and he was offering them a three-page website for $500. Of the first 100 people that he asked that were existing clients, they had two responses: “What is a website?” or “We’ll never need one of those.”
Finally, finally, one of them said yes. We built them a three-page website. Really, all it was, was a digital version of a trifold brochure that they had, but I think we spent $5,000 building this $500 website. But sooner or later, all that came back. About a year or two later, all of those companies that said, “What is a website?” or “we’ll never need one of those” were banging on our door and saying, “Hey, listen, that website thing you talked about a year or two ago – I think we need one of those.” But the good news is they weren’t $500 anymore; they were $7,500.
I think we were such an early adopter to this that we were truly to educate a market on a need they were going to have, and they weren’t ready yet. But when they were ready, they came back to us, and I think that’s part of our viability. We’re fortunate; we’re one of only 2% of the agencies who survived the dot-com bubble burst. I think it was those early seeds we planted in building a good client base that helped us survive the dot-come bubble.
We were a company that went from three employees when we got started to two years later having 30 employees to a year after that having 225 and blowing up huge in the dot-com bubble. But when the bubble burst, we went from 225 employees down to about 12 in a matter of a year period of time. If it wasn’t for that early foundation of clients that we had found, I don’t think we would have survived. There’s an old saying, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Certainly, we learned a lot of experiences from that. But very thankful for that original client base that we had.
ROB: In that timeframe, a lot of web companies went tremendously, tremendously upmarket. I don’t think people realize how little you would get sometimes for a million-dollar website in that era.
KEVIN: Yes.
ROB: Kind of the iXLs and the Razorfishes of the world. Did you ever swim up to that scope and scale of website, or did your MSP roots also keep you grounded in –
KEVIN: As I tell the story, we started out in ’96 with $500 websites. In 1998, the average value got to be $7,500. In 2000 that went to $216,500. You just see how that was growing. iXL and Razorfish were what I would call my mentor companies. I’m very fortunate that I’ve had some great personal mentors in my career, but I had some corporate mentors. I looked at iXL and Razorfish as those two companies.
I don’t know if these are the right words, but I think we got cocky a little bit. We put billboards right above the headquarters of iXL of our company’s brand. [laughs] So companies or employees going in there knew who we were, and we used that as one of our marketing tactics.
Then, fortunately, I got a chance to actually go through the offices of Razorfish on a couple different occasions as our company was about to go public in the journey, and the bankers that were going to take us public also took Razorfish public. So, we got a chance to go see how Razorfish operated and things of that nature.
But I think one of the blessings we ended up receiving was just that we didn’t go public. iXL didn’t survive; Razorfish changed ownership numerous times, bought and sold for losses during the journey. Because we didn’t go public, I got to own the decisions that we had to make to navigate that journey. While it was no fun to deal with the downside of the dot-com bubble bursting, I do think it was a savior that we were able to make the changes necessary and nimble enough to be able to survive, where some of those mentors that I looked up to didn’t have the same outcome.
ROB: It’s interesting. I think everybody in that time was a little bit cocky. You mentioned you had the billboard by iXL, and Milchem today puts billboards near their competitors just to spite them a little bit, although they are a cash machine. But iXL I believe also had a movie theater on their roof, so I think everyone was a little bit cocky.
KEVIN: For sure. Cocky or stupid or a combination of each. Unfortunately, I think a victim of the times – everyone thought those were the right things to do. At that time, I joke like everyone in 1999 or 2000 was changing the name of their company to something “dot com.” I remember seeing State Farm change their name to “StateFarm.com.” Sears changed their name from Sears to “Sears.com.” Everyone thought if they didn’t do that, they weren’t going to survive, but fear was motivating their decision, and often good decisions aren’t the outcome of fear.
I think the dot-com bubble exploded for numerous different reasons, but one of them is everyone was chasing after something they didn’t understand, and everyone got caught up in that momentum. The good news is that wasn’t the right momentum, and correction needed to take place, and it did and everyone got better and stronger as a result of it.
ROB: For sure. Amazing that you were even able to survive. How do you navigate that sort of path from 200+ employees to around 12? Obviously, there’s the financial aspect of it, but there’s also the psychological aspect, the identity of the company and your role shifting so quickly. How did you navigate that healthily and keep the business rolling as well?
KEVIN: Of course, downsizing is never fun for anybody at all, but the reality is that the companies who paid me $500 for a website or later $7,500 stayed with me. The companies who were paying $216,500, it wasn’t their money. They had investors, and when the dot-com bubble burst, those investors weren’t funding those projects anymore. 90% of my clients could no longer pay their bills anymore, so I had to send a cease and desist letter to all my clients that if they couldn’t meet their current financial obligations to our company, we had to sever services. 30 days later, I lost 90% of my client base.
But who did I still have left? The people who paid me that $7,500, who had realistic expectations of what their investment was going to make for their business and how it was going to help them grow. The ones who had unrealistic expectations were someone who raised zillions and millions of dollars with this fantastic idea and spending money like it was going out of style – and then it went out of style, and there was no money to be had.
I think in the journey of going down, some of my coworkers were cognizant enough to know that what we thought we all were working towards, the opportunity had gone. Others weren’t quite there yet, and I think there was a hope that it would go back to the way it was. Unfortunately, some self-selected themselves to go somewhere else, and unfortunately we had more than one round of layoffs that helped some of that reduction as well.
At the end of the journey, Rob, to your point, I ended up rebranding our company because the company that we were wasn’t the company that we were going to become. I didn’t want that brand of who we were – an aspiring dot-commer on the verges of going public, spending money like it’s going out of style with clients spending money with us like it’s going out of style – that went away, and I think I had to rebrand my company and find people how accepted the fact that it was never going to be what we thought it was, where we are going to have stock options and be worth a lot of money. I had to find a core team who realized that wasn’t on the table anymore. I had to change the company’s brand because I didn’t want us hanging onto a lost hope that wasn’t going to be a new reality.
ROB: Wow, that’s quite a shift, but it’s tremendous to think about getting the right team on board for that shift. You mentioned you’ve been in business almost 25 years.
KEVIN: Correct.
ROB: One thing you see with agencies that stay in business for a while is sometimes they get mired in the previous generation of the marketing that was hot. There are still web design development agencies. There are still SEO and pay-per-click agencies. But the bar keeps on moving. The target keeps on moving. How have you navigated which lines of service and which technologies, which tools, which marketing channels to bring into the mix and which ones to hold at arm’s length?
KEVIN: That’s a great question. When I rebranded the company, we came up with the brand Bayshore Solutions. Why’d you come up with Bayshore Solutions? The reality is very similar to the question you just asked. I named our company Bayshore Solutions, one, because our office was adjacent to Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa, Florida, so that’s where the “Bayshore” came from. [laughs] But the “solutions” piece was I didn’t want our company’s name to be associated with any service that I didn’t know would survive the outcome of the dot-com bubble burst.
At the time, it could’ve been Bayshore Web Design. It could’ve been Bayshore Web Development. It could’ve been Bayshore SEO. It could’ve been any of those. But I didn’t want to tattoo the name of our company and associate it to a service that may not be what the new norm was going to become. So, very agnostically, I used the word “solutions.” That gave us an opportunity to not be positioning our brand name with a particular area of the industry that you didn’t know would still be surviving.
Then on an ongoing basis, under Bayshore Solutions, the services that we provide – I’ve always said that at the end of the day, the value that we bring to our clients is a level of expertise over and above what they have. Our tagline is “Digital expertise to grow your business.” It’s my job and our company’s job to continue to find a balance between the bleeding edge of new and the tested, tried, and true. It’s finding a solution that isn’t too risky to be on the bleeding edge but isn’t that lack of scalable to be leveraging the tested, tried, and true, and always be bringing a solution to our clients that balances a little bit of both, minimizes their bleeding edge risk, but maximizes their ability to have their investment have some scalability.
It’s always having that next level of expertise that our clients value and can appreciate, and the services around what we can do for them are going to help them move their needle towards growth.
ROB: Is there a percent range of budget you recommend, often, towards more experimental channels? Less proven, in your words?
KEVIN: It’s a great question. I think while every client would love to hear every dollar that they spend absolutely is intended for strict ROI, the opportunity to find the right mix is putting a percentage in the media budget and services to some experimental type things. I think while every solution is unique and different, some are in the 10% range. Give or take 5 points is probably the right answer. So 5% to 15%.
Often that variance can be where particular industries are in their particular cycle. Almost every vertical market has cycles. Some are in an upcycle, some are in a downcycle. Where you spend your exploratory dollars on an upcycle is probably a bigger percentage, and on a downcycle it’s probably a smaller percentage. But it’s finding that right mix, whether it’s opportunity to grow in each particular vertical market that we’re providing services for, and educating our clients that part of the opportunity to find their secret sauce is finding a budget that we can use for some exploratory services.
The other neat thing that we do, Rob, is we market ourselves as digital experts horizontally across numerous verticals. When I talk to our clients every month and I ask about what’s the value we bring back to them, what I hear them say is they have a choice of picking an agency with vertical market expertise or one who’s more of a generalist across many vertical markets, and they appreciate picking Bayshore Solutions, who has this horizontal approach to many different verticals, because we’re bringing ideas to their vertical that, if they had a vertical-focus-only agency, that agency wouldn’t have that awareness from.
And as we’re able to share that expertise that we’re learning in other verticals, it’s not coming at a competitive risk that we learned it on one company that may be competing against another company; it’s coming from experiences outside from another industry. So as we have that exploratory budget for each of our clients, a lot of the learning lessons don’t come at the cost of their budget, but it comes from the learning lessons of other verticals and what seems to be working that can be applicable to that particular industry.
ROB: I hear a through line, a sense of balance across what you’re talking about. You talk about there’s a balance in the channels of not too, too experimental and not too staid and old. There’s a balance in your client base. There’s a balance in choosing solutions as being forward-thinking but also flexible.
Even in the Bayshore part, people who have been to Tampa and know Tampa know that there are parts of Bayshore Boulevard that are tremendously lovely and picturesque and evocative to someone who is from there and may or may not be able to afford to live on Bayshore Boulevard, but it seems flexible also. You mentioned that you also have an office in Denver. So, the name itself even can be about a place but is also not about a place, is also more general.
When you have two offices, how are you thinking about that balance of local clients, regional clients, or location agnostic clients? What’s the reasoning on the second office?
KEVIN: That’s a great question. The real purpose of the second office, Rob, was just an opportunity to expand our talent pool. Tampa’s been amazing to us, but we wanted a complementary talent pool to be able to find digital experts in. Secondarily, we want to be able to serve our clients as easily as possible, and our clients are nationwide. So, we wanted a second office for that talent pool opportunity, but also to be able to serve our clients in their same time zone or one time zone away.
As we expanded to a second office 8 years ago, we looked at either Mountain Time or Pacific Time, and that would give s the ability to serve same time zone or one time zone away. We looked at 13 communities and ended up picking Denver, Colorado, and couldn’t be happier that that’s where we ended up picking. I had no idea Denver would go gangbuster great and we’d be this community that’s just been thriving like crazy, but I’m so fortunate that we did.
It’s funny, talking about Bayshore Solutions – I thought I was so crafty in coming up with this agnostic name. While it wasn’t very attractive or – I hate to use the word “sexy” – it was very agnostic at the time, but certainly “Bayshore” in an application in Denver doesn’t necessarily fit. I remember opening up the office out there, I’m like, man, I wonder if someone’s going to question, “Why Bayshore Solutions? What’s ‘Bayshore’ mean?” out in Denver.
It was probably about 3 years into being in Denver that we were having a kickoff meeting for a pretty significant size company, and the CEO of that business wanted to attend the first hour of that kickoff meeting. He said he was going to exit and leave it up to the rest of his team; he wanted to take me outside for just a moment and say a couple words. He goes, “I’ve got to ask you. Bayshore Solutions – are you guys from here?” I was like, finally someone asked that question. I knew it was going to come. [laughs] And it happened to be a company that was probably about $800 million in revenue that the CEO asked me for that. I’m sure if it was Denver, it should be “Snowcap Solutions” or something along those lines.
What’s really interesting about our journey is that very intentionally, we’re headquartered not only to be able to serve our clients in the same time zone or one time zone away, but secondarily, Colorado and Florida are two of the top eight states that have the most digital talent within them. The advantage to Denver and to Florida is we don’t have the cost burdens of a few of the others, but certainly California, Illinois, and New York.
So very strategically, we are in two of the top eight most digital-rich talent states, but without the cost burdens, and secondarily, able to serve clients in the same time zone or one time zone away. That isn’t accidental. That’s very intentional, and I think it’s been a benefit to our company and our customers as a result of some of that very intentional decision-making.
ROB: It also seems aligned from a city culture – I have not lived in Denver per se, but both places are places where there are reasons to get outside. Those reasons are different, but both places have very many reasons to have a life outside of work that isn’t just going to your house and hiding in the air conditioning, as if you’d gone to Phoenix or something.
KEVIN: Right, exactly. No doubt about it. Culturally, we were a fit. In our dot-com rise, we did go from one office in Tampa – we had six offices total. Two of them were in California and one of them was in Chicago. I think we gelled well culturally with our Chicago coworkers. California was always different. We did research in four cities in California when we were doing our expansion, and when we got down to the final datapoints of what we were seeking from a data perspective, the list of 13 communities we looked at got narrowed down to just two. It was Denver, Colorado or Orange County, California.
Then I had to make a decision, and I used this terrible logic to make my decision, but it was twofold. One was about 20 years ago, I made a commitment to myself I would never fly on a redeye the rest of my life. I only cheated on myself one time, and it was coming back from Orange County, California, and the only return one-way flight to Tampa from Orange County is a redeye. So, for that reason, it had a scar. Secondarily, I recalled having two offices in California, one in San Francisco and one in Los Angeles, and culturally, while they did a great job performing, there was always a cultural riff between our California coworkers and the remaining part of our company.
For those two reasons, I picked Denver, Colorado, and again, I think I’m very fortunate that that’s what the final decision was. I couldn’t be happier about our progress in the Denver community.
ROB: That’s fantastic. Kevin, you mentioned that you made it not only through the dot-com bust, but the financial crisis. I’m sure come around March, or maybe sooner or maybe slightly later depending on how you look at things, in 2020, there was probably a little bit of a sense of, “Oh, here we go again” with the pandemic and the knock-on effects from that. Was there anything you did when you started seeing things shut down – how did you react and prepare, and how are you thinking about the situation now?
KEVIN: There isn’t a “COVID for Dummies” book published yet, so we’re all flying this with our own experiences as a navigating tool. I think everybody’s approached this in different ways. My company has taken a stance that when times get tough, we’ve reduced a lot of not necessary expenses, but we’ve actually increased our marketing budget by 50%. We’re aggressive in trying to market and sell our way through this versus cut our way through this.
We’re having some upward trends. Our leads are up, our traffic is up, sales met expectations from our December forecast. We’ve had a couple months where we actually met those forecasts where I don’t think, if we didn’t go more aggressive from a marketing perspective, we’d have any ability to do so. Our company has tried to market our way through this, and that’s continued to be what I think we’re going to see ourselves do for the remainder of 2020.
When people say, “Hey, what are we going to do in…?”, I’m not stating or committing to anything I can’t own. Right now, I feel like I can own 30 days, 60 days, maybe 90 days, but I’m not comfortable that I know I can really own anything much further out than that.
So, we are communicating frequently with our team on what our next 90-day plan is and removing any unnecessary operational expenses and reinvesting that into sales and marketing. We haven’t had to lay off any people. We’re trying to keep our great team together, and the way to do so isn’t by cutting; it’s by being aggressive and going to find business a little bit more intentional, a little bit more aggressive. There’s companies out there that need help, and we’re out there seeking those companies. That’s how we’re positioning ourselves in this pandemic.
ROB: I think not even cautiously optimistic, but just optimistically – not even cautious. There’s just an intentionality to it that I think is really worth looking at and listening to. It’s not panicked. It’s looking at opportunity without being opportunistic. I think that’s a really good stance to consider.
When you look back at the overall journey, it sounds like you’ve navigated a lot and learned a lot through that path, and we’ve talked through some of the changes, but overall if you look back and you could do some things over, what are some lessons you’ve learned along the way that you would maybe do differently if you were starting this 25-year-old company today in 2020?
KEVIN: That’s a great question. I used to have a CEO coach, and he asked me this loaded question one time. He said, “Hey Kevin, do you know how you get experience?” And I knew it was a loaded question. I knew his answer was going to be the only answer. I’m guessing, and he’s like, “No, that’s not it. That’s not it.” I was like, “Coach Chris, tell me, how do you gain experience?” He said, “You gain experience by making mistakes and learning from them.”
As I look back, I certainly didn’t make every right decision, but I’ve gained a lot of experience. I think some of the things I might do differently – one is when we started our company in the dot-com era, we had a very, very focused culture that we were driving towards, but it was caught up into the dot-com era, which wasn’t real. Then when that dot-com bubble exploded, that culture had expectations that weren’t necessarily real.
I think part of it would just be making sure that our culture is partially organically created and we have likeminded people that fit our core values, but also intentionally corporate-driven and that it’s meeting the expectations of our customers, our coworkers, and our company altogether. So, I think maybe an added focus on an intentional organic culture as opposed to an intentional focus or an organic focus. It’s a combination of both of those.
Over the last few years, I think our company has really worked on a great balance of an intentional organic culture and really spending more time identifying the core values of Bayshore Solutions and finding people to work with us who meet those core values and use those as real true guiding posts. The result of that is the amount of internal friction within our organization is significantly less than it has ever been before.
The cohesiveness of the team – they have fun together and meet all of our goals and objectives. I think in the past, we either had fun and didn’t meet our goals and objectives, or we highly met our goals and objectives but sacrificed fun. Today I think I’ve learned that there is a fine way to balance both out and meet goals and objectives with a team that you appreciate working with every day, and everyone’s having fun in the journey.
ROB: You mentioned core values. Are those something you’re able to share with us? I think it can often be helpful for others to hear each other’s core values.
KEVIN: Absolutely. First up, we work together, we win together, we solve problems together. Those are probably the three core values that we live by. We have a few others, but certainly we work together, and it’s not just as a company. We work together with our clients on one digital team. We form a digital team with our clients and our coworkers on it. We work together, we win together, we solve problems together.
We come to work with a positive winning attitude every day, problem-solving. We own our own accountability; we don’t point fingers at others. That’s really worked well, finding people who have that likeminded approach to who they want to work with and how they want to work – not only from a coworker perspective, but we see clients that meet those values also. Clients who don’t necessarily share those same values become clients who maybe you don’t have the same relationship with. So, it’s not only who we work with, but who we work for, finding likeminded customers and coworkers. In that journey, we’ve enjoyed that journey much better from a customer and a coworker perspective.
ROB: You mentioned a coach that you used to work with. Sometimes it’s interesting to hear people’s processes on working with a coach. Do you still work with a coach? How have you met that need for a voice outside of yourself?
KEVIN: I don’t have a personal CEO coach anymore, but our company has hired a coach, and in my journey of having a coach, it was great. It helped me see the blind spots that I couldn’t see. So, the coach was very beneficial.
But almost 2 years ago, I elected to switch from having a personal CEO coach to my leadership team having an executive coach. We all picked a coach together, and we started following Gino Wickman’s Traction program called the Entrepreneurial Operating System. It goes by the acronym EOS. We found an implementer to be all of our team’s coach – not just Kevin having a coach.
The journey using Traction’s EOS has been amazing for I think our entire leadership team and our entire company. It’s given us a tighter vision, a better definition of what those core values are that we just were talking about. But instead of me learning on my own and trying to bring those lessons in to my leadership team, we’re learning that all together as one cohesive team. When we hired our implementer, we made it a team hire, not “Kevin found one and brought him to the table.” It’s our coach, not Kevin’s coach.
There’s an old saying, “If you want people to be part of the plan, make them part of the planning process.” Having a team coach, we’re hearing the same thing at the same time. Following Gino Wickman’s Traction Entrepreneurial Operating System, this is stuff we’re learning together. We’re all part of the planning process. So being part of the plan comes much more easily and understandably to the whole team versus me creating this on my own and bringing it to them. It’s just been far more understanding and aware and excitable as we’ve gone from “Kevin’s CEO coach” to a team coach.
ROB: That’s a great lesson in bringing a lot of the pressure, even, off of yourself, bringing your team into the decision. I think we all need to think about and learn from that a little bit more. I was reminded yesterday when somebody on my team solved a problem better than I ever would have, but I felt like I needed to solve it at first.
KEVIN: No doubt. Quite frankly, it’s just finding the right people in the right roles. It’s helped us complement each other. I don’t have to have all the answers, and I think prior, I had to have all the answers. Today we have a very strong, strong leadership team here. We all know what we do well and the areas of the business that others do better. We’re comfortable being very vulnerable and exposing where our strengths and our weaknesses are and dividing and conquering, and working together as one cohesive team. It’s been highly effective.
I used to joke, before we were following this Entrepreneurial Operating System, which goes by the acronym EOS, prior to all of us following the EOS, I joke we were following the KOS. People are like, “What’s the KOS?” I’m like, “That’s the Kevin operating system.” No one’s written a book yet about the Kevin operating system, but there’s tens of thousands of companies following this EOS. For sure it’s been great guideposts to help us continue to find the right people to help us accomplish the things that our company seeks to do.
ROB: Super-duper solid. Love it, Kevin. When people want to find you and find Bayshore Solutions, where should they go look you up?
KEVIN: BayshoreSolutions.com, find us there. Love to hear from everybody. I’d like to have some ongoing dialogue. I’m easy to reach; it’s just kevin@bayshoresolutions.com. Rob, I enjoyed the opportunity to share some of the Bayshore Solutions story with you today.
ROB: This was great. It sounds like an excellent journey, and it’s still rolling, so congratulations.
KEVIN: Thank you.
ROB: Be well, Kevin. Thank you.
KEVIN: Thank you.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Erik Huberman is Founder and CEO of Hawke Media, an agency serving as “an outsourced CMO-level expert” which, Eric says, “puts client success ahead of our own.” The agency’s “SWOT team” identifies “holes” in a client’s marketing program and provides a “comprehensive à la carte menu of services and month-to-month contracts” to address those needs in a timely manner. Month-to-month works, Erik says, because the idea of signing a long-term contract with someone you have just met is like getting married to someone you’ve never even dated.”
When the agency started 6-1/2 years ago, the scope of services was relatively narrow – primarily e-commerce. In short order, Erik added content creation, production work, and web design. Last year, the agency purchased its first affiliate agency. Erik says that it was the -commerce community that built Hawke Media and e-commerce is still 70 percent of the agency’s business.
Today, customized, data-driven, performance-based solutions facilitate product launch, scaling, and business vitalization for a broad range of industries and business sizes. “Big” companies are responsible for only two percent of the agency’s revenues.
Erik says his agency’s goal is to expand into 3 to 5 new territories this year. Rather than acquiring agencies or opening offices in new locations, Hawke hires talent in places “of interest.” When things in a particular area “start to open up,” the agency evaluates the kind of space they want . . . and if they want a space. New markets are selected based on market opportunity, cost of living. high concentration of ecommerce brands, SMBs, startup community, and agency saturation. He believes that TikTok, once it scrapes through the political issues, will be “one of the first things since Facebook and Instagram, to be a viable [and quite possibly great] advertising platform.”
Erik notes that building community is one of his agency’s core values. Hawkefest, an annual summit, has drawn 600 brand owners every year for the past 3 years. Since inception, the agency has sponsored weekly e-commerce Happy Hours, recently started fun bi-weekly Zoom events, and even more recently introduced a trivia night. The agency will partner with the city of LA to hose an e-commerce week starting September 28.
Erik says that one thing he has learned over the years is that hiring and investing ahead of expected growth is “always a mistake.” Reacting to reality makes growth far more sustainable than proactively building for something that might or might not happen. Hiring and training executive talent is more difficult than hiring and training staff.
Hawke operates a venture fund that invests in marketing and e-commerce technology and e-commerce brands. E-commerce-related business doubled in Q2 of this year . . . both large businesses and small. Eric sees cellphone SNS (social networking service) marketing as a massive opportunity in the coming months, even more so than email.
Erik can be found on his agency’s website at https://hawkemedia.com/ or on any social media platform, including TikTok, @ or /ErikHuberman.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am very excited to be joined today by Erik Huberman, Founder and CEO and Hawke Media based in Santa Monica, California. Welcome to the podcast, Erik.
ERIK: Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s good to be here.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. I’ve heard about Hawke Media for years; why don’t you tell us about Hawke Media?
ERIK: Sure. Started about 6-½ years ago, basically with the idea that great marketing is not accessible. As a business, it is really hard to find great marketing talent, whether to hire in-house or good marketers as agencies. I just got sick of the ecosystem and decided to build a small SWOT team to help the companies I knew needed help – a bunch of people each with their own expertise, like Facebook marketer, email marketer, web designer, fractional CMO, etc. I just created this a la carte, month to month really simple model where we go into a business, identify holes in their marketing, and then spin up those people. The whole idea is making great marketing accessible.
ROB: A la carte, month to month is a little bit unusual. A lot of people aspire, especially as they grow and build their business, to get deeper into retainers, to get deeper into packages. How do you handle that degree of flexibility?
ERIK: It’s a few things. At scale, it’s a lot easier because averages play out. We know on average, we’re going to keep this many clients, sign this many clients, lose this many clients, etc., so that we can actually staff accordingly. Again, the percentage variability gets a little more evened out. Our people work on multiple companies. Our biggest clients are 2% of our revenue. It allows for a lot of spread-out, so it allows us to actually build a business that is sustainable around doing that.
What’s nice is our clients actually get the benefit of the efficiency of our employees working on multiple companies, so it allows us to charge less, make it easy, but then we get the benefit of the averages playing out and being able to ebb and flow as companies come and go when they need us.
ROB: I feel like I hear a layer of systems-thinking underneath what you’re sharing here. You’re talking about thinking about average duration, and even when you’re talking about sharing staff and clients and being able to spread the work around, there’s some knowledge transfer that has to happen. Have you had a natural dispensation towards process? How did you come to the ability to build and hand off a client? A lot of agencies really can’t handle that.
ERIK: This is my fifth business, so I’ve done a lot of operations. I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily an ops guy. I’m an operator in terms of the traditional sense of the word, but I’m not – honestly, it’s 7 years of doing this, almost. Now I know the numbers cold. I manage my business, I care about it, I love it, so all these things have become very clear. In the beginning, it was a lot simpler. When I hired seven people, it was more just “How do I create something sustainable and profitable?”
Then you start to see these benefits and you start to be able to scale off these benefits. It’s the hindsight thing, where looking backwards, I can tell you why our company succeeded, but in the beginning I was like “This makes sense intuitively,” and it came from me running businesses and hating the way our agencies worked and continuing to have to make changes, and building off of that knowledge. But then a lot of the unforeseen benefits came in too.
ROB: What were some of those prior businesses, if I dare ask? What was your journey?
ERIK: There was a whole entrepreneurial journey of selling stuff door to door. Got into Beanie Babies when I was 8 years old and made a few thousand bucks. So, there’s a lot of history there being an entrepreneur. But the real first business was actually filtering storm drains in California. California passed a law in 2006 that you legally had to filter your storm drain. If you were caught not doing it, you would end up getting I think a $75,000 curb drain fine. It was big.
I had a friend that pursued solving that problem and being the one that would actually handle that. I came in as his partner and handled sales and marketing, and we started to scale it. There’s a very long story here, but it was that. Then I went into real estate the week before the entire banking industry collapsed, made $350 that year and went, “I’ve got to figure out something else,” because that’s a really rough sustainability in terms of salary, to live in LA on $350 a year. There’s no arrows pointing there.
So, I started an online music company, built it for 2 years, hired a CEO to take over. We got it to profitability and then I realized it wasn’t going to be that big. Then I built and sold two consecutive fashion subscription ecommerce companies. Scaled them really fast, did really well.
ROB: I imagine in that ecommerce you had some agency partners that maybe didn’t function the way you were hoping they would?
ERIK: Yeah. The number one thing, which is why we’re so keen on month to month, was the idea of signing a year contract with someone I just met. Like, “Let’s get married even though we’ve never dated.”
ROB: In the early days of Hawke Media, how did you even come to the name? What’s the significance behind it? What did the early days look like?
ERIK: I wish I had a good story for the name. It really was as simple as I was originally going to call it Growth Hacker Group, and I mentioned it to a friend that was a partner of mine, helping me do some media buying, and he’s like, “Erik, I just signed with Walmart. You think they’d ever put their name on a contract that says ‘Growth Hacker Group’? Just keep it simple.”
I grew up in a small town called Ojai; I loved red-tailed hawks as a kid. Basically, I started looking on GoDaddy at 9 p.m. at night. I still remember sitting there, and I found that Hawk Media without the “e” was taken, but with the “e” wasn’t. I was like, “That sounds good. I like that.” Made the website, and we were off to the races. It was that simple.
ROB: And now, at least when we actually do go to conferences, your logo, that name – those are things that you see at conferences commonly. Hawke’s a meaningful name out in the business world, so congratulations.
ERIK: Thank you. And that’s something to learn about all names and all brands. It’s what you make of them. It doesn’t really matter. I’ve really learned, especially in B2B, just make a name that isn’t going to turn anyone off. It should be pretty simple. And then what it turns into is based on how you build your business – your reputation, your consistency.
ROB: Did you ever have an inclination to pursue the rebrand, or was that an idea you had disabused yourself of in prior businesses?
ERIK: Say that again, sorry?
ROB: The name. Did you ever, over the course of the journey, have an inclination towards changing it? Or is it an inclination you shook yourself of in prior businesses and learned that lesson earlier?
ERIK: The only thing we’ve talked about with Hawke Media is dropping the “Media” at times. But no, again, at this point we’ve made the name what it is and we’re happy with what it is, so there’s no reason to change it.
ROB: Early on, were there any particular lines of business you were deep into? Were you deep into ecommerce from Day 1? Any particular things you said you wouldn’t do? Were you not doing SEO or paid social? Or has it been the full board?
ERIK: We definitely have scaled our services. We bought an affiliate agency last year; we didn’t do it before that. We didn’t do much content creation for clients for a while. We didn’t do production work. In the very beginning we didn’t do web design. That came in pretty quickly. So that’s definitely evolved over time.
Ecommerce was a big core of our business because that was my background, and in the beginning, it was all arm’s reach. Anyone I knew that needed help is who hired us. So, it was mostly the ecommerce community that built us. We’re still probably 70% ecommerce because those clients begot other clients, etc., etc., and it just scaled from there. But we’re agnostic in what we want to take; just our reputation is massive in ecom.
ROB: Certainly, and that probably drives some of where you show up, where you speak, where you market. Not entirely, but a good amount.
ERIK: Yeah. That is the core. Again, it’s 70%, which I like. I’m happy that we still have the 30% that isn’t, and we do a lot of cool stuff in SaaS and brick-and-mortar stuff and even restaurants and gyms and all sorts of stuff that was more affected during this. But a lot of it has been – it’s nice to have that diversification, but we’ve doubled down on e-com, too. We’re hosting Ecommerce Week LA with the city of LA as a partner September 28th.
ROB: Interesting. Have you done that before? Is this the first year of that event?
ERIK: This is the first year. We’ve done a summit every year for brand owners called Hawkefest and had about 600 brand owners every year at that, and then we wanted to parlay it into something bigger. I’m the guy that, when we accomplish something, I’m like “Great, what’s next?” Hawkefest has gone really well. It’s been awesome. We’ve done it for 3 years, and it was like “What’s next?”
So, we got the city of LA to sign off on doing a full week of events. We were trying to push it for last year, but we couldn’t get it done with the city on time, so now it’s this year. Now with what’s happening with COVID, we’re going virtual with it. But the nice thing about virtual – and we’ve already thrown some virtual events – is we can have way larger headcount and way bigger pipeline, which means for next year, it becomes a great audience and community to make next year that much bigger.
ROB: Right. At that point we may be able to travel, we may be a little bit itchy to travel and maybe come on out to the LA area.
ERIK: Exactly.
ROB: Especially in the fall. Some of us are looking to get away from where it’s getting cold.
ERIK: LA’s a beautiful place.
ROB: Absolutely. As long as you have more than $350 a year to make a living.
ERIK: Or at that point a really good max on my credit card. That helps. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] You mentioned it was the third year of Hawkefest. What did the first year of Hawkefest look like that you punched up to get to 600 people? What made you feel like it was something that you needed to pursue?
ERIK: It was pretty big the first year. I think it was 300 the first year. It wasn’t like some massive jump. We could afford more, so we spent more to give more room for people. We capped it out. That was 3 years into business, the first one. We knew we had a community around us, I had connections, etc., that we could pull it off.
It was something I wanted to do from the beginning. We’ve hosted Ecommerce Happy Hours since before I started Hawke Media, and now we’re hosting what we call NightHawke, which is biweekly Zoom fun events. Tomorrow night we’re doing a trivia night. So, we do stuff like that. Build community is one of our core values. That has always been a big part of what we’re doing. Once I started to see the momentum, I realized basically at the end of Year 2, “Hey, now we’re at a point where financially we can take the risk. We have enough partners and sponsors we could probably bring in. I feel confident I can bring in the speakers people want to see and we can get it out to an audience. Let’s go for throwing our big summit.”
It was something I had in mind for a long time and then pulled it off. And then once we did and felt comfortable with it, then we started making it an annual thing, so then we had it for 3 years. We were going to have a fourth one this year; the idea was it was going to be the capstone of Ecommerce Week. But with COVID, we decided to literally just not have that piece. We don’t need to have a virtual Hawkefest. We can just have Ecom Week.
ROB: Seems like you’re always thinking one step of what’s been done and one step of what’s next. What are we looking to see in Hawke Media in the next couple of years? I get the impression you might know where you’re driving with it.
ERIK: Oh yeah, 100%. It’s shifted, and it’s still shifting because of, again, the change in the world. But we wanted to expand into three to five new territories this year. We have a list, which is Dallas, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boise. They’re places we wanted to open up this year. We already have New York, Boston, and LA.
Originally it was, “Let’s look at maybe acquiring a couple agencies or opening offices in those places.” Acquiring is harder because it’s harder to meet these agencies. Opening offices makes no sense. But hiring in those places now really does, so we’ve actually made hires in Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, and Chicago already, and we’re interviewing someone in Boise right now. San Francisco we haven’t touched yet, but the rest are starting to move. We’re just doing it backwards. We’re actually making the hires first, and then when things start to open up, we can assess what kind of space we want, if we want any in those territories. So, we’ve started to execute on that.
Our M&A is ramping back up. Just got off a call before this with a company we’re looking to maybe acquire. So, we have quite a pipeline there. Hired someone new to build out that corporate development arm of our business. Our venture fund has performed incredibly well because we’re invested mostly in marketing and ecommerce technology along with ecommerce brands – which if anyone’s paying attention, doubled in Q2 this year because that’s where the most benefit came from with this. And that includes Shopify doubling, not just Amazon. Small businesses doubled too. We’re just seeing a lot of success on that side too.
So that’s the gist, along with I’d say the biggest new challenge, which is: how do you create nuance and camaraderie amongst a team when they don’t get to hang out by the coffee machine or in the lunchroom? That’s something we’re working through. We’re going to be hiring a new Head of People and HR and trying to think through how to build a really tightknit remote team.
ROB: It seems like some of the things you’re doing for fun with the NightHawke sort of events – it seems like there’s almost a virtuous cycle between the stuff you’re going to do to build a good remote team and the stuff that’s going to be good for a broader community. You could do a trivia internally or externally, and it probably transfers well.
ERIK: That’s 100% right. We include our own employees in our events, so there is overlap. Community is community. Our internal people, external, etc., we try to open it up to everyone. But yeah, exactly. That’s part of it, but the one thing that’s hardest to replicate that we’re still thinking through is, how do I create that nuance where two random people that don’t work on the same team meet each other at lunch and then end up going out for drinks, being friends? The amount of people that become best friends or roommates, etc., through Hawke Media – even couples – is something I value.
The fact that people can actually meet – if you survey our team – and we just did this, and I got a lot of the feedback yesterday. We asked all the good and bad, like “Be blunt with us; what do you love, what do you hate?” Number one thing everyone says is they love the people around them. We’ve got to keep that. That is critical for our business.
ROB: Yeah. What do you do?
ERIK: I work on it. [laughs] That’s the fun thing. I’m interviewing for Heads of HR. It’s my main question to them. It’s a hard one. I’ve talked to people with 15-20 years of solid HR experience at great companies, and it’s like, “Uh, happy hours on Zoom on Fridays?” Like, sorry, no. I mean, it’s fun to have now and then, but that doesn’t really do it. That gets the 15 people that like to drink and like each other already to hang out. That doesn’t get the people that would’ve never met each other to actually do it.
So, creating that – we have something called Donuts that automatically pairs two people a week to grab coffee. Someone random every week, or someone you already know. A lot of times it’s people you already know. That’s been fun, but we’ve made it optional. I’m almost ready to make it mandatory so that people just have to meet someone every week. Those are the kinds of things we’re – again, it’s not easy.
ROB: You had to already be thinking about this, though, because you were looking at these new markets. You already were operating on a predicate of being even more distributed than you already were. I’m curious, though; what was your process in selecting the new cities that you’re going into?
ERIK: It was mostly market opportunity. Five of them out of the six new ones are basically the Top 5 cities where we already have business. They have the highest concentration of ecommerce brands, SMBs, startup community, etc. Most opportunity, along with – it’s also measured against the agency saturation. There were a lot of cities that had similar opportunities, like Denver, that may have a lot of marketing agencies. It’s just going to be too competitive for the market share.
We did a whole analysis over a bunch of different – and also we were looking at cost of living. Like, are these places where we can actually build teams in a little more cost-effective way? And then Boise came up because actually my COO moved to Boise 2 years ago – I think it’s been a little over 2 years – and has been commuting in to the office from Boise every week, in LA. Obviously with COVID, is not, and we’re probably not going to be asking that again in terms of full-time. So that’s always been a desire.
Boise is a much cheaper place to hire, it’s got great talent and probably a lot more loyalty. LA and New York are tough because our employees literally get emailed every day to get poached. So, we have to work really, really, really hard to keep them, and still it’s almost a futile effort a lot of the times because you’ve got Google and Facebook offering four times their salary sometimes.
So yeah, part of it is just diversifying. That’s really good too. But mostly it was the market opportunity. We know that our clients like working with a local partner.
ROB: Right. It is clever with places like Boise, where you’re college-adjacent but you’re not a college town, so you can make really high quality talent hires and keep them somewhere they like to be, but it’s not just a stone-cold college town where there’s no business there to be earned.
ERIK: Yep.
ROB: Makes a ton of sense. Erik, when we look back at the journey so far, 6 years or so with Hawke Media, what are some lessons you’ve learned along the way you might do differently if you were starting over today?
ERIK: I’d say probably the most mistakes I made had to do around a few things. One is we learned hiring ahead of growth and investing ahead of growth, assuming growth is coming, is always a mistake. Things happen, things change. It’s never what you predicted. So being more reactive than proactive in all the ways we build out our business has always been a much more sustainable way.
It causes little pain points because sometimes you grow too fast and you’ve got to deal with a lot of stress, but that’s better than not growing fast enough and being overstaffed, overleveraged, etc. That’s been a big lesson that thankfully we got through, but that caused a lot of stress at times when we tried to double and we only grew 60%. That becomes a problem. Funny enough, growing 60% is still a huge win, unless you spent money like you were going to grow 100%. That’s one thing I learned.
Also, when hiring executives and building out executive teams, a lot of people think it’s going to be – and including I used to – when you hire an executive, they take that thing off your plate. So, if I’m going to hire a Head of HR, now HR is handled. That takes a year plus, and you’ve got to be hyper-collaborative and working very directly with it during that time. That’s been the other thing that’s really helped at this point scale: spending a lot of time with our executives on how I want to see the business run so that they get up to speed and start to think similarly so they really, truly can run that piece the way we want it run.
ROB: You’re typically probably hiring people you have measured to be fairly capable. If someone’s expecting, does it take longer to get an executive performing the way you want or a staff?
ERIK: Oh, executive by far. There’s just so much more nuance. People are the same. I get that there’s people that are smarter and dumber, etc., but we hire smart people across the board. So, it’s not an aptitude thing. A lot of times experience helps them do certain things, but there’s so many moving parts for an executive that they have to pull into and understand all the nuances of the business.
It just takes a lot longer to get those nuances so that in their quick decision-making, it starts to take account of the nuances they’ve been now accustomed to. It takes time because there isn’t – our business in a lot of ways is unique. We do things differently. Most businesses do certain things differently, so they have to get ingrained with that nuance before they can really be productive.
ROB: It’s interesting what you say there. I think we all get happy hiring hands sometimes when we’re excited about growth. We see it coming, but it’s not quite there. But how do you know – it sounds like you hire at that point where it’s almost too late, and I mean that in the best way.
ERIK: That’s correct, yeah. And every once in a while it is too late, in a sense, and it causes our team to work harder than they really want to or should. I’ve been very clear with our team that that’s going to happen sometimes. That is part of the job. There will be times, like most agencies and consultancies and service businesses and any business, where you have to put in 60-hour weeks. That exists. Then we’ll right-size and we’ll get you back to normal hours, and then it’ll happen again. It’s kind of an ebb and flow. Unlike investment banking, we’re not making people work 100+ hours a week all the time. But we definitely have ebbs and flows where there’s some hard periods.
ROB: Is there a measurable you’re able to use to figure that out? Is it a number of hours billable? Is it a utilization rate?
ERIK: Exactly. We look at utilization and we look at our people, and how many clients they’re managing and what the average time spent on a client is overall. At this point we’ve been doing this long enough, we have a lot of averages, so we can give an idea of like, “That person’s fully loaded, that person’s way overloaded,” etc. Again, we have enough size now that we should be able to never overload someone more than 10%, meaning going from 40 to 45 hours a week. When it gets more than that, it’s usually either a perfect storm of a ton of sales and maybe someone leaving or something that is painful. But generally we’re okay there.
ROB: That definitely makes sense. I think it’s hard sometimes for people to imagine – when you are at let’s say 10 people, they’re not even all interchangeable functionally, so you may have some roles that are overlapped only by two or three people. So, you’re trying to figure out these huge step functions of “How do I increase my capacity here by 50% and when do I pull the trigger on that one?” Although I imagine in a lot of those cases, and maybe for you, that’s also the founders eating some of the pain.
ERIK: Exactly. Everybody has to jump in sometimes, so the pain gets spread out too. [laughs]
ROB: Interesting. Of the different marketing channels that you’re involved in, what has been bumping up as a good opportunity? What’s been attenuating? And maybe an upcoming opportunity that we don’t realize yet?
ERIK: I’d say SNS marketing is a massive one. We’re seeing crazy performance there, and I think that’ll continue, especially as things open back up, because getting people on their cellphone and texting when they’re out and about is a great way to reach people versus email. Email’s still powerful, to be clear, but I think SNS will also be a great platform.
I think TikTok, if you can get through the political stuff, is still – it’s one of the first things since Facebook and Instagram that looks like a very viable advertising platform. I hope Snapchat figures it out, but it’s still not as great. Twitter is not really great, YouTube is not really great. But I think TikTok will end up being a great platform.
ROB: Do you think Microsoft can manage to not mess it up if they do buy it?
ERIK: They did a great job with LinkedIn. They did a terrible job with Skype. [laughs] It just depends on how they manage it. If they keep it separate and let it go – I know a lot of the senior team at TikTok in the U.S. I think there’s a great team there. There’s an opportunity there, and I think Microsoft’s way of M&A has gotten better.
ROB: Sure. They’ve done a good job with GitHub as well. They really have chilled out on a lot of things they maybe used to goof up. TikTok, I imagine, has pretty strong alignment with where you are geographically.
ERIK: Yeah. They also have offices in New York, but yeah. I think they’ve created something that’s a very passive user experience. Once they build out their advertising platform better – again, ignoring the political side of this – I think the way people use it is going to be a really powerful ad platform. We’re one of the first official partners to TikTok, agency-wise.
ROB: What does that mean?
ERIK: We’ve got a full-time team there that’s working with us on everything we need to do to make the platform better and utilize it correctly, and if we have any needs to perform, basically. Same thing we have with Facebook and Google. We have full-time teams, we’re on the Slack, etc., so we can make sure campaigns are run with best practices. We can have them double down with us. It’s a true partnership in that sense.
ROB: That’s a real asset. What is your engagement with legacy media? You’ve got “Media” in your name, and some folks with media, it means very, very new media; some people, it only means very, very old media. What’s your engagement with out-of-home and video?
ERIK: We utilize it all. TV, radio, out-of-home. We usually start with digital because it’s a lot more iterative and we can actually test a lot better, but as our clients scale, we start leveraging all those other things too. We have great teams around more traditional media channels. And it works. It’s different, and there’s different ways to use all of them in a full marketing sense.
ROB: I think what I heard in there is one of the things you may do is actually iterate on messaging in digital formats before amplifying it out to more analog. What’s an example of maybe a campaign you can talk about where you figured that out? Maybe something a little bit unexpected in the digital domain.
ERIK: Honestly, off the cuff, I have a hard time trying to think of where there was an “aha” moment. It’s not like “Oh my God,” this epiphany like “That works way better. We should do that.” It was more like “Let’s test these 10 messages. Okay, that’s the message that’s working really well on Facebook, but scale that a little bit. Okay, this value proposition has always performed the best. Let’s use that value proposition on the billboards we’re going to go buy.”
ROB: You’re a tremendously sensible yet ambitious man. It’s a fun thing to hear. It’s all very matter-of-fact, “Yeah, we do it this way.” It’s not so clever; it’s just you almost seem to get out of your way by not trying to be too clever.
ERIK: Yeah. We’ve had problems trying to work with big creative agencies that have these robust creative ideas. We’re like, “Cool, but in practicality that means absolutely nothing and it’s not going to drive any business. But it looks really pretty.” [laughs] We care about growth. We care about the company’s goal, which is usually revenue and profit growth. That’s what we’re driving towards.
ROB: On the ecommerce side, are you able to get everything dialed in enough to actually be able to tell them return on ad spend metrics and that sort of thing?
ERIK: Oh yeah. We even like to talk more CAC to LTV because return on ad spend is super misleading if you have any kind of recurring business, and if you don’t, that’s a really hard digital business anyways. So yeah, we like to really give guidance into the real numbers versus – ROA ads is a very deep metric, and a lot of times it’s misreported because they’re not tracking long enough because the purchase cycle of a company, usually people forget. So, they’ll spend ads today and look at ROA ads tomorrow. They completely forget that people take time to buy something from seeing an ad. It isn’t instant. 95% of the time, it’s not an instant purchase, so you’re missing out on most of your returns if you look at marketing that way. That’s the issue. That’s not the way to look at it.
ROB: It’s interesting to hear that CAC to LTV mention, this customer acquisition cost to lifetime value. That kind of bleeds over into the startup and SaaS world. I know you’re in the startup world as well with your venture arm. I think I saw you had somebody from Upfront speaking maybe last year at Hawkefest. Did that metric start more in the ecommerce side or more in the software side? How did it bleed over?
ERIK: That comes from the ecommerce company I ran before. We were always CAC to LTV. That’s a ratio that’s mattered for a long time. Thankfully it’s getting more and more prominent. Dollar Shave Club is a good example of this. Again, I worked at the incubator with them, and from what I’ve heard, their CAC was like $20 bucks and their average order value was $5. If you looked at their ROA ads, it was 25%. Like, that’s terrible. But their lifetime value – I don’t know what it was, but let’s say it was 18 months. That would actually turn that $5 into $90. 20 to 90 is decent as long as you have the working capital to get through that.
It’s those kind of things – and it does matter. Also, knowing that payback period is super important too because you have to finance through it. So, there’s all sorts of nuance there. Yeah, running a business is more complicated than just a return on ad spend, which is why you see all these guys that are posting on Facebook about their 50x return on ad spend that they’re driving for companies and never seem to actually make any money. Because it’s B.S. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] Perfect. That makes a ton of sense, especially with the subscription model. But I imagine as we go deeper and deeper into ecommerce, a lot of non-subscription businesses have become significantly more predictable and recurring. Have you seen something like let’s say a Columbia Sportswear become almost like a subscription, even though it’s not?
ERIK: Not subscription in the sense that they’re forcing people to buy on a certain regular cadence. It’s more thinking about lifetime value, like “How do I get them to come back and buy more?” Managing your existing customer base and getting them to upsell and buy more is much cheaper than getting new customers and much more lucrative. Assuming you have a decent product that people like, it’s way easier to get those customers to continue to buy.
ROB: Perfectly sensible. Erik, when people want to find you and Hawke Media, where should they go to find you?
ERIK: Any social media platform, @ or /ErikHuberman. Even TikTok. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] And what we will we find on your TikTok?
ERIK: One video, I was sent a sweat suit by – what’s Josh’s last name? One of the biggest TikTokers. He just moved to Triller, too, because of all this stuff. Josh Richards, I think is his name. He’s got like 20 million followers. He sent me a sweat suit. I had to wear it and make a TikTok video because it just felt like the right thing to do. It’s me sliding in with the sweat suit on. It’s important. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] Perfect. Erik Huberman of Hawke Media, thank you for coming on the podcast. Congratulations on everything you’ve done and everything you’re doing. We’ll look for your people in all these new American cities.
ERIK: I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.
ROB: Be well.
ERIK: You too.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
David Azar is Founder and CEO of Outsmart Labs, a digital marketing agency focused on riding new trends and platforms to drive more traffic, more visibility, and more online conversions. His agency works with clients to build a 360 strategy to drive those conversions in sales, traffic, and newsletter signups. David says, “Digital marketing changes so fast that it’s about whoever adapts faster and whoever finds the opportunities in the market.”
The agency provides traditional digital marketing services -- Google strategies, Facebook, traditional social media strategies – but likes the advantage of being an “early adopter” of the newest trends.
Where to be now, according to David? TikTok – the place where kids dance. Or not.
In this interview, David describes the phenomenal growth of TikTok. The number of U.S. users grew from 27 million in July 2019 to 40 million in January 2020, and then to 65 million at the beginning of April, with 85 million users by mid-June. About 1 in 4 people in this country use TikTok, many of whom are “very involved,” to wit, 34% of TikTok users actively produce content.
David explains that TikTok’s paid ads platform can cost over $50,000 a month. On the self-serve side, the budget can start as low as $1. TikTok has specific rules about content, posting, and addressing the audience, along with a powerful editing app. Videos created for Instagram won’t work on TikTok.
David says now is the time for smaller brands to gain TikTok followers and community. The cost on TikTok is one-tenth that of Instagram. Big brand demand for influencers is low, so the spend on these initiators will produce a better ROI than an equivalent spend on TikTok ads. This cost is only going to go up, David warns. Today’s users will only pay a fraction of what they will have to pay in a year to “get the same audience and the same followers.” The current TikTok algorithm promotes good content and makes it extremely easy to go viral. That, David says, will probably change.
TikTok usually starts with a challenge. Someone responds to that challenge. The greater the number of people who respond, the better the chance that challenge will reach the “For You page “where everyone’s going to see it and participate in that challenge.” Outsmart Labs partners with initiators who have up to a million followers to create concepts for its client brands. It then develops a first activation, one that will attract a lot of followers and eventually take the brand to the For You Page and “very large exposure.” Outsmart Lab clients have seen great ROIs on TikTok activation campaigns over the past year.
Other areas of opportunity David discusses in this interview are local SEO and programmatic advertising. In regards to local SEO, David has found that close to 96% of retail establishments don’t do anything to develop local SEO. Yet, many customers will look for a company offering a specific product or service in their community. Unfortunately, Covid-19 has impacted this “local market opportunity” for many businesses. But the situation also presents an opportunity for companies to rethink their websites and their business models. Programmatic advertising tracks customers from their cell phone locations and pushes strategic advertisements to these phones based on their location. Covid-19 presents an opportunity for companies to rethink their websites and their business models.
David can be reached at his company’s website at https://outsmartlabs.com/.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m excited to be joined today by David Azar, Founder and CEO at Outsmart Labs based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, David.
DAVID: Hey, Rob. Thanks for having me.
ROB: It’s excellent to have you here. Why don’t you tell us about Outsmart Labs? Many firms have a superpower, so what is yours?
DAVID: That’s a great question, great way to put it. I think our superpower is definitely our team. I think the team that we have together is what makes all of our campaigns very successful. At Outsmart Labs, we focus very highly on new trends and new platforms.
First, to introduce what Outsmart Labs is, we help clients with having more traffic, more visibility, and more conversions online, and we really build a 360 strategy in order to drive those conversions, whether those are sales, whether that’s traffic, newsletter signups. I think the team we have is a team that’s very hungry. We are at the forefront of trends. We were actually one of Google’s top agencies, rising agencies, which really allowed us to have access to a lot of data.
We’re not scared of trying new platforms. For example, right now, what we’ve been doing over the last year, which we’ve been seeing really great ROIs on, is TikTok. TikTok activation campaigns. I think what clients like is the mix of finding traditional marketing, whether it is Google strategies, Facebook, traditional social media strategies, and also inputting some newer platforms.
At the end of the day, digital marketing changes so fast that it’s about whoever adapts faster and whoever finds the opportunities in the market. I think our clients like that in us, understanding that some of the things might not work, some might work, but overall the strategy is going to be a very good strategy in order to scale.
ROB: Excellent. It sounds like from your first introduction, you are very results-focused. How do you align a channel like TikTok – what do good results look like on that channel? Are you looking primarily at brand impressions, or is there a deeper level you can go to with a campaign there?
DAVID: Great question. I think I mentioned what’s really important now n digital marketing is not just doing one platform; it’s really the 360 approach. Think of yourself whenever you’re online and you’re shopping for something. Most likely, if you see an ad for something you’re interested in, you’ll click it, but most likely you won’t convert that first time. So over time, the more you’re going to be seeing that ad, the more likely you’ll say, “Okay, now I’ll take the time to convert.”
TikTok actually has a great opportunity at the moment. Even though it’s been seeing humongous growth – and clients always tell me, whenever I offer them to go on TikTok and I go, “You guys should go on TikTok,” they tell me, “But I don’t understand. TikTok is just kids that dance. I don’t understand why that’s my market.” This is when we tell them the growth of TikTok over the last year. They had 27 million users in July of last year, 40 million in January – and I’m talking in the U.S. – 65 million in the beginning of April, and on June 15th they had 85 million users.
So, 85 million users means that now 1 person out of 4, almost, in the U.S. has a TikTok account, so pretty much anyone. It’s all about finding the right way of – the way you’re going to be marketing your product. It’s not about just doing dance. It’s about finding your core values and creating it in a creative way.
At the moment, that we’re at right now, it’s a huge opportunity because the TikTok algorithm works a certain way where it’s actually very “easy” to go viral on TikTok, and the algorithm really promotes good content. To answer your question of what a good ROI on TikTok looks like, it depends on what the client is. Depends on the number of activations they’re going to be doing on TikTok. But I think that right now, what brands should really focus on is gaining followers and gaining a community on TikTok.
As you know with Facebook, Instagram, and other different platforms, the organic reach goes lower and lower as time goes by and as more users are using the platform. We are at a time with TikTok where they haven’t changed their algorithm yet, and so far, if you do a good video and you make it to the For You page, pretty much anyone with the right center of interest is going to see your video.
The way we look at it is not only do we do organic content for clients, where we’re going to be creating videos for the clients, but in order to have quicker results, it’s about doing activations with influencers – what we call initiators for TikTok. I don’t know how familiar you are with TikTok. I don’t know if you wanted me to talk to you about how the trend works to get to the For You page. But usually you want to have a challenge, and then someone’s going to do the challenge, and the more people do the challenge, the more likely your challenge will get to the For You page where everyone’s going to see it and participate in that challenge.
In order to ensure that the challenge is going to make it to the For You page where everyone is going to see your challenge and you’re going to have a huge amount of exposure, we actually partner with large initiators and we come up with the concept of whatever the client wants. They tell me, for example, if it’s a cosmetic company, “We want to promote our skincare line. We want to showcase it to as many people as possible.” So, we’re going to come up with a creative concept.
For example, there’s a trend that works really well, which you’ve probably seen, which is people have all these cosmetic products and they act as if they’re DJing, and the lights go on and off and you’re pretending you’re DJing with cosmetic products. Everyone was redoing it, and you can get a lot of followers and people exposed to your brand by doing that.
So, we actually partner with initiators that have a million or up followers, and then we work with them in creating the concepts. We have a general idea, we work with them and say, “This is the hashtag challenge that we want to create.” They help us do it, and then they launch the activation with us. Because they have such a large following – and 34% of people on TikTok are active content creators, meaning people do actually want to create content on TikTok because it’s kind of the whole goal of TikTok. So once those large initiators create this first activation, then as you see it, you want to participate, and little by little we ensure that brands go to the For You page and get a very large exposure.
It’s really a tenth of the price of Instagram. Budgets are significant for a small business, but for larger businesses, it’s not that much – especially when you’re looking at the reach you can have. A TikTok campaign right now, activation ranges between $10,000 and $20,000 for an activation, but you’re going to be reaching around – depending on how well the campaign performs – 10 million to maybe 30 million views, people watching your content. This is incomparable to any other metrics.
The reason I was saying – you were asking what the superpower of Outsmart Labs is; it’s really seeing those opportunities in the moments they’re there, because in 6 months from now, the algorithm is going to change. In 6 months, maybe 3 months, 4 months, we don’t know when they’re going to change it, but that opportunity, as great as TikTok is still going to be, it’s probably not going to be as great as it is now.
TikTok is going to have to change the algorithm, just like Facebook did before, just like Instagram did before, because they have to make sure the content they’re showing is quality content. Because obviously, they make money by showcasing a large number of pages, and the more pages users watch, the more the platform makes money. So, they want to make sure people stay on the platform. That algorithm is for sure going to change. There hasn’t been an announcement by TikTok; it’s just knowing how digital works. But I think right now is really the time where brands need to go on TikTok.
Also, a lot of large brands at the moment – we have a variety of clients, some very large international groups, and every time we pitch TikTok to them – it’s changing now in the last month, but originally for the last year, it’s always been, “We really like TikTok. We see what’s going on on TikTok, but on a global level, we haven’t decided how we feel about TikTok.” This is where I think a lot of smaller brands have such a big opportunity, because at the moment, TikTok isn’t really crowded by the biggest brands. Except if you’re the NBA or brands that are more talking to a Gen Z audience, which already got onto the trend. The other bigger ones haven’t. So, if you’re a smaller brand, it’s really the time for you to take it upon yourself to go on the campaign.
I actually have another example of showing how important it is to get on the platform early. We have this client – I can’t name it, but it’s a large high-end fashion brand. Family business. Not one of the largest ones you can think of, but fairly known in the world of fashion. I was talking to them, pitching them TikTok, and the person in charge of marketing is about 32 years old. I was telling him why he should get on TikTok now, before everyone gets on it, and he told me, “You’re right, David. I definitely see that because as a brand, I was lucky that I was in the U.S. when Instagram launched, and I told our founder to create an Instagram account for our brand, and within one year we gained 500,000 followers.”
In the last 10 years, they only gained 75,000 followers because the algorithm changed. At the beginning of Instagram, it was much easier to push your organic content. Same thing with TikTok. Whoever’s going to be able to take advantage of TikTok now, they’re going to pay a fraction of the cost they’ll pay in a year to get the same audience and the same followers.
I don’t want to make the whole talk about TikTok and bore you with just TikTok, but it’s definitely a fascinating platform. Digital is so fascinating anyway. Every month or two or three, there’s something different where there are opportunities to be seen. It’s just about finding a way to adapt your brand values and your message to that audience.
ROB: Definitely. Even though it’s been very focused on TikTok for a moment, I think it underpins even the name of the brand, Outsmart Labs. It seems like we’re in this moment of this TikTok channel that you mentioned. Instagram’s been through it, Facebook’s been through it. Even Google, from a search engine optimization perspective, has been through it. I think two things were true.
One is that the algorithm was at a point where there were true legitimate tips and tricks that work and help you rank that you can actually know and, to an extent, master or be very good at. The other one – I’m not entirely sure, but I think you may have implied – essentially, this is a really good organic marketing channel, whereas – I don’t even know; are you doing paid on TikTok? Or is the opportunity on the organic side so immense that it’s worth going deeper there?
DAVID: It really depends what kind of brand you are. The TikTok paid ads platform is fairly expensive. Usually it’s over $50,000 a month in spend, so it’s not accessible to everyone. They opened the self-serve on TikTok, which you can start at $1 or whatever budget you want to put in, so we do use that as well.
The thing is, usually clients want to have fast results. Because influencers right now are not as in demand by all the big brands and haven’t had those large contracts, at the moment, spending $1,000 on TikTok ads versus $1,000 on getting more initiators, I think at the moment it’s better to go with the initiators. But I think in 3 months it’s going to be something different, and most likely you’re going to see a big rise – and that’s also why I’m sure the algorithm is going to change, because they can’t let that happen because that’s how they monetize and make a dollar on an initiator doing something on TikTok.
So, it’s a mix of both, but when you talk organic, you definitely should. Especially if you’re a brand that’s a little popular where you have a market that knows you. People are just looking for people on TikTok. I think the DJ Khaled example is a great example with what he did with Snapchat. I don’t know if he was still very popular at the time – I don’t know if you know what happened. He got lost on his jet ski in Miami and started saying, “I’m lost in Miami” on Snapchat when Snapchat just started. Everyone picked up on it and helped him to find his way. Then over the course of the year, he became the most popular person on Snapchat and now has the success and popularity that we know he has.
So, it’s about taking it at the moment and finding the right video. The organic does work really well, and people are looking for those brands. If you look at a lot of the brands that don’t create any content at the moment, but they’re a little famous, they have followers already on their account even though no one’s really posting anything.
So, I think doing some organic content is definitely great just because the algorithm works so well. If you do a good video – the thing is, you have to spend time in creating videos specifically for TikTok. Whatever you share on Instagram is just not going to make it to TikTok. TikTok has its rules, has its way of posting, its way of addressing the audience. The editing app is quite incredible in TikTok. So, you need to utilize all of that to make it work.
It’s a mix of everything. In order to have quick results, definitely activation with influencers is number one because you definitely see a switch right away. But obviously if you’re going to be investing in the platform, you definitely want to think of also organic content and what you’re going to be producing.
A great tip I give clients that are scared and saying, “I don’t know what I’m going to be posting if I do organic content” – first of all, that’s what we do, so usually we take care of it. But other than that, the whole concept of TikTok is they suggest challenges and trends that they want people to do. Sometimes when you’re a big brand or you’re a little famous, if you just find a creative way to participate in a challenge, it gives you a chance of going viral. There’s not that much creativity that goes into it because you know the trend and the kind of video that you need to create.
ROB: Wow. It’s very clear you are, as best I can tell, completely up-to-date on the now. Let’s rewind a little bit, though, to the very beginning. What is the origin story of Outsmart Labs? What got you started in this business?
DAVID: Actually, it started very early. I was 16 years old. Before even Outsmart Labs, just digital marketing and my love for digital marketing and the possibilities that it offers. When I was 16 years old, I was put on a project. We created the first professional sports team affiliate marketing website. It was for the team – I’m French; I’m from Paris, so it was the team of Paris. We had sponsors like Nike, a kayak company of France, large car companies.
We went to the sponsors, they wanted more exposure, and we told them, “Why don’t you give us discounts, and whenever a fan goes through our website and goes through to your page from our website, they’ll get discounts from Nike, or on kayaks.” During that whole project, I was in love with how, as long as you think it, you can reproduce it.
Then I fell in love with digital marketing, went to school at University of Miami, got very lucky that it was the beginning of Facebook and Twitter, so I got to see that grow. I started an event company when I was in school. All of our promotion was done through Facebook, and we had about 800 students come to our events every time, so I saw the power that Facebook had. Basically, a free tool was giving me the strength that a paid tool would give me.
I always thought that was super interesting. If you think smartly, you technically don’t necessarily need to spend a lot to get a lot. Doesn’t mean you don’t spend a lot of time, but in terms of actual dollars spent, it doesn’t have to be that much.
Then as time grew, I worked for a large firm called Amadeus, which is the reservation system of every plane ticket that you book. They didn’t have a social media presence at the time or Facebook, so I did it for them. It was a fascinating project. I was like, “You know what? I’m doing this for all those different clients; why don’t I just create my own agency and take it from there? I know there’s a lot of people that don’t know how even Facebook works or are new to the trends, so why don’t I help them?”
We started Outsmart Labs 9 years ago now, and it’s been growing ever since. We have clients in a lot of different industries. What I really love – I personally love innovation. I personally love thinking big picture, thinking how to beat the system in ways like you were mentioning before, the secrets that are not really told, but that you guess from Google, but also applying the rules and putting it all together and making it work.
So that’s what we’ve been doing. We’ve been working with clients in hospitality, in travel, in luxury, even in mental health. I really love thinking about a lot of different industries. A lot of clients ask us, “But you’ve never worked in that industry. Is that a problem? I’d rather have an expert in whatever space,” and I tell them all the time, honestly, if someone is knowledgeable about digital marketing, there are so many tools out there that allow you to analyze all the competitors, analyze what they’re buying, what they’re doing, what kind of ads, what wording they’re using, so it’s almost not even that important. It’s even almost better to use an agency that maybe doesn’t have as much experience in the specific industry because in order to get to that level, they’re going to have to do so much more research. Because it’s changing so fast, that research is going to pay off into a smarter strategy than whoever did it a year from today.
That’s basically how Outsmart started and the logic and what I love personally about digital marketing, and I think everyone on the team is similar to that.
ROB: That’s really excellent. If you look out a little bit even beyond now – TikTok rose, it’s working; there’s probably some other platforms you’ve worked on – Instagram, there’s probably some stuff you can do even on Facebook. But what are the next potential frontiers that you see coming? Are there maybe two or three new opportunities you see emerging that maybe it’s just experimental budget for your clients now, or maybe it’s already humming for a very select subset of them, but we might be thinking a little bit more about in 6-12 months?
DAVID: One opportunity that I see that’s a really big opportunity – unfortunately, because of the current situation of COVID and physical retail not being as open as it was prior, it might not be as big of an opportunity as it should be, but in a world where there’s no COVID or in places where it’s less affected by COVID and stores are open, local SEO is something that I see overperforming. It’s something that not a lot of people put a lot of effort in.
If you want a little definition of what local SEO is, it’s how you get your retail business, your physical business, to show up on Google whenever someone makes a search query under which your business should show up. It’s showing the closer local retails, whether retail or hospitals or mental health institutions or insurance companies or cosmetic stores or whatever that is.
Local SEO is not necessarily very difficult to do in terms of what needs to be done; it’s just very time-consuming. Because Google and all of those platforms create data, people tend to assume that because they’re finding their business on Google or when they google their name, automatically they’re registered within all the local directories within Google, within Facebook, within all of those platforms, which is actually not true. It’s just a crawler doing it.
So, actually spending a bit of time on local SEO – and about 96% of retail don’t do anything on local SEO. I’m talking even the largest brands that we work with. Some of them tell me, “Everyone knows my brand. There’s no point in me working on local SEO.” Sometimes if someone types in “cosmetic store near me,” you want that store to show up first versus a competitor. So, I think that’s definitely a trend that I’ve been seeing. It’s not necessarily a trend that’s just now. It’s been two years where no one’s getting on that, and I really think it’s working really well.
Another thing that I would say – real-time bidding, programmatic advertising, definitely something we see also. Very efficient. Being able to target people based on their location, historical location or actual location, allows you to target and trigger a message very customized to each audience. Not necessarily something very new, and not necessarily something everyone’s doing. It’s also a little more expensive to do, so that’s why maybe a lot of smaller businesses don’t do it.
But doing it smartly and using the tool for another purpose – which we do a lot for some of the clients that can’t afford those budgets – you can really leverage programmatic advertising to your benefit to create a new audience, to track foot traffic in a location, to drive more foot traffic, to drive brand awareness. All of those are great things with programmatic.
In terms of other opportunities, I think just being active in general. But that’s not really an opportunity; that’s just a truth. Those are the three that we’re working on the most. Influencer marketing with TikTok mostly. We do YouTube, we do Instagram, but where we see the biggest growth is TikTok in that sense.
ROB: For someone who’s never dabbled in programmatic or real-time bidding or hasn’t done so in a while, how has that ad inventory changed – the ad units, where they get displayed, how they’re bought? I think it may not be what people used to think it was in terms of where the ads actually show up. Have they caught up to Facebook a good bit in terms of targeting?
DAVID: What’s interesting about programmatic is, first of all, not a lot of people know that this even exists. I think if more people knew how it worked, I don’t think people would accept to share their location on their apps as often.
Just to explain quickly how programmatic works, every time you download an app and you agree to share your location with the app, your device ID goes onto a stock market that anyone can buy. Along with that device ID, it gives your browser data saying you’re using Chrome, Safari, your phone is in English, French, Spanish, and you were at this exact location. On average, someone shares their location between 25 to 40 times a day.
With programmatic advertising, the great thing is we have a really great understanding of who every person is because it’s not just what you search, it’s not what you pretend to be on social media; it’s actually who you are by where you live, what time you leave for work, what time you get to work, what time you leave from work, what type of restaurants you go to, do you run, do you not run, do you bike, do you not bike, and all those different things.
Then how it works and where it’s displayed – think of yourself whenever you play Candy Crush, whenever you read the New York Times or whenever you read CNN. There are ads on those platforms. Those ads are ad placements that can be bought by anyone and it can input your ad into that. This is how programmatic works.
The beauty of programmatic from an advertiser standpoint is that as long as you can think it, you can do it. You can initially drive traffic – so you could have two competitors. Let’s pick an example at random and say McDonald’s and Burger King. That’s actually a campaign we ran with one other restaurant. What we could do is geolocate every single Burger King, if you’re McDonald’s, for example, and say everyone that’s waiting in line at a Burger King, I want to send an ad that says “Claim this $1 menu at McDonald’s.” You see that ad on your phone, you can click “Add to your wallet.” It looks like the exact same thing as a plane ticket when you add it to your wallet, and then automatically it’s claimed.
Then you can trigger that alert once it’s on the phone any way you want. You can say I want to look at the 10 closest McDonald’s to this Burger King where the person redeemed this coupon, and any time the person comes within 100 feet of my McDonald’s, I want a notification on his phone saying “Don’t forget to claim your $1 menu at McDonald’s.” Or you can say, people tend to go eat at 12:00; at 11:30, I want to send a notification to all those phones saying “Hey, don’t forget to come eat your McDonald’s.”
And you can go back 90 days, so technically you can geofence every single one of your competitors’ stores, go back 90 days, take all of the global data from all of those stores, and target those customers. The possibilities are endless with programmatic.
ROB: There’s absolutely a lot going on there. David, as we wrap up this conversation, what are some other things that we should know about either the journey of Outsmart Labs or what’s next for you and the firm?
DAVID: Two things we’re excited about. The first thing is digital marketing has always been huge. Obviously, a lot of brands spend a lot of money on digital marketing. No one’s really questioning the efficiency of digital marketing anymore. But still, for brands that are not ecommerce only, digital marketing came second to the retail business or their traditional marketing, and I think this whole situation of coronavirus has repurposed or made people reconsider the positioning of digital within their mix of marketing assets.
A lot of companies have noticed that once they got all their stores closed, all they had left was their website. A lot of companies haven’t even thought about where their in-store POS was not synced with the website POS, so all of a sudden they were left with nothing. So I think this whole coronavirus has gotten brands to rethink how to consider their digital strategies and understanding they should be relying a lot more on it because the chances of this going down is lower and people are shopping more online.
To me, whenever I pitch a client, there’s a lot of indication in terms of saying why it’s necessary for them. I think the last 3-4 months in that way, we skipped through that. Now they know, “It’s necessary, we need it; how do we do it?” I look very much forward to this because of the positioning of Outsmart. We tend to also pitch things that are not so traditional. As much as we do traditional, we always try to test things. You always need to pick your clients because not every client is willing to test things – and it makes sense; it’s their money, and they want to maybe spend money just where they know the return on investment they’re going to get.
So that’s what I’m really excited for. I think we’re going to talk to a lot more clients. A lot more clients are going to be willing to be even more out of the box in terms of what they’re going to try to do to differentiate themselves and basically have more real estate online.
ROB: David Azar of Outsmart Labs, thank you so much for joining us today. I think you’ve given us a clinic on a bunch of very targeted and effective tactics in marketing. Congratulations to you and the firm on everything.
DAVID: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure to talk for the 30 minutes.
ROB: All right, David. Be well.
DAVID: Thank you. You too. Bye.
ROB: Bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Bonnie Mauldin, Founder and Managing Director for The Mauldin Group, left a career in medicine to start a general, full-service digital marketing agency, helping any client who knocked on the door. Today, The Mauldin Group provides professional web design, internet marketing, and business development training to clients in “healthcare, construction, manufacturing, senior living, and education.” Bonnie feels these industries are less regulated than others, like finance. Less regulation means her team can create marketing content and “freely share information, education, and entertainment online in a way that’s fun and productive.”
Mauldin team members (all lovers of stories, art, and design) partner with business owners who “had the courage to start their own businesses to stand out from the competition, to build exceptional brands online, to provide products and services in a way that no one else can.”
Bonnie claims that her team’s off-the-clock recreational activities are the “secret sauce” to their creativity. She encourages them “to play video games, watch movies, watch television series, and draw and paint and go horseback riding . . . to do anything they can to regenerate their creative juices.” That’s important, when you are trying to “help business owners tell their stories in a unique way so they stand out.”
How does The Mauldin Group get at the crux of a client’s story? It’s all in the pictures, video, audio, the origins of everything that the client has done, digging into “Where did it come from, why did it come to be, and where is it going next?” Bonnie sees the biggest mistake companies make in creating online content is in posting boring, dry, repetitive, or overly complicated material; preaching at someone rather than telling the organization’s story; and failing to provide value before asking for the sale.
Bonnie sees a trend where millennials and Gen-Z prefer social media (in particular, YouTube and Instagram) over cable television. This means content creators can produce independent films and video series . . . and gain an audience . . . just as cable television stations do. Google and YouTube are today’s biggest search engines. Instagram and Facebook provide amazing demographic targeting. Younger people are watching short, funny videos on TikTok. Bonnie advises people to “Always stay on the lookout for what the young people are doing, because that’s where the world is going.”
Bonnie has been featured in The Huffington Post, Fox News, CNN, the AJC, and the movie The Inner Weigh. She has been awarded Business Person of Excellence and Business of the Year (Atlanta Chamber of Commerce). Enterprise.com ranked The Mauldin Group as a Top 10 SEO & PPC Agency in Atlanta. Bonnie serves as President of The Sales & Marketing Academy and on the board with the Greater North Fulton Chamber of Commerce. She is a seasoned speaker, teacher, business coach, team trainer, and author. She just completed a degree in Instructional Design and e-Learning and looks forward to using these new skills to help her clients train employees and communicate messages.
Bonnie can be reached on her website at: bonniemauldin.com.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Bonnie Mauldin, CEO of The Mauldin Group based in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to the podcast, Bonnie.
BONNIE: Hey, hey, hey. Thanks for having me.
ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about The Mauldin Group? Many agencies have a superpower, so what is your superpower?
BONNIE: Our superpower is content marketing. My team and I are natural storytellers. We write poetry, we write stories for kids, novels, science fiction. A lot of us are Harry Potter fans and fans of Game of Thrones and all kinds of sci-fi stuff. We are just a band of nerds that love stories, love art, love design, and we’ve all gotten together and decided to help business owners tell their stories in a unique way so they stand out.
ROB: Does this band of nerds have any particular industry that you work with more often than others?
BONNIE: Yes. We do have five main industries that we like to stick to our guns in, and that is healthcare, construction, manufacturing, senior living, and education.
ROB: Very interesting. How did you come to align on those different industries? Sometimes there’s some interesting stories on what gets you there.
BONNIE: Absolutely. We started off as a general digital marketing agency, full service, helping any and everyone. After a number of years of doing the work, we really narrowed down our niche by seeing the success stories of the companies that we did the work for. We saw a reoccurring account of tremendous success in those industries.
Some industries are a little harder to work with, like insurance and mortgages and real estate and finance, and that’s because these industries are heavily regulated and need a lot of security. We like industries where we can be free in writing our content and not have to get approval and permission from people to do so for the business owner. We can just put our heads together and share information, education, and entertainment online in a way that’s fun and productive.
ROB: You seem to know a lot about the writing interests of your team. Is that something that comes up much in the interview process?
BONNIE: That’s a good question. Yeah, I do like to ask, “What are your hobbies outside of work?” I also encourage the people on my team to play video games, to watch movies, to watch television series, and to draw and to paint and to go horseback riding and to do anything they can to keep them in a creative space and to give themselves enough room and enough time to take a break so they can relax, refocus, and regenerate their creative juices. That’s really the secret sauce to the work that we do.
ROB: It’s so helpful to have those outside influences and those places to distract. I find that often some of my best ideas come when I am doing something where my brain is detached from work and is focused on something more in the physical domain, so it definitely makes a ton of sense.
You seem to be very interested in the range of storytelling across different media. I know you mentioned video games, you mentioned poetry, you mentioned books. Obviously, there’s film, there’s TV, there’s even streaming. Where are you seeing some of the more interesting storytelling emerge that inspires you, Bonnie?
BONNIE: YouTube and Instagram are taking over for millennials and Gen Z. What I mean by that is this generation, millennials and Gen Z, are preferring social media over cable television. This is huge. This tells us that content creators can produce their own independent films and they can produce their own video series and amass an audience, just like a cable television station does.
ROB: Those people are getting more and more capable. Sometimes you have things that are very raw and authentic; sometimes you have things that are quirky and better produced. Is there any direction that starts to go? Do we lose the opportunity to be raw and authentic as other people get the gear and up their game, or is there always a window to sneak in?
BONNIE: There’s always a window to sneak in. Just come from a genuine place of something that you’re super passionate about, whether it’s helping people or teaching people or just sharing your story. Naturally, the audience that is right for you will gravitate to you and attract to you like a magnet. Next thing you know, you have a whole group of people that really enjoy your content and they want more.
ROB: You’re in some industries where, for me, storytelling would possibly be hard, or perhaps counterintuitive for the audience, like how would you tell a story in something like construction? What are some counterintuitive ways you’ve been able to weave story into maybe a client or two of yours?
BONNIE: Thinking about your childhood days and what influenced you when you were little to pick a certain subject in school and pick a certain major in college and get a certain job, these are the beginnings or the foundation of your story. The origin story of how your company began, the origin story of how you chose your first customers and what happened when you got your first customer and your first employee, and case studies of the clients that have experienced great success in your company, their testimonials and video, audio, or in text – these are all great bases to draw from when creating your story. Pictures, video, audio, the origins of everything that you’ve done. Where did it come from, why did it come to be, and where is it going next?
ROB: That’s a perfect segue. Tell us about the origin story of The Mauldin Group. How did you come to be and come into this world of entrepreneurial marketing?
BONNIE: My story is a little unorthodox. I got my start in medicine. Went to school for clinical laboratory science, was pre-med. Worked in a hospital as a lab tech for a number of years, and I decided to resign to start my own business. This was back when Google was new, Facebook was new. These platforms were just taking off, early 2000s, and I wanted in.
I did everything I could to learn about web design, social media, content, and started to produce high level content on a regular basis online and was able to garner an audience that really liked what I had to say. It allowed me to sell services like coaching and trainings and informational products, eBooks, and podcasts. All this led to me being in a movie. Someone found me online and asked me to be in their movie. I was like, “Cool, I’ll do it.” So that was a great experience.
I later had my own radio show at a local AM station here in Atlanta called Healthtopia, where I did celebrity interviews and book reviews. I just enjoyed the process of marketing this whole time, promoting my business, and I said, “Hey, this is a viable skillset. I know I can transfer this to help other businesses grow.” That’s the part I like the most – telling the story, producing the content, producing the websites and social media.
So, I started an agency, and as my book of business grew, I brought on a team. Now I have a full-time team of 12. We are a band of nerds. We love to write, we like to take pictures and video, we like to tell stories, and we help small business owners who are champions in their community that had the courage to stand up and start their own business to stand out from the competition, to have an exceptional brand online, to provide products and services in a way that no one else can. We partner with these companies, and we’re their extended online marketing team to help them grow.
ROB: That’s excellent. Congratulations on getting from yourself up to 12 people, and also that passion that you shared for other people who are starting and growing businesses. They can be sometimes a little flighty, but also very ambitious and growing very quickly.
Was your transition out of the medical field something that was gradual as you picked up these other aspects to life? Or was it more sudden for you?
BONNIE: I’ll be honest with you. All my life, when I was a kid, my parents told me to go to school and get a good job. Go to school and get a good job. I’m thinking, “Okay, which job should I pick? I like science and I like math. Okay, I’ll pick medicine. I like helping people, so maybe that’d be a good job for me.” But I got into it and went to try it out and I’m like, “Gosh, I’m bored out of my mind.”
The reason why is because it didn’t appeal to my creative side and the fact that I love speaking one-on-one with people and being super personable and creating things all the time. The job that I had picked wasn’t one that allowed me to do that.
I’m a firm believer in having kids in high school, especially in their junior and senior year, take some type of aptitude test so they can see what their strengths are and they can see where their interests lie, so they can pick a job or career that’s in alignment with what they’re able to do and what they enjoy doing, so they don’t have this drastic career change in the middle of their life because they find out that they should’ve been doing something else the whole time, and they don’t waste tens of thousands of dollars on tuition at a college to focus on a career path that’s not right for them. But that’s a whole other show.
ROB: [laughs] Absolutely. That sounds like a tremendous substrate for some additional change that we need in this world.
You mentioned that you are into the world of content marketing. I think there are some tried and true tactics, and there are probably some tactics that have become a little bit stale. What are some things that people might think of when they think of content marketing that maybe don’t work the way they used to?
BONNIE: When it comes to content marketing, you are providing educational content, informational content, content that provides value and improves people’s lives in some way.
The biggest mistake that I see companies make when it comes to creating content online is being boring and drab and dry and repetitive, or too complicated. It’s important to tell a story instead of preaching at someone, and it’s important to provide value before you ask for the sale. A lot of the content that I’m seeing from companies is very salesy. It’s “Buy my stuff, buy my stuff, I’m so great” instead of informative, “These are ways you can improve your life, this is how our product can serve you when you’re ready.” It’s not personable enough, attached to a person, place, or thing that’s relevant to the buyer.
ROB: It’s real subtle, but that person, place, or thing that they’re attached to, it’s relevance, it’s building that bridge from where that individual potential customer is to the company that’s putting out the content.
I think you already mentioned Instagram and YouTube as places where some younger generations are going. What are some new tactics you’re commonly seeing – again, some of your industries, at a glance, wouldn’t seem so novel in their channels. But do you find that the workforce is growing up a little bit where some of these other channels are relevant? Or are there some other unexpected marketing channels that are emerging content-wise?
BONNIE: You have your tried and true Google and YouTube, the biggest search engines out there right now, and then you have Instagram and Facebook, which are great in the B2C space where your demographic targeting is just out of sight. You can target people based on what they’ve liked and where they are and what their interests are and their age and gender. Targeting on there is phenomenal.
Then you have some of these emerging ones like TikTok, where kids are watching these short videos that are fun and funny. That is amassing huge audiences with young people. Always stay on the lookout for what the young people are doing, because that’s where the world is going.
Also, look at buying channels where buyer behavior is changing. People are more comfortable with purchasing things online, like clothes and food and household items, and it won’t be long before houses and boats and planes are purchased online as well, without all the complications involved with doing that right now.
So just looking ahead for the future, looking at how people learn, how people buy, how people relate to each other is going to be important to pay attention to so you can tap in early and ride the wave and not get left behind.
ROB: Those waves are obviously always moving, but as of right now – and I might even have to look at my calendar to remind myself of when right now is – but as of July 2020, where does that line end up in terms of who should be looking at TikTok and who should maybe not yet be looking at TikTok, or something tricky like that?
BONNIE: If you’re under 20, more than likely you have a TikTok account; if you’re in your sixties, more than likely you have a Facebook account. It’s just a matter of where your demographic lies and you delivering consistent, high value content on that platform on a frequent basis.
Most people are in an entrepreneurial mindset, especially millennials and Gen Z. They’re 188% more likely to start a side hustle or a new business versus Baby Boomers, and the reason why is because Baby Boomers were able to get a steady job and collect a pension at retirement, where that is not happening anymore. Most people are staying at a job maybe 2-3 years max and then moving on to another job or getting laid off.
So, people are thinking about different ways to bring in income. “How can I have something on the side that’s going to give me reoccurring revenue, passive income, that I can make?” That’s why you have this surge of small businesses opening, but unfortunately 50% of them close down within the first year, and then 95% of them fail within the first 5 years. So, you have a mass of people starting businesses and then having them not work out.
I’m plugged into the Greater North Fulton Chamber of Commerce. I serve on the board of directors there, and the whole point of the chamber is to provide small businesses with support and community and a legislative voice so they can thrive and be successful. Small business owners definitely need to get a fair amount of training, mentorship, and support before they launch out on their own because there’s just so much to know to have a successful business and to have it thrive and stay alive more than 5 years.
ROB: Super solid, and you are well on that path of staying alive and growing, and congratulations on that. As you look back a little bit at what you’ve built so far with The Mauldin Group, what are some lessons you’ve learned along the way – things you might do a little bit differently if you were starting over from scratch?
BONNIE: You need to have your vision in mind of where you want to be and have a roadmap on how to get there. If you are a solopreneuer, a micro business, and you’re wanting to earn a good living and make a six-figure salary and serve a handful of clients, then just know that right off the bat and build your business for that.
But if you are wanting to have tons of clients and you want to have a staff to support your client base, then build your business for that. Know what industries you’re strong in and try to niche down in your services and your client base and the types of people that you’re targeting and the problems you solve. Don’t try to do too many things at once. Get really good at one thing and do it with excellence and become known for it.
And make sure you have the right counselors, mentors, and advisors on your team, whether that’s your accountant, your business coach, or some type of mentor who has done what you want to do and has been successful at it. It’s important to have people in your life that can give you a roadmap instead of you making all these mistakes and having to waste a lot of time and money. The person that is your mentor can tell you, “Oh, don’t do that, do this,” and then you’re 10 steps ahead.
So, if you don’t take anything else away from today’s podcast, I would just say have people in your life that can give you strong direction so you don’t make too many mistakes.
ROB: That’s excellent. One thing we’ve heard from time to time on the podcast is people who were connected with a mentor and they concluded over time that while that person may be wonderful, they weren’t the right mentor. Or even a lot of times, as many agency owners are accidental entrepreneurs, they find that they sort of inherited a vision from somebody else’s idea of what their business should be.
What have you found is helpful in terms of finding your own truth and direction when it comes to the vision and mentors that are good for you, not someone who may not resonate but is otherwise very capable?
BONNIE: It all stems from your mission statement, your core values, and the type of customer that you’re committed to serving. For me, I think it’s tragic that 50% of small businesses fail because I understand to start a small business, people are taking their homes and refinancing them, they’re cashing in their 401(k)s, they’re asking friends and family for money, they’re taking out credit cards and putting themselves in immense debt, they’re taking their life savings, and they are stepping out in faith and starting a business because, doggone it, they want to be their own boss.
They take all this money, this time, this effort, this fortitude to go strong, and they hit a brick wall because they didn’t have the right information, the right marketing, the right sales, the right service, the right market need. Then they find themselves back in a cubicle again, having to get a job. I think that’s tragic.
I want to do everything I can to empower that business owner with the information they need to run a successful business, to have a strong sales and marketing team, to have the right mentorship in place, to know how to hire, how to fire, how to automate their business processes. The Mauldin Group is all about giving people that strong foundation and structure to be successful.
When you’re building your mission statement, it needs to be heartfelt like that. It needs to come from the problem that you’re trying to solve and the person you’re trying to solve it for, and then everything else can lay on that foundation.
ROB: So, you don’t want to end up back in a cubicle, Bonnie?
BONNIE: Hell no.
ROB: [laughs] That resonance with the customer matters so much, and that’s something I think a lot of business owners are afraid to admit. Whether you say it overtly or whether they can judge on the same vibration that you don’t want to be back in a cubicle and neither do they, that’s just amazing for credibility.
When we look forward a little bit, Bonnie, what is coming up for The Mauldin Group, and maybe even on the broader marketing landscape, that you’re excited about?
BONNIE: Thanks for asking that. I just got my degree from the University of Georgia for Instructional Design and E-Learning. I’m a lifelong learner. I’ll always be in school, even when I’m 90. E-learning is where it’s at. A lot of the kids around here are going to have to learn from home for the first time, and companies are going to need to train their stuff from home. Entrepreneurs are going to need to put together trainings for their staff and for their clients. Private training schools that are used to face-to-face training are going to have to transition into an online learning environment.
I want to facilitate that transfer. I want to facilitate that change. I want to have my hands in the process of developing these online courses. A lot of people think it’s easy to do; the problem is, 80% of people who sign up for an online course don’t complete the course, and it’s because it’s not set up properly. It’s not done with instructional design in mind. I want to set up online courses for companies, for entrepreneurs, and for schools so we can have some really good courses out that are interactive and fun and actually help people retain the information.
That is the future for The Mauldin Group. Not only are we a full-service digital marketing agency helping small businesses with SEO, PPC, social media, and content, we’re also going to add that e-learning arm to our agency where we’re setting up those online courses.
ROB: I want to reiterate – listeners, you heard the word “instructional design.” Not industrial design, not interactive design. Instructional design. That seems like something we’re all going to need to pay attention to.
I think a lot of people start off – I’ve known many people who have started making an e-learning course, much like they’ve started making a podcast, and then it never comes out. They tell you they’re working on it, they tell you they’re still working on it, they hit 10 hurdles along the way. Where is it that people seem to get stuck, where they think they can make an online learning course and then they just hit a wall? What are the hurdles there that people might not expect when they start out?
BONNIE: The first thing is having a framework that you go by. An ISD (instructional designer) is going to follow something like an ADDIE process. ADDIE stands for analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation.
First you need to analyze who the course is for, why this person is taking the course, and what this person is going to do with the information. Then you need to design the course with a proper outline of what the course is going to be about, the topics, and the subtopics. Then you need to develop the course and decide if you’re going to do this with video, with audio, with explainer cartoons, with whiteboards, with text or PowerPoint. You need to come up with the development and actually implement what the course is going to be.
After you implement it, you evaluate the results. You get people to try the course out, see if they’re able to retain the information by giving them some quizzes afterwards, looking at the work performance afterwards, looking at the results of their new skillset afterwards, and evaluating if the course actually accomplished the goal that it set out to do.
Having that ADDIE framework as an instructional designer gives my clients the power to make a course that is functional, that is fun, and that actually accomplishes the result that they want.
ROB: That’s a great roadmap for success both in getting it done and also – I think we all see this – in giving customers confidence that it’s going to get done, having that framework you can articulate on the frontend instead of just saying, “Trust me, I can build an online course.” It helps for them to know that it’s rooted in some of the education you’ve just completed.
That’s probably a good segue. Bonnie, when people want to find you and find The Mauldin Group online – either learn some things from you or maybe even make some online learning courses happen – where should they find you?
BONNIE: My main website is bonniemauldin.com, and all of my service offerings are there, whether you’re looking for a nice website or a digital marketing plan to promote your business and an implementation team to give you ongoing service to make that work.
I also serve as a speaker/trainer. Organizations hire me all the time to come in to teach and train their team. Also, I offer one-on-one coaching on a quarterly basis to give small business owners marketing strategy sessions.
Lots of offerings at The Mauldin Group. With me personally, I have a passion for helping small businesses succeed. I have a passion for entrepreneurship and education, and I love to plug in with what people are doing when they’re ambitious and they’re innovative and they’re ready to get some money in their pocket. I have so many ways to strategize with them to make that happen online.
ROB: That is excellent. Thank you so much, Bonnie Mauldin of The Mauldin Group. Great to hear some more about your story and learn about learning. Have a great day.
BONNIE: Thank you. Let’s go to the top.
ROB: There you go. Up to the top. Bye bye.
BONNIE: Bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Justin Ramb is President and Sandra Marshal, VP of Client Services, at Bigeye, a full-service B2B and B2C agency that focuses on audiences, creative work, media and analytics, and data.
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Understand audience:
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Use primary and secondary research to discover who they are, where they consume media, what they look like, and what triggers them to convert
- Develop marketing personas that match two or three target audience personas
- Test strategies against those personas to ensure activities align with objectives
B2B:
- Use current customer data to develop lookalike audience and personas based on existing data
- Develop personas based on where company wants to head. Is it looking to capture new clients or new types of clients? Supplement data with key stakeholder interviews, additional research, online research, and quantitative/qualitative research.
B2C: Bigeye utilizes specialized tools to learn about a client’s audience and customers
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Creative:
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As part of persona development, the agency tests messaging, colors, headlines, and photography for optimal audience response.
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Rather than resent the parameters of defined personas, the creative team appreciates understanding the target audience.
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Media and Analytics
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As part of persona development, the agency explores media usage.
- Media develops a persona-based media plan and begins placement in that media
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Utilizing Google Analytics and custom dashboards, the Analytics team tracks establishes targets and KPIs
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Data
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24/7 analytics data provides information about how things are performing.
- Data answered the questions: Where can things be optimized? How are conversions going? Do the real audiences align with those targeted?
Bigeye started in 2002. In this interview, Justin describes the chaos of those early years and the ultimate discovery that the agency’s greatest success was driven by hiring team members who were committed, skilled, and aligned with the agency’s direction. Sandra added that the agency also has to “arm” new employees with “the appropriate support,” foster a sense of collaboration, and avoid over-siloization.
Justin outlines the updated review and review cycle program (structured through a program called Lattice) the agency uses to keep everything running smoothly. Every two weeks team members submit a four-question online survey that covers how they’re doing, what roadblocks they have, and anything they want their manager to know. Every quarter, team members submit three or four agency- and personal-growth goals. These are used to project the agency’s direction in the subsequent quarter.
Finding a mentor, someone a step or two ahead, can help a startup avoid pitfalls. Justin comments that if you find an outside counsel and can afford that person, it’s probably not too early. He also mentions ways to find such help for free. He says strategic, balanced growth is healthy growth and believes that a company that is not growing is dying.
Justin and Sandra can be found on their agency’s website at Bigeyeagency.com, where visitors will find an “incredibly updated” blog.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Justin Ramb, President of Bigeye, and Sandra Marshall, VP of Client Services at Bigeye, and they are based in Orlando, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Justin and Sandra.
JUSTIN: Thanks for having us.
SANDRA: Thank you, Rob.
ROB: Absolutely. Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Bigeye, and what is your superpower?
JUSTIN: Bigeye is a full-service ad agency in Orlando. We do a lot of different services. Full service, but we definitely focus on four key areas of audience, creative, media and analytics, and then data. We’re very focused on that and serve a variety of clients all over the country and several around the world.
ROB: Very cool. Is there any particular vertical or size of client that tends to be in your sweet spot?
JUSTIN: We serve a lot of different clients. Whether it’s a startup, a D2C, somebody just getting off the ground that’s looking for a really comprehensive strategy moving forward to launch their product or service, or all the way up to very large CPG brands that support lots of different brands under them. So, we’ve got a wide variety.
We have engagements that mostly focus on multiple pieces and customer journey, brand development, execution, media, and then the analytics and optimization. That full spectrum is what we focus on with our clients.
ROB: Right on. Knowing your pillars does provide part of the story, so maybe it’s interesting if we step through those a little bit piece by piece. When you talk about audience, what does Bigeye talk about when they’re talking about audience?
JUSTIN: We’re really focused on audience. We believe that’s the start of almost all of our engagements, all of our initiatives – really looking at, who is the audience we’re going after for that product or service? It’s really important to understand that audience, who they are, where they consume media, what they look like, and what are their triggers to convert. We spend a lot of resources upfront to understand that audience.
We’ve got a whole insights team, led here by our Vice President of Insights, Adrian Tennant, and he leads the team to really dive into that, both in a primary research way, or we’ll grab secondary research as well. That will then also get us into audience personas and developing those personas to have a target of two or three personas we’re going after, and we’ll always match what we’re doing back up to those personas to make sure we’re always leading with that strategy.
SANDRA: And Rob, it’s really been incredible to see how well that’s resonated with our clients. To see them be able to relate to an actual person and some of the persona development that we’ve done has really set a phenomenal foundation for many of our projects. Keeping that person in mind for the duration and the lifecycle of the work together has been really, really compelling.
ROB: It’s truly critical. You mentioned the startup side of the world; a lot of times when startups are asked to articulate their audience, it almost feels like an exercise in creative writing rather than in fact. Helping them dial that in seems like it would vary quite widely by customer. You mentioned that primary and secondary research. I’d imagine on the consumer side, you may have datasets at your disposal that the client might not even have, or maybe something within their data that they don’t know.
But then on the B2B side, are you diving in sometimes and interviewing their existing customers, their potential customers, and going deep on that personal level there?
JUSTIN: Absolutely. On the B2C side, we spend a lot of time looking at that audience and customer with some really great tools that we have at our disposal to get to who they are.
On the B2B side, it is important to grab the current customer data. We can develop a lookalike audience and really develop that persona based on existing data, and/or there may be businesses that are looking to capture new clients, new types of clients, and that’s where we’ll go through quite a few exercises with the client to understand those and develop personas based on where they want to head. We’ll supplement that with key stakeholder interviews, additional research, online research, quantitative/qualitative research. We always want to make sure that we’re matching it back up to solid data.
ROB: You put creative second in that list, and I’m sure that’s no coincidence. It sounds to me like given that focus on audience, the creative has a deep, deep link to the audience that’s being targeted. Number one, how do you think about creative? And number two, how do you help the creative types to view that audience information as a useful constraint rather than maybe a limitation on their creative juices?
JUSTIN: We find that a lot of the work that we do actually arms creative to produce better creative. They love to understand exactly the customer, the audience that they’re designing for. After we define those personas, we will often then go to another step before we get into creative of researching and serving audiences to make sure that we’re creating creative for them. We’ll test messaging, we’ll test colors, we’ll test headlines, we’ll test photography, and we’ll find out what those audiences most resonate with.
We have all that data; we will then turn that over to our creative team, and then they’ll match that up to what they’re envisioning to create for them. They absolutely love it. It probably initially was like, “Wait, what’s going on here? We’ll design what we want to design,” but now they’ve come to really appreciate having some solid information before diving deep into what they do.
ROB: That definitely makes sense. Stepping through, you talk about media and analytics. Those are both words I think that have known meanings, but they mean perhaps different things to different people. What do media and analytics mean within the world of Bigeye?
JUSTIN: We will continue the journey with our customers and clients. We’ve now created the creative; it’s all matched back up to the personas, and in that persona development, we’re also understanding where they consume media. Where most can we get in front of them? Obviously, in today’s world, it’s a lot of different places. Yes, it’s Facebook, it’s Instagram, but it’s also driving down the road. People still commute. Out of home is still important. It may be a lot of other platforms.
So, we will develop a media plan, again based on the personas, and then begin to place that media and watch it through the analytics team.
ROB: Got it. Then analytics in that case is useful as part of the planning process, whereas data is probably completing that loop and tying the results back to the business objectives?
JUSTIN: We watch that data, those analytics, nonstop. It is so important in the 24/7 world to watch how things are performing. Where can we perform optimizations? How are conversions going? Are we matching up to the audiences that we’ve outlined? It’s really important that we’re looking at those analytics. We create custom dashboards. We go beyond just relying on Google Analytics and we create those custom dashboards specifically for the targets and the KPIs that have been outlined early on in the process.
ROB: That entire story makes sense. Tell us a little bit about the origin of Bigeye. How did you end up starting this thing in the beginning?
JUSTIN: We started back in 2002, pre-internet, pre a lot of things nowadays. Frankly, it took quite a few years to figure out what the hell we were doing. It was a lot of trial and error. Figured out what we did best, what we did worst, and ultimately what we ended up finding was what caused the most success was to hire properly. Bring on team members that were not only committed, not only skilled, but really were part of where we were headed as an agency.
We brought on Sandra in the client services and account department and we brought on Seth Segura, our creative director. Still here today, and really defined, where do we want to go? That’s what has led us to the focus of audience, creative, and media.
ROB: Was one of those practices more prominent in the earliest of days?
JUSTIN: Hiring was just so important. Again, it took us a number of years to realize it was all about who was going to be on the bus with us. We knew that we had to get the seats filled, and frankly a lot of what we do can be taught. There is some skill to it, but a lot of it can be taught. So, understanding the aptitude and attitude of people that we were hiring, and was it part of the culture that we wanted to build at Bigeye?
SANDRA: I think to add to that, too, one thing that we identified early on was not only did we have to look for those good cultural fits and those amazing skillsets, but we also had to make sure that we were arming the people we were bringing in with the appropriate support and other members of the team to make sure all the wheels were continuing to run smoothly and there was an incredible sense of collaboration with everybody. We did not want everybody to be working in silos. We wanted to really make sure that there was the appropriate amount of department building that was also occurring while we were looking for this incredible talent.
JUSTIN: One of the big “ahas” for us was doing better reviews and review cycles. It was really interesting to me. To the fault of our own, we were doing a really bad job at performance reviews. We’ve done it multiple different ways through the years. We’ve done annual reviews, we’ve done anniversary reviews, we’ve done 360 reviews. Oftentimes we’d forget about it until somebody said, “Hey, can I get my annual review?”
I do think that’s pretty common in agencies. We’re running hard, clients are demanding things, things are changing, so the review cycle and performance reviews was something we realized if we were going to grow, we needed to make sure we put something in place that could help that. So we did.
Now we’re on a great schedule. We do two-week sprints where we do updates every two weeks. Team members will submit a four-question online survey – how they’re doing, what roadblocks they have, anything they want their manager to know. So, we’ve got these pulse checks with our team members. Two weeks in agency life can feel like a year, so we wanted to make sure that we were touching base.
Then we do quarterly reviews. We ask our team members to develop three or four goals for the quarter, all aligned with the growth of the agency, but also personal growth. We meet with them on a quarter basis, we review the quarters, and then we project where we want to head for the next quarter.
And then we’ll do the annual review, which obviously is the bigger one and more extensive, but critically important to continue to check in on the growth and the development of our team members, but also of the agency.
ROB: Right. I think people coming from some agencies would perhaps be a little bit shocked by that level of regularity, if you’re able to actually keep it in sync. How did you come to that degree of structure? Do you have a disposition towards structure and you just had to form the idea, or were there some tools that came into play to help you arrive at some of those conclusions?
JUSTIN: The “aha” was when a team member came to Sandra and I and said, “Hey, can I get my annual review?” and we said, “That’s not right. We need to put something in place and we need to stick by it.” We did a lot of searching and we ended up with a tool called Lattice. Lattice is an online tool that allows such great structure, but a lot of flexibility. You can customize what works best for your agency. We have found it to be incredibly successful.
SANDRA: It’s helpful to not find ourselves in an annual review where surprises are being uncovered about not only employee progress, but as a manager, how we could’ve helped them better through the past year. So, these reoccurring checkpoints really help us as leaders to be able to know where we can step in and either coach better or help to refocus energy. I think it’s definitely a two-way street in all of these reviews.
ROB: That definitely makes sense. You said the agency started in 2002, and that was certainly one “aha” moment. What are some other things, when you look back at the journey, that you see that you might have done differently if you were starting from scratch that you learned along the way? Maybe some lessons learned?
JUSTIN: I’d say two things. One, looking back, I would’ve been quicker to bring in outside counsel, somebody that can give us wisdom, that can consult with us, can look at our business, can look at our processes. Bring them in and really allow them to take a look at everything.
We did that about two years ago. We brought a gentleman in from Boston and allowed him to look at every single thing of the agency and to give us his feedback and his thoughts and his perspective about what we were doing – what we were doing well and what needed to be tweaked. I wish we would’ve done that much earlier. There was so much wisdom that came out of that. It was critical.
Secondly, I would say really defining our focus. What are the services that we really want to focus on moving forward over the next couple years? What are the industries we want to focus on? I do think agencies are prone to take anything and everything as long as it pays the bills, and yes, that’s important – but to really internally know as a team, “this is where we’re headed, both in an industry focus and in the services that we want to offer,” and then align everything with that.
ROB: When you mention that outside counsel, I imagine this sort of person can go by many different titles – some sort of a consultant, perhaps a coach, that sort of thing. I think there are some people you’re not sure if you can trust, so how did you identify someone that you could trust to speak into the business in that way?
JUSTIN: We wanted somebody that knew our business, was not in our business, but that can consult with us on the business. We found a gentleman who does search consulting, works with procurement departments for agencies, and allowed him to come in and really pick everything apart. He was a part consultant, he was a part coach, mentor to me and to Sandra and the leadership team. He was just really critical as we moved forward with the incredible growth that we’ve had over the last couple years.
ROB: That part is exciting. It sounds like you’ve more than gotten your money’s worth for whatever the arrangement was. I think sometimes when I talk to folks who are earlier in their agency journey, there comes a point where they’re not sure when they should start spending what could be a significant amount of money on this type of help. How would you think about when is too early to start squeezing that outside counsel to help you get outside your business and grow?
JUSTIN: Great question. I don’t think it’s ever too early if you can afford it, but I also think there are some ways to get some counsel that may not be so expensive or structured.
I know, early on in the agency, we sought out people, other agency owners, to connect with. We didn’t feel like there was some sort of competition there. We could have lunch with them and really talk shop and get some wisdom from each other. It wasn’t a formal thing, but we got together to at least have some counsel because we were young, we were small, they were larger, they had already been through the ups and downs. I think that was really important to have as well, which a lot of people can do if they search, especially nowadays where you can jump on a Zoom call or something like that.
ROB: That’s a good way to frame the current environment in terms of the opportunity as well as the constraints. I think it’s really helpful what you said there. It’s twofold – one is finding the people a step or two ahead of you and looking to them for some ways to move forward, and also, I think what you said about if you can afford the person, it’s probably not too early – I think that creates something a lot of businesses may want to find earlier than they do, which is a lens of profitability, a lens of healthy margins. How have you thought about healthy growth, especially as your team has grown?
JUSTIN: Healthy growth to me and to the leadership team at Bigeye is strategic and it’s balanced. We want to grow. If you’re not growing, you’re dying, so we want to make sure we continue to grow. We’ve been blessed and fortunate over the last couple years to grow rapidly, but we will continue to do that strategically, and we’ll do it in a balanced way. We’re not here to drive our team to burnout. We’re going to have a work-life balance. We’re going to make sure folks get out of here on time to go to their families and other things.
Now, everybody’s going to be available and be able to communicate, and afterhours, because clients will need something, but we’re going to do this growth in the right way. We’re not here to drive everyone to burnout to then go sell the agency. That is not the focus for us. We’re going to continue to grow and develop a really great agency in the U.S.
ROB: Then you also mentioned the importance of focus as one of the lessons that you’ve learned. Have there been lines of service or particular types of work that you have shut down? If so, what did you shut down and how did you realize that you needed to?
JUSTIN: Sandra, correct me if I’m wrong – I don’t know that we’ve shut down any services. We have fine-tuned our services in the sense that we know the ones that will be a win-win for both us and the client. There are services or engagements where if it’s maybe a one-off engagement, that’s probably not the right fit for us. We’re looking for multiple initiatives, a longer-term engagement than just doing a website or something like that.
SANDRA: In addition to that, too, I think we’ve identified through that when we need to acknowledge that it’s not necessarily our expertise per se, or if we know of someone who may be doing it better than us, we’re not shy to admit, “We want to make sure this is achieving the ultimate goal that you have, so let’s bring in either a partner or some outside help and counsel to be a part of this project together.”
ROB: That makes sense. A lot of times when it comes to partnering, you see a spectrum. Some agencies have a strong preference towards white-labeling their partnerships; some of them have a strong preference towards always surfacing and strictly saying “this is a partner,” and some of them tend to go somewhere in between. How have you thought about that decisioning process about if it’s explicitly always a partnership, almost always a white-label, or in between?
JUSTIN: Most of the time nowadays we’re comfortable in our own skin, and we’ll do a partnership. I think most clients nowadays have multiple agencies that they’re working with. They understand that not every agency can offer everything. They’re okay with having those partnerships as long as the agency is managing it; they don’t want another thing to manage. And they appreciate the fact that we say, “That’s probably not our most expertise, and we’d like to bring in this partner to walk alongside this journey with us.” They definitely resonate with that and appreciate that.
SANDRA: And actually, I’d say a good majority of our current clients were working with other partners and all playing in the sandbox together. So, it’s been interesting the shift that’s happened over the last couple years where that’s almost become commonplace. I think really making sure that we are not only developing that relationship with the client, but really being appreciative of others involved, has also helped to create seamless, great projects.
JUSTIN: That was probably a big “aha” of several years ago that the days of Agencies of Record are pretty much gone, from what I can tell. Clients have multiple agencies that they’re using or vetting or working with, so they understand the partnership aspect and definitely appreciate it.
ROB: That’s a great point in serving the client well. Sometimes it may seem that what a client wants is a one-stop shop, but it’s really worth clarifying. It’s not that they want you to be superhuman. They may want you to be a trusted guide to help them find someone to do everything. They may not want multiple points of contact. They may not want multiple billing relationships. Or they may want all of that. It sounds like you can serve them well by figuring out how they want to be served and what it is that they’re asking for, which is probably not for you to be Superman.
JUSTIN: Absolutely. Almost everything we do, we do in-house. We’re pretty control freak, so we like having folks here under one roof. We like to offer those services. Most of the clients that we work with understand that. They like that and really resonate with the fact that we can offer all those services to them, but also to work with other agencies as well.
A lot of the clients come to us because they’re just overwhelmed. There’s so many things on their plate, there’s so many platforms they want to be on. They want to stay ahead of the curve, but they’re just trying to keep up with what’s on their plate currently. So, they’re coming to us to really help backfill a lot of the work that they know they need to be doing.
ROB: That clearly makes sense. When you’re looking ahead, what is coming up in either the marketing world in general or particularly for Bigeye that you’re excited about?
JUSTIN: I’m going to continue to say and double down on the idea of audience. Everything we do is going to tie back to audience. I believe for us, it is resonating. We will continue to do the persona development and tie it to creative and media. There’s so much opportunity to understand and segment audiences. We can drill down to very, very micro levels of who we’re trying to reach. I think we’re just beginning that, and we’ll continue to dive deeper into it.
SANDRA: And because of that, too, I’ll just add onto that, we’ve been able to engage with some really incredible brands. My hope and my outlook towards the future is that we build on those relationships with those incredible brands and we start to work with even bigger and larger brands as well, doing innovative projects and really working on incredible marketing strategies and initiatives for some really cool people.
ROB: When you say audience, I can’t help but think one of the audience platforms that is a little bit more in the news lately is Facebook, and some brands opting out of advertising on Facebook, and probably some other brands stepping in and maybe claiming some cheaper inventory there. How are you seeing clients think about Facebook in terms of what marketing they put there?
JUSTIN: From our team and from clients, they’re cautiously watching it. We’ve not had any clients or any recommendations to make major shifts in their media budgets because of what’s going on there, but we are watching it. There are several things like that that we need to be mindful of and we need to be watching for our clients and making appropriate recommendations as we move forward with that media.
We have not seen a dramatic downtick in the cost of that. It’s still an expensive platform because of the targeting that Facebook has, but we’ll continue to watch it.
ROB: Got it. One thing I’ve seen, at least on the brand side, is some brands have maybe not shifted their overall budget, but they’ve shifted how they spend it. Some of them are scaling back on the brand advertising and drilling more into let’s say driving ecommerce or some sort of online conversion, or more outcome-based and less of the potentially risky brand marketing.
JUSTIN: Yes. Conversion is key, and everything we’re doing leads to conversion in some way. Now, that doesn’t mean that brand awareness is not important; it is, and placements like on YouTube, which tend to be more of a brand awareness play than a direct conversion – most people don’t click the ad on YouTube – but you need to be there. That’s where the audience is. It’s the #2 search engine in the world.
We know our brands that we work with need to be there, but we’re focused on conversions along with making sure the brand stays relevant, stays top of mind, and all matching back to, where is that consumer going to consume that media?
ROB: Super solid. Justin, Sandra, when people want to find you and Bigeye, where should they find you?
JUSTIN: Bigeyeagency.com is where you can find us. There’s a lot of information there. We keep our blog incredibly updated. A lot of great information there.
ROB: Sounds great. Any last words you want to leave with our audience before we get on with your day?
JUSTIN: Appreciate your time, and look forward to hearing feedback from folks.
ROB: Sounds great. Thank you, both of you, for joining today. It’s great to get to know you, and we’ll all look forward to being down in Orlando for some fun things at some point, once we get through this whole pandemic thing.
SANDRA: I hope so. Hope to see you, Rob.
ROB: Sounds great. Be well.
JUSTIN: Thanks, Rob.
SANDRA: Thank you.
JUSTIN: Bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Justin Gray is CEO and Founder of LeadMD, a performance marketing consultancy. The agency concentrates on achieving tangible, holistic business goals – defining a buyer, launching a product, increasing revenue – to produce bottom-line impacts, rather than focusing on middle-process goals such as website or cost-per lead-optimization. Most of LeadMD’s over 3,500 clients are B2B and B2C considered-purchase organizations – big market enterprises of $100 million and up.
A “considered purchase” is a complex buying decision, fraught with emotional and financial risks and potential rewards – one that requires extensive pre-purchase research and evaluation. In B2B, this space might include software purchases, but it is more than that. LeadMD’s clients include technology providers (50% of clients are software providers), healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, and “anyone with a channel sale type of go-to-market.”
LeadMD bridges the space between being a global strategy consultant and providing regional implementation. The agency has data science, strategy, and go-to-market teams – who set strategies, plug those strategies into a broad range of systems and marketing platforms, build processes that work for clients, measure results, and optimize performance over time. Justin says that broad scope of function is rare in the B2B space. LeadMD’s consultants find the diversity in clients, the variety and unpredictability of problems and solutions, and the challenge of cobbling together customized solutions . . . exciting, and average 5 to 10 active, and widely-different campaigns a month. Close client relationships are critical.
New clients may come to LeadMD with a particular goal. The agency uses its “Catalyst Marketing Framework” that clearly states the client’s objective and then provides a “laundry list” of what the client will need to have solidly in place in order to achieve the stated objective. This helps them align their activities to the objectives, and, in the end, produce significant, relevant outcomes.
Justin has discovered over the years is that many clients believe they already have a full understanding of their buyer profile. Often that “full understanding” is only superficial. Do they really know who their buyers are? All of them? Then, do they know the platforms where their buyers “hang out”? Probably not. Yet that information is critical to know because those platforms are where LeadMd’s clients need to focus their marketing efforts.
LeadMD’s 3-person data science team digs in at a deeper level that its clients have – researching the market, defining buyers, assembling ideal customer profiles – and then translates that information into engagement and messaging frameworks.
LeadMD utilizes role-based psychological/personality profiling to select candidates who will strengthen the organization—either by reinforcing role-desirable traits . . . or by bringing a new direction to the role. The hiring process can take as long as 2 months. Fifty percent of the organization is employee owned.
Justin can be reached on LinkedIn, on Twitter @jgraymatter or on his agency’s website at: https://www.leadmd.com/.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined by Justin Gray, CEO and Founder at LeadMD based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast, Justin.
JUSTIN: Thanks, Rob. Appreciate you guys having me on.
ROB: Fantastic. Why don’t you tell us about LeadMD and where LeadMD excels?
JUSTIN: LeadMD is what we describe as a performance marketing consultancy. It basically just means that our outcomes are aligned to tangible business goals, whether that be revenue increase, product launches, defining a buyer – something that’s going to have a real tangible impact, not on the tactical side.
We don’t get into any engagements where we’re trying to optimize a website or a cost per lead. It’s going to be more holistic than that. Although we might conduct those tactics, we really desire to impact the bottom line of our clients – which are predominantly B2B and B2C considered-purchase organizations, big market enterprise.
Our secret sauce, or where we made our bones, is by operating bridging two different spaces. Normally you either work with a really high dollar, white shoe global consultancy like Accenture or Deloitte and they will help you set your go-to-market strategy or your marketing strategy, and then you’ll work with a much more regional partner that’s going to help you, maybe even an independent consultant that would pop in and help you operationalize that stuff. We do both, and we beat out the Deloittes and Accentures of the world every day.
Our real claim to fame is that we do stuff. Marketing operations is really the backbone of our organization. We’ve got the data science team, we’ve got a strategy team, we’ve got a go-to-market team, and these are all really smart people. But the thing that makes them truly unique is they know how to go plug that strategy into systems and make it work and measure it and optimize it over time, which is just a real rarity, unfortunately, within the B2B space.
ROB: For sure. You cast an interestingly wide net with your description that is still narrow in an interesting way. You said B2B and B2C considered purchases. A lot of times I think when you look at performance marketing groups, that B2B considered purchase dials in pretty tightly on let’s say software. There’s not a lot of white space around that. But it sounds like when you talk about considered purchase in consumer and non-software – where does the rest of the range go beyond that preconception about software, software, software?
JUSTIN: We’ve got probably five – because we’ve been in business for over 10 years, we’ve followed the marketing automation maturity curve, and we’re a primary partner of many of those providers. I’ve got over 3,500 customers, literally from vape pens to traditional software providers and everything in between.
But the primary concentrations we see are obviously technology providers, as you mentioned, software. Then healthcare, and that bifurcates itself into the payer/provider side and then the med device side. Both those industries, we’ve had a really strong footprint in. Then manufacturing. I describe it as when your grandma gets an iPhone happening in manufacturing right now. A lot of these organizations have really archaic marketing practices, but they’re springing forward into the latest and greatest because it’s become standard at this point. So manufacturing is a big one for us. Financial services, everything from traditional banking to online banking to credit unions.
And then really, anyone with a channel sale type of go-to-market. That can be insurance brokers, that can be real estate – commercial real estate, predominantly. Anyone that’s selling through the channel is also where we’ve seen a big concentration. But definitely, of that 3,500+, you’re probably dealing with about 50% that falls into the software provider space. Still a big industry for us.
ROB: Sure. But a fascinating range beyond that. If somebody looks you all up on LinkedIn, at least, if LinkedIn is to be believed, you have dozens and dozens and dozens of employees, but it sounds like you’re talking about quite a variety of products and perhaps even thousands of customers. It seems like there’s a story of tremendous leverage in there that I’d like to dig into a little bit, that you can be effective across such a range and across so many customers.
JUSTIN: Yeah. I think that’s just a function of necessity. With the rise of marketing automation and therefore marketing ops, there was this big talent vacuum that occurred. As we were building this agency and bringing people on and training them – and even advertising to them why they should come work for us versus go to the client side – the fact that they’re going to get exposure to – our average consultant is running between 7 and 10 active projects every month. That’s an incredible amount of exposure that they’re getting.
As I mentioned earlier, both from the strategy side of the house – fundamentally, how are they going to market? What does their buyer look like? How are they engaging this individual? – all the way down into how we make a platform like a Marketo work for that business. We’re talking to a retail burger chain right now. Loyalty programs are their predominant reason for up-leveling their marketing ops tech stack and therefore the surrounding strategies.
That’s so much different than talking to a traditional B2B software provider. I think that’s what frankly is the interesting part about what we do, and that’s also what we hear from our employees over and over again, like, “I don’t know what my day is going to look like, and that’s the exciting part about it.”
ROB: Sure, you have 7 to 10 different customers, each of which could ask you an interesting question that day or have something in their tech stack that might not be working quite as they hope. Do your teams specialize in particular marketing automation suites? Also, something I think is different – many agencies we’ve talked to will specialize in one. They’ll have HubSpot and just be trying to increase the quality of metal that is associated with their agency with relation to HubSpot. Platinum, or I guess you can go to gems, too, with Diamonds. How do you think about the right tool for the client?
JUSTIN: We were born as a Marketo consultancy, but right around the 2013-14 mark, we decided – Marketo was a predominant provider, and obviously still is, although owned by Adobe. What approach do we really want to be known for? Do we want to be known that all roads eventually end up at Marketo, or do we want to be a customer-driven solution provider?
At that point, although we still have partnerships with all of these different providers, we really do take an agnostic approach where we’re trying to understand, fundamentally, what is this business trying to accomplish? What is the best tech stack to reinforce that? And oftentimes that does go against hype. We may be recommending Pardot. We may be recommending an ESP, something that’s much more in tune with the business goals rather than our traditional partnership.
We do have specializations internally, certainly. We’ve got folks that have a big Pardot footprint, HubSpot footprint, Marketo footprint. If you think about the 6,000+ martechs on the market today, that gets pretty complicated pretty quickly. But really, we structure ourselves down into practices, and all of that will fall within our revenue ops practice. So those folks are constantly thinking about what skillsets we have, how we up-level those, how we maintain our certifications, and ensure that whatever comes long, we’ve got enough context to give the best performance for the customer.
ROB: I think something that’s implied – and tell me if I’m reading this correctly – by the tool stacks you’re mentioning, your Pardots and your Marketos and whatnot are a little bit upmarket from the entry level marketing automation platforms. Is that a selection filter for the type of customer, or is that an outworking of the type of customer that you tend to pursue?
JUSTIN: Yeah. When I say big market, I really mean $100 million and up. Everyone’s got a different definition of their market levers, but for us, our best client starts around $100 million and goes up from there. I’ve got a Fortune 3 company right now that has an active engagement with us. So it is that mid enterprise level footprint.
ROB: That sort of client often has a very high expectation of touch and relationship with their marketing providers. With that 7 to 10 customer per staffer ratio, the accounts they’re serving, how do you retain that sense of touch? Or is it really, because you’re delivering results, the touch is a little bit easier to manage and you’re not just trying to say sweet things to them?
JUSTIN: I would say regardless of how we’ve grown or scaled, the customer relationship has always been the centerpiece there. You’re never going to get away from the fact that when something goes wrong or a customer has a question or a customer just wants a piece of information as they’re going into a board meeting and they need that final piece that’s going to make them look awesome, they’re going to want to reach out and have someone answer the phone, answer their email, be on Slack, whatever it happens to be.
Relationship is absolutely critical. Again, I think that’s a unique element when you see an agency of our size that’s still able to maintain not only great client relationships, but personal relationships within that. We’ve got folks that have called us on weekends where it’s not our problem, it’s not even in our space – maybe something happened in IT – but marketing knows that they’ve got this great partner that is great at problem-solving, and “Hey, let’s reach out to them and see if they can help us.” I’ve been on those calls on Saturdays before.
It’s a tricky line. You want to make sure that you’re setting boundaries and you’re letting the client know, ultimately, we want a relationship and a partnership here, not something that’s going to feel like a whipping boy. But I do think you can’t get away from that within an agency. Any time you try to automate and people insert these separated ticketing systems and portals and things like that that their clients have to go through, I think that’s always a bastardization of the client relationship.
When I say 7 to 10, also, I should clarify that they may be hopping in and doing a piece of that project. Fundamentally, we’ve got principals aligned to those accounts that do all the account management and the relationship management. Because of your specialization, you might need to hop in and troubleshoot something on a Pardot platform or help with an integration for Marketo. But it’s really critical that we maintain a one to few relationship with the folks that are charged with managing that relationship.
ROB: That’s aligned with what you mentioned earlier, with those different practice teams. But you probably didn’t start off with a variety of practice teams, so how did this whole LeadMD thing get started?
JUSTIN: The short answer is accidentally. Yes, you’re absolutely right. Most agencies always start in the same manner, which is one person aligned to an account, like “Just don’t piss them off. Just don’t have these guys call me and say, ‘You’re providing terrible service.’” Everyone focuses on that one to one. I think agencies go through a number of maturity inflection points, but certainly when you realize that’s not going to work for your business long-term is probably one of the most difficult.
But back to your question in terms of how this got started. I was a very young VP of Sales and Marketing at a payment startup. It was actually my first venture into startup world. I graduated in marketing. I had three marketing jobs after college; I hated all of them. Suddenly I stumbled upon this new world, which was startup. I completely fell in love with it from every dimension that you possibly could.
In that business, we were selling through channel partners. We had 30+ different partners where our solution was integrated. It was a payment technology system. When we went to market and we marketed, we had to look like we were either marketing on behalf of that partner or co-marketing with that partner. We had that built into our standard agreements with them.
I was managing an ESP with that requirement and pulling lists and sending out these blasts and trying to make it seem like it was a lead nurture thing, although we didn’t even know what to call it back in 2006. Went out to Dreamforce and was talking to one of my buddies out there who owned a Salesforce agency. He said, “Hey, you should really talk to these guys over here.” We stumbled upon Eloqua, and I was like, “Wow, what is this?”
So, we did this whole evaluation of marketing automation platforms back then, like V Trends. There were so many that are not around any longer. In fact, the only two that were in that cycle were Eloqua and Marketo. Marketo I stumbled upon eleventh hour. They had a little 10 x 10 kiosk out at Dreamforce, if that tells you anything about the year.
ROB: [laughs] Which would still set them back a pretty penny.
JUSTIN: Right, totally. Jon Miller, who’s one of the founders, was working the booth. Bill Binch, who went on to become their CRO, was working the booth. I talked to those guys and described what I was looking for, and they showed me their platform. I was just blown away by the drag-and-drop nature, the intuitiveness of it and so on. I signed the contract right at that show.
We came back, we implemented it, loved it, rolled it out to my team. Eventually I sold my piece of that business and figured I was going to do the typical, “Hey, let’s go live in Italy for a year and take a year off” and so on and so forth. I flew over there. I took two weeks off. While I was over in Italy, a couple of my relationships called me and said, “Hey, can you do what you did over at this company,” which was called Billingtree. I said, “On a consulting basis? Sure, let me figure out what that would look like.”
Those three clients who reached out became our first three retainer relationships. It was just me, operating in a spare bedroom, supporting these guys. Fortunately, because of the advent of marketing automation and the rise of these technologies, the phone just kept ringing. I had to bring on employees at that point, and before you knew it, we had 12 employees and I had to take an office space.
Truly an accidental business for me. Not something I ever intended to get involved in. Never had run an agency before, never had run any sort of people-based business before. Always technology or payments. Just a really interesting experience that has really become the heart and soul of my businesses.
I’ve sold four businesses since I’ve had LeadMD as an agency, and it’s definitely the one that I am the most emotionally attached to.
ROB: With the timing of you starting that business, you were a little bit before businesses probably cared about social in any way. Is that accurate?
JUSTIN: That was the big conversation at the time, like, is social going to catch on? Who should be on social? Just like marketing automation, there were like 100 different social media platforms, like Big and – God, I can’t even remember all the names of them. Just these random little – so everyone was playing around.
I was thinking about it the other day. I can think of days where all I did was set up profiles on different social media platforms because we had no idea what was going to take off. Obviously, for business, LinkedIn has become the home for everyone, and that’s where we spend the majority of our day from a sales engagement standpoint, from a content publication standpoint.
But yeah, early days, that conversation was taking place across social, it was taking place across CRM, it was taking place across marketing technology and marketing automation. No one really knew what any of this stuff was going to become and if it was going to catch on. My early content creation was centered on that, like “What is this marketing automation thing and why should you care?”
Every once in a while, I’ll feel one of those little waves come around. Manufacturing went through that 2-3 years ago, where they’re asking, “What is marketing automation and why should we care?” You get these little flashback moments as laggard industries fall into more desire for digital transformation and so on. It’s interesting to feel that nostalgia when those circles come back around.
ROB: I imagine when manufacturing comes around to it, you probably have some playbooks in place and some understanding of how to measure success. How do you help filter when clients are asking – you have some industrial software company who comes to you and says, “Tell us about TikTok.” Who’s to say that TikTok doesn’t become – at one point in your business, I imagine LinkedIn was not a place where people should be spending time. How do you start to filter and maybe experiment when something is potentially relevant, kind of relevant, or strategically critical?
JUSTIN: Fortunately, questions like that all root back to the same answer, and that’s the buyer. It’s a great emphasis for us to start the conversation on “How well do you know the buyer that you’re trying to engage? Are they spending their time on these platforms?” and really have that be the guiding light around a recommendation.
Oftentimes when we first engage with a client, we’ve got what we call our Catalyst Marketing Framework. Essentially, it’s just a big menu of dependency, like, “Hey, I want to launch this product in EMEA via a demand-generation go-to-market.” “Great, here’s the 15 things that you need to have in place and shored up at a decent maturity level in order to succeed within that.”
The box that always gets checked on there, i.e. the customer feels like they’ve done a great job around it, is, “I do customer profile research and buyer personas.” Then as we proceed down an engagement, that’s also the box that tends to get rewound and revisited. We say, “Well, you felt pretty confident in that, but as we dug into the research that you have and the information you have around your buyer, there’s some gaps there. Let’s dive in and help you better define that process.”
We have stood up a data science team. It’s small but mighty. It’s literally three people, but they’re producing some awesome, awesome results in terms of market research, buyer definition, ideal customer profile assembly, and then the translation of that into engagement and messaging frameworks.
Long story short, we answer those questions through the lens of the buyer, and it’s a great opportunity for us to dive in where often a superficial look at who the buyer is has been conducted in the past.
ROB: Right. I think a lot of businesses are pushed into inventing a fairytale about who their ideal customer profile is, and you having three data science people who know what to do with the data is many steps ahead from the forced hypothesis I think a lot of businesses get into.
JUSTIN: That’s the danger of data science, actually. The one thing we’ve learned about these services is you really have to set a strong foundation for the fact that data is going to be the determinant of what we do. Even when you think about the narratives that happen within an organization – like I’m extremely opinionated about who our ICP is. I get challenged all the time from our marketing team, like, “Is that truly correct still? That’s something that was true 5 years ago. Let’s go out and go into the market and do some research and validate that.”
If you’re going to open that door, you have to open the door to being really uncomfortable, because what you often find from a data perspective is incomplete data. It’s the fact that you can’t draw those lines without going out and doing customer interviews or prospect interviews and employee interviews. Therefore, organizations really have to be prepared to say, “A lot of these maxims that we’ve held up are not supported by data and may be untrue.”
We’ve had to do a lot of expectation setting around the engagements that involve data science because the results are often quite different from what the internal narrative actually is.
ROB: For sure. I appreciate your willingness to be questioned and not just to say, “I’m right and I know because I’m in charge and I’ve been doing this for a while.” I think that willingness to be wrong probably helps model what your own team does in engaging with clients and how to guide them through that process gently, where they may be wrong, but you’re really just interested in helping everything be right.
JUSTIN: I’ve had some meetings in the past where maybe we’ve involving a vendor or someone from the outside is sitting in – we had a leadership coach in, in Q4, and they were in one of these meetings and afterwards said, “Wow, the way your staff questions the things that you say, are you ever bothered by that?” My mantra is ruthless pragmatism. If you see something that doesn’t make sense or isn’t supported by something or you think it’s assumed or you think there’s a better way to do something, everyone here has the license to dive into that and really question that.
I think sometimes that can be a bit uncomfortable for people from the outside. They have these strong lines of strata that are drawn where it’s like someone breezes into a meeting, says something, leaves, and everyone just has to go run and do it. I think that’s the value if you’ve got a really strong team and you embrace becoming a people-based business.
ROB: That ruthless pragmatism sounds like a cousin of radical candor and that whole line of thinking. Have you had people where it turns out that it may not be a fit for the organization with that level of candor? Is there a way you filter for that on the way in?
JUSTIN: We’ve done probably more work than I even want to admit around trying to profile for hiring and really getting into role-based profiling. We have a 200+ question survey. You don’t have to answer all the 200 questions; it just says, “Answer these for an hour. Do at least 100 of the questions.” It is a psychological survey – I forget who publishes it; some university – but our data science team got a hold of it and scrubbed out a few questions that are inappropriate for an employer to ask, and now we give that up front.
We don’t provide the results of that survey to our team until someone’s ready to make an offer. What we’ve done is essentially taken all of our employees, had them complete that survey – it is a personality survey, akin to a DISC or a Briggs-Meyer, and it really gives great insight into the traits and the skillsets someone’s going to have. But we’ve also scatter-plotted those around role. So, we know that in our project management role, here’s the big skillsets that stand out. We take the lens of, do we want to change that? Do we want to bring in someone that’s more extroverted to push the team into a certain direction, or do we want someone that fits the existing mold?
I will caveat all of this that we are by no means where we want to be in this process. It’s always a maturity curve and a learning process. But I think for an agency, every single person I bring in is going to develop personal relationships with the client – I don’t care if it’s an associate, which is our lowest level of consultant, least amount of time in the chair; if we lose that individual, someone’s going to say, “Hey, are you guys okay over there? I was really enjoying working with so-and-so. They’re the key to my account.”
Any loss of employee, whether it’s voluntary or involuntary, is a natural stick in the eye of an agency, so we have to be really careful about who we bring in. We have to be really intentional about the types of people we’re looking for. It all boils down to the desire to employ owners, like people that are going to own whatever they’re working on. 50% of this organization is owned by our employees, literally, through an equity program. We want that to foster the type of environment that we’re trying to create and be a representation of that.
But that’s so difficult to uncover, even when you take 2 or 3 months through an interview process. There’s so much that comes out in the day to day that you just can’t get exposure to. Every day we’re trying to get better.
ROB: Fascinating, Justin. Based on what you’ve learned so far in building LeadMD, what are some things you might do differently if you were starting over right now?
JUSTIN: God, there’s probably a host of them. I would say certainly one of the first things I would do is go to specializations earlier. We spent a lot of time trying to hire for these unicorn generalists that could do strategy and be really adept at tactics. We spent a lot of time pulling our hair out, wondering, “Why can’t we find more of these people?” The short answer is because they’re incredibly rare and rarely exist. I would certainly go more into a segmented and a specialty type of approach earlier.
I’d also say – you have to remember the year that this was formed, 2009. People rarely knew what marketing automation was. They didn’t know what it did. Certainly no one was implementing it around any sort of consistent methodology. We productized our offerings very early, but when we did so, we also really painted ourselves into a corner. For a number of years, we became a Marketo implementation shop because all of our products were focused on that implementation or optimization motion.
Then we had to spend a lot of time unwinding that and getting back to our roots and fundamentals of starting with strategy, starting with the real reasons why, and building from there. The brand ramifications that that has in terms of the runway and the necessary rebranding and the time it takes to get that optic to change is something that added a lot of lead time to our business that I wish it hadn’t.
Productizations is really critical in terms of trying to define the quality of outputs, but I would not take such a laser-focused productization approach.
ROB: I want to pull on something there a little bit, because I think what may often happen is that you’re starting, and you’re the superhero, and then you hire some people who are pretty good superheroes too and do all of those things, but as you said, they’re sort of unicorns. I think sometimes there’s a tension in the billing model that can make pulling that apart a little bit difficult. You feel like, “I’m charging X amount for a superhero; how do I switch to charging for a team?” Was that something you learned, or did you have a different path through that transition and that challenge?
JUSTIN: Yeah, absolutely. Fortunately, there was a degree of immaturity and inexperience that set our original pricing. I’ll say something that’s quite embarrassing and I rarely admit: when we first launched this business, our rate per hour was $75 bucks an hour because I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Right now it’s $300, and $500 for end version work. So, we had a lot of room to grow there because I was charging $75 bucks an hour for my own time.
As we adjusted along the lines of what you’re describing, which is you have this rock star, “I’ve been charging X for them; now I need to scale, I need to charge potentially the same X for that individual,” we were able to scale our pricing up on the upper bound rather than having to have it come down. Early days, I had a lot of competitors that were very upset with me because of the pricing that we were introducing to the market, and it was just my own inexperience, quite frankly, that made that happen.
ROB: Now I think you have some pricing that is probably aspirational for a lot of people who are listening, who would like to figure out how to charge $300 or $500 just for their own time, much less for somebody who they’ve brought onto their team. I think there’s probably a lot to learn in the middle there that makes it easier to learn –
JUSTIN: Sorry to interrupt, but we still run into downward pricing pressure, of course. We’ll run into a $25 million hypergrowth organization with another $50 million bucks in funding, and they have no problem paying for anything. Like, “Okay, great, send me over the MSA.” Then we’ll run into a global, highly visible, highly well known brand – and I won’t say the name, but the biggest rideshare organization out there – and they’ll throw something out like, “Hey, we don’t pay more than $165 an hour for consulting.” We went through an incredible procurement cycle there. We don’t dip down that low.
The only thing that really adjusts that mentality for the client, I think, is being able to call in references and referrals from folks that look like them that say, “Yeah, an hour with them is expensive, but only because it’s worth three employees. Only because it’s knowledge that you’re never going to get internally, you can’t hire for it, and it’s really uncommon what they’re combining over there.” You’ve got to build up – and certainly discounting and things like that are critical to building up those referral sources and getting people to take a chance on you.
But once you’ve got both a good stockade of references and folks willing to go to bat for you, I think that’s the most powerful lever that you can pull there. Like, “Let me put you in touch with someone that you respect that we’ve worked with, and let me have them give you the story.”
ROB: There’s so much wisdom there to unpack. You’re talking about the referrals; earlier, woven into the conversation, you also talked about LeadMD in a consulting role, and you talked particularly about benchmarking. You’ve positioned yourself alongside Deloitte and some other folks that I think really helps elevate that brand profile instead of saying, “Hey, we are Scottsdale Agency #25 and we are here to help you get some leads.”
JUSTIN: Yeah, totally. People think in terms of stories. How many people have put “We want to be the Facebook of X or the Uber of Y” in their pitch deck? People need frames of reference, and I think that really helps them do so. We are the combination between the best strategic Deloitte out there and the best independent consultant you can think of, because they both have really great aspects to them, but they also both have downfalls. The reason we exist is to eliminate those downfalls.
So I agree. I think you need to speak their language. There needs to be a shared vocabulary established there.
ROB: Really solid. Justin, when people want to find you and LeadMD, where should they go?
JUSTIN: They can of course go to the Google machine, but the best channel to get me at is certainly Twitter or LinkedIn. I’m @jgraymatter on Twitter. On LinkedIn, you can just search for me, Justin Gray. LeadMD is just leadmd.com.
We use Drip, so there’s a little chat feature on there. You can mention that you want to chat with me or anyone within the organization, and we can hop on and have a bit of a discussion there. I love to talk to anyone that’s curious about business, marketing, sales, life, any of those topics. I’m happy to lend my time. I find those conversations very interesting. So if you have a question, please reach out.
ROB: Perfect. Thanks so much, Justin, for coming on and sharing so much about that LeadMD journey. It sounds like a really excellent ride.
JUSTIN: Thanks, Rob. Appreciate it.
ROB: Thank you. Take care.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Alana Sandel, Chief Experience Officer of the agency, Marketing for Wellness, has a deep passion for helping people “to be well.” Her personal health struggles inspired her to create her agency, which focuses on quality of life, healthy foods, and fitness. “better-for-you products” – “to build brands for a better tomorrow” – especially brands with solutions for people with chronic health problems.
Alana notes that 60% of our population suffers from chronic health issues. COVID-19 is dangerous, but even more of a threat to people with diabetes, asthma, cardiovascular diseases, and other ongoing health issues.
Marketing for Wellness works to link “best fit” social media influencers with client brands. Media events have been crippled by the pandemic, so the agency is exploring virtual and augmented reality options (for education and entertainment) to replicate the experiences audiences used to have with high-touch media events, where such events balanced digital-touch social. Alana anticipates an unprecedented expansion of companies’ use of augmented reality and virtual reality technologies to create meaningful experiences for their prospective clients.
Alana believes that the companies that survive will be led by people whose work “resonates to the core,” drives them, and feeds their passion. With the strain of the times, a lot of talent will become more affordable. People will develop common goals to help each other through this crisis. Companies not prepared to go digital will need to act quickly if they are going to survive. And right now, Alana notes, there are some great deals in both digital and traditional format channels.
Today, people’s immune systems are the only protection they have against COVID. When will we get a vaccine? When will we have a treatment? How is this virus going to change? What other viruses are going to plague us? When? Alana emphasizes, “The only thing that we can rely on is our immune system.” Many niche brands, Alana says, are developed in people’s garages or kitchens, out of inspiration or desperation. Because these small-time innovators understand their customers’ “pain points,” their brands come across as being “authentic.” She expects to see a lot of innovative product development, both in foods and beverages, with a strong shift toward healthier ingredients.
For the future, Alana expects brands already in foods, beverages, and wellness will expand their offerings in support of our immune systems. Companies not in those industries may support their communities by investing in health and wellness initiatives. Smaller brands will increase their corporate citizenship contributions and make a tangible difference to society through the products they create.
A lot of people will continue to support their wellness experience digitally, but Alana does not put her trust in health gadgets. Devices may measure some vitals, but the most accurate and complete picture of an individual’s health is in the bloodwork. Simplicity – eating better, thinking of food as medicine, eliminating toxins and artificial ingredients from our diets, and “moving more” are the way to win health, even without the gadgets.
Alana can be found on LinkedIn at Alana Sandel, and on her agency’s website at: marketingforwellness.com.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Alana Sandel, Chief Experience Officer at Marketing for Wellness based in Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to the podcast, Alana.
ALANA: Thank you, Rob. Happy to be here.
ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Alana, why don’t you start off by telling us about Marketing for Wellness and what makes Marketing for Wellness amazing?
ALANA: Marketing for Wellness is designed to help better-for-you brands to succeed in the marketplace. What makes us amazing is really our deep passion to help people to be well. Whatever we do now is really built around health and wellness and how we can help build brands that have the next amazing, great-tasting product that’s gluten-free and dairy-free, or a fitness company that can get people moving and get them excited about living their life to the fullest. How can we make them successful?
It’s really about our passion, our values, and about an outstanding team of professionals who put their best to help many brands out there who need a voice, who need their stories to be told.
ROB: There’s certainly been an explosion of these better-for-you products. What do you think has created that opening and that opportunity? And how do you think about some of the challenges, because there’s almost so many that it’s hard to break through the noise?
ALANA: What created this huge demand is a new generation of more mindful people who appreciate the fact that wellness is the new currency. People are much more conscious about the choices they make, about where their attention goes. I think we’re dealing with a new generation that looks at our Baby Boomers and ask themselves the question, “How can I have a better quality of life?” I think this is one of the areas where we see a lot of demand.
In terms of challenges, how you break through the clutter, I believe if your product is truly great and you have a wonderful story to tell – and especially if it comes from your experience, because a lot of those niche brands were created in a garage, in a kitchen. They came from either a point of inspiration or being desperate. [laughs] They really understand pain points. Usually these smaller, authentic brands really get their audience and they’re able to get noticed. I think it all boils down to what you’re really good at.
ROB: At the onset, you alluded to, in your introduction, the food category and I think fitness as well as some categories. Are those maybe some of the hotter areas for this better-for-you movement?
ALANA: Absolutely. These are our basic needs. Food is medicine, and I think a lot of people are starting to appreciate that fact. We’re looking at food differently, and we’re reading the ingredients. We’re getting ourselves educated. Because of social media, things are going quite all right now. If you have a great product, people will endorse you, they will embrace you. If your product sucks and you’re not being true to your claims, it will also become pretty transparent relatively quickly.
When it comes to fitness, movement is life. If you are not out there, if you’re not taking the time to invest into your wellness and not giving yourself time to take a class or go for a walk or just do breathing exercises, your body is not going to be happy. So, food and fitness are definitely two big pillars that people are paying attention to and taking better steps than we used to in the past.
ROB: What marketing channels are you most often involved in? What are the key avenues to get the word out on a brand that probably can’t do everything?
ALANA: I think it’s obvious now that social media is one of the most important channels, especially working with social media influencers. Our agency has spent a lot of time to create valuable partnerships, working with social media influencers directly or through talent agencies. It’s really an art to find the best fit between the influencer and the brand to make sure there is really an authentic relationship where it doesn’t feel forced or staged.
Many influencers actually don’t want that. They’re looking for brands that they can represent with passion and brands that align with their values. Social media is basically a space that we embrace, that we enjoy working with, and this is where a lot of our work is done now.
But obviously there are other avenues with digital marketing, and most recently I have to say, because we can’t do media events like we used to – we really appreciated the balance it could create between high touch during the events and digital touch social. We’re exploring options with augmented reality right now, AR and VR, and how we can replicate experiences for people to connect with brands around entertainment and education.
ROB: That’s a very salient trend. Some places are opening up, but to a large extent a lot of people still aren’t going out. They’re certainly not getting together for events in the wake of this global pandemic around COVID-19.
Are you also finding perhaps some amplification opportunities that were less appealing before? You’ve got these influencers, and at least what we’re hearing sometimes is that some channels are opening up for paid media in ways where you used to have to spend a little bit more money to get the same message out.
ALANA: Rob, clarify your question for me.
ROB: Have you seen any opportunities open up because maybe the cost for certain ad channels is lower because some retailers aren’t advertising, some movies aren’t advertising, so you can get let’s say an impression rate or a click rate or something that’s lower than it used to be?
ALANA: Oh, absolutely. In the last I want to say 5 to 6 weeks, we’ve seen a lot of great deals on different channels. Both I would say in digital and traditional formats. Yeah, I agree with you on that.
ROB: That makes sense. Alana, tell us a little bit about how you got into this Marketing for Wellness. The business is a little bit newer, but your industry experience is quite extensive. What shifted your attention in this direction?
ALANA: When I started with my own journey back in 2001, I always had a commitment to myself that I’m not going to compromise on what I believe in. Early on, pretty much as a team, we primarily went after brands that we knew improved quality of life, but it was really a mix of organizations, from food companies to financial services companies and not-for-profits.
Last year, I realized that I really want to polish my focus on working with brands that can make a special difference for people with chronic health conditions, because I think with 60% of our population having chronic health issues and with COVID-19 putting a lot of these people in a very vulnerable spot, I think those people that have diabetes, asthma, cardiovascular diseases, and others need a lot more support today perhaps than before, especially when it comes to food and beverage companies.
So, Marketing for Wellness is designed to build brands for a better tomorrow, and we’re focused on quality of life, but our special attention now goes to those brands that have a solution for people with chronic health issues.
ROB: It almost seems like this was a little bit of a reboot, that you had built this career and you had built a firm that could do more things, and you felt the desire and saw the need to go focus in a little bit more. Is that part of the journey?
ALANA: That’s right. This is under my skin. This is something that I’m vested in personally because it’s part of my personal wellness journey and the struggles that I faced. I know there are a lot of people out there with pain points that have not been addressed.
Obviously, there are medications and there are a lot of health options, but at the end of the day what’s important is what you do every day and how you invest in yourself. What type of food you eat, how you exercise, how you develop yourself from within, how you make your life meaningful, how you look for purpose – this is all interconnected. It’s all one big holistic picture that creates wellbeing for people. But for those with chronic health conditions, it’s a lot more challenging. It’s a lot more painful. It’s a lot more expensive. I’m really embracing those brands that have great products to help those people manage life much better.
ROB: You can definitely hear the resonance between this business and your own personal journey. I couldn’t help but think as you were talking earlier about influencers, and now about some of these different conditions, it almost seems like a very good intersection where there could even be brands that would pay some influencer more to advocate on their behalf – but someone who self-identifies with a particular health concern, a particular need, may just be so grateful to find a product that helps them, whether they’re dealing with celiac or lactose intolerance or whatever, that they might choose your clients over a lot of other options. Is that part of the dynamic? You get to resonate also with your influencers?
ALANA: Absolutely. I’ll give you one example. I have the privilege to support Lively Foods. They are a manufacturer of a kefir beverage. It’s a probiotic drink that is rich with good bacteria that loves your gut. It’s especially important now because most of the health of our immune system sits in our gut. About 70% is there. So, taking care of our digestive health is critical.
Lively Foods is so loved by those people who appreciate how good this product is for their lives, both for adults and kids, that they’re extremely popular with influencers, going beyond food. You can see it on Lively Foods’ Instagram channel, classes that range from fitness to mental and emotional health. Influencers are drawn to this brand, knowing that this is one of the best choices you can make on a daily basis to keep yourself strong and resilient by taking care of your gut. So yeah, this is exactly right, Rob.
ROB: That definitely makes sense. I can’t help but notice when you talk about originally launching a business in 2001 – many would say that was not the best timing. Many would say that this year is not the best timing. Of course, 2001, we had 9/11 and the dot-com bust. Along the way, you also kept in business through the Great Recession as well.
What are you seeing, knowing that we’re probably heading into recession now – or maybe we will have an amazing recovery, as the stock market seems to believe – but knowing that we may be into a leaner time, what have you learned, at least the past couple of rounds of downturn that you have been in business through, that you’re thinking about as we look forward?
ALANA: Great question. Here’s my big idea. I believe if you are doing something that resonates with your core, something that drives you, something that you’re passionate about, you’re going to make it. You’re going to be resilient, and you’re going to find ways to sustain your business and yourself and your family. It’s not going to be easy in the next couple of years, but there’s going to be a lot of talent available that perhaps before were a little bit pricy for small to mid-size brands to tap into. There’s going to be a lot of I would say common goals to help us through this crisis and find better solutions, so people are going to be drawn to ideas, and those people who have tools and solutions that can actually help us.
So, I think we’re going to see a positive transformation where people are really working together on projects that inspire them and connect them to their better selves, and this will give us strength and resilience. We’re going to see a lot of great ideas. We already do. I believe it’s not going to be easy, but at the same time, we’re going to tap into some areas within ourselves that are going to give us that superpower.
ROB: Right. This is the time where the tourists in the industry might go away, the folks who could stick around when you could just throw a stick and find someone who needed some help with digital advertising. Those types might be on break for a little bit. People need thoughtful performance, and they need someone who’s going to adapt and find those opportunities. It sounds like you are on that journey.
ALANA: I believe I am, yes.
ROB: If we widen the aperture a little bit, Alana, having been in the industry for quite a while and having been a business leader, a business owner, what are some things you would do differently if you were – I mean, you are starting over from scratch, so maybe it’s more interesting to say what are you doing differently this time that you left behind when you left your previous business?
ALANA: Happy to share. One of the things that I wish I did from Day 1 is finding a mentor or mentors. For me, when I found my mentor, Ted Pincus, he was a financial PR pioneer. Unfortunately, he passed away. He made a world of difference within my life. Within the short time that I knew him, he led me to some really important decisions that I’d make. Because of his guidance, I joined an executive management course at Kellogg Business School. I revisited how I managed the business and how I looked at priorities.
I would encourage everyone, no matter where you are in your professional development, whether you work for a small business or a Fortune 5000 organization, I think having the right mentor by your side, who can listen, who can reflect, who can give you guidance, is the most important step you can take towards your success.
ROB: That process of finding and then also recruiting a mentor can be a little bit intimidating. In other words, some people would say that going up to ask someone to be your mentor is a lot like walking up to a stranger and asking them to marry you. How do you think about that process of, number one, finding someone who’s resonant and isn’t just somebody who seems important, and number two, building that relationship to the point where it’s not such a weird question, perhaps, to ask for a mentor?
ALANA: I think there are a number of options. My path to finding Ted Pincus, my mentor, was through another private organization where I reached out to some of the people I knew and I said, “I’m looking for help. I need guidance.” Once people got to know me, they said, “You should talk with Ted and see if he could help you.” Then Ted led me to another person who I greatly respect, Lloyd Shefsky, who was also a part of the Kellogg School, who led me to other ideas and opportunities.
So, it’s kind of a chain reaction. You talk to people, you connect with people, and you find the right person. I see many universities now, their alumni programs, offering that as an option, or there are now online portals where you can go in and look for a mentor or make yourself available to mentor someone.
I think it takes a conversation. It takes creativity, how you reach out to people. If you set an intention and you’re clear on who you need in your life now, I think you’ll find the right solution as long as you’re creative and resourceful.
ROB: Which is all part of success anyhow. I did want to poke in on one thing you said there. You initially said you didn’t say, “I need a mentor”; you said, “I need help.” First of all, asking for help is a tremendously powerful thing, and it’s also a much lower commitment. How soon into that relationship did you feel like it was going to be a long-term one?
ALANA: I knew right away. Ted understood me. He immediately responded to some of the issues that I had, and he really lent constructive support on many levels. This relationship was meant to be, so I was really fortunate to find Ted.
ROB: That’s great. You also mentioned there was a geographic resonance with Northwestern – around Chicago. People do have that affinity around their school that makes them more likely to help, I think. So that all makes plenty of sense there.
For those of us who are not as deep in the wellness industry – I think a lot of us know the lactose, gluten – what are some surprising categories of product that you see coming up? Maybe some new client categories or just the digital marketing world making the universe smaller for people to find exactly what they need?
ALANA: One of the things that I see coming, which makes me really excited – again, I’m going to use the example of food and beverage because I think this is going to be one of the biggest areas where we’re going to see change – is innovation around ingredients, what companies are putting in our food now. There are a lot of breakthroughs around alternatives to sugar.
In fact, my team a few years back was working with an organization, Tate & Lyle, as they were branded a sugar alternative, which was monk fruit. We were engaged in this process, which I was really passionate about. I think we’re going to see a lot of innovation from a product development standpoint, both in food and beverage.
Also, I see a lot of digital innovation of how people experience wellness. With COVID, there are a lot of restrictions. Before, you could go into a yoga studio and take a class with 30 people in a really tight setup; now, that capacity is probably going to be cut in half and classes are going to become more expensive. So, we’re going to see a lot of people continuing their experience digitally in terms of how they’re going to support their wellness.
Another thing that I see, and actually I’m a part of, is I believe we’re going to see a lot of smaller brands creating contribution to the society at large, not just bigger brands. For example, my firm recently launched a project for wellbeing, which is a not-for-profit initiative. We are developing a platform where we make it much easier for people to practice wellbeing. It’s not only about employees; it’s also about the wellbeing of employees’ families and loved ones. So, we’re actually investing resources to build a platform that can create more wellbeing and wellness.
I think we’re going to see more projects like that coming from smaller organizations. Fortune 5000 companies have practiced corporate citizenship for a while, but smaller companies don’t have as many resources. But now, with the transformation we’re seeing, I believe a lot of people will be driven to make an impact and make a contribution and to make it tangible so people can really feel the difference of their efforts.
ROB: A lot of that can line up with these brands also owning their own platforms. I know I’ve seen some things. What have you seen in terms of shifts around smaller brands and ecommerce, perhaps, in this season?
ALANA: Oh, my goodness. I think those companies that were not prepared for digital transformation had to wake up and get their act together really quickly. If you are not prepared to sell your product online –whether on Amazon, on Etsy, or maintaining your independent platform, or a combination of all – you’re going to have a really difficult time sustaining business.
I saw a lot of companies, overnight, getting an online makeover in terms of getting their ecommerce act together, which was very impressive. And I’m not surprised, because we have a lot of tools and technologies. You can build a website overnight. If you know what you stand for and what you want to say, you can do that. We built the For Wellbeing platform in 5 weeks, and it has thousands of resources. Technology creates opportunities right now for people who get it done quickly.
ROB: The toolsets are certainly remarkable, between some of your lightweight website things, your Wixes, your Webflows, your Squarespaces, but even into – a friend of mine runs a company that has been in the grocery space. They’re in technology for grocery gig economy work, and a lot of that went away, and they very quickly stood up not just an online store, but a multi-vendor online store. They’re a mini Amazon that lets all their different clients sell food products online, and they did it so quickly. It would’ve taken months and months, if not over a year, to do this in different areas, and now a Shopify store – I think there’s a reason their stock went up. It’s just so fast, and there are so many tools that integrate, that you can be shipping just shockingly quickly.
ALANA: Absolutely.
ROB: Alana, we’ve pulled forward several years of digital transformation already, so where do you see the next horizon now? People who have been pulled into the future now, what is their next future that they’re being pulled towards that they’re going to have to figure out, as maybe a challenger food brand having a wellness dimension to it?
ALANA: I think brands that can will market around wellness, and this is how Marketing For Wellness is set up, to help organizations to figure out how they can market around wellness. With COVID, you realize that our immune system is the only shield we currently have to protect us against COVID. We don’t know when we’re going to have a vaccine. We don’t know when we’re going to have a treatment or how this virus is going to behave, and are we going to have other viruses that might intrude on our lives? The only thing that we can rely on is our immune system.
So we’re going to see those brands that are already in the space, in food and beverages and wellness, stepping up their game and helping people to support their immune systems. But then we’re going to see companies who might not be in that play – they might be in a different industry, but they want to support their communities. They’re going to start investing into wellbeing and wellness initiatives. That’s one area that I see.
Another one, I definitely forecast huge growth for AR and VR technologies to take off, and for many brands, figuring out how to use it wisely, in a way that people can have meaningful experiences – and there are already some interesting innovations coming, like from Lego, where they employed an AR tool working with a company called 8th Wall to create retail experiences to get people to stay in the store longer and get engaged with the product and buy more. We’re going to see a lot of the area of AR and VR, I believe.
ROB: Around wellness in the past few years, with things like the Apple Watch, and as it’s actually become better, we see people trying to quantify some parts of their health. Same thing with Fitbit. But a lot of the sorts of health that you’re talking about seem like they are harder to quantify – for instance, the quality of the sugar in a particular product or the quality of your gut biome. Is there anything emerging that you see that may quantify a new area of health that has been a little bit unobserved that may help a category pop?
ALANA: Let me first share with you my perspective on all the gadgets. I think they’re awesome. I think we need them. I do want to know how many steps I took. But at the end of the day, if you look at the number of insurance claims, they’re the same. We still see doctors at the same rate as we did a few years ago, regardless of how much investment has been made into gadgets and into platforms. This is just my overall position.
The most accurate measurement of how well your body functions and the most precise measurement is your blood work because gadgets measure some vitals, but it doesn’t give you a complete picture. I saw some really interesting technology coming out of Germany where they actually measure your wellbeing and your wellness using your frequency. It looks promising.
But what I believe in today is simplicity. As long as we can get people to eat better and to perceive food as medicine, if we eliminate toxic ingredients, artificial ingredients from our diet, if we move more, it’s a win. Simple steps. Even if we don’t have any gadgets. [laughs]
ROB: Yeah, simplicity more than technology.
ALANA: Simplicity, yes.
ROB: I dig it. Alana, when people want to find you and find your company, where should they go to find you?
ALANA: They can find me in two places. They can find me on LinkedIn, Alana Sandel, and they can go to our website, marketingforwellness.com.
ROB: That’s a good domain for it. I like it. Alana, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It’s been great chatting with you.
ALANA: My pleasure, Rob. Thank you for inviting me.
ROB: Now more than ever, I can say: Be well.
ALANA: Thank you.
ROB: Bye.
ALANA: Bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Tara Murphy owns 360 Media, an entertainment, lifestyle, and hospitality agency that focuses on public relations, event planning, and digital marketing. In the last couple of years, the agency has expanded into hotel work and commercial real estate. 360 Media will have been in business 25 years as of next January.
In this interview, Tara describes how her agency utilizes a variety of complementary narratives, images, and quotes layered on different platforms (social, email, print TV) to build a “big picture” storyline and cadence a client’s message. Tara explains that a lot of companies have ineffective PR because they fail to link their messages across the various platforms. 360-Media often educates clients on how to figure out message cadencing and how to make everything work together.
360 Media’s expansion into the commercial real estate market segment came about when the agency was tasked to promote Atlanta’s Krog Street Market, one of the first “food halls” to gain global recognition. Tara explains that Krog Street Market could have been a glorified food court, but it became much more than that . . . and was pivotal in rejuvenating the neighborhood around it.
Understanding a client’s goals and objectives, mapping out a strategy, and then building a PR program with integrated story-telling, place-making, and branding components can change commercial real estate from a B2B proposition into a personal “what’s coming to my neighborhood” lifestyle play.
Tara provides tips on how to write and submit press releases in today’s environment, what makes something newsworthy, and how to help a client find the unique “angle” that makes a “me too” announcement stand out. (This understanding is the light-bulb moment.) Less is more, Tara says. You have to target your audience, then customize the pieces for each of those targeted audiences.
Tara notes a couple of things she might have done differently when she started:
- She feels she should have been more ready to follow her intuition,
- She made the mistake of extending too much credit to financially-strapped clients
The things that have helped 360 Media succeed for almost a quarter decade:
- Being open to morph and willing to take on new challenges
- Keeping a diverse client base
For the past 2 years, 360 Media has published the Atlanta 100, an end-of-the workweek e-newsletter and website (theatlanta100.com), which each week features twelve 100-word stories and 100-second videos on topics of intrigue in the Atlanta area. Lots of information . . . quick and easy access.
Tara can be reached on her agency’s website at 360media.net or on Instagram at 360 Media, Inc (@360mediainc).
Transcript Follows:
Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Tara Murphy, Owner at 360 Media, based in my own hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to the podcast, Tara.
TARA: Thank you so much for having me.
ROB: Thank you for coming on. I wish that we were not sheltering in place and we could then actually meet up in Atlanta and do a live interview. Those are always fun. But we will call that for another time. Why don’t you start off by diving into 360 Media and where 360 Media excels?
TARA: Sure. 360 Media is an entertainment, lifestyle, and hospitality agency. We focus on PR and a little bit of event planning and then digital marketing. Our sweet spot is traditional PR, and we are about to celebrate our 25th anniversary in January of 2021, which is very weird to say. We’ve morphed over the years but always have stayed under that umbrella of entertainment, lifestyle, and hospitality. That’s our focus and the sectors that we work with.
It’s been really interesting the last couple of years. We’ve expanded a little bit into hotel work, commercial real estate. We have a lot of those clients who say that we make corporate cool. We take commercial real estate and turn it more into a lifestyle play, which is really fascinating and interesting. It’s been a wild ride over the years, and we’ve continued to morph. But PR has been the area we’ve always continued to excel and focus on.
ROB: Congratulations, by the way, on that 25 years. Hopefully you’ll be in a good position to actually plan an event for that, because that would be an excellent thing to be able to do from where we are right now.
TARA: Thank you. Yeah, I’ve had a couple of people say the same thing, and I’m like, “We still have 6 months!” But that’s going to fly by.
ROB: For sure, it will. It’s interesting you mention that shift in commercial real estate. What do you think it is that has made it shift so that normal people are interested in development of cities and new things that are happening? Nobody really gets excited about an office building usually, but something indeed I think has changed with the emergence of let’s say Curbed and some of the blogs in the space and that sort of thing.
TARA: Yeah, good point on Curbed. I think they’ve really helped make it accessible. For years, everyone just thought of real estate – there would be a sign in front of a building or in a window, and it was like, “Okay, what tenant’s going to go in there?”
But I would say probably in the last 5 to 7 years, it’s really turned a lot more into the storytelling, the place-making, the brand awareness, because you’re creating these pockets in cities that are little neighborhoods. Obviously, you live in Atlanta; a lot of people these days, because of the traffic and the growth, are staying in their 3-5 mile radius around their home. They want to know, “Do I have those everyday needs accessible?” and “What’s coming into my neighborhood?”, whether that’s a great little restaurant or a boutique or some sort of service that you want to be able to use.
I think people get more excited about “this is what’s coming to my neighborhood.” People are really thinking about the needs of the neighborhood. Also, what’s really popular in Atlanta is not just taking buildings and revving them – actually renovating, going in and repurposing. I think people have gotten really excited, so that’s opened the door to a little bit more interest and knowledge from the general public.
It’s funny; with a lot of the real estate clients that we’ve had, it all started because we got brought on for Krog Street Market, when that got announced here. For those that don’t know, that’s a big food hall in town. It was one of the first food halls that made a mark globally, and it was interesting being part of that because people look at that and say, “It could’ve been a glorified food court” – but it wasn’t that, and it isn’t that to this day. That really helped change that neighborhood.
When we finished working on that project, when the developer sold a couple years ago, it opened the door to a lot of other real estate clients coming in and saying, “Hey, how do you take something like that and make it accessible for the general consumer or get them excited, or how do we get press like that?” It really was an area that I never thought we would get business in, but it’s been challenging and fascinating and fun. I think we bring a different viewpoint, coming at it from the lifestyle perspective rather than the B2B perspective. Clients like that. We’ve been able to get press, so that’s been good.
ROB: I think we do want to hear those stories, these origin stories, these entrepreneurial stories, of something that we hope becomes something bigger. I think it’s something that we lost. Food courts at one point actually were a place of innovation and entrepreneurship and of good stories. Chick-fil-A heavily grew in food courts, and I believe the Great American Cookie Company started in Atlanta, Georgia in a food court.
We went through a season where those things didn’t happen and there wasn’t that entry point for an entrepreneurial restauranteur. And it’s back. It’s cool that you get to be a part of that story.
Now, PR means a lot of things to a lot of people. Some people think about trying to get a software company an article in Forbes or Fortune, and some people think about this very encompassing suite of services, often on a local level. When you break down PR into the pieces and parts, what are the actual details and activities and day-to-day things you’re doing for clients?
TARA: It varies per client. A lot of them will come knowing that they need PR, but not exactly sure what we can do for them or what we bring to the table. A lot of times it’s definitely, especially in our pitching, a little bit of an education as to what we do a little differently than most.
But our day to day varies depending on if we’ve got an event that we’re working on, or if it’s a product or a restaurant opening. From press releases to pitching media outlets – and that’s print, radio, TV, online, influencers now, which is a big taboo topic – pitching all of that, crisis management if there’s an issue, management of the day-to-day messaging and storytelling for a client. We also do a lot with social media and digital marketing, whether that’s us doing it for a client or working with another vendor that they have.
We help create the storyline for the PR side, and where a lot of companies fail is that they’re not weaving these things together. When that message is weaved together, whether that’s through their email blasts or their social media platforms, it all works together. They may see something on social, then they see something in an email, then they see something in print or on TV, and you get that bigger picture storytelling.
So, we do a lot of education with clients on how to figure out their cadence of messaging, but then also, how does that all work together? Are you telling the same story on every platform on the same day? No, let’s not do that. Let’s build it out. Let’s weave in PR. Let’s weave in quotes. Let’s weave in whatever the reaction is from the general public, or high points.
There’s a lot of strategic work that we do now, which for me personally is my favorite thing. Starting an agency 25 years ago, I didn’t know a lot when I started. You don’t know what you don’t know. As it’s grown and PR has changed and morphed over the years, strategy has always stood out to me as the key need. Understanding a client’s goals and what they need to get out of it and then mapping out a strategy – that’s where we’ve had, knock on wood, our most successful campaigns and client work.
I remember years ago, prior to starting 360, I worked at an independent record label, and we used to have to monitor how many calls we made, and we had to send out so much product. It was like you send out hundreds and hundreds of pieces of music and you just see what sticks. You can’t possibly call thousands of journalists.
I learned during that time that it worked for a short period of time, but then what really changed was, let’s target. Maybe we send all this stuff out and whatever sticks, sticks, but let’s target 10-15 outlets that we really want to tell the story to, and let’s figure out that story for each outlet depending on what they cover.
As we started to do that, we had big, successful pieces, and they were larger features. That was the turning point for me, going and working with a lot of clients and figuring out, “What’s our strategy and how do we make more impact?” They always say less is more, and that definitely resonates a lot these days with PR.
So, every day is different, but those are the base things that we work on. Some days there are some new things brought to the table, especially during a pandemic. [laughs] We’ve done a lot of new stuff that I was like, “Huh, never thought we’d work on that or do this kind of thing.” But for the most part, the overarching PR is a lot of writing, pitching, press releases, and storytelling.
ROB: You can definitely see where that 360 degrees comes in for 360 Media. I think PR is often misunderstood to be shouting really loud, and you’re talking about it so much more like a surround sound, where you get those different touchpoints that really reinforce the story and create that picture in your mind.
You mentioned press releases, and I think press releases are perhaps one of the most misunderstood, maligned, and also misused tools that are out there. How do you think about and redeem the press release and help it to be the noble thing that it is, and also maybe how people may misuse them?
TARA: That has become a very hot topic in our office. You go from one extreme to the other, where, as you said, people get confused by it. Not everything is worthy of a press release, but then again, there are plenty of times that a press release done well can cut through the clutter and gets picked up exactly how it’s written, and that is a win for a client, and obviously a win for us.
In this day and age, there’s an amazing 24-hour news cycle and there’s a lot of opportunity to get coverage, but there’s also fewer journalists and people working at publications, so you’ve got to find that middle ground that you’re not inundating them with useless information, but you’re also providing enough that if they are short-staffed or they are one person covering five or six feeds, you have enough information there that they can pull content, don’t necessarily have to deal with you or do an interview, and get a story up.
Part of what we do is not only look at things and say, “Yes, that’s worthy of a press release,” but we also look at what information we have. Do we have video? Do we have photography? Do we have quotes? Is there another way that this may be delivered to a journalist that would resonate more than just a press release?
We really are now weighing out how that information goes out on our email list. Some days it is just a traditional press release, and other days it’s a video that then links to a blog post that has more information, or it’s an e-blast that is an invite to experience something online, especially now, since everybody’s working remotely. There’s a lot of different ways that we’re doing it, and we continue to change it up and think, “How is this going to land and what’s going to interest someone?”
That’s been really good. We get a lot of feedback from journalists who are like, “We’re not getting the same old, same old from you, and that’s really what stands out to us,” which I love.
On the press release side, though, I will say if you write a great press release – and sometimes I get dinged from people and they’re like “it’s not AP style” and all of those things that are traditional. It’s like, no, this stands out a little bit differently because we write in a little bit more of an editorial fashion. Some of our clients can be dinged as a little fluffy, so people are like, “This isn’t really newsworthy. It’s a little too fluff.”
But we try to find that middle ground where it’s like, here’s an editorial piece for you that not only covers what’s newsworthy on this end, but it can be cut and pasted and either put on a blog, or if an influencer is putting something up on their Instagram, they’ve got quotes they can use from the client, or a link to a Dropbox that’s got photography or graphic assets that are done for Instagram, Facebook. We really try to make it very easy because everybody is so crazy busy, and that also stands out.
Press releases are interesting. We just had a conversation this past week about a client. They wanted something in a press release, and I was like, “No, it’s not going to land right. Let’s do XYZ.” It stood out and it was different. There’s a lot of stuff going on, obviously, with the pandemic and restaurants reopening. Because restaurants are reopening, everyone thinks, “My dining room is open. This is newsworthy.” Well, we’re in a huge influx of dining rooms reopening, so what are you doing that’s different compared to everybody else and you’re not just opening? So we had to dig a little deeper, and we created the story, which then was like, “Okay, this is press release worthy because they’re doing some stuff differently.”
ROB: This is where maybe someone will say they’re doing this different menu, they’re doing this different format of service, they’re doing this very unique thing in terms of how they’re protecting people, or even some restaurants have been able to get the story out about how they are doing a mini-grocery. Is that the story?
TARA: Yes.
ROB: Instead of saying, “Hey, we’re still open and doing takeout.” It’s like, yes, so is everyone else who wants to save their restaurant. What are you doing that’s different from just “yes, you can place an order on Uber Eats”?
TARA: Yep. It’s interesting because at the time when everybody was pivoting, that was newsworthy because some of these places weren’t on Uber Eats or Grubhub or any of those services. But then it was like, okay, that’s newsworthy for all of 5 minutes, but what are you doing differently for your team or onsite or the meals you’re delivering?
A prime example, Mission + Market in Buckhead is one of our clients, and for the first couple of weeks as they were pivoting, they were doing themed nights where it was like family meal and just different things. That was working very well for them, but what they ended up doing also was realizing that so many restaurants were closing at the time, they stepped up and on Thursdays were doing meals for people that had lost their jobs because of COVID.
So, they not only covered the hospitality industry, but they were like, “Anyone that’s lost their job, if you can show that you’re no longer employed, you can order a meal through us.” They did it I want to say for 2 months and served over 1,500 people every Thursday. It was really incredible, and they got a lot of attention. Now, they didn’t do this to get attention, but we had to put it out to say this is what they’re doing so that people knew, and it ended up getting a lot of positive attention and other companies that wanted to support and give sponsorship to help cover the meals they were covering themselves. It turned into a much bigger thing. We got a lot of press out of it, even though that wasn’t the game plan for it. It really made them stand out.
ROB: For sure. There are a few folks I know in the service industry who just seem to have a natural knack for storytelling and baiting the hook and getting the right stories out there and getting coverage. How much of this thinking and getting these stories to land right is instinct, and how much of that do you think can be developed? And if it can be developed, how do you think about developing that proper mindset?
TARA: I think some of it is instinct. I think also some of it is development. I think you’re on the money there, because a lot of people – any client; it’s not just in the hospitality industry – they’re in there day to day, and they can’t really see everything that is exciting or interesting, or maybe they’re not up on the day to day of what’s newsworthy or what might be resonating in pop culture. Meanwhile, they’re doing something and it’s like, oh my gosh, here’s a local story that resonates with a national story or something that’s trending nationally.
When you start working with a client and start putting those ideas out there or talking to them or digging in a little deeper, all of a sudden you see their eyes light up and it’s like a light bulb moment. They’re like, “Wait a second, we’re also doing XYZ.” It’s like, “Yes, that is interesting and that’s newsworthy.” That’s been a really cool thing to watch as we continue to work with clients. Over time, you get in that groove, and they start seeing what you’re seeing.
They also start understanding how media works. Sometimes we’ll have clients call and say, “I read this piece. We are doing this. Can you reach out to this writer and perhaps they would do something on us?” That’s always cool, when we see clients grow into understanding what editorial options they have. Or “Hey, we’re looking to do something for our anniversary. We don’t want to do it exactly like everyone else. Here are the ideas we’ve come up with.” We come in and fine-tune that stuff.
We also sometimes – I think this is one of the things that we’re really known for amongst the clients we work with – just coming in and seeing things differently, and giving them a picture. They may come to the table and say, “Here’s what we have. This is what we’d like to do,” and then we say, “Okay, this is great. Let’s take this up a notch. How about this?” That’s been really cool, to have clients that are open to collaboration and getting it to a place where it’s like, “This will get you small press, but this will get you big press.” They’re like, “Oh, okay!”
That part is a lot of fun, especially when you tell them something is going to happen and then it does. [laughs] Which you can’t guarantee, but when you’re like, “This is big,” and then we take it out and either pitch it to someone exclusively or put it out en masse and they see the response they get, it’s like, “Oh, okay, you guys were right.” That’s a lot of fun.
It’s interesting, too – I had a new business pitch last week over Zoom, which obviously is new. A lot of calls and a lot of Zoom pitches. But in the midst of the pitch with this potential client, they were talking about some of the things they were doing, and immediately I was like, “Why don’t you take this and you could do this and this and this?” The look on all of their faces – we were on Zoom and I love seeing it – they were like, “Oh my God, that was right in front of us.” I was like, “Yes, but you’re in it. You can’t see it.” That part was great.
We had a follow-up call yesterday and they were like, “We took what you said. How about this, this, and this?” And we’re not even on board yet. We’re just now going through the proposal. It was funny. I was like, “Yes, that could all work.” That’s an interesting – either you have to feed people or they get into it and get excited.
ROB: And maybe the people I think have good instincts just have really good help, so who knows?
TARA: [laughs] Both.
ROB: [laughs] Tara, almost 25 years ago, when you started up 360, did you have any inkling that you were in it for the long haul? What was the formative driving force there?
TARA: No, I really didn’t. It’s funny; a lot of times people ask, “Did you have a business plan? Did you map things out?” For the longest time, I was a little embarrassed. I was like, maybe I did something wrong? I didn’t have a business plan, and I never mapped out, “Here’s my 3- or 5-year, 10-year goal.”
When I started 360, I had just left a record label, and the owners were married and they got a divorce. It was like you had to take sides, and the label crumbled. I jumped ship with the female side of the business because she was my day-to-day, and she started another company and I worked there for a little bit. In the midst of that, she ended up taking another job. There were four of us that had gone with her. I started to reach out and do résumés and call people and all these things, and it just never went anywhere.
I had interned with a company called Concert Southern that is now the Live Nation Atlanta office back in the day, and I was there when they started Music Midtown. I was an intern on Music Midtown the first year, and then they called and were like, “Why don’t you put in a proposal? We need a PR person, and you know this event.” I was like, “What?” [laughs] I put like a 27-page proposal together. I’d never done one before. I put it in. This was Year 3 of the festival. I’d been an intern on the first one, volunteered on the second one on the PR communications side, and then put in a proposal for Year 3.
It ended up becoming my first client, but I didn’t know it at the time. It was more, “Sure, I’ll do this. This is a 6-month gig. This will pay me some money.” I had to move back in with my parents right after college for a little while during this time because I didn’t have a job. It was kind of like, “Okay, let’s do this.” Then I started to get other business. Then it was time for Music Midtown again.
So, 3 years into it, I was like, maybe I really need to get a business license and do some things rather than this freelance stuff. I ended up getting my first employee and built it from there.
Sitting here now and thinking about it being 25 years later, there’s so many things that happened over time – the recession and things that we got hit with – and to still be here is mind-blowing to me on a lot of levels. I didn’t have a business degree, and I got a ‘D’ in PR in college. It was not what I wanted to do. [laughs] It’s like, you put your mind to something and you can do anything.
Sometimes when people ask me about a business plan, I say, had I done that, I probably would have failed because I would have been one of those that had to stick to the business plan. Over the 25 years, we’ve morphed and we’ve opened the door to other types of clients. Like I mentioned earlier with commercial real estate, I would have never, ever opened the door to that. But it rolled in in a very interesting way, and it was like, “Okay, let’s go down this road.” That’s I think kept us going.
Honestly, even in this pandemic, probably 80% of our clients have put us on hold because a lot were restaurants and entertainment and events. Our hotel, real estate, design clients are all still booming, so that’s been interesting. Had we not had that, we would probably be in a little bit of a different spot right now. But our restaurants are coming back and things are changing.
I’ve learned a lot over the last 25 years. But no, I would’ve never guessed that we’d be here. Ever.
ROB: You mentioned learning some things over the course of the business. What are some things you’ve learned along the way that you might do differently if you were starting anew?
TARA: It’s interesting. I was asked that question one other time, a couple years ago, and I had a very different answer. I think for me, there’s not a lot that I would do differently. I probably would learn to go with my gut, my intuition. I wish I had learned to do that sooner. I’ve always had a strong gut reaction and intuition, but sometimes it’s like, “That doesn’t make sense right now. Why are you thinking that?” I didn’t fully always embrace it. So I would probably do that sooner.
I also would not let people – you bend for clients that might be struggling or things that are happening, and I have bent probably one too many times for people who owed me money. I let it get a little too far down the road, and then it becomes harder to collect. I’ve learned that a lot more in the last 4 years of business. You get to a place where you’re doing well, and it’s like, “Oh, we can let someone slide for a little bit while they’re struggling,” and then it just ends up catching up. We got dinged a little too much the last couple of years. So, I probably wouldn’t let the debt get too big. I’ve learned a lesson there.
I also probably – there were two times in my entire career that I took clients for money, because it was big, but my gut said “these aren’t right for you or the firm.” Again, just listening to my gut. I would do that much sooner.
But I think also, in what would you not do/what would you do, as entrepreneurs, when you have no fear in the beginning because you don’t know what you don’t know and then you go through an experience and you’re like, “Ugh, been there, done that. I’m not doing that again” – I think it’s important as an entrepreneur to really be open and let things flow in and assess them, and not be closed off to things.
It really, truly is how I’ve grown 360. Putting out there, “Hey, I’m interested in more events or festivals” or whatever it is, always, doors open. Being afraid is fine, but you can take a pivot, you can take a next step, and it does work out. I think you just have to control your fear and be excited about it. I think that’s important.
ROB: That’s all very practical, and I appreciate that. I also had some wounds on the not collecting money quick enough train. It’s never, ever fun, because you realize quickly that when someone is going out of business, there’s just really not going to be money for you, for the most part.
TARA: [laughs] That is a lesson to learn.
ROB: You think about “Oh, bankruptcy, you split it up” – no, no. There’s just no money. Good luck. [laughs]
TARA: Yeah. Also, being diligent. I will say this: I have a former client that has owed me money since 2017, and I got a check last week. In a pandemic, I’m getting paid. I’m like, okay, this is the universe looking out for me. But it was being diligent and not just letting it go. I wouldn’t have done that before. I just would’ve been like, “It’s just a write-off. Let’s move on.” But sometimes good things happen.
ROB: Yeah, don’t write it off until you’ve asked a few times, at least, right?
TARA: Right. [laughs] Totally.
ROB: Excellent. Tara, when people want to find you and find 360, where should they look for you?
TARA: We have a website, 360media.net. We are also on Instagram under the same thing, 360 Media, Inc (@360mediainc).
We also are the publishers – I didn’t even mention this – of the Atlanta 100. The Atlanta 100 is a weekly newsletter that we do, and there’s a website, theatlanta100.com. It’s a weekly newsletter that goes out every Thursday or Friday with 12 stories about Atlanta in 100 words. We’ve been the publishers of that for the last 2 years. There’s a lot of not only stuff about Atlanta, but also our clients as well.
ROB: Excellent. Sounds solidly played. We’ll get all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on, Tara. It’s been a pleasure. Again, maybe someday we can do an event in person.
TARA: I know, I would love that. It was good to hear that you’re here. Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun.
ROB: Thank you. Bye bye.
TARA: Bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
In 2007, after nearly a decade of experience in numbers-focused direct-response marketing, Matt Weber used a business broker to buy a small jack-of-all trades agency that provided sales training, traditional media marketing, and a small bit of web development. Over time, that agency became ROAR! Internet Marketing, where Matt is now President. The agency’s forte today? Measurable actions.
In this interview, Matt explains what a buyer can expect from a business broker, how to select one, broker limitations, and a broker’s role in facilitating business acquisitions. He warns that it will be challenging to evaluate transactional opportunities in the next few months. But, he also expects to see a lot of merger and acquisition activity as companies adjust to the COVID-impacted business environment. Matt’s general tips? Agencies will need to be more aware of costs now, “throttle back” on anticipatory hiring, , and eliminate “tool bloat” (buying multiple tools with the same functionality).
Matt is no stranger to change. In 2007, websites were little more than glorified brochures. Matt shed virtually everything of the original business, rebranded it, and focused heavily on digital marketing conversions and direct response. Early on, 85-90% of the agency’s revenues came from web development.
Today, 80% of his agency’s revenues come from recurring digital marketing services, primarily for three verticals: elective medical (almost recession-proof), recurring-business home services (need-based), and manufacturing (which has a completely different cycle than consumer-based marketing). Matt says, when you focus your efforts on a limited number of verticals, you “leverage your success more effectively,” and follows that with the comment: “Diluted focus yields diluted results.”
Matt has created a free tool, Smylelytics.com, which he compares to a car’s “check engine” light. (It won’t tell you what is wrong, but it will tell you when to take a look.) Twice a month, Smylelytics evaluates a company’s Google Analytics, translates the information into memorable, themed photographs, and emails the company with the (good/neutral/bad) “news.”
Matt serves as a national trainer for the Grow with Google program, where he presents small- to medium-sized businesses with a one-day class that covers Google My Business, Google Analytics, and Google Data Studio tools. He also speaks at conferences, frequently on the topic of, “5 Things Your Website Is Trying to Tell You but You’re Afraid to Ask.” Here, he provides a brief overview of those 5 things:
- Does your website, as a salesperson, feel confident in selling your business? Is it effective in turning leads into sales?
- Where should you focus your limited time and budget?What do the analytics show you about which efforts are paying off and which are not?
- Is your landing page making a good first impression? What does your landing report say about what your first-time visitors do on their first visit?
- Who likes you best? Focus your efforts on communicating with those who like you the most.
- Are certain pages repelling your customers? Stop serving the bad pages.
Mayt is available on his agency’s website at: RoarontheWeb.com or on Twitter @BestWebDesignFL.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Matt Weber, President at ROAR! Internet Marketing based in Altamonte Springs, Florida just outside of Orlando. Welcome to the podcast, Matt.
MATT: Thank you. Great to be here. Been looking forward to this for some time.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. I’ve been looking forward to this as well, especially with some of the interesting nuances of your own history and background. Why don’t you kick us off, though, by telling us about ROAR! Internet Marketing and what the company specializes in?
MATT: Our real specialty is conversions. We’ve been around since 2007, and back then we started lead tracking, lead recording, and a focus on measurable results. That came from my background in direct marketing. I did direct mail. I did nearly a decade of direct response marketing where if you couldn’t measure it, you didn’t do it. Back in 2007, that’s not what websites were. In 2007, websites were kind of glorified brochures, and nobody was really talking about conversions and goals and tracking things.
That was our entrée into the marketplace, and we were really one of the pioneers in that area. We’ve continued to evolve that – to the point, though, where we’ve gotten a little bit less into web design and more into digital marketing. When we started the agency, 85-90% of our revenue was web development, and now 80% of our revenue is recurring digital marketing services. So our forte is measurable actions.
ROB: Who were some of the first sorts of clients that were really open to thinking about their website as less of a brochure and more of a destination and opportunity to actually get action? I think some people were willing to spend more money on expensive brochures for a while, but who started turning that corner to thinking more progressively about their websites?
MATT: Elective medical. Cosmetic surgeons, LASIK, cosmetic dermatologists. They came into 2007 with a fairly refined understanding of how much a new patient is worth, and they had some sensitivity to cost per lead. So that’s where we get our start, and that was the segment that was most receptive to our messaging, followed by home services. They were also receptive to that because they were prolific direct mailers. So, they did receive that message well, and we’re still in those two verticals today.
ROB: That makes sense. Certainly, a lot of elective medical can potentially be fairly large tickets, fairly decent margins, and probably also so on the home services side. Was it larger project stuff, or were you also finding things even down to emergency plumbers?
MATT: More things that had a recurring value – your pest control company where it was an average lifetime value rather than a transaction value. They got it pretty quickly. Let’s say you engage with a pest control company; you’re going to typically stay with them for 2+ years at $70 a month or $80 a month. Those companies understand lifetime value as opposed to transaction value, so this worked well for them.
ROB: That’s a great line of thinking, especially to find your way into some of those good long-term customer lifetime value – not so much restaurants and that sort of thing.
You started in 2007. You started at perhaps an inopportune time, much as anyone who started a business last year may feel right now amidst this coronavirus crisis/shift/recession, whatever we wish to call it. How did those next couple of years going through that financial crisis with the business change your thinking, and how is it shaping how you think about the virus era and post-virus era that we are in and heading into?
MATT: I want to answer the second part of that question first because we have always run our business imagining that we were always in the worst of times – because we were, in 2007-2008 and early 2009. We were in times where we were watching this deposit so that we could make this payment. We were running checks to the bank and then saying, “Okay, now we can make this payment.” Everything was almost on a minute by minute basis.
We never forgot that. I think it’s a lot like people listening who might have grandparents or great-grandparents from the Depression era and how that affected their spending all the way up until their late life. That happened to us and a lot of businesses, so we always managed the company as if times weren’t great. That’s helped now. We’re in a stronger financial position, we’re a financially strong company, and a lot of that is the attitudes that 2007 and 2008 brought with us.
ROB: How much of that comes naturally for you? I think any entrepreneur, and especially in the marketing and agency world, one of the first questions you’re asked when you meet anybody is “How many people do you have?” It’s this tempting ego number to hire a little bit ahead of need. Probably throttling back on that along the way, was that a natural thing for you? Or was it an acquired discipline?
MATT: It’s an acquired discipline. You brought up a great one: labor. I think a lot of agencies do hire before the need.
Another one is tools. I run into a lot of agency owners that have six or seven or eight different tools that duplicate functionality. These tools reshape themselves, they come out with something new, so the agency buys a subscription to this one without canceling the subscription to that one, and all of a sudden they’ve got what I call “tool bloat.” They’ve got subscriptions to a bunch of different things they didn’t even know they were subscribing to.
That happens as well. Being mindful of that I think is a result of the 2007, 2008, and 2009 experience, where we track everything we spend on a recurring basis, what we’ve committed to, and we’re very cautious about our labor expenses.
ROB: How do you manage those labor expenses when you do start to get close to the margin? I think we’ve all had that experience where we have a little bit more work than we can do or maybe a lot more work than we have capacity to do. How do you think through some of those inflection points?
MATT: We’ve got quite a few spreadsheets and calculations that we do behind the scenes, and there’s a premise behind it, and that is: we don’t want to be that agency that hires up, loses an account, and lays off. We mathematically figure out not only what the point is when we need to hire somebody, but what’s above that so that if we lost anything, we don’t want to lay off.
I’m happy to say that since 2007, we have never laid off a single employee because we’ve lost an account. We’ve eliminated a position because the scope of work changed, but we’ve never eliminated a position because we’ve lost a client.
Now, when we go to hire people, yes, people are looking for money, absolutely. But at some level, they’re looking for stability. A little bit lesser so today than maybe 6 years ago, but we get to tell those people, “This is our philosophy. We don’t want to hire up and lay down. That’s not who we are. We want to build a team, a coherent team, and we want to build for retention.”
We’ve been very fortunate in that. We’ve got folks that have been with us for 10 years, 8 years, 7 years, and it’s because of that philosophy. They know underneath it all, we’re trying to build something progressively stable.
ROB: That’s insightful. One thing that goes along with that dynamic you discuss of losing an account and laying people off is also revenue concentration. Some agencies can be anywhere between let’s say 30% and 70% all-in with one client. How do you think about revenue concentration? Is it something you try and manage, or is it something you just deal with and manage around?
MATT: We definitely try to manage to it. In fact, we not only manage revenue concentration within a client, but we try to manage revenue concentration within a vertical. Our three verticals are elective medical, home services, and manufacturing. Those were chosen because elective medical is almost recession-proof. In fact, a couple of our cosmetic surgeon clients had some of their best years in 2007 and 2008, surprisingly. Home services are need-based, so it’s hard for a consumer to give up let’s say their pest control company, as an example. Then manufacturing has a completely different cycle than some of the consumer-based marketing that we do.
So, we not only look at revenue concentration per client, we look at it per vertical. We don’t want to be heavily invested into any one of those three verticals.
ROB: Really interesting, and makes a ton of sense. Matt, how did you get into this business in the first place? What led you to move from whatever you were doing before to starting ROAR?
MATT: I was working for the broadcast industry. That’s where I grew up. I spent 15+ years in the broadcast industry. Then I worked for an exciting and fast-paced direct response marketing company, and I was in a job that was very challenging. A lot of travel, a lot of 65+-hour weeks. My wife at the time also was in a very challenging position, and our daughter was about two years from graduating high school.
We looked around and said, “What does life look like after our daughter leaves the house?” We came to the conclusion that if you are going to kill yourself for somebody, why not kill yourself for yourself? So, we went on this process of buying a business.
Interestingly enough, we ran into a business that at the time – and this is early 2007 – was a high-end luxury home theater business. I was going through the financials and going through the business, and it was owned by a gentleman who was an extremely smart engineer, and he had a great business from a technology standpoint, from an execution standpoint – but he was a horrible marketer. I thought, “Ah, this is for me because that’s my strength. I’m a great marketer.”
I was just about to put pen on a contract to buy that business, and our business broker called and said, “Hey, there’s another thing out there. Why don’t you take a look at it? It’s an advertising business.” Of course, business brokers call everything an advertising business. So we went and looked at it, and it was a guy who had started this small shop that did a little bit of everything – it did sales training, did traditional media, and it did, back in 2007, a little bit of web development.
We looked at 2007 and we said the future is digital, the future is web, the future is not traditional, and the future certainly wasn’t sales training to us. So, we bought that company in early 2007 and began to morph it. We got rid of its traditional market offerings, got rid of the sales training, rebranded it, and got heavily invested into conversions and the direct response portion of digital marketing. And that’s how we got into it.
ROB: I think a lot of people may not be familiar with working with a business broker. Is that something you had done before? Is that something you would do again? Maybe in this season there’s other businesses that would be worth acquiring?
MATT: I think so. You’re right, I think we’re about to enter an interesting time for merger activity and acquisition activity.
I do think a business broker is a time saver. It doesn’t give you a pass on doing your own homework because business brokers can never be an expert in your line of work. In the acquisition opportunities that we’ve evaluated since then, that is very apparent. They don’t know the metrics to ask and they don’t know how to peel back the onions of the financials to look for what really is a healthy agency.
But they do save time. In fact, a lot of agencies that might be for sale – how do you find out about them? It’s not like you can drive by and they’re going to put a “for sale” sign on the outside of the building. The only way you might be able to find out about them is if they’re represented by a business broker. So, I do think if you’re looking to acquire something in the coming months and years, definitely find a business broker that you can trust and build a rapport with.
I think it’s a little bit like buying and selling a home. You have to have a rapport with your real estate agent, and that real estate agent needs to have some level of expertise. You wouldn’t engage with a real estate agent who doesn’t really know the neighborhood that you’re buying in, and you might not do the same thing with the business broker. Don’t engage somebody who doesn’t have at least some high level awareness of the type of business that you’re looking at.
But they are not going to be the expert, and you’re going to need to bring a fair amount of analytical power to the evaluation of any potential transaction.
ROB: That’s a very timely insight, I think. For someone who hasn’t worked with a business broker before, I think a lot of times when you generally talk about acquiring or selling an agency, quite often they’re revenue and retention financed.
How does that dynamic work with a business broker? Is it similar, where there’s an earn-out and payback period? Or is it a little bit more of a buyout and transaction since there is a middleman in there who isn’t involved at all in retaining clients the way you might be doing if you were acquiring an agency more directly?
MATT: Yeah, brokers aren’t really keen on the whole earn-out scenario. [laughs] But they’re going to attach a value to the transaction regardless of how that transaction is funded, ultimately. So, the broker is going to seek its commission based on what that topline value is, and it’s going to be paid at the beginning portion of that transaction. If the transaction takes years to complete, the broker will get his money upfront.
ROB: So, the rest of the transaction, are you then able to still revenue finance it and set those terms directly with the owner?
MATT: Yeah, and that’s part of the negotiation. I think we’re going to see changes in that upcoming. I think that we’re going to see some vulnerabilities for shops that are heavily invested in these segments that we just talked about. If you’re running a digital agency and 80% of your revenue is coming from restaurants right now, I sympathize with you. You’re in a tough spot. If 80% of your revenue is coming from travel and tourism, I empathize with you. You’re in a tough spot.
So, what is that owner going to do? Maybe that’s an agency where that owner says, “You know what? Maybe it’s time for me to look at other things.” You have to then bring in the power of where that revenue came from, what it could be, and could you potentially help diversify that revenue? It’s going to be a challenging time in the next few months to evaluate transactional opportunities.
ROB: Going back to the start of the business for you – you talked about how you’ve navigated a previous financial crisis, but I think another thing you’ve navigated is in 2007, as you mentioned, websites were essentially glorified brochures, and social media was in an infancy if at all. LinkedIn I think was around, and Facebook I think was around for college kids.
As additional marketing channels have come online and become viable, how have you navigated the process of when this is relevant to someone in manufacturing, when it’s relevant to someone in elective medical, or when it’s time to sit on it and tell them to take a back burner and maybe it’s not time to put their business on TikTok?
MATT: Great question, and this is where analytics comes in. This is why it’s such an exciting time to be a small or medium sized business owner. If you think about where it was to be a business owner in the early 2000s – and way before that – the data was in the hands of agencies, and the data was in the hands of media outlets. You really couldn’t answer that question that you just asked with clarity.
But now the data is in the business owner’s hands. The paradigm has changed. It’s not a matter of speculating whether TikTok is of value or whether Facebook is of value. It’s a matter of making sure you have the measurements setup in place and answering that question objectively.
We have this conversation a lot. You’ve got a lot of companies that are way too heavily invested into social media because they thought it was cool, because it was the thing to do and everybody was writing a blog article on how you have to use Facebook 5 years ago. But then when you got into the numbers and you broke down the facts, a lot of folks weren’t getting the ROI off of that investment they made into social media, and they were overly prioritizing it.
So, the answer to your question is you’ve got to have the analytics and you’ve got to get the data set up, which has grown so much since 2007. Now everybody has the key to unlock the answer to that question with clarity.
ROB: Very, very interesting. It makes sense, too. Data-driven decisions help here, especially when you have these transaction/conversion focused clients who know what a lead is. It’s always easier to have an objective discussion around that.
Now, if you rewind and if you were going to do this whole ROAR! Internet Marketing thing over again from scratch, what are some of the things you would consider doing differently if you were starting over?
MATT: The biggest thing I would do differently is we were way too late to get into the game of specializing in the three verticals that we’ve chosen now. We at one time were proud of the fact that our portfolio contained everything from A to Z, and we would look at the world and go, “The world’s our oyster! Everybody’s a great prospect!” Ultimately that turned out to frustrate our salespeople. It sounded good, but it really wasn’t a smart thing to do.
When you focus your efforts on a limited number of verticals, all of a sudden you prospect better, and the biggest thing that you do differently is leverage your success more effectively. When you look at any particular business that knocks on your door as a prospect, you typically may not have a great story to tell them of what you’ve done in the past. When you narrow your focus and somebody knocks on your door in one of those verticals, you’re very confident that you have a success story to share with them, and that becomes compelling.
So that’s absolutely the one thing that I would do differently faster. I would focus faster.
ROB: There’s so many interesting levels of discipline in here, because I think some people get into the entrepreneurial world and they think about the excitement, they think about the risk-taking, and I think they think about that correlating highly with running a successful business.
It sounds to me, if we peel back the DNA here a little bit, it sounds like you have built in habits that lead to running a healthy and successful business that is good for your team, that gives margin to invest in them, and candidly – at least, a lot of people I know who have this sort of habit – it’s actually better for their personal bottom line than having a bunch of employees and an infinite number of lines of business. How have you thought about the difference between a healthy business and the ego around it?
MATT: I think running a business sometimes is kind of like the Olympics. For most folks, you have to specialize in a particular event and do well in it, but there are those rare individuals that can participate in the decathlon and be good at 10 events.
I found out that I’m not one of those people. I need to focus on a particular specialty. So that’s what we’ve tried to do. We’ve tried to focus on being a fantastic digital agency that produces results and tried to attract employees that share that singular vision. We’re not thinking about this exciting app that we could do next week, and then we’ve got this idea for this other app that we could build the month after that. Not that we haven’t tried to expand beyond our range; we have. But it’s been cautious and it’s been measured.
I had a former boss tell me one time, and it sticks with me for a long time, that diluted focus yields diluted results, and that is something that I continue to live by. I’m very conscious of where our mental time and attention goes. If our mental time and attention gets diluted, we see it. We see it show up in the numbers that we track. Sometimes it’s my role as the president to bring us back and make sure that we’re focusing.
ROB: Matt, outside of ROAR, you have a couple of other interesting things that you shared, and probably some other interesting new hobbies amidst this pandemic. Among some of the professional things that you do, interestingly, when people are traveling, you go on the road and speak with Google, actually. What do you share about, and how did that come to pass in the first place?
MATT: Yes, I’m a national trainer for the Grow with Google program. About 10 years ago, a call came into the office and our office manager answered it and she said, “Hey Matt, Google is on the phone for you.” I said, “Sure they are.” There’s all these people masquerading as Google. But I pick up the phone, and indeed, it’s Google.
On our website at the time, we had some videos that were called “60 Seconds to a Better Business Website.” We did this series about helping small and medium sized business owners get better results from their website, and they somehow found it. They saw I’m in the video, and they said, “Hey, we’d like you to come to Atlanta and audition for this program to be a trainer.”
At the time, the program was called Get Your Business Online (GYBO). So I went to Atlanta, I auditioned, and I got the job. For the next 3 years, I traveled all over the country for them, teaching Google content.
They disbanded the program, and then about 2 years ago they brought it back under a different name, GWG (Grow with Google). A little bit different content. So, they host these events all throughout the country. They’re typically a day long, and in that day of presentation where they invite small and medium sized businesses, they’ll do a class on Google My Business, they’ll do a class on Google Analytics, they’ll do a class on the Google Data Studio tools.
I’m one of the people – there’s 13 of us – that teaches those classes. All totaled, I’ve gone to 37 different states teaching for Google and teaching those classes, and it’s been a blast. It’s been a real blast.
ROB: That’s a really good credential. It’s a good tip of the hat to what you know and the business you’ve built. Specifically, you’ve presented on “5 Things Your Website Is Trying to Tell You,” I believe you said that you’re afraid to ask. What is our website trying to tell us that we’re scared of?
MATT: this is a program that I do outside the Google confines for a lot of conferences and trade events. It’s called “5 Things Your Website Is Trying to Tell You but You’re Afraid to Ask.” Real quickly, the five things:
Number one, it’s trying to tell you whether it feels confident selling your business. Ultimately, your website is just a salesperson. That’s all it is. Just like you would measure the effectiveness of a salesperson – how many leads did they turn into sales? – you really need to be doing the same thing for your website. It’s going to tell you whether it feels like it’s doing a good job at that.
The second thing it’s going to do is it’ll tell you how to prioritize your time if you let it. We’re all investing in these different marketing activities, and if you look at your analytics, they’re going to tell you which ones are paying off and which ones are not. We really need to focus. Unless you’ve got an unlimited budget and unlimited time, you’ve got to stop doing maybe your organic efforts because your paid is so much more profitable, or vice versa, stop doing your social because your organic is – but if you’ve got limited time and budget, you’ve got to focus. Your website will tell you how.
The third thing that your website will tell you if you let it is, are you making a good first impression? One thing that’s never changed is that you never get a second chance to make a good first impression, and that’s true everywhere, and it’s true with websites. If you look at your landing page report, it’ll tell you what first-time visitors due when they come to your website for the first time. It may not be making a great first impression, and that could be costing you money.
The fourth thing your website is trying to tell you is who likes you best. It’s 2020. We don’t market to everybody anymore. That’s ridiculous. Let’s shave that down and we’ll find that women are more receptive to our message than men, or 35 to 54s are more receptive to our message than 18 to 24s, or we’ll find out that people in the city are more receptive to our message than outside of the city. Whatever that pattern is – there’s always a pattern – somebody likes you best. Let’s spend our time and energy talking to them rather than trying to convince the whole world that they should buy our product or service.
The last thing that your website is trying to tell you is some of your food is not very good. It’s trying to tell you that some of your pages are just flat-out repelling people. If you imagine being a restaurant owner for a second, and every single time you put down a particular dish on a table – every time – people looked at the dish and they got up from the table and walked out of the restaurant – imagine that happened to you. Ultimately, what would you do pretty quickly? Stop serving the dish, right?
If you think about websites, you know what we’re all doing? We’re still serving the dish. Because we do have a page that you can look at the statistics and go, oh, people look at that page and go, “Ugh!” and they get up and leave. If you look at your exit page report, you’ll see what pages that’s happening, and you’ve got to cure that because if you don’t, then you’re just like that restaurant owner who’s continually serving that dish that’s forcing people to walk out the door.
So those are five things that your website is trying to tell you, but you’re afraid to ask.
ROB: I can definitely see why a lot of us would stick our head in the sand on that and try to do the thing we do every day rather than looking in the mirror and actually thinking about the data on our website and the page that everybody bounces from. It’s straightforward, but I think we all certainly need that reminder.
One other thing in your background I can’t pass up and I have to ask about is Smylelytics. That’s just a fun, catchy name, but what is Smylelytics that you have created?
MATT: I’ve met a lot of small and medium sized business owners, and I talk to them about data like you and I are talking about right now, and they nod their head politely – and yet even my own clients, who I try to make data a little bit more accessible and enticing to them, they’ve got busier things to do, frankly. A lot of my clients are owner/operators. They’re running the business, they own the business.
So, I thought, how do I get this treasure trove of data that can be fundamentally business-changing to them in a way that they want to look at it? What Smylelytics does is takes your Google Analytics data and translates it into memorable photographs. So you can go to Smylelytics and you can pick a photo set – maybe you like sailing; there’s a sailing set. Maybe you like dogs; there’s a dog set. Maybe you’re into cute babies; there’s a cute baby set.
You pick that, and then Smylelytics is going to send you an email twice a month, and it’s basically going to turn your analytics data into red, yellow, green. Super simple. If things are going well for your amount of visitors, then you’re going to get a happy baby face if you selected the baby. If things aren’t going well, then you’re going to get a sad baby.
You don’t have to think about it, you’re not worried about charts, you’re not worried about graphs, you’re not worried about formulas, you don’t have to dig your way through the weeds of Google Analytics. In a nanosecond, you can get the Smylelytics email, which comes out twice a month, and you can instantly know, “Hey, things are going well / things are going not so well.”
It’s kind of designed to be like the check engine light on the car. The check engine light doesn’t tell you anything. It just tells you that you should go talk to somebody. That’s what Smylelytics is designed to do: give you the confidence that everything’s going okay, fantastic. If it’s not, you know it, and whoever that trusted resource is in your life, then you ought to tell them, “Hey, we should look into this.” Maybe it’s nothing. Just like that check engine light, sometimes it’s something significant, sometimes it’s not. But you should pay attention to the check engine light, and that’s what Smylelytics does.
ROB: The way you describe it – we can’t tell because we’re on a podcast, but it does make me simple. Is that a paid tool? Is that a free tool?
MATT: It’s absolutely free.
ROB: Great. We’ll get that in the show notes as well. It’s Smylelytics.com, is that right?
MATT: Right.
ROB: Excellent. Matt, when people want to track you down and want to find out more about you and ROAR! Internet Marketing, where should they go to find you?
MATT: We are RoarontheWeb.com. That’s where you can find ROAR! Internet Marketing. And on Twitter, I am @BestWebDesignFL.
ROB: Legit. You can tell you started up in an SEO environment. That’s so important to this day, amongst all the other things you’ve learned along the way. Thank you so much for joining us, Matt. I think you’ve had a lot to share that’s really helpful, and we can all bring a smile to our faces and websites in this time.
MATT: Great. Enjoyed talking to you.
ROB: Thanks so much, Matt.
MATT: Bye bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
As a bestselling author and keynote speaker, Deb Gabor, CEO and Founder of Sol Marketing, has, herself, become a “brand.” She defines Sol Marketing as a brand-driven, strategy-led marketing firm in the business of creating irrational loyalty. Irrational loyalty means people are indelibly bonded to a brand.
When Deb talks about her agency, she does not list the provided services: she feels marketing services have become commoditized. Instead, she presents a passionate vision of what the future could be. She tells people she is on a million-brand mission – to impact a million brands in her career. She believes that the best brands in the world are truly unique – in why they do what they do. Her goal is to strengthen brands: making businesses more sustainable will up-level communities, and, ultimately, help people.
When the Corona virus hit, Deb’s speaking engagements for the next 6 months were cancelled. She is sheltering at home . . . but not sheltering in her mind. The question was: how was she going to generate income when she could no longer speak at face-to-face events? What could she do? How could she help her company? She mobilized her team and made her personal brand a “client” of the agency. “Figure out how this has impacted us,” she told her team, “and then what we need to do.”
Deb referenced an interview with James Stockdale in Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. Stockdale was held for 6 years in a Vietnamese POW camp. When asked how he managed to survive, Stockdale explained that he faced the brutal facts of his situation, but also kept up his hope and optimism. Prisoners who were over-optimistic, but refused to face the “brutal facts,” did not do as well.
Deb’s team identified around eight “brutal facts” about how Deb’s brand was impacted by Covid-19. Some issues were solvable, some were not.
The company pivoted and, got Deb back on track in a new direction – creating information products, building online courses, building sales funnels, and building webinar funnels. Deb identified the assets she needed her team to build, established a schedule, and set targeted monthly income goals for the information products, her speaking, and her book sales. Then, taking things a step further, the company prioritized a something new: authority marketing services for professionals, who, like her, were facing the same challenges. The assets her team built for Deb became a product that could help other speakers, authors, experts, coaches, and consultants.
Deb says she has never seen a better opportunity than now for “smart people with expertise that can elevate other people in their own businesses, in their lives – I’ve never seen a better opportunity for them to share generously that expertise with other people.” She challenges people to think about: “How can I be indispensable to people at this time? How can I share something that I know or that I can do in a way that helps another person?” In reaching out, Deb says “be helpful, be authentic, be true to your brand.” She now spends around 6 hours a day, every day, presenting public or private webinars, and consulting one-on-one with business leaders, marketers, creators, or people with personal brands who are interested in setting up their brands to thrive during these unusual times.
Deb can be reached through social media and on her website at: debgabor.com, where Deb is posting thought-provoking webinars that explore a post-Covid world. Deb’s books, Branding Is Sex: Get Your Customer Laid and Sell the Hell Out of Anything and Irrational Loyalty: Building a Brand That Thrives in Turbulent Times are available on Amazon.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Deb Gabor, CEO and Founder of Sol Marketing based in Austin, Texas. Deb is also a bestselling author and keynote speaker, and I think you’re going to enjoy this conversation. Welcome to the podcast, Deb.
DEB: Thank you. I’m really glad to be here.
ROB: It’s fantastic to have you here. Why don’t you tell us about Sol Marketing and about your own journey as well into authorship and speaking?
DEB: Right on. I tell people that I’m in the business of creating the condition of irrational loyalty, and when I say irrational loyalty, that’s that feeling that you’re so indelibly bonded to a brand that you’d feel like you were cheating on it if you were to choose an alternative. It’s kind of how I feel about my iPhone, and the weird feeling I get when my friends who have Android phones send me text messages and they show up in green bubbles. I’m so irrationally loyal to i-thingies that even if I would hold a competitor’s phone in my hand, I’d feel dirty.
So that’s the business that I’m in, and how I do that is by running a brand-driven, strategy-led marketing firm. We do all the marketing things, and the reason why people hire us is because they need a good kick in the ass. They’re growing rapidly, they have a lot at stake to get it right, they have no time to waste, and they need someone to lead them through the hard work of branding. Is that a good explanation?
ROB: That’s perfect. How did you come to this positioning? A lot of people talk about what they do, they talk about the nuts and bolts, the details of what they do, and I hear you coming at the conversation from the complete opposite direction. You’re coming from a vision of the possible future, a vision of where things are going. How did you arrive at that view that this is how it needs to be?
DEB: This is the work that I actually do with my clients, so a little bit of this is the process of eating my own dog food. I firmly believe that the best brands in the world are not just different; they’re truly singular and they’re unique, and that uniqueness comes from truly why they do what they do.
When people talk to me personally and say, “Hey, Deb, what are you obsessed with? What are you working on right now?”, I tell people, I’m on a million-brand mission. Through my career, I want to have impact on a million brands. The reason why that’s important is if I can help a brand be a better brand, it helps them create a more sustainable business. More sustainable businesses are great for up-leveling communities and truly helping people.
So, I’m really internally motivated, and I’m very, very driven. It’s an obsession and a compulsion for me, so I can’t really talk about it any other way.
The other thing is I work in Austin, Texas. There are 150 other people who do exactly what I do, including a direct competitor whose office is directly across the street from me, and when I’m at my office, at my desk, I look out this gigantic picture window and across the road I see the tombstone with her sign on it, and it drives me absolutely mad. Her services, her functional benefits, the stuff that she does as a company is exactly the same as the stuff that we do as a company, yet we don’t compete. We really don’t compete for the same clients because the reason that people hire us is vastly different than the reason that people hire her company.
So that’s one of the reasons why I don’t default to the comfortable way of talking about agency business in terms of “here’s what we do” because those services have become relatively commoditized. I want people to remember me for what I’m about, and I want people to really understand the specific singular thing they get from us that they can’t get from anyone else. That’s why I talk about it in terms of “here’s the mission I’m on and why I do what I do” and being in the business of irrational loyalty.
Also, if I told you “We’re a branding and strategy and marketing services firm,” you would be like, “Meh, everybody else is that too.”
ROB: Yeah, you definitely hear that a lot, and it’s a tremendous visual metaphor to have that nemesis across the street. I find it motivating for a lot of teams to know who the enemy is – not in a jealous way or a competitive way, but in helping you refine and define the mission.
You mentioned you’re based in Austin, Texas. We were originally supposed to meet up in person at South by Southwest. It’s April; South by Southwest is cancelled. It didn’t happen. We are sheltering at home. But you, as we were talking about before we started recording, are not sheltering, in your mind. How has your strategy shifted amidst this coronavirus outbreak, amidst this pandemic, amidst some companies pulling back and some accelerating forwards?
DEB: I think I shared with you before we got on the interview here that I’m in touch with a lot of business leaders through my personal and business networks, and they fall into two camps right now. There’s one – these are the folks that are shuttering everything, they have their thumbs in their mouths, they’re rocking back and forth, they’re lying on the doormat in front of the front door – they’ve given up. They’re throwing in the towel.
Then there are others who are really looking at this through a new lens and practicing the art of the pivot or figuring out, “How this is an opportunity for me to emerge with maybe new offerings, new products, new services and things like that that are going to position me for the long term?”
One of the things that I did that I think is going to be really helpful for your listeners is I went back and reread my copy of this great book by Jim Collins called Good to Great. The day that I decided to pick up Good to Great again, I opened up the book and it opened directly to a chapter where there was an interview with James Stockdale. Jim Stockdale was previously a vice presidential candidate, but he was also an admiral and a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. For 6 years, he was in a POW camp.
Collins interviewed him for his book and asked him, “How were you able to actually get through that experience relatively unscathed? How did you endure 6 years in a POW camp?” What Stockdale explained was that he was able to maintain hope and optimism in the face of the brutal facts of his reality. He also explained that the people who were in the POW camps who were overly optimistic and refused to face the brutal facts were the ones that didn’t fare very well.
That’s called the Stockdale paradox. I was reading about the Stockdale paradox probably right about the same time that South by Southwest was getting cancelled, and it was really empowering for me because I actually did an exercise with our leadership team where we went back and revisited our core values and our core purpose as an organization, and then we documented all the brutal facts.
The brutal facts of the current situation are, personally, I make most of my money as a speaker and an author and a workshop leader, and every single speaking engagement I had scheduled between South by Southwest and the end of July was cancelled, all over the course of about two days. That’s a brutal fact. Another brutal fact was I do mostly B2B work in our company, and we had already been seeing some supply chain issues with our clients, making it really difficult to do things like shoot videos of their products. That had started happening back in January, so that was a brutal fact.
Another brutal fact was everybody’s going to have to work from home, people are going to be less productive, we’re going to have connectivity issues. Another brutal fact was I looked at how much per day does it cost to operate my agency, and how much cash runway do I have? How many days of cash runway do I actually have in the bank?
And for each of these brutal facts – and there were about eight of them – there were some that I could do something about, and then there were some that I couldn’t do something about. But for each of those brutal facts, my leadership team and I acknowledged every one of them, and then we flipped immediately to “What is our response to this brutal fact?”
What I’m doing during this time, which gets back to your original question of like “you’re not sheltering in your mind,” one of the opportunities that surfaced from really examining these brutal facts was the notion that I’m at home in Austin, Texas for 6 months without anywhere to go. What can I do? How can I help the company?
Two things came of that. One of them is that we made a very strong pivot to offering authority marketing services to other speakers and authors and experts and coaches and consultants – people like me – to help them share their expertise without the need for face-to-face events. We had already created a business for me out of this – I’m a client of my own company – and we were offering it to other people. We turned this into a service.
I’ve had a number of conversations with other people who are in my same situation where we’re offering these kinds of services, which are like creating information products, building online courses, building sales funnels, building webinar funnels. That was one thing.
And then another opportunity that came from that, which is really where I’m not sheltering in my mind – I have never seen a better opportunity for smart people with expertise that can elevate other people in their own businesses in their lives, I’ve never seen a better opportunity for them to share generously that expertise with other people. I literally have been spending I would say probably 6 hours a day, every day, if I’m not doing a public webinar, I’m doing a private webinar. Or I’m having one-on-one consultations with business leaders or marketers or creators or people with personal brands who are interested in understanding how they can set their brands up to thrive during this time.
ROB: I love what you say about uplifting, because even though you could have a disposition towards making the most and really transforming business to thrive in this environment, we all I think still need a little bit of encouragement and uplift from other people for those days when maybe we’re not feeling quite as strong about it. We’re all going to have a down day here or there.
I’m very interested by what you said about authority marketing and focusing there. I think that’s a word that has been used and misused. I’ve seen it misused in such a reductive way as essentially buying a book for yourself.
DEB: Yep, exactly. Which actually, I think the people who wrote the book Authority Marketing, the purpose is they wrote a book called Authority Marketing to teach you how to buy a book to do authority marketing. I look at authority marketing in a much more comprehensive way.
ROB: And you’re providing that service to people who know the difference, too. The people that you’re going to work with are people who know how to get a book published, probably. They might change what they’re writing right now, but it’s not “Help me be famous.” They probably have a brand. They probably have some opportunity. They probably have some skills. But a lot of these folks probably don’t have the tools around them the way you do.
DEB: Right. I invested significantly over the past couple of years to actually build these things. I’ll tell you a quick story about where this all came from.
I wrote my first book, called Branding Is Sex: Get Your Customer Laid and Sell the Hell Out of Anything. Yes, I am the person who used both the words “sex” and “laid” in the title of a book. When I wrote that book, it really was part of this compulsion to share that information with as many people as I could. I give away our methodology, my expertise, 30 years of experience and track record in brand strategy – I give that away for the cost of a book.
But what I didn’t do was connect that back to how I wanted to grow in my own career, how I wanted that to serve my agency business, and how that was going to be the pathway to what my vision is for myself. I wasn’t very intentional about it.
After that book came out, fortunately for me, because of brand disasters at the hand of such great brands like United Airlines and Pepsi and Uber and Papa John’s, lots of other branding dumpster fires that happened, I became the world’s resident authority on brand disasters and botched corporate apologies. I became the person who was able to answer all the media’s questions about who’s handling it well, who’s not handling it, what brands should do, what brands can learn.
It was really during that time that the second book, Irrational Loyalty, was written, because that book basically wrote itself. I thought, I need to be smarter and more intentional and definitely more thoughtful and strategic about how I want these pieces of content that I’ve created to serve me in the long term.
That’s when it became apparent to me that I needed something other than just a book to express my authority, because a book is just one method. I do a lot of public speaking, but I also wanted to share my expertise in other ways so that people could consume it in more actionable methods for them. So I went out and attended a Mastermind of some of the best digital marketers in the world. This is one of those Masterminds you pay $30,000 a year to be a member and then $10,000 an event. Definitely the upper echelon.
I happened to be there because I was a speaker, but I got to spend an entire 3 days with people who had 9-figure sales funnels. I thought, all right, these people are selling information products and they’re selling a buttload of them. They’ve created a way to scale their personal brands or their business brands or whatever. I could do that too.
I went out and asked all those people, “Can I hire you to build this for me?” They were all like, “No, you can find other people. Go see this person, go see that person.” I started talking to people, and I was interviewing people, and there was no shortage of people who were willing to put me into a sales funnel to sell me a course on how to build a sales funnel. I was like, what the hell? This is ridiculous.
So, I mobilized my team, and my personal brand became a client of the agency. I was like, “You guys are going to figure this out. We’re going to build all of these assets. We are going to build all of the automated marketing platforms. We’re going to tie all of this stuff together, and we’re going to build a business for me. Here’s a metric, and by this time, in this many months, we’re going to be making this much per month revenue off of these information products. I’m also going to do this much in speaking, I’m going to do this much in book sales.” We built a business around it.
Over the last year, I had a number of clients coming to me saying, “I want to be you. How do I build that footprint?” I said, “Well, interestingly, we built it internally.” When the current coronavirus situation hit and all the other authors and speakers and experts and coaches and consultants, like me, were like, “Oh my gosh, I’m stuck in front of a computer in my dining room, working over Zoom; how do I impact many, many people?”, I was like, I’m good. I’ve got stuff.
But I also was able to work with the company, and we made a pivot. We made this quick pivot. I said, “We need to really prioritize these authority marketing services.” So that’s the story of a pivot. I hope that’s helpful to your audience.
ROB: I think it’s absolutely impressive and resilient, and something to learn from. I think a lot of people strike out to write a book as a hunt for where their expertise is. It seems to me that in particular, the services you’re providing require that somebody have an expertise that goes beyond just a book.
But if someone’s feeling like they really need to have this expertise and this array of services around it, but they’re not quite sure where to go, where to focus on their expertise, how do you think about zoning in something that a person can offer that nobody else can offer, but they can’t put their finger on it quite yet?
DEB: That’s an interesting question. That’s a question that I’ve been answering for a lot of people over the past couple of weeks – people like me who are sitting around with a little bit of time to really navel-gaze and pontificate for themselves about where they’re going.
My recommendation for that is to just ask the question of “How can I be indispensable to someone at this present time?” That’s the first question, honestly. I always start everything from a reexamination of my own personal core values and my own core purpose and my mission and my big hairy audacious goal and where I’m going in life. I’m lucky that I have that as a compass.
If people are thinking about this and they’re like, “What expertise can I share?”, the first place to start is really with, why do you do what you do? Or why are you? It’s a very existential question. Simon Sinek’s stuff helps with that a lot, too. I recommend that people do some examination of that.
But then ask the question, “How can I be indispensable to people at this time? How can I share something that I know or that I can do in a way that helps another person?” If you’re looking at creating content and putting content out to the world to share your expertise with only the goal of making money, you will never be able to make money. If you are putting content out in the world because you truly have a message that you need to share with other people because it’s going to elevate them in a particular way, it is your job to figure out specifically what you do.
I always tell people, just ask the basic – I have these three brand questions. The questions are, “What does it say about a person that they use my brand? What does it say about them?” The second question is, “What is the one thing they get from me that they can’t get from anyone else?” And “How can I make my customer or my reader, my listener, my viewer, how can I make my person a hero in his or her own story?”
I think that people will find a lot of answers there. In my own experience with not being super intentional about how I’m going to use a book – I’m very intentional now because I have a book and I have another book and I have a speaking business and I have classes, and we’re starting up some online courses, I now have a webinar series, all that kind of stuff – the whole purpose of that is to create a community, and create a community that I can engage with and share my expertise with.
My goal in my approach of sharing expertise first and not asking for anything in return, my hope is that it’s going to elevate a lot of people and make them irrationally loyal to me. Then, when people are in a situation where they’re back to buying stuff, they’re going to want to buy that stuff from me, or they’re going to want to buy that stuff from my company.
ROB: Right. I think what you’re saying there – it’s subtle, but this is not a time, for the most part – unless you’re selling surgical masks, this is not a time to be selling for a lot of people, but it is a time to be investing deeply and helping, and sometimes helping – I think you’ve done some work with startups; a common thing in startup land is a lot of times you’ll ask for help, but you get money. If you ask for money, you’ll get help.
DEB: [laughs] That’s true. I have a business where I work with early stage companies, helping them tell their story effectively through their investor pitch. That’s something that we always say. You have to treat fundraising like a branding exercise, but the ideal customer that you’re going after is an investor, and you have to figure out how you’re going to elevate that investor’s life. How are you going to give them bragging rights from offering you that kind of help that you’re looking for?
But you’re 100% right. Now is a time to be looking at everything through this lens of helping versus selling. I’ve been telling everybody this. You really, really have to ask that question of “How can I be indispensable at this time?” There’s lots of businesses that we can’t use right now. There are lots of things that feel to us that they are maybe luxuries that we shouldn’t indulge in right now.
As a brand, any kind of brand, you can still help during this time. It’s not just like the parent company of Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior retooling their factories to go from manufacturing perfumes to making hand sanitizer, or Tito’s Vodka here in Austin doing the same. It’s also, how can you help people deal with the current situation at hand in a helpful way?
Really good example – I’m a skier, and I was super bummed that my season got cut short this year. One of the places that I buy gear from sent me the most delightful email. It acknowledged the current situation, showed real regard for humanity, and it said, “Hey, we’re also bummed out that the season got cut short. If you’re feeling bad, here’s a link to a playlist of your favorite ski porn” – which is a playlist of really fun ski movies on YouTube. And further down in the email, there was a nice feature that you could link to on their website about ski touring – which, for people who are not skiers, that’s the process of climbing uphill and skiing down. You don’t ride a chairlift; you climb uphill and you ski down.
The ski areas are closed, but there’s plenty of places to go into the back country. A lot of people need tips and tricks for doing that and doing it in a way that’s appropriate for the current pandemic conditions, so how do you still stay safe and ski with a buddy without getting too close? Also, safety – it’s avalanche season, all that kind of stuff. Further down in the email, they merchandised, “Here’s the best of the 2021 gear that’s coming out. Ski season 2020 is over; however, it’s never too early to dream.” So it was a light message, and it was not sales-y at all.
Then what I loved, at the very bottom of this email, I truly was delighted to see there were the signatures of everybody who works in the store. It was very personal. It was very authentic. It was really sincere. It was totally on brand. It was helpful. They’re not selling ski gear right now. People are not going online and buying a $1900 pair of skis and a $700 pair of boots right now. They’re just not. However, this brand is going to stay connected not just in my mind, but in my heart. The next time I do need something, I’m going to go to them.
Looking at everything from this lens of helping versus selling is what’s going to help brands connect in the long term and remain relevant and thrive when this is over – which this will be over. Come hell or high water, it will be over, and people will be back, but nothing will be the same as it was before.
ROB: It ties back nicely – it sounds like they even may have asked some of those questions that you asked, of what are the things they can’t change. The thing they accepted that they can’t change is that people cannot go skiing, and asking people to buy a pair of skis to sit in their closet for next year is not maybe a very good message.
I’ve seen, I’m sure you’ve seen, I’m sure everybody has seen an unbelievable number of emails from companies about their response to COVID-19, and half of them say, “We’re just going to keep being the business that we already are.” That’s maybe an innocuous brand fail. But you, being someone who keeps track of some bigger mistakes, what are some bigger mistakes people have made in messaging around this crisis that we can learn from? Not to trash them just to trash them, but to trash them by way of example.
DEB: I have something that would be really fun right now, which is this morning, I wrote something that is the perfect COVID-19 email that comes from that brand – I call it the perfect “we’re all in this together” email. How many “we’re all in this together” emails have you received from brands that you didn’t even know you were on their email list?
ROB: Oh, uncountable.
DEB: Yeah. Let me read you the message. It’s entitled, “An important message from our CEO”:
“Dear Deb,
“You don’t ever remember giving us your email, nor do you know how we got a hold of it. You once briefly thought about us 7 years ago; however, we’re here for you during these (unprecedented, uncertain, challenging, unsettling, unusual, rapidly evolving) times (pick one). We’re keeping everybody safe and monitoring the situation. If you need a new wine rack/sofa table/machete/floor lamp/outdoor fireplace/Aston Martin, we’re in this together.
“Also, here’s a reminder that we’re also here for our employees, whom you didn’t even realize existed until just now. Our thoughts and prayers go out to everybody affected by the current health crisis. Just know that (brand that you didn’t even know had your email address) is by your side during these tough times.
“We’re in this together, and I’m on Richard Branson’s yacht –
“A Brand You Don’t Really Know.”
That’s the big crime right now. During the first week – this was just post-March 11th – everybody was rushing to send out their COVID-19 email. All of them were “a letter from our CEO,” and they were all entitled “We’re in this together.” That’s my parody of that. Worst is automated marketing. Turn off your freaking automations, people.
The day that the WHO announced that we had a global pandemic – and it was also the same day, I believe, that we closed off our borders to people arriving by airplane from most countries in Europe – I got an email from Air Canada asking me, “Hey, don’t forget to opt in to get insider information and savings on your next flight!”
I also received an email from another brand, like a big box retailer, from whom I recently purchased a box of legal pads – you know, those yellow lined pads that we write on at work – and they wanted me to give them a review. I was like, “Oh hey, let me stop everything and give you a review.”
Then probably the worst offender that I saw during that time period was the email that I received from a clothing retailer. The headline on the email was “Staycay is better than vacay,” and they were advertising a 40% off friends and family sale. This is anything but a staycation, people. We are sheltering in place. This is for the safety of all humanity at this point. Don’t make light of the situation.
On the flipside, like the example that I gave you of the ski gear retailer that sent me that great message, I’ve also seen incredible efforts from brands, big and small, to be helpful.
I have a really good friend who owns a chain of ecofriendly dry cleaners, and if you think about it, dry cleaners are not doing really well during this time, are they? It’s considered an essential service, but since we’re working from home – I don’t know about you, I don’t know what you’re wearing, but I’m doing what I call the “business mullet,” where I’m wearing business gear on top and I’ve got workout pants on the bottom. It’s business on top, party on the bottom. We’re just not wearing dry clean-only clothes.
He called me in a little bit of a panic and he was like, “I think my business is going to completely tank.” I said, “Let’s think about this for a minute.” He’s an ecofriendly dry cleaner. He also has a network of vans and drivers – it’s a pickup and delivery service. They come to your house, they get your stuff. I said, “Everybody’s working from home in their day pajamas, and they make the transition to the night pajamas later, so they’re not doing dry cleaning of their clothes.”
However, I work in my dining room and I have a set of really hideous, very dirty drapes. I said, “Do you guys dry clean drapes?” He was like, “Yes, I do.” I said, “You know what? It sounds like a time for you to educate people on the household items in your home that, while you’re working from home and looking at them for 24 hours a day, you might think about getting cleaned, to have a cleaner, healthier home.”
I said, “How can you be the arbiter of helpful content? You’re an ecofriendly dry cleaner. How can you be the arbiter of content that is cool, that’s helpful content about how you can keep your home clean during this time that you’re sheltering in place with products that you have around the house that are also ecofriendly? How can you also provide helpful, useful content to people while they’re working from home? Nobody sees more business casual clothing than the dry cleaner. How can you, in a fun and uplifting and elevating way, create some content for your immediate community showing them the best and worst of Zoom fashion?” Just to bridge the gap with content.
This time is bringing out the best and the worst in people. Don’t send the email that’s the “We are in this together,” and God forbid, please don’t use any of those words that I used in my parody email. Make sure that you’re being authentic and sincere to your brand. What you do as a brand during this time is going to define you, more so than what you say. This is a time for people to take action. Thank you for listening to my TED talk.
ROB: Oh, it’s fantastic. To take action, to give, and to rethink. If a dry cleaner can rethink their business for this time, then so can any of us. I know, Deb, you’re certainly not the only one with the “business mullet.” You might’ve seen this – I saw Walmart said that their sales of shirts are up and their sales of pants are down.
DEB: Yes. [laughs] I love it. It’s amazing.
ROB: It’s pretty universal. Deb, when people want to get more from you, when they want to see what you’re doing – you mentioned all of this content you’re putting around your brand, all these different tools that you’re putting out into the world – where should people go to find those things?
DEB: People should go to debgabor.com. All the things are there, including the webinar series, which we’re adding new webinars every day. These are open and available to the public. Like I said, I’m bringing on a bunch of really, really interesting experts. Our focus really is just to help people. Nobody gets paid for this. I have experts in my network, and I’m helping them connect with people and share their expertise to help other people.
There’s ways to get in touch with me. You can send emails to me via the site. I’m on all the social media stuff as Deb Gabor. You can find me. I love to hear from people. If you hear this and you’re like, “Wow, what you said, I really like it” or “What you said, it’s complete B.S.,” I want to hear from you. I love to talk to people. I’m an extrovert, so this time of sheltering in place is really hard for me. So please, connect with me. Please, please love me.
ROB: [laughs] Fantastic. Yes, I am in that boat with you of severe cabin fever.
DEB: [laughs] Yep.
ROB: Thank you for coming on the podcast, Deb. You’ve given a lot today. It sounds like you have an absolute ton more to give. I hope people will seek you out, and hopefully next year we can actually connect in person in Austin, Texas for South by Southwest.
DEB: Yeah, I hope so. Thank you.
ROB: All right, thanks, Deb.
DEB: Take care. Bye bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Jeff Jordan is President and Executive Creative Director of Rescue: The Behavior Change Agency. Rescue offers a broad range of marketing services for government agencies (public health departments, state and federal agencies) and non-profits seeking to promote positive changes in public health related behaviors.
Jeff started his agency when, as a high school student, he volunteered for his local health department’s youth-targeted anti-tobacco program. He transitioned from volunteer to contractor, tweaked the anti-tobacco program to approach teens in an innovative way, and grew the agency through “a lot of referrals.” He opened his first office while he was in college and continued his focus on behavioral change for social good.
In this interview, Jeff tells us that marketing tactics that are used to sell products don’t necessarily work in changing “fundamental behavior.” His team has to be expert, not just in marketing, but also in behavior change theory, psychology, and sociology . . . and know how to appeal to different subsets within targeted cohort groups. Jeff says that it can take years for a consistent message to bring measurable change, and although there is nothing equivalent to “sales data” to gauge message impact in “real time,” he has found there are some measurable interim “markers” on the path to behavior change. Tracking and measuring specific behavior-related attitudes or beliefs or pieces of knowledge over time can predict subsequent behavior changes.
About 7 years ago, Rescue won a $150 million FDA youth tobacco prevention contract. These funds allowed the agency to increase in size from 50 to 150 employees in 3 years. Today, Rescue’s 175 employees work out of 6 offices around the country. They serve government agencies and nonprofits in 30 states. Rescue creates programs for these organizations, but also has a library of campaigns that can be licensed.
Over the years, Jeff has learned to say “no” to opportunities that are not right for his agency. Budgets that are too small can limit a campaign’s success . . . . and blame for poor results will invariably fall on the agency . . . not on the tight budget. The smaller a client is, the more they tend to demand. Jeff has observed that agencies end up over-servicing smaller accounts to keep them, tie up senior personnel in servicing these smaller clients, and underservice their larger accounts. Jeff warns that really small accounts can hold an agency down.
Jeff applauds the move away from condemning people who choose unhealthy behaviors and the increasingly broad awareness of underlying lifestyle situations that contribute to these behaviors. Jeff’s agency attracts employees who want to do something good in their careers. He describes the agency as “responsibly rebellious,” and explains that is manifested in the way the agency encourages clients to take risks in a responsible way.
Jeff can be reached on his company’s website at: Rescueagency.com. The agency runs what Jeff describes as a “pretty robust YouTube Channel” at: youtube.com/rescueagency.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Jeff Jordan. He’s the President and Executive Creative Director at Rescue: The Behavior Change Agency. Welcome to the podcast, Jeff.
JEFF: Thanks so much, Rob.
ROB: It’s excellent to have you here. Why don’t you kick us off by telling us – it’s right there in the title, a little bit – Rescue: The Behavior Change Agency. But tell us a little bit about Rescue and where you excel.
JEFF: We are a public health behavior change-focused agency. What that means is that we exclusively work for campaigns that strive to change health behaviors for social good. Almost all of our clients are public health departments, state and federal agencies.
When we say behavior change, we refer to actually changing a fundamental behavior that a person is performing. So rather than changing what we would describe as a brand preference of someone who drives one car, changing them to drive a different brand of car, we’re looking to change that fundamental behavior of actually driving the car and converting them to ride a bicycle instead. Or in other health arenas, things like quitting smoking or eating healthier, etc.
ROB: Perfect. Is that something you’ve actually engaged in? Encouraging people to ride a bike instead of driving a car?
JEFF: Not that one. [laughs] But it’s an example people tend to understand.
ROB: What are some examples, digging a little deeper, of campaigns? You mentioned smoking cessation. There’s probably some other interesting things you’ve worked on. What are some examples?
JEFF: We work from simple behaviors like quitting smoking or not using drugs or not vaping and things like that to more complex behaviors like healthy eating, where we’re actually promoting specific types of foods, specific changes to what they eat, as well as mental health behaviors that are even more complicated – trying to get people to reduce stigma and recognize when to seek help, when to do something about the feelings they’re having, and whatnot.
ROB: Very interesting. You mentioned brand preference; in some cases, I think people think of brand preference as being kind of pliable. Maybe it is just as difficult to change as some health behaviors. How do you think about, or how do your clients even think about, measuring these behaviors over the long term? I imagine the feedback loop on one of your campaigns might be rather long in some cases, given the research required to gather those results. Or maybe there’s something unexpected I’m not thinking of.
JEFF: You’re absolutely right. Behavior change, we usually say you need a couple years at least of consistent campaigning to really see a measurable change. Unfortunately, we don’t have sales data to look at to see what’s happening in real time, so we rely on self-reported surveys and things like that that either our clients perform or that we help them perform to see what people are saying about the behavior.
You do have some interim steps that you can measure on the path to behavior change. Whatever your underlying theory is of what you think is changing in order to change the behavior, such as specific attitudes or beliefs or pieces of knowledge about a behavior, you can measure those, and then those can be pretty predictive of a behavior change later down the line.
ROB: One benefit it seems like you might have in your industry – is the behavior change industry perhaps a little bit more open about what works and what doesn’t than maybe some particular vertical market, like marketing soda or something?
JEFF: I think it’s a double-edged sword there. It’s more open in the sense that you can survive on theory for a longer period of time. In the commercial world, you can have a great theory, but if it doesn’t turn around sales in a quarter, you’re kind of out of luck there. In public health, you can survive on theory for a few years. So that does allow you to explore more options.
But that also allows bad work to remain for a long time. We see that there’s a lot of mistakes and common pitfalls that clients fall into, usually when they work with traditional agencies, that just happen over and over again because it works to sell a product, but it doesn’t work to change a fundamental behavior.
ROB: What about openness in terms of tactics? In some cases you have organizations like the UK’s famous – I may be misattributing it, but their Nudge Unit there. You have probably published research in some cases around behavioral change. How much of your work is synthesizing and adapting those things to a community and to availability of resources versus cooking up something completely out-of-the-box and new?
JEFF: There’s a lot of theory and approaches already within public health behavior change. I think the UK is interesting in that they tend to have movements that occur there within behavior change. 10-15 years ago, they were really social marketing, and then it switched to Nudge, and they seem to all move a little bit more cohesively, maybe because it’s a smaller country.
Here in the U.S., we don’t see as much cohesiveness in the approaches. The latest and greatest CDC strategy or FDA strategy, those do have a big influence on the work, but a lot of states are making decisions for themselves and applying the theories and approaches that they’re comfortable with – everything from states that might still be using hardcore scare tactics like the ’90s in their drug prevention work, all the way to other states that are more open-minded in realizing things like adverse childhood experiences influence how people make decisions about risk behaviors later in life. That’s something that the state of California is really looking at.
You have a really wide range of approaches and comfort level with those approaches. One of the things that we have to do that is kind of unique to our industry is we often have to share some of that education and some of those case studies from other states with potential clients so that they can understand, these are your options. You don’t have to just do the scare tactics. That’s not the only thing out there, and actually it often doesn’t really work.
So, we have to be the experts not just in marketing itself, but in behavior change theory, psychology, sociology, all these things that go into it.
ROB: It sounds like there’s a difference of tactics, a difference of outcomes. Are you seeking cessation? Are you seeking some sort of treatment? Are you just seeking a reduction of use in something that is now legal in certain places? It sounds like you are able to pool that expertise and help – in the ways that many agencies are, but you don’t think about it so much in public health – bring those best practices and learnings from other clients.
That makes me want to pull back and dig in. You’re in a very unique area of focus. I think we’ve done probably 120 or so episodes right now, and we have not been in a conversation with an agency owner who is in public health and behavioral change. You mentioned you’ve been in the agency, at least, for 20 years. Did you start off with that area of focus? How did Rescue come to be?
JEFF: We are definitely a unique agency. I actually started the agency when I was in high school. I was a volunteer for my local health department’s anti-tobacco program. That was a youth program.
They worked with a local agency, and after volunteering for about a year, I noticed that the kids we were reaching, the teenagers we were appealing to, were not current smokers, and they were never going to be smokers, whether we existed or not. These were good kids. They were leaders. They wanted to put this on their college application. There was really no change I could see that we were causing, even though we were successful from the sense that there was a lot of youth involvement and we were doing a lot of things.
Fortunately, we had an advisor at the health department that was also pretty savvy in terms of youth culture. I like to joke that she was a break dancer when she was in high school, and she was maybe 7 years older than me. So, she was still pretty connected with what high risk youth culture might look like versus low risk youth culture. I said, “Why are we spending all our money on these youth?” She was open to allowing me to move from being a volunteer to being a contractor to start to provide some of these services that would change who the program appealed to.
That continued for the next year or so in high school, and very quickly we started to innovate in a way that just wasn’t happening in public health, particularly with teens. That turned into a lot of referrals. While I was in college, we grew a lot through referrals and got our first office when I was in college and things like that. So, we really grew organically, and from Day 1 have been exclusively focused on public health.
ROB: What does the team look like today? What are some of the scale points and key hires to where the team of the agency is now?
JEFF: Today we have about 175 employees, six offices around the country. We are the largest marketing agency in San Diego, but most San Diego businesses can’t hire us. [laughs] Our work, though, is spread around the country. We don’t have a specific geographic footprint. There’s not one place where our clients are clustered. We work with about 30 different states and with the federal government, with the FDA, as well as Veterans Affairs and others.
Some of the big scale points that have occurred – there’s been a few. The biggest one was about 7 years ago, when we were about 40 or 50 people at the time and we won a contract with the FDA to do youth tobacco prevention. That contract was a $150 million contract for an agency of 50 people. We very quickly grew thanks to that contract. We brought on our CEO, Kristin Carroll (who’s still with us today), at that time, who helped us grow quickly. Within a matter of 3 years, we went from about 50 people to 150 people.
But in that time, we’ve continued to grow with other clients as well. Some other notable wins are the California Department of Health’s nutrition campaign as well as some other states that have brought on larger contracts.
ROB: You mentioned that many San Diego businesses probably can’t work with you. Does that reflect a change in the overall deal size that you’ve pursued?
JEFF: No, no, that’s just mainly because we don’t do commercial marketing. You have to be a public health oriented campaign. We work with the local county health department, we work with the local school district, and we also work with the district attorney’s office. So, we work with a lot of local government agencies, but we don’t have any commercial customers here or anywhere else.
ROB: I see. Once many agencies scale, and especially north of 100 people, I think a lot of times they become very focused on just the FDA size deals. How do you manage that different granularity of client size within one organization and not become really fixated on hitting those homeruns?
JEFF: That has definitely been a problem of scaling up. There aren’t that many FDA size deals in our space, so we’re forced to continue our more modest deal size – which we’re very happy with.
But I think the biggest challenge that has occurred is being careful not to try and apply universal lessons to the entire agency. Some things that we do for our largest client don’t necessarily apply to our smallest clients. We’ve gotten in trouble sometimes in starting to do things for our smaller clients the way we do it for our larger clients and then going over budget and overcomplicating things when they don’t need to be. And vice versa, also making sure we don’t get too simple with our biggest accounts. We have to operate in this limited budget standpoint for some of our accounts and then a more open budget to explore different things with our largest accounts.
That’s probably the biggest thing we have to remind ourselves of and be cautious with. Really, we’re operating like two different agencies within one.
ROB: We are chatting here right in the middle of the spring 2020 COVID-19 epidemic. How has that changed your mix of business? Do you have clients that are working within – do you have some stay home campaigns running and that sort of thing as well? I imagine any work you’ve done, you’ve had to learn very quickly.
JEFF: Surprisingly, we haven’t gotten into any stay at home work, mainly because we tend to focus on long-term campaigns so that we can measure these long-term changes. It does affect COVID because a lot of the reasons that people are passing away because of COVID is because of preexisting conditions that we’re trying to prevent with some of our other behaviors. So in a way, they’re all connected.
But when there’s an emergency like this, communications get out pretty quickly and go viral pretty quickly. You don’t really need the traditional long-term campaign to figure it out.
The one thing that has changed the most for us is the production of new creative and new messages. Right now we’re focused almost exclusively on creating animated work and infographics and things like that. Our clients still want to produce the work, still want to put new messages out there. Right now, people are consuming media more than ever before, so we’re still cranking away new stuff.
ROB: That’s excellent. Jeff, you’ve been at this for a little bit; you’ve built the largest agency in San Diego, which is quite a thing. What are some things that you’ve learned along this journey that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting Rescue all over again?
JEFF: There’s so many lessons you learn, but you almost need to learn them in order to grow from them. I think that one of the things that we learned was not to be afraid to say no to an opportunity if that’s not the right opportunity.
I have to teach this lesson to every new business development person we bring on or client service person we bring on. It might feel weird to say no to a small client, but keep in mind that if they don’t have enough funds for us to do a good job, they won’t blame the budget; they will blame us for not doing a good job. And without fail, the smaller the client, the more they ask for.
Oftentimes I’ve seen a lot of agencies get stuck in this world where they are over-servicing smaller accounts to keep them and underservicing their larger accounts, and it’s usually top-heavy. It’s usually more senior people that are servicing these smaller accounts, who are now not able to go out there and pursue bigger work. So, you really have to be careful of the really small accounts holding you down.
ROB: How do you think about positioning and communicating the scope with the small accounts so that their expectations are aligned? Or have you found it’s hard to manage them and you just have to pick the right ones and let someone else have the ones that are going to ask for the full buffet for 5 bucks?
JEFF: We definitely let someone else have those. [laughs] It’s about being transparent upfront and saying, “Look, this is what it takes to do good work, and this is why. These are all the components that need to go into something.”
We have found ways of being able to accept smaller accounts with different strategies. For example, something that’s completely unique to our space is we actually license campaigns. We have about four different preexisting campaigns that governments can license from us and that are reused over and over again across the country.
That has allowed us to open the door to some smaller – not the smallest, but some of the smaller accounts that don’t have the funds to create new campaigns, but do have enough funds to implement a licensed campaigns. That’s something that could never happen in the commercial world; no one would ever want to share anything. But in our space, the government loves to share, and they actually love the reduced risk that comes with knowing this has already run somewhere else.
ROB: Right. I can see you coming with some results, and they can see what the campaign looks like out in the world. They can probably even go and visit and see in some other place how this campaign looks in the wild, which you can’t do, to your point, for most businesses. Maybe you could get away with it in – I don’t know, if you were just serving one lawyer per market, or one plumber, or something crazy like that. But even then, they probably wouldn’t want to share.
JEFF: Right, exactly. There’s so many things that we do here because we are focused on this space that would just not be possible if we were a generalist agency. And that’s part of our argument for potential new clients: look, you can hire your local ad agency that everyone has heard of that has done all the car dealerships and local banks and things like that, or you can hire a specialist in public health. What’s going to happen if you hire a specialist in public health is you’re going to get all this institutional knowledge about how public health marketing is different from commercial marketing and be able to be more effective, more efficient, and have all this research and tools at your disposal.
ROB: Jeff, at 175 people, you’re up above that 150-person Dunbar number that many people talk about as that maximum number of people you can be in relationship with, or people might phrase it differently. How have you thought about structuring, organizing, and persisting culture as you break through dozens and then triple digits and then over 150?
JEFF: We had a pretty strong culture before I knew that company culture was a thing. It comes from the culture being embedded in the work. A lot of times, folks try to put this layer of culture on their organization that doesn’t really have anything to do with anything. That’s where culture tends to fail or feel shallow.
Where culture is really strong and real is where it manifests through the work. For example, one piece of our culture is that we describe ourselves as “responsibly rebellious.” What that means is that we want to push our clients to take risks within a responsible way. That is manifest through a lot of decisions that we make for our clients, things that we present to our clients, ways that we approach how we work with our clients.
Then, when we say that’s a part of our culture, it’s true. It is a part of our work. It’s part of what we do. When we talk about being science-based, we have a giant in-house research team that does presentations for us that is then infused in the creative and in the strategy. So, I think the best way to maintain culture is to just have an identity that is real and that you truly apply every single time you do the work.
ROB: It almost seems like some of the culture would be self-selecting. Not to say that people might not view Rescue as a very attractive place to work, but it seems like an odd company to sign up for unless you have a real interest in messages of public health and in helping people and helping communities. Do you find that in the interview process?
JEFF: Yeah. This millennial generation that’s now dominating our workforce, we are the ideal kind of company to work for. They want to cause social change. They want to have an impact, and we can allow them to have that impact. So, definitely the people that come in are people who have an interest in doing something good with their career.
And that helps. Everybody in the agency wants to have a good outcome from that campaign on a deeper level than just simply delivering for a client.
ROB: That makes sense. Jeff, what’s coming up for Rescue that you are excited about? Or maybe it’s even something in terms of either broad messages that you’re seeing trends in, or even tactically?
JEFF: One thing that’s pretty exciting is that we’re seeing a broad awakening of the underlying lifestyle situations that lead people to choose unhealthy behaviors.
The best example of this is what’s happening in California with the new – California has a Surgeon General for the first time, and she is focused on infusing adverse childhood experience understanding, which is this area of health research that talks about if you had these really, really big things happen to you when you were a kid – things like divorce or a parent dying or domestic violence or mental health in the family, these heavy things – those things set you on a trajectory to take on much higher risks later in life. And if you can embed an understanding of who people are and where they come from in your work, you can be more effective with these populations.
So, an understanding of that, an understanding of mental health, an understanding that people don’t do risky things in isolation. They do them from a complicated equation of everything that’s happened in their life. That was just not existent for the past 20 years, particularly in things like drug and alcohol prevention, where it’s like “people who use drugs are just making a bad choice, they’re just stupid, they’re just bad and they need to be told to stop doing bad things.” [laughs] That’s just not how it works.
It’s really nice that a lot of public health is moving away from that perspective and instead moving towards a deeper understanding of the complexity of human identity.
ROB: Absolutely. It brings to mind for me – you have a responsibility; the messages you’re putting out there are not messages for any particular – you probably work with governments of every political party possible.
JEFF: That’s right.
ROB: But we live in a world where – what you’re saying even hearkens back to partisan politics. How do you think about putting messages out into the world that have to transcend politics and party?
JEFF: I think we all suffer, across industries, across topics, from talking to ourselves and not understanding someone who’s different.
One of the things I like to say that I feel makes this so different is applied empathy. It’s not just that we have more empathy than someone else, but that we actually apply that empathy to how we create our messages and can articulate, when we’re going to create a campaign for rural men, why that campaign has to be so different from a campaign, for example, for African American women. What is different about their life experience, their attitudes, their worldview, their values that will change the way we communicate to them – but also change what we’re saying.
A great example of this is that we do a ton of tobacco prevention work, still, with teenagers, and you can talk to an alternative teen in an urban area who listens to rock and things like that – you can talk to them about the evilness of the tobacco industry and all the horrible things they’ve done, and they will get fired up. They’ll say, “I don’t want to support an industry that’s destroying the world and manipulating people.” So, you can motivate them not to smoke just by talking about the tobacco industry to them.
But then you take a rural teen, a country teen who maybe is a younger version of the right side of our political spectrum, and you talk to them about the tobacco industry and it just doesn’t even faze them. They’re like, “Well, that’s their right as a company and you have the right to choose what you’re going to do, whether you do that behavior or not. It’s all about personal responsibility.”
If you don’t know that difference and if you don’t know that they are processing information differently and caring about different things, then you’re just speaking to yourself. You’re just speaking about what you care about. And that can apply to so, so many different things. Within politics, its’ so interesting to see people just yell within their bubbles about things that they care about and are baffled by why no one else cares about them or why the other side doesn’t care. All you have to do is just spend a little bit of time on the other side and you’ll understand why they don’t care about what you’re talking about.
ROB: It’s a great thought for all of us on meeting people where they are instead of where we think they are. Jeff, when the audience wants to get in touch with you and with Rescue, where should they look for you? Where should they find you?
JEFF: Yeah, definitely. Rescueagency.com is our website. There’s contact information there for different folks. But also, if you’re just interested in what I was talking about and learning more about public health marketing and behavior change and things like that, we have a pretty robust YouTube channel, youtube.com/rescueagency. Lots of actual workshops and videos that we’ve done explaining our approach and research and some examples of the work.
ROB: Perfect. Jeff, thank you for joining us. Thank you for the thoughtful work that you do. We’re grateful for it, and look forward to a lot more of it in the future. Congrats on all the success.
JEFF: Thank you. Thanks for having me on.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Keith Perhac is the Founder of SegMetrics, a once-upon-a-time marketing agency that pivoted from marketing services to a suite of analytical and reporting products. Today SegMetrics builds and refines digital testing and tracking tools that provide marketers with critical information on where “leads come from, how they act, and how much a marketing program is really worth.”
In this interview, Keith explains that KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) tell a company if it is doing something better or worse than at some time in the past. However, KPIs are about averages – they do not explain what is wrong or right – or what action to take next. Keith says it is important to look at the outliers, follow your leads through their entire customer journey, and dig beyond top-level KPIs to get a deeper understanding of the contribution different components make to a KPI.
Before SegMetrics, Keith worked as a developer at a marketing/development agency in the middle of nowhere Japan. Fed up with long hours, Keith decided to quit to do “something on his own.” He started freelancing, “building awesome software” for great marketers, including Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You to Be Rich. Keith claims Ramit taught him most of what he knows about marketing. Back then, agencies built their own metrics and testing tools.
Ramit’s focus on data, customer experience, and the customer journey brought a new dimension to Keith’s understanding of marketing: He had to go back to his college psychology lessons on “how people think.” How could a company measure every touchpoint, every experience? How could it split-test design or copy position? What could it do to test whether people were converting?
Keith’s agency focused on expediting client launches and optimizing their marketing funnels. Keith says that, often, the biggest value the agency provided was in pointing out customer journey disconnects, fragmentation, and “holes” in funnels. The launches were exciting . . . the retainers not so much. Still, the agency expanded to twelve employees in four countries.
During a two-week period of client-free downtime, Keith’s team built the software that is the foundation of SegMetrics today. A month-and-a-half later, the product launched. Keith intended to transform the agency to a product-oriented company over time and as the product increased in popularity. Didn’t happen. The product did not “take off” until three years later, when they started a SegMetrics marketing campaign . . . and shut down the agency. Skillsets, tools, the business model, and staffing needs changed overnight.
Today, SegMetrics provides done-for-you services, facilitates client agency onboarding, and offers a lot of customer support for its software. The biggest challenge is educating agencies that “think they already know what they know.” Keith is believes that setting up solid tracking and UTM implementation is critical for understanding where to best spend marketing dollars. An Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) is simple URL-linked code that generates Google Analytics.)
Keith discusses the impact of Covid-19 on various business segments . . . and highlights the surprising number and kinds of businesses that are seeing tremendous business growth. While brick-and-mortar companies have suffered, Keith has seen increased traffic for companies providing entertainment, digital media, telecommunications, online information products, and Masterclasses.
SegMetrics is releasing its first printed book this May: The 90-Minute Guide to Building Marketing Funnels That Convert. The book will be available on Amazon. Keith can be contacted throughs his company’s website at: segmetrics.io and on Twitter (Keith Perhac).
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I am your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Keith Perhac. He is the Founder of Segmetrics, based in Portland, Oregon. Welcome to the podcast, Keith.
KEITH: Thanks so much for having me.
ROB: It’s excellent to have you here. Keith, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your own journey and how that landed you into Segmetrics?
KEITH: It was a long journey, as I think many listeners’ journeys were. I started out working as a salaryman in middle-of-nowhere, Japan as a marketer. Or not as a marketer, as kind of a developer and working at a standard marketing/development agency. That continued on for a while. The company got acquired; I decided I don’t like working until 2 a.m. every night, and I’d prefer to do something on my own.
I ended up leaving that and started out freelancing and doing work for a couple of marketers that were not very well-known at the time. Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to Be Rich and a couple of other people. It grew and ballooned from there.
It was interesting, because my journey was not, “Oh, I’m going to go start an agency.” It was more falling into that agency. I started out as a freelancer and then I got too busy, and it’s like, I’ve got to bring on a subcontractor, and then I’ve got to bring on another one, and then there’s more clients who want to work with me, and okay, now I have five people working with me. Oh, now I need to start doing events, and now I have 12 people working for me in multiple countries.
So, it just grew organically from “I just like building awesome software and working with great marketers” to “Now we have a team of 12 people over four countries and we’re working with clients all over the globe.” That was a shift. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] That’s quite a shift. Across the world, across industries. So many different shifts there.
KEITH: Yeah.
ROB: I would imagine going through that I Will Teach You to Be Rich phase – people may have heard of Ramit now. From a marketing perspective, were they numbers-driven? Is that part of your story?
KEITH: Yeah, he’s always been super numbers-driven. Honestly, working with him was probably the highlight of my career and probably where I learned the most stuff about marketing because it really was trial by fire.
This was back in the day when there really wasn’t a lot of marketing technology out there. We look at things like automated webinars now, or we look at things like proof, to have a little pop-up to say, “So-and-so just bought . . .” None of this existed back then. There were no metrics except what you could calculate yourself. Google Analytics was around, but it wasn’t very good. Split testing tools – all of the stuff that we take for granted now, we had to build ourselves.
Ramit’s always been a marketer who has been very into the data and very into the experience that customers are having and that people are going through. So the whole idea of how we can measure every touchpoint, every experience that people have and then take that and do something with that, whether that’s a split test on design, whether that’s positioning for copy, whether that’s a little pop-up that says “So-and-so just bought . . .,” what are the things that we can do to test and see if people are converting or not?
This all sounds like standard hat now; it wasn’t back then. And we were also in a compressed timeline where it’s like, “Hey, we want to have this up by Wednesday and it’s Tuesday evening.” [laughs] It really was a trial by fire. I had had some marketing background, mainly dev and design, and then suddenly I got thrown into this world of, “You have to understand the marketing, how people think.” I used a lot of my psychology background and stuff that I learned in college that I thought, “I’m never going to use this again,” and now that’s front and center with how people react to pages, how people interact with sites and copy and design, and then being able to test and improve that.
It’s really crazy. It was just constant. I think we worked with him for 5 years. That sounds about right. But it was a small team. He had just launched the second version of his first product, and I think there were five of us. It was pretty amazing.
ROB: That sounds like quite an adventure, and quite a journey for him, his brand, and probably you along the way. I think you have talked a lot about numbers, about KPIs, and things that people get right and people get wrong about KPIs. What are some of the goods and bads of KPIs?
KEITH: There’s a lot of cargo culting in marketing, for good and bad. I think that KPIs are something that have been pushed for so long that people, rightly so, are like, “KPIs are important. They’re our key performance indicator. If we don’t know these, then we’re not going to be able to improve our marketing.” That’s what I hear over and over, especially when we were doing the consulting with the agency, and especially now that we’re a KPI-driven company. People are always like, “What KPIs do I need to look at to improve my marketing?”
The answer is you don’t, because KPIs are key performance indicators. They indicate whether the company is doing well or not, or whether a marketing funnel is doing well or not. It’s a measure like your speedometer, or I guess the engine heat gauge on your car. If the number is going down or up, you know you’re doing something wrong or right. But just looking at that number is not going to let you know what to do next.
That’s why we’re really big into looking at outliers. When you look at a KPI, you’re looking at an average. Let’s say you have 200 people coming into a funnel. You have 100 people coming in from Google, you have 100 people coming in from Facebook. The 100 people from Google convert at 100%. Every single person purchases. No one purchases from Facebook. What’s your KPI for your conversion rate? It’s 50%. That’s great. But that didn’t tell you that you have one audience that’s making all the money and one audience that’s making none of it. So, you know what to do at that point. You either get rid of the Facebook ads or you figure out why they’re not converting.
Looking at that top level KPI – and this is what most people think of when they think of the KPIs – it doesn’t let you know anything other than, is the business continuing to do better or worse than it was yesterday or last month? It doesn’t tell you those outliers, which is what you actually need to look at if you’re going to improve.
ROB: That’s interesting what you mentioned on outliers. Especially when you’re talking about looking at traffic from Google, some traffic from Google you can do more quickly in terms of ads. Some traffic you can do more slowly, maybe, in search. And sometimes you don’t know – without a proper indicator of search traffic, there may not be any more traffic for you to get.
KEITH: Right.
ROB: All of that is context, I think, for what makes a good number and what makes a good KPI. What are you seeing in terms of maybe some unexpected outliers? We are in this moment where many of us are sheltering at home. We are in the middle of this coronavirus outbreak and trying to take care of each other and other people in our world by staying home. What are some of the shifting outliers you’ve seen in this mode?
KEITH: This has been super interesting because some of the things that I predicted would go down and fail have not, and some of the things that I thought would do great have not. Obviously, anything with a physical aspect to it has done poorly. Anything where you have to go do sales in person or you’re running a brick-and-mortar shop, those places are really struggling right now. It’s very difficult.
We’ve had a number of clients in those spaces – we had some dog trainers that are not able to do their work anymore. We had some construction places that aren’t able to do their work anymore. There’s a lot of places like that. That was I think an assumption that everyone had.
Entertainment, digital media has gone way up, which has been really interesting. I think everyone kind of assumed that as well. Netflix is killing it. Telecommunications, of course – Zoom, we’ve all heard what’s going on there, but that’s been crazy. There’s all these new telecommunications companies coming out of the woodwork because working from home is the new normal. I think both of those, people knew that that was coming.
The one that’s been really interesting to me, though, is online info products, especially higher tier ones, because I expected that people have less money, they have less disposable income; they’re not going to be dropping $300, $500, $1,000 on info products and learning products. And I was wrong. Across the board, we’ve seen most niches of info products actually increasing in sales.
Masterminds are increasing. A lot of events that have gone virtual, those are all improving. Specific niches – like I have a friend who is in the jobs space, and that of course has gone down because no one’s going to work. But most places for general online learning have been increasing, and it’s been very interesting to see that.
ROB: Very interesting. I’m getting bombarded with ads for ClassPass – not ClassPass, rather, but Masterclass. ClassPass is probably having a hard time with their gym passes.
KEITH: Right. [laughs]
ROB: Masterclass for sure. So, it’s interesting to hear those trends. When we look a little bit at your journey, Keith, talk about the transition from agency world to product world a little bit more. Was that a gradual transition, and one day you just realized where you wanted to be? Or was there a very decisive moment where you threw a switch?
KEITH: It’s a little bit of both, to be honest. I’m kind of risk-averse, I guess I would say. We were probably 6 years into the agency at this point, and our whole thing was we help people with launches, we help people optimize their marketing funnels. So, we’re dealing with clients who, when they do a launch, they do $5-12 million launches. We bust our butts, and it’s really rough, and then we see the same retainer, the same pay rate for that client that we do for any other client. So, we help make a $10 million launch and then we’re just sitting there at the same point.
After doing a number of these, we got to the point where we were like, “We know all the parts of this; why can’t we do this for ourselves?”, as I think many people do. We’re a bunch of developers. We really like developing, and we had done the marketing, so we said, “Why don’t we try to build our own software?” We had about two weeks of downtime where we knew we weren’t going to have any client work, and we said, “We’re going to sit down for two weeks and build this thing.”
And we did. We launched it I think a month and a half later, because building it and launching it are two completely different things, and it was always something that we were going to continuously work on in order to improve, and eventually that was going to take over the revenue for the agency. We were going to slowly transition from agency work to working on Segmetrics as it became more popular.
We jumped up, we had really good MRR [Monthly Recurring Revenue] in the first month, and then it just plateaued for the next 3 years. [laughs] We didn’t really lose any MRR; we didn’t really gain any MRR. It just kind of sat there, and occasionally we’d fix things, but there was no focus on it. This was the main problem that we had for many years, which was “We have this great piece of software that we’re using internally for all our customers, but how do we focus on it?”
Focusing on the software is easy because we’re all developers. Focusing on the marketing is harder because marketing is not something that you can sit down for an hour or two hours and bang out. Marketing is an overall idea and understanding of your customers. There’s customer research. There’s a lot of that goes into it. What we were finding was we couldn’t make the time to do it.
ROB: I think many services firms have that challenge. It’s sort of the “cobbler’s children have no shoes” scenario. How do you look at turning that corner? What started to unlock for you? Because that’s a problem even for any given agency, I think.
KEITH: Yeah, definitely. Just look at most agency websites. They don’t usually build them internally because they don’t have the time or the energy, or it makes more sense to go work on client work. Back when I was a salaryman, we actually had a group of five agencies and we were all friends with each other, and we would build each other’s websites. We’d hire each other to build the other one’s website because we weren’t going to do it ourselves. [laughs]
So, we tried a number of things. If you know 37signals, who did Basecamp, they were an agency originally. They’re probably the unicorn of that agency turning into a SaaS company. They did the Fridays. They said, “We don’t do any client work on Fridays, and we’re only going to work on our own stuff.” We tried that; that didn’t really work. We tried “After 3:00, we’re not going to work on client stuff.” That didn’t work.
We tried a lot of different things, and we never really were able to get any traction on any of them. I think that a lot of it was just mental, because it’s things like – let’s take the Friday for example. We worked really hard on clients Monday through Thursday; now we’re going to work on our own stuff, and we’re just exhausted from 4 days of working on client stuff. And then we also need to reset and say, “Where were we last Friday when we left off?” So, there’s this huge gap of what we did then, what the priorities are, if the priorities have shifted. Half the day is then essentially wasted getting back up to speed on what we were doing last week.
We had the same problem with doing afternoons. After 3:00, we would work on our own stuff, or after 2:00 or whenever we decided to make that break, and the issue was for the entire morning, we’re focused on a very input-output type of work style. Client says, “I need these six things,” we produce those six things, we know the agency has made six things’ worth of money. It’s a very transactional idea.
Being able to translate from that into “Okay, now we need a marketing campaign. When are we doing this marketing campaign?” “I don’t know, we need to figure it out” – going from this transactional to this creative side of things was very difficult for everyone.
Those were really the two main challenges we had. How do you shift from a transactional mindset with the agency and with client work to an almost blue-sky, “We don’t know what the answer is here”? usually when we’re working with clients, they have a strong readership, they have a strong brand. They’ve gotten to a certain point where we are iterating on a foundation that they’ve made. But we’re now having to build that foundation from scratch.
Starting over from that and not knowing where to go, and to have to spend that time to do it, was very difficult, making that mental shift every day or every week.
ROB: You knew yourself as a customer. You knew what you needed. You built technology to do what you needed. But it seems like there was probably a stage of getting to know your own customer better, which we all need to do. How did you take the steps to get to know that customer well enough to speak their language and really market well to them?
KEITH: Lots of customer calls is honestly the only way. We talked with our agency friends, got on calls with them. Made it very obvious that they weren’t sales calls, but essentially saying, “Hey, I want to show you this. What is the value for you?” We knew what the value for us was. We knew what the values for our customers was as an agency. But one thing we’ve learned is that every single marketer is different, and every single marketer wants different things, and they all have it set up differently. Honestly, that’s the most painful thing out of all of it.
We take something simple like recurring payments – there’s 101 ways to set up recurring payments for a product. Maybe it’s an invoice that gets an extra payment on it. Maybe it’s multiple invoices. Maybe it’s not even called an invoice, but a recurring – there’s just so many things that come in, and everyone has set them up differently, even within similar systems. This was the first time where we realized, oh crap, everyone’s doing something different; we need to figure out how to support everyone in a single bucket.
So yeah, it was just talking with a lot of agencies. A lot of the things we ran into with the agencies were not actually technical at all. They were more like, “This is great. I really want to start using this. We don’t have the time to set this up. We just signed up for someone else who does something similar, and it’s been sitting there for 3 months because no one has the time to do anything with it.”
ROB: Even with one of the simple things that you were involved in with Segmetrics, when I see lead tracking – we actually had an experiment we did with some agencies that we know involving simple things: how do you get very regimented about your UTM tracking, and how do you do this right? Can you get involved in publishing content and ads and whatnot so that it’s easier to close the loop on a transaction? Everybody does it differently. Some people say “That’s not important to me”; some people say “That’s confusing.” And yet I know myself, coming from an engineering background, there’s a part of me that screams out and says, “Don’t you see? This is a really good way to do things.” [laughs]
One thing I notice when I look at your product platform and some of the things that it does – and we don’t talk a lot about products on this podcast, but I think it’s worth reflecting on, especially from your background. I see this different DNA of how to efficiently run an agency well. You want to know when someone’s not paying you. You know that talking to a client every week, giving them feedback on what you’ve done for them every week, can be a good practice to do that a lot of people don’t get around to.
How do you strike that balance of the stuff you feel like you strongly know somebody should do and whether or not they’re ready to do it? I think we all have those things we feel like we ought to do. We ought to eat our vegetables, but we’re not ready to, business-wise or at dinner.
KEITH: It’s rough. You know the old saying: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. There’s a number of things that we want people to do. There’s a number of things that we want people to think of when they’re doing analytics. The only thing we can do is really educate them.
We produce a lot of content about teaching people how to market. We have onboarding calls and we have hand-holding, done-for-you services and stuff. But the education side, especially when you’re targeting agencies, is tough because they think they already know what they know. That’s one of the biggest issues I think we have, which is we want to teach people that you should really use UTM values, and they’re like, “We haven’t used them up until now and we’ve been doing fine.” I’m like, “Well…”
It’s funny because I think the biggest hurdle we have is getting people’s tracking set up correctly – installing the snippet, making sure those ad IDs and those UTMs are installed. We have a number of customers who are more technical, and they have literally perfect analytics. 100% attribution of every single click, and it is beautiful. I love it. And then I work with some people and I’m like, “None of your ads are set up correctly.” They’re like, “Oh, we threw it over to the ad guy and he never set it up.” It’s just so frustrating; it’s been like 3 weeks, and why have they not added this ad snippet in?
It’s just very frustrating that because I’m technical and I understand the technology of how the web and marketing on the web works, I consider it a foregone conclusion that these are the things you need to do to set up. What I’m realizing is that a lot of marketers do not understand how the internet works and how marketing on the internet works.
I think this is a difference of marketing now versus marketing 10 years ago, when you had to build everything yourself. Most people just see, “I have this landing page builder, I slap in this iframe, and then I’m good to go,” because from their perspective, it works. But that’s not actually how anything is working, and there’s a lot of magic going on in the background that they can’t see and they don’t understand as to how it’s actually working. As long as it’s working for them, they’re like, “Everything’s good.” But then something breaks and they have no idea why.
We had one customer we were looking at and they weren’t getting – and this is amazing, I think, with the software. This is also what we found when we did the agency stuff. The biggest value we provided to new customers was telling them where the holes were in their funnel. And sometimes these holes were not like, “Not many people are clicking on this.” It was “This campaign is not hooked up to anything” or “Your webinar is not sending in any leads to your marketing, so you have 5,000 leads that have never gotten an email from you.” We find this all the time, and it’s so frustrating. It’s so frustrating, both for them and for us.
ROB: You’ve dialed in with being able to lead a horse to water. The follow-on from that we don’t think about as much is really that you learn this often in relationships. You can’t change people for the most part, but you can be there and help them and be helpful to them when they make a decision to change. It seems like that’s a lot of times what marketing around this kind of product can be.
I think there’s an interesting thread I want to pull on here. You mentioned your own agency making a transition into a product and 37signals making a transition into a product. What do you think it is, perhaps – and maybe you’ve seen some other examples – that is in the DNA of an agency that makes it possible for them to make a jump into product? I think a lot of agency owners want to, and even spend a little bit of their engineering bench time to build something, but there is a wide chasm to cross past that. What do you think makes it work?
KEITH: I don’t know exactly, and that’s because I don’t think that we were able to make it work while we were an agency. But I think that you can’t look at the product as a side hustle. It has to be part – we did not really start growing Segmetrics until we decided, “Hey, we’re shutting down the agency. We’re going to start moving everyone off and we’re going to focus on this full-time.”
It wasn’t like we fired all the clients that day, but we made a very distinct decision that “We are not focusing on getting new clients. As client contracts are over, we’re not going to renew them and we’re just going to keep going down this path of software because that’s where we want to go as the agency.”
It has to be buy-in from everyone. We had some people who either did not or could not make that transition mentally, or didn’t want to, and that’s fine. But if we were to keep those people on and we were to keep going half-kilter at it, we were never going to succeed, because we had done the half-kilter thing for 3 years and it just doesn’t grow like that. You have to be all-in. Or at least have that all-in as the final goal.
ROB: Were there some roles that were more or less receptive to the transition than others?
KEITH: Yes. I think there were some roles, but also just some people because of the way that – we were talking about that transactional idea where a client says “Do this,” you work for an hour, you complete that, the client is happy, and you know that you made the agency 1 hour’s worth of money. With software, it’s completely different. You could work for 8 hours and not produce anything because it was the wrong thing, or even if you did something awesome and everyone’s happy, it doesn’t actually result in any money. That was a very hard mental thing that was not role-specific, but a mental thing that needed to be addressed.
One of the harder ones was account managers, because as an agency, you have to have an account manager, and only now are we starting to go back into account managers in Segmetrics because we just didn’t need them. We needed support people, but that’s very different than an account manager. We couldn’t afford to have an account manager for every single customer that we had, especially when a customer is paying you $100-200 instead of $5,000 a month. It doesn’t make sense at that scale.
It was interesting, because I thought support was going to be very similar to account management, and it is not. It’s a very different skillset. You need very different tools, and getting a new support person, getting support to work with Segmetrics was very difficult just because it was so different than anything we had done before.
ROB: As you were talking about the account size required to support an account manager, it made me think of another example of what we’re talking about here of an agency transitioning into a tech company, which was MailChimp. MailChimp started off as a web design shop and now is this huge, massive email marketing platform with hundreds and hundreds of people onboard.
When you’re charging $20 bucks a month for email marketing, you can’t put an account manager on that. You can hardly spend an hour on them. But you can scale support. Support is a process of scale, I would argue, largely of consistency, of knowing when something needs to be escalated and when it doesn’t, where the answers are, and how to help people find the answers. That may be overly simple. You probably have a better pulse on it than I do here. How would you distinguish it?
KEITH: I think that’s exactly right. It’s very different than an account manager, where it’s not about necessarily solving the issue directly, where support is, but more of that overall keeping in touch and relationship with them. It’s more of an emotional thing than support is.
ROB: Keith, what is coming up for Segmetrics and perhaps for broader marketing that you’re excited about? We all need some things to be excited about in these moments, and I think many of us are finding them. What’s exciting you?
KEITH: Going outside at some point. [laughs] Being over quarantine would be great. Man, that’s a hard question because there’s so many things that I want to do and that we’re working on that excite me.
One personal thing that I’m excited about with Segmetrics is that we’re actually releasing our first paper book in May, and I just got the proof for it yesterday, so I’m pretty excited about that. It’s something that we’ve been working on for – even from the agency days, I had originally done a video course that never got produced, and we decided, “Hey, this is some great content. We really need to put this together into a book.” So, I’ve been writing that for a while. Really happy about that.
Overall, with Segmetrics, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m excited about next. The long, slow SaaS ramp of death I think is what they call it, and I think we’re right in the middle of that right now. I have a list of features and new things and new ideas that we’re super excited about, but it’s just doing them. It’s out of that exciting, blue sky phase and more into the “Okay, time to put our pedal to the metal and actually get this stuff done.”
One thing that we did that I’m happy about is – I think I mentioned that we’re bringing some account managers back, and what we decided to do is start working with agencies and companies that are signing up and providing them an account manager and getting them set up and having someone come in and configure all their campaigns and do all that. That’s something I’m excited about that’s hopefully going to be kicking off at the end of this month.
ROB: Excellent. And where do we find your book when your book is available?
KEITH: The book will be on Amazon. We’re probably also going to have it on the site, but it’s going to be on Amazon. It’s called The 90-Minute Guide to Building Marketing Funnels That Convert.
ROB: Excellent. That sounds very practical and like something we all need to think about.
KEITH: I read a lot of marketing books. I read a lot of business books, and I always hate that they’re really fluffy. They’re also only half the size they need to be. I was talking to a friend about this who’s a writer, an author in the industry, and I said I was reading Ryan Holiday’s book – I’m trying to remember what the name of it was – and I’m like, “It was great up until the halfway point and then he started repeating the same stories. It was like he was rehashing the first half of the book.”
He’s like, “Well yeah, a book has to be 175 pages. It cannot be shorter than that. If you only have enough content for half, the publisher will say, ‘Write a second half that’s just rehashing it.’” I hate that.
ROB: Was this The Obstacle Is the Way or one of those?
KEITH: No, I think it was his first main one that he did. I can’t for the life of me remember which one it is. But I’ve always hated that, and I’ve always hated the extra – I like the stories because you have to get emotionally involved and you have to have a connection with the reader, but at the same time, at some point I just want to know “these are the six things you need to do, these are why they work, and here’s my experience with them.”
So that’s what I’ve really tried to do with this book, is really put it down into “here’s the theory, here’s the reasons, here’s what you need to do.” Hopefully it’ll do that.
ROB: Keith, when people want to find you and Segmetrics, where should they go to track you down?
KEITH: Segmetrics is segmetrics.io. We’re also on Twitter. I am Keith Perhac, also on Twitter. I am literally the only Keith Perhac in the world that I know of, so it’s very easy to find me. And if you search far enough on Google, you will find things that I am still trying to bury 20 years later. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] We won’t put those in the show notes.
KEITH: Good, good. That’s the problem with having a very unique name. You can never escape Google.
ROB: Understood. Keith, thank you for coming on the podcast.
KEITH: Thank you so much for having me.
ROB: All the best for you and your team. Be well.
KEITH: Definitely.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Brian Lawson and his brother left their jobs in engineering, IT, and software development to found WebMO (Web Marketing Optimizer), a digital marketing agency. From the beginning, they focused on optimizing organic visibility/SEO and doing Google search ads, not just studying digital marketing tactics, strategies, and analysis, but digging into the “behind the scenes” mechanics. Today, WebMO is heavily data-driven, does everything digital marketing, and serves a large number of diverse and predominantly small-businesses nationwide.
WebMO’s “super-detailed” understanding of Google Analytics, conversion tracking, visitor engagement metrics, and the conversion heuristic enables the agency to fully understand clients’ market spaces. Over the years, the agency built their own analytical tools. The combination of three major Google data points – Google Analytics, a company’s Google Search Console data, and the data compiled in a company’s Google my Business listing – provides a clear understanding of a company’s “true space in the market.”
Education is the beginning of WebMO’s relationship with its clients. Brian loves to break down complicated technical concepts. He is used to speaking to groups of people, and loves running free workshops to help business owners understand complex concepts. As a result of this proactive training, WebMO became a Google Partner. When Google introduced the Grow with Google program, which encourages small business organizations, chambers of commerce, public libraries, agencies, and other organizations to participate in live feed educational workshops, WebMO was on board. Because of the huge number of people who have gone through WebMO’s workshops, Google recognizes the agency as a “high impact partner.”
Education on how Google works, Brian says, “is absolutely critical.” After defining a client’s market space, the agency evaluates the client’s unique situation, and then makes recommendations.
Because Brian’s agency works with smaller companies with smaller budgets, “testing” the market and quantifying the response works well. Instead of spending thousands of dollars for a huge campaign, the clients may spend a few hundred. WebMO is then able to quickly show them the ROI on that investment. Brian says, “If it’s going to fail, fail fast and fail cheap.”
Covid-19 changed the agency’s operations. Although WebMO has been unable to meet with clients in person, it continues its educational outreach through weekly updates. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Yelp are constantly tweaking their policies . . . WebMO is working to keep clients aware of these changes. One of Brian’s more recent presentations covered “how to look at Google Trends to truly understand the impact that this [Covid-19] situation is having on your business.”
Brian explains that Covid-19 has affected businesses in several different ways. Companies that provide such things as bartending services for parties are devastated. For other companies, like air conditioning repair companies and plumbers, it’s business as usual. For the last category, exemplified by companies that sell cleaning supplies, provide in-home nanny services, and medical professionals who are still working, traffic has gone “off the charts.”
In addition to having its own clients, WebMO partners with agencies that need an invisible number cruncher. When asked what he would have done differently when he started his agency, Brian said, he should have been “a little quicker to respond to where our clients were probably needing us most.” He seems to be doing that now.
Brian can be reached on his agency’s website at: www.web-mo.com
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Brian Lawson, Owner and Co-founder of WebMO, based in Tucson, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast.
BRIAN: Hey, thanks, Rob. I appreciate you having me on.
ROB: Brian, it’s great to have you. Why don’t you start off by telling us about WebMO and what makes WebMO great?
BRIAN: Awesome. We are, as you mentioned, a Tucson, Arizona based digital marketing agency. I’ve always introduced our company as being a little different than quite a few others in our space because of our backgrounds. The co-founders, myself and my brother, come from a much different background than the typical marketing agency background. A lot of times people that provide the types of services that we provide, like websites and digital marketing and SEO and Google and YouTube and Facebook and all that, tend to come from either the design world or sometimes a traditional marketing background.
Our backgrounds were in engineering, IT, software development, all those things. So, from the very beginning, we started approaching all of these digital marketing tactics and strategies and analysis with a much greater emphasis on the machinery, the real techy stuff that’s lingering behind the scenes. You think about Google as one example; Google’s a company that has 20,000 engineers and 300 designers.
So, taking that real math-based, almost “super nerd” approach, if you want to think about it that way, is a good way to approach it given the kind of issues we’re dealing with. We tend to be – again, compared to most – a little more data-driven, a little more analytical. We definitely tend to be sometimes a little skeptical of other things that some others in our industry are saying. That gave us the foundation for a very unique and somewhat successful agency.
ROB: It sounds like that would also shape the sort of client who comes to you and resonates with you. What sort of clients are drawn to and resonate with this approach?
BRIAN: We have a pretty large variety of clients, which thankfully serves us well when things in the market go up or down. We don’t really specialize in any one kind. We have some larger end clients that pretty much just engage our services purely for the data analysis part of what we do. We’re one of the few agencies who have a complete understanding of all the things going on with Google Analytics and conversion tracking and embracing some of the math that’s in our industry, like visitor engagement metrics or the conversion heuristic. We really get super detailed on that.
But interestingly, that overall idea is also very appealing to a small business. If you’re a house painter and you’ve been through multiple agencies so far and no one’s really been able to figure it out, when they hear that story, it’s like, “Whoa, these guys are super into this stuff and they’re really technical and analytical.” In a way, it gives that client a reason to believe that maybe this time will be different.
Our industry, digital marketing, is old enough now to where most businesses out there have had at least one or two or more experiences with other efforts, and most of them haven’t been exactly what they were hoping for. So as an agency – and I would say this to any agency – one of the things you have to really get out there for a client is a reason to believe that this time, things will be different.
For us, it’s that. It’s our unique value proposition, that idea that we’re going to take a closer look at the data, but because we have this deep level of understanding of how this stuff works, we’re going to find a way to get things happening that maybe weren’t happening before.
Now, on top of that, I also happen to be a business owner, and I have been a business owner for 30 years, so when I’m talking to another business owner, it’s like, “Oh yeah, you get it. You understand.” So a lot of our clients – I’d say the majority of them – definitely fall into the small business category, with a few exceptions being some of those higher end companies that want to bring us in for the analytics side of things.
ROB: Very interesting. What sort of toolkit do you bring to bear on that analytics problem? I think people look at tools all the time, and often having right thinking is much more important than the tools, but having good execution is also helpful along those lines. What’s your go-to?
BRIAN: We’ve actually done a lot of in-house compilation things, if you want to think about it that way. We’re very heavy on the technical side. We have a team of 23 people total, very heavy on the techy side. A lot of developers and programmers. Because of our background being software developers/app developers, we really didn’t have to rely on finding third party solutions to do most of what we do. We were able to grow them from the ground up.
One example is, for instance, if you’re trying to analyze a company’s visibility. Let’s say you’ve got a local PC repair guy, whatever, and they want to really understand how they’re doing online. We rejected this idea of rank reports way before everyone else did. Even when we entered into this business probably close to 10 years ago, we immediately looked at that model and said, “This doesn’t make any sense.” Clients were getting these reports that said “Hey, you’re #3 on this term and #6 on that term,” and it all seemed so useless, honestly.
Clients were already saying it was useless because they were looking at these reports and saying, “Whatever. Yeah, you found that I’m #3 if I type this exact phrase or whatever; what good does that do me? What do I get? Am I going to get a prize for this? What’s the reward?” So we almost right out of the gate rejected that model and said rank reports are about useless, especially when it comes to local visibility.
We started creating our own analysis tools that combined, at the time – and now more than ever, in today’s market – the three major data points in Google, which is the data that’s being accumulated, of course, in Google Analytics, your Google Search Console data, and all the data that’s being compiled in your Google My Business listing. The only way to get a really accurate understanding of your true space in the market is with all three of those data points being combined.
And then taking it a step further – and again, just putting your mind in a small business owner’s frame of mind, they say, “Yeah, I get that I have traffic and I understand that all these people are finding me on these different words and phrases, but again, what does it really mean?” So we’ll look at a market and say, “You are in Phoenix, Arizona; there are 50,000 searches per month, roughly, for people looking for plumbing repair. As a business, you, Mr. Plumber, are visible about 33,000 of those times.” Like I said, compiling all this data. That’s the starting point: understanding your percentage of market share as opposed to just saying, “Hey, you’re showing up in the third spot on this particular search term.”
Then it just goes from there. If you’re going to have any chance of getting a client or winning a new customer, they have to be able to at least see. As a business owner – and of course, we teach them this – the very first question you should be asking is, “How ubiquitous am I? If there’s 50,000 people searching per month, how often am I one of those people that at least appears in front of somebody’s eyeballs?” That’s just one example.
ROB: Absolutely, that makes sense. You talked a little bit about your technical background and your co-founder, your brother’s background, coming into starting this business. But in particular, what was it that made you decide to start this business when you did? How did you go from the technical background to “I am going to start a digital marketing agency”?
BRIAN: It’s interesting. A couple things. We’re serial entrepreneurs, as most business owners tend to be. From early on, from about the early ’90s, about 1991, we had started an IT services company that was pretty much helping businesses with, at the time, the very confusing world of internal LANs and inter-office communication and computer networking and all that, and then branching into internet configuration and everything else.
So, I had a very deep, good long list of local businesses that trusted us for pretty much everything technical. This buildup started happening probably around 2009-2010 with clients saying to us, “Hey, you guys are awesome in helping with all this other stuff, but I can’t find anybody that can explain this to me or help me with this.” Almost getting dragged into it from that standpoint. We were thinking, “That’s interesting, but let’s put a pin in it.”
Meanwhile, again as serial entrepreneurs, we did a tech startup. It was a home-based internet security product. I won’t get into a lot of detail, but we had the old venture capital funding and all that, and we had developed a marketing strategy for that online. And it was good, using a combination of SEO and Google search ads and all the other things. We had it really cooking.
After some investors came in, they basically said, “Hey, you guys are engineers. You guys are probably really good at communicating what you know about your product, but you’re not marketers. You don’t know what you’re doing there. Let’s hand that over to this agency” – it was in New York City, one of the bigger agencies out there. “Let’s let them take care of that part.” We’re like, eh, okay, let’s see what happens.
Sure enough, we watched what they did and we were doing it better. Our results, everything about it was far exceeding what one of the top agencies in the country was doing. So of course, the little lightbulbs go off in our heads, thinking, as soon as this current tech startup is behind us, between the demand that we’re seeing from the boots on the ground, all the people out there that were literally begging us to help them, and combining that with the affirmation that we were truly, truly good at this stuff, our course was set. That was about 10 years ago.
ROB: It’s interesting how oftentimes through that experience in another business, you find out – sometimes it can be wanderlust and you just try to do something different, but in this case you were able to find something that you could do differently and successfully. If I rewind the conversation a little bit, you were talking about some of these rather complex things. I think if you ask a client sometimes to pick an attribution strategy in Google Analytics, their eyes glaze over. It sounds like you have the strength and knowledge to be able to prescribe that for them pretty well.
But marketing also requires going one step further when you’re working for a client and helping them understand. How do you think about helping these owners understand something like attribution when you get to something like beyond first click, last click, even attribution, and you’re trying to tell somebody that an ad gave them 20% of a lead? I think it’d be pretty confusing. How do you think about getting those concepts through to clients?
BRIAN: That’s a great question. Early on, we really embraced this idea of the client relationship model, starting with education. I’ll come back to that in a second, but really making sure that our client is truly educated. We weren’t oblivious to the fact that, for the most part, in our industry, the number one reason why clients drift away is because they make a comment that says something like, “I didn’t know what they were doing.” They honestly didn’t understand what was happening.
So first is education. Then it’s evaluation of their specific situation. Only after that we make specific recommendations as to what they should be doing.
The education side – as it turns out, I love talking about this stuff. I’m a passionate advocate for the entire model of digital marketing. I love getting in front of groups of people and explaining these things. Because of my background working with businesses on the IT side, I spent many, many times in boardrooms and in front of employees from companies, really breaking down very complicated technical things into little anecdotes and analogies and fun ways to think about stuff. So I was always very capable of doing that, and I really truly enjoyed it.
We got way ahead of the curve on that and early on started doing workshops, just free education workshops that would be designed to get business owners understanding this stuff. Because they’re dying for information. Even today, even though our industry is a little bit more mature, still so many business owners are quite oblivious. They really don’t understand even the basics, let alone some of the more complex concepts like you mentioned.
So we hopped on that train big time, and interestingly, it led us – because we’re also what’s considered a Google Partner; we have a Google Partnership status, and about 3 or 4 years ago, Google introduced this program called Grow with Google, where they were encouraging small business organizations, chamber of commerce, public libraries, or whatever to allow Google to do these live feed education workshops. At the time, since we were a partner, they were opening it up to agencies as well, so we started becoming involved in that.
We did that so much that we became the only agency, at least in the state of Arizona, that Google recognized as one of its high impact partners. That was strictly because of the sheer number of people that have gone through our workshops. I know that’s sort of a long roundabout way to answer your question, but yeah, education on that stuff is absolutely critical.
There’s also another element as well. There’s getting a client to the point to know enough to know that they’ll never truly understand it, and then they basically have faith in you at that point. They say, “Okay, I get that it’s really complicated. I don’t think I fully understand it, but I’m fully convinced that you understand it, and as long as at the end of the day I’m seeing results and I see that you’re attentive, that’s really the key.”
ROB: As we were chatting before we started recording, that background you have in doing this education has really helped in the moment that we’re in. We are in the middle of this coronavirus national shutdown, everybody work from home situation. How are you adapting your agency to operate in this new, fully remote environment? What parts of that do you think you might stick with even once we’re all back together in person more often?
BRIAN: That’s a great question. Like we were talking about, I love the live workshop. I thrive in that environment where I can be interactive with people and gauge – if I’m saying something that’s flying right over their heads, I can usually pick that up. So the challenge, for all of us really – and this doesn’t just go for workshops; it goes for meetings, it goes for everything that we’re doing right now – is to try to find a way to offset that disconnect. Like we talked about before, there’s no substitute for that live connection.
That being said, I think there are also some opportunities right now. I think that as of today – I feel like we’re still, sadly, in the early stages of this; we’re hopefully maybe a third of the way through, who knows – but I think after we settle into the new normal and people realize that, “Okay, I’m going to be here a while. I can’t, even if I wanted to in some cases, be as productive as I was before because I can’t do meetings, I can’t do this, whatever. I’m stuck at home, not even driving” – I mean, for some people, an hour or two of their day just opened up because they don’t have to drive cars.
Again, for business owners and for those that are truly entrepreneurial, I think they are going to shift over to this mindset of saying, “You know what? With all this free time, I’m going to use it to make things better. I’m going to finally understand this thing I never really understood before. I’m going to figure out how to program my TV.” Whatever is on their list of things. From a business standpoint, they might actually be more interested in circling back to saying, “When I come out of this, I’ve always wanted to try Facebook ads, but I don’t know how to do it.”
So I think there will be an increase in the number of people that are at least interested in listening to or participating in some form of webinar or podcast. I don’t think we’re there yet; I think people are still in the “I’ve just got to figure out how to work remotely.” But once that settles in, I think there might actually be some opportunity.
Back to your question. We were doing a pretty steady series of live events. We’ve obviously switched those over to all webinars. Even in the month of April that we’re in right now, we’ve allocated every Thursday morning from 9 to 10 a.m. – we’re just doing updates. There’s so much information coming out in waves from Google and Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram and Yelp, and they’re all offering money this and credits for that and changing their policies. So, we’re allocating that time just to get everyone up to date.
But then we’re also layering in really interesting topics. Like I think the one we’re doing tomorrow is how to look at Google Trends to truly understand the impact that this situation is having on your business. This is something anybody can do. You don’t have to have this high level of analytical skills to go to Google Search Trends and see whether or not people are searching more often for this, less often for that, or about the same. Once you’re looking at that data and saying, “Interesting. People are no longer searching for this; however, they really are searching for that now,” that actually might help you course correct and maybe adapt your strategies a little bit.
So yeah, we’re still 100% all-in on the education side. Obviously switching over to webinar, for better or for worse, and then hopefully getting back to the normal mode once all of this is behind us.
ROB: Are there any interesting examples of the Google Trends shifts you’ve seen on behalf of clients that you might be able to share?
BRIAN: Absolutely. People ask me, “How are you guys doing?” We have such a diverse number of clients that we’re really seeing all three scenarios. We’re seeing some that are just devastated, sadly. We have clients that specialize in providing bartender services for parties and events, and of course, they’re wiped out. Their entire book of business from now through May no longer exists. Our guidance to them is saying all the people that had these events are going to have to reschedule, so even though you’re not finding people that are looking to do it right now, you might find them later.
We have some that are seeing no impact whatsoever. If you’re looking at AC repair or plumbing repair – pipes and air conditioning systems have absolutely no respect for the stay at home orders. If they’re going to break, they’re going to break. They’re not going to wait until everything’s normal, so there’s no reason why there’d be less search on that, and there isn’t. If anything, we’re probably going to start to see a sudden uptick of that. People are home more often, and if you’re in a state like Arizona where it’s going to get into the upper 80s this week, they’re going to be putting stresses on systems that they didn’t really have to before with their kids at home and working from home. So I would expect they may grow a little bit.
The third category of businesses that we work with are actually seeing increases. We have businesses that sell office cleaning supplies. We have businesses that offer nanny services for people that come to their homes and watch their kids. Again, there’s a lot of people that have to go to work. All the people in the medical industry. So there’s an example of a huge uptick. Their website traffic and the amount of leads they’re getting is off the charts.
So we really are in an interesting situation where we get to see all three of those scenarios playing out.
ROB: That’s an interesting mix, and probably encouraging to have that combination of some clients that are needing you a little bit more while some of those other clients maybe need a little bit less while they figure out this time.
BRIAN: Right. It’s almost like having a stock portfolio. [laughs] It’s good to have diversity. You’ve got your winners and you’ve got some of them that aren’t so good.
ROB: When you think about your experience in building WebMO – and it sounds like you have some experience from building prior businesses as well – what are some things you would do differently if you were starting WebMO from scratch that you’ve learned?
BRIAN: That’s a good question. I saw that previously, and it’s always hard for a business owner to do that, when you see yourself as being like “I’ve got this figured out.” But I would say in the early years, we found our lane. We found this lane and we were very committed to sticking to it. We were like, “We don’t want to build websites, we don’t want to do social media, we don’t want to get into this, we don’t want to get into that.” We were very much specializing in really optimizing organic visibility/SEO and doing Google search ads, because we had that down. We mastered those two things.
We were probably a little more reluctant than we could’ve been to just open up and be more responsive to what the market was asking for. There was probably a few years where we just said, “No, no, no, no, no.” Again, hindsight is 20/20. I don’t know, maybe it was better to do that.
But today, through growing and evolving or whatever, I think the lesson with most small business owners is you have to listen to the market. You have to provide what your client wants, ultimately. You can’t be too stubborn about saying, “No, no, this is all you need.” But on the other hand, you can’t be running around like a crazy person saying yes to everything and getting into areas that are outside your expertise.
I would’ve probably gone a little sooner into getting more into a lot of the other stuff that we do. Now currently, we do stuff across the board. Of course, we build websites, and we have campaigns running on everything from Spotify to obviously all the social media platforms and LinkedIn and direct email campaigns. You name it, we probably do it, if it’s in digital marketing.
I probably would’ve been a little more open to doing that sooner if I could roll back time for a few years. But again, you can’t really second guess it too much when you like where you’re at currently. We’re very happy with where the business is now. It’s always tough to say – but if I had done that too soon and I hadn’t really mastered it, maybe it would’ve done more harm than good.
It is a tough question, but that’s probably about the closest I can get. Just being a little quicker to respond to where our clients were probably needing us most. That would probably be it.
ROB: Are there any new directions that you think you might be getting pulled in, but you’re not quite sure yet?
BRIAN: There’s certain things that I’ve just never been a big advocate of when it comes to marketing in general. There’s certain tactics that I’m not probably ever going to be convinced to do. Things like spam. We’re never going to tell a client, “You should be blasting spam out to people’s inboxes.”
Sending advertisements to people’s text messages is to me crossing a line that I just will never feel comfortable doing. Yeah, you know you’re going to get email solicitations from people you don’t know; you accept that. You know you’ve got to see commercials when you watch TV. You know you’re going to see ads on websites. You know if you’re a Facebook user, you’re going to see advertisements. But texts to me are our one safe space where we can be sheltered from getting bombarded with ads.
We’ve had clients before say, “Hey, what about these?” and I’m just like, “I don’t think so.” I think I’d still be reluctant to do something that I know, anecdotally, people in general just really, really don’t like. Even if there’s a possible ROI on it, there’s probably some areas where I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking my clients.
ROB: I absolutely understand that, and I totally agree with you about crossing those lines. It’s interesting what you mentioned on being pulled toward social earlier and resisting it.
In a way, one of the things I end up seeing as I have these conversations is a lot of the people who got really good early at doing the core search ads and that sort of thing stayed away from social when it was fluffy and then came back into it when it wasn’t “Hey, let me make a nice organic post that goes viral and gets a lot of activity,” but “Oh my goodness, Facebook ads is becoming sophisticated, and look at these tools we can bring to bear.” I think there may be a theme there. Also the case in email. I think a lot of clients weren’t ready to use email intelligently for a while.
BRIAN: I would say that’s exactly correct, and that almost mirrors precisely how we approached it. I didn’t like social media management because of that very reason. It was fluffy, like you said. There wasn’t a lot of ways to calculate an ROI. There wasn’t as much engineering and math and science behind it. It was way too obvious what you were doing and not doing from a client’s perspective. There wasn’t anything you could bring to the table other than really clever writing skills. It just didn’t go to our core value. It’s like, we’re math guys, we’re science guys; how in the world does that apply to making a clever, quippy little Facebook post?
But then, like you mentioned, things got a lot more interesting when some of these more sophisticated targeting tools – that’s about the same time we started hopping into it, because then there was a value add. That’s the thing. As an agency, as a business owner, or whatever, if you’re not doing something that’s adding value that’s obvious, your lifespan with them is going to be limited.
I always explain that with any transaction. You have this perception of value that the client or the customer sees, and if they see the cost being at about the same level – there’s a value, there’s what you’re getting, and then there’s the cost that they’re paying for it – if that is out of balance, if they feel like “I’m paying too much because they’re not doing this,” then it’s going to be trouble.
The problem that we ran into, and a lot of people ran into with social media management, is that it’s so obvious what you’re doing. There’s no secret. They’re looking at your posts, and for better or for worse, they’re saying, “That’s it? My 16-year-old could do that. I’m paying $1,000 a month. I could just hire a part-time person and have them do it all the time.” So it’s really hard to explain or to get across to somebody that what you’re doing is something that you’re uniquely qualified to do, that somebody else couldn’t do as well.
About that time when ads became a little more sophisticated or whatever, it fit into – one of our core, principal beliefs is this idea that there are no expert marketers, only experienced marketers and expert testers. So, we started embracing this idea that every single strategy out there is probably worthy of testing. If you’re looking at Facebook, if you’re looking at Instagram, if you’re looking at Spotify, whatever, you don’t have to buy into this idea that you spend thousands of dollars and do it whether it’s working or not. You just have to take a testing mentality and say, “I’ll try it. I’ll throw a few hundred bucks at this.”
And if you’re working with somebody like ourselves, who’s very good at analyzing data, with a relatively small budget we can drill right down and say, “There you go. That little budget that you ran for 2 months, here’s precisely what it got you. We may have run across the tactic that will work.” On the other hand, some things don’t work. It’s marketing, right? You’re going through your ideas; some things are going to work, some things are going to fail. If it’s going to fail, fail fast and fail cheap. That is the beauty of digital marketing. You don’t have to necessarily do an ad buy that you’re committed to for 6 months. You can actually try a small budget test.
I know that was a long circle around, but that mindset of adopting this idea that our job is just to test things for our clients – we just need to execute tests – that then opened up everything. Everything from Yelp to LinkedIn to Bing and YouTube and whatever. That’s what got us into that, after that first wave of pure social media management abated a little bit.
ROB: That seems like a great principle to carry forward, this idea that you might not say no to something you don’t believe is effective; you can test it, and you can even probably keep testing it as long as you are changing something and you’re not just in a rut of experimental nothingness.
BRIAN: Exactly. That idea of A/B split testing everything from your landing pages or conversion pages to your ad copy – again, the beauty of digital marketing comes back to data. If you have data, you can literally look at it and say, “That ad got a 3% click-through rate and led to this sort of visitor engagement when they got to my website. This ad had a 4% conversion rate, but had lower visitor engagement.” Okay, that’s some great information.
It’s very unique that way. It’s extremely hard, if not impossible, to get that level of detail on traditional marketing methods. Radio, TV, billboards, magazines – there’s basic things you can do, maybe track phone calls, but the unique thing is you can’t get into the mind of somebody watching a TV ad and see how they’re reacting to it. When they come to your website or a landing page, based on all the math that we are able to apply to this, you can really understand the people that are there that appear to be engaged, the visitor engagement metric. It’s pretty common in our industry.
It’s exciting to me. I’m super passionate about it. This is the kind of thing where I teach people this in a workshop and a lightbulb goes off. They’re like, “That makes sense!” You can actually get a better understanding of if your marketing is even moving generally in the right direction.
ROB: You definitely know your numbers, Brian. When people want to find you and WebMO, where should they look you up?
BRIAN: You can just go to www.web-mo.com. That’s our website. Or you can just type “WebMO Tucson” or “WebMO” Arizona, “WebMO.” You’re going to find a few references to us out there. We do work with clients all over the country. We’re based in Arizona, but we are definitely nationwide in terms of the clients we work with.
We love to partner with other types of agencies. We have a lot of partnerships with website designers, traditional marketing agencies, where we provide these services behind the scenes and basically make you look awesome because we’re back there crunching all these numbers and generating all this great data and reports. Meanwhile, you’re talking to your client and saying, “Hey, look what we did!” Sot hats a good way to initiate the conversation.
Sign up for a workshop. Ask for a free report where we can obviously analyze your market. There’s lots of actionable steps once you get to the website.
ROB: Excellent. Thank you so much, Brian. Best wishes to you and WebMO going forward. We’ll look for you online. Enjoy.
BRIAN: Thanks, Rob. I appreciate the time. Stay healthy and safe and all that good stuff.
ROB: Indeed. Take care, Brian. Thanks.
BRIAN: Thanks.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Ty Largo is Owner and Creative Director at Awe Collective, a full-service agency providing branding, advertising, public relations, digital strategy, content marketing, social media, video and photography services to diverse industries across the US.
Sometimes the agency does (awe) inspiring work. Currently, in the face of Covid-19, the whole agency has shifted to “show up for clients in a different way.” Ty has been on phone calls, comforting clients crying about having to cut shifts. He has written emotionally difficult letters communicating a client’s “hard messages” to their staff, vendors, and/or guests. He feels this kind of PR service is a privilege, an honor . . . and a burden. Even in these “weird and uncertain times,” the agency’s role is much the same as in better times . . . to provide guidance.
Ty recognizes that no agency can excel at “everything,” and wants every tool used for its clients to be “best in class.” He uses the analogy of a Swiss army knife: a tool made of many tools . . . none of which work particularly well for what it’s purported purpose. Ty believes it is a strength to know where parts of his agency work like a Swiss Army knife and to be willing to reach out to a partner agency whose tool is “best in class.” If the client wins, then so does Awe.
Ty explains further explains: The ideal situation for Awe is that they always have a good network of great partners to partner with in order to provide optimal client results. Awe can pass over clients to these same partner agencies when it is already working at capacity or when the client needs services Awe cannot provide.
What has Ty learned over the years? In the past, when he was more “ego-driven,” he would tell a prospective client that his agency could do everything, and then “white label” work contracted through other agencies. Today, he just tells clients what his agency can and cannot do, recommends when a partner is best added to the mix, or admits, kindly, “Hey, this is not a fit for us,” and then refers the client to another agency. He says it’s a relief “to be honest . . . transparent . . . not to try to pretend.”
Business owners often feel they should say “yes” to everything. Ty reminds us there are other options: you can compromise and you can say no.
Ty went to college to study music, dropped out in his third year, and never returned. He hopscotched around industries and quit his job as creative director at a poorly-managed software firm on February 14, 2008 – the same day he bought his first house.
Ty started freelance marketing consulting, growing his business client by client. (He had no training in marketing, and this was during the recession of 2008) He never planned to have a business. (He had no training in business and he thought he was going to be a nerdy band teacher.) In 2018, Awe Collective was named the #1 “Best Place to Work in Arizona” by the Phoenix Business Journal. Ty attributes that award, and his agency’s success, to his obsession with team wellness. “Are they happy? Do they feel like they’re in an environment where they’re being challenged and they have opportunity?”
Ty can be reached on his company website at: https://awecollective.com/
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Ty James Largo, Owner and Creative Director at Awe Collective, based in Tempe, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast.
TY: Hello. Hi, listeners. Thanks for having me.
ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Ty, why don’t you start off by telling us a little bit about Awe Collective and what makes Awe Collective great?
TY: We are a full-service agency based in Tempe, Arizona, but our work spans across the country. When I say full service, everything from branding, marketing, advertising, public relations, digital – everything across the board.
Our clients are a diverse portfolio, which is great, especially in these very interesting, ever-changing times. Clients include everything from luxury, a Venetian resort and spa, to the California Democratic Party. So, we are definitely a very diverse and very interesting agency. We do a little bit of everything, which is great.
But I say it on our website: we are not a Swiss army knife, and I hate when people say that because a Swiss army knife is the worst thing on planet Earth. Could there ever have been a worse pair of scissors invented, or a nail file, or a knife? A Swiss army knife can do so many things, but it does it so poorly in every facet that it’s actually engineered to do.
But we are not a Swiss army knife. We are experts at everything. We are that full tray of tools that is expertly crafted to be its best max effort in every different medium where possible. That’s us. Awe Collective.
ROB: Fantastic. We are right in the thick of the coronavirus lockdown, so maybe doing a little bit more Democratic Party and a little bit less travel and spa right now? Or how are clients reacting? Are some doubling down and planning for the time of abundance after? How does that look?
TY: Candidly, in my past 6 days, I’ve been getting on the phone with clients that just need someone to virtually hug them as they cry about having to do tough layoffs, having to cut shifts, having to deal with the actual true person-to-person tough calls that have to be made – I think that’s our privilege and our honor and our burden, too, as a PR agency.
We don’t always get to promote great stuff. Sometimes we have to do real tough messaging and level up for our clients. That’s been the past 5-6 days, where I’ve had to write really strongly, emotionally generous, hard messages for clients to their staff or to their vendors or to their guests. So, it’s not a great time.
But per this podcast and per the arc of everything that you’ve done work on, we typically get to say really great stuff all the time. We get to have fun and promote really cool things and all the stuff. But in this case right now, I’m switching gears and my whole agency is switching gears to be able to show up for clients in a different way, where they need help delivering very tough messages. Yeah, it’s a weird time.
ROB: For sure. But what a privilege to be called upon in this time, what a privilege to be needed to help people get outside the things that they don’t quite know how to say, but they know they need to say, they know they have to communicate. I like what you said about the Swiss army knife. You’ve even probably seen the 1,000 tool Swiss army knife that they were briefly selling and had become a little bit of an internet meme. But it’s not that useful. It’s a tool in origin, I think, more of bare utility and survival and not one of thriving.
As you think of being the best of each tool that you provide, how do you think about keeping excellence in each area while also – you’re not probably a couple thousand person company with whole pods of teams on each specialty. So how do you keep that excellence on each tool?
TY: Great question. When I do talks, when I do public speaking, I’m pretty real. I try as much as possible to not do pitching and spin. I think one of my strongest top tier superpowers is knowing what I suck at. I think that’s part of – if we’re using the Swiss army knife analogy, you can’t be great at everything. No one can be. No agency out there can do all of the things on planet Earth.
So, you have to have a real chat internally and reflect on, “Hey, are we the Swiss army knife on this part? Are we that crappy pair of scissors that’s in the Swiss army knife in this area?” And if so, let it go. Or pull in a partner to fill that gap. Pull in a partner agency that it’s like, these guys are amazing, we love them. We can provide strategy and leadership from a client perspective; however, we just don’t have the capabilities that this other agency has to that degree.
It’s more about letting ego go, I think, and being, in the best way, self-deprecating to be able to be high performance. You can still perform and show up for a client without having to try to do it all. There’s power in saying “Hey, I suck at this; however, my friend over here at XYZ agency is rad, and we can give him good direction on it, we can keep it aligned to our strategy overall, but let’s partner with this person.”
It’s not a moment of failure. I think a lot of agencies feel like they have to always be the best at everything. It’s a moment of power, where you acknowledge power elsewhere and you acknowledge the fact that your superpowers are very different and very diverse. Pulling in a partner is not a threat to the work that you’re doing with a client. It’s a moment of strength, I think.
ROB: I think it depends on what your goal is. The hard part and the ego part is to try and be the solution for everything, but that’s not what your clients are asking for. If it’s possible, what they’d love for you to do is to help them find a solution for any problem. That’s a trust building exercise, when they come to you with a new problem and they say, “What about this? Could you help me?” You say, “Oh, I know this person over here, I know this partner” – because they don’t. If they knew the partner, they wouldn’t be asking you.
TY: Right. In general, clients are calling us because they need guidance, period. It’s not effective or healthy as an agency, or for the client, to mislead them on capabilities that you know you don’t have expertise in or a specialty focus in. They’re calling us because they want guidance. If you have a trusted partner that can do that for them, great. Do it. That’s our purpose.
Even in these times right now, too – again, not to make it a dramatic response, but more than ever, businesses are needing guidance and expertise. They’re like, “What do I do?”
So yeah, I think part of our model is to always have a good set of great partners that we can either partner with on clients or do a pass through where it’s like, “We have a conflict of interest; however, we love this other agency, this other marketing provider that we love to death. We wish we could work with you right now, but we can’t” – for whatever reason, whether it’s a conflict or we’re just at max capacity.
I think that’s an important thing for agencies in general, to get over yourself and just really, truly have a good network of people that you respect that you can refer work to or partner with on. It makes you that much stronger. It doesn’t make you weaker. It makes you stronger.
ROB: It’s all in a good toolkit. I think there’s an interesting question, and I don’t know if there’s a right or wrong answer to it: how do you think about when to white label, when to present the solution as part of your overall solution as an agency, versus when to partner where the partnership is more visible, and when to wholesale refer and not take any part of the business, but just pass it along? How do you think about that decision – if you have any sort of rubric for it?
TY: I used to do the very ego-driven, “We can do it all,” and if I private label a select part of the service, I’ll do it. I think these days, though, I’m very transparent. I’m very like, okay, cool, we’ll do our consultation on the sales call, and if I really, truly feel like this is not something that we 100% can do, or if we have to partner or if we have to refer, I just tell them.
And I have to tell everyone in this audience here, there’s such relief in that, not trying to pretend. Again, I don’t want to be the Swiss army knife moment ever, and as much as we have a wide-ranging capability suite for sure, there’s so much power and relief in being able to be transparent and honest right from the get-go. Before we even send a contract or a proposal or whatever. Just being able to say, “This is a project that needs a very specific toolset, and although we can do that work internally, my recommendation is we pull in a partner.”
Or “Hey, this is not a fit for us.” We always say that with kindness. We’re really big on chemistry with our clients. We’re very fortunate in the way that we can pick and choose who we do and do not want to work with, and if there’s not a chemistry, if there’s not a cultural connection, we still love on those potential clients. We’ll be upfront and say, “This is not a fit for the kind of work that we do. However, we’re very grateful for the opportunity to chat with you. We are inspired by where you’re going with the brand. However, we’d love for you to talk with XYZ partner.” We’ve done that a million times.
I think that’s a big thing. You feel the need as a business owner to say yes to everything, but you can compromise, and you can say no. And there’s power in saying it upfront versus going through the motions of a whole parade of fake, weird flirting when you’re not interested, when you’re having the worst date of your life. [laughs] It’s a terrible date but you’re still flirting; however, you know this person is not the one. There’s power in real talk. There’s power in being able to say, “No, it’s not a vibe. Not a fit. I’m out.”
ROB: For sure. Not that it’s quite this extreme, but if you go to a really nice hotel and you go to the concierge, they do absolutely nothing, but they have a huge degree of trust because they can tell you anything with a high degree of authority.
If we rewind a little bit, Ty, tell me about the origin story of Awe Collective. How did it come into being? What made you start this thing?
TY: Oh, interesting. I wish I could tell you some very charismatic leadership message about the origin story of my company, but I can’t. I went to school for music. I took a break from college 3 years in, and I’m still on that break 20 years later. [laughs] So I don’t have a degree in anything, period. I’ve never studied marketing or PR or branding or anything in that sense.
I kind of hopscotched from industry to industry. I’ve done everything from public education to IT to marketing to fill-in-the-blank moment. My last job that I had was I was a creative director for a software firm based in Arlington. It was not a great situation. I had really bad bosses and leaders, period. So, I decided to quit my job. This was 2008.
I quit my job on Valentine’s Day in 2008 – also the same date that I bought my first house. Great timing. [laughs] Believe me when I say I did not have a plan to have a great business. But yeah, I made a leap of faith and I made it at a wrong time to dive into a deep end of a pool that I didn’t know was so deep.
I started doing freelance consulting for marketing, client after client. It made sense at some point to call it something different than just having clients cut checks to me directly. I never had a plan to have a business, ever. If you had asked me as a kid, “Would you ever think you would own a business?”, I’d be like, “No, I want to be a band teacher. That’s my purpose in life, to be a nerdy band teacher.” But fate has a different plan for everybody than what we think we’re supposed to be.
Flash forward to now, I started off not planning to own a business and now I own a business, and I’m very proud of it. My company has been named the #1 Best Place to Work in Arizona – not just in my industry, but period, across the board. I didn’t plan to own a business, but I’m pretty good at it.
It’s because I love on my team so much, honestly. Even as we’re going through these crazy times and I don’t get to see them every day – that’s probably the hardest part of my job right now. I don’t get to see my family every day. I love on them so much. I’m obsessed about their happiness. I think when you do that, you don’t have to worry about the performance. You don’t have to worry about how good the work is going to be.
The only thing I think as a leader you have to worry about and obsess about – and I’ll say it again, obsess about – is how happy your team is. You should be waking up at night in fear of like, “Is everyone happy?” That’s where the focus should be.
Again, I’m not a trained business owner; I did not plan to do this or to work in marketing. I’m not qualified, technically, to work in marketing. But I love my team so much, and I’m so grateful that they are on this journey with me.
It seems very basic to me, but I think it’s so revolutionary to some people, and maybe perhaps to the listeners here too – you will thrive if you just take care of your team. You will thrive, period. There’s not a big pitch behind it. Just obsess about the happiness of your team, and the work will be good. I promise, the clients will be happy. The clients will be plentiful. The clients will continue to grow, and you’ll get more clients, all the things, whatever.
That’s the endgame, for sure, but if you really focus on loving on your team and making that your prime priority, especially in this time right now – I didn’t go to school for business, whatever, but I just know what has worked for us, and I’ll just tell you, that’s what the focus should be.
ROB: Beyond the instinctual, are there any habits or rhythms or routines in the business that you have, whether it’s daily/weekly/monthly, that help you reinforce love to your team? I know that sounds a little bit mechanistic, but for folks who it doesn’t come naturally for, that may be helpful to them, or even helpful in showing love to people who may have different ways of feeling love. How do you think about rhythm and routine?
TY: Great question. We have our weekly team meetings, and we do it over lunch. Not catered in because that’s still in our office space and it feels very technical and it feels very clinical.
We have a gross, awesome, amazing, wonderful local dive bar that is approximately 1.5 minutes away from our office. We’ll go there and sit on the patio and just be exposed to fresh air. It’s a limited venue, so either you get chicken tenders or you get a burger – and this is funny because we have James Beard caliber clients that we could go to if we wanted to, but this is not about that moment. It’s about how we can really, truly feed ourselves in a very comfortable context.
So we go there, and there’s a level of love in that situation where we get to have work talk, talk through the clients, whatever, walk through the next week that’s coming up, forecast it, go through the forensics of the last couple weeks. It’s a weird, twisty dynamic, and I think that’s part of our routine. We want to mix it up as much as possible, because the stresses at work are challenging. Why not just sit at a gross dive bar where every table that you sit at is sticky? [laughs] Just mix it up.
And the staff knows fully that we are ready, able, and capable of doing a very bougie team meeting, but there’s something about the self-deprecation, collectively, of chilling at a gross dive bar, like, “Hey, get over yourself. Let’s chill and let’s have an 11:00 vodka drink and chicken tenders and just be friends because we love each other.” This is a space where we can be at ease. It’s not at a conference table. It’s not in a boardroom. We do that weekly.
ROB: There’s definitely something intangible about breaking bread together, about getting outside of the confines and the familiarity of the office, for sure. That’s all really good stuff.
What are some things that you’ve learned from building Awe Collective that you might do differently? Maybe some lessons learned if you were starting over, and things maybe you’re already doing different going forward now?
TY: Good question. If I could go back and do it again. Actually, I’ll be honest – I don’t know that I have any regrets. But I have advice. I think my path is very different than most business owners, period, let alone agency owners. I have no regrets because of the fact that all I did was always, endlessly obsess about my team’s wellness. Are they happy? Do they feel like they’re in an environment where they’re being challenged and they have opportunity?
The way I describe my company is this is not the place that you retire at. This is the place where you learn how to be a badass. I say that because I don’t have high turnover; I have an incredible list of alumni who I’ve been very privileged to work with and to raise. That is my ultimate honor and purpose, to raise badasses.
So, I don’t have regrets in any way, shape, or form. I have pride in the sense that all I’ve ever done is obsess about the wellness and development of my team. As they move on, my alumni are not like a marketing specialist at XYZ Agency. Cody on my alumni list is a director at a global PR firm based in LA now. Another former alumni is a director internally at a global grocery chain.
I think as a business owner, the tendency is to obsess about sales and very clinical things. That’s responsible to do. Yes, do that stuff, or bring somebody on your team that does that for you. But – I sound like a broken record, but if I had to look back and think about it, I would have regretted not loving on my team. But thankfully I don’t have those regrets because that’s always been my obsession.
It’s been the critical key to my success, making sure that my team is growing, thriving. In their time with me, how much can I make sure that they make the most out of this for themselves? Everything else will just fall into place. Client success will fall into place. Agency success will fall into place. If you just focus on your talent, your team, who can say that’s the wrong thing to do?
It seems basic to me, but I think a lot of agency owners don’t understand that. That should be your obsession. Obsess about every single person. If you have waking nightmares at night – which sometimes I do – it should be about that, not about “Is XYZ client happy?” or “Is XYZ client going to renew?” or whatever. Your eyes are not on the prize where they need to be. It has to be on the people that you should be loving.
ROB: That’s great. I hear a tremendous amount of positivity, a tremendous amount of even appreciation for the people that you have worked with. It’s probably less scary – I think people worry when they go to work for a closely held business that their boss is going to be crazy and controlling. And I think a lot of people are, out of fear. I don’t hear a lot of fear coming through. Certainly, fear of not treating people well, but not fear of the outworking of treating people well.
TY: Part of having the privilege of being able to work with talented people is to know that they’re not going to be with you forever, so just – I think that’s part of the pressure to just absolutely endlessly love on somebody. You know they’re going to be gone.
Cody, who is one of my stars, forever amazing alumni, I’ve always known that he’s going to move on – not away from us, but move on to something different. He needs more challenges. As a boss and as an employer and as a leader, you have to lean into that. You can’t be sad about that stuff. You have to be very excited.
I do feel like it is a family, and obviously my kids are not going to live at home for the rest of their lives. I’ll be so happy when they go to their next steps. That’s what it feels like to me. Again, it’s an honor and a privilege, and a little bit of sadness, to see their next steps and to be a part of raising them where they are ready to go and be a badass somewhere else, and not take that as a loss, but take that as a win.
I get to look at Cody and be so proud. Not to get too emotional but be so proud. It’s cool. It’s a cool thing.
ROB: Fantastic. When people want to find you and Awe Collective, where should they go to find you?
TY: I would say hit us up on our website, www.awecollective.com. Obviously on social too, as well. I feel like we’ve been very dark on social the past couple weeks, for obvious reasons, because we’re dealing with this whole situation on behalf of our clients. We’re there to support them. So, if our social channels seem a little quiet, that’s why.
But yeah, hit us up on the website. You can see a little bit more about our wide and weird breadth of the work that we do. There’s a lot of our DNA in there, too, a lot of our voice. It’s not just a big portfolio site. It’s more like “Here’s who we are; here’s who we’re not.” So, you can really, truly see the DNA of our company. We try our best to express that on our website. It’s not a pitch. It’s not a flashy, razzle-dazzle website. It’s just like “Here’s who we are.”
It almost acts as a filter, if anything, for clients. If they want a very traditional path for marketing in general, you as a viewer on the website know that’s not us. I think our website does a really good job of telling our story, and again, who we are and who we are not.
ROB: Perfect. Ty James Largo of Awe Collective, thank you for joining the podcast and sharing with us today.
TY: Thank you so much for having me and thank you to the audience for listening. This has been really fun, and hopefully informative for the audience here. I’m happy to do any follow-ups if needed. Go team.
ROB: Perfect. We can all stay positive. Thank you, Ty.
TY: Thanks.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Dave Nobs is the Managing Director and Chief Growth Officer at Lavidge, a highly awarded, employee-owned, full-service advertising agency with ever broadening horizons. Lavidge started in traditional advertising in 1982, then added public relations in the 90s, digital marketing in the 2000s, and multicultural marketing about 5 years ago. A couple years later, the agency broke down the walls between what had been its divisional siloes. Subject matter experts now look at the totality of a client’s issues holistically.
Dave notes that the agency’s work focuses on projects that meet client-specific and industry-specific benchmarks, most commonly tracked through brand awareness and sales. He explains that his agency strives to make a difference for clients, employees, and the community.
Lavidge added multicultural marketing to address cross-cultural messaging needs in a state with a strong Hispanic presence . . . but multicultural marketing is not just about language differences. Dave says marketers serving a specific cultural market need to be aware of the different, and almost intangible. “tones,” strategies, and tactics needed for a client to gain credibility within that community.
“Truth, inspiration, and action” drive the agency’s projects:
- Truth “happens” when the agency and a client collaborate to research issues, develop strategy, evaluate data and analytics, and go through the give-and-take-process of participating in focus groups, interviews, consumer intercepts, and experiential observation – and synthesize all that market and client information to understand what the client is “about,” and what the client “needs.”
- In the inspiration phase, the agency and the client work “hand-in-hand” on the marketing story, the design and art direction, and the feel of the narrative.
- The action part includes media and channel placement and assessing responses and brand impression dynamics – getting the message to the masses and hearing their reply.
As Chief Growth Officer, Dave generates new business, grows existing client business, attends to agency marketing issues, and develops strategic client innovations. In this interview, he lists assets that he attributes to Lavidge’s success:
- An attitude of positivity
- Daily communication with clients large and small
- The agency’s focus on the client . . . and on using “every experience, tool, trend, skill and insight at our disposal to create immediate and lasting connections between brands and human beings.”
Over the years, Lavidge has evolved to concentrate on a number of core verticals: healthcare, education, retail services, homebuilders, and sports.
Dave discussed re-reading a Harvard Business Review article on how to market in a recession. The article’s author asserted that tough economic times were “not the time to cut advertising.” Historically, brands increasing advertising during a downturn, while their competitors cut back, “can significantly improve market share and return on investment.” Dave reminds us that “It’s also important to be aware of tonality . . . to be authentic . . . to be helpful” and highlighted several companies that are taking action to do just that.
Dave is available on his company’s website at: https://www.lavidge.com/.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Dave Nobs, the Managing Director at Lavidge based in Phoenix, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast, Dave.
DAVE: Thank you, Rob. It’s a pleasure to be here.
ROB: Fantastic to have you here, Dave. Why don’t you explain to us where Lavidge really excels and what you’re known for?
DAVE: Sure. We are a full-service advertising, digital, public relations, and multicultural agency here in Phoenix. We’ve been in business since ’82. We were founded in the ’80s as an advertising agency, added PR in the ’90s, digital in the 2000s, and then multicultural marketing about 5 years ago.
We are one of the largest agencies in Arizona, and certainly one of a handful of full-service agencies, meaning all of our services are in-house under one roof.
ROB: Perfect. You’ve been around for the addition of that multicultural line of business; what were some of the things you saw in the market that pulled you in that direction and caused you to commit to that line of business?
DAVE: We’re always looking at innovative client solutions, and multicultural marketing, particularly Hispanic marketing here in the Southwest, is particularly important to our clients. We started with McDonald’s, which was a big client of ours, and then we added multicultural marketing to a number of our other clients, particularly in healthcare, like Banner Health, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and others just because it was a need that they have.
Multicultural marketing is very different than general market in tone and some strategies and tactics specifically geared to accomplish results in that area.
ROB: How in particular? What are some of the ways you would say in detail that things need to be different when you’re speaking to that sort of audience?
DAVE: I think different strategies and tactics resonate with the Hispanic market better than others. Obviously, digital is very important. Events, immersive/experiential marketing sometimes is more important than others. But really, for us, it’s more a client solution than it is anything else, particularly for our clients that has that audience, and that’s important for them.
ROB: I would imagine a part of that is really almost subjective in the eyes of the person being marketed to. It’s this overall sense I think we all have when someone knows and understands us versus where someone’s intruding into our world but doesn’t really belong at the party. Is there an intangible dimension to it, do you think?
DAVE: I think that’s accurate.
ROB: Perfect. Tell us a little bit about how the agency started, if you can get into some of that, and then how you came into the picture as well.
DAVE: Sure. As I mentioned, we were founded in ’82. We have a staff of just over 70 people. We have $70 million in capitalized billings, and we’re employee-owned. I believe we’re the only agency in Arizona that’s employee-owned. We’re proud of the fact that we’ve been voted Best Place to Work eight times and the Top Agency in Arizona six times, Best Place to Work for Women, and just recently – this month, as a matter of fact – we were named AZ Big Media’s No. 1 Advertising Agency for the ninth year in a row. We’re very proud of that.
For us, it’s really about solving client problems with strategic thinking and sharp creative views that go well beyond producing ads. Our agency mantra is “be creative, work smart, and have fun.” We live and breathe that every day.
ROB: With an agency that’s been there for a while, and you said it’s also employee-owned, how do you think about leadership transitions within that environment? Because 33 years, you didn’t start the thing but you’re running a lot of the show there now, and someone will supersede you. How does that work in that sort of environment?
DAVE: Good question. My role is that of a Chief Growth Officer, so my focus is generating new business, growing existing client business, agency marketing, strategic client innovations. I’ve been here 10 years, and I’m part of a management team of eight people. If you can believe it, I’m the newbie. The rest of the management team members have been with Lavidge for more than 10 years.
The industry has changed so much. It certainly has become more project focused. What we need to do, and what we’re focused on, is really – our purpose is to make a difference for our clients, our employees, and in the community. Our beliefs are really around truth, inspiration, action.
What I mean by that is for our clients – and we’re very collaborative; we like to involve the client at every step of the process, from the outset of the campaign to the strategies and tactics to the implementation and to measuring the results. So when I mention our purpose, making a difference, we’re looking for truth. You hear a lot in our industry about finding insights, but the truth for us is really strategy, research, the conversation with our clients, including the hard conversations, looking at the data, analytics, focus groups, interviews, consumer intercepts, the experience. All that we put into place to gather these insights.
The next step for us is really the inspiration, which is the motivation, the motion, the design, the art direction, the experience, the usability, the feel – to tell those stories, because for us, like most agencies, it’s all about storytelling.
Then it’s the action, getting the results that our clients need. That’s looking at media, looking at the channels, looking at loyalty, all of the brand impressions, clicks, visits, awareness, decision, movement, all generating the results our clients are looking for.
ROB: It sounds like quite a range of things to think about. I appreciate what you’re saying about the insights and having some of those hard conversations around the insights. In some ways, coming into digital, even coming into PR before that, in some ways the numbers that you can present to a client have changed, but the bottom line of business in terms of doing well for your clients, doing well for the business, doing well for your employees – those haven’t changed.
What are some of the key numbers you see that are really relevant to clients today, that help them understand and help them come to grips with maybe a hard conversation?
DAVE: That’s a good question. Most of our clients – and this is historically true for the industry as well – are looking at two things at the end of the day, usually: brand awareness and sales. The trick is to develop programs that are specifically geared toward our clients’ benchmarks. They’re different by industry and they’re different for each client.
I think it’s particularly important these days to develop tailor-made solutions because each client is different, each challenge is different. Oftentimes, there are different projects for some of our bigger clients, and they all have different metrics.
ROB: Yeah, especially when the clients are significantly larger. It can make a difference. When it comes to Lavidge, is there any particular sweet spot for you in terms of industries and client size that you maybe see a cluster of clients around that helps develop some particular excellence in that area?
DAVE: Some of our core vertical experience – healthcare, certainly we have a number of healthcare clients such as Blue Cross Blue Shield, Delta Dental, SimonMed, Sonora Quest, Banner. So healthcare is certainly a specialty of ours.
Another one is education. Arizona State University is one of our larger clients. It’s interesting – I say Arizona State University; it’s really 12 or 14 different clients because we work with their enterprise marketing hub and all the different schools and divisions, such as Barrett Honors College, Thunderbird, Cronkite, the Alumni Council, the athletics department. It’s a number of different clients under that one banner.
So healthcare, education. Retail services is another core area of expertise for us. We do a lot of franchise marketing in the retail space. We worked with Massage Envy for years and years and years in virtually every year of marketing and communications. Re-Bath is another significant retail service client of ours.
If I had to mention three, those would be it. Healthcare, education, retail services. We also do a lot with homebuilders. We’ve done a lot in the sports area as well. We’re a full-service general market agency, but those are some of our core areas of expertise.
ROB: Very interesting. It makes sense. Some of those are very familiar, although even with the educational focus, in some ways it maybe looks more like enterprise than ever before, because what you’re describing to me sounds almost – you mentioned their marketing hub – it sounds like a center of excellence that any enterprise brand might have. Do you think they have had some inspiration from that world, or some learnings from the center of excellence approach? Or maybe even the enterprises learned from them.
DAVE: Yeah, I believe so. For ASU, it’s really all about innovation. They’re proud to be named the most innovative university. Obviously Michael Crow, their president, deserves a great deal of the credit for that. But ASU, for us, that’s a great example of our collaborative approach. We really do work hand-in-hand with them.
It can get messy at times, and we like that because we think involving them, again, early in the process and working with them – daily communications, weekly status calls, monthly reporting – that helps generate best results as possible on their behalf.
ROB: It’s really interesting because you jammed through that cadence of the daily, weekly, monthly. A lot of times when we talk to even very successful agencies, especially because I think maybe people come from a creative place, they don’t mention that sort of process. How do you, with I think you said around 70 some employees, think about establishing that as a standard? How do you communicate those standards of cadence and make sure they’re listened to and followed throughout the organization? Because they come from a place of wisdom.
DAVE: Right, and that’s really our commitment to our clients because things change so often. Daily communication is vital – not only for our big accounts, but also for some of our smaller accounts. We have, like a lot of agencies, larger agency of record relationships, and then we also have standalone public relations clients or website clients or creative services clients. It’s important, no matter how big or small they are, to communicate daily. Again, that’s part of our commitment.
Then the weekly calls keep everybody on track – not only us, but also our clients. Particularly helpful for the larger clients. One of the things that we like to do is have one point of contact for our clients so they’re not making four different calls. They’re calling one person who can marshal the internal resources that are needed.
One of the things we did that I think is interesting, a couple years ago – we used to have a standalone advertising division, a standalone interactive division, a public relations division, a multicultural division. We broke down those walls and those silos a couple years ago and implemented a more unified approach.
It’s not about whether they’re an advertising client or a PR client; it’s much more about what that client needs. Does it need strategy? Does it need creative? Is it a user experience website/responsive design approach that’s needed? Is it content? Is it social? Is it search? It could be a number of things, and it’s really about answering clients’ needs and offering one-stop client solutions on their behalf.
ROB: When you made that transition, did they have an account manager in each of those divisions before and you were able to streamline that to one trusted point of contact? How did that realign when you made that switch?
DAVE: It was actually fairly seamless. We had, obviously, experts in each one of those areas, and we had a head of advertising and a chief creative officer and the head of our interactive division. Breaking down those silos – we still have subject matter experts, but it’s about bringing them to bear on our clients’ behalf rather than looking at it division by division, if that makes sense.
ROB: For sure.
DAVE: The reason for that is we found that it’s like – what’s the old saying? Trying to force a square peg into a round hole. We were slotting different clients into different divisions, and that’s not always the case. They could be primarily a public relations client, but they’re going to need a website or they’re going to need a special event or they’re going to need print or digital magazine execution, video. It’s really about being more client-service-focused than anything else.
ROB: Dave, what are some things you’ve learned as a marketing agency leader that you might do differently if you were starting again 10 years ago, or even further back in your career?
DAVE: That’s a very good question, Rob. I think the one thing that I would’ve done differently is I would have taken one of the client side opportunities that came my way over the years, because I’ve been in the agency business – all my career has been spent on the agency side of the business. Talk about a glutton for punishment. [laughs]
But I probably would have taken one of the client side opportunities that came my way. I think I would’ve liked to have that experience, sitting in the client’s chair and having the final say and making decisions on which campaigns run and why. In fact, one of those opportunities was in your neighborhood, with Turner Broadcasting System, interestingly enough.
ROB: Oh, interesting. It’s very common, I think, for people to bounce from brand side to agency side, sometimes drifting over to the vendor side. I think there is value in that empathy. I’m sure you have had plenty of people on your team that have had that experience, right?
DAVE: Yeah. I think it’s useful. I also teach a sports marketing class at ASU at the Cronkite School, and that question comes up a lot with students, because of course, they’re thinking primarily, in sports marketing, “I want to work for a league or a team,” and they don’t really understand all the other avenues of career development, whether it be in an agency like ours or a corporate sponsor or some of the other suppliers that are involved in sports marketing.
But I do always recommend having both experiences, and again, I would have probably done that differently, to answer your question.
ROB: You can also see quite often how many agencies, some of their longest running clients come from the relationship you’re talking about. You have a relationship with the university, and the university is also a client. It’s not a quid pro quo, but it’s a relationship business. Someone who spends 5 years inside Coca-Cola, 5 years inside Home Depot, 5 years inside Blue Cross is going to have some very longstanding relationships to pull on.
Not to say that you don’t have those from being a trusted agency partner for people; it’s just in some cases, it’s different because you may have a former agency you can’t pull that client from the same way you can if you left the brand and you’re on the agency side.
DAVE: That’s a good point. I remember when I was general manager of Rogers & Cowan in Los Angeles, which is the big entertainment publicity firm, we had a number of different divisions, like television, film, music, product placement, consumer, etc. It was interesting; I always talked to the CEO about how there were really, really expert people, but they were what we call an inch wide and a mile deep, meaning they knew everything in the world about music, but it was hard to transfer those skills to say consumer marketing or corporate communications. I think this is true of clients as well. They get so deep into their area of expertise.
I think it’s the role of the agency to really bring best practices and other solutions, perhaps from other industries, to the table to get them to thinking beyond just what works in a specific market.
ROB: One thing I imagine that’s probably relatively new for Lavidge, and you’re learning a little bit, but maybe you also have some lessons to learn, is this thing that many of us are doing perhaps not by choice right now, which is working in distributed teams, working remotely. You can’t even get in a room if you want to, or at least you probably shouldn’t amidst this coronavirus/COVID-19 crisis.
What are some things you’re learning, especially since you mentioned these cadences that you had? Are you learning some different habits that are helpful for teams that are at a distance now?
DAVE: That’s a great question, particularly given the challenging times that are upon us. I think one overriding principle is to be determined in what you do and not be fearful. Despite the current circumstance, there are opportunities.
I’m very proud of our agency, as an example, because we quickly, a couple weeks ago, switched over to working remotely. It’s been seamless. We just had an all staff meeting on Wednesday that we did remotely, and it worked remarkably well. We’re doing that for our client teams. So there are some opportunities.
I think in general, one of the things that I’m seeing is that brands can use this opportunity to step up and take action. There seems to be a common thread around brand purpose. You hear a lot of words like “authentic,” “useful,” “helpful,” “purposeful,” but I think it’s really about leveraging brand power for good.
ROB: It’s a good reminder. You mentioned “helpful,” and I think if we all take a step back as marketers and as people who are communicating into the lives of other people, we probably realize – we should always be helpful, but I think it can get a little bit hard to remember that sometimes. When people are just out there spending money, everything’s fine, people are looking to buy stuff, I think we can lose some of that helpfulness and get a little bit flashier. I think we maybe realize right now, this is not the time to ask for stuff from people, but it’s time to be helpful to them.
DAVE: Yeah, no question. Just the other day I was rereading the Harvard Business Review, an article about how to market in a recession, and maintaining marketing spending is important. It’s not the time to cut advertising. It’s well documented that brands that increase advertising during a recession or a situation like this when their competitors are cutting back can significantly improve market share and return on investment.
But your point is well taken. It’s also important to remember tonality. It’s important to be authentic. It’s important to be helpful. You think about some of the recent examples, like Ford and Tesla are using their factories to make ventilators, or Anheuser-Busch are using their distilleries to make hand sanitizer. Just a couple of examples of being authentic, being useful, being helpful.
ROB: For sure. In some cases, with Budweiser, with Anheuser-Busch, I’d imagine that’s even coming to them a little bit at the expense of their actual business. Ford may not be needing to make as many trucks, but if my social feeds are anything to be believed, Anheuser-Busch and their competitors are doing pretty well right now. A lot of people seem to be buying their product and talking about it. [laughs]
DAVE: That’s right. That’s very true. But again, I think it’s really about their brand purpose. I imagine they are doing very well, but it’s also about being helpful and being purposeful in what they’re doing to consumers at large.
ROB: Perfect. Dave, when you’re looking ahead – you mentioned in this time, you see opportunity. This is a time to seize opportunity. This is certainly not a time to be shy right now. We all feel probably some moments when we want to just chill out and check our brains out, but when we’re done with that, what are some things that are coming up for Lavidge that you’re excited about?
DAVE: I think we’re very excited about a number of areas. In this particular situation, the coronavirus/COVID-19, crisis communication is obviously important. We’re staying very busy in that area, public relations experts.
Two other areas that we’re looking at are certainly ecommerce, given the remote learning and the remote situations that both we and our clients are facing, and then cause marketing – again, really talking about what you and I were just discussing: brand purpose, connecting a brand purpose with their business goals and making sure they stand for something that their consumers care about.
So those are three areas that we’re looking at. Before this came upon us, we were also looking at a number of other areas. One was the rise of experiential marketing as a strategy to engage consumers, using branded experiences, live marketing, event marketing. The whole idea is creating a memorable impact on the consumer.
Obviously, two other areas that our digital team has really focused on is increased artificial intelligence, in-depth information about what consumers want and how that can be personalized and how that can personalize the buying experience based on someone’s preferences. And then one of the areas that I’m really interested in personally is the whole brand solving business challenges by engaging young consumers through their passion for e-sports, gaming, as an example. Those are the areas we’re looking at.
ROB: It’s really fascinating because a lot of times a 30-some-year-old agency would be very steeped in things they’ve done, but it sounds like, especially with that leadership team that you have around you, this company has been through multiple downturns and has grown and is still one of the largest in Arizona.
I can hear in your description of the things you were thinking about, the things you’re thinking about now, it’s intentional but it’s not opportunistic. It is tied to things you’ve been dong, but it’s not overly tied to the plan that you had, and you’re still trying to push really hard to find some way to do branded experiences. There may be something that emerges from that, but you’re not going to do a big brand activation in a physical place right now.
DAVE: Correct. I do think, to your point, it’s important to be flexible. I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve been extremely successful for almost 40 years.
We do have a number of client innovations that we’ve developed for our clients, whether it’s introducing new services such as account-based marketing or programmatic digital media, but it’s also about improving traditional marketing methods. Innovation is not just about coming up with new solutions, but it’s also about improving marketing and advertising, digital, public relations, social, website design and development, etc. So I think innovation comes in two areas: both coming up with new solutions as well as improving solutions that you’ve employed for clients in the past.
ROB: Excellent. Dave, when people want to find you and they want to find Lavidge, where should they look?
DAVE: We are in the Biltmore area of Phoenix, which is right on Camelback very close to the Biltmore Hotel, if you know where that’s at. Certainly centrally located.
Again, we’re a full service agency, and I think that’s important. Not that we don’t have standalone clients, but usually we like to think of ourselves as a one-stop client solution. Those services include strategy. We do a lot of branding work, a lot of corporate communications work. That includes market research and customer segmentation. And then we have our creative services, so that’s TV, radio, print, digital advertising. We have our own in-house video production capability, so it’s not just TV ads. We’re doing a number of videos, whether it’s corporate videos, product videos, training videos, only videos.
Then our digital expertise is really in two areas. One side of it is the website design/development, microsites, landing pages, mobile apps. The other side of that is all forms of digital marketing – search, both paid and organic, email marketing, lead gen, lead nurturing, ecommerce that I mentioned before. We even do custom loyalty programs for some of our clients. That’s helped by the fact that we have our own in-house analytics department as well.
Then in the public relations area, it’s both traditional corporate communications and product publicity, but also content. As a number of agencies do, we’re doing more and more content creation/content management, whether that be videos, blogs, infographics, whitepapers, etc., and mapping that out to make sure it syncs with traditional public relations.
It’s nice to have all those client solutions, if you will, under one roof and available to our clients. Now, some of our clients are using all those services; some are using the services that are most needed for them.
ROB: Got it. That’s excellent, Dave. It looks like they should also probably, if they’re looking for you online, go to lavidge.com. Is that right?
DAVE: That’s correct. Lavidge.com. You’ll see on our website a lot of the information that I just talked through. You had asked about some of our core areas of expertise, and in three of those areas – there’s more, but certainly using healthcare as an example, we did our own marketing report. We literally conducted research to determine which messages are most resonating with consumers, which marketing tactics are more successful than others. So we did a whole research study, which is available on our website.
Additionally, that’s reinforced by a number of whitepapers that were written by our subject matter experts, whether it be digital, creative, strategy, to really walk through and bring to life some of those findings. All of that is available on the website, Lavidge.com.
ROB: Perfect. Thank you so much, Dave. It’s been great to have you on the podcast, and I’m grateful for all you shared about the journey of Lavidge and how sustained that business has been in a really admirable way.
DAVE: It’s my pleasure, Rob. Thank you very much for the time. I enjoyed it.
ROB: Take care. Thank you.
DAVE: Thank you.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Jon Boles is the Founder and CEO of Avintiv Media Avintiv Media, an award-winning boutique digital marketing agency that focuses on branding, web design, and digital marketing content creation, syndication, and search engine optimization. Starting as a full service agency 4 years ago, running ads, Facebook ads, and working with celebrities and influencers in the influencer marketing niche. The agency withdrew from advertising and social media when they determined the uncontrollable volatility compromised the value add of those services. What that left was what they were passionate about anyway: branding, web design, and digital marketing – key pieces of every brand’s lifecycle.
Avintiv serves a wide variety of industries, but one “ideal client” is a well-funded, very-much-at-the-beginning startup with business experience. The process begins with a deep-level discovery consultation to determine the “end goal.” This usually progresses to a half-day brand workshop, which involves the brand’s/company’s stakeholders and the entire Avintiv strategy team. The product of that workshop is a 40-50+ business plan/investor pitch deck that covers SWOT analysis, and includes buyer personas, a mission statement, and a competitive analysis, what Jon refers to as a company’s “Bible for your business over the next 10 years.” Jon explains his company’s criteria for finding startups to work with . . . relationships where the end result is win-win-win . . . the company, its customers, and Avintiv all gain.
In branding, Avintiv may provide a company name, logos, icons, SKUs, a style guide, typography, colors, and with e-commerce or product-based businesses, product development and design. The in-house development/creative team builds out a custom WordPress or Shopify website. The SEO team takes over at that point, providing keywords, creating a 6- to 12-month SEO campaign, and writing the content.
The second “ideal client” is one that has grown in the past and wants to grow today, but can’t seem to “move the needle” in today’s business climate. Avintiv takes these companies through the entire buyer’s journey to clarify who their customers really are . . . and why they buy. Working off data, Avintiv identifies the buyers and price points companies need to target, redesigns the website to fit buyer needs. Jon has found that working with investors and investor firms can be very effective, because investors appreciate that working with Avintiv increases the odds of recouping their investments.
In this interview, Jon talks about the impact of corona virus . . . that he believes it will probably change a lot of the way we do business, that brands will need to pay closer attention to detail, that a “less trusting” population will research more, judge organizations’ actions more during these hard times, and look for good people and good companies with which to do business. Jon says that he has found that, people in quarantine have become more engaged and more focused on providing good to the community. People whose work typically comes with a high price tag are jumping in and offering their services for free. In the same vein, Jon says he has no passion for building something for himself: his passion is for changing other people’s lives. He expects the coming year to be one of unprecedented growth.
Jon’s company can be reached on its website at: www.avintivmedia.com or through Instagram t @AvintivMedia. Jon is best reached on Instagram @JonBoles.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Jon Boles. Jon is the Founder and CEO at Avintiv Media based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast, Jon.
JON: How’s it going, my man?
ROB: It’s going great. You?
JON: No complaints this week as of yet. It’s pretty crazy what’s going on in the world, but we’re prepared for it.
ROB: Sure. We’re dead in mid-late March, right in the thick of the coronavirus, and everybody is sheltering in place. But we are sheltering on a podcast. Why don’t you start off, Jon, by telling us about Avintiv Media and where Avintiv excels?
JON: Avintiv Media is an award-winning boutique digital marketing agency in Scottsdale, Arizona, and we specialize in three solutions for our clients: branding, web design, and digital marketing. With digital marketing, what we hone in on is content creation and syndication and SEO.
Essentially, we launched Avintiv 4 years ago. We were a full service agency. We ran ads, we did Facebook ads, we did influencer marketing, we worked with a lot of celebrities and influencers. We just realized what we weren’t passionate about anymore. We realized what we were passionate about, and that is building brands, and that’s only offering services that we truly believe in. With how volatile and how up-and-down advertising is, social media channels are, we didn’t feel that we had enough control over them to have them be fully valuable for a client. So we focus on those three services.
ROB: Perfect. Those three services seem like a natural lifecycle that any brand is going to go through.
JON: Exactly.
ROB: The need for a brand refresh, the need to speak that into the world, and then the need to continue sustaining that. Do people often come to you at the branding end of things, or is it really they enter into that virtuous cycle at every point but still go through that cycle?
JON: That’s such a great question. I’m glad you asked that. The reason why we offer those three services – my background is consulting, so I’ve been building brands for close to 11 years now, probably built and scaled over 250 or 300 brands in the past 10 years so far. I found a common element on what it takes to start a brand, grow a brand, and keep growing it with trust and redoing the branding and redoing landing pages, websites, and that is why we offer those services that we do.
To answer your question, we have two really ideal customers that come to us. We have a plethora of different industries that we serve, but our ideal customers that we know are going to be grand slams, it’s going to be a win-win for both parties, is startups that haven’t gotten started yet and they have funding behind them, whether it’s an angel investor or they have family money behind them.
They are already seasoned with business. They either have a good job or they’ve started companies in the past, and they realize that the statistics are against starting a small business or starting a business. The odds are against you. People come to Avintiv or to myself and they want it done right the first way.
We start with the discovery; that goes into a small consultation to get to know them. What are their goals? What are their dreams? We dive inside their head, deeper than they’ve even gone, and figure out what they really wanting to start this company for. Is it an exit? Is it this is their lifelong dream that they’ve dreamt of since they were a child? What is their end goal?
What happens is after that consultation, 9 times out of 10 it goes into a brand workshop. A brand workshop is a half-day consultation with our entire strategy team and whatever stakeholders are in that brand or that company. Then that dives into 40-50+ pages that we create for them. It’s a new aged business plan/investor pitch deck, if you would. It goes over SWOT analysis, we create buyer personas, we create a mission statement, we go over your competition. It’s the Bible for your business over the next 10 years.
Clients really love that because it gives them, their team, their investors, or anyone involved the playbook of who they are, why they’re doing what they’re doing, and it creates validity to them starting this company. It gives them hope that this can be successful.
After that, we help brand with naming, coming up with the name – or if they already have the name that they want, it goes into logo, icons, it goes into style guide, typography, colors, the whole nine yards. If it’s an ecommerce or a product-based business, we then go into the product development and design.
We were big in 2019 in the CBD industry. We had multiple clients that did the brand workshop. We then created 20 different SKUs for them, whether it was gummies, tinctures, bottles – you name it and we created – the bottles, the SKUs. We did a CBD water company in 1,200 or 2,400 Circle Ks, so we had to do different line item SKUs for them.
Once it’s in the product design phase and the packaging design phase, then we start building out the website. Once the website is fully built out, we do custom WordPress or Shopify, depending on what the client’s needs are. We have in-house devs, in-house creative team, so it’s not outsourced to Asia or India or anything like that.
Once the website is getting ready to launch, our SEO team hops in and redoes all the on-page SEO. We build out their keyword analysis and basically create their 6- to 12-month SEO campaign, and we start writing the content. That’s how we launch a lot of the companies. And we do consult with them what they should be doing on social media, what they should be doing on the ground with their team, and vice versa.
So that’s a 20,000-foot approach of a new brand that would hire us. Then we have a lot of companies that are 2 to 20 years old that have hit plateaus. They scaled up really quickly or they bought their family’s business from them or they’ve bought a company or they just don’t know how to grow in 2020. They come to us, and it’s almost the same process. It’s just a company that’s doing a couple million in revenue and that’s not good enough for them. They want to hire more employees. They want to scale up to more cities. They go through the exact same process that I just mentioned to you.
ROB: Very interesting. One thing that’s interesting there is that I think with an established brand, you as the agency have the advantage of they have customers; they may just not fully understand them. They may not fully understand why they are customers. It seems like you would be able to come in as Avintiv and pull on that thread and understand the deeper customer road and innovations.
One thing that is hard in the startup world and the raising money world is that sometimes the ideal customer for them is a little bit more hypothetical. How do you walk through that process of helping them discover what is real versus what is an imagined fiction that they’ve been pushed towards – sometimes just in order to raise money?
JON: I’ll start with the first question and follow back with the startups. The first question you asked – yeah, I think it’s vital for an already-successful company that’s hit a plateau to come to us because they think they know their customers, but they’ve had so many employee changeovers, their team is much larger than it used to be.
The owner thinks they know who their customers are because when they started it 2 to 10 years ago and they were the sales guy, they were on the frontlines – as the business grows, the CEO or the founder is not on the frontlines anymore. As time goes on – I’ve even been at fault for this in the past with other ecommerce companies – you start to lose who your customers are and what is making them purchase from you.
We go through an entire customer buyer journey with them, and we even interview some of their customers and some of their clients and go through the whole process. “What is your buying process? Why do you buy from them? What makes you light up about working with this company?” The findings of that is it’s almost like an out-of-body experience for business owners that have been in business for so long because it’s completely different than anything they would’ve thought. The reasons why these customers shop with them or go to them are things they don’t even focus on.
That allows us to go back and figure out the three differentiators. Why do people shop with them? Why do people go to them for business? That allows us to help redesign the website and focus on why people go there, and use that as the language. That helps big time.
Now, on the second question, for startups, you have a lot of people that are trying to raise money. Yeah, they put different types of Baby Boomers or millennials or this or that because they think that’s the cool thing to talk about or they read a press release on Forbes or Entrepreneur.com and they’re adding personas in there.
What we do is go on data. We’re not just throwing crap against the wall and hoping it sticks. Our team of analysts and our team of strategists, including myself, we’ve been researching for 10 years, so we know exactly what materials and resources to use, how to dive in, dive deep. We’re able to find other business plans and other things that are already out there and basically pull together a web of different resources and show the entrepreneurs, “Hey, this is why your personas are a little bit off. Really, it’s this person who’s going to be buying from you. The price point needs to be XYZ, not what you had in your pitch deck.”
You might grow a little bit slower, you might grow a little bit faster, but we go off data. That’s why investors and investor firms – we partner with a couple investment firms – they love working with us because when you work with Avintiv, the investor has higher odds of getting their return back, and at a quicker pace. But if you’re working with an entrepreneur and this is their second or third business and there’s really no direction, it’s just going off of them, it’s a lot riskier doing that because the investor is thinking, “What if something happens? What if they get burnout? What if this happens?”
When you have an agency that knows what they’re doing, we have as many case studies as we do, we have as much experience in the industry as we do, investors feel very safe working with us because our team acts as if we’re the owners of the company as well.
The past two weeks of coronavirus, I think I worked with our whole team till 9:30 at night. I’ve never worked that late with my team. I usually work that late, but my team goes above and beyond for the brands that we work with, especially in times of emergency like this. We’re adding so many more hours to projects and not charging for them. We’re just trying to provide as much value as possible right now.
ROB: Absolutely. A lot of that value in this season is going to be probably going back to some of the diagnosis you’ve already done on customers, and some of it’s going to be figuring out almost testing new ways of doing business. What are you seeing with maybe a customer or two that is finding a new way that they have to do business and actually learning about their customers in the process?
JON: The good thing is our clients right now have been affected a little bit by what’s going on, but I think that every one of our clients is understanding that they need to pay a lot more attention to marketing, to the words that they use, to every detail of everything that they publish.
When people hire us, I’m very OCD. Our team is very OCD. We don’t agree with us doing a Rolls-Royce style brand, logo, and packaging, but your social media looks like crap or your website looks like crap. I think clients are now understanding that the world is evolving to a place that isn’t really trusting right now. The American people, or people around the world, aren’t really trusting the government. They don’t know what’s real, they don’t know what’s fake. They’re not really trusting banks.
So I think 2020, people are going to be taking a step back and they’re going to be thinking about their purchases a little bit more. They’re going to be doing a little bit more research. They’re going to be going from your website to your social media handles to see how you talk. People are wanting to invest in companies that stand for something, that are good people.
I hate to say it, but a lot of businesses right now aren’t being positive on social media and they’re not being the light at the end of a dark tunnel. Customers are judging you. They’re looking at you on what emails you’re sending about the coronavirus, how you’re acting in this type of emergency, because they’re not going to come back and shop with you – if you can’t handle yourself in an emergency, why do you deserve them when times are good?
I think the biggest thing for brands right now is they have to pay attention to the details. I think for the agency world, the marketing agency industry and world is going to skyrocket over the next couple of months. We’re looking at our sales forecasting, and it’s not even about revenue for us. It’s about the lives of our clients that we can change, and every client that we work with, they have hundreds if not thousands or millions of customers. So when we provide value to our one client, it’s almost like we just impacted 10 million people.
ROB: It’s a good point you make that we’re moving into a slightly longer buyer journey, in some cases because of trust and I think in other cases because we just can’t get things as fast as we’re used to and we don’t need them as fast as we’re used to. You order from Amazon Prime and it’s not two days anymore sometimes. Sometimes it’s four. You order from Instacart, sometimes you can’t get an appointment for over a week. We’re not as impulsive and the economy is not as booming, so people are going to think, and it’s great that they’re going to be able to think about and trust you.
If we rewind that journey a little bit, how did you come to start Avintiv Media in the first place? What led you to the beginning of this journey?
JON: Great question. I think most agency owners that would listen to this can agree – I kind of fell into it. I didn’t plan on starting an agency. At the time, my background was consulting. I was in the bar and restaurant industry for a number of years, owned different establishments, was in event planning and event marketing. I owned a consulting firm. Then I got into ecommerce for a little bit.
When I started Avintiv, I had an ecommerce clothing company that was booming at the time, and I kept hiring web developers and I kept hiring agencies to do Facebook ads and work on our marketing for us because even though I’m self-taught, being the CEO of a startup, you can’t manage all aspects of everything. So I kept outsourcing it to different agencies, different people.
Every developer I hired fell short of what I wanted, and then they wanted more money, they wanted more money. Then they took my website and threatened to not give the website back if we didn’t pay an absurd fee. I just got sick and tired of being screwed over. The agencies that we were hiring – and I’m sure anyone that ran Facebook ads a couple years ago – there’s a couple different settings on the Facebook ad ROIs you can click. One of them shows, “if this many people go to this landing page or add to cart, that’s what the total would be.” Our agencies were acting as if those were our revenue numbers, and I didn’t catch on for a couple of months because I was running at the speed of light.
My accountant told me, “Dude, you’re not doing as much revenue as this agency is making it seem, and you’re not even profitable working with these guys.” I used two agencies, and both of them were not as truthful as I would’ve liked them to be. I kept having people reach out to me about a year after that like, “Hey, who did your logo? Who did your website? Who’s running your social media?” I was doing everything. I taught myself web development. I taught myself videography. My background was social media, so I had that on lockdown.
People kept reaching out to me, and I said, wow, there must be a need in the marketplace for offering these types of services that everyone keeps contacting me for. So I started building a couple websites for a couple local brands, and it evolved into I couldn’t take on any more clients because I was at capacity.
We were profitable the first week we launched the agency, and it evolved into being what it is today with having a full team and phenomenal clients. We’re hitting our 4 years in April next month, and it’s kind of like an out-of-body experience. I realized in this journey, I don’t have a passion for building my own brands and selling my own products and launching – I owned a couple CBD brands last year. I don’t have a passion for building my own thing. I have a passion for changing other people’s lives.
I’ve been a coach and consultant; I love changing an entrepreneur’s life. I love giving them a phenomenal experience. That’s why I love Avintiv so much, because we are so passionate about building other people’s brands that change the world.
We’re working with a local health and wellness clinic in Scottsdale that’s actually a very big clinic, and he is one of the most talented doctors I’ve ever met in 31 years of my life, doing holistic type of medicine, IV drips, Botox – a variety of different things. He has a new, modern way of doing medicine, and the amount of lives this guy is going to change just by us being able to redo his branding, his website, and sending him in a different direction – that’s what gives me fuel to keep growing the agency. But if it was me just selling my own products and trying to get rich and things like that, I don’t have a passion for that.
ROB: It’s hard to come across as genuine with a passion for that because it seems like you’re serving yourself maybe more than your clients. How did you come to find this particular resonance with startups? Were you tapped into a vein locally? Is there a regional connection? Or do you think it’s just a natural resonance with who you are and that brand building connection?
JON: When I started my clothing company before I sold it, I posted my whole journey on Instagram, on social media. I’m talking about our first initial designs 6-7 years ago, and then our first warehouse, and people saw me use my living room as my warehouse, and then we got a bigger warehouse. So I’ve been sharing my journey for a number of years.
But not only that, any industry I’ve been in, I’m blessed to be I guess you could say a social butterfly. No matter what city I live in or where I’m at, I’m able to meet the who’s who that runs that city, become friends with them. I’m a likeable guy. I’m someone that doesn’t screw anyone over. I have a lot of friends.
I think that has helped me build a good amount of following and people that pay attention to me, along with press releases or certain things. I think it’s just a combination of who I am and the journey of me sharing my journey. People have seen how many startups I’ve built or have consulted, or people ask around town, “Hey, I have this new company idea. Who’s the best person in town I could ask?”, and 9 times out of 10, people send them my way.
ROB: As a social butterfly, I’m sure there’s a certain extent to which you have also engaged with other social butterflies. How are you finding to connect and scratch that itch in this season we’re in, where you’re probably not getting together with people you don’t know?
JON: To be honest, if you look on my Instagram page or any public stuff that’s out there of me, it probably looks like I’m the life of networking, going out – not partying, but being out and about and socializing. I am such an introvert. I’m standing, as I’m talking to you, at my bookshelf right now. Being locked in, reading books and working, I don’t think I could be happier right now.
Yeah, it’s a little weird not going out, but I honestly think it’s a little bit easier to connect with people right now. I have a lot of “celebrity influencer” friends that are in LA that it might take them a week or two weeks to text back or to get back. I’m talking to people I haven’t talked to in years or months. I’m talking to my family more than ever.
So I think what’s going on with us all being locked in, I think people are more accessible. I’m hopping on so many free consultation calls and discovery calls that I would usually charge a pretty high rate for just because I have extra time on my hands. I’m not traveling to the office, I’m not traveling to the gym, so why not provide more value?
I know a lot of friends or people of that nature, influencers in LA, New York, Miami, they’re doing the same thing. And these are guys who charge a couple thousand dollars an hour, and they’re hopping on tons of free webinars, they’re hopping on free Zoom calls. I think it’s a really cool thing, what’s going on right now. All of us are trying to just be there for people that are scared and don’t know where to turn.
ROB: That’s perfect. It’s such a great time to give and to build trust – not that it isn’t always time to build trust. Jon, as you look back, what are a couple things you’ve learned from building Avintiv in these 4 years that you would do differently if you were starting from scratch?
JON: A couple of different things. Before I started Avintiv, I wish I would’ve understood the accounting and financial realm a little bit better. I always thought that having the best accountants, they would fix everything. I ran into a bad experience about 5 or 6 years ago when one of my accountants was going through chemo and had cancer and actually dropped the ball with a couple of things, and I didn’t notice it because I didn’t know it as well as I should have.
So understanding the fundamentals of business – not per industry or what type of business, but just understanding accounting and business from a financial aspect. That’s one of the things.
Two, from an agency standpoint, I probably would’ve niched down immediately. Although I did, but the niche I chose was more fitness and fitness product realm, and there’s not a lot of money in the fitness industry, as much as people might portray that. So I would’ve definitely niched down in the beginning, and I might’ve only launched one service.
If I had to start over or if Avintiv sells down the road one day and I had to redo the agency realm, I would probably launch three individual brands. I would start with SEO. I would build a multiple 6-figure per month MRR SEO agency. I would then build a web design agency, and then I would build a branding agency. All three have different managers that run the businesses, all internal team members, and we outsource in between the companies. I would run each individual solely.
When you’re running your advertising and your lead gen for each of those businesses, you don’t have to talk about web design or branding. You talk about SEO. It’s simply SEO and content. So I would have three individual brands that basically live in the same ecosystem, but to the general public, they don’t.
ROB: Right, so to the general public, it wouldn’t be a white label pass through. It would be a partnership to the world?
JON: Exactly.
ROB: Got it. What’s next for Avintiv? What are you looking forward to? What do you think we should be looking to in the marketing world as we’re looking ahead?
JON: Oh man. What’s next for Avintiv is, now seeing how busy everything is going to be, I definitely think that we’re able to double in size and double in revenue this year. We might be going remote for the next couple of months just because it doesn’t make sense having expensive office space when our city isn’t even letting us operate out of our office. So we might be going remote for a couple of months. But I would like to scale the team up to about 15 in-house employees, a little bit bigger office space this year, and be the go-to for building startups and rebuilding brands that are hitting a plateau.
2020 is the first year that Avintiv has been my only company and my only focus. I had a lot of different fires out there in 2019. I owned a couple CBD brands, I was in the credit card processing space, and the opportunity cost that hit me – I was so passionate about helping these other brands grow that I got equity plays and equity pieces. It took my eye off the ball. So 2020 is honestly the first year since we’ve launched Avintiv where it is my only and sole focus.
If we’ve grown this far in 4 years and it’s only been 25% or 30% of what I do day to day, I’m pretty excited to see what 100% looks like.
ROB: Wow. A lot of times when we have our hand in too many things, it becomes very difficult to find that margin and time to reflect and really gather the confidence that you’ve got to do something else, you have to change how you’re doing things.
How did you find that margin to realize the things you needed to cut out of your own world, the things you were more passionate and less passionate about, and focus solely on Avintiv?
JON: I go through phases of cycles of what books I read and what coaches I hire. I had an out-of-body experience towards the end of 2019 and towards the beginning of 2020, and I just found out that I had too much – and I never usually have anxiety or stress. I live in a stressful environment doing what I do, but I never usually let it get to me. It started to get to me a little bit, and I said, what the heck is going on in my life that I can’t really control – all of a sudden I’m having anxiety on a Monday or a Tuesday?
I started to realize I was waking up and I was consulting for a financial client, and then I was running a CBD company, and then I was an agency owner, and then I was consulting on SEO and content. I was too many people in a given day where I’d come home – at the time I was in a relationship, and then I had to play boyfriend, or son. There was no time for me to sit back and just be Jon. I was 15 or 20 different people to so many different people, and I was filling so many other people’s cups versus my own. I was taking care of everyone’s needs but my own.
ROB: Sometimes we do need that sort of break. If I look back to your ideal customers, I think one challenge people often find themselves in is when you’re looking at startups, how do you qualify the ones who are good clients, and how do you qualify the ones that are going to have you do a bunch of work and not pay you? How do you think about discernment when it comes to the startup world?
JON: Great question. We’ve run into some payment issues with the CBD industry, but now, going through that – and it pays to have a great collections agency and a great legal team behind your back. We’re pretty protected when it comes to that. But we have a pretty good and robust discovery and consultation process where we can smell bull from a mile away. I’ve been doing this for so long where I trained my team to ask certain questions.
And it’s not that we don’t want to help startups that don’t have the funding or don’t have the money, but we will be doing a disservice to you if you don’t pay for what our services are worth because our team is going to resent working for you, we’re not going to be able to profit or be able to pay for things.
So at the end of the day, we don’t usually work with people that don’t have funding or they can’t cope with money just because, even though it’s not a business transaction, it has to be a win-win scenario. It can’t be a win-lose scenario where we feel so bad for the startup and this entrepreneur because he or she is such a good person that we’re going to discount our services 50% so they win. That is going to be a loss for us. It always has to be a win-win.
We always tell our clients we want it to be a win-win-win scenario. All of our clients that we help are B2C, the majority of them. So if we help our clients succeed and we make our customers happy, those are two wins. And if those two people are happy, that equals a win for Avintiv. So we are in the win-win-win type of business.
We just brought on a startup a month ago, and he’s a very successful pilot. We can see that if someone has already had a career for 25 years or 20 years and they make a really good living, that shows us that there’s probably capital that backs them. They went through schooling. Being a pilot is a rigorous checks and balances. They have a crazy amount of processes. So that would fit in line with how we run our agency.
Now, if someone hasn’t been employed for 10 or 15 years and they’ve had a couple startups that have failed, this is a new great idea that’s going to take over the world, but they talk about crazy things like “This is the next billion dollar idea! I want to create this and sell it in two years for $5 million!”, like half the CBD startups out there right now, we won’t work with them. The expectations that they’ve fed into their head are not real, and I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news to tell them that there’s no Santa Claus.
Everyone thinks “because this company sold for X” or “Elon Musk created this,” that it’s possible for anyone. I’m never the guy that’s going to kill someone’s dreams or say you can’t do anything; I’m actually the guy that thinks anyone can do anything if they believe in themselves. But we’re not going to go along on the ride if you’re going to be dragging us through the mud with you because we’re just not at that place anymore.
Maybe 4-5 years ago, we would’ve tested the waters. But we have a big enough clientele and portfolio and case studies now where we are very choosy with who we work with. We can pick and choose very easily, and we turn down clients left and right. If it’s not going to be a win-win-win, we’re not going to work with you because you’re going to be mad at us, we’re going to be mad at you, and it’s just going to create resentment.
ROB: It almost sounds like a hiring decision.
JON: Oh, one hundred percent. It’s funny when clients are on a discovery call or consultation call and they think that they’re interviewing us, and when the roles get reversed and we start interviewing them, they’re like, “Wait a second. What’s going on here?”
It’s like, we only take on X amount of clients per quarter, projects of this size. We want to make sure that our whole team would enjoy working on your project. It’s not about revenue or profit for us. If our creative team is going to be bored out of their mind working on this project, we’re not going to do it because that is going to stunt their growth for every other project they work on. So we are so careful with who we work with.
ROB: Perfect. Jon, when people want to find you and want to find Avintiv Media, where should they go?
JON: You can go to www.avintivmedia.com. Otherwise, our Instagram handle is @AvintivMedia. Otherwise, I am mainly on Instagram @JonBoles. It’s got a little verified checkmark next to it, so it’s pretty easy to find.
ROB: That’s a solid move there. Jon, thank you for coming on the podcast. Looking forward to that doubling growth here in 2020.
JON: Thank you so much for having me. Hopefully I was able to provide a little bit of value to you guys.
ROB: I definitely think so. Take care.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Anthony Sarandrea is the founder of Siteflood, a high-revenue agency offering website design, search engine optimization, paid social, paid search management, and analytics and tracking to select clients. Siteflood’s primary focus is on paid media, fast results, and a trackable ROI.
Originally, a boutique agency with select clients paying a monthly retainer, Siteflood has added a “partnership model,” where Siteflood’s income from a client is tied directly the number of leads it generates or the client’s sales numbers. As these clients grow, the agency’s incentivization grows. This model has enabled Siteflood to scale quickly without needing to add huge numbers of staff or hundreds of clients. The agency garners a daily gross revenue in the six figures – with a staff of around 30 people.
Does incentivization always work?
Anthony relates the story where one of two client companies, with identical, copy-pasted Google AdWords, made $3 for every $1 net margin spend and the other company claimed they had not “made a dollar of revenue” in 4 months. The difference in results had nothing to do with the generated lead flow. It came from differences in the companies’ internal sales processes, products, and how each company closed deals. Anthony emphasizes that incentivization only works when you are “aligned with the right people.”
In this interview, Anthony recommends finding clients that work . . . and then finding more of the same kind of clients. He describes the process Siteflood uses to select “the right clients”:
- Does the company measure up on an in-depth “vetting process” of its processes, culture, and growth-readiness? Does this relationship look like it will be successful?
- Is the company at an inflection point where it is large enough to quickly scale to putting six figures a month into marketing and small enough that it can be coached to improve its internal, customer relationship, and sales processes?
- Does the company have the infrastructure to support a ten-fold increase in sales?
At the beginning, Anthony did it all. He explains how growing his company was an iterative process of replacing himself. He recommends a book, The E-Myth, Why Most Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It, available on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Most-Businesses-Dont-About/dp/0887303625. The book discusses the growth journey in terms of learning new skill sets. Anthony feels the key to sustainable long term growth is to invest in his people – to serve as a facilitator and cheerleader, to provide the right tools and training, to continuously invest in his employees’ wellbeing, and to set them up for success.
Growth also requires hiring . . . the right people for the right reasons:
- Hire quickly to replace yourself in jobs you don’t like to do.
- For fast results, hire people who can do things better than you can. If you cannot afford someone full time, hire part time. Anthony recommends a site called Clarity.fm https://clarity.fm/ where experts are paid by the minute.
- Hire for jobs at which you excel, but expect that the person replacing you will only be 70% as good at it as you are. Here, Anthony explains his training process. He says a company owner absolutely has to replace him- or herself if the company is to grow.
Anthony’s interview is rich with ideas. His favorite way to be contacted is through Instagram at: @anthonysarandrea. Or google his name and reach out to him on one of his sites. He loves answering questions.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Anthony Sarandrea, Founder of Siteflood in Scottsdale, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast, Anthony.
ANTHONY: Hey, Rob. Thanks for having me, brother.
ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Siteflood and the specialties that you work in?
ANTHONY: We started as a boutique agency that took on select clients. Really the paid media space is where we’ve always sharpened our teeth. A lot of that is the speed of results to be able to have a trackable ROI on a lot we’ve done. We started taking on select clients in a traditional agency format where they paid us a retainer per month, and a lot of clients still are on that format.
Over the years, we started performing well for clients and realized, why don’t we productize our service? Why don’t we sell leads or sell on a per sale or something like that where essentially, instead of getting paid a flat fee each month, we were tied to incentives that aligned with the actual company itself – or our partner, I should say.
That allowed us to very rapidly scale without having to add hundreds of people or hundreds of clients or anything like that. When our clients grew, we grew and the incentivization grew and we made more money. Today, we’ve scaled up to a little over six figures a day that the company makes in gross revenue. I think a lot of people are surprised the team is only 30-something people. Most agencies in order to scale need to hire on dozens and dozens of people to get anywhere near that level, where because of the model and incentivization ad structure, and we’ve been able to do it in a win-win format.
ROB: The productization you came up with, did you get to leads? Or was there another metric? Does it vary by client a little bit?
ANTHONY: It varies by client. Most of what we focus on today is in the lead space, so each customer we send. But a lot of times it was structured initially on profit sharing or rev sharing or a bounty per new customer we drove. I think a lot of agencies and brands – we talked a little bit before this on where I see the future of advertising agencies – I think brands are going to demand more, as they should, out of their agencies, where it’s not just a “write a check and forget it” and pay it each month.
When essentially the incentivization is in alignment, both the agency and the company grow and everybody feels good about it versus writing a 10 grand a month check about SEO and saying you might see something in the next 2 years.
ROB: Right. It seems like there’s always tension in pricing, and you want to drive to value for sure. It seems like when you talk about leads, there’s a tension because if you price towards closed business, then you are linking your business to their sales effectiveness. But if you are not pricing to their closed business, then it leaves room for conversations about lead quality. How did you figure out which side you wanted to land on, if you have?
ANTHONY: Great question. That thought process – I’ll start with this, too, to asterisk the whole thing – it forced us to realize that we bring a lot more – a lot of times companies or even vendors look at themselves as vendors and they’re like, “These are the guys that write the checks for me.”
It’s like, hold on, when we’re doing good services, we’re actually helping write the checks for them. We’re helping them pay their employees because we’re driving customers. So it put us a lot more in the driver’s seat than I think a lot of agencies or even brands look at vendors or agencies. They look at them as a commodity or it’s just another person, where now it forced us to be infinitely more selective on who we worked with.
To your point, I remember at one point we had two companies that were the exact same. We literally copy and pasted the campaigns in Google AdWords, and one company was making $3 to every $1 net dollar margin that they were spending, and the other one said in 4 months, they hadn’t made a dollar in revenue. What was the difference there? It was their sales process internally. It was their product. It was how they closed deals. It had nothing to do with the lead flow we were driving.
I think a lot of agencies and brands, it’s easy to point and say the leads suck or the traffic sucks or they’re not good at what they do. We had to really look at, who are we aligning ourselves with? That is equally if not infinitely more important, to be aligned with the right people.
I guess to answer your initial question, we focused at the beginning, and we do today, on driving the best customers, really helping our clients make the most money, because we know in order for us to get paid more and put more dollars in our pocket, we need to help them put more dollars in their pocket. Otherwise they can’t pay us. If the company is not making money, they can’t continue to justify paying us.
So by focusing on really the bottom line of our clients or for agency owners to do that, you’re able to essentially justify your fees coming back tenfold. They’d be silly to not want to pay you more if you’re making them that money and you’re able to trackably show that.
ROB: As you’ve dialed in on these right customers for you, have there been certain categories, certain types of companies for certain product lines that have emerged? And how do you get close enough to really, really vet and evaluate whether they’re a good customer?
ANTHONY: The vetting, we’ll do everything. When they come in and they’re asking to work with us, we’ll buy the product or we’ll call in and even walk through the sales process of enrolling the client and stuff like that and just see, how is their follow-up sequence? How is their upsell sequence? How do they do it? A lot of that, we don’t necessarily have enough hours in the day or resources and/or bandwidth that we want to point towards helping them tune up their sales process.
If a lot of that is not already in place, we know it’s probably going to be a failing campaign. Simple things that you forget, but most companies don’t even pick up the phone when it rings. It’s so funny. They have a $12 an hour college guy or gal answering the phone, and it’s like, you’re spending 10 grand a month on Google AdWords and then you have a $12 an hour girl or guy answering the phones? How does that make sense?
So even just little quick things like that. Just saying, “Hey, is this going to be successful? Have they invested in their sales process?” That’s number one.
Number two, we’re at a really interesting inflection point where we need a big enough company that can scale so they can put six figures a month into marketing dollars, but also small enough where we can grab their ear when we need to say, “Hey, answer the phone in a certain way” or “Hey, you should work on your upsell sequence.” We had Fortune 500 companies where it took months to move anything, and it was hindering us, especially if we’re tied to performance. If we know something is going to work, or at least we want to test it, and it takes 3 months of approvals to get through middle management to upper management to senior – that’s not a partner for us either.
So we’ve really landed on companies that probably do anywhere from $10 million to $50 million a year that are heavily focused on direct response advertising. Things like that are really our bread and butter.
ROB: Any particular categories of direct response product?
ANTHONY: On our own website, a lot of the lead focus are a lot in the financial space, but healthcare has also been very big for us. Very easily, though, you can apply the same model to ecommerce. The same challenges work there, and now the conversation is on the phone with the brand. “How is your supply chain pipeline? Are you guys able to scale up quickly? Do you guys have investments? How’s your cash flow?” Asking those types of questions where if you’re signing up 100 sales and you go to 1,000 sales a day, do they have the infrastructure to support that?
I guarantee you, if you’re an agency owner or if you’re a brand listening, that conversation sticks out infinitely further than every other agency that’s like “I charge 10% of spend. We’re going to get you impressions and clicks and SEO.” The brand owner is almost like, “I don’t understand half this stuff. It feels like brain surgery. Everyone is having the same conversations with me.” “Here’s my past work.” It’s like, how about getting on the phone and being like, “Logistically, how would it work if you tripled it? Do you guys have the infrastructure to support that?”
Have that conversation. See the response you get if you’re an agency owner to a brand. Or if you’re a brand, think about how good that would feel to have that agency partner having those conversations with you as a partner.
I keep saying partner, too. I don’t say a vendor. I don’t say a company. It really becomes a partnership in a lot of ways because the whole train falls off the tracks if both sides aren’t keeping up their end of the bargain. If the engine isn’t moving, if they’re not putting the right gasoline and oil into the engine, you’re just the wheels, really. You could be the best wheels on the planet; if that engine is not fine-tuned, which is the client, or vice versa, there’s a problem. So there really needs to be an alignment on both.
ROB: Anthony, you said you’re around 30 people in the company now, but obviously everybody starts somewhere, and it usually starts pretty small. How did you end up starting Siteflood, and what led to that beginning?
ANTHONY: It really started with me doing a lot of essentially consultation or consulting work, it felt like, or side hustle, where you’ve got a couple clients. I was the technician. I’m the one running the AdWords accounts and things like that and having the conversations.
At least me – I’ll just tell my story – you start doing everything, really. I’m the bookkeeper, I’m the accountant. I’m wearing all the hats. Then, at least my journey, I got busy enough where I was able to hire on – at the time, the first hire was a bookkeeper part-time, and then the second hire was actually my brother, someone to run the ads where then I enjoyed and was good at the conversations with the clients. Then started building out essentially people doing the work, so the technicians. I was the manager/point of contact for the clients to liaison, I’ll say. Then eventually replacing myself as that, and then last step is and was replacing myself in sales.
That’s the progression. I find a lot of agency owners move through a similar progression. They go from the technician to manager to learning how to be an entrepreneur. There’s a great book called The E-Myth that I recommend to anybody listening. It essentially walks through that journey and how you’re really each time learning new skillsets.
I was a badass sales guy, and then I was a badass internet marketer, and then I had to learn how to be a good manager. Then I had to learn to be a good entrepreneur. You really start at ground zero, almost on each one. I think the quicker you wrap your head around this is a totally new skillset, even though it’s the same industry or type of business – I think a lot of people fall into the fallacy that it’s like “I’m really good at Google AdWords. I’ll be a really good manager or a really good entrepreneur.” It’s not always the case. It’s very difficult to start from ground zero and really humble yourself each time you move that progression from technician to manager to entrepreneur.
ROB: Those last couple of steps that you mentioned can often be the most challenging. That switching out from being the lead salesperson, in particular, because in a services firm, so often the client wants some facetime with you as the founder, as the leader. How have you navigated that transition? Is it more that people who are taking the role and leading on sales are leading in that function and you’re still brought in sometimes because that’s part of the brand of the firm? Or have you found some tactics that you’ve been able to move it even further?
ANTHONY: I think there’s one thing that really stuck with me. I think especially a lot of A type entrepreneurs are very controlling, and nobody’s going to ever have the same level of care you do for your business because your name is on it. You’re taking the risk, so you get the downfall and the upside. When the company is making good money, you’re making good money. When the company is struggling or failing, it’s really your ass.
Where was I going with that? Oh, I had a great mentor tell me one time, “If you can hire someone to do the job 70% as good as you, that’s what you should aim for.” It was tough because at first I had someone come in and would run the AdWords accounts, and I was like, I can do this better.
The reality is, you probably can. If you’re telling yourself that, it’s probably true. But you will never grow with that mindset. The company will not grow. Unless you find a way to get more hours in the day – which Bill Gates hasn’t been able to figure that out yet – unless you find a way to be able to extend the length of the day, it’s impossible for you to ever break that.
Wrapping my head around that was like, got it, cool, put your ego down, understand that yes, nobody can do this as good as you – and that’s okay. Now it’s become a function of, can I hire someone to do it 70% as good as me. I really lead with “I do, you watch, then you do, I watch, and then I manage.” Essentially, I’m doing it and showing it; they’re watching. Then I’m hands off and I’m watching and I’m saying, “Now you’re doing it.”
Then when it feels good, it’s putting checks and balances in place. It’s “Hey, let’s track the CPA you’re driving for this campaign. Let’s track how many conversations you had with a client.” I’ll poke in time to time and just listen on mute to a sales call, little things like that. But really, at least for me, it’s a function of again, I’m doing and you’re watching, you’re taking notes.
And it’s not a one-time thing. It’s consistently – it’s funny. Now I joke I’m really a cheerleader, at the end of the day, today. I work for my team more than they work for me. My job all day long is like, “What can I get you? How can I help you?” They’re like, “Go get me this.” I’m running to go get coffee for everybody. That’s my job now: to continuously invest in their wellbeing, to make sure they have the right tools, they have the right training, set them up to have consultations with people that might be better. That’s in personal and business life.
That continuous grooming of individuals is really, at least in my opinion, the key to sustainable long-term growth. But again, that was a little tactical there. I think that same progression applies to whether you’re hiring someone around an AdWords account, someone to talk to clients, or someone to sell. But short answer, yeah.
The other portion of my time is putting out fires. I’m not going to say I’m sitting on a beach all day and the machine runs itself. I am there to put our fires. I am there when there’s a difficult conversation or a new challenge that comes up for a sales guy or within the accounts. I am there to help strategize or to jump in or anything like that. Yeah, I’d say I handle the top 10% of fires as well that roll up to me.
ROB: Very good. Anthony, you mentioned that one of your early hires was your brother, and it sounded like he came in in this operational structuring role. How have you thought about, as you grow, handling this balance of needing process to scale while also needing creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit to continue growth and avoid stagnating?
ANTHONY: That’s an awesome question, dude. I think first you’ve got to understand where your strength is. Is it operationally or is that continued vision? Ultimately, I think I’d be lying if I didn’t say you have to learn and work on both. That’s where that challenge of the 24 hours comes in.
But it’s hiring people that can do things better than yourself. For instance, I remember when we were at a much, much, much smaller size, I hired an operational consultant who came in for a week. It was a ton of money at the time for him to come in, and I was like, this is a necessary investment. He put together project management systems and he put together processes.
It was all stuff that I had been probably a year too late. We really needed it a year earlier and I just kept being like, “I’ll do it” or “We should” or “We’re good, the train’s not falling off.” Making those investments back into the business is extremely key because if I hadn’t done that, we would’ve never unlocked the next level in the video game. We would’ve been stuck on that same level.
That process is extremely important and it is something that I am not blessed with. I was not born to be very checklist, A, B, C, D, E. I always joke it’s a “fire, ready, aim” mentality. Essentially, finding people, whether it’s consultants, it’s a part-time person – whoever gets that ball moving, because a lot of times it’s hard, depending on the size of an agency, to be like “Let me go hire a full-time operations guy or project management.” You might not have the cash flow to be able to justify that.
But what can you afford and what kind of steps – there’s a great site called Clarity.fm where you can pay people per minute for their time. Go find someone who ran a good-sized company operationally and have them come in and help put this together. Spend a day with someone on your team that can help do it. Because ultimately, you do need to be watching out for icebergs as an entrepreneur. If that is the role you’re going to take and you are going to be the visionary, you do need to be looking out for the future and say, “Hey, we need to productize our service” or “Hey, we need to focus here.”
Some of the most successful people in the world stare out of a window for hours throughout the day. Everyone’s like, “Are they daydreaming? What are they doing?” You get paid as an entrepreneur to think. The quicker you can free up your time from – I’ll have days where I have 200 emails, and I’ll shut it down. I’ll just sit outside and just think.
It sounds funny. It’s like, “Dude, you’ve got to knock those out.” Some of my highest ROI time is just sitting on a bench somewhere and thinking. It sounds funny and it sounds silly, but it really is true. Eventually, if you are the visionary, you’re paid to think. You make money when you’re thinking. The quicker you get out of the day-to-day rut and the more time you have free to just express yourself and think, the quicker the business is going to grow.
If you’re not the visionary, if you’re not there, can you find a business partner that is? Can you find someone, again, a consultant or a mentor, someone who has been there, done that, grown to that level? How can you get around them and incentivize them again to help you? Maybe they make a percentage of growth. Maybe you’re paying them high hourly to get that. Maybe that’s a skill you’re going to work on. “How do I study some of the best visionaries and thinkers in the world?”
So I don’t want you to get stuck if someone is really good operationally on stuff to be like “That’s not me, I’m screwed.” It’s like, no, find someone who – essentially, understand what you’re good at, double down on that, and then surround yourself with people that can pick up the slack on the other level, is really the key.
I think the reason I’m so good at what I do is because I know what I’m really bad at and I’m okay with that. So I don’t need to wear 50 hats. I don’t need my ego to be stroked. I don’t need to be right. In fact, I want to be wrong. How can you find people that will tell you you’re wrong and can help get that to the next level?
And it doesn’t have to be hiring someone full-time. You don’t need to have a $100,000 a month payroll to do that. I’m telling you, there are shortcuts. There are people that want a mentee in their life because they get a ton of value out of mentoring someone at any stage of a business. Are you reaching out to those people on LinkedIn? Are you direct messaging them on Instagram for a conversation? Again, are you hiring a consultant? Are you paying someone an hourly rate to come in? Are you finding a part-time CFO that can at least get the ball rolling so you can start seeing the value or start making somewhat of your investment back? Understand the value of a CFO or something like that at a limited facet before jumping in and hiring someone at $100,000 salary, $60,000 salary.
ROB: A lot of gold there, Anthony. We will get Clarity.fm into the show notes as well. You’ve been looking back a little bit on some really good lessons along the way. What are some things you might do in building Siteflood that you would do differently that you’ve learned? If you said, “If I were doing this all over again, I would change…”
ANTHONY: I had a few key moments for me. One was I remember I sat in this all-day learning thing, and they go, “If you can’t sit here all day without having to go – if you can’t step away from your business for a full day on a workday, there’s a problem.” I think that pain point really hit with me. I felt successful, I felt good enough, I was making good money, and I felt kind of like an idiot. I was like, damn. I got four or five calls throughout that thing. I had to literally go outside. I was like, “Holy crap, I have not created a business. I’ve created a job for myself.” The second I woke up to that, I started really understanding, again, some of my pain points.
Some of the things that I would do differently is niche down in the specific industry and focus on that. I hear it over and over again; it did not ring with me, and now I can say, thank God, it finally did. In hindsight I can look back, and like I said, healthcare and financial industries – it’s not I just focus on plumbers or something like that, so I’m not even there yet, although I’d like to be one day. Even just this focus around finance and healthcare – we don’t work with ecommerce clients. Even just cutting that off, it sounds funny and it felt funny at the beginning because you don’t want to turn away business.
There’s ways to do it. Refer someone and get a referral fee to an agency that does work on ecommerce clients. Then it doesn’t feel like you’re turning away money. Stuff like that. But niching on one industry I think allows you to not just think about – if you’re an advertising agency, not just advertising all day, but really helping you read on the financial industry or read on the healthcare industry, whatever it is. If it’s legal, law firms, read on that. You start learning the conversations. You start seeing trends in what’s working and not working, even as osmosis, even outside of running ads.
It also allows your team to focus. Now they know how to run a law firm’s account versus they’re working with a car guy and then a plumber. They’re learning new industries all day long. There’s a compounding effect to just focusing on the same industry. So that’s number one. I heard it, but I wasn’t listening for probably 2 years. I heard niche down specific on one, and I was like, “Yep, sounds good, but I’ve got this auto guy who’s about to sign up, and then I’ve got this DUI lawyer that’s about to sign. That’s money. I want money.”
I’m not necessarily telling you turn away money. Find ways to monetize that or do it at a limited facet, but start gravitating towards which client are you performing the best for? Who do you have the best results for? Then go find more of those people. Go find more of those to essentially enroll more in your program or bring on as a client. That niching is the number one change that I would make. Can’t stress that enough. I didn’t listen.
Number two, again, is find what I disliked the most, like what didn’t I like in my day-to-day the most, and hire for that immediately. There is a massive cost that people don’t see to their brainpower, to you spending time on things that you’re not good at and you don’t like doing. It drains your energy.
Looking at your energy as a currency is a really big deal. People don’t look at their energy and time as a currency. Is something energizing you and getting you excited, or is it draining you? If it’s draining you, find someone who it does excite.
I remember my bookkeeper, I kept apologizing when I needed her to do stuff because I hated it. One day she goes, “Anthony, why do you keep apologizing? I love doing this stuff.” That clicked with me. Just because I don’t like to do it, doesn’t mean other people dislike to do it. So that was a really big learning point for me too.
Really, those two go a long way, the focusing, doubling down on a specific thing, and then essentially – there’s a theme here – hiring around things you’re not good at or you don’t like doing.
ROB: That’s a great takeaway to get rid of those things. Really, it takes your mental energy to think about doing it, then to not do it, and then to do it. It’s a bad, bad thing. Anthony, as you’re looking ahead, what is coming up for Siteflood or the industry in general, marketing world, that you’re pumped about?
ANTHONY: I think marketing world in general I’ll touch on – because I think it’ll apply the best to everybody – I really do see a shift in the market where brands are not going to put up with just writing a $5,000 or $10,000 a month check and be okay with it. I think the companies and the agencies that are good at what they do are going to move to more and more performance-based. I think that’s very healthy for the space.
I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here with both brands and agencies. They’ve gotten burnt by the people overseas that said, “I’ll get you to Google No. 1 for $500 a month” or “I’ll do this.” The overpromise, underdeliveries I think are keeping a lot of brands from working with the right agencies. That’s challenging, and I think we’re moving that friction point of tying in performance bonuses or becoming more performance/CPA driven agencies versus, again, these big agencies that come in and get big contracts and say “Look how many eyeballs you’re bringing out!”, which some people are excited by, but most brands are ROI focused, CPA driven. At some point they are focused on revenue.
I see that as a shift over the next few years. It will become more and more prevalent for marketing agencies, and I think it’s going to squeeze out the low-performing ones, and I think it’s going to put the high-performing ones on a rocket ship to the moon because brands are going to be a lot more excited to work with agencies. There’s not this dirty feeling around it.
I look at it as like buying a car. I hate going to buy a car because I feel dirty about it. Even when I need a car or even if I want one, I’m like, “Nah, I don’t really want to go deal with that process.” I think brands probably feel that way to an extent. They’re like, “I know I need a marketing agency, I know there’s good ones, I know I can use it, but man, I don’t really want to get jerked around for another 6 months and thousands of dollars and this and that.”
I’m hoping the overall viewpoint and feeling around marketing agencies increases in a positive light versus “I’ve been burnt 50 times” or “I’ve just given up.” They’re too jaded. So I’m really hoping for that.
The other thing that’s interesting is we’re in a great market right now. Everybody is a little bit more lenient with spending money and things like that, and as we head towards, eventually, the economy correcting itself – I don’t know when it’ll be, but that’s something interesting to focus on, too, for a lot of agencies. Are you working with recession-proof businesses? That’s interesting to think about on the horizon. Are you working with want-to-haves or need-to-haves? Are you working with people that sell trinkets? Are they going to be the first to get cut when it comes to a recession, or are you aligning yourself with businesses that are recession-proof?
That’s not everything, but it is an interesting thought that I think a lot of agencies may not be looking at. Because things are good, people forget the ’08s or ’06s of times. Or may not have been in business or around then. I fall into that too, being younger and not really being mature in business when the recession was low. So I’m really preaching to myself. Just look out for the horizon. I don’t know what that exactly means to you listening, but it is an important thing that I think when times are good, everybody forgets and doesn’t necessarily prep for. So apply that however you want.
ROB: That’s real solid, Anthony. When people want to find you and they want to find Siteflood, where should they go to track you down?
ANTHONY: I’m most active probably on Instagram. It’s just my first and last name, @anthonysarandrea. Just google me and reach out on one of my sites. I’m happy to answer any questions for anybody, too.
Any way I can help. If you’re an agency looking to grow, I’d be more than happy to help point you in the right direction or give any feedback. Or if you’re a brand that’s struggling to decide which agency to work with, I can help, give you some pointers as you’re going through that process on some of the best people or best things to look out for or questions to ask, things like that. It does feel a little bit like brain surgery. Really, on either respect, if you’re the agency or you’re the brand, having third party clarity, I’m happy to jump in that facet.
ROB: That’s great. Thank you, Anthony Sarandrea, Founder of Siteflood. It has been great to hear your own story and journey. Congratulations on everything that y’all are doing.
ANTHONY: Thanks, brother. Thank you guys for having me. I really appreciate it. I had a blast.
ROB: All right. Be well.
ANTHONY: Thanks, bro.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Espree Devora, got tagged as “the Girl Who Gets it Done.” Later, when a friend observed her enthusiasm in tackling a number of business tasks for Tony Hsieh, then head of Zappos. Her passion for content creation began when she was in the 6th grade and her father gave her a video camera. She filmed hundreds of sequences featuring “extreme” sports (skateboarding, motocross) and built the first online action sports social network. In 2012, she attempted to start “We are LA Tech,” featuring local startup founders. She shot 12-episodes, but her enterprise partner refused to edit the material. Dead end.
Two years later, in September 2014, Espree resurrected “We are LA Tech” as a podcast. By October 2014, it topped Apple’s New & Noteworthy. She had learned on YouTube everything she needed to know to run a podcast. In 2015, Espree launched “Women in Tech” in response to the dire “glass ceiling” warnings so prevalent at the time. Her purpose? To “create a positive piece of content whose sole purpose is to show us what’s possible, to expand our belief system, so listeners walk away feeling, “’If she can do it, so can I.’” Much of the theme of her work is what Espree calls “vulnerable leadership.” She wants to share “how people have built their companies and their professions in ways that are really empowering, and what can we learn from them.”
In this interview, For people interested in getting started in podcasting, Espree recommends the technical equipment and software that she has found to be most helpful, planning and motivational strategies, She provides a series of podcasting training videos.
The first tool in Espree’s podcasting toolbag was an app to help her maintain focus on daily goals, to help her deal with her fear of “ creating this thing, and then creating a thing that didn’t work out.” Tools she uses today: An Audio Technica 2100 microphone, Sound Studio editing software. As podcasting has grown, the demand for podcasting training has likewise increased. Espree teaches everything from large groups to intensive, private, month-long master classes. She recommends continuous outreach to maintain relationships and lists a number of tools effective for doing this, and offers tips on techniques and frequency . . . in order to be “un—annoying.”
Espree had been scheduled as a speaker at this year’s now-cancelled South by Southwest. She has given many presentations there in the past, performed live podcasts, and led meetup groups. She credits her success to being where hard work meets luck and opportunity, a variation of the Roman philosopher Seneca’s “Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity."
Espree can be reached on LinkedIn and all social at (Espree Devora), and onTwitter @espreedevora. Her podcasts are on: WeAreLATech.fm http://podcast.wearelatech.com/ and WomeninTech.fm http://podcast.womenintechshow.com/.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Espree Devora, “the Girl Who Gets It Done.” She is the Creator and Host of the We Are LA Tech podcast and also the host of Women in Tech. Welcome to the podcast, Espree.
ESPREE: Hello, hello! Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
ROB: Very excited to have you here. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your own journey into becoming “the Girl Who Gets It Done” and hosting the things that you do?
ESPREE: Oh my gosh. A lot of people ask me when I became an entrepreneur, like when I made that decision. I feel like I was born an entrepreneur. I remember walking into Westwood Village with my father and looking into the empty office buildings, picturing what businesses I would put in them.
As I went along my journey, I think I just became very resourceful in a lot of different areas, from junior high to high school to college, and eventually the tagline “the Girl Who Gets it Done” came from when I was hanging out with Tony Hsieh, who is the head of Zappos, and a bunch of his entourage. I was taking care of some things and people kept asking me, “Are you his assistant? Are you his publicist? Who are you?” My girlfriend who was with me at the time just said, “She’s the girl who gets it done.” [laughs] It just stuck, and it’s been that way for a really long time.
ROB: Excellent. I think if you get a nickname around Tony Hsieh, you stick to it for the most part.
ESPREE: Definitely.
ROB: What about the journey into these podcasts that you host? When did you realize that was something you wanted to do and then really caught your ongoing attention?
ESPREE: I think the first moment that I realized I was really excited by content creation was in the 6th grade, when my dad gifted me a video camera and I got to explore. I ended up building the first action sports media company online. It was the first action sports social network, and we produced hundreds and hundreds of video content across skateboarding, motocross, all these things.
Then in 2012, I had this urge to continue creating content, but at that point in my life I was more interested in the startup world. I had already been in the startup tech world, obviously, building the first social network for action sports, but I didn’t understand that. At that time I was just doing things. They weren’t a global trend like it is now. Terms like “social media,” “entrepreneur,” “founder,” “accelerators,” these things were not a thing then.
In 2012, when LA started to have more startups and have more founder stories, I wanted to capture that moment, so I partnered with someone to create a video series called We Are LA Tech. Unfortunately, that person didn’t share the same work ethic I had. We shot 12 episodes, and that person’s responsibility was to edit them and none of them were edited. My heart was broken. I waited a year, and I ended up going on a backpacking trip to escape this reality that this video series would never be completed that I felt so passionate about.
While backpacking in Europe, my friend Mark who founded a company called BetaList, started showing me podcasts on his iPhone. At the time I was an Android person. He’s like, “You’ve got to listen to these podcasts. They’re so funny. You’ll love them.” I get back to the States; I get an iPhone because I want to stay connected with my friends in Europe and it was the easiest way to do that at the time. I start listening to podcasts.
I didn’t realize that years before, I had actually been listening to two podcasts, Podcasts and Product People by Justin Jackson, who actually has now co-founded a podcast hosting company called Transistor. He was one of the early podcasters, and I just loved his show. But at that time I would move the audio files from the computer to my phone. It wasn’t the thing it is today, so I didn’t even know I was listening to podcasts.
Anyway, at the same time, I was like, wow, if I start a podcast too, I never have to rely on a video editor again. [laughs] So in 2013 I started stirring up the We Are LA Tech podcast in my head. It launched in I think September 2014, and by October 2014, it was number one on Apple’s New & Noteworthy. It was just really exciting. I’m completely a self-taught podcaster. I taught myself how to edit. I taught myself everything. I just watched a lot of YouTube videos, and I’ve been podcasting ever since.
Then in 2015, I launched the Women in Tech podcast, and the story goes on and on.
ROB: What made you realize that maybe it was worth at least experimenting with the Women in Tech podcast? Or were you all-in from Day 1 and you knew it had to be a thing?
ESPREE: The Women in Tech podcast was inspired because at the time, these women’s groups were becoming a thing. They were never a thing before. I’m like, “Oh look, that’s me. I founded companies and I am a girl too, so I want to check out what’s going on.” All these groups I would go to at the time, the whole conversation would be about how women are held back or statistics that are in the negative and this and that. I’m like, man, I’ve never felt held back. The only person I’ve ever felt held back by is me.
If I had heard all these messages about how much was not possible for me, I would have never built the first action sports social network. I wouldn’t have raised money. I wouldn’t have done all these things because I would’ve believed it wasn’t possible for someone like me.
So I wanted to create a positive piece of content whose sole purpose is to show us what’s possible, to expand our belief system, so listeners walk away feeling “If she can do it, so can I.”
ROB: There’s a common thread, it seems, between both of the podcasts. You have, with LA, an underappreciated market for startups – I think perhaps even still to this day, there’s some very good companies, but also with a chip on their shoulder. And then with Women in Tech, similarly, there’s sometimes a lack of appreciation, a lack of highlighting, a lack of encouragement in both cases, you’re putting a positive spin on it rather than saying, “Hey, pay attention because you’re not paying enough attention.”
ESPREE: Yeah. I think my brand theme – I call it vulnerable leadership, where it’s not that I want to just be positive. I don’t want to be Instagram perfect. But I do want to share a vulnerable message in a way that we could shift our belief system to turn something that could be perceived as a negative into a positive.
I think the process behind that is really important. It’s not just about being like “Everything’s great! You have it so much better than everybody else!” [laughs] It’s about, okay, today sucks or whatever a person is dealing with, but here are the steps I went to, because do I want to feel sucky right now? No. If I don’t want to feel sucky, what’s something that I can do to potentially shift myself out of that mindset? I think that’s what my shows exemplify, just vulnerable leadership: how have people built their companies and their professions in ways that are really empowering, and what can we learn from them?
ROB: For those of us who are outside of the LA tech world, certainly we’ve heard of some of the newer fliers – I think maybe Byrd or Lime scooters is from there. I apologize for not knowing what you know.
ESPREE: That’s okay.
ROB: I’ve definitely ridden plenty of scooters. But what are some of the companies that are maybe trending right now that people may not fully be aware of, but should be?
ESPREE: Oh wow, trending? I don’t know who’s trending right now because I tend to stay laser-focused on sharing people’s stories. But some companies that are iconic that you may have seen – of course, Snapchat is here. FabFitFun is here. There’s really huge companies that are popular at least across the U.S., if not globally, that were created – Myspace was in LA. Google has tons of offices here now, and they’re really a dominant force in the LA tech scene. YouTube has their Creator Hub here. It’s definitely a thriving tech city.
My primary interest is the lifestyle and culture of a tech professional, more than what is the latest gadget. However, if you tell me the latest video or microphone gadget, I will be interested, but that’s just for personal, selfish reasons. [laughs]
ROB: I was going to ask – I think a lot of people, when they hear about podcasting, they feel very intimidated in terms of the whole process, from creation of the content to editing and publishing. What was in your first podcasting tool bag?
ESPREE: That’s a great question. I’d say the first thing that was in my podcasting tool bag was actually the app. I don’t even remember what it was called. It’s like Daily Goal. It was some daily goal app. The reason that was the first one in my bag is because I was so afraid of, one, creating this thing, and then creating a thing that didn’t work out.
What I did was I created a goal every day. It could be like “create podcast artwork,” “get a microphone,” “schedule an interview.” Just one thing. And I wouldn’t allow myself to not do the thing. I remember when I got my first podcast poster designed, and I didn’t like the design and I thought it was really ugly, but my goal for that day was “post it,” like it’s done. So I just went with it. It was about the forward movement; it wasn’t about being perfect. I actually happen to really like that flyer now, but at the time I did not.
That was my first one. Then as I became more educated by watching YouTube videos, I bought a Snowball mic because I knew my episodes would be in-person and it would be more than one person, so I wanted a mic that picked up more people.
A Snowball mic is actually the lowest level mic because it’s really meant for musicians, like a guitarist or something like that. It’s not meant for multiple people. Those are for technical reasons that I can get into another time. Feel free to tweet me @espreedevora if you’d like to know more reasons why. But it was a Snowball.
What I’d recommend to everybody starting out is an Audio-Technica 2100, and that’s actually what I’m using right now. Again, I could share with you the technicalities of why in another conversation.
Then I had my computer. I have a Mac, so I found an editing program called Sound Studio. I found it on a random forum. They do a terrible marketing job because they’re very hard to find. [laughs] But they’re an incredible software program. The way I describe it, it’s like iMovie for audio. They just make it stupid simple to edit audio. It’s great. So I used that.
I remember my very first interview, I didn’t even know how to record it. I was just confused, and I plugged the Snowball into the computer and I was trying to figure it out. It’s scary, but what matters is that we take a step forward.
In my speeches, when I give speeches on how to podcast, the thing that I tell the whole audience is on their way home, I want them to take out their phone and, in their voice memo app in their phone, I want them to record their first interview on the drive home, or their first podcast episode. Then I want them to send me that via Google Drive or email or whatever it is, because that’s all that matters in the beginning, is taking a step forward and just taking action.
ROB: If you take that step forward every day, which you were doing with your app, it’s like those challenges when people talk about if you just get 1% done better every day, it really does add up. Are you still editing, or have you managed to delegate that opportunity?
ESPREE: First of all, I happen to love editing. I call it “painting audio.” But it is not who I want to be in the world. [laughs] I’m very lucky; an editor that I hired in 2014 has been with me since, and he works with me and edits everything. I have other editors that I’ve worked with as well. So I do have the editing done. Every so often, I’ll tell them that I want to contribute and I’ll do an episode here or there, but I do not rely on my own time for editing anymore.
ROB: It’s the same as my experience. We actually did a quick cycle episode that we recorded yesterday about the financial stimulus involved in the CARES Act and how marketing agencies can claim that money for themselves to keep their team onboard. But normally, I have trained editors – and I think what you said before, audio versus video is very, very forgiving.
ESPREE: Completely.
ROB: If there’s a glitch in the middle of a word, it’s remarkable. You can just highlight it, delete it, and it sounds great all of a sudden, whereas if you did that with video it would look insane.
ESPREE: Totally, completely. And there’s so much that goes into video, from lighting, color correction, angles, audio. There are so many variables, you just cannot get away with high quality video if you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s a huge learning curve.
The main components of a podcast – and again, I can dig into this deeper in a different conversation – are the tracks: is each person’s voice being recorded on a separate track or is everybody’s voice on the same track? How does it sound, the mic that you’re using? Are you doing it remotely or in person? Because that will have an impact on your equipment decisions. Things like that. But there’s just so much more that goes into editing and shooting video.
ROB: As you mentioned, all the information is out there. Everything is essentially figureoutable. I think there’s a book to that effect. I first figured out how to record live because I was at the Social Shakeup Conference and I saw somebody there recording live, and I just walked up to them and asked them, and because they’d done it enough, they had a page that listed all their gear, and they had affiliate links.
Normally I don’t even click on affiliate links because I’m kind of ornery about that, but I totally clicked their affiliate links. It was something done with a mix of generosity and sharing, and if they get a few bucks, to your point, for that Snowball mic or for the Zoom recorder that we use when we’re in person, who am I to be upset about that?
ESPREE: Yeah, totally. But I don’t have an affiliate link for you. [laughs]
ROB: Maybe another revenue stream there.
ESPREE: Yeah, it’s something I’ve thought about. It’s one of the many things that still is on my to-do list for way too long.
ROB: But you’re figuring it out step by step. How did you make that jump? I think a lot of agencies, marketers, organizations develop a competency without taking it to the next level. You went from creating podcasts to training people to do podcasts. How did you evolve into that shift?
ESPREE: I think it’s a few things. One, I was just asked by several people. I got into podcasting in 2013, when it wasn’t a thing and it wasn’t cool. It didn’t start to become more – I mean, obviously podcasting has been around for several years, way before that, but it just became this mainstream thing in the last few years.
In 2013, it wasn’t on the radar. In 2014, it started to bubble up on the radar because of the StartUp podcast. Then Serial came out, so then the mainstream news started talking about podcasting, and it was a domino effect from there.
At that time, I think it was just supply and demand. [laughs] Even today, it’s supply and demand. People have a really hard time finding any indie production companies for podcasts, so I get a lot of inbound on that because I’ve been creating my show for several years. You can’t find a lot of people who have been both producing and hosting for several years. Maybe they just started 10 episodes ago or something. I have hundreds and hundreds of episodes done and distributed. So sometimes it’s just getting there early.
Now my “why” is interesting. I get asked a lot to teach. Initially I did it just for the community so that they can learn and express themselves, but I found that it was really exciting to be a part of their journey in creation and to really help facilitate them creating something meaningful so it’s not just another audio file, but it’s something people feel mentally subscribed to. That’s been great.
So I do a couple things, whether I’m teaching classes for the general assemblies of the world or USC and organizations like that or I’m doing semi-private masterclasses that are a month-long immersive, and I meet with a small group of people and I have expert guest speakers on. It’s just really, really fun. So I’ve really enjoyed it. That’s why I do it, because I love it and love being a part of their journey.
ROB: There’s so many cool little hidden skills in there. I think you’re able to keep going on a podcast because of that rhythm that you put into your life overall. I think people might not think entirely – you’re based in the Los Angeles area, and that’s content city. That has to partly pervade who’s interested in talking to you.
When I look at how you’ve picked up these skills along the way, one skill you picked up that I think a lot of people would look at with some jealousy is you have figured out how to be selected as a speaker at South by Southwest. That’s where we originally intended to speak in person. How did you figure out that process? I know people who have been trying for years and can’t sort it out. I imagine you did it one step at a time.
ESPREE: Honestly, I feel like I got – what’s that saying? “Where hard work meets luck and opportunity” or something like that, or preparedness? I’ve bene working so hard for so many years. I started going to South by as a journalist, and then I became a speaker at South by – I don’t remember what year, but I’ve given many talks there and performed the podcast live and led meetup groups.
But the meetup groups I’ve led have been the podcasters meetup, and like I said, in 2013 no one cared. I said I would do this thing; I was the only person offering myself up to do this thing. Or maybe there weren’t a lot of people. And the talks that I’ve given have ranged from anything from in the early days it was more on entrepreneurship, and now, again, podcasting.
It’s just about demonstrating where my unique value proposition is, the unique insights, the energy that I bring to the table as a speaker, what makes me a speaker that stands out amongst the rest. So just really think about that for yourself. What is an interesting angle? Actually, I think I’ll do a thing for you in a second, just for your audience, so you can have a little sampling of what that sounds like.
The last thing is performing my podcast live at South by Southwest. I performed the Women in Tech podcast live last year and then also this year. Again, it’s over time, establishing myself as a podcaster, my relationships, the audience that I have. The purpose and mission of why my content exists in the first place is very clear.
It’s just this stew of hard work, and then it’s the luck of being noticed. Sometimes you can even manipulate being noticed. I should say positively manipulate, meaning that you’re doing enough outreach, that you’re using programs like Pipedrive and Contactually to make sure that you’re continuously doing your outreach. That’s maintaining your relationships.
My mom comes from an entertainment background, and she always said – it was her or maybe my grandmother who said “the squeaky wheel gets the oil.” So when she talks about being in the entertainment business, she says they’d cast the people who called last because that’s the person that was on the top of their mind. I’m like, that’s really interesting.
And it’s true; the more you’re on the top of people’s minds, in a non-annoying way, the more they’ll think of you when there’s an opportunity. The more you make yourself helpful – I was featured in Forbes randomly, and the reason I was featured in Forbes, that feature happened because I was doing an interview I think a year or a year and a half before, and the interview went something like 3 hours late. So I was just sitting in a waiting room for several hours. I never complained and I just chilled there and I was nice about it.
Then the person who kept coming back in to apologize to me was so grateful that I did that that when there was the opportunity for Forbes, I was the first person that was thought of. Just because I waited in a chill manner. [laughs]
ROB: Which anybody can do.
ESPREE: Totally. So it’s like, how are you showing up to life in unique ways that make you stand apart? If it’s okay with you, Rob, I’m going to do a quick thing. I’m going to show you how I start my speaking engagements and my podcast, because it’s not this tone of voice. Is that okay with you? Can I do that?
ROB: Run with it.
ESPREE: Okay, cool. Everybody watch your eardrums just a little bit. I’m going to hold the mic a little bit away because I don’t know the levels of how we’re recording right now. But this is what it sounds like, and the reason why I’m sharing this with you is because this is what sets me apart and makes me a unique speaker and podcaster. I’d say the thing that sets me apart is my energy when I show up to the stage.
Three… two… one…
“Welcome back to the Women in Tech podcast, celebrating women in tech around the world! So excited for our next guest here today. Welcome…” and then you say the person’s name. But that’s just crazy, right? That’s out of nowhere. Where it’s inspired from is growing up, I was super into wrestling. [laughs]
ROB: Yes, it sounds like wrestling. [laughs] That’s amazing.
ESPREE: I was super into wrestling and I loved the wrestlers being announced onstage, and then I was really into Steven Tyler’s stage performance and how he would really be into the mic and really be energized. So that’s why when I do my podcasts and my interviews, I stand. You never see people stand when they’re doing it. I stand. And I do it for a lot of other reasons too, because of your vocal cords. Onstage, I stand. Sometimes I’ll kick my shoes off. I’ll never stand behind a podium.
There’s just all sorts of techniques. My friend Mark, who actually built the YouTube Player, gave me the best speaking advice. He said, “People don’t remember what you say; they remember how you made them feel.” I think about that with my podcast. I think about that onstage. How am I making everyone feel? Are they feeling the way I intend for them to feel? And if not, what do I need to do?
When I show up that way, the guest feels more energized, the audience feels more engaged, and to the event organizer, I’m a unique speaker that brings something different to the table.
ROB: Absolutely. I love it. We have a wrestling announcement right here on the podcast. [laughs] I think you mentioned something that is really key that would be easy to get lost in the mix. You mentioned staying on people’s minds in an un-annoying way. I think we are in a very perhaps more challenging moment for that, where people who don’t have that skill may be a little bit lost. We are sheltering in place right now in our homes to avoid getting and spreading the coronavirus. What you can’t count on is bumping into somebody in the halls, in a restaurant you usually run into, at a networking event.
How do you think about staying on people’s radar in an un-annoying way? Because quite often, I think people give advice of sending a link – and you actually did send me a very good link in our chat – but I think there are often times where that can feel still very inauthentic and people can tell. You’re still just sending them a link because someone told you to send them a link to stay on their radar.
ESPREE: A hundred percent. I think there’s a lot of different ways, and we need to find the tools that are right for our own personalities. The kind of things that I look at – one of them, the first thing I want to say, there’s a tool called Bombbomb which does video messaging. It’s really great to make something a bit more personal, to show somebody that you care.
I find that even when I send a Bombbomb video, if I don’t say the person’s name, they may think that I created it for a lot of people. I remember I made one for even my friend, who’s also a customer, one time. She said, “You know, it was until you said my son’s name, I thought it was a video for everyone.” It’s really interesting to me because it was personalized.
There’s tools – like I said, Contactually. There’s a ton of other tools. I know Tim Ferriss uses Evernote a lot. I don’t necessarily know if he uses it for maintaining follow-up, but Evernote is a great tool. There’s WorkFlowy. There’s different programs that will spit out who you haven’t followed up with lately. LinkedIn is such a powerful resource for all of us.
I think it’s about really thinking, who do you want to connect with? Why do you want to connect with them, and how often? And are you tracking that follow-up? I use a CRM system called Pipedrive, and like I said, I’m a huge fan of Contactually as well. I think Contactually is just a great follow-up tool. I’ve heard good things about Nimble.
You could find out what’s going on in someone’s life via Twitter, via Instagram, via Facebook. Really paying attention to their social networks. I call it ego marketing. It sometimes sounds like a bad thing, but all of us – all of us – we operate on our egos. We feel like the world is revolving around us at all times. “What’s that person thinking of me? What’s that person doing,” blah, blah, blah, me, me, me.
If you all of a sudden come to someone and say, “I watched your talk online,” and say the specific talk, and then say what you got out of it and maybe a timestamp, it is just so clear that that is about them.
The kind of messages I can’t stand – because I get an abundance of inbound messaging for the Women in Tech podcast, or even one yesterday, perfect example, the We Are LA Tech podcast. Someone messaged me asking to be on the show and they weren’t in Los Angeles. If they knew the show, they’d know every single episode is from someone in Los Angeles. So obviously you don’t care. You’re just mass mailing.
With Women in Tech, I’ll get messages about the controversial topics someone could talk about, and if they knew the show, they’d know we do no controversy, no politics. So it tells me that you really don’t care. I’m just some name on your list.
So when you’re thinking about follow-up, you want to think about: who do you want to follow up with and why? What’s a meaningful way to follow up with them? And then tracking that follow-up.
And not following up too much. Another example is somebody followed up with me three times in one week, and I hadn’t seen any of the messages. Then on the third message they said, “I know you’re probably getting annoyed with my messages” – which just shows me it’s an automated system. “You’re getting annoyed with my messages,” and the truth was I hadn’t even seen the other two. My response back was, “One, I’m not interested, and two, I recommend you not follow up in such a short period of time.” [laughs]
Imagine if I’m giving a talk, if I’m at South by Southwest this week, I am not really on email or paying attention. If you follow up three times this week, during this particular phase of my life, the chances of me seeing them is so low. That’s why it’s way more effective to follow up 3 weeks to a couple months apart. But just really be sincere in why you’re even following up with the people in the first place.
ROB: If you’re following up 3 weeks or 3 months or anything like that, also, you have to have a mindset where you’re playing the long game. You’re not playing the short game where it’s “How many times can I message you in 2 weeks and then either ignore you or maybe you’ve answered me.”
ESPREE: Right.
ROB: If someone looks at the Women in Tech podcast, I think one thing they’ll realize is, number one, your level of commitment there. I think I’m seeing over 400, almost 450 episodes. But also, I think they’ll notice that you do the work, and you do the work authentically.
What I mean by that is you’re not just cherry-picking and trying to ladder up to the biggest name. You have some names on the podcast that are known, but you also have – again, in this theme – people that your listeners might not know but they should. It looks to me like quite often you are going far and wide. You’re doing the work of actually reaching out to people across the world, and probably even going there to have those conversations.
ESPREE: Rob, I love how you did your homework. [laughs] You would be an email that I would open, because that is so spot-on. I get a lot of messages from a lot of super fancy people, thinking that they’re just entitled to be on the show. My personal excitement is sharing a story of a woman that normally doesn’t have access. I’ve traveled to Bosnia; recently I was in Kazakhstan. I’ve traveled to over 100 countries just to celebrate these women in tech in person, share their stories, be in their culture.
People say, “Why not just do remotely?” I wouldn’t see the bullets in the buildings on the streets of Bosnia if I wasn’t in Bosnia, understanding that the girl I’m interviewing, as a child, she had to be in a bomb shelter to be safe from the war. These are just things you don’t get on a 1-hour Skype call or something like that.
So really discovering all these magnificent women in tech around the world, giving them the opportunity – I’m really proud that the Women in Tech podcast is, for the majority of guests, the first podcast they’ve ever been on. It just blows my mind. And it’s not necessarily even, by the way, Rob, that these people aren’t seasoned; they’re just not the internet celebrities of the world. They’re not the Gary Vaynerchuks. [laughs]
Then I also have the more well-known people, as you mentioned, and I’m excited to share their stories as well. But my “why” in doing the show is not for social status. It’s not to look good. It’s really to be this bridge for women in tech around the world to be able to discover the resources and mentorship that they need to accelerate.
Hearing stories of how women have pulled over to write notes, listening to the episodes, or shared the stories with their family, or investors have reached out to them because they’ve been on the show – truly social impact. It’s amazing. So it’s not about “do I look the coolest?” It’s about “am I creating the biggest impact?”
ROB: That resonates completely with who you are and what you want to accomplish. I think it’s also a little bit of a secret – and it’s not a secret because we’re talking about it, but candidly, it makes booking a podcast a lot easier when you’re booking people who are interesting and have a story, but it is their first podcast. They say yes a lot more.
ESPREE: Oh yeah, I’m sure. Well, the one thing about women in tech – yes, I think your point is accurate, and, unfortunately, with women in tech – a lot of people ask me, “What’s the biggest commonality of all the women in tech that you’re met with?” They’re expecting some technical answer. Unfortunately, the biggest commonality is that I think as a culture, oftentimes we feel we’re not enough.
So I will get women who will say “I don’t think I’m good enough for your show” or “I haven’t spoken before” or something. Then it’s my responsibility as a person who wants to be empowering to give them the level of confidence, and also to say, “Listen, I wouldn’t be picking you unless I thought you were good enough to be on the show, so how about I make the decision on that?” [laughs]
I’ve had a couple people not want to be interviewed because they’re scared, but yes, you are absolutely right that it’s going to be a lot easier. You’re also right that it’s a huge pain point in the podcasting industry for new podcasters, or even a lot of seasoned podcasters, to get yeses from guests. It’s a huge pain point. It is one that I do not have, and maybe that contributes to it, you’re right.
ROB: And you do in-person a lot, which always helps with that rapport. It would be great if we were, but that’s not an option right now. We’re not getting on planes right now.
ESPREE: Totally.
ROB: That is okay. We’ll hope that we can meet up at South by Southwest next year, perhaps.
ESPREE: A hundred percent.
ROB: Espree, when people want to check out all the things that you’re doing, where should they look to find you?
ESPREE: Man, if only I had been smart enough to have one link that says all the things. [laughs] Honestly, look me up on LinkedIn, Espree Devora on LinkedIn. Add me there. It’s also Espree Devora on all social – on Instagram, on Twitter, on Facebook. I do really engage on Twitter. And check out the podcasts, WeAreLATech.fm and WomeninTech.fm.
ROB: It’s all those little things. You put in the work on the domains too.
ESPREE: Yeah.
ROB: Fantastic. You’re consistent on the brand. Espree, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It’s been a true joy to get to know you a little bit, and I know our audience has enjoyed your challenging example of just doing one more thing each day and how that carries through in everything you do.
ESPREE: Thank you so much for having me, Rob. This has been great. I’m happy that you made it remote and we were able to make this happen.
ROB: That’s great. Be well.
ESPREE: Bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Oliver and his brother started Kemweb in 1998, providing coding for other agencies and then livestreaming the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000. Three years ago, frustrated with being a tech-supply company, they took their technical expertise and redefined their business as a full-service digital agency, . offering results-driven web design, online marketing, social media marketing, PR, consulting, podcasting, video production and hosting services.
Today, Kemweb’s 35 developers, art directors, social media experts, and performance team workshop with clients to discover their needs. Kemweb customers range from B2B small and medium sized companies to fast moving consumer goods suppliers. Oliver credits his agency’s success to curiosity and agility, and a change in its approach to potential customers.
A lot of companies will pitch what they can do for customers, without first finding out what the customers need, saying, “We can do this . . . and this . . . and this. What do you want?” Companies may think about “What are we offering? What kind of service?” – but fail to ask, “Why are we doing it? Why should our customers believe the things we’re doing?”
Finding the answer to those last questions was pivotal in driving the Kemweb’s approach to its own customers. Business consulting is rare in Germany . . . and it’s one of the things that is an intrinsic part of today’s Kemweb process. Oliver suggests that you have to drive a lot deeper than the “easy questions” to discover what actions will best serve a client’s needs.
Kemweb now begins a client business relationship with a workshop/consultation utilizing Strategyzer’s Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas to map out a business’s knowledge, unsnarl its inherent complexity, and structure a customer-centric solution, with a focus on communicate the messages their clients want to communicate.
Sean notes that there are cultural differences between businesses in Germany and those in the U.S. For instance: German business owners have greater fear of change and new ways of doing things. Legalities differ as well: Data protection laws are more stringent in the U.S. Sean explains that the linear career process in Germany also affects the way people think. After finishing a German citizens finish their education, they take an apprenticeship, then go to a company and move up the ladder within that company.
Oliver was supposed to serve as a mentor at South by Southwest 2020 in Austin, TX, but the COVID-19 pandemic changed all that. He believes that, “This is a special period in time (that) forces people to be more courageous and to try out new things.” He feels that it is important for businesses to work together – to help the customers with their businesses and to help them survive. “We have to take care of each other . . . worldwide,” he says
Sean recommends looking at today’s challenges as an opportunity to spend more time with family or to online to learn new skills – just use your time. He is using his time in quarantine to set up an English-language Kemweb landing page.
Oliver and Sean can be reached on the social media channels or on the company’s website at: www.kemweb.de. They have a German-American podcast, Robot Spaceship, at www.robotspaceship.com,. described as an industry-leading, European podcast network with a focus on technology, culture, innovation and living the digital lifestyle. (You may need to understand a little German.)
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Oliver Kemmann, Owner and Founder at Kemweb in Mainz, Germany, and also Sean Earley, the New Business Development Manager for the firm. Why don’t you gentlemen start off by telling us about Kemweb and where Kemweb excels?
SEAN: You go.
OLIVER: Maybe I start. [laughs] I founded Kemweb together with my brother about 20 years ago, so 1998, in a time without smartphones, in a time without Facebook and YouTube. We were pretty much doing some coding for other agencies. We started also with livestreaming in the year 2000 for the Olympic Games in Sydney, so we were quite tech-related.
As time passed by, we started to ask questions. How can we get away from being this tech supply company and how can we find our own customers? So we started to talk about digital communication and how we could help people out there to succeed in their special business by using modern digital technology.
This is what we’re doing today. We have about 35 people in the agency and we have developers and we have art directors and we have a social media team and a performance team. We do workshops and stuff to find out what the business is all about and how we can help, and then we set up the channels where we can communicate to the target groups of our customers.
We think in stories and experience, talking about the stories our customer wants to get communicated, and we develop the experience on different channels and different devices. This is what we’re doing.
ROB: A lot of firms I think start off in that mode where they are taking downstream work from other agencies, other firms, but now it sounds like you have a better idea of who your direct customer is. What sort of company and perhaps focus or stage of company is that now?
OLIVER: There’s not one special kind of customer we are serving. We have a lot of B2B business. In Germany, we have a lot of small and medium sized companies. They’re doing a lot of engineering stuff, or small producing companies. Usually they are not very familiar with classic marketing topics and how they could use digital communication to sell their products and services.
But we also have, for example, fast moving consumer good customers and help them, for example, with social media campaigns. So it is very widespread, actually, the customers we are serving. It’s quite exciting. What do you say, Sean? [laughs]
SEAN: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there. I think from my point of view, I come from a background – it’s a little bit different in Germany than it is in America. In Germany people have a linear process; they go to school, they do an apprenticeship, they go to a company, and they stay there in that skill range, and they just move up the ladder.
In the States, as you all probably know, we work all kinds of jobs before we actually start our career. I’ve done all kinds of different things. I’ve worked in all kinds of different jobs. Lots of different agencies, consulted, tech, gaming. One of the things that I have seen is that there’s always differences in everybody’s needs as a business, but when it comes to marketing specifically, there’s a lot of things that everybody needs. It really gets down to that value point, that use case that everybody needs, what is the problem that they have and how we can provide a solution.
I think a lot of agencies particularly get a pitch and they go to a client and they say, “We can do all this stuff. What do you want?” When I started working with Kemweb, Ollie and I had a talk and it was like, that’s exhausting. It’s counterintuitive to what we want to do, and it’s kind of counterintuitive to what the client needs because there are specific things that clients need.
So we tried to refocus our strategy a little bit to work with clients to figure out exactly what they need first before we say “We’ll take your 200,000 euro budget and we’ll give you one or two or three things. What do you want?” We really try to focus in on the needs of the client and give them exactly what they need, and at the same time try to explore other areas to try to explore new places ourselves internally and externally so we can provide lots of services to clients.
But at the same time, we really like to consult first and then give them what they need, and not just “here’s your website, have fun with it.” Sometimes they say they want a website and they don’t really need a website, so it’s important to talk to people first. That’s where the workshop and consulting come in.
ROB: Got it. I think there’s subtlety in the details there. You’re not just talking about doing a bunch of discovery, if I’m hearing you correctly. You’re actually talking about entering into a business relationship sooner with the client, where you have a process around a workshop, where you have a consulting arrangement rather than doing a bunch of unpaid discovery on an RFP. Is that what you’re getting at?
SEAN: Exactly.
ROB: Very cool. What does a workshop look like for you?
OLIVER: I’m a fan of a company called Strategyzer. It originated in Switzerland. These guys developed some canvas thing called the Business Model Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas. I guess you’re familiar with this.
Our approach in the workshops is something Sean said. As a consultant, my job is to get the complexity out of the things. I’m taking all the knowledge the customer has and I’m structuring it in these canvases. This leads us to a very structured way, and at this point we start to look at our customer’s customer, so it’s very customer-centric.
This leads us to exactly the customer pain we’re addressing and what the customers are really looking for. Most of the time, it’s the first time our customers have thought about their own purpose or why they’re doing what they’re doing. Most of them are coming from the “what?” – “What are we offering? What kind of service?” But not “Why are we doing it? Why should our customers believe the things we’re doing?”
This is what we do in the workshops. We try to get all the information from the customer and structure it down in canvases, and then we find the channels and we find the customer groups we should address first.
ROB: That’s probably been a part of your own journey as well. Business Model Canvas, anybody can google it. You’ll find it, you’ll pull it up. I feel like that tool flows from left to right, where it does flow into how everything leads in to the customer so you know what you’re doing, but let’s all tie that through to the customer.
You probably had a little bit of your own journey on that as you transitioned from being a subcontractor coding shop to pursuing your own customers. What did that journey look like where you started to realize what the direct customers needed and you started to be able to pull away from taking parts of projects from other people?
OLIVER: Good question, actually. Or the right question. When we started 2 or 3 years ago to find this way for ourselves, we always were communicating the “whats,” what we were doing. Websites, apps, firms. This is what every other agency is doing, too. They say what the output is.
Then we started to dig deeper and find out, what are we good for? What has brought my brother and me to the point of founding a company or agency? Curiosity and agility are what’s driving us. What we are doing now is we’re very much curious about our customer’s business. If we fully understand what the customer is doing and what the customer needs, then we can help. This was the turning point in our own company history, when we found out that.
ROB: That seems like a neat intersection because you’ve not only found this curiosity for what they’re doing, you’re aligning this tool. You have a tool that actually facilitates your own curiosity that aligns the customer to where they’re actually getting value out of the discovery process, unless they can pay you for it. You’ve aligned the customer and value for them with who you are in your own curiosity, it sounds like.
OLIVER: Yeah. In Germany, at least, it’s not very common that you do some kind of business consulting thing in a web project, for example. Most people, after the workshop, say, “This was a business consulting, what you’re doing.” They start to look differently at their own business, at the company. In Germany, we’re far behind you guys in the States where digital transformation is concerned. Most of the companies are very slow in changing things.
The owner-driven companies really are shy to start changes, so they want someone who says, “Everything is okay. We have this web project, for example,” and you give them the money and it’s ready by the 1st of June or so, and then you don’t have to think about it.
SEAN: I would just interject and say culturally, working in the States and in Germany, there’s a lot of hyper-focusing on details here. There’s also a lot of different rules when it comes to things like data protection, so there’s a lot of hesitancy in a lot that goes on here as well. Especially with some sort of new and innovative tech project, a lot of people are like, “We can’t even legally do that.”
When it comes to things like sales funnels and where you store your customers’ data, it’s a whole other story over here, so it’s not just – they’re behind in their desire, but I think also they’re behind because there’s a hesitancy to want to try because sometimes it’s difficult to make those steps. So I think it’s a 50/50. There’s innovation and there’s also limitation. For us, we try to find a happy medium in there. Sometimes you have to talk a lot about that as well.
ROB: In terms of adjustments, we were originally scheduled to have this conversation in person, in Austin, Texas at South by Southwest, and as we are in the midst of this global coronavirus pandemic, we’re all doing this interview from home. I’m in a closet, to be candid. It’s a different thing.
But just for a moment, Oliver, you were invited to be there as a mentor. Is that something you’ve done before at South by Southwest?
OLIVER: No, actually not. [laughs] I’ve been in Austin for the last 3 years, and last year I met some guy from Denmark and he was a mentor last year. He explained what he was doing there, and I thought it was interesting, so maybe I could help young people with my different perspective I bring as a German. Maybe I do look differently on things. On the other hand, I’ve been self-employed or an entrepreneur for more than 20 years. So maybe I can help some people. I just filled out the form and they picked me. [laughs] But I can’t tell you what it’s like because I didn’t do this before. Maybe I will do it next year.
SEAN: Ollie and I are both big music fans, and I actually played in a band at South by Southwest before. He was like, “Have you been to South by Southwest?” I was like, “Yeah, musically,” but the whole tech thing – and he was so excited. I was like, oh man. I felt so bad when they cancelled that.
He was like, “What am I going to talk about now?” I was like, “You’re a German guy there. You’ve got to talk about German topics.” I think that’s stuff people want to know about. There’s a whole different perspective there. It’s not just tech in general. A lot of people talk general tech, but there’s a lot of cultural differences in the tech industry here that I think he could really have provided. But I guess we have the internet now to communicate.
ROB: Yes. People can reach out when they hear this and we can all talk in our closets. Or maybe we’ll be out of our closets by the time we get this out there. Did they give you visibility into people signing up to talk to you and what they wanted to talk about? Or is it more so that you show up and people show up and go from there? How is that structured?
OLIVER: I can’t tell you. [laughs] We had a slot somewhere in a hotel for an hour I guess, or an hour and 50 minutes. I had 17 fans on the app, so 17 people were bookmarking me. Actually, I can tell. I guess you have to reserve a slot, but actually, I can’t tell you if anybody already had the slot reserved.
ROB: We’re right here in the middle of March. At this juncture, as you are talking to your customers and potential customers and that sort of thing, how is the current state of things affecting both their mindset and maybe even how they do workshops? Are your workshops normally in person and you’re planning for how to do them online? How is that changing your own business and your customer mindset?
OLIVER: Wasn’t it Macron, the French president, who said we are at war? [laughs] It’s changing everything right now. We were well-prepared, actually. Sean, 2 weeks ago, said, “This is getting really bad, so we’d better be prepared.” We tried to get all our people home office ready 2 weeks ago when it just started to get really bad.
But I have tons of customers who were not prepared for that. They’re not even prepared to get their people in the home office, and they didn’t think what they could do in this time. To be honest, I think this will not be a thing for 2 weeks or 3 weeks. I guess we’re talking about months or years if this is getting better.
We should for sure find very fast things we can change to have a workshop by Zoom or Teams and so on, but I can work with my customers even if they are not in the room. It’s a little bit different, so I need my customers to be courageous enough to take such a step. I have a lot of customers who say, “Let’s postpone the workshop and meet in 2 or 3 weeks. This can wait.” [laughs] I say, “Okay, go for it.”
But on the other hand, there are a couple of people from the consulting business who were already setting up their remote setup. I can film the canvas and I can put the post-its there by myself. The important thing for me is to get all the information from my customers. They are driving this process, so I need all the information, and I can structure it at home in my closet. [laughs]
My impression – maybe, Sean, you have your own opinion about this – I think people are getting aware. This is a special period in time, and not many people have experienced what we are experiencing right now. This forces people to be more courageous and to try out new things. This is my impression.
SEAN: Yeah, I would just say that we were lucky to have enough time to try to be proactive and plan for it. Kemweb has a lot of experience in livestreaming and webinars as a core business, so it wasn’t anything new to go remote. Since we do a lot of consulting for how to become more digital, it was not a scary concept for us. It was more about organization.
We’ve noticed a lot of people who weren’t ready, who are reaching out and trying to get an idea of what they can do to get ready, and I think it’s also important for any business who does have any sort of strategic advantage – at this point, it’s not about competition anymore. This is a global problem that nobody’s ever dealt with, so I think we’re just trying to take the opinion of let’s try to be as helpful as we can. Let’s be a resource for people. Let’s do some consulting for people just so they can figure out what to do, much less take action on it.
Everybody has different problems, but we have CEOs and managers, and everybody is quarantined in their house, worrying about their business. Some people are losing their business as we speak, and some people are like, “I need to figure out how to conduct business when we’re here. How do we do this?”
Luckily, we’ve just been in a position to be able to help people. For me, that’s the most important thing. Just making sure businesses are running, people are being as successful as they can with the limitations, and hopefully when we get through this, everybody’s going to be in a better place and not a much worse place.
ROB: Right. That’s an advantage I think you have in being strategic. I was talking to a client yesterday, an agency, and they have one client who’s in travel, and they’re very large, so that client is rightly putting a lot of initiatives on hold. But I think everybody has an inclination towards timidity in this moment. One of their clients was a beer company, and they said, “Should we cut back?” They said, “No, you can be bold right now.”
SEAN: If you’re not Corona. [laughter]
ROB: Yes, for sure. I see it in my own feeds. People are talking about going out and buying beer right now. I think they look forward to it. So there are opportunities.
OLIVER: That’s what’s different between Germans and Americans. Germans are buying toilet paper and noodles. [laughs] The French are hamstering red wine, and you guys go for beer.
SEAN: The German term for prepping is hamstering, so there’s a lot of hamster memes going on in Germany. [laughs]
ROB: I had no idea. I’ve learned something there as well. Oliver, some people’s agencies that we talk to are brand new, and some folks have been running them for a while. If you were in the U.S., we would probably talk about the 9/11 situation here. But you did navigate through the global financial crisis 13 years ago. What are some lessons that you may have encountered from that time that have helped you as you’re looking at this new set of circumstances that is resetting global markets and making people worry a little bit?
OLIVER: What we learned – our luck in this crisis 13 years ago was we had customers from all kinds of business areas. We were not only doing business with banks. So we survived it quite well, actually, but only because we had a widespread portfolio of customers. This is what we kept all the way from then to now.
I guess this is also what maybe, or hopefully, will help us through this crisis too. We have also customers from the tourist business, so we’re doing a lot of event stuff. Like Sean said, maybe now some livestreaming things. These companies are dying while we’re talking. They’re losing all the events, like South by, for example. All the catering people, our customers from catering. We have other customers from the public sector, for example, and we have customers from the hygienic field selling soaps. I think this is what we learned. Don’t focus too much on one specific branch.
13 years ago, we were a much younger company. There were just a couple of people there. Actually, we were not flying high enough to be hit very strongly by the crisis 13 years ago, so it’s hard for me to compare it this way. Sean, do you have a point here?
SEAN: I wasn’t with the company at the time, but I think just from experience and being in Germany at the time, it’s similar in that there are companies that get financially hit and they’re going to go down. There’s nothing they can do. There’s other companies that get hit hard, but they try to climb up. I think at this point, everybody is struggling and everybody is needing to be loud. Everybody is needing to communicate and reach out.
Kemweb did video production, they did web production, so they had a rounded base of services that they could offer. If you have a diversified portfolio, then you can be agile with your approach to lots of clients. I think that’s one of the reasons Kemweb has been able to be successful for so long through these ups and downs, at least in my opinion. Unless you know a secret I don’t know. [laughs] That’s just my outside opinion.
OLIVER: Yeah, that’s right. Maybe you know the new book by Simon Sinek, The Infinite Game. When I read this book, I didn’t know up to the point I read the book we are in this infinite game. Since we are helping our customers, or trying to help our customers to succeed in a digital world – we did this for 20 years, actually, and every disruption or every crisis forces us to be inventive and to question our own work all the time.
We did this for the last 20 years, and we came out stronger. So I guess he’s right in his book. If you don’t reach finite goals, to be the best in town or whatever, then you will find new approaches even for your customers, and you learn from every punch you get. You’re learning.
I think this is what we learned over the years. For example, when all the streaming was Flash – maybe your younger listeners remember, there was a software called Flash. Steven Jobs decided – all the streaming things we did were running on Flash from one day to the other. Nobody actually was using Flash, so our streaming business was down within a couple of months, for example.
But you start finding workarounds and finding new solutions and stuff like this. If you get used to this, if you are not scared by disruptive changes – I guess such a crisis is a very, very disruptive change to everything. It’s even a threat to your health, so this is a different problem. People are now really scared about their health, not only business-wise, but family and personal health-wise. So this is a different situation we have right now.
ROB: That’s a great point. With The Infinite Game, the objective, the point that Sinek makes is that this is not a chess game that you can win or lose. The goal is to keep playing the game. I think it could even be possible in this moment to take more encouragement. You mentioned Flash – Flash, for people who don’t remember, was made by Adobe. It was Adobe’s attempt to control the browser.
SEAN: It was Macromedia and then it was Adobe, I think.
ROB: Yeah. When Apple came out against Adobe, that was a specific headwind against Adobe, and a big part of their strategy and a big part of their business. They moved out of trying to control the browser into a bunch of other things. There’s a lot of big companies that just take up space and are hard to admire, but Adobe, with having the primary paid enterprise for analytics up against Google Analytics, with the way they’ve managed to turn their creative suite into a subscription business, they really have figured out how to keep playing the game.
I think anybody who’s listening probably has even more of an advantage now because Adobe had a specific headwind; this is a headwind that we all have. Everyone’s fighting this at the same time. So it’s not just you. People are going to win here, and I think it can be Kemweb and it can be anyone else who’s listening, if they figure out how to keep playing the game well.
SEAN: Yeah. I’d look at this as an opportunity. You can look at it as negative as you want, you can get depressed about it and you can sit there and pout, or you can really try to think of the positive ends. For me, just being able to take time to spend more time with the kids when they’re home, or to be able to teach them from home how I want to, or to be able to go online and spend my time with a course, learning something new – you’ve got to take this as positive as you can.
You have to utilize your time. Everybody in the world is confined to their homes at this point, or almost, so do what you can do to benefit from that situation. I think that’s really what you’ve got to do here. I think you will benefit in some way as long as you see it as a positive thing.
OLIVER: I would like to bring up another point. It’s actually about solidarity. We all have to take care of each other and the other companies. If our customers die, for example, we won’t be able to do business after the crisis with them. So we also have to put up plans where we can help our customers not just on the business, but on the survival side of things.
So maybe this will make people think about things they’ve done before or ways they saw things before. Right now we have to take care of each other worldwide, actually.
ROB: Yeah, it has definitely taken that longer approach of, for people who are young, to say, “You may be young and you may not be likely to get sick, but what about someone else’s parent, grandparent?”
SEAN: We’re getting up there.
ROB: What about us on this call? Take care of us too. But really, how to think beyond yourself I hope is a lesson we can carry forward a little bit longer than just the memories of this unusual season.
Oliver, Sean, when people want to track you guys down, when they want to find Kemweb, where should they go to find you?
OLIVER: They should go to the internet, this new thing, you know? [laughs]
ROB: That’s all we got. That’s all we got right now.
OLIVER: You’ll find us on the social media channels. We have our own podcast, actually, which is a German-American podcast form, and it’s called Robot Spaceship. You need to understand a little German. I’m speaking German and Sean is speaking American English. But you’ll find us on the web, www.kemweb.de.
SEAN: Kemweb.de, and that’s www.robotspaceship.com for the podcast.
OLIVER: Sean is using his quarantine to set up an English landing page. [laughter] Isn’t it, Sean?
SEAN: It is. There’s so much translation that happens. There’s so much work. [laughs] I need to take a vacation from working because I’ve got so much work to do. [laughter]
ROB: I think we’ll all be looking to help the travel industry rebound in a little bit when we can all come out of our holes. Oliver, Sean, thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing at this time. It’s good to be able to connect over audio, at least, and share some of your learnings, lessons, and growth with the world.
SEAN: Thank you.
OLIVER: Thank you for the invitation. Great experience for us.
ROB: Thank you so much. Maybe in Austin next year.
SEAN: Definitely.
OLIVER: For sure.
ROB: Let’s work that out.
SEAN: Fingers crossed.
OLIVER: On 6th Street. [laughs]
ROB: All right, thanks, guys. Bye bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Laurie Keith is Vice President of Media, Social & Emerging for the Ad Council, “where creativity and causes converge.” The Ad Council, a non-profit organization, coordinates “contributing partners” to address the most important issues in the US and globally, including social and environmental concerns and national crises.
Laurie started her career working with big media agencies, but her heart was in her volunteer work. Joining the Ad Council in 2010 allowed her to meld her love for media strategy and planning with her passion for social good. Today, she manages the organization’s relationships with major media, tech, and entertainment companies, including large tech platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Apple, Amazon, Pinterest, Reddit, eBay, and Twitch.
Since its start in 1942, the Ad Council has, over the years, produced many iconic messages. Two of the earliest were: “Loose lips sink ships” (a wartime reminder that divulging sensitive information could result in American deaths) and Smokey Bear, (who always seemed to be saying, “Only YOU can prevent forest fires.”) Other iconic messages include: “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” Crash dummies, and the current “Love has no labels.”
In this interview, Laurie explains how the Ad Council’s partnership model works and how it has grown:
Nonprofit and government agency “issue experts” need help to communicate critical messages to their target audiences.
- U.S. creative agencies (and the Ad Council’s Creators for Good team) donate time to develop creative strategy and content
- The Ad Council deploys this information to media volunteers
- The media volunteers provide pro bono digital “real estate” – the platform
Today, these large media companies often contribute on creative side as well, honing material to produce platform-optimized messages.
Before the COVID-19-precipitated cancellation of the South by Southwest 2020 conference, Laurie was scheduled to moderate a panel, “Marketing in the Age of Digital Community,” exploring the power and rise of digital communities. Here, Laurie discusses the power of Reddit, a community where anonymity opens the opportunity for people to more freely talk about sensitive issues, and the potential gains (and caveats) for brands that decide to work in that space.
Laurie talks about how the Ad Council’s current “Alone together” message, encourages social isolation to slow the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic while communicating that doing so brings people into a “group” taking action together. Alone. But not alone. Laurie says she has been thrilled with the level and depth of brand involvement in communicating COVID-19 information to various audiences.
Laurie can be reached on Twitter @lauriekeith, on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/adcouncil, and on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-advertising-council/. The Ad Council offers an audio/video/print “finished content” COVID-19 information toolkit for people or organizations with outreach capabilities at: coronavirus.adcouncilkit.org.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m excited to be joined today by Laurie Keith. She’s the Vice President of Media, Social & Emerging for the Ad Council based in San Francisco, California. Welcome to the podcast, Laurie.
LAURIE: Thank you so much for having me.
ROB: It’s fantastic to have you here. I think a lot of people, the name “the Ad Council” is familiar to them, but they might not be able to tell you off the top of their heads what it is, how it operates, what the deal is. I think people don’t even realize how many iconic campaigns the Ad Council is associated with. So why don’t you give us the big picture of the Ad Council and what the Ad Council excels in?
LAURIE: Of course. We like to say the Ad Council is where creativity and causes converge, put simply. We are a nonprofit organization. We’ve been around since 1942, and we bring together unique convening partners from the creative minds in advertising, media, technology, in order to address the nation’s most important causes.
We convene all of the partners that we have in all of those industries to tackle the country’s toughest issues. We are a national nonprofit, so we’re really focused on issues at home. Of course, if there’s an issue of global importance, we also will take those on as well.
It’s a really unique intersection in that we’re able to work with the nonprofits and government agencies – they really act as the issue experts – and our “clients” – the media, technology, marketing industries – in an effort to get these critical messages out there to the audiences that we’re trying to reach. And then the advertising creative industry are really tasked with developing and coming up with the creative that you see out there.
As you alluded to, we have created some of the most iconic campaigns in advertising history, from “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk” to Smokey Bear. Our most iconic campaign right now I think is “Love has no labels.”
We really are the convener, as I said earlier, to bring everyone together so that we can make sure we’re getting these critical issues out there.
ROB: For sure. And even I believe going all the way back to Rosie the Riveter, at the origin? Is that right?
LAURIE: That was up for debate for quite a long time. [laughs] I don’t think we can claim that one, but our very iconic campaign was “Loose lips sink ships” back in World War II era. That was I think one of our first campaigns, along with Smokey Bear.
ROB: Crash Test Dummies, McGruff, do you get to claim those?
LAURIE: Yep, Crash Test Dummies, McGruff the Crime Dog. Those are also our iconic campaigns. I should mention we have a long history of creating campaigns in times of national crisis. I just mentioned World War II; we had a big September 11th “I am an American” campaign. Also, any time there’s a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy.
And of course, our most recent efforts that we have on the ground right now to spread awareness on the slow of the spread of coronavirus, COVID-19. We’re currently spinning on all cylinders getting those messages out to the public.
ROB: It’s quite a charge to make these memorable and meaningful campaigns. I don’t think a lot of people would think about having interesting and memorable government advertisements, but yet that is a place that the Ad Council has absolutely excelled. Let’s dig a little bit into your own journey. How did you come to be at the Ad Council in the role that you are in now?
LAURIE: In my role as Vice President of Media, focusing on social and emerging, I really work in this unique intersection of the tech media industry, and I manage our relationships with major media, tech, and entertainment companies, using their platforms to develop largescale, innovative, social good partnerships.
I oversee our partnerships with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Apple, Amazon, Pinterest, Reddit, eBay. I’m always worried like I’m missing someone. Twitch is a big one. A lot of the large tech media platforms really fall under my huge umbrella.
Your question was how I got here. Prior to the Ad Council, joining 10 years ago, I worked at big media agencies. I started my career at Starcom MediaVest Group in Chicago, and then I moved to Los Angeles, where I worked for Mindshare, working on the Ford Automotive account, and then moved over to Initiative, where I worked on the Carl’s Jr./Hardees QSR account.
I reached a point in my career 10 years ago where – I went to school for advertising, I went through the media track; I really loved media. I’ve always been super interested in media as an industry. I was really enjoying the strategy that went behind building a media plan, understanding the specific targets and how they’re consuming media and what we need to do creatively in order to get the message in front of them at the right time so they’re going to take the call to action that we need them to take.
But my client at the time, as I was going through this life shift, was a fast food restaurant. So, I was realizing I was doing such cool, innovative partnerships – I did one of the first text messaging campaigns for Carl’s Jr./Hardees – but I was not really passionate about the brand that I was working on. It was like getting men 18-49 to continue to eat fast food hamburgers.
I was also doing a lot of personal volunteering and helping out a lot in my local community in Los Angeles. I reached a point where I was like, how do I work in social good and help people, but also continue to work in advertising and media? Because I love how this industry is constantly changing and there’s new technologies coming out all the time. So, I was trying to figure out how to bridge the two together.
It was a long journey, which I won’t get into on this podcast, but I ended up getting accepted to the United States Peace Corps, and I was thinking about going to – they wanted to send me to Kazakhstan to do youth and community development, and I was going to be the only Peace Corps volunteer. My parents are usually really excited about all of my adventures and ideas, but they were like, “Is that really what you want to be doing?” I was at the point in my career where if I were to leave to do something like, it would probably drastically change the course of my career.
That was when I found the Ad Council. I was driving down La Cienega in LA. I was driving down a street that I normally wouldn’t have been, but I was on jury duty during this time, so I was doing a lot of things and doing a lot of soul-searching, trying to figure out my next steps. I passed this billboard, and it was right after the Haiti earthquake, and it was a partnership that the Ad Council had with the Red Cross. It said “text (whatever) to donate to the Red Cross to help with the Haiti earthquake efforts.”
It was just one of those lightbulb moments. I’ve had a couple in my life, and I’m grateful that the Ad Council really came to me in this way. It was like, “Who is the Ad Council? Maybe you should look into what they’re doing. Clearly, they have this big billboard on La Cienega, and maybe they’re a company that you should look into.”
Everything just was clockwork after that. I reached out to the person that ended up becoming my boss and let them know that this was really my passion. My passion was social good, but my talent, so to speak, was media strategy and planning, and “I would love to come in and talk to you.” That turned into an informational interview, which turned into they were looking for someone with exactly my experience, which was local and national media strategy.
Also, at the time in 2010, Ad Council was really starting to build out their partnership model. Of course, we’ve always worked off of a donated media model, and we run all of our PSAs through donated media, which we’re so grateful to get from the industry. But at the time, the partnership model – which is “How do we develop custom content together? How do we bring in a measurement study? How do we develop an innovative product that can help get the message out there?” – that was when they were starting to think in that vein, and that was really what I wanted to be doing for them.
So it was just a perfect timing situation. The job was in New York City, and I was really excited about the opportunity to live in New York City and jump-start my career there. I took the job about 4 months later and have been with them for the last 10 years and have really, like I said, grown the digital/social/emerging part of the Ad Council, which has been really the highlight of my career.
ROB: That’s such a fascinating transition to bring you out to the West Coast again and really to identify – it seems like a lot of the technology opportunity – is it really donated media from them as well? Just as perhaps airtime on radio and on television would be donated, these platforms may also donate part of their own real estate to these causes?
LAURIE: Yeah. Every time you see an Ad Council PSA advertisement, whether it’s in your Instagram feed, whether it’s on a billboard on the highway, whether it’s on the radio or a podcast that you’re listening to, all of that is donated to the Ad Council, which I think puts us in a really unique position because we’re able to get our messages out there on all these different platforms. It’s really the generosity of the media community that allows us to do that.
So yeah, it’s a very unique model. I think it’s also a testament to the relationships that we have with these media companies that when we do need to get messages out there, they’re raising their hand and they want to support it. It’s a really great place to be.
ROB: Wow. For them to donate that time, there has to be an element of trust that what they’re going to be using that airtime, that screen space for, is going to be of excellent quality. Who actually creates the campaigns and creates the content? Are they also donating their time?
LAURIE: That’s a great question. The creative is really twofold, and I feel like it’s one of the things that keeps evolving. Traditionally . . . our traditional model is that the advertising agencies in the U.S., the creative agencies in the U.S. – we call them volunteer agencies, and they will donate their time pro bono to develop the creative strategy and come up with the actual creative idea that we then deploy and put out there in the media.
I feel like more and more, especially with the accounts that I manage, the media companies themselves not only want to donate the media, but they also want to be very heavily involved in the creative process. Facebook has Facebook Creative Shop, Pinterest has their own creative team, Snapchat has their own creative team.
So oftentimes media companies will also step up and say, “Listen, we want to donate X amount of media, but we also want to work with our creative team to develop a custom filter or come up with a new video social campaign that is very specific to this platform.” And we welcome those opportunities. Obviously, these media companies know what creative is going to perform best and what the best ways are to reach audiences on their platform, so we welcome that.
Oftentimes we do work with media companies, and they will donate their time to develop content similar to advertising agencies. But of course, our agency model is very strong because there’s so many media companies out there and so many ways to reach people through multiple media channels that it’s important for us to have face-to-face campaign creative and have creative that’s ready to get out there on any platform at any given time.
ROB: That makes a lot of sense. I can definitely see, especially in your department, when you’re dealing with these technology companies, even the way they would execute a campaign, they would probably like to execute it in a way that is very native to each platform that they’re on in a way that might make the entire campaign different.
LAURIE: Yeah. I should also add we have a whole department at the Ad Council called Creators for Good. Again, it’s another small and mighty team, but they are working with talent. Anyone from digital talent, digital creator influencer, to celebrity talent, comedians, musicians. They also develop content for us and their voice, lending their talents to get these critical messages to the public.
It’s great. We have basically content coming in from all different directions in order to get the messaging out there.
ROB: Perfect. I think very relevant to this, you were prepared at South by Southwest to be a part of a talk called “Marketing in the Age of Digital Community.” That’s very relevant, I think, to this conversation. What was going to be in that talk? And maybe we’ll get a chance to hear it if it comes out in digital format later.
LAURIE: Yeah. It was a panel that I put through. I was planning to be the moderator, and it was with Will Cady, the Head of Brand Strategy at Reddit, Addie Marino, who’s the Global Prototype Lead at the Creative Shop Studio I just mentioned – we work with them – over at Facebook, and then Adam Warrington, who is the Vice President of Better World, the CSR arm of Anheuser-Busch.
The panel was going to be focused on the power of digital communities and also the rise in digital communities. 81% of companies, up from 67% in 2012, report that they have a community-centric approach to marketing. And then at the same time, there’s been a significant increase in the number of internet users that engage in online forums, blogs, subreddits.
Reddit did a study called “The Era of We,” and it went from 72% of global internet users saying that “yes, I engage in these online communities” and that has increased to 76%. It’s this really interesting phenomenon that more and more people that are active internet/social media users are part of some type of community. Maybe they’re part of one, maybe they’re part of several.
And at the same time, companies that are starting out or companies that are evolving are making sure that they have a community-centric strategy. We basically designed a panel around that, and as a brand, how do you authentically insert yourself into let’s say a subreddit community that has millions of followers and people that are really passionate about an issue? You as a brand have a big stake in the ground, and how do you enter that community but then also do it in a very authentic way to where the people in that community are really receptive?
That was another part of the panel, too. Reddit did a separate study that found that 82% of community users are receptive to brands participating, and they really respect when brands make an effort. So this whole idea of – this is a huge marketing opportunity for brands to come in and insert themselves into these communities, but doing it in an authentic way that really fares well for your brand.
Of course, brands have a lot of guidelines on how they can show up and what they can say and do. How do you do that in a space that is very authentic? You don’t want to stand out. You don’t want to do anything that could make you come across as you don’t know what you’re talking about.
So it was a really awesome panel that we had designed to talk about this, because I think a lot of brands are trying to figure out how to enter this space.
ROB: An interesting panel for that. I would say perhaps Reddit is the place you can insert yourself into community and be most quickly corrected if you have done so in a way that is not right for that community.
LAURIE: Yes, absolutely. I think Reddit is also super unique – and we were going to talk about this in the panel, too – just the anonymous nature of the platform. A lot of people are joining subreddits, but they don’t reveal their real person, whereas on a Facebook, you are showing up as who you are.
I think what makes Reddit so special is that you can be part of this community, but not have to reveal who you really are. From an Ad Council perspective, we’ve found this to be really powerful for campaigns like our Youth Suicide Prevention campaign, like holding a Reddit AMA and reaching out to different communities to get people to talk about the issue of mental health that maybe in a public setting, that’s difficult to talk about. It’s a sensitive subject.
So we are able to see a lot of success in raising awareness on our campaigns when we do it in a really unique way on Reddit.
ROB: Reddit is certainly, by contrast, also a place where if you do things right, the rewards are tremendously rich and robust. I think maybe relevant to that, you’re at an intersection that is very interesting today amidst this COVID-19 crisis. At the Ad Council, I believe the day that we’re recording this, there’ve been a couple of new ads that have come out.
I think when you’re talking about digital platforms, often younger audiences might be some of the folks who feel like they have the least to worry about with this COVID-19 crisis. How is the Ad Council working into this crisis and getting what messages out to the right places?
LAURIE: It’s a great question, and thank you for asking. We have a huge campaign, and it has a lot of legs. We actually announced our campaign on March 19th, and we are working in partnership with the White House, the CDC, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to develop this largescale national PSA campaign in order to get messages to the public.
To your point, there are a lot of different targeting sets of people that we’re trying to reach. We have a lot of different campaigns under this one COVID-19 umbrella, so to speak. We worked with NBCUniversal. They created a series of videos, TV, and digital and social graphics both in English and Spanish that are reaching the high-risk populations as well as the general public. Those ad sets talk about the steps that people can take to protect themselves.
Then separately, we worked with ViacomCBS and really leveraged their portfolio of brands to develop a multiplatform PSA campaign that targets more of the Gen Z/Millennial, younger, low-risk, I think we’re calling them – like the 16- to 35-year-olds that might be a carrier or might have had the coronavirus but had mild symptoms, but of course, are a carrier of the virus and can spread it quickly.
That campaign is called Alone Together. We’re partnering with Twitter, we’re partnering with Snapchat, we’re partnering with TikTok, all of the targeted media platforms, to really bring light to that campaign. It’s also social and talent led, so we have a bunch of celebrity talents that have lent their voice to get the message out there, of course. They’re really big on social platforms, so partnering with them was really important for the campaign.
In addition to that, we also just launched new PSAs that feature the Surgeon-General, Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci, the health officials that really get the message out there on social distancing. Those are also targeted to the low-risk group of Americans.
And we have more and more, it seems like every day, more and more media companies coming to the table. We’re now working with The Atlantic’s internal creative studio to develop customized digital creative. iHeartMedia just raised their hand and they’re going to be developing audio and radio spots. Wall Street Journal, I just heard this morning, and Hearst are going to be developing custom print.
And then of course, the partners that we work with out here in San Francisco, our social and emerging media partners, have all – we basically reached out and asked for their support, and every single one of them is stepping up, whether that be through donating a significant amount of media to get these already-created assets out there to developing custom content.
Snapchat, their creative team is developing custom filters as well as designing some new creative that will live within their app. We’re partnering with TikTok and some celebrity, talent-led creative. Reddit is doing something really unique in that we’re doing a trending takeover on their front page, and we’re also going to be developing custom content with them.
I could talk forever on all the companies that have stepped up, but it’s really been an industry-wide effort to not only develop content that reaches these very specific audiences, but donating media and each platform lending their own creative team to make sure that we’re getting this message out there in the way that their audience is going to consume it best.
It’s been definitely the highlight of my career in these last 10 years I’ve worked with the Ad Council. We always take the call. We take the call when there’s a national crisis and a national emergency. I never thought in a million years that we would be dealing with this in our country, but it’s so amazing to work at a company like the Ad Council that is really on the frontlines on this communication and media strategy in order to get people to do what we need them to do.
ROB: You must really feel like this is such an opportunity to actually – I think more tangibly. Many of your campaigns have been out there to save lives, even going back to “Loose lips sink ships” or the Crash Test Dummies. I just think there’s something a lot more tangible about the immediate opportunity here. I’m amazed you can keep all of that that you just shared even in your head.
LAURIE: [laughs] It’s hard.
ROB: How do you think about organizing moving parts and partners with so many different campaigns in flight, so many different placements in flight, different contexts?
LAURIE: Thankfully, we have such an incredible team at the Ad Council. Our media team at the Ad Council is really broken out in that we have different specialties and different focus areas. Of course, our team in San Francisco, we’re really focused on social and emerging media companies. Anything we’re doing with any of those companies, we’re really leading the charge in developing those partnerships.
We have another team that’s focused on audio and podcasts. We have another team that’s focused more on TV and radio. We have a whole team of people that are working tirelessly with all of their partners in order to get the message out there. And then, of course, we have our talent team that’s leading the talent-led efforts. We have our campaign teams that are in charge of managing the relationships with the CDC and the White House.
It honestly is a whole team effort. It really makes me take a step back and go, wow. I’m happy to be where I am during this crisis. Ad Council, we have the convening partners of the industry to enable us to do this. I’ve got to say, it’s really awesome that we have a system set up for when there is a crisis and that we can get the messages out there so quickly across the entire industry.
ROB: It sounds like you’re saying there’s a value of specialization, but there’s also a value of coordination and having the right people in the right seats and enough of them to make sure this whole thing works together.
LAURIE: Totally.
ROB: You have the quantity and the talent. Perfect. In these moments of crisis, one thing I saw maybe right around the time that cities were beginning to lock down – there are always loud voices on Twitter, but I saw very intelligent people who were calling out and calling on some of these – probably companies you work with, the Facebooks, the Twitters of the world, and saying, “Why aren’t you helping? Why aren’t you getting the word out?”
What do people not realize is going on behind the scenes? Because I’m sure they’re talking about it. When these companies are thinking but haven’t quite acted yet, what’s going on behind the scenes that people might not appreciate about these companies?
LAURIE: I think that’s why we at the Ad Council work directly with our PR communications team, because it is important for us to get the message out there that these companies are standing up. I know we just came out with a press release last Monday talking specifically to the tech community and what they’re doing to step up.
You just mentioned Facebook and Twitter; they’re both doing a lot for our campaigns. Facebook is donating a significant amount of media for us to get the message out there, and Twitter is developing a custom emoji that will show up any time someone types with the hashtag “#alonetogether.”
It’s important for us to get the message out there that these media companies are stepping up, and we do that through a press release so that we can make these announcements and so the press can write about it. Obviously, sometimes that’s not happening at the same exact time these questions are being asked, like, “Why aren’t these companies stepping up?” But we were able to turn around a press release within a matter of 3 days.
I think these companies, beyond what they’re doing with the Ad Council, I’m reading every day – Apple just created a COVID-19 special section. Facebook has a COVID-19 special section. I know Twitter does as well. So I know beyond just what they’re doing with the Ad Council and helping us get these messages to the public, I do think a lot of them are doing way more beyond that. They’re actually using their product to get the message out there as well.
I don’t know if that helps answer your question, but we try to raise awareness on the fact that they’re supporting through the press that we put out there.
ROB: It’s yet another example, I think, of the high-level, three-dimensional chess that you all have to play that very few people have to do. There’s a PR dimension to what you’re doing, but very rarely do you see such a deep level of also execution, also distribution, also partnering and coordinating, all within one organization. I think it’s a tremendous amount to appreciate.
LAURIE: It’s a well-oiled machine. [laughs]
ROB: [laughs] It sounds like it, especially to be all virtual now. Laurie, when you are looking at the future, what’s coming up for the Ad Council and for the industry that you are excited about?
LAURIE: It’s a big question. For me personally, where I sit at the Ad Council and focusing on social and emerging media and having a pulse on the frontier of what’s happening and where we should really be inserting ourselves, there’s a couple things I think that I’m excited about.
We’re talking to some companies right now on the idea of a virtual concert where you essentially can join virtually, whether you have a VR headset or you just – you don’t need a VR headset to join; you can also just join and experience it from your regular desktop or mobile phone.
This idea that we can bring thousands if not millions of people together in a virtual space, share our messaging, whether that be – I think we’re talking about bringing in some artists, some talent – but really getting everyone in a virtual space. Obviously it’s hard in person. There’s a lot of logistics that go into actually planning a physically live event.
But the idea of being able to pull something off like this in a virtual space and have different messaging points, different levers that we can pull, whether that’s getting a reward within the experience or maybe collecting user-generated content where people can share their own experiences as it relates to that issue – of course, there’s a donation stream, if we wanted to raise money for a specific nonprofit.
So I’m really excited about that potential, especially after we’re living in this COVID-19 space where there is so much happening in a virtual world. I’m excited to see where Ad Council can take that, especially with our partners like Twitch and other leaders that are really driving the VR space.
And then I think separately, it’s this whole idea of purpose-driven marketing. I think we’re going to see more and more brands really step up and make sure that they stand for something that’s beyond just the product that they’re selling and going beyond just their pocketbooks and giving money to causes – which of course is super important, but how can they actually develop unique experiences that happen in the communities of people that follow them and help make the world a better place through the causes that they care about?
I think you’re going to see more and more companies step up. Of course, that’s an exciting opportunity for the Ad Council as well because we work with so many brands that sit on our board of directors, so how can we really play a part there, knowing that Ad Council invented this model of purpose-driven marketing back in 1942? How can we work together?
We have a separate arm at the Ad Council that is focusing on this as a revenue stream. It’s called Ad Council Edge, really helping brands and other nonprofits with their purpose-driven marketing strategy. So I’m really excited to see how that will play out over the next couple of years.
ROB: It’s amazing to see so much agility in a nearly 80-year-old organization. You mentioned VR there for a moment; I believe you’ve done some speaking and thinking on VR, but then you overlaid that onto our current moment. How much of things that you’ve seen and thought about in VR do you think are getting jammed into our lived experience of normal work and life right now? What’s stuff we’ve talked about for VR that just became life all of a sudden?
LAURIE: I went to F8 last year and they talked a lot about the Facebook Watch platform, and they showed an example of – it was two women. Her mother lived in Australia and she lived in Los Angeles, and they were watching Red Table Talk through their VR, like Oculus headsets, sitting in their living room, watching the show together and commenting.
This whole experience of, okay, we’re not physically together, but we are physically together because we are watching this and feeling this through this virtual experience.
I see that, especially in where we are sitting right now with this shelter in place and people staying at home, this whole idea of watch parties and watching comet together and being able to respond in real time – just like you would if you were sitting in a living room with someone watching a show together. You might pause it and say, “Oh my gosh, what did you guys think about that?” or what have you. I see this really starting to pick up in a virtual space, being able to watch content together, experience content together.
And then when we get out of this space and we eventually can get back to our normal lives and be together again in community with each other, I can see brands taking advantage of this whole – we have this online world, this online community, we’re doing something together online, but then facilitating how those online connections can live out in the real world and in real life.
I’m interested to see how brands will really scale that. I think we’ll see more of these online-meets-real-life experiences happening.
ROB: Fascinating. It will be interesting to see the before and after around this forced technology adoption. People are learning things they probably would have not learned for 5 years right now. It’ll be fascinating to see what that means for the community that you are involved in and the companies you are working with.
LAURIE: Absolutely, yeah. It’s a huge opportunity for virtual companies and really digital companies that are thinking in this way to really take advantage of this time and figure out how they can evolve their products to fit in this space.
ROB: That’s all brilliant. Laurie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and for sharing. I think we all learned a great deal. When people want to find and connect with you, where should they look for you?
LAURIE: I’m pretty active on social media. That should not surprise you. [laughs] My Twitter is just my name, which is @lauriekeith. I’m always welcome to be hit up on Twitter through DMs. That’s probably the best way to reach me. And then I did want to also plug our Coronavirus Toolkit, if I can.
ROB: Absolutely.
LAURIE: For anyone that’s listening to this podcast and has the ability to reach people, we have a toolkit set up. It’s coronavirus.adcouncilkit.org, and you will find everything from all of our PSAs to our social media assets to sample television and audio scripts if you want to develop your own content. I just wanted to make sure I plugged that, because I know a lot of people and companies are trying to figure out how they can help. I think it’s a good one-stop shop of how to get our assets and get them out there.
ROB: Super solid. Thank you so much, Laurie.
LAURIE: Thank you so much. Hope you have a good one.
ROB: You too. Bye bye.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Caren Carrasco is Senior Partner at Benjamin David Group, a 4-year-old marketing consultancy that excels at digital marketing – in particular, website creation, branding, content strategy, social media, email marketing, and paid media. Benjamin David group works with a wide range of clients, from startups focused on getting their Series A, others with their first infusion of venture capital, to larger, more mature corporations like Cirque du Soleil. The objective? To help their clients get fast, profitable growth.
Many clients are B2B. Benjamin David Group provides strategy, with a focus on figuring out how to get traction fast, and supplies the team to make it happen – either by handing off the strategic plan to the client’s team or by facilitating the hiring of an appropriate team. “It doesn’t make sense to pay a consultant to execute,” Caren says, except maybe at the very beginning when the marketing structure is not yet established. To maintain close contact, at least one member of Caren’s agency will work in-office at the client’s site.
Except COVID-19 has changed things up. Caren explains how BDG is handling the imposed transition to virtual, the continued importance of weekly contact with their clients, the impact of an established and clear cut workflow, and why detailed meeting documentation is especially critical at this time.
Caren started her career in loyalty and email marketing, and worked in a variety of industries. At Luxury Retreats, a villa rental company headquartered in Montreal, she drove customer journeys, learned “fast and agile” marketing, and worked closely with Salesforce. Salesforce invited her and her Luxury Retreat co-worker, Benjamin David, to speak at Connections 2014 on building effective client life-cycle programs, engagement strategies, and campaign automation. Realizing the depth of their knowledge, Ben and Caren decided to form a marketing consultancy, and set up their first office . . . in a local Starbucks.
(This year, Salesforce Connections 2020, originally scheduled in Chicago for May 4 through May 6, will be a virtual experience.)
In this interview, Caren introduces a powerful market targeting tool, RFM database segmentation. RFM identifies different buyer groups so that marketers can apply group-specific strategies and optimize repeat business. RFM is an acronym for recency, frequency, and monetary – where recency is how recently the buyer made a purchase; frequency is the number of times the buyer has purchased; and monetary is the dollar value of the purchase. Each category of buyer type needs to be approached in a way congruent with their buying history.
Caren admits that BDG does not provide all the services a client might need. Instead, they work with a network of trusted partners, many of them curated through networking at industry events. Over the past 4 years, the agency has actually invested in 8 of its clients, through either sweat equity or capital investment. This type of partnering is something BDG would like to further explore since a client’s success then becomes BDG’s success.
Caren and Ben can be reached on the company website at: www.benjamin-david.com or on LinkedIn.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Caren Carrasco, Senior Partner at Benjamin David Group based in Montreal, Canada. Welcome to the podcast, Caren.
CAREN: Thank you, Rob.
ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don’t you kick us off by telling us about Benjamin David Group and where your firm excels?
CAREN: Sure. Benjamin David Group, we’re a marketing consultancy based in Montreal. We do everything that has to do with digital marketing, from website creation, branding, content strategy, social media, email marketing, paid media. We excel at those verticals.
Our clientele can go from bigger corporations like Cirque du Soleil, which is a very well-known brand, or we also work with startups. The startup scene in Montreal and Toronto is very big right now, so we find a niche to work with funded startups – startups that are either chasing a Series A or that just got funded and they need a marketing arm to execute and start having traction. So, we help them with their marketing efforts.
We have been in business for about 4 years now, and we’re a team of marketing consultants. Our main goal is to help our clients with fast, profitable growth – not only to help them grow, but do it as fast as we can. That’s a little bit of the nature of the startup clients that we have. They need to show results fast.
ROB: Now more than ever, startups are asked to actually prove that their economics are good, and it sounds like you have this sweet spot where you’re coming in in that in-between time where there is something there, there is something worth marketing and something to prove, still. They’re not at the point maybe past a Series B, C, D, E, whatever, where they would bring in a CMO and a bigtime team.
When they’re looking to get to that Series A, what are some of the key metrics that you’re driving and some of the key channels that are working for them to get there?
CAREN: We work with quite a few B2B clients. What we focus on at the very beginning is to really set up a model where we can track what is the recipe to start growing. The recipe will have a mix between paid media, of course content will be present everywhere, but our first approach is to try to understand the formula to start driving traction, either through account-based marketing or gaining leads through gated content on different platforms. We actually act as their de facto CMO. We not only bring the strategy, but we also bring the muscle, the team to execute.
Once we find that formula, we have two approaches. Either we hand the strategy to our client so that they can execute with their team, or we can take the executive with us and help them through the hiring process so that at some point, once they have their marketing team, we can hand that execution to them because it doesn’t make sense to pay a consultant to execute. It makes sense at the very beginning when you’re creating the pillars and having the foundation of your marketing practice, but after that, our goal is to really make our client autonomous, and they can use us for direction and strategy. That’s a little bit of our approach.
ROB: You mentioned the CMO. Probably not typically a full-time CMO, but probably a lot of times actually a fractional marketing team. So, I’d imagine there’s a point where you are incrementally replacing yourselves, and sometimes you’re able probably to bring – do you have one super marketer that’s assigned to a client? Or are you giving them a thin slice of a full-on marketing team? Maybe two, three, five people, where they couldn’t imagine having five full-timers on staff, but with you, they get a piece of five different expertises that they wouldn’t have.
CAREN: Exactly. We have a few clients on that model, and it’s very effective for them because, to your point, they’re not getting only one person. They’re getting a fraction of our team.
Another thing that we do with our clients is that we have an office presence with them. We make sure that we have a seat in their office so that we can be with them, and it’s not a remote collaboration; we’re actually there to be part of the key decisions, to also train their future team if they’re at the point of hiring. It’s a very, very effective model, and it helps fast-track things and make sure that we’re aligned with our business objectives.
ROB: The in-person model is definitely a differentiator, and I think it probably distinguishes you from people who might even outsource a lot of their execution to maybe somewhere far away. It’s often so beneficial to have someone who understands intrinsically the context of the company, the context of the location, and relationships with the team.
Originally, you and I were scheduled to meet up in Austin, Texas for South by Southwest, and as everyone is probably well aware by now, that was cancelled. That in-person conversation for us was cancelled. I’d imagine some of your in-person conversations – perhaps all of them – have also been cancelled and that seat at the office is empty along with the rest of them.
How have you thought about adapting that personal integration into the team operating in this coronavirus, social distancing, remote working environment?
CAREN: Specifically, for South by Southwest – and this is a small collaboration that I did with another company through a webinar – there’s still so many things that we can do even if events have been cancelled. We still have access to the attendee list for, for example, South by Southwest or any event. So, I think companies can still try to make those meetings happen, just not personally, but virtually. So that’s one way you can still get the advantage of the whole event.
With our clients, we’re keeping the communications fluid through the tools that we have. We’re making sure that every week, we’re in touch with them. Because it’s a situation that is not only on our side, but on their side as well, it has been very positive, the transition of not being in office, but making sure that we are online and available through different platforms and making sure that we have touchpoints with them.
Actually, one of the things that we have at BDG is that we work with Jira and Confluence and we make sure that every single thing that happens for an internal meeting/external meeting, it’s documented in meeting notes. That way, even if you’re not physically there or if there’s a meeting that was held between certain people, we make sure everyone is in the loop by giving access to those meeting notes. So far, with this whole crisis, I think we have managed well with our clients.
ROB: That’s really interesting. Jira and Confluence are pretty sophisticated and capable tools. Kind of a Basecamp on steroids sometimes.
CAREN: Yeah. Thanks to us being very diligent on having our setup with those tools, it’s actually how and why we are well-positioned to work remotely with our clients because we have a very clear workflow and process and methodology. So, I’m happy that we put that in place so that now we can actually work efficiently remotely.
ROB: Excellent. You mentioned that you started BDG around 4 years ago. Tell me about that origin story. How did you come to start a business that you’ve now been glad to grow and work with some really excellent clients?
CAREN: My expertise as a marketer was with loyalty and email marketing specifically. I worked in different industries, from luxury travel to loyalty. I worked at Aeroplan, which is the loyalty program of Air Canada. Here in Montreal, I worked at Luxury Retreats, which is a villa rental company that got acquired by Airbnb a couple of years ago.
I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to work at a startup at Luxury Retreats and go through what it means to work fast and agile and where speed is everything. That’s where I met my co-founder, Benjamin.
We were very knowledgeable in everything that has to do with the customer journey and lifecycle. We worked closely with Salesforce. At the time it was ExactTarget. The people at Salesforce were very impressed with the way we were driving customer lifecycles with Luxury Retreats, to the point that they invited us to Connections and to give speaking sessions in Indianapolis and to basically speak to their clients about everything that they can do from a marketing automation standpoint.
At that point, I think it was the very beginning of thinking that we could actually have a practice out of consulting, because we were very knowledgeable in everything that has to do with customer journeys. At that point, Ben had been at Luxury Retreats for 16 years, and I was working by that time at Aeroplan. At some point we got together and he was the one approaching me to say, “Caren, let’s create a consultancy on marketing. We’re very knowledgeable.” At the time I was like, “How are we going to find clients? How do we grow this?”
So, we started together. I quit my job. We started working at a Starbucks, no office. Fast forward 4 years, we’re a team of 20 consultants and we have big clients such as Cirque du Soleil and a very healthy pipeline. It was an interesting decision, but it was very rewarding to see how based on the knowledge you have and the expertise, you can actually build a business out of it and grow it.
ROB: Congratulations on all of that. It seems like a lot of your success is rooted in some very – I see with Jira and Confluence, and then also with ExactTarget, there’s this deep technical competency that seems to resonate throughout and elevates the work to a level of consultancy and not just some sort of lightweight content shop.
Now, what I’d like to dig into that goes even deeper to that technical capability is you have prepared presentations on something called RFM segmentation. Tell us what RFM segmentation is, what we need to know, and how we should be deploying it.
CAREN: When we worked at Luxury Retreats and the reason why Salesforce was very impressed about what we were doing in marketing automation and lifecycle journeys was the segmentation that we put behind it. Basically, RFM segmentation is a way for you to segment your database and monetize it and get the most out of repeat business.
This is a model that is very easy to implement for businesses for retail and travel. Basically, what you’re trying to do is have a very specific strategy for people that have purchased with you one time or more than one time and have a different approach for each one, because you shouldn’t be targeting in the same way a first-time buyer as a three-time buyer. That will help you with your incentive strategy, how you give up promotions, how you incentivize your database to keep buying more.
RFM stands for recency, frequency, and monetary – recency, how recently the purchase was; frequency, how many times the buyer has purchased; and monetary, the value. In a nutshell, you assign scores from let’s say 1 to 5 to one of those dimensions, and you will have different clusters of segments that you can target differently.
Think about having a big grid of different segments where you are going to have your VIPs, which are the 5-5-5s. Let’s say someone that made a purchase yesterday over $1,000 and they have purchased more than three times. The way you target a 5-5-5 is very different than the way you target a 1-1-1, someone that maybe had purchased over a year ago for a very low amount of money and they just purchased once.
This really helps you focus your efforts and understand how you should be moving your low-engaged segments through your high-engaged segments. It’s a very, very strategic and detailed approach, and it’s a methodology that we have put in practice with different clients, as I was saying, in the retail and travel industry with very good results in terms of repeat business.
ROB: I think that makes sense, and it makes even more sense with your background in loyalty because as I think about you talking about a 5-5-5, I think about the different airline status programs, even some credit card programs. It seems like there are entire programs, your Delta Platinums and Diamonds and I don’t know how high it goes, that are all about capturing the brain of a 5-5-5.
CAREN: Exactly. Also, because you don’t have infinite budget to give incentives to everyone, that’s why the RFM segmentation helps to put exactly where you should be putting your efforts. And at the same time, not everything is going to be a monetary incentive.
Sometimes recency, like the time where you’re targeting someone, is the variable that will make you move the needle. Through analysis, you can understand when is the right time to send a communication – for example, an email – to a customer that just made a purchase for the first time so that you can convince them at the right time to make the second purchase. It’s not about maybe the incentive, but to understand that, for example, on Day 72, that’s where your database is the perfect timing to trigger a second purchase.
ROB: Very interesting. Does this have any applications then into something like a Cirque du Soleil or even into some of the startups that you work with?
CAREN: Yeah, absolutely. We implement it on different clients. Any type of business that has a repeat behavior that it’s a product or a service that you can buy over and over again can use RFM segmentation.
ROB: So if you’re in something like Cirque du Soleil, you might know that someone’s going to buy every time you come to town or they’re going to buy – I don’t even know if there are higher packages available that you can get them into. But you could actually design marketing around the knowledge that someone’s definitely going to go and what they’re going to buy, versus they might come let’s say every couple of years.
CAREN: Exactly. It’s the same thing as in travel, for the travel industry. Depending on your niche, you know when is the right time for someone to start thinking of their next travel. Because you know that information, which is your recency factor, you know exactly the right time to push for the next trip.
At the same time, for most of the businesses that I have been working with, there is a truth in the data, which is once you convert a first-time buyer into a second-time buyer, you basically have them for life. If you make sure that you convert a one-time to a two-time, to get them to repeat to three times, four times, depending on your industry, is not that difficult.
The big step that you have to focus on at the beginning of the program is how you make a first-time buyer buy a second time. After that, if you give good service and the product is good, they’re going to be happy and they’re going to keep buying from you. So that’s what I usually recommend to our clients and where we usually focus at the beginning, to transform the first-time buyers into second-time buyers.
ROB: Suppose you’ve solved the initial part of getting somebody to be a repeat buyer. Are there industries where you can actually impact the recency, frequency, or monetization of the customers? It seems like in some cases, particularly in travel, moving someone up from a one, a two, to three, to four, to five on the monetization scale, for instance, would be a real game-changer for a business.
CAREN: Exactly. For example, if you master the recency and frequency and now you are close in the window for them to book faster and you’re making them book with you multiple times, then you're viable to start to tackle monetary, how you can get them to spend more money with you. And there’s different marketing strategies that you can do around that.
ROB: What’s an example of a way you might be able to move somebody up the monetization or frequency scale, for that matter?
CAREN: We did a very interesting promotion once at Luxury Retreats. We were giving free flights to anyone that would be booking for a certain period of time for certain locations. It was a very interesting way to move people, first of all from first-time buyers to repeat buyers, and also to increase their monetary value because we needed to lock them for a certain number of nights.
That promotion turned out to be one of the most successful promotions in this particular niche. This is luxury travel. So, you’re getting a free flight, and the gain for the company is right away because you’re not putting money upfront. You’re only giving away the incentive once they book with you. That’s a promotion that is still alive, and it was very, very successful from an RFM perspective because we were tackling the three variables at a time.
ROB: That’s fascinating. It seems like in the case of luxury travel, in particular, one of the things you may be able to do is actually change someone’s concept of themselves as being the sort of person who does this sort of travel. If you can get them to think of themselves that way, it probably becomes something that feeds itself a little bit.
CAREN: Yeah. In particular with luxury travel, incentives have a different take because those are brands that don’t get discounted. It’s a luxury item, so you don’t offer discounts. Everything that you’re offering them, either to book faster or to increase the basket size, is actually on giving them a better experience, to upgrade their experience, to give them something more. So it’s a different way to see the incentive and how you can make them increase their monetary value.
ROB: Fantastic. Caren, when you think about your 4-year journey so far building Benjamin David Group, what are some things that you might do differently if you were starting over? Some lessons learned, if you will.
CAREN: I think as we positioned ourselves as a growth partner of our clients, one of the things that we have been doing – it’s not something that I would do differently, but I think it’s knowledge that I wish I’d had since Day 1: to build a network of trusted partners that I can always go to, to enhance the service that I provide to my clients.
Just to give you an example, we don’t provide PR services. We’re very focused on digital marketing. But we have a lot of clients that at some point, because of the different marketing strategies that we have with them, there’s a right time for them, for example, to engage with a PR agency. Sometimes we don’t have the right partner to send to our clients.
So I think to have a very strong network of different service providers that don’t necessarily have to do with my core business, but that I can always give to my clients so that they can continue with that execution is something that I would like to have curated faster during this journey.
ROB: What have you found to be some of the keys to establishing those connections? It sounds like you have a lot of that in place now.
CAREN: A lot of these connections and partnerships that we have developed right now have been based off networking, to be honest. In every event and every opportunity that we attend, there are other players attending there.
Just to give you an example, at South by Southwest, there are multiple agencies going there. Myself, I was booked pretty much the whole week with other agencies where my services are complementary to them or where they actually complement my services. So the best way we have curated those relationships has been through networking.
ROB: I think another question that comes into play with that sort of partnership is: how do you think about, when you’re working with a client, whether that relationship is an introduction and a referral or whether it’s a white label service or just generally provided under the scope of BDG?
CAREN: The way that we have managed, it depends on the needs of the client. Also, it depends on our direction on the overall service. Sometimes we just connect the client with the service provider and they can work with them directly and do whatever they need to do. But there are other instances where it makes sense for us to be involved, just to give direction to this third party, and then they will be working with us behind the scenes and we will be assisting them with the direction and getting all the information from the client, and then we’re able to brief the third party.
So it really depends on the mandate and also where the client sits, where they want to move forward. But both angles have worked with us.
ROB: I can imagine some startup where you are the entire marketing arm of the organization, they probably just want you there to solve any marketing problem possible and to bring solutions to the table. Is that part of the mix?
CAREN: Exactly, and that’s a big difference. For example, I’m just thinking from a startup. That’s the difference between hiring for example five different freelancers – let’s say that a startup goes, "I'm going to hire someone for social media, someone for SEO, someone for email marketing,” and so on; the client will still have to have someone to manage those five professionals and make sure that people are not working in silos and bring them all together with the direction.
The difference with us is that we are that connection. We have the team and we have the specialists. The client just needs to make individual connections with the specialist because everything is centralized through our service. I think that’s a big advantage for us to work in that way, mostly with our startup clients.
ROB: Caren, what do you think is coming up next for BDG that we should be looking forward to, or maybe some lines of service that you're doing where you see some trends emerging?
CAREN: Other things I would do at BDG – we do digital marketing, but we also have a small venture arm. Whenever it makes sense for us, we do invest in some of our clients in a mix between sweat equity and capital. That’s something that we would like to explore even more. We have made eight investments during these past 4 years.
Moving forward in 2020-2021, we really want to keep developing that ability to invest in companies where we provide the marketing services, but because we're also investors of the company, the dots are aligned, so our clients’ success will be also our success. We want to keep exploring and get deeper into our investment arm.
ROB: Very good. Any of those companies that we should be looking out for that you'd like to plug while we're chatting?
CAREN: Absolutely. One of the companies that we're very, very proud of how they have success – it’s a marketplace. They’re called GoMaterials. Basically it's a marketplace between landscapers and vendors. We have been helping them since Day 1. It’s a very, very interesting concept. They are disrupting an industry that is very old-fashioned, where everything is done through paper, and they’re bringing technology to the industry, which is where they are succeeding in the space. So that’s one of our investments that we’re very, very proud of.
ROB: Very, very interesting. That is probably a hot one right now, at least where we are in Atlanta. Landscaping is considered one of those necessary services where business is going to keep on humming except for maybe some people would pull back. But at the same time, probably having an online service to handle some of the logistics is better than going in person for a lot of people.
CAREN: Absolutely. They have a platform where everything is centralized, so it's going to be a big, big change for the industry. The way that we provide and we support them is we have very good experience with marketplaces. Back at Luxury Retreats, it was basically a marketplace between the hosts and the guests. They're basically doing the same thing, but for landscapers.
All industries that have been managed in an old-fashioned way, whoever can disrupt that and bring technology and make that marketplace unified has a winning angle to gain that market, and that’s what they’re doing.
ROB: Fantastic. Caren, when people want to find you and want to find Benjamin David Group, where should they look?
CAREN: Our website, www.benjamin-david.com. Also, we're very, very active on LinkedIn. I would say that our main focus in terms of content is through LinkedIn. So either our website or our LinkedIn page. That’s where they can find us.
ROB: Fantastic. Caren, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, and best wishes to you and BDG, and hopefully we can connect up in person at your first South by Southwest in 2021. Hopefully we can make that happen.
CAREN: Absolutely. Thank you, Rob, for the invite.
ROB: Thank you so much.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Carlos Gil is CEO of Gil Media, a digital media company that specializes in video production, influencer marketing, social media community management, talent management, and content marketing. Carlos is a first generation Latino marketing executive, award-winning Snapchat storyteller, and author of a recent bestseller: “The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI,” available on Amazon. He presents bilingual keynotes at major marketing industry events.
In this interview, Carlos reviews his unconventional path to success, the importance of passion, and the long-term humanizing person to person linkage that creates business opportunities. There are no shortcuts. He believes the strength of a company is in its employees. He hopes his book will help companies future-proof their brands and their businesses for the long term.
In 2008, Carlos lost his job in the financial industry – the same day that he joined LinkedIn. A couple of days later, he started an online LinkedIn group job board, JobsDirectUSA.com., and promoted awareness through social media (which was in its infancy). He learned how to build relationships through social media and enabled thousands of mid- to senior-level career professionals to find jobs. Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine, Mashable, Social Media Examiner and numerous trade publications featured his work with this startup. In 2010, Fast Company recognized him as one of the Top 50 “Most Influential People Online”.
Carlos worked for a couple of grocery stores chains, developing their social media platforms, before joining LinkedIn to run social media for their Sales Solution business unit. His personal brand grew as he was repeatedly tapped to speak at marketing industry conferences.
Carlos took one final corporate job with BMC Software because he wanted the opportunity to work with Nick Utton. Used to battling the status quo in highly-structured hierarchies, Carlos had been frustrated by bureaucratic foot-dragging when he tried to get things done. Nick taught Carlos to “Fail fast, learn from that failure, and keep moving forward to what does work.” Carlos says that it is important, wherever you are in your career, that you have a leader who really supports you.
Today? A best selling book . . . A résumé showing over a decade of experience running digital and social media marketing for enterprise brands . . . A highly-successful agency working with an amazing roster of enterprise clients . . . Worldwide speaking engagements. For a man who dropped out of high school, got his GED, and jumped into an MBA program at age 30, Carlos has far exceeded expectations. He credits getting laid off in 2008 as the springboard for what has become an amazing track record of accomplishments. In the face of Covid-19, Carlos is one more entrepreneur re-inventing himself for these challenging times.
For those who have questions, Carlos can be reached at @carlosgil83 on Twitter and on Instagram. (Just let him know you heard him on Rob’s podcast), on LinkedIn, or by email . . . at carlos@gilmedia.co. To view Carlos interviewing his mentor, Nick Utton, (9/25/2018, topic “How to Sell to a CMO and Marketing Truths with Nick Utton.”), see this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql733a53xa0
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Carlos Gil, CEO of Gil Media. He’s a keynote speaker, an author of the recent bestseller, The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI, and he’s based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Carlos.
CARLOS: Hey, Rob. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on the show.
ROB: Sure, glad to have you here. Wish we were in person in Austin, Texas as we had planned, but the coronavirus had other plans. Why don’t you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself and your own journey into the world of marketing agency speaking origins?
CARLOS: My career in marketing actually started in 2008. I started my career in the early 2000s working in the finance and banking industry. It was right around the fall of 2008 that the banking industry took a turn for the worse. I was laid off. I was working for AIG at the time. The same day I lost my job is the same day that I joined LinkedIn.
To put it into context for everyone listening out there, the moment I lost my job, hundreds of thousands of other Americans lost their jobs too, and the irony with what we’re seeing happening today in this current crisis is – It reminds me a lot of what I went through about 12 years ago, early on in my career. I joined LinkedIn the same day I lost my job, and I became really inspired to help others find work.
I knew that the likelihood of my finding a job in banking any time soon was probably not going to happen. It was looking really bleak. Within just a few days of joining LinkedIn, I became inspired to help others find jobs, so I started my first business, and that was an online job board.
Now, to put this in perspective for you, I was 25 years old at the time. I had no experience running a business. My parents are serial entrepreneurs, so I knew that entrepreneurship and running a business isn’t easy by any means. But the point where I was at in my career, where I didn’t have experience running a business, I didn’t have any seed money or real savings, and I definitely didn’t have experience building websites or coding – or marketing, for that matter – the cards were really stacked against me. But I was really passionate about helping others find work.
The first thing I did was I started up a group on LinkedIn called Jobs Direct USA, and then that group morphed into what was the basis for my online job board, and then eventually an events business. For about 3 years, I forced myself to learn how to use social media. Again, to put it in perspective, not having any real experience in corporate marketing at that point, social media was really new. We’re talking about the years of 2008, ’09, and ’10, when businesses weren’t really using Facebook and Twitter and even LinkedIn like they are today. I really learned how to use social media to form relationships, and it was those relationships that eventually helped me gain clients and grow my business and led me down this path of corporate marketing.
I ended up getting hired by one of my clients, Winn-Dixie, which is a supermarket chain based in Jacksonville, Florida, which is where I lived at the time. They ended up hiring me to start up social media for them in 2011. I was at Winn-Dixie for a couple of years; ended up going to another supermarket chain called Save-A-Lot in the Midwest, where I was the Director of Digital.
Then things really skyrocketed for me when I was hired by LinkedIn and relocated out to San Francisco to run social media for one of their business units. It was around that time that I worked for LinkedIn that I started getting hit up to speak at different conferences, Social Media Marketing World, South by Southwest, various industry conferences, and I started investing more into building a personal brand.
Fast forward to where I’m at today, which is 2020, like you mentioned before, I’ve got the bestselling book The End of Marketing, which came out at the end of 2019. I have an agency, Gil Media Co., and I have this great résumé which spans now over a decade running digital and social media marketing for various enterprise brands – and now I have the pleasure of working with an amazing roster of enterprise clients.
None of it would’ve been possible, Rob, without first of all losing my job in 2008 during a crisis and really turning to social media to brush myself off and build the brand that you see today, which is Carlos Gil.
ROB: It’s quite a personal brand. A lot of people have probably heard you speak, seen you on conference rosters. It seems a fascinating theme in your journey is that when you have your back against the wall, you’re a guy that finds your way out.
One of the times I became aware of you was when you were running social media for BMC Software. BMC Software doesn’t resonate in most people’s minds as a titan in social media, but you had a lot of interesting things to talk about, and they probably to an extent had their back against the wall to figure out how to do something in social media. Not engaging was not an option, but I imagine figuring out how to engage was a real challenge for them.
CARLOS: I’m so glad that you brought up BMC, because BMC Software is the last corporate brand I worked for full-time as an employee. When I got hired by BMC, I was at this crossroads in my career. I went to go work for LinkedIn; LinkedIn was a great opportunity, but ultimately it wasn’t going to be the end-all, be-all for me. I was at this crossroad where I was like, do I go out on my own? Do I go work another gig?
The reality is that when you run social media for a brand – an enterprise brand like the Winn-Dixies, Save-A-Lots, BMCs of the world – it’s all the same job. Creating content, managing a community, influencer relationships. It’s all the same gig. It doesn’t really change outside of the logo that you represent.
What really steered me to go work for BMC was the CMO that hired me, Nick. He was a former CMO of MasterCard, worked for E-Trade, JP Morgan Chase – this is a guy that lives, breathes, and eats marketing, and I think it’s really important, regardless of what stage you’re at in your career, that you have a leader that really supports you.
If you have a boss, you should have a boss that supports your growth, supports your endeavors, and really is your champion internally. One of the challenges is there’s always this hierarchy that you have to work against. You’re constantly swimming against the current. You have all these ideas, like right now, a lot of clients are coming to me and they’re asking me about TikTok. So, I’m advising them on what they should or shouldn’t do. Any time there’s this emerging new channel, a lot of marketers are eager to jump on that channel, and then they’re met with resistance.
Whereas my boss at BMC, Nick, understood that if you want to constantly evolve, you need to be trying new things, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. You fail fast was his mantra, and you learn from that failure and then you keep moving forward to what does work. What I enjoyed about working at BMC in the 2 years I was there is that as an employee, they really gave me full autonomy to do my job.
And now, as a business owner, it’s that autonomy that was given and that leadership that I was surrounded with that’s really helped me and my business, imagining the employees that I have and really growing my business with the mindset that employees are our greatest asset. It’s not the products, it’s not the services, it’s not the logo, but it’s the employees that make us who we are.
Going back to at BMC, which is very much B2B focused from a marketing standpoint, relationships are paramount. My mantra, Rob, before I turn it back over to you, is in this world of marketing that we’re in today, you don’t need to have the most followers. You don’t need to have the most engagement. But what you do need to have is an engaged community of customers, clients, and fans – even if it’s five people.
ROB: Indeed. That’s quite a range, going from Winn-Dixie, which is a consumer brand that is for everybody within the region of that grocery store chain – I spent middle and high school in Tampa, Florida; I know Winn-Dixie well, a lot of my high school friends worked there – to BMC, which is enterprise software. And it’s not even – Zoom is having this moment because everybody needs to talk to everybody. BMC is not in a moment where everybody is still going to need it. Certain people are still going to need it.
I think it flows nicely into your book. One of the themes of your End of Marketing book is really knowing where your target customer is. I think you’ve taken this lesson you learned in going so far between consumer and enterprise and taken a really good general lesson. It seems like maybe the book itself is some of these general lessons you’ve extracted that can apply to anyone. How do you think about that book in our current moment?
CARLOS: I don’t want this to come off as a cheap plug for The End of Marketing, but I think right now, humanizing your brand is going to be what keeps your brand in business. It’s something that throughout my book and even throughout my keynotes now, I state upfront the reason why I wrote the book in the first place is to help future-proof your brand and your business for the long term.
When I started writing The End of Marketing at the beginning of 2019, at no point did I ever think a year into being a published author, there would be coronavirus or I’d be quarantining and staying at home. But the premise of The End of Marketing and the methodology behind how you market as a human versus as a brand is that at the end of the day, people relate to people. Since the beginning of time, people do business with who they want to do business with, who they like, who they trust. For example, you had never heard of me, seen me speak, or even like what I have to say, you wouldn’t invite me on your podcast.
It’s that basic. It’s that simple. And it’s not a hard methodology, but I think marketing has become so fragmented and marketers themselves have gotten so far away from the basics, and we get so wrapped up with having that content constantly flowing out – I refer in The End of Marketing, my book, to social media and the internet being this noisy digital ocean. And it is, because we’re constantly facing this pressure to have to push out content. We’re constantly looking at metrics. We’re constantly comparing our wins and our highlights to someone else’s wins and highlights.
At the end of the day, if you focus on reaching individual people like a human being, not as a brand, over time they will show love for you. They will show an affinity for you. And that is how you grow your business. It’s one person at a time. It’s one-to-one marketing; it’s not one-to-many.
ROB: It’s awesome how that probably ties straight back to that job board that you built, because you didn’t set out to build a job board for the world. You were in a moment – and you were in finance; people may not remember just how bad it was to be in finance in 2008. It would be like being in a restaurant for this month when everything’s shut down. You can’t go out and get a restaurant job right now in this coronavirus pandemic.
But you started block by block, person by person, connecting people to each other, connecting people to jobs, also in a very human business in Winn-Dixie. It now probably is tying right into the work you’re thinking about for brands now, helping them realize how human they need to be in this moment.
CARLOS: Yeah. I’m so glad that you brought that up. It’s funny because I’m here thinking, maybe I need to dust the cobwebs off my Jobs Direct USA business plan and maybe bring it back. It’s hard times right now. You’ve got a lot of people in hospitality that are being hit hard by this crisis.
You’ve got a lot of people all over the board – I was just sharing this with you before we jumped on here; as a speaker, my entire business has been wiped out for probably all of 2020. Yes, conferences are saying they’re going to reschedule, yes, they’re saying they’re looking into other plans, but the reality is that we’re in this for the long haul.
I think what’s most important for anyone that’s sitting out there listening to this is that you start thinking about how you’re going to get to the other side. I will tell you this: the Great Recession, 2008, ’09, ’10, were some of the worst years of my life financially speaking, but what it did help me do is first of all build character because I was able to survive it and get through it, and that in itself helps you build tough skin in other scenarios throughout life.
But really what it helped me do is acquire knowledge, and it helped me acquire experience. I think that’s one thing that a lot of people don’t realize. Right now, even though times are bleak and tough, you have all this time on your hands that you can be using to learn something, whether it’s reading a book, whether it’s going on LinkedIn Learning – if you want to look me up there, I have courses on LinkedIn Learning – whether its going on YouTube and watching and consuming.
This is a prime opportunity for you to enrich your mind and allow that enrichment to be able to carry you on to what you’re going to do on the flipside of this crisis.
ROB: Indeed. It’s hopefully a time where people figure out to watch more than just Netflix. Now, we were originally scheduled to meet up in person in Austin. You were going to be at South by Southwest as a mentor and also at the LinkedIn Studio there, providing a talk on the future of work. Share with us a little bit what you were intending to speak of in that talk, and even maybe some additional things – how you’re thinking it may have evolved since then.
CARLOS: I was going to be first of all doing mentor sessions at South by Southwest. Throughout this recording, I want to make myself available to anyone out there, whether you were going to attend South by Southwest or not. If you want to meet with me one-on-one, if you’ve got any questions, I’m really easy to find. You can go to @carlosgil83 on Twitter as well as on Instagram. Just let me know that you heard me on Rob’s podcast. Again, any questions I can answer for you, any advice that you need, marketing-related, crisis-related, whatever it might be, let me know.
But going back to South by Southwest, besides the mentor sessions I was going to do, I was also going to speak at LinkedIn’s activation there called the LinkedIn Studio. It was going to be on the future of work. A lot of what I was going to talk about wasn’t so much the technology aspect, because I think we all get it that work, whether coronavirus happened or not, eventually was going to move more to this virtual world that we’re seeing happening right now, using tools like Zoom and Skype and Slack and other tools out there.
But I think, again, my piece is you don’t need a college degree from Harvard in order to get the really sexy brand marketing job or agency job. You don’t need to have all this formal education in order to be able to run your own business, because I myself am a high school dropout that has a GED. I myself didn’t go to college until I was 30 years old and I got into an MBA program.
My point that I’m trying to make, Rob, is that you need to be able to get the basics and actually implement the basics and keep moving forward and keep learning and keep growing, and you do that by getting the opportunities that come your way and making the best of them.
Relationships are paramount. I wouldn’t be on this podcast right now, I wouldn’t have the career I have, if it wasn’t for the relationships I started building in 2008 as a result of a job loss. Again, when I think of future of work, I think it’s not going to be based on where you went to school. It’s going to be based on not just who you know, but who knows you. That’s where personal branding is paramount.
It’s funny because I am a big proponent of personal brand, hence why I’ve invested so much into my own personal brand. Your personal brand is your new résumé. When people think about doing business with you, what they’re going to do is google you, and within a few seconds they’re going to learn everything that they need to know based on what Google gives them. And if you don’t have a presence online, it’s going to make it hard for people to be able to find you.
Case in point, going back to the agency world, I run a successful agency that I started 3 years ago when I left my corporate job. I do very little business development. I do zero traditional business development from the standpoint of cold calling, pitching, RFPs. I participate in zero RFPs. The way that I’ve been able to grow Gil Media is through the content I create that lives through my personal brand channels.
So think of my personal brand. Everything that you see on my Instagram, my YouTube, Twitter, even Facebook and LinkedIn – it’s all funnel. That’s to create that top of the funnel awareness, as we call it in the B2B world, and then as you subscribe to my content – and you subscribe by hitting a “follow” button – then at that point, I’m able to get you hooked. You’re able to see who I am as a real person. You’re able to see how I speak. You’re able to learn a couple nuggets from me.
That is something I’ve found is the way to circumnavigate the traditional business development activities to be able to get business.
ROB: Perfect. One thing I wonder about a little bit – a lot of the people listening who are in the marketing agency world, and even with our own clients, when I think about our clients, I think about a person, I think about a name, I think about a relationship. And I think that’s true easily on the consumer side and easily on the enterprise side, where the deals are large.
Then there’s I think this middle that can be somewhat mechanistic, the world of hundreds of outbound cold emails and SDRs and that small- to mid-scale SaaS play. When you’re thinking about a brand in that kind of market, where people show up and put in the credit card, how do you think about humanizing and making that sort of brand personal in marketing?
CARLOS: I think you still need the emails just to keep your name on the radar and stay in front of people. You still need to be out there, all over social media. Again, like I said before, social media and the internet is a noisy digital ocean. These aren’t my rules; I just play by the rules of the house, if you will.
But I’d say one-to-one interaction is where it’s at. If you have someone that you want to do business with right now, or if you have a general idea of the type of client it is that you’re trying to reach, your objective is to get in front of that person, one way or another – whether it’s an email, a Facebook ad, or a direct message on Twitter or Instagram.
Where most people mess up is they’re relying on LinkedIn and they’re running ads and pumping out content on LinkedIn, and they’re spamming, quite frankly, through direct message, everyone that they can on LinkedIn. Here’s what I can tell you as someone that has worked at LinkedIn as an employee and teaches on LinkedIn’s platform: LinkedIn is a phenomenal directory to find who it is that you want to do business with. But it’s not where you go to actually network.
What you need to do is to see if the individual that you’re looking to do business with is on Twitter or if they’re on Instagram. If they’re on one of those platforms, or both, follow them. Consume their content for a period of time so you know what they’re into. You want to know what their hobbies are, what their interests are, and you want to organically form a relationship with them.
The reality is that when you talk about any sizable business deal, whether it’s SaaS, agency work, whatever it might be, people are not going to meet you on the first date and agree to do business with you. And they’re definitely not going to sign off on a high 5- or 6-figure or 7-figure deal with you just because you direct messaged them on a social network.
It takes time to build that relationship. That’s real talk. And I can tell you for a fact that I’ve never messaged someone out of the blue and all of a sudden they’re like, “Hey, here’s a 6-figure deal for Gil Media!” It just doesn’t work that way.
But what I will tell you is a good strategic path is think of all your prospects as seeds in a garden. Right now, I can tell you that I’ve got dozens of seeds that have been planted over the last several years, and even before that, when I was still working in corporate marketing and I knew eventually I was going to go out on my own. Those seeds you plant in the garden, and as you engage, as you mature the relationship, that harvest starts to bloom. Some of those trees grow bigger than others. Some of those trees sprout dollars on the branches. Some of them just stay as little buds, little bushes.
But my whole point I’m trying to make is that you need to really think about going wide and also going deep – going wide in terms of you want to be able to have a lot of prospects, but you also want to go very deep with the relationships and not think about relationships as being transactional. When you start thinking about relationships as being about money and transactions, at that point you don’t have a relationship. You just have a transaction.
In this market, especially this market now where people are going to be tighter with budgets, I’m telling you, the relationship is going to be worth gold.
ROB: So true. I think sometimes the thought leadership we get is from companies that are in a hot category. If you are out there selling marketing automation and everyone feels like they have to have a marketing automation or maybe two of those, then maybe you can get by with being a little bit transactional. But unless you’re selling toilet paper right now, you probably can’t be very transactional. It seems like very much a time to plant rather than to harvest, except in very rare situations.
But as you’re talking, I’m listening and it sounds like – I get what you’re saying about planting seeds, but casting a wide net while planting seeds sounds overwhelming. How do you think about relationship across a wide range of people that you’re working to build real, authentic relationships with, but recognizing that it’s going to take some time?
CARLOS: It’s removing the transaction out of the relationship altogether. It’s actually connecting and forming an authentic and organic relationship, asking someone, “How are you? How are you weathering the storm? How’s your company doing? Is there anything that I can do for you? Hey, I work for this company; I’m not really trying to sell you anything, but I just want you to know that I exist.”
The irony in all this is that since we started this crisis, since work from home became a thing, I haven’t sent out one email yet. I haven’t sent out any piece of communication selling anything to anyone. Yes, I had an email that went out letting people know that my book is on sale on Amazon, and yes, I’ve got this course on LinkedIn that you can watch, but in terms of actually selling agency services, nothing’s gone out.
I told my team, “You know what? Let’s chill. Let’s not be aggressively pitching to anyone, and let’s let the game come to us.” No kidding, in the last 2 weeks, I can’t tell you how many CMOs, CEOs, C-suite executives have been hitting me up personally to help them with their crisis comms plan on social – what to say on social, do an audit, review. It’s crazy what happens when people don’t perceive you as being the cheesy salesman and instead they perceive you as the good guy, the advocate that’s here to help them.
I think regardless of where you sit in an organization, whether you’re an account executive, a sales rep, a CMO, owner – whatever your role is, make business about the relationships and the people that you’re truly trying to serve and not about the transaction. When you start operating with that mentality, you’re going to see how business is going to start coming your way when you least expect it.
ROB: That’s perfect. When I think about what you have done yourself, when your name shows up in their inbox, without you saying a thing about your business, they already know who you are and what you can do for them. They have a sense of brand, of what you can do there. But it’s also worthless without the staying on their radar part.
I know for myself, when I think about partners we have, people we work with, people we go in together on deals and help serve customers – the ones I think about are the ones who have spoken to us most recently, and it’s not the folks that say, “Hey, just checking in.” It’s the folks I’ve built a relationship with but have also stayed on my radar so that I remember them, so that when an opportunity crosses the path that I can’t do myself, I pick up the phone and I talk to them. So it is that planting and that harvesting. It really makes sense.
How do you think about avoiding that “just checking in” dynamic? I think right now, “How are you?” is perfect. We are all I think looking for someone to tell how we are with trust. How do you think about that when it’s less obvious? How do you keep that relationship? Because people will tell you, “Find this article, send it to them” – sometimes it still I think feels kind of fake, cheesy, and forced.
CARLOS: That’s such a good question. I think in this market right now, we operate with a servant mindset. It’s about giving, not taking. The more that you give, the more it’ll pay itself off tenfold. It’s using social media to listen to what people are saying. It’s going in the right groups, running the right searches, paying attention and swooping in with solutions to people’s problems.
I’ll give you an example. I have a lot of downtime right now. Because I have that downtime, I’m looking to make use of that downtime. One of the objectives on my plate is getting on more podcasts. I didn’t go out and run an ad on Indeed or LinkedIn or even post some looking for a virtual assistant; instead, I just went on Twitter and I ran a search for people that do VA work. I was able to connect with someone right away – and again, it’s different because I’m not selling anything to them. On the flipside, I want to give them money so they can do work for me.
What I’m trying to say is those are the type of opportunities that happen when you, in this case, have a solution to someone’s need or someone’s problem.
ROB: And you’re probably also getting more inbounds right now, which probably helps tip your own brain on what to be thinking about. When there’s an uptick in the data on something technical, there’s an uptick in the human factor of that as well.
CARLOS: Yeah, 100%. It goes back to what I said earlier. We’re all people, we’re all in this together, and at the end of the day, people do business with who they like and who they trust. Regardless of what services it is that you sell, your objective as a salesperson, as someone who’s trying to drive and increase revenue, is to be able to connect your buyers with solutions to their problems.
This is probably not the best time to be cold calling and cold pitching and hard selling, but this is the time to be connecting with those individuals and just get on their radar.
ROB: Absolutely. One thing we’re definitely seeing, if you look in the tea leaves – we’ll email a certain number of people every week to look at future bookings for the podcast, and I can tell you, it’s typically cold contact. A lot of people will say yes because they want these conversations, they want to share their journey, they want the exposure. But I’ll tell you, the accept rate is basically double what it was 3 weeks ago. The information is there in the detail. I like how you talk about these searches and these platforms and LinkedIn as the tools to help you understand how to be a better human to other humans.
CARLOS: Yeah, 100%. Podcasting especially right now, it’s really high. I’m sure that between last month and this month, you’re going to see a big increase in downloads, subscribers, and listens because you’ve got more people that are tuning in. You’ve got more people that need content to consume that’s not just news and doom and gloom.
I think right now, podcasting is a blue ocean. If you can find your niche, you can carve a lane for yourself in that niche, and you can find ways to monetize with, again, brands or advertisers that normally are trying to get in front of a certain audience, and they’re finding ways to pivot or reallocate their budget. If you’re able to bring a specific audience, then man, a podcast could actually be quite beneficial from a revenue standpoint.
ROB: Absolutely. Carlos, you shared earlier a very generous offer to connect with listeners. Remind us all, when we want to go out there and find you – other than obviously your immediately findable personal brand – what’s the best way for folks to connect with you? You said @carlosgil83 on Instagram, Twitter. Google you, I’m sure they’ll find you. Anything else?
CARLOS: You can connect with me on LinkedIn. You can also send me an email, which is carlos@gilmedia.co.
ROB: Perfect. Thank you so much, Carlos. You have dropped gold. I know you’re sowing seeds for a tremendous future already in the midst of all this, so congrats on being ahead of the game there.
CARLOS: Thank you so much for the opportunity.
ROB: Thank you.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Mathew Sweezey is the Director of Market Strategy for Salesforce, a company best-known for providing and supporting a cloud-based, cross-departmental customer-relationship-management solution. Salesforce has expanded its offerings to include a broad range of integrated service, marketing, sales, front end, and back end business software. Mathew is an award-winning marketer, podcast host, technology pioneer who writes about consumer behavior, media theory, and new marketing strategies. His publishing credits include AdAge, Brand Quarterly, VentureBeat, Forbes, The Observer, and The Economist.
Twelve years ago, Mathew started a marketing technology company that provided online lead generation. This failed experiment provided him with a valuable education. He joined another startup, Pardot, and initiated its thought-leadership practice. Like a string of ever small fishes being consumed by ever bigger fishes, ExactTarget acquired Pardot and then SalesForce acquired ExactTarget, with Mathew maintaining his ever-expanding role as each-organization’s marketing thought leader – exploring the future of marketing. What he learns is communicated internally to guide company direction, externally to customers to help them “better their businesses,” and even worldwide to conference attendees in his keynote presentations.
Mathew is the author of “Marketing Automation for Dummies: (2014) and, just-released this year, “The Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media” (Harvard Business Press). Mathew started writing this book long before the world heard of Covid-19. As companies reel from the overnight environmental changes wrought by this virus, his message is acutely “on target” . . . suddenly the whole world has had to figure out a new way to interact. In this interview, he discusses the changes marketers will need to make to meet the challenges of a “changed environment.”
Mathew spent 5 years researching over 20,000 global consumers and over 20,000 brands and then looked at the general marketplace. He reminds us that, when we have a specific environment, we play a game that fits that environment. When the environment changes, the game, likewise, must change.
Mathew says that today’s consumers produce the largest amount of noise (their devices are second). He believes the consumer now controls the environment, which changes marketing’s requirements dramatically. Marketing is no longer just a message . . . it is an experience. Purchases now are not just a single “click-here-and-buy decision,” but rather a process of guiding a customer along a curated journey. To “cut through the noise,” companies will need to be agile, distribute marketing functions throughout the organization, build strong relationships with their customers, master internal alignment, continue to invest in strategy, and experiment and adapt rapidly.
From all this research, Mathew believes he has identified the key to the success of today’s high-performance marketing organizations . . . executive buy-in to this “new idea of marketing.” With the Covid-19 challenge, he would like to help people understand what we should be thinking about, how we plan a road for recovery, and how, specifically, we deliver moving forward. Context, he says, is a “significant part of what consumers are going to demand.”
The Salesforce website is: https://www.salesforce.com/. Mathew can be reached on Twitter at: @msweezey. To schedule time to talk with him one-on-on-one, reach out to him on LinkedIn. “The Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media,” is available on Amazon.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Mathew Sweezey. Mathew is the Director of Market Strategy for Salesforce. He’s an accomplished public speaker, podcaster, and author of the forthcoming book, The Context Marketing Revolution, published by Harvard Business. Welcome to the podcast, Mathew.
MATHEW: Rob, it’s so great to be here and talk with you again.
ROB: For sure. For those who don’t know, Matthew and I go back a little ways from Atlanta; he has since moved on to the beach, basically, I think. But I think that actually transitions well to you telling us a little bit about yourself, your journey, and what might be called a dream job for a marketer.
MATHEW: Myself, just a guy that loves marketing, let’s start there. The journey really on this current path started, I don’t know, 12 years ago when I had a startup. We were a marketing technology company. Essentially, we’re doing online lead generation, lead arbitrage for an SEO term.
That then ran for about 2 years. Lost a lot of money, learned a lot of stuff. Shut that down and went to work for another startup, which became a great success, out of Atlanta, Pardot. I was Employee 13. I helped grow that company up, and then we were acquired by another company called Exact Target, and I transitioned to the thought leadership team there. I had started the thought leadership practice at Pardot, and then we continued that at Exact Target.
Then we were acquired by Salesforce, and then that led me to the thought leadership side of Salesforce, which is where I reside now. I’m really focused on the future of marketing and on that POV for the organization. So that’s the nutshell of where I came from and what I do.
ROB: That’s a pretty awesome journey. Very few people get to take that rollercoaster ride from 13 people to acquired, acquired, public company now. I think unless people are really deep into enterprise marketing stacks, they might find it counterintuitive to have strong marketing thought leadership within Salesforce. There’s that typecast view of Salesforce, obviously, on the sales side because sales is in the name.
But tell me a little bit about how even with the acquisition, marketing has come to the forefront of Salesforce and how Salesforce as a whole thinks about marketing, and then within the marketing cloud and where that’s leading.
MATHEW: Marketing is a wide, wide, wide swath. The larger the organization you are, the more facets and the more things it comes to represent. Really at the heart of all of our marketing is helping us connect companies with their customers in new and better ways.
Most people know us as the CRM platform. Yes, that’s definitely where we started; now we’re the number one provider of probably 5 or 6 different business software categories, from service, marketing, sales, there’s frontend, backend – there’s a whole platform and range of things. That’s a large swath.
Where my role fits in is helping on two fronts, really diving into looking at what the future looks like to help roll that back in to internal insights as to what we should be thinking about moving forward, and also then helping roll that information and those insights directly to our customers through one-on-one meetings, through lots of different formats, as well as then writing an onstage presence in traditional conferences and keynotes.
For us, marketing is a wide range of things. You can look at the brand aspects, the one-to-one aspects, the events. There’s so many different facets. But really the heart of all of that is helping our customers be better at business and really helping them connect to their customers.
ROB: That’s such a good big picture view. You mentioned conferences. We were originally supposed to meet up in person in Austin, Texas for South by Southwest. You were going to hop on up and give a talk, talking about this new book that you’ve got coming, The Context Marketing Revolution.
Amidst the disappointment of not meeting up and South by Southwest being cancelled in this COVID-19 crisis that we are in the middle of, give us the picture of the context marketing revolution and some of what you were excited to share but didn’t get to, but you can get to now.
MATHEW: Part of my job is doing a lot of research. Over the past 4 or 5 years now, we’ve really done a lot of research looking into the key traits of high-performing organizations. That’s based on multiple largescale surveys, doing both surveys from consumer sides, brand side – we’ve looked at 20,000+ consumers globally, about 20,000+ brands over the past 4 years globally, and then combining that with looking at the marketplace at large.
What I was realizing was there was something that was fundamentally different going on, and a lot of people were simply missing the boat. That’s really where this idea of context marketing revolution comes in. It’s two basic aspects.
One is the basic concept that the idea we have of marketing, we can no longer iterate upon because it was an idea that we created at a different point in time, and marketing is a game that we play given the specifics of an environment. It’s game theory. Given an environment, we play a specific game. When the environment changes, we have to change that game.
The environment has changed so much that we have to change the very fundamental idea of what this thing marketing even means. This means a whole new role, scope, and function, not just how we take that thing we know and apply new things to it. So that’s where the word “revolution” comes in.
Then the idea of context is essentially the antithesis of attention. The old foundation of marketing was let’s grab someone’s attention and come up with some creative way to get them to do what we want them to do. The reality is, now that the entire environment is controlled by the consumer, and to reach them you have to go through multiple layers of AI, through multiple channels – all consumers now, all purchases, are journeys – what we must realize is, one, breaking through, now the foundational element is context, helping them accomplish a goal in a moment.
Two is that to motivate a decision, now all decisions are considered, so now our goal must not be to get them to take the final action, but simply guide them to the next step and continue to do that multiple times, and that is how we motivate modern consumers to act.
Looking at all of that and taking in the big scale, that was the big thing I was hoping to write about in the book, to show the number one key trait that high performers have right now, high-performing marketing organizations, is executive buy-in to a new idea of marketing. It’s not new marketing ideas; it’s a radically new idea. That’s what I was so excited about to get out with this book.
Then this whole thing happened, and now this book is even more relevant because the things that we may not have thought about – we’re talking about radical change in the marketplace. A lot of people say, “Yeah, that may affect your demographic, but not my demographic.” The reality is, the entire world was forced into a new way of connecting and communicating overnight.
My father is 75 years old, doesn’t know how to use a smartphone; is now having to do Bible studies via Zoom over a smartphone and figure that out overnight. Large scales of the population are going to be operating and expecting different things, and they’re going to expect us to accomplish their goals in hand. I’m going to stop with that and turn it back over to you, Rob.
ROB: Especially in this moment, people don’t even know what they want. They don’t know what they need. We’re all a little bit discombobulated and need someone who cares about our lives, who actually thinks about what we need rather than someone who is going to tell us what we need. There’s some stuff you just can’t tell people they need, and there’s some ways you need to tell them differently.
You were scheduled to speak at a conference, go on a book tour – all of that is necessarily in the trash, but you still have a book coming out. How have you even thought about remixing the book launch process amidst this change?
MATHEW: Yeah, it’s difficult. I think the number one thing I can do is no one cares that you have a book, right? It’s like, “Cool, you’ve got a book coming out.” No one cares. We all have problems. We’re all trying to figure out how we take what we were planning on doing and either salvage those efforts or redo those efforts. So everyone’s got a lot of work on their plate, and it’s happening rapidly fast.
The best thing that I can help people do right now is understand, number one, what we should be thinking about, and number two, how we then plan for a road for recovery. The good part is context is a part of both of those answers. It’s not the only answer, but it’s definitely a significant part of what consumers are going to demand, and then the specifics of how we deliver that moving forward.
What I’ve done is set up personal time. I’ve opened up my personal calendar to anybody. In fact, there’s a post that went up in LinkedIn this morning that says if you want to schedule time with me, I’m more than happy to have any of these conversations with just you one-on-one – this is not a webcast; let’s just talk one-on-one. So I’m trying to do those efforts.
Definitely reaching out personally to everyone in my network to ask for a hand, let them know what I’m helping out with, so that if anyone that they know needs that help, they can get that information to them, as well as saying, “Hey listen, I need a hand too. If you could simply let one other person know about this, that would be a big help to me right now.”
Those are the ways that I’m trying to pivot in this current time, as well as just continue to transition a lot of the other efforts from physical to virtual and just take the rest day by day, like everyone else.
ROB: Right. It’s definitely been a reset, and I think it’s been really helpful, because I had to go into my own business to reach out to some people that I’d worked with before about maybe working together again on some things. In the first couple of days after everybody went remote and everybody shut down business as usual, I struggled a little bit. I said, what is the appropriate way to even reach out to these people?
It’s human, and it’s also realizing that even in this disruption, there are still ways – we all need help, and some of that help is business, and we all need to be thinking about how to help each other rather than how to sell each other stuff. It’s actually a really good reminder, I think.
MATHEW: Yeah. If we look just as a basic roadmap – in the book, I talk about the 5 elements of context: available, permission, personal, authentic, and purposeful. If we ground our efforts in those 5 elements, we will be fine moving forward.
Available. How do we make sure the information and our help is in the way that they want it and where they want it? If they’re asking questions, we need to make sure we have answers for those questions and that they’re easy to find. That means a single central source of information.
Starbucks is doing a great example of this right now. They’ve got a page of how they’re moving everything that they can do in one place. From a business standpoint and a marketing standpoint, we must do this not only for our customers; we also must do this for our partners and all stakeholders at large, as well as our employees.
When we’re communicating with people, we need to make sure we have the permission to communicate with people and that we’re using that permission appropriately. There was a great comic that came out today from Tom Fishburne – he’s a comedian, he’s a comic. The comic is there’s this person reading an email and they turn to their spouse on the couch and say, “Hey, this is great. The company we haven’t heard from in 5 years just reached out to let us know how they’re going to do things during this current crisis.”
It’s like, if people aren’t engaging with you for 5 years and you’re now reaching out to them, they probably don’t care. You’re probably just now spamming them and flooding their inbox and probably just causing things they don’t want.
Then we continue down. It’s personal. It’s not just how personalized we can take a mass message and personalize mass messaging; it’s how personally can we actually deliver that message? Human to human, how many people can we connect together? That’s really one of the big things we’re finding. People are learning to connect without us in new ways. They are easily being able to make connections via all types of new methodologies – working from home, and we talked about Zoom, we talked about all these other things. We need to also be a part of that, whether that is us connecting our advocates to other people, whether that’s us connecting our employees and delivering these messages.
Then finally, the last two, authentic and purposeful. These messages have to be authentic. What we need to think about in that word is empathy. We have to be empathetic. And to be empathetic, that means you have to have constant conversations with your audience to know what is empathetic right now, and that’s going to change day to day. You need to be having conversations with them to find out what those things are.
The last element is purposeful. We need to find ways that are purpose-driven, and there’s tons of examples right now. One, you could simply find a new way to use your products. You could come up with purpose-driven efforts.
Nuun is doing a great example. They’re creating care packages. If you’re not familiar with Nuun, if you’re an adventure athlete or an athlete, Nuun is a thing we drop in water that’s full of electrolytes to keep us going. But who needs to keep going right now are healthcare workers, so they’re asking their audience, “Tell us who your healthcare workers are so we can send them care packages.” Lessonly created a coloring book so parents that are working from home can simply print out a coloring book for their kids to play with, to help keep them busy.
Chipotle is focusing on safety. They’ve created new ways to ensure that the delivery food is tamper-proof. They’ve enhanced the functionality to know where your order is to make sure that this whole delivery to home is a seamless and as best an experience as it can be at the current point in time.
If we can ground our efforts in those 5 things, we will be contextually marketing and will be poised to break through and still drive growth during this current point in time.
ROB: Right, and it’s all super necessary. The available, personal, permission, purposeful, authentic – if you’re missing some of those elements, if you’re not authentic, if you’re not purposeful right now, it’s going to come across very, very wrong in the moment of what people are dealing with. If you’re not thinking about the personal, where people are and why you need to communicate a message of food safety – because you could copy Chipotle’s message and it still wouldn’t necessarily resonate, depending on who you are.
As we’re sitting here and looking at perhaps an accelerant for some of this revolution – or maybe it’s even a necessity more than ever – when did this revolution start, and what fueled the growth and tipping over of the revolution?
MATHEW: The revolution is a direct response to a market change, and that market change is the fundamental aspect. This is like hardcore, fundamental scientific theory of what we should be thinking about. It’s media strategy, media theory. Essentially what we look at is, who does the media environment operate for?
There was a specific date I was able to find out through research. Up until 2009, we lived in a world that was specific. It was called a limited media environment, and that means media was limited in three specific factors: creation, distribution, and access. Given those factors, it operated for brands. We were the ones who had the capital to break through. We could pay to have content created; we could pay to have content distributed, as well as there was a limited amount of content, so the noise we had to break through was a certain type and a certain way. It created a certain game.
But then you start thinking about, what happened when consumers started to be able to create their own content? That really started back with the invention of email, and it’s continued forward and has exacerbated over time. We don’t really think about how radical today is from 2007, but it’s radical.
Just think about this: the amount of data we create per day today is 500 times more than the amount of day we created per day in 2007. The amount of mobile connections is 30 times greater than in 2007. The largest human gatherings are 100 times that size. We have 1.6 billion daily active users on Facebook. That’s 800 times the size of what it was in 2007. It’s a radically different era.
What we live in now is the infinite media era, and that’s what really is causing this revolution, because now the entire environment operates for the individual. The consumer is the largest creator of noise; number two is their devices. So how we as marketers break through is radically different. And then because there’s infinite information, how they make decisions is radically different. That is the cause of this revolution. It’s really a shift in media environments, from the limited media era to the infinite media era.
What we see now is just an exacerbation of these things. Now consumers’ lives – what I say is the tinder was there. All of these elements were there and the change was happening, but what happened is this current scenario sparked that tinder, and it went wildfire. Populations that would’ve taken 5-10 years to really adapt to these changes had to adapt overnight, and they just adapted. That’s really where the revolution came from and what’s driving this.
ROB: That makes sense. It went from very slow, to your point, to very fast. There was a time of television monoculture, of three national networks. What I hear you getting at is the filter was the media, and now the filter is all the way down to the person. And we had a couple of middle roads there. We had cable, and cable got more and more and more cable, so you were a little bit of a filter, but the brands still had access to shoot content through a cannon at you. Now it really is each person can turn you on or turn you off as a marketer. It’s getting more and more overwhelming.
MATHEW: Yeah, and increasingly so, the consumer doesn’t have to, because the environment is doing it for them. That’s really the underlying factor we need to think about. Between you and them in any medium is a layer of artificial intelligence, and that AI is optimizing for the context of the moment. That’s why context is the foundational element.
Look at anything. If you do a Google search, we can all ask the same question, but we will all receive a different answer based on us in context – who we are, where we are. If we look at a social media feed, they’re not chronological feeds. They’re contextual feeds that AI is optimizing for whatever you’re going to engage with most, which is the most contextual thing for you in that moment.
You start to look at how modern media formats operate – TikTok doesn’t even have timestamps on posts. You can resort and resift infinitely, and you never even think about time. It’s only to the context of the moment. The time doesn’t matter.
That’s really the underlying thing we have to think about. Context is what now the modern environment operates for. And if you can’t create that, you’re going to be filtered out. The environment is going to filter you out on its own because it’s optimizing for the individual, not optimizing for the brands.
ROB: That’s fascinating even to think about TikTok. I’m not certainly in the core demographic of TikTok, and I hadn’t even noticed the timestamp, but it does make sense because within that platform, there are hashtags and there are memes and there are moments, and that’s the context. The context is not the time; the context is did you catch the wave when it was going through the platform, or were you late? Or did you happen to make content that intersects with something 4 months from now and then you’re back in context, you’re back relevant. The algorithm may even resurface you. Is that the direction?
MATHEW: Exactly right.
ROB: Right on. A lot of our audience for this podcast is in the marketing agency world, and I’m sure plenty of agencies intersect with your world; I’m sure you speak to plenty of people. One of the things I think may be starting to tip over now is there are some very traditional structures for teams that work on brands, that work on marketing content. How do you think we’re going to need to change the structure of those teams, the composition of those teams as we are heading into this context world, this revolution, where we can’t ignore and we can’t just make a content pipeline the same way?
MATHEW: There’s lots of answers to this question. There’s lots of factors. The easy answer is the top of the line is agile. We all have to change the way that we structure and think about work, and that means really moving to an agile format. That’s the simple answer, and essentially that just means data-driven and iterative at a very high level. You can go very specific and say agile organization, agile agency, agile workflow.
The second is the concept of distributed marketing job. There used to be the concept that the marketing department was the department who created marketing. That’s not true anymore because marketing is no longer just a message. Marketing is now an experience, and if all departments now have customer-facing experiences, we must realize that all of these people are now marketers.
If we’re thinking about this from a brand standpoint, now what we must have is a distributed marketing role. What I believe is going to be happening is we’re going to find citizen marketers. The term “citizen” essentially means any person that’s not an expert in a field being enabled by artificial intelligence to be about 90% proficient as a trained expert.
So what we’re going to find is we’re going to be able to empower just about anybody inside an organization with technology and artificial intelligence to allow them to be hyper-efficient marketers. That’s how we’re going to see marketing distributed across the organization.
What that means is now who runs marketing needs to be elevated, and there needs to be a CXO or CGO – chief experience officer, chief growth officer – who’s monitoring all these experiences and optimizing for the most efficient customer journey that optimizes for the best experience. So those are a couple of ways I think we’re going to start to see things change in terms of the way that we work and how we operate.
ROB: Really, really interesting. One thing that I think about is you talk about people creating content. Obviously, as we can see from Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and all of that, the quality of content that an individual can make is ever escalating. There are one-person teams that can do amazing things, and because of that it’s efficient for them to target perhaps a very small or giant audience in a large and interconnected world.
But within that context of increasing content quality and volume, what then is the place for people who are still trying to deploy very large, ambitious projects to create content, to create relevant messages for people? How can they think about that? Is there a budget that can be too big in this new era?
MATHEW: Let’s tackle the first one. I don’t think there’s ever a budget that can be too big. We can always find ways to do more stuff and test new ideas. But I think what we need to really think about is it doesn’t matter if you’re going to create something small or create something big. The whole point is the modern media environment operates for the individual. If you are thinking about creating something and then trying to come up with a creative way to put that in the marketplace, you’re fundamentally flawed in your strategy to begin with. We must realize how to work with our audience, not how we work on our audience.
There’s a major problem we’re going to face, and that is the content conundrum – because like you said, if an individual now can create content at such a high level, who are we competing with? We are now competing with an infinite amount of people, creating an infinite amount of content. That radically changes how we think about content creation, in two ways. One, how much we have to create. I firmly believe that we’re going to have to move into a fast advertising and fast content model, just like fast fashion has moved into a fast fashion model.
Delta, great example. You get on a Delta flight, you don’t see the exact same Delta safety video every time. Every month they put a new safety video on. Why? Because it’s empathetic. We must realize that we can’t put one storyline out into a marketplace and expect that to keep people’s interest over a period of time when their normal marketplace is rapidly changing by the moment. We’re going to have to move to a new model.
There’s two ways that we can do that. One is super agile methods; the other is by working with our marketplace. Look at brands like Coca-Cola or Daniel Wellington. Daniel Wellington, the startup watch brand, sells $100 million of watches; 99.5% of the content about that brand that lives on Instagram was not created by the brand. 80% of the social content about Coca-Cola, not created by Coca-Cola.
We need to come up with ways to work with our audiences to help create this content and get it out there. If it’s not done with them, it’s done on them, and no one wants things forced upon them.
ROB: We used to have that ability to force things upon people, more or less, right?
MATHEW: Totally. That was the whole point of the limited media era. It was a monopoly, and we had control. That’s why those ideas that we had came about. But those no longer work. New environment, new games.
ROB: It seems like when you think about a big film, the ceiling now is higher than it used to be, but I think the floor is also lower. If I summarize some of what I’m hearing you say, the consumer has a higher ability to say “no” than ever before to a Batman movie – you name it. You can push a Batman movie and people can say, “We don’t care.” We can say no, the information travels instantly, and people will say “We don’t want to see that.” Whereas you could’ve had a good week or month at the box office before. They can just go turn on TikTok instead, thank you very much.
MATHEW: The hobby of hobby, right? How many hours are people spending watching YouTube videos about how to do hobbies and never doing those hobbies? There was a great piece on the radio this weekend about that.
ROB: As you’re thinking about the brief or maybe not brief trough that we’re in right now, where everybody’s cutting back their expectations for the second quarter of the year, and as you’re thinking about what will emerge on the other side, whether it’s a few weeks or a few months ahead, what do you think – obviously you have this context message, but tactically, what do you see emerging that’s going to be the DNA of the strongest products, firms, and teams coming out of where we are?
MATHEW: There’s going to be a couple of basic things that people are going to have to have moving forward. One is the brands that have the best communication with their stakeholders and customers right now are going to be positioned to be the best moving forward. The question is, what do we do? If you don’t have a daily conversation with people and understand how their lives are changing, how their buying processes are changing, how their needs are changing given the current situation, you won’t have the right answer.
To know what to do, you simply have to talk to those people. Whether that’s through daily calls, whether that’s through weekly calls, you need to have them. Once again, they have to happen across your stakeholders, your partners, your vendors, your agencies that you work with, as well as your customers. You’ve got to have that information to know what to do and how to respond. So that’s going to be a key thing.
The second thing is that we have to realize that even in downturns, there’s still a couple of things that we must do. You must have the best internal alignment. You must master internal alignment. There’s been a big trend that we’ve all been working towards removing silos, but still the reality is that there’s a lot of companies where silos still exist. This is a massive problem because currently, if you’ve got different departments talking about different ways of dealing with this scenario, you can imagine how that’s going to resonate inside your marketplace. You need to master internal alignment.
Second is excel at stakeholder continuity. Third is we need to continue to invest in strategic efforts. When you look at what happens during downturns and during times of crisis, the brands that rebound the fastest and rebound the highest continue to invest in strategic efforts. That means right now, if you’re thinking about, “Should we be changing and investing in new technology to give us new capabilities?”, you probably shouldn’t put those on the back burner because once we come out of this, those are going to be critical. If you’ve implemented them and understood them now, you’ll be poised to use them best when you can coming out.
The fourth is rapid experimentation. Those companies that are experimenting rapidly with what we should be doing and then rolling those learnings back into their standard programming are going to be succeeding faster than anyone else.
I see it as a combination of those things that we need to be doing to sustain and rebound quickest.
ROB: Perfect. Mathew, very exciting with the book coming out. Very exciting when we let you back outside to go talk to people in public. When people want to find you and learn more about what you have to say and maybe even connect with you on some of these chats, how should they go find you?
MATHEW: I’d say the best place is probably LinkedIn. You can follow me on LinkedIn. I publish a lot of stuff on LinkedIn. And then Twitter. It’s @msweezey on Twitter. Those are really my two channels. You can find me there; you can catch up with all my information.
ROB: That’s perfect. Go find Mathew. He’s a great follow. He’s a great person too, so if you get a chance to see him in person, you should definitely get to know him there as well. But you can also catch him online or maybe catch him on a boat. They still letting you out on a boat?
MATHEW: I think, but all the boat ramps are closed.
ROB: [laughs] Tough times. We’ll look forward to brighter days, and thank you so much for sharing. I think there’s a lot to be bright about right now.
MATHEW: Hey, man, thanks for having me.
ROB: Take care.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Jessica Rhodes is Founder and Co-owner of Interview Connections, the first and leading podcast booking agency. The beginning? Jessica started working from home as a virtual assistant, booking her father on podcasts, so he could get exposure to his target audience and amplify his brand . . . without a lot of travel. Then added companies.
While many of her clients think they would like to be on “big-name” podcasts, Jessica feels it is important for them to be strategic about where they “spend their time” and about getting on the right shows. Rather than using a “shotgun” approach, entrepreneurs will be far better served if they can get on shows where they will be addressing 500 of their best potential clients. Most of her bookings are for mid-range shows . . . with a few hundred up to a thousand super-targeted listeners.
Jessica’s co-owner, Margy Feldhuhn, started at Interview Connections as a contractor in 2016 and hired on as the first employee in 2017. A year later, on the occasion of Margy’s first annual review, Jessica made her a co-owner. The “fit” was that good. The company hit its first 7-figure year in 2019.
Jessica notes that podcasts are not an effective marketing strategy if they are intermittent. Podcast interviews need be part of long-term marketing strategy – done with consistency and momentum. Jessica recommends doing an interview a week, 4 weeks a month, year over year.
Advantages of podcasting:
- Podcasts will “live” indefinitely – as long as people continue to search for what you teach.
- Backlinks between the websites of interviewers and interviewees boost SEO rankings.
- Interviews increase a podcast guest’s credibility and help establish him or her as a leading expert.
- Podcasts attract qualified leads in a way very different from other marketing strategies
Effective podcasting is not about the ego. It’s really about “relationship-building and getting in front of the right audiences.”
Jessica believes it is very important to have clear, written systems in place before you hire someone for a new position. it’s easy to train and onboard them. Interview Connections has a full-time staff of employees. Jessica believes the full-time staff is cheaper because contractors:
- Will constantly demand more money as they gain the skills you teach them
- Leave for another job or for vacation at will, providing no consistency for your clients
- Take the skills you taught them to your competition.
Podcasting is growing every year. Jessica recommends people guest on podcasts before they “start their own show,” just to figure out where your podcast fits in.
Jessica can be reached on her agency’s website at: https://interviewconnections.com/ or by texting the word “GROUP” to 38470. You will receive a link to Interview Connections’ free Facebook group, Guest Expert Profit Lab.
It sounds too good be be true, but there's really no catch to using the Payroll Protection Plan Program forgivable loan program to keep your Marketing Agency team in place and pay the rent (for free). Jason Blumer is an expert in the business of Marketing Agencies, Accounting, Taxes, and more, and is here to answer the key questions of how you can use the CARES act to solidify your business in the midst of Coronavirus uncertainty. Additional Resources: The SBA site that explains the PPP (you can't apply for this until April 3rd but this link has a sample form to download): https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/paycheck-protection-program-ppp The SBA site that lets small businesses know where to find a lender (must apply at a local SBA lender): https://www.sba.gov/local-assistance Where to apply online for the SBA Economic Injury Disaster Grant of $10,000: https://covid19relief.sba.gov/#/ Jason's Previous Podcast "Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast" Episode: http://convergehq.com/podcast/avoiding-chaos-to-expedite-agency-growth/
Jason Ciment, is CEO of GetVisible, a consultancy and digital agency that builds websites, drives traffic to websites through search engines and social media channels, and provides digital reputation management services.
Most of the agency’s 10 employees started their careers as professionals working in businesses other than marketing. Jason, himself, started as a CPA/real estate specialist in a big accounting firm. He went back to school to study law, worked a summer with a large clothing factory in Sri Lanka, and spent time in the NYC rag trade before he finished his law degree. What then?
Time to start a business.
Jason launched Magmall, an ecommerce business selling magazine subscriptions, in 1997, and dug into pre-Google search engine optimization. (Early Google became one of his clients.) Over the years, GetVisible added a new skillset every couple of years: service business website development, pay-per-click ads, social media services, reputation management, LinkedIn-associated services, and email marketing. Each time the company decided to offer a new service, it hired someone who already had the needed expertise and introduced them to the organization’s philosophy and its Assessment Toolbox Methodology, a means of discovering a client’s customers and where on the digital landscape they are to be found.
Jason admits that the company is relatively small. Leveraging limited assets is important. A big question and challenge is always: How can they stretch a dollar and produce a higher ROI with a lower cost?
A few innovations . . .
- GetVisible has never had a sales force. Jason feels that salespeople focus on sales; he wants to focus on client outcomes.
- GetVisible uses a what Jason refers to a “transparent contract,” a flat fee, six-month contract that, rather than tallying up a total of separate service, targets producing a client’s desired results and itemizes how the client’s money has been allocated.
- The agency implemented a simplified wireframe process to increase WordPress site development efficiency, promote intra-page symmetry, and get early client involvement and buy-in.
Jason believes a website needs to answer 3 questions: : What is it that you do? Who do you do it for? Why are you better than anyone else?
Get Visible builds healthy online branded Google and Bing search reputations for its clients. But, what can be done when a company gets damaging listings, bad news, or bad reviews?
There’s the clean way and the not-so-clean way of removing someone’s “bad news” from the internet. The “not clean” way is to actually try erase the bad thing that is damaging a client’s website, not an easy thing to do. The clean way? GetVisible creates a flood of “good news” content for its clients. This more current information pushes the bad news down the page. Good news won’t make “the bad stuff” disappear completely, but the bad stuff will become obsolete and irrelevant.
Jason can be contacted on his company’s website at GetVisible.com, or through his LinkedIn profile, where those interested can sign up for his “secret newsletter.” His first book, I Need More Clients: Digital Marketing Strategies That Grow Your Business (Amazon, 2016), has straight five star reviews.
Blake Akers is the owner of Webology, a digital marketing agency that started by “knocking on the doors” of local small and mid-size businesses. The company focuses on using Google for organic and paid search, providing scientific SEO, testing, and data analysis on the organic side and split testing ad campaigns within paid search.
Today, the agency takes its focused expertise and works regional verticals, e.g. roofing and niche legal firms – companies that typically have a high cost per click and a high per lead value . . . companies where Webology, because of its tight industry focus, knows the business.
Webology’s intention is to work exclusively with one company in a vertical in a geographic market. Blake claims that, if you know how to rank a local roofing company website, you get a lot of leads on the search engine results page (SERP) – those from organic search and those from the Maps Pack (3-pack). The Maps Pack is the group of up to 3 businesses that appear in a box at the top of the page, after the advertisements. The Maps Pack is a valuable piece of real estate . . . studies suggest if a the SERP has a local pack, that local pack will get the majority of the clicks, but the Maps Pack alone will get over 40 percent of the total clicks.
How did Blake get Webology so well-launched in such a short period of time (3 years)?
Branding.
Blake researched SEO to figure out what it took to rank a website locally and get leads for small- to mid-size businesses. . . starting with his company. He asked some critical questions:
How do we write really, really good copy that sells, but also checks off all the boxes in regards to competitor averages?
How do we enhance a page for users and still fit the averages that Google is looking for?
He started getting some answers when he reviewed everyone else’s “best practices.” But, the true answers did not come to light until after he dove deep into data science, assessed competitor averages, and identified and implemented advanced SEO strategies. This knowledge gave him the tools to help his own company grow . . . and a product he could sell to his clients. He has used his own company website a number of times to beta-test new ideas that later get rolled out to customers.
If there is one thing he would change back at the start, Blake says he would have gone after more client reviews and worked even harder at building up his brand. Today, he is a lot more proactive about reaching out to his clients and interviewing them to get those valuable endorsements.
To contact Blake, visit his company’s website at: https://webology.io/, email him directly at: blake@webology.io., or ask general questions at: info@webology.io.
Melissa DiGianfilippo, Co-founder and President of Public Relations, Serendipit Consulting, Scottsdale, AZ
Melissa DiGianfilippo is Co-founder and President of Public Relations for Serendipit Consulting, a full-service marketing, PR, and creative agency.
In this interview she talks about the questions she asks to suss out what each client truly needs – as opposed to what they think they need: What’s the goal? Is it storytelling? Is it brand awareness? What’s unique about the brand? Does the company have sales goals? What Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are important? Once needs are established, what services does a client need? Media relations? Digital marketing? Zocial media? Content creation? Do they need everything?
Melissa believes that “all marketing tactics are moving in the direction of measurability.” Serendipit customizes its PR services: strategizing placement timing and geography. Melissa explains that they are “looking for a lift in traffic” at the time a TV segment airs and afterward. TV segments, difficult to track in themselves, are reposted and shared on social media. Trackable links help customers to understand the value of PR placement and the role of social amplification in strengthening placement impacts. Did the placement drive a direct increase in any of the tracked KPIs?
Melissa believes thought leadership and subject matter expertise are the most powerful kind of PR. If one thought leader in an organization is good, “more than one” can highlight a company’s diversity. Being featured on a consistent basis – in national broadcast or news or print, local markets, and industry-related publications – and talking about trends, forecasting, and your personal story may not produce immediate results. But this kind of exposure will, over time, drive influence for your brand, establish you as a credible thought leader, and boost KPI results.
Melissa credits Entrepreneur Organization with contributing to her company’s success. After 11 years in business, Serendipit has over $4 million in annual revenue, high profitability, 30 employees, and a culture she describes as “enviable.”
Melissa is candid about her company’s mistakes. A few years back, when the company decided it wanted to go to “the next level,” they hired an expensive “expert” to lead the charge. BIG MISTAKE. Nine months of BIG MISTAKE. Melissa says that owners need to know that they don’t need to hire a high-ticket “name” to pull an organization up. Employees have the capability, within themselves, to grow their skills and ramp up an organization. A structured commission program has proven to be win-win . . . for employees, for clients, for business partners, and for the agency.
Another mistake? Melissa and Co-founder, Alexis Krisay, love business development. Melissa warns that when agency owners sell to customers, they may tend to sell themselves and not their agencies. Which is what Melissa and Alexis did. Then, when the “unknown” Serendipit team started working these projects, clients were not happy. Weren’t Melissa and Alexis supposed to be leading the initiative? Today, Melissa and Alexis bring the teams in early during the sales process.
Melissa can be found on her company’s marketing-education-content-rich website at: www.serendipitconsulting.com, by following @serendipit on Instagram (or for Melissa’s longform stories, @melissadflip on Instagram), or on LinkedIn.
Location 3, is a digital marketing agency that “delivers enterprise-level strategy with local market activation. In its 20th year in business, the Google-Analytics Certified agency works primarily with franchisors to understand their business objectives and facilitate enterprise strategy alignment and with individual franchisees, to promote hyper-local-level marketing activation. Services include business listing management, SEO, data and analytics, and driving new revenue through paid search, paid social, local programmatic buys – and anything else that makes sense for boosting local level revenue.
How big is the franchise market? Alex notes that over 50% of all US retail locations are part of a franchise organization. Only about 30% of the approximately 750,000 franchise locations in this country are in fast food/casual dining. Almost anything, Alex explains, can use the franchise model. Location 3 focuses less on fast food and more on services or franchise systems with measurably higher customer lifetime values.
In this interview, Alex explains how Digital marketing at the local level is interesting, but also complicated. Unlike direct mail, where someone can walk into a store with a traceable coupon, programmatic vendors (e.g., Google and Facebook) can claim, based on their technology, that someone saw or engaged with your ad or website on their platform, and ended up in your location. When promotions are on multiple platforms, how does one tell which one actually drove the store visit? And how should the proportion of spend be tweaked to maximize revenue growth? To facilitate optimal decisions, Location 3 provides franchisees with full turnkey campaigns across a broad variety of platforms, tracks return on ad spend, and shares that information with it clients with full transparency.
Location 3 developed a franchisee-facing software platform, LOCALACT, which serves as a hub of local digital data. Franchisees can use this tool to see their local page analytics, how their local Google My Business is performing, and where their traffic is coming from; respond to reviews; and buy additional media.
Alex can be reached on his company’s website at: https://location3.com/, on YouTube, or at 820 16th St. Suite 300, Denver, CO 80202.
You can always check out our website. We’re very active. We have a pretty active YouTube account. We put up some video content. We go to pretty much every franchise tradeshow that’s out there, so if you’re in the franchise space and we haven’t met you, I’m sure we will soon. Very active in that community, the tradeshow community. If you’re ever in Denver, we’re right on 16th Street Mall right downtown.
Ten years ago, when the real estate bubble finally burst, Jeff Pulvino closed his decade-old real estate investment company and sweated through the “Now What?” people face when they find themselves out of a job. Social marketing was in its infancy. Jeff pivoted his company, and, using the strengths of its internal marketing department, jumped into Facebook marketing, and, ultimately, built a full-service digital marketing agency. It was not an easy climb.
Eight years into agency life, Jeff realized that, without a strategic plan, the agency was just “marketing in the dark,” and often failing to deliver what customers wanted and expected – a specific goal had never been communicated. Today, most of their 4- to 5- year-long client relationships start with a marketing strategy workshop, a 30-day, low-level engagement where the parties can mutually get to know each other, discuss objectives and strategies in depth, and determine if there is a “fit.”
Jeff explains that “most entrepreneurs, business owners, and established businesses come . . . for marketing, but they have no real defined marketing strategy.” As an additional challenge, these clients often come to Boost when declining sales have left them strapped for cash. They may know the results they want . . . and desperately need to survive. They may even by hyper-focused on some particular technology, but often fail to have an understanding of realistic timelines.
Boost Media Group takes a step back, looks at the realities of cash flows, calculates how long it will take to generate a return on investment, and then crafts programs that address a client’s current cash needs and long-term growth objectives. Starting with this workshop session has exponentially increased Boot’s close rate and its ability to attract new customers. One of Boost Media Group’s sub-brands, Fitness Media, helps “big name clients” in the fitness industry develop their funnels and monetize their brands.
In this interview, Jeff identifies some of Boost’s keys to success. In the early years of the agency, he focused on sales. Over time, he has learned that it is not about how much the agency sells . . . it’s more important to make sure clients are a good fit. He credits having a robust technology stack of project management tools, templates, and proven processes . . . and iteratively improving those processes to meet the needs of his employees, clients, and his company . . . to being able to consistently deliver great results.
Boost recently acquired another agency, SearcherMagnet, which is “highly specialized in direct response lead acquisition.” Jeff says that acquiring another company brought with it experienced, high-level, passionate team members that Boost never would have been able to hire. He looks forward to expanding more this way in the future.
Jeff can be reached on his company’s website at: https://boostmediagroup.com/, by phone, on Live Chat, or by filling out a Contact Us form.
John Hernandez is Owner and Partner at On Advertising, a marketing and advertising agency that has, over the past 26 years, rebranded itself, leveraged “new identities,” survived a recession, and increased and changed its client base.
In this interview, John talks about his company’s “humble beginnings” and reveals the strategic decisions that helped it grow.
Ron Meritt, a television meteorologist, started NPR Public Relations in 1993 as a side gig. He provided traditional PR for nonprofit organizations . . . working out of his house with 1 client.
In 2002, John accepted Ron’s invitation to join the business and quit his job at the television station. They took out an SBA loan to cover payroll, rebranded the company as PRfect Media, and offered a flat fee “one-stop-shop for everything” marketing solution for small businesses. In addition to traditional marketing services – billboards, TV, radio, PR, and support – they utilized video, a technology application new for marketing. John’s television-world experience – in graphic design and in scripting, shooting, and editing video – provided a differentiating and cost-saving advantage for both the agency and its clients: They didn’t need to hire outside firms for those services.
Six or seven years ago, the agency was doing a lot of non-traditional work, but people on the outside perceived them as a traditional PR firm. What to do?
How about doing the same thing the agency would do for its clients?
John and Ron tasked the agency’s employees to rebrand the company and On Advertising was born: The employees set the color palette, the logo, and the brand. In a bold move, the agency took out a revolving loan and relocated the company from a commercial building in the Phoenix suburbs to a downtown high-rise, putting their signage on a street with heavy traffic all through the day. That move almost doubled their business: they were now visible, accessible, and re-defined.
John says On Advertising has two growth strategies: to build the business organically and to expand its client base and capabilities through mergers and acquisitions. The agency still maintains its revolving credit line to even out the cash flow and to facilitate these acquisitions and mergers.
John lists a number of keys to On Advertising’s success:
He believes the company gets traction as long as it treats itself as a client: spending money on itself; boosting its website presence, Google Analytics, and social media presence; and embracing media marketing technology.
He emphasizes that it is as critically important to have “trustworthy team members on the outside” (CPA, attorneys, PEO) as it is to have good employees.
And, to weather a recession, as this company did in 1987-88: John recommends developing multiple streams of income.
John can be reached on his company’s website at: https://onadvertising.com/
What kind of marketing agency picks Wichita, Kansas – a city very close to the geographic center of the continental United States, for its headquarters? How about an agency with 4 media buyers, providing everything marketing from traditional media buys to a full-range of digital services including online presence and reputation management, and serving an extremely diverse clientele. What kind of employees would choose to work for such an out-of-the-way agency? Could be people who enjoy a slower pace, a shorter work week, a culturally-rich/affordable life-style, extended benefits, and a five- or ten-minute commute to the office. Advantage Marketing strategizes with diverse client companies about what needs to happen with their businesses, collects a “lot of information,” and develops a “lot of data” to determine when and where to place ads to reach the target client base. Customized, multiplatform marketing initiatives blend traditional marketing with newer, “personalized” digital plans. “bridging from one media to the next.” Cori outlines a number of promotional targeting strategies she is excited about for the coming year. As an example, she expects a “boom” in OTT (over the top/subscription) and DTV-connected television, which allows focused zip code and contextual targeting and cross-device matching. Cori started her career as a sales rep in broadcast television. After 5 years, she joined an agency. After five years there, still not “settled,” she started Advantage Marketing. Her partner, Amy Hoefer, who has a background in cable television, joined the agency in a year later. Cori believes that an in-depth understanding of media buying planning has been critical to her agency’s growth and that it is important to establish and document processes to ensure scalability and continued organizational success In this interview, Cori explains the process she used to grow her agency fast – and increase its service offerings at the same time. In 2017, four years after agency started, Cori and Amy decided the best way to “grow” would be to acquire another agency. It wasn’t something they wanted to do “on the fly.” They selected a “great accountant” and a “great attorney,” discussed with them their goals and objectives, and targeted a successful company whose owner wanted to retire. They signed the necessary non-disclosure agreements and requested and reviewed the company’s client list and financials. Advantage had the capital to purchase the agency, but Amy has had a number of entrepreneurship classes, done a lot of research, and learned this: “Don’t spend your own money. Get a loan.” Makes sense. A “loan” leaves an intact “cushion” for dealing with daily business expenses. Cori took an SBDC (Small Business Development Center) Emerging Leaders Program last year to learn more about scaling her business, planning growth, and getting the agency’s processes documented and in place. She relies on the SBA (Small Business Association) for valuable information on how to run her business and, interestingly, still gets periodic mentoring from the woman who owned the agency she bought. Cori can be reached on social media, on her company’s website at: https://admarkict.com/ 0r by phone at: 316.729.0500.
Josh Belhumeur is Managing Partner at Brink, a creative group that uses culturally relevant art content and experiences through a variety of initiatives to engage audiences and build brands for products, political candidates, and progressive causes.
In this interview, Josh explains how his agency, which started as three guys in a Tucson garage doing web development, evolved into a full-service, “all things media, all things internet, all things digital” agency with attitude and two physical locations. Only recently has the leadership at Brink started to understand who they are, who they want to be, and what they want to create . . . and it is the nexus between brand development and socially-responsible advocacy.
A consultancy branch of the organization works with C-suite level executives to discern product market fit and develop an organization’s ability to innovate. An indie film “wing” distributes about 150 titles worldwide and on subscription platforms.
On the agency side, client-focused teams (a UX lead, an art lead, a producer, and a strategist)
- Help brands identify their purpose and bring that purpose to market
- Produce excellent, timely, relevant, and digitally-rooted creative work
Josh joined Brink (2006) to work on strategy and business development. He moved to Washington, D.C. to expand the agency’s client base and found “a lot of government, a lot of politics, a lot of advocacy” and a lot of “learning.” In Washington, organizations often align under the same brand – a for-profit, a nonprofit, and a super Political Action Committee – separate entities, but run side by side. This provides the flexibility for the organization’s “branches” to have separate missions and do different things while utilizing the same internal knowledge and resources.
Brink grew up with the internet. Around a year and a half ago, troubled by the power of the internet to distort truth, Brink launched a 501(c)(3), now managed by Josh’s partner, to address what Josh refers to as the 4 destructive forces of the internet/ social media:
- The filter bubble: Social media platforms will push content to you that matches your beliefs. You are more likely to interact with this content. They make more money
- The sensationalist skew: People are more likely to react to the outrageous. Again, more money
- Binary thinking: Digital platforms will push people into little boxes. If Facebook senses you are considering buying a home, its algorithms will push content related to home-buying.
- Unclear authority: The proliferation of fake news makes it hard to know who and what to believe.
The goal of the Brink Foundation is to educate people on these four destructive forces and then target messages to offset the harmful effects of the internet and reduce political polarization. Knowing their “purpose” has lost clients for Brink . . . but gained new clients who are better aligned with the agency’s interests. Win-win.
Brink’s unique value ad? The ability to work with brands, introduce activism, help them brands guild out activism programs, and unify that activism into their brand strategy. According to Josh, “Being an activist brand is the strongest way you can find a tribe.”
Josh can be reached on his agency’s website at: https://brink.com/ , where you will find information on the agency, the consultancy, their films, and the Brink Foundation.
Mike Stratta founded Arcalea on the idea that digital marketing and advertising should be objective, not subjective. In this interview, Mike talks about the importance of focus: on a very deep and narrow skillset, on a limited niche of (service) industry clients, on engendering a great company culture, and on hiring great people.
Mike built Arcalea’s service offerings around the things he really loved to do. Arcalea provides comprehensive quantitative analysis and implements tactics based on that analysis and how brands are positioned online. Mike believes it takes significant due diligence to prevent scope creep from paralyzing the creative process. Arcalea stays out of the creative arena by cultivating relationships with partner agencies to provide clients with creative content.
Mike thinks that it is essential for any business to ask itself, “What can we provide at such a depth that we differentiate ourselves from our competition?” . . . and “How can we provide a higher level of service than others in our same space?” Companies that fail to build a deep enough or wide enough economic moat risk becoming price-driven commodities.
When Mike started Arcalea, he had already built and sold an agency, but one that dealt with blue-chip companies. He tells his audience that, “When working with those big brands, you are just a commodity” and explains how these giants put the squeeze on small agencies to provide more at a cheaper price . . . because they can always find someone else to do the work.
Today, his agency serves companies with $5 million to $500 million in revenue . . . where the agency can work directly with the C-Suite decision-makers and the client base is more nimble and responsive to changes in direction than larger organizations or subsidiaries of those larger organizations. Mike’s ideal customers are those who are a cultural match for Arcalea: the ideal relationship is one of appreciation/ advocacy/ trusted partner – and he definitely eschews being a “vendor” because vendors are commodities.
Critical to long-term success? Mike says, “Hire slow. Hire the person who sees more in the future of the position than you do. Hire the person who will be a 10x game-changer.” Then, he says, “Lock them down with a cultural fit and cultural environment and even more pay than you first intended so they will never want to leave, no matter how much someone else offers them.”
Mike also addresses the difficulty of implementing policies in a period of fast growth, as his company experienced when it grew 2800% over a period of three years and made position #149 the very first year it qualified for the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing privately held companies in the U.S. Whew!
Mike can be reached on his company’s website at https://arcalea.com/ or on LinkedIn.
Greg Keating is Agency Operations Manager and Business Development Lead at Hangar12, a fully remote, digital marketing agency that has been in Greg’s family in one form or another for 3 generations, and transitioned from brick-and-mortar to fully remote in 2015.
After a college internship his father arranged at what is today Hangar12 (No, thank you!), Greg started his career in production supply chain management, doing supply chain and marketing analytics, and “proving himself” in massive companies (Coca-Cola and Ecolab). His father, Kevin, again tapped him a few years ago. What to do?
Greg’s father, Kevin, whose original career choice had been to work in Parks and Recreation in Irvine, California, likewise, had been tapped by his father in 1988 (Greg’s grandfather had joined the agency in 1981). Greg’s father joined the agency and worked there for 12 years before he purchased it in 2000.
Granddad worked there, Dad owned it . . . Greg took a second look, and, amazed at how far the agency had come – from the in-store shopper marketing cardboard cutouts he saw when he was growing up to today’s digital and social media marketing – and fell in love.
Hangar12, renamed 1n 2012 in honor of his grandfather’s WWII Air Force service, is somewhat Chicago-centric, but staff are located throughout the Midwest. The agency provides consumer packaged goods clients in the food and beverage space with a consumer-first approach, in-house creative teams, omnichannel activations, and a focus on measurement.
What makes Hangar12 great? Greg believes the remote business model enables his team to deliver “quality marketing campaigns faster than anyone else,” utilizing digital, social media, consumer promotions, and shopper marketing. And LOTS of video. Remote employees work when they feel they can be most productive (which improves efficiency) and log their time on daily timesheets, “meeting,” as needed, by phone or email. Getting campaigns running fast makes for happy clients and reduces the delay in marketing effort revenue recognition.
Greg notes that ecommerce and the rise of Amazon have challenged brick-and-mortar retailers to stock new brands and unknown products, even before a full marketing plan is in place. Why would stores do this? Brick-and-mortar businesses, especially grocery stores, having been stagnant area for so long, are now scrambling to find the next “hot item,” to get on the “front end” of a trend, to stock a product before the competition does, or, even, to become an exclusive vendor for a “unicorn” product. Once a start-up’s product is “on the shelves,” stores are demanding that these brands “prove” that they are putting in the marketing effort that justifies the placement . . . which is when the startup brand goes looking for what Hangar12 can do.
Greg can be reached on his agency’s website at: Hangar-12.com or by email at: greg.keating@hangar-12.com’
Verne Harnish, founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) and CEO of Scaling Up, a global executive education/ coaching company, has spent the past three decades helping companies scale up. Credentials?
- 15-year chair/instructor at EO's "Birthing of Giants" CEO development program (held at MIT)
- Authored best-seller, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits (published in 2002 and translated into 9 languages)
- Authored Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It and the Rest Don’t (published in 2014 and winner of 8 major international book awards)
- Grew Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) to over 14,000 members worldwide
- Chairs annual ScaleUp Summits (in collaboration with Bloomberg) and grew Scaling Up to over 180 partners on six continents)
Verne, citing John D. Rockefeller’s biography, Titan, believes that hyperfocus is critical to business success. He gave the example of Arnie Malham, a longstanding EO member, who wanted to be a marketing/ advertising agency. Focus? Advertising and marketing for law firms. More focus? Personal injury law firms –Intense focus? Personal injury law firms in NFL cities, large cities with the sophistication of billboarding and radio. Hyperfocus? To work for one personal injury law firm per NFL city, making a simple promise: “I’m going to make you No. 1 in that market.” Then, provide a 100% solution.
In this interview, Verne talks about the four numbers it takes to grow a company: revenue, gross margin, profit, and cash – each significant at a different growth stage.
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From startup to that first million dollars, the most important number is revenue. It’s not about fixing the logo or the website, Verne says, just “Sell like hell,” and then when you get to a million, fix those other things.
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From a million to $10 million, the most important thing is cash . . . because growing 10x will take a lot of cash. The cash model, the timing of incoming and outgoing cash, has to work.
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From $8 or $10 million to $40 million, gross margins are critical. As companies start adding middle management and infrastructure, costs will increase, and gross margins will start to slip.
- When a company is at the $30-40 million level, the most important number is profit consistency, because that is what the market expects.
At the organizational level, Verne claims there is one routine that will drive things further faster than any other – daily meetings to ensure organizational alignment on the task that needs to be done that day.
Verne invests privately in a number of scale-ups and is a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians – so business-wise, or recreationally . . . he spends a lot of time doing “magic.” He available on his company’s website at Scalingup.com, on the company’s new media site at Scaleups.com, and by email is verne@scalingup.com.