The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

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 ChiatDay. 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 ChiatDay 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?  What are the six components of success? 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.

1984. 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.

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.