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In the the third hour of Friday's BBMS, the guys are joined by MD Governor Wes Moore, who shares his thoughts on the draft and responds to an important question from Rob: Do you think Baltimore could ever host the NFL draft?  Sticking with football, the guys break down who they feel won the first round.  Is it the Eagles far and away?  Ravens Cap-ologist Brian McFarland then joins the show to discuss what the ramifications of Lamar's deal will be on the Ravens wallet.  Will they have space to add more pieces?  An O's vs Tigers recap closes the hour out, but did the Birds prove they're a never-say-die team?

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.

Steph is joined by a very special guest and fellow thoughtboter, Rob Whittaker. ngrok (https://ngrok.com/) Time Off Book (https://www.timeoffbook.com/) Rob's Codespace Setup (https://github.com/purinkle/codespace) Rob Whittaker on Twitter (https://twitter.com/purinkle) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: STEPH: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. And today, I'm joined by a very special guest and fellow thoughtboter, Rob Whittaker. Rob has been in the software business for the past 15 years and spent the last five and a half years at thoughtbot. Rob is the Director of Software Development for our Europe, Middle East, and Africa team and, in his spare time, likes to hunt down delicious beers and coffee. Rob, welcome to The Bike Shed. It's so lovely to have you on the show today. ROB: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, thank you for that lovely introduction and my far too complicated job title. It sounds more serious than it actually is. STEPH: Well, you do have a fancy job title, yeah, Director of Software Development. [laughs] ROB: Yeah, it's the added on bit where it's Europe, Middle East, and Africa where I feel like there's about 20 of us maximum. But that sounds more grandiose than it actually is. STEPH: Yeah, that's something that Chris and I haven't dug into too much on previous episodes are all the different teams that we have at thoughtbot. So the shorter way of saying that is Launchpad II, but not everybody knows that. But I'm going to circle back to that because I would love to talk a bit more about that specific team and the dynamic. But before we do that, I'm realizing I'm not familiar with your origin story as to how you came to thoughtbot and then how you became this very fancy grand title of Director of Software Development for Europe, Middle East, and Africa team. ROB: Yeah, there's a bit of history about thoughtbot London as well that kind of ties into this. So before thoughtbot Launchpad II, it was thoughtbot London before we went remote. And initially, we had the plan of setting up a new studio in London to help expand thoughtbot outside of the Americas, but that plan fell through. But he knew some people from another agency called New Bamboo, and so we merged with or acquired that agency, and that agency then became the thoughtbot London team. I'm actually the first hire or...not the first hire, that's not true, the first development hire for the thoughtbot London team that would then become launchpad II. I was at the Bath Ruby Conference six years ago, I guess. And there was just an advert up on the hiring board that Nick Charlton, who's a Senior Developer and Development Team Lead at Launchpad II now, had put up. And I saw it, and I was talking to somebody who was my mentor at the time that I'd worked with at a previous job at onthebeach.co.uk, a guy called Matt Valentine-House who now works at Shopify who, actually, fun fact, his face appears at the top of Ruby Weekly this week. If you open up this week's Ruby Weekly, you can see Matt Valentine-House, who said to me, "Yeah, apply for it, why not? You see what happens." And I was like, "Okay," and just kind of took the leap. So I thought, thoughtbot, why would thoughtbot want me? Which is something I think a lot of people think when they want to join thoughtbot. They think, well, I can't do that. But I would implore people to apply. And so, from there, I never really wanted to move to London. I'd always lived in the North West of the UK. I made that leap to London because I wanted to work at thoughtbot. And then, gradually, over time, the London team expanded, and we needed to split out the management roles, and the development director role came up. And I've always enjoyed the coaching side of software development. It seems that you gain more experience as you help people with less experience, and I've always enjoyed coaching. And that was a big part of the role for me. So I was fortunate enough to be allowed to do it. And then, from there, things have grown. Yeah, so it's been a really interesting journey as a development director. The London studio went through a pretty tough time at one point where not long after I became development director that two-thirds of the team, in the space of two weeks, decided to hand their notice in and unbeknownst to each other. And so, all of a sudden, we didn't have a very big team. We didn't have very many prospects, and so it was a tough time. And so it's really nice to look back on the last three years and go, okay, we came through that. We're now one of the stronger teams at thoughtbot. And somebody actually asked me in an interview the other day, somebody we actually hired, not just based on this question, but he said, "What is your proudest moment of working at thoughtbot?" And I was like, that's one of the best questions I've heard from a candidate. And I said, "Hmm, that's interesting." It's not anything development-related, but it's that I can now look back on this team and say this is the team that I have grown in my image and all these people apart from Nick, who was the person who put the advert of it at Bath Ruby. I've hired all these people, and so the buck stops with me really because if anybody isn't able to perform, then it's kind of my fault because these are the people that I want to grow into being the team and see be a successful product design team or product development team, which brings us to modern-day I guess. So yeah, that was a long origin story. That's pretty much my whole thoughtbot biography. And I apologize. STEPH: That was perfect. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing it. And yeah, that's an awesome question. What's your proudest moment, like, part of a team? That can yield so many insights. I love that question. And I love your answer as well in terms of this is the team. We've pulled through a hard time. And then we've built everybody to the point that they are now, which kind of leads in perfectly to my next question. So being the software development director, could you walk us through a little bit of like, that's one of those titles I feel like a lot of companies have, but they can be very different from company to company. Would you mind walking us through a bit of the day-to-day in the life of being a development director? ROB: Yeah, sure. It's one of those things where I think this is something that I'm not sure if it's unique to thoughtbot, but you end up taking on a lot of hats at thoughtbot. So I know you're a team lead. So you have to balance your responsibilities as an individual contributor, which is a term I don't like, but I haven't got a better way to say it yet, and your development team lead roles. And I have similar sort of responsibilities where I have to do my individual contributor work. I have to do my director work. I'm also on our DEI Council. So I have to add that work in too, and make sure it's balanced out. So the start of my day is very much about prioritizing things. I know you and Chris, a few episodes ago, had quite lengthy discussions about productivity systems and what tools Chris wants to use. And I'm a big fan of Things, and I've been using it for maybe ten years, if not more, that I've now got my system down that I'm able to prioritize things in the way that I can pick up the right task at the right time. So a big part of my day-to-day is figuring out what is the most important thing to work on? So I have my client work, and then it's about supporting the team from that point. And the big part of my idea of what a manager is is that my job isn't to tell you what to do; my job is to find out what you want to do and direct you in a place where you can find the answer. Or I can give you some guidance about where to find the answer. And I feel like I'm doing a bad job as a manager where if I have to act as a middle person. Because if somebody comes to me and says, "Oh, I want to do this thing," And I say, "Well, I'll talk to that person for you," and then come back, I have failed. And my job is to say, "Oh, you should talk to that person about this." And to some extent, it's about being lazy. I don't want to be doing too much stuff because I have other things to do. But I want to make sure that those people have the right frameworks and guidelines in place so that I can point them in the right direction. STEPH: I think the fancy term for that is just delegating. [laughs] ROB: Yes, thank you. [laughs] STEPH: But I like lazy. [laughter] I like that one as well. I love that framing of a manager where you're not telling someone to do, but as your job, you are helping that person figure out what they want to do and then supporting them. I've been chatting with Chris recently and some others because I've been reading the book Resilient Management by Laura Hogan. And it's really helped me cement the difference between mentorship, coaching, and sponsorship. And I realized that I'm already falling a lot into the coaching and sponsorship because mentorship can be wonderful, but it is more directive of like, this is what I've done. And this is what has worked for me, and you should do this too. Versus the coaching and sponsorship, I think aligns far more perfectly with what you described as management, where it is my job to figure out what brings you joy, what brings you energy, and then how to help you progress to your next goals and your next steps in your career. ROB: Yeah, I think Laura Hogan is a great resource like her blog posts and books. I haven't read Resilient Management. But I know that the team leads on my team had been on her training courses, and they say how great it is. And there's also a blog post of hers that's about managing in tough times. It has a much better title than that. But it's about how do we be good managers in such uncertain times when there are a lot of things going on around the world right now that we all have to deal with? And helping people deal with those situations. Because at the end of the day, work isn't the most important thing; the most important thing is living. And it's something I say to my team, especially when people feel like...it's something that I say to my team when they're not feeling well. The most important thing is that you get better. And thoughtbot is still going to be here. The most important thing is how you live your life and how you look after yourself, and everything else is secondary. STEPH: Absolutely. Well, and everybody needs something different from work too. Some people may be in a state where they really need more stability and predictability from their work. And some people may be in a space where everything else outside of work is very stable and calm, and then they want work to bring the challenge and the volatility and the variety to life. So I remind myself very often that not everybody wants the same thing from work and to figure out what it is that someone wants from work. And then your seasons change. You may be in a season of where you want stability, or then you may be in a season of like, I'm ready to grow and push and take some risks. So helping someone identify which season of work they're in. ROB: Yeah, I 100% agree. What people can't see is me nodding vigorously on the other side of this call. It's very much about understanding because everybody is different. And that's what we want from a good team; it's understanding everybody's different approach to things. And so sometimes people want the distraction of work because they don't want the time off to think about other things. They want to be able to sit and concentrate on something. And it's understanding different people. STEPH: Yeah, that's a great point. I'm curious; you mentioned that as part of being development director, you are also, in addition to managing the team and being part of DEI then, there's also your day-to-day client work. I think you've started a new client recently. Could you tell me more about that? ROB: Yeah, I'd recently been working for a client for two and a half years, which is a very long time to be working with one client at thoughtbot. And it came to the time where I was ready for a new challenge, and it was stable enough for me to move on. So I've been working for a company in the UK. They allow customers to buy and sell cars, not between customers, the customers like companies like Auto Trader but customers to dealers and back and forth. And primarily, they worked with buying cars. And they've launched a product in the UK where people can sell their cars as well because they found that 70% of people who are buying cars also want to sell their cars. And from there, they're now looking to expand into Germany and Spain, so we are helping them to do that. And it's an interesting project, not necessarily from a technical point of view, but I might come back to that but definitely from a cultural point of view. The product at the moment allows you to put in a license plate or a registration plate for a car. And there's then a service in the UK that will allow you to pull up the maker model and the service history of that car. But you can't do that in Germany because it's against the privacy laws to find something from registration plates. And so it's interesting these different cultural aspects that you have to take into account when expanding into other countries that you aren't from and that you have less knowledge about. Because I'm also aware that credit cards aren't a big thing in Germany either. So you have to think about how they pay for things in different countries. And the previous company I was working for they're based in the Middle East. And so we had to take into account how we would do right to left design in a mobile app, which is really interesting from a western point of view that you get so used to swiping through an experience from left to right. But then it's not just the screen that's right to left. The journey moves from right to left. So you have to get used to the transitions of the screen going the other way and not thinking of that as going backwards. It's one of the best things about working in this region is that we get to deal with so many different cultures and how they expect to use applications. It's really satisfying. STEPH: That's fascinating. Yeah, I haven't gotten to work on a project like that that has those types of considerations. I think the most relatable experience I have is more working in healthcare because that's one of those areas that I'm certainly not proficient. I've become more proficient because of the type of projects that I've worked on. But I'm curious, for expanding into other regions and cultures, do those teams typically have an expert on their team that then helps guide the development process? Or, as you mentioned, the process of buying a car could be very different in some of the legal aspects that you're up against. Is there someone that you can turn to that's then helping mentor or be aware of that process? ROB: Yes, the current client they have a team based in Germany, people who are from Germany that are advising us on different cultural aspects or legislative things. They are doing a lot of data analysis for us because we need a new service that we can use for looking up car details. Because there is a service that you give different information to to get information about the car back from. So yeah, we do have that team there. But that's not always the case because every client is different. The company that we're working for in the Middle East didn't have a team. They had two developers who were helping us. But we have to figure things out just from their cultural background to ask them questions about things and allow them to advise us, but nobody who was really a specialist. But that's an interesting thing as well, not just the cultural aspects of the customers but the cultural aspects of the company that you work for. We definitely found that the company in the Middle East was more hierarchical. And so that's another challenge that you have to work with because we tend to work in quite a flat way where we tend to default as on thoughtbot projects, of not having a point person on a project. Everybody is there to answer the questions. But some teams or clients want that point person. And so, we adapt and change to allow for that to happen and work in that way. But it is interesting to work in different companies as well as working as an agency. STEPH: Yeah, you bring up a really good point of something that I don't reflect on very often, but it's something that I really appreciate about our thoughtbot culture is that we do try to strive for a very flat hierarchy. But also in working with clients, we purposely will avoid like, if there are two or more thoughtboters on a project, we don't want one person that is then the primary contact between the client and the thoughtbot team. The goal is that everybody shows up. Everybody is part of the process; everybody is part of meetings. And we do have an advisor for projects, but otherwise, we work very hard to make sure that there's not just one person that's then responsible for communication. We want everybody to have opportunities to be part of meetings, to lead meetings, to take on initiatives versus having that one person. That is something that I really appreciate that we do. ROB: Yeah. And it's more noticeable when you go to places where that isn't the norm, and you appreciate it more. And I think a big part of that is how much we are trusted. And we trust people to trust us, I guess. STEPH: Yeah. And I think it fits in nicely with circling back to the management conversation is that when people have access to those opportunities, that makes my job so much easier as a team lead where then there are more opportunities to sponsor someone or to coach someone as to how they can then be the person that then takes on a project or if they want to lead a particular meeting, or if they want to help a team introduce retrospectives into their process. So it gives more opportunities for me to then coach someone into expanding their skill set in those ways. ROB: Yeah, that's interesting to think about, allowing yourself to coach other people in that role. Because as we gain more experience and become senior developers, we naturally fall into that role of taking the lead on projects, even when we're not asked to. But then, when you gain other responsibilities in the management track, so you as a team lead and me as a team lead and a development director, it could be better for you to not take that role and allow somebody else to come into that role so you can coach them. That's been playing on my mind the last couple of days. Josh Clayton, who's the Managing Director for one of our teams in the Americas, raised it on our pull request in our handbook where we were talking about team leads having a dedicated day to concentrate on team lead things. It's one of those things where somebody says something, and it's like, oh yeah, that really clicks. Maybe that's why we have been having certain struggles on projects where we need to rearrange things and learn from that and so we can be better on projects in the future. So that's something that really resonated with me, and it's flying around in the back of my mind at the moment. STEPH: Yeah, that really resonates with me because while the predominant part of being a team lead at thoughtbot is having one-on-ones with folks, I find that when I have more time, a lot of the work also falls outside of that one-on-one where it's following up on conversations around hey, this person mentioned they're really interested in growing their skill. How can I help them? How can I help find opportunities? Or I know that they're currently stretching their skill set right now. If I have some extra time, then I can check in with them. I can pair with them. I can see how things are going. So I find that while the one-on-ones are the staple thing that happens every two weeks, there's a lot of other behind-the-scenes work that's going on as well to make sure that that person is growing and feeling really fulfilled by their work. ROB: I know we've spoken a lot about the product side and the client side of working on the new project that I'm working on. There are some interesting technical sides to it as well. The client has found that they have had some issues with Haskell and running on M1 Macs. And so, they've decided to take the leap and use GitHub Codespaces as their primary development environment, which has been interesting. I had heard about it but only in the background. I hadn't read anything about it or hadn't had any direct conversations. I just heard that there was a thing. So it's been quite interesting to play with that. It's interesting the way the client is using it as well because they're using a Dockerized environment effectively inside Docker by using Codespaces. So you start the Codespace, which very basically is a Docker instance somewhere on GitHub's infrastructure. It's built very much for Visual Studio Code, and so you can just directly attach your Visual Studio Code session to the Codespace and go from there, but I'm a Vim user. I've started to feel like a bit of an old guard or a curmudgeon recently where I've been like; maybe I need to use Visual Studio Code. Maybe I should just unlearn my Vim key bindings and learn the Visual Studio ones. And people say, "Oh, you could just use The Vim key bindings in VS Code." I'm like, that's cheating. I spent the time to learn the key bindings for Vim. I will take the time to learn the key bindings for Visual Studio Code and use it for the way it's intended. So it's been interesting to understand how Codespaces works, not necessarily in the way, it's intended. So you can still SSH into a Codespace session, but then you lose all the lovely setup stuff that you might have on your local machine. So I did spend half a day porting my dotfiles which are based off thoughtbot's dotfiles, into something that Codespaces can use and made it publicly available. So if you go to github.com/purinkle/codespace, you can see what I use to set up my Codespace environment. And once that's set up, it becomes a bit easier because then you have all the things that you're used to running locally. It is very much early days for how the client is using it. And so they're really open to saying like, okay, let's find out what's not working, and let's work and figure out how to get it up and running properly. So one of the things we do find is that Codespaces do timeout after a while. And then you might lose, like, even if I've created a tmux session, that tmux session disappears. And so I have to go in and create it again. I'm not sure what the timeouts are. I haven't had time to look into what those timeouts are yet. But that's definitely the main pain point at the moment of it being used as a development environment. It's been interesting. It's been kicking around in the back of my head like the difference between developing locally and deploying locally. And it's something that I wanted to talk to people at thoughtbot and outside of thoughtbot as well to understand that more. Because I don't think you need everything running to develop locally, but you might need it to deploy locally. It's interesting to me to understand how different companies work on their products from that point of view. STEPH: Yeah, I'm selfishly excited that you are using Codespaces for a client project because I have kept an eye on it, and I'm very intrigued by it. But I also haven't used it for a project. And it sounds really neat. I'm curious, have you found that it has helped them with onboarding or if you need to switch from working on one application to another? Have you found that it has helped them with some of those? I'm guessing that's the problem that they're optimizing to solve is how do we help people run everything quickly without having to set it up locally? ROB: It's an interesting question because I don't have the comparison of trying to set up the environment as it was before. It was smoother. The main thing with access tokens because once you can set up your SSH keys and your GitHub tokens, it's just a case of running a script and letting it run. So yes, from that point of view, I can imagine if I tried to set up their previous environment, that it'd be a lot more challenging because they were using Vagrant and running things that way, which I know from experience would not be fun. And I know that my Mac fans would just be spinning all the time. It would be like an aeroplane was trying to take off. So I'm thankful for that, that I don't have that experience anymore that my machine is going to slow down all the time. We've had on a previous client who had a Dockerized environment, but you have to have it all running on your machine. There are pros and cons to everything with these things. And it's like you said, what is the problem they're trying to solve with introducing this setup? STEPH: Yeah, I can't decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing. But I'm also intrigued by the idea that if a team is using Codespaces, then that means everybody else is using VS Code. And you can still customize it so you can still have your own preferences. But that does set a standard, so everybody is using the same editor. There's a lot of cross-collaboration in terms of if you do run into an issue, then you can help each other out. Versus when I join other teams, everybody's using their preferred editor, and then there you may have a day where someone's like, "Oh, I'm really stuck because my particular editor is suddenly having a problem and can't connect." And then you have less people that are able to help them if they're not using that same editor. And I can't decide if I like that or if I hate it [laughs] in terms of taking away people's ability to pick and choose their editor. But then the gains of everybody is using the same thing which is nice and would be really great for pairing too. ROB: Yeah, that's an interesting point. I was talking to...I have a management coach. He's a PHP developer, and I'm a Rails developer. And we were talking about the homogenization of things nowadays. And is that good, or is that bad to use with stuff like RuboCop that lints everything, so it's exactly the same? Does that stifle creativity? But then, at the same time, the thing I like about Codespaces is I think we're biased coming at it from the point of view of Rails developers. And if you look at how you can use Codespaces in the browser directly from GitHub, that's quite interesting because now you're lowering the barrier to entry to get started and saying you don't need to have an editor. You don't have to set up everything. You can just do it from your browser. A few years ago, I used to volunteer or coach at an organization called codebar. They help people who are less represented in the tech community get represented in the tech community. And we would see a lot of people coming for sessions using...I forgot what it's called. What was it called? Cloud 66 or something. There was some remote development environment that people would come and say, "Oh, I've been using this," because they didn't know how to set up the necessary infrastructure to just get a Rails server going or things like that or didn't know how to set up Sublime or Atom or editor of choice. And it's really interesting if you remove your bias of 15 years of professional software development and go okay, if I were starting today, what would the environment look like, and how would I get started? I'm lucky enough that I've grown up with the web and seen how web development has changed and been able to gain more knowledge as it's appeared. I don't envy anybody who has to come into the industry now and suddenly have to drink from this firehose of all these different frameworks, all these different technologies. Yeah, I started off by just right-clicking and viewing source on HTML files back in 1998 or something ridiculous like that. And CSS didn't even exist or wasn't used. And so it's a much different world than 24 years ago. STEPH: That is something that Chris and I have mentioned on previous episodes where people are coming into software development, and as much as we love Vim and it sounds like you love Vim, our advice is don't start with Vim. Don't start there. You've got so much to learn. Start with something like VS Code that's going to help you out. And you make such a great point in regards to this lowering the barrier to entry. Because I have been part of a number of classes where you have people coming in with Macs or with a Windows machine, and then you're trying to get everybody set up. You want them to use the same browser for testing. And we spend like a whole class just getting everybody on the same page and making sure their machines are working or then troubleshooting if something's not. But if they can just go to GitHub and then they can run things seamlessly there, that's a total game-changer in terms of how I would teach a class, and it would just be far easier. So I hadn't even considered the benefits that would have for teachers or just for onboarding teams as well. But yeah, specifically for leading a class, I think that is a huge benefit. GitHub did some pretty cool stuff around when they were launching that as well because I went back and watched some of their GitHub Universe sessions that they had where they were talking about Codespaces. And one of the things that they did that I really appreciated was how they went about launching Codespaces. So initially, it was how fast can this be? Or what's our proof of concept? And I think when they were building this, they found it took about 45 minutes if they wanted to spin up an application and then provide you a development environment. And they're like, okay, cool, like, we can do this, but it's 45 minutes, and that's not going to work. And so then their next iteration, they got it down to 25 minutes, and then they got it down to 5 minutes. And now they've got it to the point that it's instantaneous because they're building stuff in the background overnight. And so then that way, when you click on it, it's just all ready for you. But I loved that cycle, that process that they went through of can we even do this? And then let's see, slowly, incrementally, how fast can we get it? And then, to get feedback, instead of transitioning their own internal teams to it right away, they created this more public club. I think they called it The Computer Club, something like that. And they're like, hey, if you want to be part of Codespaces or try out this new feature that we have, delete all the source and the things that you need locally, and then just commit to using Codespaces. And then, if you are stuck or if you have trouble, then your job is to let us know so then we can iterate, and we can fix it. I really liked that approach that they took to launching this product and then getting feedback from everyone and then improving upon it. ROB: Yeah, that sounds like an Agile developer's dream where you just put something out there that's the bare bones, and you're given license to learn from that experience and how people are actually using that tool. That's something we've actually tried to do on the client project at the moment is adding all the...now that there's a different flow in Germany, there are different questions we need to ask. And so that could be quite a complex thing to put into place. So what we said is what we're going to do is just put in the different screens, and all you have is one option to click. So you click that option, you go to the next one, go to the next one, go to the next one. Then we have something that the customer can click on and play with and understand, and then we can iterate on top of that. But it also allows us to identify areas of risk because you can go; oh, where does this information come from? But now we need to get this from a third-party service. So that's the riskiest thing we've got to work on here, where this other thing is just a hard-coded list of three-door or five-door cars. And so that's an easier problem to solve. So allowing yourself to put something that could be quite complex like GitHub Codespaces and go okay, we're going to put something out there. It takes 45 minutes to run-up. But we're telling you it takes 45 minutes to run it. We're not happy with it, but we want to learn how you're using it so that we can then improve it but improve it in the right direction. Because it might be that we get it to 20 minutes to start up, but you need it in half a second. That's a ridiculous example. Or it might be that you need to be able to use RubyMine with it instead of VS Code, and that's where the market isn't. That's the thing that you can't learn in isolation that you have to put something out there for people to use and play with. STEPH: There's one other cool feature I want to highlight that I realized that they offer as well. So in the past, I've used a tool called ngrok, which then you can make your localhost public so other people can access. You can literally demo what you're working on locally, and someone else can access it. And I think that it's very cool. It's come in handy a number of times. And my understanding is that Codespaces has that feature where they can make your localhost accessible. So your work in progress you can then share with someone, and I love that. ROB: Oh, that's really interesting. I didn't know you could do that. I know you could forward ports from your local machine to that. But I didn't know you could share it externally. That'd be really cool. I can see how that can be really helpful in demos and pairing. And it makes sense because it's not running on your computer. It's running on some remote architecture somewhere. That's interesting. STEPH: Well, that's the dream I've been sold from what I've been reading about GitHub Codespaces. So if I'm telling lies, you let me know [laughs] as you're working further in it than I am. But yeah, that was one of the features that I read, and I was like, yeah, that's great because I love ngrok for that purpose. And it would be really cool if that's already built into Codespaces as well. ROB: ngrok is really interesting with things like trying to get third-party services to work. So from, the previous client, they wanted an Alexa Skill. And so, if you're trying to work with an Alexa Skill, you have to sign in from Amazon's architecture onto your local machine. You have to use ngrok as the tool there. So I wonder if that could potentially solve a problem where if there are three developers trying to develop on this if you could point to one Codespace that you're all working on rather than... Because the problem we had was if me or Fritz or Rakesh was working on this, we'd have to go and then change the settings on the Amazon Alexa Skill to point to a different machine. Whereas I wonder if Codespasces allows you to have this entry point, you could point to like thoughtbot.codespace.github.com or something like that that would then allow you to share that instance. That's something interesting that I think about now. I wonder if you could share Codespace instances amongst each other. I don't know. STEPH: Yeah, I'm intrigued too. That sounds like it'd be really helpful. So circling back just a bit to where we were talking about wearing different hats in terms of working on client work, and then also working on the team, and then also potentially some sales work as well, I'm curious, how do you balance that transition? How do you balance solving hard problems in a codebase and then also transition to solving hard problems in the management space? How do you make all of that fit cohesively in your day or your week? ROB: The main thing that somebody said to me recently is that you can only do so much in a day, and it's about the order that you approach those things. And just be content with the fact that you're not going to get everything done. But you have to make sure that you work on things in the right order and just take your time and then work through them. I read a really good book recently that was recommended to me by my coach called Time Off. And it's all about finding your rest ethic, which sounds a bit abstract and a bit weird. But all it is it's about understanding that you can't be working 100% all the time. It's not possible. As developers, sometimes we can forget that we're creative people, and creativity comes from a part of your brain that works subconsciously. So it's important for you to take breaks throughout the day and kind of go okay; I use the Pomodoro Technique. So I have an app that runs, and every 25 minutes, I just take a little break. I don't use it in the way that it's supposed to be used. I just use it to give me a trigger to have a break every 25 minutes. And so in that time, I'll just step away from my computer. I'll walk to the kitchen, grab a glass of water. I usually have a magazine or a book next to my table. So I have a magazine here at the moment. I'll just read a page of that just to kind of rest my eyes, so they focus at a different level but also just to get my brain thinking about something else. And it seems counterproductive that like, oh, you're stepping out of what you were doing. But then I find like, oh, I suddenly have a little refresher to like, oh, I need to get back into what I was doing. I know where I've got to go. That thing that I was thinking about now makes a little bit more sense. And even if it's a bigger break, give yourself the license to go for a walk and just kind of clear your head. And a big thing about going for a walk is not to concentrate on completing the task of walking but to concentrate on the walk itself and taking the things that are happening around you. And let your mind just kind of...you'll sometimes notice that oh, I can hear a bird. But that bird's been chirping for five minutes, and you didn't notice because your mind's kind of going. And if you concentrate on, I just want to complete this walk, that's what I'm out here to do, then you lose that ability to let your mind reset. That's a big thing that I'm working on personally to concentrate on the doing rather than the getting done. And it ties into the craft of being a software developer because if you concentrate on the actual writing of the code and the best practices that we all believe in, you end up with something better that you don't then have to revisit at a later time. Where if you just try and get something done, you're just going to end up having to come back to it or have to revisit in some other way. I've actually got a blog post coming out soon about notifications on phones. I'm a big believer that your phone belongs to you and that if your work wants you to have work notifications on your phone, then they could buy you a phone just for that purpose. The only thing where I kind of draw the line is I have notifications for meetings on my phone because I can't think of another way to get those things to ping up at me. And I understand that there are jobs where you do need to have those sorts of notifications, especially things like where you're on call; it's a big thing. But when it comes to things where a manager wants to get a hold of you straight away, from a trust point of view, that's where I think things fall down. And you're questioning, like, okay, why does this person need to get hold of me at 7:00, 8:00, 9:00, 10:00 o'clock at night? And should I be available? We build by the day at thoughtbot. And so when I find, not when I find but when I talk to people, and they say, "Oh, I was still working at 7:30, 8:00 o'clock," I will say, "Why? You're devaluing your own time at that point because we're not billing any extra for that time. So you're making your craft and your skill...you're cheapening it. And I want them to relish the skills and competencies that they have. That's a big thing for me. We're very lucky at thoughtbot that we can draw a boundary at the end of the day and go, okay, that's it. There's no expectation for me. It is much more difficult at product companies. But yeah, I think it's something that as an industry, and it's a bigger thing as a society, especially with younger people coming into the industry who have never worked in an office and may never work in an office, that idea of where is the cutoff? For so much of the pandemic, the people I would get concerned about the most are the people whose beds I could see behind them because I'm thinking to myself, you spend at least 16 hours a day in that same room. And that's going to become the norm for people. And if people don't have those rest periods and those breaks and aren't given the opportunities to do that by their managers, then it's not going to end well. And happy people and fulfilled people do the best jobs from a business point of view. But that's never the way I approach it, but that's what I say to people. STEPH: I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that I made early on in my career, and even now, I still have to coach myself through it. It's like you said, we are creative people and people in software and in general and not just developers, but it's a creative craft. And I wouldn't step away to take breaks. I just thought if I pushed hard enough, I would figure it out, and then I could get done with my work because I was so focused on getting it done versus the doing, as you'd highlighted earlier. I haven't really thought about it in that particular light of focusing on this is the thing that I'm working on. And yes, I do want to get it done, but let's also focus on the doing portion of it. And so I wouldn't step away for walks. I wouldn't step away for breaks. And that is something that I have learned the hard way that when I actually gave myself that time to breathe, if I gave myself a moment to relax, then I would come back refreshed and then ready to tackle whatever challenge was in front of me. And same for keeping a magazine that's near my desk; I have found that if I keep a book or something that I enjoy...because, at some point, my brain is going to look for some rest, like, it happens. That's when we flip open Twitter or Instagram or emails or something because our brain is looking for something easy and maybe a little bit of like brain candy, something to give us a little hit. And I have found that if I keep something else more intentional by my desk, something that I want to read or that I'm enjoying, then I find that when I am seeking for something that's short that I can look at, that I feel more relaxed and fulfilled from that versus then if I go to Twitter, and then I see a bunch of stuff, I don't like, and then I go back to work. [laughs] And it has the opposite effect of what I actually wanted to do with my downtime. I love the sound of this book. We'll be sure to include a link in the show notes because it sounds like a really good book to read. And I've also worked on improving the setup with my phone and notifications, where I have compartmentalized all the work-related apps into one folder, and then I keep it on the third screen of my phone. So if I want to see something that's work-related, it's very intentional of like, I have to scroll past all of the stuff that matters to me outside of work and then get to that work section and then click in that folder to then see like, okay, this is where I have Slack, and Gmail, and Basecamp, and all the other things that I might need for work. And I have found that has really helped me because I do still have the notifications on my phone, but at least putting it on its own screen further away from the home screen has been really helpful. ROB: Do you find that you still get distracted by that, though, when you're in the flow of doing something else? STEPH: I don't with my phone. I am a person who ignores my phone really well. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, [laughs] but it is a truth of who I am where I'm pretty good at ignoring my phone. ROB: That's a good skill to have. If there's any phone in the room and a notification goes off, my head swivels, and I pivot, and I'm like, oh, yeah, some dopamine hit over there that I can get from looking at somebody else's notification. STEPH: I have noticed that in the other people that I'm around. Yeah, it's that sound that just triggers people like, oh, I got to look. And even if you know it's not your phone like you heard someone else's phone ding, it still makes you check your phone even though probably there's a part of your brain that recognizes like, that wasn't mine, but I'm still going to check anyways. And I have worked hard to fight that where even if I hear my phone go off, I'm like, okay, cool, I'll get to it. I'll check it when I need to. And I'm that person that whenever apps always ask me, "Can we send you notifications?" I'm like, no, you may not send me notifications. [laughs] Something else you said that I haven't thought about until just now is the idea that there are some people who have never worked in an office or may never work in an office because we are leaning into more remote jobs. And that is fascinating to me to think about that someone won't have had that experience. But you make such a good point that we need to start thinking about these boundaries now and how we manage our remote work and our home life because this is, going forward, going to be the new norm for a number of people. So how do we go ahead and start putting good practices in place for those future workers? ROB: One of the things, as we've hired people from a remote point of view who've only worked with thoughtbot remotely, is the idea of visibility. And I don't mean the visibility of I want to see when somebody's working but maybe the invisibility of people. Because you can't see when people are taking breaks, you assume that everybody is working all the time, and so then you don't take those breaks. And so this is something we saw with people who we hired in the first six months of being remote. And they were burning out because they didn't realize that other people were taking breaks. Because they didn't know about the cultural norms of how we worked at thoughtbot. But people who had worked in the studio would know that people would get up and have breaks. People would get up and go get a coffee from a coffee shop and then have a walk around. They didn't know that that was the culture because they bring the culture from other places with them. But then it's much harder to get people to understand your way of working and how we think that we should approach things when you are sat in isolation in a room with a screen. And that's something that we've had to say to people to break that down. And even things that we took for granted when we worked in a studio where somebody would get up and ask somebody if they could pair with them even if they weren't on the same project. Somebody might have more Elm knowledge or React Native knowledge, or Elixir knowledge. And you'd get up and say, "Hey, can I borrow some of your time just to go over this thing, to pair?" And everybody would say, "Yeah, yeah, I can find some time. If not now, we can do it later." And recently, we've had people saying, "Oh, is it okay if we pair across projects? Is it okay if we pair with other people?" It's like, "Yeah, pair." One of the big things we say is that we have this vast amount of knowledge across thoughtbot, across the world that we can tap into and that you can use. And that's just one example of how do you get those core things that you take for granted and help people understand them? Because you don't know what people don't know. And it's all about that implied knowledge. So that's something that we learned. And we try and say to people and instill in them about yeah, take breaks. You can pair with people. There are people who bring in culture from other places with them. But then, to go back to where you started, how do you start with people who have no culture with them or have the culture of coming from maybe from school, or university, or from a different industry? How do you help those people add to your culture but also learn from your culture at the same time? Big people problems. STEPH: Have you found any helpful strategies to normalize that take a break culture? ROB: One thing we tried, but it doesn't last very long because people are lazy, is putting it in Slack saying, "I'm going for a break." And you can do that, but it's so artificial. After a week or two weeks, people just stopped doing it. It was through conversation. We have a regular retrospective as the Launchpad II team where we talk about what is working, what isn't working. And we have such a trusting environment where people will say things along the lines of this isn't working for me, or I feel like I'm burning out. Then we will talk to each other about it and figure out where it comes from. And it's a good point to raise that I don't think we have explicitly addressed it. But it is something that we will address. I'm not going to say could address; we will address it. I will talk to our latest hire, Dorian, who I have a one-on-one with next week, and to kind of talk to him about it. And we should maybe try and codify that in our handbook somewhere so everybody can learn from it, at least start a strategy and a conversation. Because I don't think it is something that we do talk about. It's the problem of being siloed and being remote and time zones as well. A lot of stuff that Launchpad I knows Launchpad II doesn't necessarily know because we only have three, maybe, hours if people are based on the East Coast where we overlap. I have meetings with Geronda, who's our DEI Program Manager, and she lives in Seattle. And so sometimes I'll talk to her at 5:00 o'clock, and it's 7:00 o'clock in the morning for her. And you have different energy levels. But yeah, so we spend time to try and figure out how we work together. STEPH: Yeah, I like that idea of highlighting that we take breaks somewhere that's part of your expectations as part of your role. Like, this is an expectation of your role; you're going to take breaks. You're going to step away for lunch. You're going to stick to a certain set of hours in terms of having like an eight-hour workday with a healthy lunch break in there. I think that's a really good idea. On the Boost team, I have found that people have adopted the habit of not always but typically sharing of, like, "Hey, I'm stepping away for a coffee break," or "I'm having lunch. Maybe like a late lunch, but I'm taking it," Or "I am stepping away for a walk." You often see later in the afternoon where there are a number of people that are then saying, "Hey, I'm going for a walk." And I feel that definitely helps me when I see it every day to reinforce like, yes; I should do this too because I already admitted I'm bad at this. So it helps reinforce it for me when I see other people saying that as well. But then I can see that that takes time to build that into a team's culture or to find easy ways to share that. So just putting it upfront in like a role expectation also feels like a really good place to then highlight and then to reinforce it as then people are setting that example. ROB: One thing that Nick Charlton tried to introduce was a Strava group. There's a thoughtbot Strava group. So you can see if people are members of it that they've been walking and things like that. It was quite an interesting way to automate it. I think it fell off a cliff. But it was something that we did try to how can we make the visibility of this a little bit easier? But yeah, the best thing I've seen is, like you say, having that notification in Slack or somewhere where you can see that other people are stepping away from their keyboards. STEPH: Well, as you mentioned, solving people problems is totally easy, you know. It's a totally trivial task although I'm sure we could spend too many hours talking about it. All right, so I do have one more very important question for you, Rob. And this goes back to a debate that Chris and I are having, and I'd love to get you to weigh in on it. So there are Pop-Tarts, these things called Pop-Tarts in the world. And I don't know if you're a fan, but if you were given the option to eat a Pop-Tart with frosting or a Pop-Tart without frosting, which one do you think you would choose? ROB: That's an interesting question. Is there a specific flavor? Because I think that the Strawberry Pop-Tart I would have with frosting but maybe the chocolate one I have without. I know there are all sorts of exotic flavors of Pop-Tarts. But I think I would edge towards with frosting as a default. That's my undiplomatic answer. STEPH: I like that nuanced answer. I also like how you refer to the flavors as exotic. I think that was very kind of you [laughs] other like melon crushed or wild flavors that they have. Awesome. All right. Well, I think that's a perfect note for us to wrap up. Rob, thank you so much for coming on the show and for bringing up all of these wonderful ideas and topics and sharing your experience with Codespaces. For folks that are interested in following your work or interested in getting in touch with you, where's the best place for them to do that? ROB: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's been fantastic to have a chat. If people do want to find me, the best place would be on Twitter. So my handle on Twitter is @purinkle which I understand is hard for people to maybe understand via a podcast, but we'll put a link in the show notes so people couldn't find me more easily. And that's probably also a good time to say that I am actually trying to find a development team lead to join our Launchpad II team. So we are looking for somebody who lives in Europe, Middle East, or Africa to join our team as a developer and manager of two to three people. There's more information on the thoughtbot website, and I do tweet about it very, very often. So feel free to reach out to me if that's of any interest to you. STEPH: Awesome. We'll be sure to include a link to that in the show notes as well. On that note, shall we wrap up? ROB: Yeah, let's wrap up. CHRIS: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeee!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What you'll learn in this episode: Why the Netherlands has a high concentration of the world's art jewelry galleries Why public funding and support is crucial for the survival of art jewelry How Rob finds new artists, and how he defines what a strong piece is How Rob uses social media to find clients across the world  About Rob Koudijs Rob Koudijs is the founder and owner of Galerie Rob Koudijs, a 100-square-meter exhibition space located in the gallery district in the center of Amsterdam. The gallery specializes in contemporary art jewelry which communicates ideas, has sculptural qualities, and uses materials in innovative ways. The gallery represents a group of jewelry artists who produce work challenging the borders of the applied and the fine arts. As these artists come from all corners of the globe, the latest international developments are on display in regular solo shows and in the gallery's collection. As well as showing jewelry, Galerie Rob Koudijs stocks a range of books and catalogues by the represented artists. Additional Resources:  Website Facebook Instagram Photos: EVERT NIJLAND necklace ‘Red'; silver, glass photo: Eddo Hartmann NHAT-VU DANG earrings ‘Dominique'; silver photo: Ceyhan Altuntas TERHI TOLVANEN necklace ‘Lunatic'; silver, wood, windowpane oyster photo: Terhi Tolvanen ESTHER BRINKMANN ring ‘20ba-4'; fine gold, iron, jade photo: Esther Brinkmann HELEN BRITTON brooch ‘19B022'; silver, tiger eye, lapis lazuli, jasper photo: Helen Britton PAUL ADIE ring 'Talk to Me'; silver, aluminium photo: Paul Adie Transcript: Rob Koudijs knew he was taking a risk by leaving his original career path and opening an art jewelry gallery in Amsterdam. That risk paid off, because Rob Koudijs Gallery is still going strong nearly 15 years later, despite jewelry still being a niche art form. He joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about how he discovered his interest in contemporary jewelry, where he thinks the industry is headed, and why the Netherlands has a robust culture of art jewelry. Read the episode transcript below.  Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. Today, my guest is Rob Koudijs—I'm going to let him pronounce his name—founder of a leading art and jewelry gallery in Amsterdam. He's also a leading figure in championing art jewelry. We will hear about his jewelry journey today. Rob, welcome to the program. Rob: Thank you very much, Sharon. Sharon: I'm so glad to talk with you. Tell us about your jewelry journey. How did you get involved in jewelry and art jewelry in particular? Rob: Do you want to have the long story or the short one? Sharon: We want the full story. Rob: Then I will start where it all began. That was about 40 years ago. I met the man who is now my husband. He was starting architecture in Delft, and when I was in Delft, we went to an art gallery. They had jewelry and he thought, “O.K., I'm an architect. This jewelry is very conceptual, very architectural, and I can wear it.” He bought a piece from Joke van Ommen I don't know if you know her, but Joke van Ommen was a Dutch artist. A few years later, she went to the United States and founded Jewelerswerk in Washington. I think that must be interesting for you as well. That's how it started. It was not me; it was he who bought a piece, and then he got interested. We both were interested in art and design, but we didn't know anything about contemporary jewelry. We thought about finding books about it. Well, there was nothing in the world, not at that time. We are talking about 1979. There was one book shop in Amsterdam and they had books—I don't where they found them—about contemporary jewelry. I'm telling you about that art book shop because we were invited to a birthday party there. There we met Ruudt Peters —you probably know him—and he— Sharon: Ruudt Peters? Rob: Ruudt Peters, that's how you pronounce it. It is a funny journey, because he invited us to his birthday party, and I'm talking about 40 years ago. There was a friend of his called Marie-José, and she had just started a gallery. She also started going to an art fair, and she invited us to come to that art fair. We went there, and I think within five minutes I started selling. I always say she discovered my talents in contemporary jewelry. She told me later on that she saw my enthusiasm about the work, so she asked me if I'd help her with the art fair. I did that for 10 years, only at my holidays, of course, because I had a totally different job; I was working in healthcare, psychiatry. I took vacations every year to help her with the art fair and to help her open the gallery. That's what I did for 10 years; that's how it started, and of course, I got a lot of inspiration from that.  We started buying jewelry—well, you know how it works. Before, there was not that much in the Netherlands. Marie-José just started. When you are getting interested in contemporary jewelry, you think, “This is fantastic, but where can I find it?” So, we went looking for galleries. We found one gallery and we started buying things, and we went to Gallery Marzee and started buying pieces. At one moment, we discovered there was another gallery that opened. That was in 1985, I think, and that was Louise Smit Gallery. So, there were some galleries. There was one in Delft as well, Louis Martin. I became involved in the jewelry world, but it was not my job. Shall I go on? Sharon: Please.  Rob: After 10 years helping Marie-José she went to the big building where she is now. You probably have been there. Then we stopped working together. Later, we visited the Louise Smit Gallery and she said, “O.K., sit down. I'm here now for 10 years. I don't see what's going on in the jewelry world anymore, and I need a business partner.” It's a long story, but I became business partner in the Louise Smit Gallery. Sharon: Is that still going? I don't know. Rob: No, it's not there anymore. It existed for 10 years and then I did it for 10 years. The 20-year celebration, I was still there. The idea was that she should focus on the big names, the big artists she was already working with, and it was my task to find new talents. That's what I did, and I'm still working with them. I have to tell you—I wrote it down—we are talking about 25 years ago, and we started with lots of students, and most of them came from the Netherlands. They had all their education at Rietveld Academie, but we also went to Munich and then we found students there. I brought them into that gallery. I was a business partner, so I got the young talent over there, and that's how it worked. We did it for 10, years and then very abruptly—is that how you say that?  Sharon: Yes. Rob: It didn't work out very nicely. She stopped our companionship, and that was that, my 20 years in contemporary jewelry. So I thought, “O.K., this was so nice.” I liked it so much. I did it next to my other job, and I thought, “O.K., I have to try it myself because if I don't, I will regret it the rest of my life.” It was 2006, and a few months later—I don't know, half a year later—in April 2007, I opened my own gallery. The idea was, O.K., there were two galleries in Amsterdam. There was one gallery in Delfts. I thought, “It's crazy. We are a very small country. Contemporary jewelry is a niche in the art world, so will there a public for it?” But, I thought, “If I don't do it— let's give it a try, and if after a year I see it doesn't work out, I will stop with it.” Well, that's now 14 years ago and I'm still here. That's more or less the story over 40 years and how it all started.  Sharon: Wow! I love the fact that you're saying you realized you would regret it for your whole life if you didn't do it. I think of things myself where I thought, “If I don't this, I'll just—” It didn't work out, but at least I can try. Rob: Exactly, that's what I thought, and that's how it all started. Of course, I was very dedicated to contemporary jewelry. Some artists stayed in the older galleries, but there were a lot of artists that needed a gallery. That's what's still going on now. There are not that many galleries in the world. So, I thought, “O.K., I'll just give it a try,” and I didn't regret it at all. Sharon: There's a handful of galleries in the world, and there are really not that many that were doing. There's a handful. The majority seem to be in the Netherlands. There are not that many in the world. I don't think there are a dozen.  Rob: It's funny, because it's not like that anymore, but at a certain moment, I think we had five galleries for contemporary jewelry in the Netherlands. At the moment, there are only two—well, the galleries with big names. It's Marie-José and it's me in Amsterdam. That's because the other galleries closed, so there are only two galleries. It's still a lot for such a small country. Sharon: Why do you think that is? What is it that the Netherlands has, where you have two galleries or in the past had five, when the rest of the world has so few? It's so unusual. Rob: No, you're right. I've thought it over a lot, and I've gotten that question many times as well. Probably it has something to do with—not now, but in the past. In the past, in the Netherlands, artists got very good grants. Museums bought contemporary jewelry, and there was a lot of publicity about contemporary jewelry. I think the focus was on contemporary jewelry. I don't know why. We always say it has something to do with the 60s, when Dutch jewelers started. I don't know why it happened that way, but I think the government was important. The grants, that's what it's all about, because otherwise most of the jewelry artists cannot live from what they are doing. When you get a grant, you can develop yourself, and that's what happened. That's why all these artists, the names I told you before, all these artists are still working. After 25, 30 years, they are still there and they are still successful. It has something to do with that.  What you see now is that there are no grants anymore, not for jewelry artists. There is no publicity. Museums don't buy that much. There's only one wonderful museum in the Netherlands. You probably have heard of it; maybe you've been there. It's the CODA Museum in Apeldoorn, and they have the biggest collection of contemporary jewelry at the moment. Through the years, Stedelijk Museum didn't buy any more. Rijksmuseum, they have a nice collection, but they don't buy. You can be successful, or a field in the art world can be successful if there's publicity, if there are grants, and if the museums are interested. There were a lot of exhibitions, like I said, but it's all in the past. The jewelry is still there and the collections are there. The Stedelijk Museum has a big collection, and they started early. I don't know how it is in the states, but they all started after the war, in the 50s, 60s buying contemporary jewelry. I don't know if that's the reason, but that's what we think. It has something to do with it.  Sharon: It makes a lot of sense. I'm interested in the fact that you use the term contemporary, because if you were going to Google contemporary jewelry, you wouldn't see a lot of these names come up. You'd see more—I don't mean to knock it, but run-of-the-mill or production jewelry as opposed to art jewelry. But you use contemporary jewelry. Do people know what you're talking about when you use it? Suppose you are at an art fair. I'm just interested in the fact that you use the term contemporary jewelry as opposed to art jewelry.  Rob: When I use my hashtags on Instagram, I use art jewelry, studio jewelry, contemporary jewelry; I use them all, because I think in the world, not only in the Netherlands, we use all those names. There is no specific name for it, as far as I know. Sharon: There isn't. It's such a nebulous name. There's not one name that says what it is. Rob: Yeah, you can call it art jewelry or art you can wear, sculpture to wear. I think the problem is when you are talking about a painting or a sculpture, well, that's what it is. You have contemporary sculpture and you have antique sculpture, but it is very difficult. Like I said, it is probably because it is a niche in the art world, and you want to be different from the big jewelry shops, somewhere where they sell the gold and the diamonds. That's not what we are doing and what our artists are doing, but there's not a specific name for it, no. Sharon: What was it that attracted you initially? Was it the art aspect of it? You could have been attracted to gold and diamonds. What was it that attracted to art and jewelry? Rob: No, it's more the integration of the artistic concepts. It's art and it's design and it has craft. Craft, for me, is very important, all the crafts that are used and the combination of that. Like I said before, my husband and I were interested in art and design and architecture, but this integrates it all. We could wear it, because especially 40 years ago, it was very common for men to wear jewelry. That's why we started with geometrical jewelry. I think it has something to do with that. It integrates a lot of things. It's small sculpture. I talk to a lot of collectors, and if you are collecting sculpture, for instance, or paintings or photos, all your walls are full. When you are collecting contemporary jewelry, you have the most wonderful pieces of art, and you can put them in a drawer and go on till you die. Sharon: This is a question I have; I've thought about it a lot. What is a collector? When do you cross the line from being someone who is just an enthusiast into being a collector? When do you become a collector? Rob: Some people are opposed very much to the word collector. For a long time, we didn't like to be collectors. We just bought things we liked and we could wear. At a certain moment, you have over a hundred pieces, and then other people are calling you a collector. I know the same thing happens with clients in the gallery, for instance. They also don't like to be called a collector, but at a certain moment, they have so many good and strong pieces. Then other people start calling you a collector, and then you are a collector whether you want to be or not. Sharon: Another question, perhaps not so easy to answer: When you say good and strong pieces, what's a good and strong piece? Is a good and strong piece one that I love? Maybe it's by a certain artist. Rob: When someone asks me that, I always give the same answer: It is very personal. Our personal is that we like architectural, sculptural jewelry. We like brooches because we are men and we don't wear necklaces. So, our focus is on that. When we say it is strong, it has to do with that. It has to be sculptural, and of course it also has something to do with the artist. You follow the artist and think, “O.K., this is new. This is interesting,” because it's also important that there is somewhat of a development in what an artist is doing. I think that makes it a strong work, but it is very personal. What you think is good or strong or special, I cannot say it for the whole world. It's only for me. Sharon: As a gallerist, you must be inundated with artists saying, “Are you interested in carrying my work?” or who come to you and say, “Let me be in your gallery.” How do you sift through all of this? Rob: That is a very difficult part of being a gallerist, because you have to disappoint people, especially disappoint artists. There are not that many galleries and there a lot of artists. Most of the time when people reach out to me by email or they come to the gallery, I always say, “Send me some images and don't expect me to react.” That doesn't sound very kind, but if I can't do that, I should hire someone to do that for me, because we got a lot of questions about it, “I want to show my work in your gallery.” We are always looking if it is an adjustment to the artists we have in the gallery, for instance. I think that's very important. And is it new? Is it something special I haven't seen before? With the adjustment to the other artists, I don't want three or four artists there that look the same. I'm not interested in that. That's what's happening, and most of the time, to be honest, we find the artists ourselves. Sharon: At shows? Rob: Yeah, it doesn't happen often that people reach us and send us emails or show us work and we say, “Oh yeah, that's fantastic for the gallery.” It doesn't happen that often, no. Sharon: Do you find them at shows like Schmuck, or what's the one in the Netherlands? Rob: No, there is not that much in the Netherlands. Schmuck is very important, but there is something else. We've known all the artists so along already, 25, 30, 35 years, and they know other artists. Sometimes they say, “I know a guy, I know a girl. Have a look at it.” That helps us as well. We don't go to all the graduation shows. For us, it's important to go to Schmuck in Munich. Sharon: We should tell people what Schmuck is. I'm sorry; go ahead. Schmuck being the art jewelry week in Munich. Rob: In Munich, yes. Schmuck is actually the German word for jewelry, but everybody calls it Shumuck now. Things are changing. We went to all the graduation shows, and of course we follow the artists who are graduating and want to give them a platform in the gallery. We want to show young artists, but that has changed. It's not that strong in school anymore, not for contemporary jewelry. There are not many artists from the Rietveld Academie anymore, so we have to find them all over the world, and that's what we do. We have artists from all over the world, from New Zealand, from Austria, from the United States. Most of them come from Europe, but we are a very international gallery.  Sharon: Do you have clients from all over the world? People buying from the gallery all over the world? Rob: Yes, that has a changed as well. When we started, it was mostly from the Netherlands or from Europe, when people could travel, of course, but that has changed as well. The world is smaller. We have Facebook. We have Instagram. We make online catalogues. You probably have seen a few from us. We reach out to our clients in the world, and there are some very good collectors in the world, especially in the United States. So, we have clients from all over the world, from all countries in Europe, from the United States, and from Australia. These are the countries from where we get clients. Sharon: In terms of dealing, I don't know how it's been in the Netherlands with Covid. Have you been doing more online with Covid, or even before that?  Rob: We did a lot. Like I said, I'm very active on Facebook and especially Instagram, because I think it's an important medium at the moment. During lockdown, I think we did something by email every week, by Facebook, by Instagram; we sent out to the world. We had the idea while we were in lockdown in the beginning of last year. We were closed for over four months, and then we were closed for 3.5 months. I just opened up a few weeks ago. So, we had to reach out to our clients by email and make it interesting. That's why we started to make those online catalogues to seduce our clients.  Something else was very important first—that's how it actually started. We had to let them know we are closed, but we are there and we still have those wonderful artists who we work with, and they're making new work. We asked them to make new work. They did, and we want to show it to you, and it worked. It kept us through. You have seen my place; it's not for nothing that you rent a place like that. We needed to pay the rent and so on. It was tough, but it worked because we worked very much online in the last year. I don't think we'll stop, even though we're open again. We discovered what we could do to find a bigger audience.  Sharon: What do you see as the trends, or where do you see the global market in art jewelry going? Do you think it's an increasing interest? Some people think no, it really hasn't changed. I like to think it's growing, but that's just my American optimism. Where do you see art jewelry? Do you see it expanding the market? Do you see more galleries opening, more interest, more people understanding it? I can't claim to understand it, but I'm just asking what you think. Rob: Let's just say it this way, Sharon: I hope so. I don't know. What happened in the art world with photography—that's already quite some time ago—it started to explode and was seen as real art. I hope that would happen to contemporary jewelry as well, but not at this moment. There are fewer galleries. All the galleries are old, more or less; there are a few younger, but most of them are old, so it will stop. I don't know. I think the biggest problem is that it's wonderful to do it. It's the best thing I have done in my life, but if you are young and you have a family and you have to live from it, I don't think it will work out. It will be very difficult; otherwise, you have to commercialize, and that's what I don't want. If I should do it that way, then I stop immediately.  Sharon: When you start selling the T-shirts with the gallery name.  Rob: Yes, for instance. That can be a problem. You probably follow the jewelry world as much as we do, and you know when you go to auctions, we always hope the jewelry will get a higher price. Sometimes it works, but it has to be gold. You see at auctions that good pieces from good artists from the last 50 years, they go up in price, but it has to be from precious materials. Well, not all our artists' work is made of precious materials. They work with wood and glass and textile. They also work with gold and silver and pearls and diamonds, but they use it not for the sake of gold or diamonds. They use it as their material to express themselves. So, I hope it will get better, especially for all those artists who are working so hard, but it still is a niche in the art world. Sharon: Yes, very much so. Thank you so much for talking with us today. I'm glad things have opened and that you are expanding in the online world so more people can see what you're doing and what you have. Thank you so much for talking with us today. Rob: Thank you, Sharon. Thank you again for listening. Please leave us a rating and review so we can help others start their own jewelry journey.

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On today's Today With DW, DW is joined by friend fellow Food Town resident, Rob Do...The Chicken Wars are far from over, is taco a sandwich and DW and Rob pair wines with some of your fast food favorites as they take a trip into Food Town. Brought to you by BODYARMOR, Jay's Wicked, The Shirt Factory, and Chase Sports Complex . Streamed with Streamyard. www.streamyard.com #onlyyoucan #fueledbyBODYARMOR

Omi Diaz-Cooper is CEO at Diaz & Cooper Advertising, a digital “growth agency” that focuses on developing tight strategic plans and transforming client websites into top-performing salespeople. Omi says that websites are no longer “set it and forget it”—they are “living things that need to be producing” for clients. Since Covid, even companies that used to have “catalog” websites have found the need to proactively nurture prospects along the customer value journey.  Engaging and locking-in relationships with customers before they are ready to purchase is essential. People may start out merely seeking information. Providing great content and thought leadership will encourage today's digitally-empowered potential clients to “keep coming back” until they are ready to buy. Nurturing them after the sale turns them continues the client-journey as customers become repeat customers and provide references.  Diaz & Cooper utilizes data-backed optimization to build a predictable system of growth for two industry verticals – travel/tourism and online retailers. When Covid struck, travel and tourism revenues took a dive . . . and business for companies that sold things online soared. Omi agrees that “anybody who didn't have an ecommerce store who ever needed to decided they needed one pretty quickly.” Diaz & Cooper is both a Shopify Certified Agency and a HubSpot Gold Solutions Partner.  Omi loves the travel industry and expects that it will rebound. She explains that most people who love to travel will do a lot of online inspirational research before they book. They may be looking for a unique experience or an adventure, seeking something new to surprise them, or to go somewhere where they know exactly what to expect.  During the research phase, Omi says, “You have to get them to sign up for something so you can remarket to them with an email.” She recommends offering such things as destination information or tips on how to pack for a given climate to build value so people keep returning to your site. Engagement needs to be an iterative process where each stage brings opportunities to remarket. If potential customers book outside your brand's website, it is hard to recapture the relationship.  After an individual becomes a guest at your venue, remarket to them for great reviews and references. In this interview, Omi talks about how agency focus has shifted. At the turn of the century, agencies created concepts, gave the concepts away in pitches, backed everything up with an invented rationale, and made money by handing accounts off to lower-paid junior executives, padding time sheets, or through media commissions. In the past five to ten years, the focus has shifted to consumer first, with senior-level strategy development, billing based on value provided to clients, and integration of constantly evolving technological innovations. Omi can be reached Twitter at @diazcooperor on the agency's website at www.diazcooper.com. The website offers a variety of audits and calls to action that visitors may find of value.  Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Omi Diaz-Cooper, CEO of Diaz & Cooper Advertising based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Omi. OMI: Thanks, Rob. It's really great to be here. ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Diaz & Cooper and where the firm excels? OMI: Absolutely. We really think of ourselves as a growth agency rather than a traditional marketing shop. Our focus is really on transforming our clients' websites into top performing salespeople. How we do that, or rather our secret sauce, is really data-backed optimization. We want to create a predictable system of growth. We believe websites are living things that need to be producing for our clients, especially since nowadays, consumers are just so much more digitally empowered than ever before. The old ways of building websites, of setting them and forgetting them, and the old ways of how you used to reach customers online really have to evolve. So, we're kind of a bunch of data nerds who understand and love the customer value journey. [laughs] ROB: That seems like it can be better for everyone, because so often the website is this giant project that people work on, they get the website out the door, they work with someone to get it done, they don't talk to them for 2 years – maybe they do talk to them 2 years later – and then you rebuild everything from scratch because the universe has changed. Having a framework where the site can evolve and where the relationship between the agency and the brand can continue – I guess if you're cynical, you'd say it looks like you're just keeping them on the hook, but realistically, something has to change every month unless you don't expect anything at all from the website. OMI: Yeah, exactly. That's why we really focus on people who are actually selling something online. We do well with lead gen, but where we really shine and what really jazzes us is seeing our client numbers go up in analytics, making more and more revenue for our clients, but also connecting them to the people who will have some sort of an enhancement in their life experience by connecting to this particular brand. Like you said, it's really not about those brochure sites of “set it and forget it.” It's really about growth-driven design, and that's driven by actual visitor data. And those things change. We saw the huge changes that have happened over the last 6 months in consumer behavior. If you had a dusty old site that you hadn't touched in 2 or 3 years, you bet your bottom dollar that you're touching it now. ROB: Right. Omi, you mentioned being able to tie something back to the bottom line and measurability. Are there particular industries that you find that Diaz & Cooper engages with most often? OMI: Yeah, we have two pretty big industry niches. The first one, believe it or not, is in travel/tourism. We've worked with everything from local attractions of an aquarium in Tampa that's pretty famous and has actually been in a movie to global brands like Regent Seven Seas and Royal Caribbean. I have a lot of faith in the travel industry, even though obviously it got whacked pretty bad 6 months ago. We can talk about that a little bit later. So that's one niche. But again, it's all about generating bookings online. For example, we currently have an airline client, and it's all about generating those bookings. Then the other piece of it is more of a peer ecommerce place, so retail businesses that are selling something online through Shopify, for example. We are a Shopify Certified Agency as well as a HubSpot Gold Solutions Partner. ROB: That's an interesting place to be. Quite often, when people think about HubSpot, they think very B2B, but HubSpot is also a lot about the customer journey. The past couple years – certainly not this year, but the 2 years prior, we recorded this podcast at the Inbound Conference because they get great speakers in there, and the advantage of recording in person is really helpful. It makes for a great conversation. Talk a little bit about how to think about – I think booking travel is a customer journey, much like buying a B2B product. What are the stages when somebody's thinking about travel that might make sense to us but be not intuitive to somebody looking from the outside? OMI: For sure, travel, and especially with more and more people doing so much research online, travel begins at the inspiration. Unless you're traveling for business and you have to have travel and you don't have that much choice in the matter, most people that love to travel really are looking for an experience, something unique – they either want adventure and they want to be surprised, or they want to know exactly what to expect. Either way, they're going to do a lot of that inspirational research online. That's the piece where a lot of companies, like for example tour companies, have really not been doing super well in the past. I'll give you an example. Have you ever landed in a new city and gotten out of the station and seen people handing out little flyers or little postcards for bus tours or an excursion locally? Honestly, that's been one of the largest ways that a lot of these tour companies have marketed themselves, and they've really ignored that pre-travel inspiration research aspect of it. By the time someone's landed nowadays, they might be pretty set with their itinerary and they may not even look twice at whatever excursion you have to offer. So, it's really about trying to capture the imagination of people who are at that research stage and then having engaging content. From there it's a pretty traditional ecommerce journey. You have to engage them with content, you have to get them to hopefully sign up. If they're not ready to book yet, you have to get them to sign up for something so you can remarket to them with email. And then after they become a guest, how do you remarket to them so that they give you a great review and refer you to others? It's really looking at everything from the time that they first think about wanting to travel through turning them into a raving fan. ROB: It seems like it could be getting very divergent. It seems like there would be a pull. A lot of the travel booking sites would probably be trying to pull these brands into their own marketplace to book alongside their travel, to book alongside their AirBnB. But it seems to me if you're doing that, you've lost complete control of the customer relationship. How is that pull working on the tours? Or is it not much of a factor yet? OMI: It's beginning to be. For example, I think Bookings Holdings, which is the owners of Booking.com, they realize the potential of the excursions & tours area of travel tourism, and they actually purchased a booking engine called Fair Harbor. Again, they want to have more control of that customer journey. But you're right; that means the brand themselves loses that a little bit. It's really important to have a mechanism by which you can engage with the potential customers before they actually book so that they're already looking to you for information, whether it's destination information or whether you're giving them tips on how to dress or how to pack for a particular climate. Whatever the case might be, it's going back to good old-fashioned content creation and thought leadership where you really want to be able to establish that relationship before they book. Because if they book outside of your brand's website, you've lost that relationship until you can capture their email again or something like that. It's really about providing touchpoints prior as well as throughout. As soon as they book, what are you doing to nurture them before they show up? Unless it's like a same day thing. Obviously, every brand is a little bit different, but those basics are the same as far as wanting to figure out ways to create more touchpoints throughout the relationship so that you don't lose that touch with the guest. ROB: And they might even be able to capture some of the referral revenue out to the accommodations, out to the plane flights and whatnot, right? OMI: Yeah, that's actually pretty common in the industry. For example, concierges at a hotel, if they book a tour or something like that, they get a piece of the revenue. That's a pretty common practice. How do we do that digitally, and how do we do it digitally effectively so that you're not pushing things on people that don't make sense? That's the rub. ROB: Got it. March 2020 must have been quite an inversion of your business, because you have this travel vertical that undoubtedly was hit hard, but conversely you have this ecommerce side of things that anybody who didn't have an ecommerce store who ever needed to decided they needed one probably pretty quickly. OMI: Yes. [laughs] That was definitely our saving grace, that we did have that part of the business. We had already been Shopify partners for several years and have had a lot of success with some retailers. Because yeah, literally about 60% of our agency's revenue paused within a week or two of March, the terrible Ides of March. [laughs] ROB: Were people looking for any sort of store to sell their thing online? Were there particular types of products that seemed to accelerate faster? OMI: Obviously anything related to health and toilet paper and sanitation and that kind of thing. Obviously all of that was huge. But overall I think it took a little time for people who had never done ecommerce before. They knew that they needed to go into it, but they weren't sure how to go about it. And that's not really our core target audience. It was really more about finding more of those clients who already had a decent ecommerce shop and how do we make it better? How do we do conversion rate optimization so that they capture more of the market? Because the behavior really changed. The behavior changed in that people were less loyal to specific brands and they were looking for bargains and looking for something that was going to make sense for their budgets. Again, yes, there were a lot more people buying online, but there were also a lot more people with less money to spend. ROB: Right. It all flipped very quickly. We had one client who was in a different business who decided to spin up a third party marketplace for challenger and interesting food brands. You can imagine, they're talking to all these companies that are used to selling stuff in grocery stores; now they're not because nobody is stopping and browsing around a grocery store. If they're going at all, they're going to find their toilet paper and their core essentials. The shift from March until now – at the beginning, everyone they talked to said, “No, we don't have a store.” It has come so quickly to now they fully expect this client to integrate with their Shopify store and integrate their order history. The knowledge and sophistication really turned amazingly quickly. OMI: Yeah. I read somewhere that the CEO of Microsoft said that we experienced 2 years of digital transformation in 2 months, and that's exactly what it felt like. [laughs] ROB: Oh yes, it felt like a lot of things, for sure. Omi, when you look back, tell us about the origin story of Diaz & Cooper. How did you decide to get this business rolling? OMI: That's actually a funny story. A little bit personal, but I'm going to go ahead and share it. I had been in the ad agency world for, I don't know, 10 years, maybe 15. I can't even remember. I had decided to step off the hamster wheel and freelance. I wanted a little bit less pressure; I wanted a little bit more intimate contact with my clients and all of that. I also wanted to start a family around that time. After about a year, I was finally pregnant. I was about 7 months pregnant or so, and my husband and co-founder Todd Cooper came home from work – he was an associate creative director of a kind of large agency here at the time – and he said, “Hey, I want to quit my job too. Let's do this for real.” So, I looked down at my pregnant belly, looked at him, looked at my belly again, and went, “Are you crazy?” [laughs] But then I realized, okay, there's a gap in the market we can fill. Why not? Let's try it out. At that time – this was back in 2000-2001 – most local agencies created work in a vacuum. All the agencies we had worked for would come up with creative and then invent a rationale. Nobody was talking about data, nobody was talking about putting the consumer first. A lot of agencies were hyper-focused on getting creative awards – or even worse, as soon as they landed an account, they just dumped it off on a junior executive. Because strategy was not valued and creative was given away in pitches, the only way agencies could make real money was through media commissions. That really misaligns the agency and the client goals. Tim Williams talks a lot about this, how with hourly billing, the agency is penalized for being efficient, so you either have to make up time sheets or just make a lot of money through media commissions. A lot of that has definitely changed in the last 5-10 years, but back then that was the status quo. We really learned how to value what we do based on the value that we achieved for our clients, and that's really what we wanted to do with the agency from the inception. We wanted to provide senior level strategy, access to senior level thinking to all the clients, and be able to feed our intense curiosity for new technologies. ROB: And if LinkedIn is to be believed, it looks like he joined in early to mid 2001. OMI: Yeah. ROB: So you put all of your family eggs in this basket, you have a child incoming, and then you have 9/11. You're now in your third turning of the world upside down, between COVID, the financial crisis, and 9/11. How did 9/11 and that time affect your business? And were you in travel then? Because that was another travel mess. OMI: Yeah, it was. Luckily, 9/11, as horrific as it was, really didn't have the long-lasting effects to the industry that COVID has had. We did have a couple of travel/tourism clients at the time. I think we had a couple of hotels. They didn't really change a lot. That didn't really affect us horribly. One thing that did, though, was the real estate bubble bursting. 2008 was one that really whacked us because we were pretty deep in the real estate market. Probably 10 out of 15 clients were in real estate. So that was another big wackadoodle. We learned a lot of hard lessons. Big agencies treat employees like cogs in a wheel, but for us they were almost like family, so it was hard to sit down and say, “Oh my gosh, what staff do we need to cut? How do we make it so that people can survive this?” That was just a big lesson in making sure that we weren't overextended not just in terms of staff but also in terms of expenses. We had a big fancy office and things like that. All of those things really played a part in us reassessing the model itself and being able to focus more on the team and less on anything extraneous so that we could be more resilient when things like this happen. And inevitably something will happen again. It's almost our 20th year in business. Bring it! What's next, world? [laughs] ROB: Yeah, you're still here. Did you have an office in January, and do you have an office now? OMI: We did. This is another semi-funny story. We were ROWE Certified back in 2012. ROWE is Results Only Work Environment. Obviously, from pretty early on, it made sense for us to focus on results versus somebody spending X amount of time in a seat in an office. So we've been at least hybrid since 2012. By hybrid, I mean some days some people come into the office, some days some people don't. Back in October of last year, we made the decision that we were going to go 100% remote. We looked around and we saw that almost all the big HubSpot partners were either 100% remote or nearly 100% remote, and a lot of our clients are not even in the vicinity. They're not traveling to our offices all the time. If anything, we would travel more to them for presentations. So we said, let's not have an office anymore. Let's go 100% remote. We can always do a WeWork type situation if we have to do a conference or a meeting or find other ways to meet as a team. So we had already made that decision in October. We had already let our landlord know we weren't going to renew our lease in the summer, and we wrote a blog post about how to measure results remotely and things like that, kind of in preparation for announcing that we were going to 100% remote. Then, of course, COVID hit 3-4 months after that, and we were already ready from the standpoint of letting go of the office. That was already in the works. So we were already ready. And of course, we were already hybrid for many years, so all of our systems are online, our management software is online, our servers, everything. It was a really seamless transition. ROB: Do you think it'll be completely remote when the world comes back? Or do you think you'll have some sort of default remote? Some people were 3 or 4 days in the office before. Do you think it'll be 3 or 4 days remote and 1 or 2 in an office if you choose, or are you thinking doesn't matter, probably fully distributed, maybe not even all in the same city or state? OMI: We already don't have everybody in the same city or state. We've had employees as far away as Italy. Today we work with a U.S. designer out of Mexico; I have writers that are in North Florida. So we already have people. I think the beauty is not just the flexibility for employees, that they have a much more balanced lifestyle and they're actually a lot more productive. The real beauty is that you can get the best talent no matter where they are. I have a very long-time employee, someone that's been with us 10 years, who recently let us know, “Hey, since we're going to be 100% remote, I think I'm going to be moving. I want to try out a new city.” His roommate got a job in New Orleans, and he's like, “I'm moving to New Orleans with my roommate. Is that cool?” I'm like, “Yeah, of course. Why not?” So I think moving forward, if we do have some sort of an office, it would probably be more one of those contracted things where you can have a coworking space somewhere. It would have to be pretty flexible because, like I said, we meet with people usually in their cities. So, it would have to be something where we could meet in different cities. ROB: Right. Our team is very distributed as well. When our team still wants to work remote but not in their house, we may try to equip them with some sort of local coworking membership. The bigger challenge, I think, is in relationship and team rapport. Have you thought at all, or have you done, something to bring a distributed team together and to maybe gain some of the benefit of having been in the same place, even if that's not the norm?  OMI: Yeah. Obviously, we do a lot of video meetings. We do little celebrations online. We send each other things. Culture is such a big part of the agency. Culture is so important. But we're playing around with the idea of maybe having quarterly live meetings in, like you said, a coworking membership type of space, and even like a retreat once a year when we can all travel again. I'm really looking forward to doing that. This is our first year, and I'm definitely itching to travel. So that's definitely something that as soon as it's safe for everyone, we would likely have maybe a once a year agency retreat. ROB: That's going to be such an interesting ongoing conversation, I think, the agency retreat. We have one employee in Santiago, Chile, and I'm hoping we all go see him. OMI: Oh, that'd be fun. ROB: That's some logistics right there. OMI: Yeah. ROB: We've talked about some lessons already, but what are some things you've learned in building Diaz & Cooper that you might like to do differently if you were starting over right now? OMI: I will tell you that I would've done the remote thing a lot sooner. Like I said, the benefits of being able to attract talent from all over the U.S. and things like that – I would definitely have done that a lot sooner. I would've pushed harder to go fully remote sooner rather than later. Also, moving to more of a value or performance pricing model versus hourly billing. We did that pretty early on. If I could do it from the inception, I would've. One of the ways we started when we first started our agency was we were kind of a little creative boutique, and we did a lot of ghost creative for bigger agencies. We moved away from that pretty quick, but I probably would've done it quicker, looking back, because we got a lot more out of getting referrals from those bigger agencies and having them rely on us for things that they couldn't do. I probably would've done that sooner and created our customer base larger more quickly. ROB: Right. OMI: The other really big lesson – this is a plug to all those wonderful agency consultants out there – there's some really good ones out there, like Jason Swank and Karl Sakas. I would've invested in a consultant sooner as well. Because you don't know what you don't know. [laughs] ROB: Jason was an early guest. He was once a fellow Atlantan, although I do believe that's not the case anymore. Not that you'd see anybody in your same city right now very much. When you talk about, especially on the consulting and advice consultants give you there, a few different perspectives on value-based pricing, how do you think about arriving at a cost for an engagement? Do you have packages? Are you using some sort of estimated effort but then adjusting so that it's not hourly and you can have comfort giving certainty to the client? OMI: That's kind of a bird's nest. I'll tell you that agencies will fight over this. “No, my way's best,” “My way's best.” We looked at the whole point system that was pretty popular with the HubSpot Partners a couple years back. What we arrived at, what works best for us and most of our clients, is we do have certain packaged programs. However, they're highly, highly customizable. We always, always start with a strategy engagement. It's a limited time. It's a value for the client. It's not exactly a loss leader for us, but it's not exactly a big money maker either. What that allows us to do is, number one, see how we work with the client. Really shape where we think the account should go. Really understand what their customers' journeys are, what needs optimization, and really be able to craft the program that will work best for them. It's also kind of a dating before you marry for both of us. They can see what it's like to work with us, we see what it's like to work with them. We can see if we're a really good fit. And then after that, there are programs at different levels that they can sign onto depending on how fast they want to reach their goals. Everything is goal-based. Everything is all around reaching certain SMART goals that we define during the strategy process. Then where the performance comes in is certain built-in bonuses for going beyond certain expected performance metrics. ROB: Makes a ton of sense. No matter how you approach the price for what's done, I think one of the big unlocks that a lot of agencies struggle with is how to define an initial structured engagement that is paid discovery that also delivers value to the clients. OMI: Yes. And it does have to deliver value. It can't just be a laundry list of B.S. It really does need to be strategic. And what we deliver, they could literally take it and run or go with somebody else and do it. A lot of people are hesitant of that, but I find that the approach that some of the prepackages that I've seen of “Well, you get four blog posts a month and six social media posts and an hour of SEO” – how can you determine that that's what they need before you even get to know their business? They may not need blog posts. They may have somebody that does it internally and maybe you're just reviewing and helping them out with the topic strategy and the SEO. Until you have a good strategic plan, you're really just checking off deliverables, and that's not what we're about. We're about delivering a result, and you can't do that unless you have a good plan. ROB: That's super key. This is probably a topic we could spend a lot of time on with a lot of people. It's a lever to growth, and it's a lever to not seeming like – you don't want to sound like you're asking to bill hours to fill out their RFP. That's where it comes from, this defensive “Somebody asked me to do a thing and I didn't have an answer for them, so it cost me time, so I'm going to throw up a defense.” But that positioning and framing towards value really helps you stand out and it helps people have some skin in the game with you while also you freeing them to go anywhere and also not wanting to. OMI: Yeah, exactly. ROB: Excellent. Omi, when people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to connect with you and Diaz & Cooper? OMI: We are on Twitter @diazcooper. Also our website at www.diazcooper.com. Those are the best ways to reach us. There's all kinds of different calls to action and website audits and all kinds of things that are of value that we provide free on our website. So that's probably the best way to reach us. ROB: Sounds good. Omi, thank you so much for making time to come on the podcast. You have shared some wisdom from the year, some experience, some nuggets to carry forward, some really good stuff. I wish you and Diaz & Cooper the best, especially as you are able to not only keep your ecommerce folks happy, but bring those travel clients back into the world. Sounds like a good season ahead. OMI: Yeah, we're excited about it. ROB: Thank you so much. OMI: Thank you. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

John Saunders, Founder of 5Four Digital, honed his SEO, SEM, and PPC digital marketing skills when he started his career working for an agency that provided dealership-level marketing services for automobile manufacturers. When John figured out that he wanted to use his skills for different kinds of projects and a more diverse clientele (SMBs, tech-startups), he started his own company. Today, 5Four focuses on brand identity (logo design and brand guidelines), and website design and development on Shopify, Webflow, and WordPress platforms. In this interview, John explains how to build automated linkages that will increase customer engagement and discusses 3 “shopping” platforms: WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow.  John says WordPress was a game-changer – it made CMS (content management systems) “accessible” for people with lower-level HTML and CSS skills. The platform is flexible enough that amazing sites can be built with either the supplied templates or with custom code. A disadvantage of WordPress is that it requires the use of an extensive array of plugins for website “attributes,” and these and other security measures need to be maintained. Wordpress with a WooCommerce plug-in works well for ecommerce, but John has found that Shopify allows the agency to more quickly scale stores for its clients. One Shopify app, Teelaunch, provides companies with low cost, high-quality print on demand products so customers can create an MVP (minimum viable product, Eric Ries: The Lean Startup,) and build their own brand for less than $1000. Another CMS option, Webflow, can produce outstanding websites. It has a slight learning curve but is easy to use and highly flexible. Although John currently sees Webflow as ”the future,” an organization's decision to use a particular CMS platform should be based on a number of considerations. Through the years, John has developed systems and standard operating procedures which allow him to delegate tasks to his staff or to automate processes, so the work gets done automatically. One tool he has found to be particularly helpful is Zapier, which provides a way to “web-hook” different websites, platforms, and apps. John uses Zapier to cross-integrate his company website contact form with Slack (to notify John that the form has been filled out), and then with Mailchimp to send a “thank you for your interest, here's another form.” Response to that drives another form for scheduling . . . and that information is sent to Colony. John says Zapier can be used to link Facebook to Gmail, Facebook Forms to Google Sheets, with up to 10 such linkages free. John recommends written website SOPs to facilitate task handoffs to clients if the client prefers to maintain the site. 5Four Digital was already running remotely when Covid-19 hit. John's SOPs and integrated technology continue to keep the agency operating smoothly. Many of his team use Asana to manage tasks. He notes that not everything he has done succeeded. However, the failures often provided the tools, resources, and experience he needed for subsequent projects . . . that did succeed. John recently started a company offering downloadable illustrations featuring people of color so sitebuilders have beautiful pictures that promote diversity. BlackIllustrations.com. He is also involved in digital education and sees a lot of that in the future replacing the traditional four-year degree.  John can be found on his personal website at JohnDSaunders.com and @JohnDSaunders on Facebook and Instagram. His agency's website is: https://www.5fourdigital.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by John Saunders, Founder at 5Four Digital based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, John. JOHN: Hey, Rob. Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here, man. Thank you. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Why don't you start us off with an introduction to 5Four Digital and where you specialize. JOHN: Absolutely. My name, of course, as you said, is John D. Saunders. I'm the founder of 5Four Digital. We focus and allocate our resources towards a couple key services. Those are brand identity, which is logo design and brand guidelines, as well as website design and development for Shopify, Webflow, and WordPress. Those are our main focus areas. ROB: That makes perfect sense. WordPress obviously has been around for a very long time, Shopify a decent amount of time. Webflow is a little newer. How has that development of competencies happened? Did you start in one of those areas? How have you decided where to keep your skills sharp? JOHN: Great question. I started in WordPress – man, it was at least 10 years ago. WordPress put CMS, or content management systems, on the map in regards to making it accessible for people that either have an entry level to HTML and CSS or high level. You create these amazing websites either using templates or doing custom code. I started doing that with WordPress, and man, it was an exciting time because I started out and I learned everything I could from YouTube videos and other things like that. This was in the infancy of WordPress, so it was before they even had all these templates and themes. I was able to build a site for my mom, who's a teacher, and we built this tutoring site. Kids were able to go on, fill out the contact form. I was able to take this idea I had in my head and make it something tangible. That's when I was hooked. As the agency grew, we really thought to allocate our resources toward a few key resources, and WordPress was that main one. As ecommerce started to build up and develop, I thought, WordPress is great. We have WooCommerce, plug-ins that integrate well. But I feel like Shopify was the perfect platform because we were able to scale out stores for clients at a quicker level than WordPress. So, we did that with Shopify. Then a couple years ago, we heard about Webflow, which is another content management system or almost like a live builder, and man, I built my first site in Webflow and I was like, this is definitely the future. It's easy to use. Of course it has a learning curve, but ultimately you can build essentially whatever you want in regards to your website, have your own custom CSS in there, and the designs and things we've been able to create with Webflow have been really, really dope. ROB: Right on. If somebody has a WordPress website, they'll probably stick with WordPress for the time being, although any given revision to a WordPress site can certainly be an entire rebuild. But if someone's starting today, how would you help them consider the decision of whether to go with WordPress or whether to go with Webflow? JOHN: That's a great question. If they're an existing business – let's say they've been using WordPress for 5 or 6 years and they just want to do a refresh or redesign their site. They already have historical data or historical SEO attributes to that website, so I probably wouldn't recommend completely changing over to Webflow unless the site was new and they didn't get a ton of traffic. If they're doing over 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 hits per month, we'd probably stay with WordPress and scale out that website in regards to building out a new design. If the business doesn't get a ton of traffic and they're not really worried about pulling all that traffic to the new site, I would absolutely recommend Webflow. One thing I like about Webflow is a lot is the transition in regards to using the platform is easier. You can build out sites how you want. You don't necessarily need a ton of plug-ins, which is one of the issues I have with WordPress; you need plug-ins for a lot of the attributes you need to add to a website. It also takes a lot of constant upkeep. Every month you have to make sure the plug-ins are up to date. You also have to make sure WordPress, the framework, is up to date, and you're open to malware and malicious attacks from people because the CMS is so popular. The good point about that is there's a ton of resources on WordPress and information out there. Thousands of plug-ins, thousands of resources, developers, designers. It's an open source platform that has a lot of people linked to it. With Webflow, it's a little bit newer, so it's smaller. But the level to entry isn't as steep as say WordPress, and it doesn't need that constant upkeep. You can build out your site, you can set up Zapier to set up web hooks between different websites and platforms, and you're pretty much good to go. ROB: Wow, it sounds like you're deep on the Zapier stuff. That's a whole other unlock there. JOHN: Oh man, it's like a cheat code, dude. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] Tell us about that a little bit for folks who aren't as familiar with Zapier and what sort of directions you can take that toolkit. JOHN: I'll give you a precursor. The first thing is I'm a big proponent of standard operating procedures or setting up systems within the business so I can delegate to either staff, team members, or create automation. That way no one has to do it and it just gets done automatically. I'm a big proponent of that. I work from home. I have five team members on our team, and I love to have the freedom to be able to focus on big picture. With that said, Zapier is a great way to connect different platforms easily through a platform seamlessly. I'll explain that. For example, when you visit our agency website and you fill out the contact form, that form automatically pushes to Slack. As soon as the form gets filled out, I get a notification that someone's filled it out on Slack with their information. That keeps me up to date. Secondly, we set up a Zapier so that it integrates with MailChimp. So as soon as someone fills out that form, they get an automatic email response saying, “Hey, thank you for your interest. Would you mind filling out this free form?” Once they fill out that form, then they get another automatic email push that says, “Hey, great, go ahead and book a time here,” and then we've connected Colony. All Zapier does is just connects different apps to each other. You can connect Facebook to Gmail, you can connect Facebook Forms to Google Sheets – the possibilities are endless. I think you can do up to 10 for free and then you can pay for different Zaps. ROB: Very nice. Thinking about WordPress versus Webflow, you get the site designed, you get it developed, you hand it over to the client – is either one of those more conducive to clients being able to manage things themselves? Or is it just the case that clients, even if you give them all the tools, aren't going to manage things themselves to make minor changes in the future? JOHN: It really depends on the client because they're both very user-friendly, especially on the client side, for the most part. It's easy to add blogs. It's easy to update pages once either you're using a third party platform like Oxygen or Divi or Elementor, the page builders. It's pretty easy to use once you get over that initial learning curve. Both WordPress and Webflow have a client-facing side so that they can make updates. So that part is pretty easy. What I like to tell people, especially agency owners, is it's a good idea to set up SOPs, or standard operating procedures, for your clients in regards to the handoff. If you're a web design agency, there's one of two things you can do. You can either manage and host that website for the client, and then they pay a fee every month, or you say, “Hey, here's a repository of my trainings on how to use the platform, how to jump in, how to add blogs. Your team can use this.” Because sometimes you'll build a project and give it to their staff. They might have a marketing team or a content marketing team that can create that content; they just need to know how to use the backend. So, you want to have that in your back pocket so that way when a client is like, “Yeah, we don't really want you to manage it. We just want you to build it out and then hand it off to us,” you already have that repository of operating procedures that you can give them. ROB: That all makes sense. John, if we rewind a few years, how did you come to start 5Four Digital? What's the origin story here? JOHN: For me, I was at an agency. I worked there for about 4 years. I moved up in the ranks and became marketing director. It was an automotive dealership agency, so we dealt primarily with a lot of the car manufacturers – Audi, Land Rover, Ford – at the dealership level. We would do the marketing at the dealership level. Being in that position taught me a lot because I was able to use SEO, SEM, PPC, all these different services under the digital marketing moniker. It helped me develop my skillset. Once I did that, I got to the point where I wanted to work on different types of projects. I got kind of burnt out from the automotive side. I wanted to work with maybe SMBs, tech startups, and that type of thing. That's when I left and I started my own company, 5Four Digital. I was focused on more so on the product as opposed to how it looked. I didn't need to have a fancy office or anything. Honestly, when I started, I didn't really have much money. I was on the ramen diet, and I was saving money because I had segued from a full-time position to doing this on my own. The biggest thing for me was to really focus and allocate my resources towards providing a great product to the client. I didn't have an office. I was working from home, and I started to build my team remotely. When other agency owners were like, “You need an office, you need this, you need that,” I was like, instead of paying $2,500, $3,000, $3,500 – because I am in South Florida – for an office, I can take those resources and I can pay a developer, I can pay a project manager to help scale this business without having to have that burden of a physical location. ROB: So, you were completely ready for the shutdowns this year. Did very much change for you as a business, either with how your team worked, or maybe with some of your clients when some of the COVID-19 shutdowns started to come through? JOHN: I do want to say that a lot of people are going through a lot currently. People are being furloughed, fired from their jobs. It's just a lot. The transition for us prior to COVID and to now hasn't really changed much because we were already running remotely. All the platforms and things that we were using were already conducive to that environment. A lot of our team and our staff work through Asana, our task management system, and that's what we work by. This is when something's due, and team members can work at night, in the day, they can take the day off and take their kids to the park. For me, ultimately you work when you're comfortable because I feel like that's when people work the best, and then we follow the structure of the due date within the task management system. ROB: That makes sense. When I look at your LinkedIn profile, some people are all-in on one thing and some people have a whole portfolio of interesting things they're involved in. What can you share about some of the other projects or businesses that you're involved in that keep your attention and you feel are worth pursuing? JOHN: For me it's about building an agency that not only works well for our clients, but for us internally also. I always recommend those that have the skillset to build an agency because (1) you can help build and develop clients, and then (2) you can build your own products or your own projects that siphon through your agency ecosystem. For us, when we have an idea and we want to build something internally, we're just taking that project or that idea and running it through our client cycle. For example, I have a business called BlackIllustrations.com, which we launched in April, which is a platform that allows folks to download illustrations for their websites, for their projects, featuring people of color. Because I didn't see the market have a lot of that, and as a website builder, there just wasn't a lot of diversity in the illustrations. Now, I've seen some beautiful illustrations, and we've leveraged a lot of them online, but I just didn't see that and I saw that opportunity. When that happened, I put together the process, I told the team, “Hey, this is what we're going to start building out,” and then it's essentially just walking them through that client lifecycle. It's almost like taking the ideas that we have and pushing them through this conveyor belt of the business and then being able to make another business that has its own separate income as an entity. BlackIllustrations.com launched in April; we've already had 40,000+ downloads, over about half a million visitors to the website. I'm really proud of that, and a lot of that comes down to creating those procedures and then running it through that cycle. ROB: That makes a ton of sense. With those different projects, you can imagine that some of them are going to thrive, some of them are going to perhaps not thrive. Some of them over time you might need to put to rest. I wonder maybe if even there's some projects that you have brought through the process, they lived a good life, and then you put them on pause. How do you think about the lifecycle and lifespan of these internal projects? JOHN: Essentially, for me it's really about learning as much as I can from the process. In one example, as an entrepreneur, you know we have a ton of failures. I'm not going to act like everything I touch turns to gold. I had one project in particular – it was a Kickstarter campaign. I was trying to raise funds for an app. This was 5 years ago, 6 years ago maybe. I went through the entire process of hiring a videographer, getting footage, walking through the process of creating this crowdfunding campaign, and it was a lot of fun doing it and experiencing it. Ultimately, we flopped because we didn't get to 100% of the goal. I think we got to around 60%. At first, I was like, man, I'm a failure. I didn't do the right thing. But, ultimately, I learned a lot through that process. I learned how to start a crowdfunding campaign, how to create engaging video that converts folks, and how to leverage an audience. So, I like to look at it as an experience as opposed to a failure, and I'm able to use those resources and those things that I came up with and allocate them later on in the next project. ROB: Each project is its own success, even if the project itself doesn't succeed. In that case, how fortunate to assess demand for an app. It's an inexpensive experiment to launch a crowdfunding campaign versus building the dang app and then hoping somebody likes it. JOHN: Exactly. ROB: Very good. John, you mentioned some lessons you learned there. When you look back over the history of 5Four Digital so far, what are some other lessons you've learned along the way and things you might consider doing differently if you were starting from zero? JOHN: I would look at delegating faster than I did prior. I think in the beginning, especially the first year, first couple years, I was trying to do everything and do it all myself. When I started the agency, we were doing SEO, SEM, Facebook ads, social media, web design, web development. It was a complete agency, full service. Which is great, especially if you have a good amount of employees, but it was just me. So I'm working with clients and one client is doing SEO, one client is doing PPC, one client is doing web design, and it's just a lot of work, especially changing your mind and doing the different things and turning off that creative and turning on the analytical side. It was just a lot. I started to get burnt out. One of the things I wish I did was niche down to a specific set of services. Not even niching down to a specific client set, but only offering a few core services. That would've helped me really streamline my process and be like, “This is the process we go through every time we take on a client” as opposed to doing all these different services myself, especially as a small agency or even a freelancer. It was just a lot. So, I wish that was one thing that I did: focus on a few core services. Secondly, I wish I would've started to make my operating procedures in the initial or in the beginning. Really start to think about, “These are the core services we have. These are the things we want to offer.” But I think it just took me time to get acclimated to providing a high-quality service to clients and then documenting that process. Then the third piece is hiring faster, hiring either a part-timer or an independent contractor in the beginning to help facilitate some of these things instead of trying to do it all myself and taking hours and hours in the wee morning trying to do it. ROB: How did you go about finding some of those fractional or independent contractors that you could trust to do the work in a way that's going to keep your clients happy? Did that involve the clients at all in the conversation of shifting who was doing the work? JOHN: Great question. For me, finding great people – and again, this is a process as well – comes down to not even necessarily their full skillset. A lot of times you'll try to find the perfect candidate in regards to their skills. I try to find a good quality designer, for example, but I also want them to be able to fit into our team dynamic. The fact that they're fun, engaging. The fact that they get their work done, but they're able to balance that and know that it's an open work environment where they'll be able to have fun and enjoy cultivating their creativity. So, for me, it's really finding someone that's a good fit for the team as opposed to just focusing on skillset. ROB: I hear a recurring passion for process. Is that something that has come naturally for you, but you didn't initially apply it to the business? Or has it been something you've discovered in some way as you've built the agency? JOHN: It's definitely something I've discovered while building the agency. There's a book by Michael E. Gerber called The E-Myth, another book by Tim Ferriss called The 4-Hour Workweek – those are two great reads – that talk about building a process so that you can delegate. For me, ultimately, in the agency right now I'm pretty much the project manager. I'm the one that talks to the client, that organizes the projects, that puts in my two cents and my recommendations and helps the team navigate through the buyer journey or the customer journey. I love being in that role because I'm able to pull out of the day to day and focus more so on big picture. I'm able to convey my ideas to the team, and we're able to implement together on what works best.  ROB: I can definitely understand that, and there's probably some future date where you're thinking about that second project manager role that takes that over. That's probably a whole new round of hire. John, you mentioned in your previous agency experience that you had done some work with auto dealers. For people who don't know, that can be a whole segment. A lot of agencies that do auto kind of only do auto. It sounds like you're not doing much of that anymore. One concern I have heard from people who are heavy into that space is some different constraints to the budgets of some of the different dealerships and what they want, and sometimes even the technology. What is your experience with that then, and was there any consideration of that when you decided not to focus on that as much with 5Four? JOHN: Can you repeat the last part of the question? It cut out for a sec. ROB: Oh, sure. How much of that distinction of the constraints of automotive clients drove your decision to focus less on that when you started 5Four? JOHN: Oh man, there's a lot of red tape you have to deal with. Just getting a webpage up or going through a brand discovery session, there's so many people that it has to go through that by the time you get the thing live, it's already dated. [laughs] It was really hard to move and grow the design and the marketing side of it because we had so many constraints in regards to the industry. But nowadays, especially working more so with startups or Series A companies, they have a lot more freedom to move around and upward. If there's new technology that comes out that we want to implement, you don't have to go through three C-level executives to get it done. You can just talk to a couple people, tell them, “Hey, this is how it works,” do a small test – if it works, great. Scale it up. It's a totally different dynamic. ROB: I've also heard a number of complaints about the technology that is even able to serve the auto dealer industry. Is that true, number one? And if so, why do you think it is? I've heard often there's a completely different marketing stack for that particular customer. JOHN: I will say in the last probably 2 to 3 years, there's been a lot of companies doing cutting-edge stuff in the automotive industry. Of course, outside of that you have Tesla, which is doing phenomenal things. But there are platforms, especially like for example Dealer.com, which is an automotive digital marketing company – they crush it, man. They do a lot of these different things – it's almost like Google, but in the automotive industry. They have all these different solutions and resources. So, I will say in the last few years there's been a dynamic shift.  Of course, you have startups coming out like Carvana that are doing a really great job of showcasing and making the process easier for the customer. I think the automotive industry has taken a while to understand it, but a lot of people don't necessarily want to go into the dealership. They don't want to go through that long process. They're trying to accommodate this fast shifting economy. ROB: I understand that. It's nice that there is some future that is not really, really dated marketing stacks for that industry. John, when you look ahead a little bit, what are you excited about that's coming up either for 5Four Digital in particular or for marketing more generally? JOHN: Man, I'm a tech guy, so I love being a part of this process and being in this industry. Some of the biggest things I see coming down the pipeline are one-click or headless ecommerce. A lot of folks have been talking about it. It's an ecommerce experience where you literally push one button and you're able to purchase, similar to what Amazon has and a lot of these sites that are coming out, but it actually works across the entire internet. That's something I've been hearing a lot of buzz about. In regards to the education side of digital, I'm really excited about it. As we move or shift into this new world dynamic, a lot of people are realizing that traditional college degrees might not necessarily be the best bet for us all. There are just so many options. I have my Bachelor's, but there's just so many different opportunities now. You have all of these educators, people like myself and yourself, who are great and skilled and adept that can create courses and teach other people our processes and the things we're doing. So, I'm really excited for the digital education frontier, I guess we could call it. But I think a lot of people are going to start segueing or moving towards that because it's super affordable. You can buy $500, $1,000, $50 bucks for these courses and learn these tangible skills that can pay you well into the six figures. So, I'm ultimately excited for that. ROB: Do you have some of your current projects or future projects in that online education space? JOHN: Yeah, we have a few resources. My biggest thing is providing value, value, value, value up front so that way you can position yourself as a thought leader, you can gain the trust of the people, they actually take your advice and leverage it and use it, and then creating more high-level, detailed courses for those people that are really trying to dive in heavily. We have a couple courses. We have a Web Design Studio Accelerator, which is for people that want to start their own web design accelerator, and then I have other job templates and SOP courses that people can leverage to learn and apply these skills. ROB: Solid. The SOP courses seem like something you can even also show to your team for training. JOHN: Oh yeah, that's what we do. We probably have 100+ videos for our team. We have one business – it's called IllustratorHub.com; the whole business runs on an SOP. I don't do anything with the business. It's automatically updated. Our team manages it, and it's just a great platform and a great example of creating these operating procedures in your business so that way you can thrive. ROB: Wow, that's excellent. Looping back to one thing you mentioned earlier – and I think I let it go a little bit too quickly; you mentioned beyond Webflow and WordPress – we dug into those differences there – but you also mentioned that you do work on the Shopify platform. If you look at their stock, they're not quite Zoom, but they're pretty close. This seems to have been a fairly banner year for that approachable “get an ecommerce store online” platform. What have you seen in terms of either how clients are investing differently in Shopify now or people who are putting stores online that hadn't quite gotten around to it yet? JOHN: I'm glad you brought up the Shopify stock, man, because it makes me feel like I'm Warren Buffett out here. [laughs] I bought 20 shares when it was like $60 bucks because I believed in the company and I saw what they were doing. With Shopify, I think, like you said, this year is their year. So many people are home. They want to start a business. They want something that's easy, that they can leverage, that they can create a high quality product. And that's what Shopify does. You look at some of the top stores, you have Kylie Jenner's Cosmetics, you have Allbirds, I think Warby Parker at one point was on Shopify. You have all these major brands running through this platform. It just goes to show you that it's made for commerce. People that are starting out like, “I want to sell some t-shirts” can open up a Shopify store, they can integrate it with Teelaunch, and then they can have these high-quality print on demand products with their own logo, their own brand on it. It's really low cost out of the gate. You can test and you can create this MVP, or minimum viable product, as Eric Ries would say, the writer of The Lean Startup, and ultimately you can really build your own brand for less than $1,000 bucks. ROB: Is Teelaunch a Shopify plug-in, or how does it work? JOHN: Yes, it's a Shopify app. They have hundreds of products – teacups, t-shirts. They even have air fresheners. It's ridiculous. [laughs] ROB: CafePress used to sort of let you do this, but you were listing stuff on their site. This is your own brand store. You can have your custom underpants, whatever you want. JOHN: Exactly. And they fulfill on your behalf, so if someone goes on your website and your shirt is $24.99, they go and buy that shirt – the app is integrated, so as soon as they make that purchase, it pushes to Teelaunch, they charge you the $12, $10 for the shirt and then the shipping, and then you take the rest for your profit. Then they ship it on your behalf to the customer, so you don't even have to touch the inventory. ROB: Very, very cool. John, when people want to find you and when they want to find 5Four Digital, where should they go to look you up? JOHN: They can find me at JohnDSaunders.co. That's where all of my resources and guides are. Also, I'm on Facebook and Instagram @JohnDSaunders, and that's pretty much where I'm at. ROB: Excellent. What's the “D” for in John D. Saunders? JOHN: David. ROB: Excellent. Perfect. JOHN: I have that because there's a famous ESPN newscaster who passed away a few years ago and his name is John Saunders. So, I had to put that “D” in there to add a little difference. ROB: Yep, I know that name. I remember that sportscaster. John D. Saunders of 5Four Digital, thank you for coming on the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast.  JOHN: Rob, thank you for having me, man. I'm happy to be here. ROB: Thank you much. Be well. Bye. JOHN: You too. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Erik Huberman is Founder and CEO of Hawke Media, an agency serving as “an outsourced CMO-level expert” which, Eric says, “puts client success ahead of our own.” The agency's “SWOT team” identifies “holes” in a client's marketing program and provides a “comprehensive à la carte menu of services and month-to-month contracts” to address those needs in a timely manner. Month-to-month works, Erik says, because the idea of signing a long-term contract with someone you have just met is like getting married to someone you've never even dated.” When the agency started 6-1/2 years ago, the scope of services was relatively narrow – primarily e-commerce. In short order, Erik added content creation, production work, and web design. Last year, the agency purchased its first affiliate agency. Erik says that it was the -commerce community that built Hawke Media and e-commerce is still 70 percent of the agency's business. Today, customized, data-driven, performance-based solutions facilitate product launch, scaling, and business vitalization for a broad range of industries and business sizes. “Big” companies are responsible for only two percent of the agency's revenues.  Erik says his agency's goal is to expand into 3 to 5 new territories this year. Rather than acquiring agencies or opening offices in new locations, Hawke hires talent in places “of interest.” When things in a particular area “start to open up,” the agency evaluates the kind of space they want . . . and if they want a space. New markets are selected based on market opportunity, cost of living. high concentration of ecommerce brands, SMBs, startup community, and agency saturation. He believes that TikTok, once it scrapes through the political issues, will be “one of the first things since Facebook and Instagram, to be a viable [and quite possibly great] advertising platform.” Erik notes that building community is one of his agency's core values. Hawkefest, an annual summit, has drawn 600 brand owners every year for the past 3 years. Since inception, the agency has sponsored weekly e-commerce Happy Hours, recently started fun bi-weekly Zoom events, and even more recently introduced a trivia night. The agency will partner with the city of LA to hose an e-commerce week starting September 28.  Erik says that one thing he has learned over the years is that hiring and investing ahead of expected growth is “always a mistake.” Reacting to reality makes growth far more sustainable than proactively building for something that might or might not happen. Hiring and training executive talent is more difficult than hiring and training staff. Hawke operates a venture fund that invests in marketing and e-commerce technology and e-commerce brands. E-commerce-related business doubled in Q2 of this year . . . both large businesses and small. Eric sees cellphone SNS (social networking service) marketing as a massive opportunity in the coming months, even more so than email. Erik can be found on his agency's website at https://hawkemedia.com/ or on any social media platform, including TikTok, @ or /ErikHuberman.  ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am very excited to be joined today by Erik Huberman, Founder and CEO and Hawke Media based in Santa Monica, California. Welcome to the podcast, Erik. ERIK: Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's good to be here. ROB: Excellent to have you here. I've heard about Hawke Media for years; why don't you tell us about Hawke Media? ERIK: Sure. Started about 6-½ years ago, basically with the idea that great marketing is not accessible. As a business, it is really hard to find great marketing talent, whether to hire in-house or good marketers as agencies. I just got sick of the ecosystem and decided to build a small SWOT team to help the companies I knew needed help – a bunch of people each with their own expertise, like Facebook marketer, email marketer, web designer, fractional CMO, etc. I just created this a la carte, month to month really simple model where we go into a business, identify holes in their marketing, and then spin up those people. The whole idea is making great marketing accessible. ROB: A la carte, month to month is a little bit unusual. A lot of people aspire, especially as they grow and build their business, to get deeper into retainers, to get deeper into packages. How do you handle that degree of flexibility? ERIK: It's a few things. At scale, it's a lot easier because averages play out. We know on average, we're going to keep this many clients, sign this many clients, lose this many clients, etc., so that we can actually staff accordingly. Again, the percentage variability gets a little more evened out. Our people work on multiple companies. Our biggest clients are 2% of our revenue. It allows for a lot of spread-out, so it allows us to actually build a business that is sustainable around doing that. What's nice is our clients actually get the benefit of the efficiency of our employees working on multiple companies, so it allows us to charge less, make it easy, but then we get the benefit of the averages playing out and being able to ebb and flow as companies come and go when they need us. ROB: I feel like I hear a layer of systems-thinking underneath what you're sharing here. You're talking about thinking about average duration, and even when you're talking about sharing staff and clients and being able to spread the work around, there's some knowledge transfer that has to happen. Have you had a natural dispensation towards process? How did you come to the ability to build and hand off a client? A lot of agencies really can't handle that. ERIK: This is my fifth business, so I've done a lot of operations. I wouldn't say I'm necessarily an ops guy. I'm an operator in terms of the traditional sense of the word, but I'm not – honestly, it's 7 years of doing this, almost. Now I know the numbers cold. I manage my business, I care about it, I love it, so all these things have become very clear. In the beginning, it was a lot simpler. When I hired seven people, it was more just “How do I create something sustainable and profitable?” Then you start to see these benefits and you start to be able to scale off these benefits. It's the hindsight thing, where looking backwards, I can tell you why our company succeeded, but in the beginning I was like “This makes sense intuitively,” and it came from me running businesses and hating the way our agencies worked and continuing to have to make changes, and building off of that knowledge. But then a lot of the unforeseen benefits came in too. ROB: What were some of those prior businesses, if I dare ask? What was your journey? ERIK: There was a whole entrepreneurial journey of selling stuff door to door. Got into Beanie Babies when I was 8 years old and made a few thousand bucks. So, there's a lot of history there being an entrepreneur. But the real first business was actually filtering storm drains in California. California passed a law in 2006 that you legally had to filter your storm drain. If you were caught not doing it, you would end up getting I think a $75,000 curb drain fine. It was big. I had a friend that pursued solving that problem and being the one that would actually handle that. I came in as his partner and handled sales and marketing, and we started to scale it. There's a very long story here, but it was that. Then I went into real estate the week before the entire banking industry collapsed, made $350 that year and went, “I've got to figure out something else,” because that's a really rough sustainability in terms of salary, to live in LA on $350 a year. There's no arrows pointing there. So, I started an online music company, built it for 2 years, hired a CEO to take over. We got it to profitability and then I realized it wasn't going to be that big. Then I built and sold two consecutive fashion subscription ecommerce companies. Scaled them really fast, did really well. ROB: I imagine in that ecommerce you had some agency partners that maybe didn't function the way you were hoping they would? ERIK: Yeah. The number one thing, which is why we're so keen on month to month, was the idea of signing a year contract with someone I just met. Like, “Let's get married even though we've never dated.” ROB: In the early days of Hawke Media, how did you even come to the name? What's the significance behind it? What did the early days look like? ERIK: I wish I had a good story for the name. It really was as simple as I was originally going to call it Growth Hacker Group, and I mentioned it to a friend that was a partner of mine, helping me do some media buying, and he's like, “Erik, I just signed with Walmart. You think they'd ever put their name on a contract that says ‘Growth Hacker Group'? Just keep it simple.” I grew up in a small town called Ojai; I loved red-tailed hawks as a kid. Basically, I started looking on GoDaddy at 9 p.m. at night. I still remember sitting there, and I found that Hawk Media without the “e” was taken, but with the “e” wasn't. I was like, “That sounds good. I like that.” Made the website, and we were off to the races. It was that simple. ROB: And now, at least when we actually do go to conferences, your logo, that name – those are things that you see at conferences commonly. Hawke's a meaningful name out in the business world, so congratulations. ERIK: Thank you. And that's something to learn about all names and all brands. It's what you make of them. It doesn't really matter. I've really learned, especially in B2B, just make a name that isn't going to turn anyone off. It should be pretty simple. And then what it turns into is based on how you build your business – your reputation, your consistency. ROB: Did you ever have an inclination to pursue the rebrand, or was that an idea you had disabused yourself of in prior businesses? ERIK: Say that again, sorry? ROB: The name. Did you ever, over the course of the journey, have an inclination towards changing it? Or is it an inclination you shook yourself of in prior businesses and learned that lesson earlier? ERIK: The only thing we've talked about with Hawke Media is dropping the “Media” at times. But no, again, at this point we've made the name what it is and we're happy with what it is, so there's no reason to change it. ROB: Early on, were there any particular lines of business you were deep into? Were you deep into ecommerce from Day 1? Any particular things you said you wouldn't do? Were you not doing SEO or paid social? Or has it been the full board? ERIK: We definitely have scaled our services. We bought an affiliate agency last year; we didn't do it before that. We didn't do much content creation for clients for a while. We didn't do production work. In the very beginning we didn't do web design. That came in pretty quickly. So that's definitely evolved over time. Ecommerce was a big core of our business because that was my background, and in the beginning, it was all arm's reach. Anyone I knew that needed help is who hired us. So, it was mostly the ecommerce community that built us. We're still probably 70% ecommerce because those clients begot other clients, etc., etc., and it just scaled from there. But we're agnostic in what we want to take; just our reputation is massive in ecom. ROB: Certainly, and that probably drives some of where you show up, where you speak, where you market. Not entirely, but a good amount. ERIK: Yeah. That is the core. Again, it's 70%, which I like. I'm happy that we still have the 30% that isn't, and we do a lot of cool stuff in SaaS and brick-and-mortar stuff and even restaurants and gyms and all sorts of stuff that was more affected during this. But a lot of it has been – it's nice to have that diversification, but we've doubled down on e-com, too. We're hosting Ecommerce Week LA with the city of LA as a partner September 28th. ROB: Interesting. Have you done that before? Is this the first year of that event?  ERIK: This is the first year. We've done a summit every year for brand owners called Hawkefest and had about 600 brand owners every year at that, and then we wanted to parlay it into something bigger. I'm the guy that, when we accomplish something, I'm like “Great, what's next?” Hawkefest has gone really well. It's been awesome. We've done it for 3 years, and it was like “What's next?” So, we got the city of LA to sign off on doing a full week of events. We were trying to push it for last year, but we couldn't get it done with the city on time, so now it's this year. Now with what's happening with COVID, we're going virtual with it. But the nice thing about virtual – and we've already thrown some virtual events – is we can have way larger headcount and way bigger pipeline, which means for next year, it becomes a great audience and community to make next year that much bigger. ROB: Right. At that point we may be able to travel, we may be a little bit itchy to travel and maybe come on out to the LA area. ERIK: Exactly. ROB: Especially in the fall. Some of us are looking to get away from where it's getting cold. ERIK: LA's a beautiful place. ROB: Absolutely. As long as you have more than $350 a year to make a living. ERIK: Or at that point a really good max on my credit card. That helps. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] You mentioned it was the third year of Hawkefest. What did the first year of Hawkefest look like that you punched up to get to 600 people? What made you feel like it was something that you needed to pursue? ERIK: It was pretty big the first year. I think it was 300 the first year. It wasn't like some massive jump. We could afford more, so we spent more to give more room for people. We capped it out. That was 3 years into business, the first one. We knew we had a community around us, I had connections, etc., that we could pull it off. It was something I wanted to do from the beginning. We've hosted Ecommerce Happy Hours since before I started Hawke Media, and now we're hosting what we call NightHawke, which is biweekly Zoom fun events. Tomorrow night we're doing a trivia night. So, we do stuff like that. Build community is one of our core values. That has always been a big part of what we're doing. Once I started to see the momentum, I realized basically at the end of Year 2, “Hey, now we're at a point where financially we can take the risk. We have enough partners and sponsors we could probably bring in. I feel confident I can bring in the speakers people want to see and we can get it out to an audience. Let's go for throwing our big summit.” It was something I had in mind for a long time and then pulled it off. And then once we did and felt comfortable with it, then we started making it an annual thing, so then we had it for 3 years. We were going to have a fourth one this year; the idea was it was going to be the capstone of Ecommerce Week. But with COVID, we decided to literally just not have that piece. We don't need to have a virtual Hawkefest. We can just have Ecom Week. ROB: Seems like you're always thinking one step of what's been done and one step of what's next. What are we looking to see in Hawke Media in the next couple of years? I get the impression you might know where you're driving with it. ERIK: Oh yeah, 100%. It's shifted, and it's still shifting because of, again, the change in the world. But we wanted to expand into three to five new territories this year. We have a list, which is Dallas, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boise. They're places we wanted to open up this year. We already have New York, Boston, and LA. Originally it was, “Let's look at maybe acquiring a couple agencies or opening offices in those places.” Acquiring is harder because it's harder to meet these agencies. Opening offices makes no sense. But hiring in those places now really does, so we've actually made hires in Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, and Chicago already, and we're interviewing someone in Boise right now. San Francisco we haven't touched yet, but the rest are starting to move. We're just doing it backwards. We're actually making the hires first, and then when things start to open up, we can assess what kind of space we want, if we want any in those territories. So, we've started to execute on that. Our M&A is ramping back up. Just got off a call before this with a company we're looking to maybe acquire. So, we have quite a pipeline there. Hired someone new to build out that corporate development arm of our business. Our venture fund has performed incredibly well because we're invested mostly in marketing and ecommerce technology along with ecommerce brands – which if anyone's paying attention, doubled in Q2 this year because that's where the most benefit came from with this. And that includes Shopify doubling, not just Amazon. Small businesses doubled too. We're just seeing a lot of success on that side too. So that's the gist, along with I'd say the biggest new challenge, which is: how do you create nuance and camaraderie amongst a team when they don't get to hang out by the coffee machine or in the lunchroom? That's something we're working through. We're going to be hiring a new Head of People and HR and trying to think through how to build a really tightknit remote team. ROB: It seems like some of the things you're doing for fun with the NightHawke sort of events – it seems like there's almost a virtuous cycle between the stuff you're going to do to build a good remote team and the stuff that's going to be good for a broader community. You could do a trivia internally or externally, and it probably transfers well. ERIK: That's 100% right. We include our own employees in our events, so there is overlap. Community is community. Our internal people, external, etc., we try to open it up to everyone. But yeah, exactly. That's part of it, but the one thing that's hardest to replicate that we're still thinking through is, how do I create that nuance where two random people that don't work on the same team meet each other at lunch and then end up going out for drinks, being friends? The amount of people that become best friends or roommates, etc., through Hawke Media – even couples – is something I value. The fact that people can actually meet – if you survey our team – and we just did this, and I got a lot of the feedback yesterday. We asked all the good and bad, like “Be blunt with us; what do you love, what do you hate?” Number one thing everyone says is they love the people around them. We've got to keep that. That is critical for our business. ROB: Yeah. What do you do? ERIK: I work on it. [laughs] That's the fun thing. I'm interviewing for Heads of HR. It's my main question to them. It's a hard one. I've talked to people with 15-20 years of solid HR experience at great companies, and it's like, “Uh, happy hours on Zoom on Fridays?” Like, sorry, no. I mean, it's fun to have now and then, but that doesn't really do it. That gets the 15 people that like to drink and like each other already to hang out. That doesn't get the people that would've never met each other to actually do it. So, creating that – we have something called Donuts that automatically pairs two people a week to grab coffee. Someone random every week, or someone you already know. A lot of times it's people you already know. That's been fun, but we've made it optional. I'm almost ready to make it mandatory so that people just have to meet someone every week. Those are the kinds of things we're – again, it's not easy. ROB: You had to already be thinking about this, though, because you were looking at these new markets. You already were operating on a predicate of being even more distributed than you already were. I'm curious, though; what was your process in selecting the new cities that you're going into? ERIK: It was mostly market opportunity. Five of them out of the six new ones are basically the Top 5 cities where we already have business. They have the highest concentration of ecommerce brands, SMBs, startup community, etc. Most opportunity, along with – it's also measured against the agency saturation. There were a lot of cities that had similar opportunities, like Denver, that may have a lot of marketing agencies. It's just going to be too competitive for the market share. We did a whole analysis over a bunch of different – and also we were looking at cost of living. Like, are these places where we can actually build teams in a little more cost-effective way? And then Boise came up because actually my COO moved to Boise 2 years ago – I think it's been a little over 2 years – and has been commuting in to the office from Boise every week, in LA. Obviously with COVID, is not, and we're probably not going to be asking that again in terms of full-time. So that's always been a desire. Boise is a much cheaper place to hire, it's got great talent and probably a lot more loyalty. LA and New York are tough because our employees literally get emailed every day to get poached. So, we have to work really, really, really hard to keep them, and still it's almost a futile effort a lot of the times because you've got Google and Facebook offering four times their salary sometimes. So yeah, part of it is just diversifying. That's really good too. But mostly it was the market opportunity. We know that our clients like working with a local partner. ROB: Right. It is clever with places like Boise, where you're college-adjacent but you're not a college town, so you can make really high quality talent hires and keep them somewhere they like to be, but it's not just a stone-cold college town where there's no business there to be earned. ERIK: Yep. ROB: Makes a ton of sense. Erik, when we look back at the journey so far, 6 years or so with Hawke Media, what are some lessons you've learned along the way you might do differently if you were starting over today? ERIK: I'd say probably the most mistakes I made had to do around a few things. One is we learned hiring ahead of growth and investing ahead of growth, assuming growth is coming, is always a mistake. Things happen, things change. It's never what you predicted. So being more reactive than proactive in all the ways we build out our business has always been a much more sustainable way. It causes little pain points because sometimes you grow too fast and you've got to deal with a lot of stress, but that's better than not growing fast enough and being overstaffed, overleveraged, etc. That's been a big lesson that thankfully we got through, but that caused a lot of stress at times when we tried to double and we only grew 60%. That becomes a problem. Funny enough, growing 60% is still a huge win, unless you spent money like you were going to grow 100%. That's one thing I learned. Also, when hiring executives and building out executive teams, a lot of people think it's going to be – and including I used to – when you hire an executive, they take that thing off your plate. So, if I'm going to hire a Head of HR, now HR is handled. That takes a year plus, and you've got to be hyper-collaborative and working very directly with it during that time. That's been the other thing that's really helped at this point scale: spending a lot of time with our executives on how I want to see the business run so that they get up to speed and start to think similarly so they really, truly can run that piece the way we want it run. ROB: You're typically probably hiring people you have measured to be fairly capable. If someone's expecting, does it take longer to get an executive performing the way you want or a staff? ERIK: Oh, executive by far. There's just so much more nuance. People are the same. I get that there's people that are smarter and dumber, etc., but we hire smart people across the board. So, it's not an aptitude thing. A lot of times experience helps them do certain things, but there's so many moving parts for an executive that they have to pull into and understand all the nuances of the business. It just takes a lot longer to get those nuances so that in their quick decision-making, it starts to take account of the nuances they've been now accustomed to. It takes time because there isn't – our business in a lot of ways is unique. We do things differently. Most businesses do certain things differently, so they have to get ingrained with that nuance before they can really be productive. ROB: It's interesting what you say there. I think we all get happy hiring hands sometimes when we're excited about growth. We see it coming, but it's not quite there. But how do you know – it sounds like you hire at that point where it's almost too late, and I mean that in the best way. ERIK: That's correct, yeah. And every once in a while it is too late, in a sense, and it causes our team to work harder than they really want to or should. I've been very clear with our team that that's going to happen sometimes. That is part of the job. There will be times, like most agencies and consultancies and service businesses and any business, where you have to put in 60-hour weeks. That exists. Then we'll right-size and we'll get you back to normal hours, and then it'll happen again. It's kind of an ebb and flow. Unlike investment banking, we're not making people work 100+ hours a week all the time. But we definitely have ebbs and flows where there's some hard periods.  ROB: Is there a measurable you're able to use to figure that out? Is it a number of hours billable? Is it a utilization rate? ERIK: Exactly. We look at utilization and we look at our people, and how many clients they're managing and what the average time spent on a client is overall. At this point we've been doing this long enough, we have a lot of averages, so we can give an idea of like, “That person's fully loaded, that person's way overloaded,” etc. Again, we have enough size now that we should be able to never overload someone more than 10%, meaning going from 40 to 45 hours a week. When it gets more than that, it's usually either a perfect storm of a ton of sales and maybe someone leaving or something that is painful. But generally we're okay there. ROB: That definitely makes sense. I think it's hard sometimes for people to imagine – when you are at let's say 10 people, they're not even all interchangeable functionally, so you may have some roles that are overlapped only by two or three people. So, you're trying to figure out these huge step functions of “How do I increase my capacity here by 50% and when do I pull the trigger on that one?” Although I imagine in a lot of those cases, and maybe for you, that's also the founders eating some of the pain. ERIK: Exactly. Everybody has to jump in sometimes, so the pain gets spread out too. [laughs] ROB: Interesting. Of the different marketing channels that you're involved in, what has been bumping up as a good opportunity? What's been attenuating? And maybe an upcoming opportunity that we don't realize yet? ERIK: I'd say SNS marketing is a massive one. We're seeing crazy performance there, and I think that'll continue, especially as things open back up, because getting people on their cellphone and texting when they're out and about is a great way to reach people versus email. Email's still powerful, to be clear, but I think SNS will also be a great platform. I think TikTok, if you can get through the political stuff, is still – it's one of the first things since Facebook and Instagram that looks like a very viable advertising platform. I hope Snapchat figures it out, but it's still not as great. Twitter is not really great, YouTube is not really great. But I think TikTok will end up being a great platform. ROB: Do you think Microsoft can manage to not mess it up if they do buy it? ERIK: They did a great job with LinkedIn. They did a terrible job with Skype. [laughs] It just depends on how they manage it. If they keep it separate and let it go – I know a lot of the senior team at TikTok in the U.S. I think there's a great team there. There's an opportunity there, and I think Microsoft's way of M&A has gotten better. ROB: Sure. They've done a good job with GitHub as well. They really have chilled out on a lot of things they maybe used to goof up. TikTok, I imagine, has pretty strong alignment with where you are geographically. ERIK: Yeah. They also have offices in New York, but yeah. I think they've created something that's a very passive user experience. Once they build out their advertising platform better – again, ignoring the political side of this – I think the way people use it is going to be a really powerful ad platform. We're one of the first official partners to TikTok, agency-wise. ROB: What does that mean? ERIK: We've got a full-time team there that's working with us on everything we need to do to make the platform better and utilize it correctly, and if we have any needs to perform, basically. Same thing we have with Facebook and Google. We have full-time teams, we're on the Slack, etc., so we can make sure campaigns are run with best practices. We can have them double down with us. It's a true partnership in that sense. ROB: That's a real asset. What is your engagement with legacy media? You've got “Media” in your name, and some folks with media, it means very, very new media; some people, it only means very, very old media. What's your engagement with out-of-home and video?  ERIK: We utilize it all. TV, radio, out-of-home. We usually start with digital because it's a lot more iterative and we can actually test a lot better, but as our clients scale, we start leveraging all those other things too. We have great teams around more traditional media channels. And it works. It's different, and there's different ways to use all of them in a full marketing sense. ROB: I think what I heard in there is one of the things you may do is actually iterate on messaging in digital formats before amplifying it out to more analog. What's an example of maybe a campaign you can talk about where you figured that out? Maybe something a little bit unexpected in the digital domain. ERIK: Honestly, off the cuff, I have a hard time trying to think of where there was an “aha” moment. It's not like “Oh my God,” this epiphany like “That works way better. We should do that.” It was more like “Let's test these 10 messages. Okay, that's the message that's working really well on Facebook, but scale that a little bit. Okay, this value proposition has always performed the best. Let's use that value proposition on the billboards we're going to go buy.”  ROB: You're a tremendously sensible yet ambitious man. It's a fun thing to hear. It's all very matter-of-fact, “Yeah, we do it this way.” It's not so clever; it's just you almost seem to get out of your way by not trying to be too clever. ERIK: Yeah. We've had problems trying to work with big creative agencies that have these robust creative ideas. We're like, “Cool, but in practicality that means absolutely nothing and it's not going to drive any business. But it looks really pretty.” [laughs] We care about growth. We care about the company's goal, which is usually revenue and profit growth. That's what we're driving towards. ROB: On the ecommerce side, are you able to get everything dialed in enough to actually be able to tell them return on ad spend metrics and that sort of thing? ERIK: Oh yeah. We even like to talk more CAC to LTV because return on ad spend is super misleading if you have any kind of recurring business, and if you don't, that's a really hard digital business anyways. So yeah, we like to really give guidance into the real numbers versus – ROA ads is a very deep metric, and a lot of times it's misreported because they're not tracking long enough because the purchase cycle of a company, usually people forget. So, they'll spend ads today and look at ROA ads tomorrow. They completely forget that people take time to buy something from seeing an ad. It isn't instant. 95% of the time, it's not an instant purchase, so you're missing out on most of your returns if you look at marketing that way. That's the issue. That's not the way to look at it. ROB: It's interesting to hear that CAC to LTV mention, this customer acquisition cost to lifetime value. That kind of bleeds over into the startup and SaaS world. I know you're in the startup world as well with your venture arm. I think I saw you had somebody from Upfront speaking maybe last year at Hawkefest. Did that metric start more in the ecommerce side or more in the software side? How did it bleed over? ERIK: That comes from the ecommerce company I ran before. We were always CAC to LTV. That's a ratio that's mattered for a long time. Thankfully it's getting more and more prominent. Dollar Shave Club is a good example of this. Again, I worked at the incubator with them, and from what I've heard, their CAC was like $20 bucks and their average order value was $5. If you looked at their ROA ads, it was 25%. Like, that's terrible. But their lifetime value – I don't know what it was, but let's say it was 18 months. That would actually turn that $5 into $90. 20 to 90 is decent as long as you have the working capital to get through that. It's those kind of things – and it does matter. Also, knowing that payback period is super important too because you have to finance through it. So, there's all sorts of nuance there. Yeah, running a business is more complicated than just a return on ad spend, which is why you see all these guys that are posting on Facebook about their 50x return on ad spend that they're driving for companies and never seem to actually make any money. Because it's B.S. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] Perfect. That makes a ton of sense, especially with the subscription model. But I imagine as we go deeper and deeper into ecommerce, a lot of non-subscription businesses have become significantly more predictable and recurring. Have you seen something like let's say a Columbia Sportswear become almost like a subscription, even though it's not? ERIK: Not subscription in the sense that they're forcing people to buy on a certain regular cadence. It's more thinking about lifetime value, like “How do I get them to come back and buy more?” Managing your existing customer base and getting them to upsell and buy more is much cheaper than getting new customers and much more lucrative. Assuming you have a decent product that people like, it's way easier to get those customers to continue to buy. ROB: Perfectly sensible. Erik, when people want to find you and Hawke Media, where should they go to find you? ERIK: Any social media platform, @ or /ErikHuberman. Even TikTok. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] And what we will we find on your TikTok? ERIK: One video, I was sent a sweat suit by – what's Josh's last name? One of the biggest TikTokers. He just moved to Triller, too, because of all this stuff. Josh Richards, I think is his name. He's got like 20 million followers. He sent me a sweat suit. I had to wear it and make a TikTok video because it just felt like the right thing to do. It's me sliding in with the sweat suit on. It's important. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] Perfect. Erik Huberman of Hawke Media, thank you for coming on the podcast. Congratulations on everything you've done and everything you're doing. We'll look for your people in all these new American cities. ERIK: I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. ROB: Be well. ERIK: You too. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Raj Lala – CEO of Evolve ETFs   Rob: Good Day folks. I'm Rob Tétrault from robtetrault.com, head of the Tétrault Wealth Advisory Group here at Canaccord Genuity Wealth Management. Pretty excited today who we got here today. Raj Lala. He's CEO, president and founder of Evolve ETFs. Really glad to have him in our office here in Winnipeg. Thanks for coming, we are excited to have you and we're going to talk ETFs today. Evolve. You guys have really kind of evolved from, I'll say a niche player, to now becoming more mainland with some of the line's you guys have on the ETFs. First of all, I'd love to hear about how the company started, and why ETFs. Raj: Prior to putting a evolve together, I ran Wisdom Tree Canada, which is one of the world's largest CTF providers. Prior to that, I ran the retail business for Fear of Capital, which is one of the country's largest asset managers. Before that, I ran a company with a couple of partners and actually sold that to Fiera. Going all the way back, I worked at Jovian capital, which was a mid-sized financial services company. Jovian was actually the company that helped incubate the horizons ETFs. I intersected into the ETF business a couple of times. When I left wisdom tree towards the end of 2016, I decided I wanted to go out and build one. All my friends said I was nuts. How are you going to build something? It's way too competitive. You've got the banks, you've got the large asset managers. How are you going to compete? We already have 500 ETFs, today we have over 800 ETFs, but back then, 500 ETFs in the market.   Rob: This is in 2016?   Raj: This would have been at the end of 2016. And how are you really going to get traction? I said, you know what? You're actually right. If I was going to go and create kind of another XIU or another SPY you know, I think that those are very well covered by the big firms like the iShares and the Vanguards, but I believe that there's a couple of areas of the market that are either underserved or unserved. I'm a big believer that in certain asset classes you really need good active management because good active management can make a big difference on a risk adjusted return basis. What we did was we put together a lineup of asset classes, and specifically in fixed income for sure, that we felt truly do benefit from good active management. And then how we differentiate ourselves a little bit is we went out there and went across the globe, and of course folks here in Canada, to identify the kinds of portfolio managers that we could partner up with who had a great track record in that specific asset class. Oftentimes our competitors, what they'll do is they'll internalize that portfolio management, but sometimes the portfolio management team doesn't have a great deal of expertise. For us it was more important to find a manager with a brand, and that actually had a great track record. We've partnered up with Voiced and Gordon Pain to run a couple of funds for us. Our biggest fund, which has emerged somewhat of a flagship for us, is a Canadian preferred share fund that they run full as …   Rob: That's DIVS?   Raj: That's DIVS, yeah. We've partnered up with Voiced In also to run a Canadian core fixed income fund. We partnered up with Nuveen in the US – for those of you not familiar with Nuveen, Nuveen runs part of TIA, which is effectively the US version of Ontario teachers.   Rob: Okay, yeah.   Raj: They run about a trillion dollars. They're running a couple of funds for us, a US equity as well as a short duration yield, and the biggest manager that I've ever worked with in my career. About eight months ago, we launched a fund with Allianz Global Investors. Allianz right now runs about $2.2 trillion. The portfolio manager of our fund is the sister company to PIMCO. So really, these are segments of the market that we believe really benefit from good active management. Then the other pillar to our business where we've gotten a lot of press and a lot of attention is our thematic, primarily index-based ETFs. So focused on long-term trends, focused on strategies or sub sectors that you can point to that are really changing our world over the course of the next 10 years. But most importantly from an investment perspective, that they have a strong investment thesis behind them, and that they could never be confused with a fad. For example, we launched Canada's first cyber security ETF. Can't be a fad; everybody knows, all of your clients will know. I'm sure everyone has had an attempted breach. They have gotten an email from a bank that they don't bank with asking them to verify their account details, or a Microsoft email to verify their account. We're clear we're getting barraged by attempted hack in our world today, and it's only going to increase.   Rob: Let's talk about that one. So that is the cyber security ETF launched in the last year or so, right?   Raj: A year and a half ago.   Rob: So specifically, what kind of tech, what kind of companies are you targeting, what goes in there? How many names are in there?   Raj: That's an index based, passive ETF.   Rob: Okay.   Raj: What we do is, our typical index provider is a Frankfurt based company called Solactive. They're doing a number of ETFs in Canada as well, and what we do is we put together the methodology. They put together the methodology with us. I would go to Solactive and I would say I want to build a cybersecurity ETF. They would go and take a look at their entire list of indices. If they say, actually we don't have a cybersecurity index, they would go and build it. There's an organization called Factset. Factset creates the methodology. Effectively, every company that would be classified as a cybersecurity company that's publicly listed, that also has a minimum market cap of 100 million for that fund. Depends on the fund, but for that fund – Minimal Heart Capital – 100 million. And then minimum trading volume of 2 million a day makes it into our portfolio.  So right now, that's about 37 companies.   Rob: That's globally?   Raj: That's globally.   Rob: How many of those are in North America?   Raj: About 75% is US based. There's nothing right now in Canada. And then you've got a little bit in Europe and you've got a little bit in Asia, but still it's been dominated. One of the interesting elements of Cybersecurity is that there's such a massive shortage of human capital in the cybersecurity world. I'll give you an example. When I take a look at this space in this sector and think long-term, here's what I think. First, we all know cyber-crime is going to continue to increase. Second, we all know that companies need to continuously increase their spending on cybersecurity. What's really interesting is that it's a nondiscretionary spend. You're never going to have a CEO of a major fortune 500 company after a terrible financial quarter stand up in front of their shareholders and their board and say, we've had to cut our spending on cybersecurity.   Rob: Right.   Raj: They will say that we've decided to close some offices, or that were the first certain initiatives, but they're never going to reduce their spending on cybersecurity because it's death if they get breached. Equifax, about two years ago, got a breach of 143 million records, right?   Rob: Stock dropped like crazy.   Raj: 35% drop and still hasn't recovered. Why hasn't it recovered? Because everybody left Equifax and went to companies like Transunion and never went back.   Rob: They don't have the confidence, right?   Raj: They don't have the confidence. You can imagine what it would be like for, let's say a bank, where if you lose that customer confidence they'll just go to another bank. They may never come back, and you spent all that money to acquire that customer, and tens of years to get there, you never want to lose it. It's really important. Then the third part to it is that a lot of people don't know that cyber security is one of the very few sectors today that actually has negative unemployment. There is a shortage of about 3 million people, meaning there are 3 million job vacancies in the cybersecurity world. What has happened is a lot of the largest companies, government agencies, fortune 500s or banks, contract out a huge portion of their cyber security work. Typically, a Canadian Bank for example, might have between 3 to 5 million attempted breaches per day. They need a cyber security company to help them weed through the real threats and the artificial threats as well. When you look at a product like that, the investment thesis behind it is yes, cybercrime is going to continue to increase. Companies need to continuously increase their spending on cybersecurity, making it somewhat recession proof. Finally, there's a shortage of human capital, a massive shortage of human capital, which means most of the work needs to be contracted out. If you're CEO of a fortune 500 company, are you going to contract out that work to a small private cybersecurity company or are you going to contract …   Rob: Publicly listed.   Raj: Bingo. So that's that fund. So that fund …   Rob: How's it done?   Raj: First of all, it ended up being the top performing equity ETF from Canada last year.   Rob: Wow.   Raj: Right now, we launched at the end of September, so we're, what, call it a year and eight months, and we're up over 50%.   Rob: Wow.   Raj: From point to point and not been an easy market the last year and a half …   Rob: Right.   Raj: … it's performing incredibly well, but what I love about it is the long-term investment thesis is strong. And then another example of that would be our Future of the Automobile ETF.   Rob: Yeah. You know what, let's talk about Canada's first future car ETF. I'm here with Raj Lala, CEO of Evolve ETFs. Raj, why would someone launch a future cars ETF?   Raj: I think that the next 10 years will be the biggest transformation in the automotive industry, not just of our lifetime, but in history.   Rob: Do you think oil is going to eventually not be a player at all?   Raj: I think what's interesting is the misconception as to how much of oil demand is derived from automobiles. It's not as much as you think it is. It's about 20%.   Rob: Right.   Raj: Oil is used for so many other things, right? So, yes, I believe that in the next 10 years, that 20% will shrink dramatically for sure. Because we have countries today like India and China who have both publicly declared that they will ban the combustible engine in the next 10 to 15 years – China in 2030, India in 2035.   Rob: Okay. So, this ETF, how does it play that?   Raj: When I looked at – again, the long-term trends are shaping our world – the long-term trend, I'm a firm believer that in the next 5 to 10 years, we will have self-driving cars on the road, autonomous cars. I'm a firm believer that electric vehicles will continue to rise in popularity, especially as the cost comes down and it is coming down. The cost of manufacturing the battery is coming down, countries are putting in place policies ...   Rob: Infrastructure's improving.   Raj: … Infrastructure's improving, the auto manufacturers are moving from combustible engine, to hybrid, to eventually full electric. You're seeing all of that. I mean, more electric vehicles were sold last year than all other years combined. China's producing about 39 million electric vehicles right now. They have that much demand at the moment. You're seeing all of this taking place. On the electric side it's firmly embedded. It's firmly going to continue on the self-driving side. I do believe that you're eventually going to have self-driving cars. In fact, I was just talking to a couple of other people about it, and I said I think in the next 12 months, most people here in Canada will actually have their first experience in a self-driving car. Somebody will be sitting at the steering wheel, but they won't be touching anything. They'll just be there to make sure that the car is safe. But we are definitely getting to the point where the technology is there. And I'll give you an interesting stat. In order to power a self-driving car, a semiconductor chip needs to have the ability to make 10 million decisions per second.   Rob: Okay.   Raj: That's how many decisions you and I are making per second when we're driving. Now you could think that doesn't make any sense, because I know I'm not making 10 million decisions per second. You are, it's just subconscious. Right now, the best something semiconductor chips can power about 4 million decisions per second. So, we're still 40% of where we need to be to power a self-driving car.   Rob: There's not enough computation power right now to drive, is what you're saying?   Raj: Right. The way it works in self driving cars is level 5 would be a fully self-driving car. Today we're at about level 3.5, so we still have a ways to go to get there, and then we've got to deal with legislation, and then we've got to deal with insurance. If you get into an accident, who has the insurance claim? You're not driving the car, so it was that the auto manufacturers. That's all the stuff that still needs to get sorted out. But I believe that we're getting there, and that the amount of increase in safety that it's going to create, and also decrease the amount of traffic and congestion. I live in Toronto and I know how bad the traffic is, and self-driving cars would be great. Then the other side to that business is also the shared. Shared is a super interesting side of the business. when I'm talking to 65 or 70-year old's, and their grandparents, I say to them, if you're thinking about saving money for buying your grandchild a car, go on a trip. Don't waste your money. Because as kids are getting older, they actually don't want to drive. Most kids don't want to drive, they want to be Ubered or Lifted around. Or they might even consider a shared a model where they have a partial ownership of a car, but they don't actually even really want to own a car. Very different than when we grew up.   Rob: I couldn't wait to save money to buy my first car.   Raj: Right. I couldn't wait until I could get my driver's license and drive my Dad's Monte-Carlo around, and eventually get my own car. It's different. Younger people are different today. They don't want it. The shared side is also another aspect of this. That fund really kind of encapsulates what is actually like   Rob: What are the companies that we're buying? Are we buying like Waymo and those kinds companies?   Raj: Great question. Well, although Waymo is making a lot of progress and …     Rob: And Waymo is Google's self-driving car.   Raj: Yeah. Although Waymo is making a lot of progress and some people think they're the front runner, the challenge with Waymo is, unless Google spins it out, we would have to buy Google. And so how do you do it then? What are you actually buying? Typically, you would have to generate between 25 to 35% of your overall revenue from these aspects 25 months ago. And Waymo is not generating. Waymo is not making up 25% of Google's revenue as an example rate. It has to be more of a pure play. And what we also did was we equal weighted this fund instead of market cap weight. And the reason we did that was because if we market cap weighted it then investors would basically just have a lot of exposure to the car manufacturers. Rob: Right.   Raj: What we wanted was to give investors the experience of having exposure to the supply chain, the companies that are creating the batteries, the companies that are creating the semiconductors, the technology that's going into self-driving cars, electric vehicles.   Rob: So is this one an index or is this one …   Raj: It is.   Rob: It's an index as well as, and there'll be some supply chain, there'll be some car manufacturers, there'll be some battery makers, there'll be all of that.   Raj: You got it.   Rob: Nice, very interesting.   Raj: And then one other fund that ties into those two, which I think is always relevant is the Innovation Fund. The TSS ticker for that is edge. The reason we created that was because when we were talking to a lot of advisors, and we're talking to a lot of clients, you know, we, we heard them say to us that I love your cyber security ETF, I love your Future of the Automobiles ETF. Don't know how it fits into my portfolio. So, could you create something that becomes kind of a catchall to all the disruptive industries and companies that are really shaping our world over the course of the next 10 years? We created Edge to basically be that proxy. So effectively, it has six buckets; in in a week from now, we'll actually have seven buckets, but six buckets. One bucket allocates to our cybersecurity ETF, one bucket allocates – and it's all equal, so, one sixth in each – one allocates to the Future of the Automobile. Then it also allocates to Robotics and Automation, and also to Data, Genomics and Social Media. All of the industries gives you a more diversified way to invest in everything that is shaping our world. And you know, it's a super interesting world, there's a lot of things that are going to change. I'm actually a firm believer that in the next 10 years most of us will have robots living in our house. We'll have cars and …   Rob: Not just doing our vacuuming,   Raj: No, not just doing our vacuuming. First robot was actually the dishwasher. That was the first official encounter with a robot. And now it's the vacuum or the Roomba. Now we're migrating because artificial intelligence is becoming so strong, which is super important. We will have robots performing surgeries on us without that nine month wait list. It's a super exciting world. And these are all the industries and the companies and sectors that are changing it, and making it better.   Rob: I'm here with Raj Lala CEO of Evolve ETFs. Let's talk briefly about cannabis ETFs. There's a lot of talk that's been about HMMJ, kind of the first ETF that came out. You guys approached it a little differently. Tell me about the two that you have on the shelf now.   Raj: Yeah, good question. When we started looking at the cannabis space, I started looking at it actually a few years ago and decided not to launch a product because I just still didn't feel like the social stigma was positive enough towards cannabis. This was pre legalization of course. Then we started getting more comfortable and started taking a closer look at it. What we decided as a firm is that we felt that it made a lot of sense to take an active approach to this market, because there's a lot of things at play that are a little bit unique to the space, legislation, momentum, things like that. It's a niche play. We have two – as you mentioned – we have two cannabis funds. One that's kind of Canadian/Global, and then one that we launched just about two months ago, which was actually the first in the world focused on the US space. I'll talk really quickly about both. The Canada global one has been around for about a year and a half now, and over the last year, the top performing ETF actually in Canada.   Rob: It was up like 40% or something like that?   Raj: Yeah, up about 43% for the one year. It's done incredibly well, and our management team has done a fantastic job of managing it.   Rob: How many those names would be in that one?   Raj: There're about 35 names in it.   Rob: So that's an actively managed ETF. Management is picking stock selection that's happening in there. Arbitrage, you're trying to find deals that are going to come. Overprice; is it long short or is it strictly long?   Raj: Strictly long.   Rob: Strictly long, and you're trying to find value.   Raj: Very little in privates. Like you know, we can only allocate about 10% into privates. But what the guys did, I think where they really generated some strong alpha would have been in Q3/Q4 of last year. Leading up to legalization in October, we took the view about a month and a half prior to legalization that the euphoria that was going to go into the space was going to go into the big names, the Aphrias, the Canopies, the Auroras of the world. We went overweight into those names, a week and a half to two weeks prior to legalization. The team took the view that there's not a chance that post legalization reality is going to live up to all this hype. What they did was they went way under on the large caps and they also started to allocate to some of the tertiary businesses like the Scott's Miracle Grow. In that two-month period, we added about close to 20% Alpha versus the passive index. The active approach has really worked well for us in that fund. As we started to focus on that fund, we started to recognize the opportunity that exists in the US cannabis space. Looked at stats like Planet 13, which is a big dispensary business in the US, had more revenue than Kronos, but had one 20th the market cap of Kronos. The US companies were way undervalued. Part of it was because there's a lot of legislative things to deal with in the US as it's not federally legal yet in the US, but we hope that that's going to change the next couple years. But then you have States Act, Farm Act, Safe Act, all these things that are kind of coming into play at the moment and went, and US companies cannot also list in the US right now, so they're listing here in Canada. But the opportunity is massive. We look at the US opportunity to be kind of like the way the Canadian opportunity was like three years ago.   Rob: You're trying to get ahead of the bump there.   Raj: What we try to do with our business, is always try and look forward. I try to stay away from, oh this is a sector that has performed the best over the last five years, so let's launch this product. If you don't have the conviction or the strength to believe that it's going to continue for the next five years, then I don't think you should do it. You should be thinking early stages. Like for example, we launched a Materials and Mining Needs ETF just last month. It's not a popular sector, right? It's been beaten and battered and bruised. But we believe that that's a sector that's going to recover over the course of the next couple of years and we want to be there for that recovery. So, the same type of logic. On the US side for cannabis, our view is that as legislation starts to become more friendly towards cannabis companies, you're going to start to see more value go into those stocks, more investors moving into them eventually. They'll also be listing in the U S which will be a lot easier for Americans to buy, versus trying to buy a Canadian listed stock. As you and I both know, the potential of the US market is always 10 or more to 1 versus Canada. The big advantage that they've got, like you look at California, which is the interesting one, California …   Rob: The size of Canada. Raj: Right, similar size. But they allowed them to brand the products and market them properly and things like that. We don't unfortunately have that hear in Canada, so the US will most likely displace Canada in many ways in that space. We want to be there early.   Rob: And these are listed companies in Canada that are in the ETF?   Raj: That's right.   Rob: It's a real neat idea. Congrats, and want to talk about one more. It's really interesting to me. I'm here with Raj Lala, CEO of Evolve ETFs. Let's talk about Hero. The ETF that you guys launched about Canada's first e-gaming ETF. I played a lot of video games and as a kid, I still wish I had more time to play them. What's Hero?   Raj: I love this fund. It's an interesting story. I would say about nine months ago, multiple people brought the idea to me; have you looked at the gaming industry, because it's really taken off in a big way. I have two 11-year-old daughters that do not really spend much time gaming. I think my mom spends more time gaming because she plays a lot of candy crush cause she's retired. I was looking at that whole space and I was like, I don't see. And then as I started to really drill down into it, I was like, wow, this is a massive, massive space. There are today 2.2 billion gamers in the world. A gamer would be defined as somebody that spends six hours or more a week gaming. Okay, so 2.2 billion. That's a third of the population …   Rob: That's a lot of time, a lot of time.   Raj: That's a lot of time, and it's a third of the population. Most of it is on people's smartphones. So originally, I was thinking, okay, but how does this make a lot of sense? Because when I think of video gaming, I think about, yeah, when you and I were teenagers, we were playing video games or in today's world, you've got your teenager up in their room playing video games or in the basement or what have you, and then realized how big the market was because it is people like retired people playing candy crush and word search games, things like that. It is 40 something year olds. I've got friends that are 40 something years old, working on the trading desks at the banks, that wake up on a Saturday morning and they hop online and play an e-sport together with their friends for three, four hours. The demographics for this are enormous. That's interesting. Then I started to take a closer look at the business model of these companies. And that's where I would say I had my aha moment that we need to launch this type of product. Because in our days when, we wanted to play video games, we would go to the store, buy the cartridge or the CD, we'd come home, we'd plug it into the console, and away we went, right? But that's where the revenue stopped for the game manufacturer. In today's world, they have an entire vertical of revenue. So, Fortnite as an example …   Rob: It's unbelievable.   Raj: It's a free game, right? But where they make their money is the boosters, the weapons, the players, all that kind of stuff. Right? But companies like Tencent effectively and directly owns Fortnite. But technically it's not just creating the revenue off that game. What these game manufacturers are also doing, like Activision, Blizzard, EA and Tencent is that they're creating the leagues that people compete in.   Rob: Yes.   Raj: And then they create the events. The events are very interesting. Last year, Dota 2 was a big event, actually the biggest event so far. It was actually in Vancouver. They had over a hundred million people. League of legends as well, had over a hundred million people watching it. So not just filling stadiums to watch people play games, which surprised me, but watching online. Today, 11% of all YouTube video viewing hours is about gaming. Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, is all about gaming. These companies have created an entire vertical of revenue for the game. Then it leads to media rights, cause now ESPN is broadcasting, TSN is broadcasting. Then at leads to sponsorship rights. You can see how the business model has morphed, evolved and improved significantly for these game manufacturers, which I find super interesting. I never thought in my lifetime that people would go and fill stadiums to watch other people play games. But they have. And so, when I look at this and I look at how it's just starting now, you've got 5G coming. When 5G comes, it means that graphics are going to improve in games, it's going to be faster to play online. 5G is going to change a lot of things of course, but gaming is definitely one of them. You're seeing it, and Fortnite is a great example. You know the average revenue generated per user is getting close to $100. It's $96 right now per user. Give you something to equate that to the average revenue per user on Facebook, Google, Twitch is about $25. Fortnite is generating four times more revenue per user than some of these others because they've built a great business model off of this. I mean, how many times do you here this story, that my teenager needs to take my credit card. That's why they use PayPal now because they want to buy boosters and weapons and things like that. I look at all of that and I think this is a real business. A lot of people have their eyes on this sector. And I thought, okay, so I get the business model, I get the investment case; let's create a passive index. It's passive market cap weighted.  We just launched it last month. So, it's very new. Probably my favorite ticker that we have as well. The ticker for it is here. So far so good.   Rob: Nice. Okay, good. Hey, you guys also have some income stuff as well as some actively managed. Real briefly want to touch on some of the covered call strategies that you guys use. Generally, why would someone want to do that?   Raj: Yeah, covered call strategies are interesting because what they could do is, they could subsidize income and they can help potentially moot some of the downside risk. Effectively, the way a covered call would work is you are going to end up giving up a little bit of your upside potential, but you're not going to have as much downside risk as well. And in return for that, you're going to generate some yields. There're premiums generated based on the covered calls. We have one fund, the ticker's life that's global healthcare. It's a passive index of the 20 largest global healthcare companies. And then our team does an active covered call overlay on up to a third of the portfolio. They take a passive, and they put a covered call overlay onto it. We also have done the exact same thing for big US banks. And as I mentioned before, we just launched one on materials and mining. Right now, depending on the fund, those are our three covered calls strategies. Right now, between 7 and 8%, a yield that's being generated between the dividends on the stocks, plus the premiums from the calls. And then the other one that has, as I mentioned at the beginning, emerged as our flagship, is our preferred share fund. I think it's starting to get a lot more attention now, perhaps have been beaten up over the last six to nine months. It's not been easy for them, but where can you get a 5.5 to 6% tax advantage yield in today's world, pretty tough to find. It's pretty tough to find …   Rob: Doesn't exist really. I mean there's a real estate space that can give you something comparable, but it's a different risk profile for sure. Different volatility profile tool.   Raj: Absolutely. I think that fund is going to start resonating again as people start to recognize that the pref space, because the pref space is one of the only sectors or asset classes that hasn't recovered yet, unlike the equity markets. We think that over the next little while that fund's going to perform well.   Rob: All right folks, you heard it here, the preferred market's going to come back. Fantastic, great to have you here. Appreciate the time. Always good to talk about ETFs, huge part of, I think any portfolio managers toolbox, especially the niche stuff that you guys are doing really, really interesting. We're thankful for your time. Thanks for being here.   Raj: Thanks.

Hey Everyone sorry for the late upload. We were all busy with our New Year Celebration and forgot to post the episode on time! Either way HAPPY NEW YEAR TO EVERYONE IN THE  COMIC UNIVERSE!!! Into the Spider-Verse Review and 2018 year review   With the new year steadily approaching it is time for the Krew to sit down and discuss the best and worst movies, tv shows, comic books and videogames of the year. However, before they get into their lists Kris and Rob are joined by movie guy Ed for Into The Spider-Verse movie review! Who had the better lists for 2018? Do you agree with Kris or Rob? Do they have bad choices? Tune in for a wild ride.

Listen now: Clive Chafer has been a namer for almost as long as naming has been a profession. In 1987, he started at the firm now known as Lexicon, where he helped develop a few names you definitely know, like PowerBook for Apple and Outback for Subaru. He went on to eventually become creative director at Master-McNeil in Berkeley, California, and he now runs his own firm: Namebrand. Clive also does freelance naming work. Clive and I dove right into a conversation about his process for name generation, which led us to a discussion of "sound symbolism." I brought up the bouba/kiki effect (but couldn't remember what it was called) and Clive pointed out that, "whether it's consonants or vowels, you can build something just on sound symbolism that will have certain tonalities and associations, even if the brief is very abstract. We linguists are not left entirely adrift." Clive talked about his "wonderful thesaurus" from the late 60's (so good luck getting a copy). Clive Chafer's well-used Roget's Thesaurus He listed a handful of other online ad offline tools* he uses while naming, e.g.: Wikipedia Foreign-language dictionaries (online) Forvo.com (to hear native speakers pronounce foreign words) OneAcross.com (a crossword dictionary, especially useful when length is a consideration) Clive talked about keeping the creative juices flowing by stepping away from a project for a bit and exercising, going out with friends, or doing a DIY project. He listed a few pitfalls young namers (and more experienced ones) can fall victim to, and proposed some solutions. Lastly, Clive shared his favorite thing about being a namer: "It keeps the brain young." If you want to learn more about Clive or get in touch with him, check out wemakenames.com. You should also check out the interview Clive did with Robert Siegel on NPR's All Things Considered. Below, you'll find the full transcript of the episode (may contain typos and/or transcription errors). Click above to listen to the episode, and subscribe on iTunes to hear every episode of How Brands Are Built. * To see a complete list of online resources listed by namers in episodes of How Brands Are Built, see our Useful List: Online/software resources used by professional namers. Rob: Clive, thank you so much for making time to speak with me. I'd love to just talk about process, and given how long you've been doing this, I figure if anyone has a process—I'm talking specifically about when you sit down to start generating ideas—where do you start? Clive: I knew in advance you were going to ask me this, and I had to sit and think for a moment about whether or not there is a start point, or indeed a process. Yes, there is a starting point. And, having been a project manager as well as a creative, I know a little bit more now about how those two things work together, and the brief is incredibly important in how well the creative process develops and how well it goes. And it may well be proved to be—as you probably know—way off track after the first or second round of creative. Back to the drawing board. But in terms of the actual creative process, I start narrow and broaden out. So if I get a brief, whether it's couched in single-word naming directions or explained content, I will draw up a list of words and word parts that I think might be useful. Now how do I get to those? Well, partly from the words that are already given to me in the in the brief. And then from there, broaden out to closely associated ideas, concepts, and directions. And I think, yes, I definitely use the thesaurus, but it really depends on the nature of the project whether the thesaurus is going to be a useful tool or not. Rob: Right. Clive: If you get a name, this rarely happens, but if you get a brief that says, "This name needs to have no content whatsoever," because perhaps it's a name for a company and they don't want to be tied to any one activity. Rob: Sure, a name like Avaya, or something ,  a coined... Clive: Yeah, or Hulu or something like that. You know if you're going to do that then there's not a lot of point in going to the thesaurus. I mean, the truth is that most names have something about them that does relate back to what they do. You just mentioned Avaya. If you kind of pick that apart for sound, the idea of 'a way,' "via," is buried in there somewhere. And so the idea that a buyer is a communications company and that it's providing the means the "via" for communications. Okay. Yeah. You know, it's not too many steps away from the thesaurus. Rob: Right. Clive: So sometimes, even when it seems like they want to take a step away from real-world vocabulary, you still can start with that kind of mindset, if you like—that kind of relatively pedestrian research that says, "Let's put together as many words that word parts that are relevant to this as possible, and let's use those as the springboard," rather than trying to find something entirely meaningless out of nothing, out of whole cloth, if you like. Rob: Yeah, I find that that's really hard to do. You end up sort of wandering aimlessly. Clive: Well yes. Now this is where, going back to Lexicon, I met the chap who was their kind of linguistics expert. His name's Will Leben—lovely chap—who I've come to know as a friend as well, and the exquisite irony of Will Leben is that he is almost entirely deaf. He is a linguist who doesn't really hear language the same way that we do. Plus which, his specialism was what they call "sound symbolism" or what he called "sound symbolism." And he really developed the idea of sound symbolism and it's not a particularly deep science, but short, high sounds tend to suggest things that are smaller, and larger, longer, deeper sounds tend to suggest things that are bigger. So, "Pixi," has to be something small. You don't know what it is, necessarily, although obviously a pixie is a little creature. But sound symbolism is a somewhat disputed area of linguistics and it's very culturally confined, but it does work as a way to look at the tone—the tonality, if you like—of what you're trying to put across. These are things that work without meaning, without semantic meaning. Rob: Right, and to some degree across cultures. I hear what you're saying, it certainly is culturally specific to a degree, but I think I've seen—and I'm not sure whether this would have come from Lexicon or if it's actually just from social psychology—but this diagram with two drawings, one of which is pointed and sharp looking, and the other is just a bunch of curves and swirls, and then there are two made-up name options underneath them, and one of them has hard stops in it like "t" and "k" and the other has, like you said, liquids, more vowels, more soft fricatives "s" and "f" and "v." And it's, I believe the finding is that across pretty much every culture, people choose the same way that the harder sounds, so to speak, go with the pointier made-up object and vice-versa. Clive: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Now what cultural associations they make with that can vary. But yeah, I mean by and large, that works and it works particularly well across all the romance languages. It's a little harder in the Germanic languages, but anyway, yes you're right. I mean whether it's consonants or vowels you can build something just on sound symbolism that will have certain tonalities and associations even if the brief is very abstract. We linguists are not left entirely adrift. Rob: Well, if you'll bear with me getting into the weeds a little bit on process: Let's start with timing. Do you generally sit down for a certain number of hours with any given brief? Do you have any kind of consistent approach along those lines, just with regard to timing? Clive: It's not entirely consistent but there is a pattern. When I first sit down with a brief, there very often quite quickly comes a point within an hour or so where I'm banging my head against a brick wall—where I've got through the obvious stuff, I've made the obvious connections and made the semantic and language word parts and phonemes, and so on, and listed them, and come up with some names based on them, and so on. And then I kind of go, "Ok, what's next?" I have found personally, that if I break off then, that isn't going to help. That's actually a barrier that I have to work through, so I generally don't want to start a project unless I've got about at least four hours clear in front of me. Rob: Wow. Clive: Because I find that a lot of really good stuff comes after that point where you're going, "Wow, this is a tough one. I don't know that I'm going to be able to come up with a lot of stuff for this." And then you just have to keep pushing back the borders of your own immediate responses to a brief. And that's the problem. I've been doing this for so long now—you know for 25 plus years—that there are tracks in my brain. And to get out of those ruts, you need to make associations that you haven't made before, or least if you have, it was a while ago and you can't read them. And I find that I need to work through that barrier rather than walking away at that point. Now, having said that, there then comes a point about—you know, whether it's 4 hours, or whatever in—where you've then had a little breakthrough and suddenly there's been this strangely rich period of productivity. And then I think, frankly, the brain just gets tired, and that's the point at which I take a break. Rob: Ok. Clive: And yeah, it helps if you can go away for 24 hours. There are other things you can do as well. Exercise is terrific at reframing the brain, at you know throwing the pieces up and letting them fall down in different places. Rob: Do you find that when you are exercising—or just, you've gone away from being immediately focused on the project itself—do you find yourself still thinking about it, and that sometimes ideas will pop up and maybe you'll need to quickly find a way to jot them down before you forget? Or do you really feel like you push it out of your brain for a while? Clive: Both. I find that I can definitely push it out of my brain for a while. I find that if I do go off and do something else, I'm not thinking about it. But ideas will come to me and it's clearly there in the subconscious, because something out of apparently nowhere will come and will relate back to what I'm working on—the project that I'm working on. And I'm not making any conscious effort and in fact, some of the best associative ideas—associated ideas—come from doing something completely different, but there's suddenly this connection with what you're doing or with an idea that you have to what you're working on. And your brain reminds you, or at least it does me, that this is an idea you might want to capture for what you're working on. But I never go to bed when I'm working on a project without a pad next to the bed. My partner, Christian, will tell you, I quite often turn out the light, five minutes later, I turn the light back on, because that moment between sleep and waking is absolutely the best time for my best ideas. Rob: Do you use a pad otherwise, or is it just for that space specific context. I was gonna ask anyway, do you work in Microsoft Word or something like that as you're coming up with ideas, or do you tend to stick to pen and paper? Clive: It used to be pen and paper. Partly that was because one of the great things about naming is you can do it anywhere, and I used to do it in the back of the tour bus when I was touring a theatrical production, and then it was definitely a pad, because laptops were way too big and expensive back in the nineties to do it any other way. But occasionally I'll do it with a pad if I'm travelling and getting a laptop out is a hassle, or whatever. I still make notes on pieces of paper. But generally, I work in Excel now. I used to work, for years I worked in Word, till I realized that actually, it's easier to manipulate data in Excel even if it's just text data. Rob: And what about, you mentioned the thesaurus earlier. Do you do you favor any particular thesaurus, whether it's print or online? Clive: I have a wonderful thesaurus... Rob: That sounds like a book, then. Not a website? Clive: Absolutely. I was awarded this. I was actually able to choose the modern languages reading prize at my secondary school—my high school—I won for reading a Russian poem, and was awarded Roget's Thesaurus in nineteen sixty...I can't remember, eight, or something like that, and it still has the sticker inside that says, "Modern Languages Reading Prize, Awarded to Clive Chafer." Rob: Congratulations. Clive: It's not because of that, although it's wonderfully battered now, because he used to go to Lexicon, it used to go to Master-McNeil, and so on. But it has words in it that I've never found in any other thesaurus. It's a treasury of the English language. I was given more recently I think a Bartlett's Thesaurus, which was given by a namer who said, "This is absolutely the best thesaurus I've ever found." And it's very good, and it has a lot more modern usages in it than my sixties tome, but it's nowhere near as comprehensive. Rob: Right, it sounds like if you cross reference both, maybe you get the best of both worlds. Clive: Absolutely, and I use both. I use them all the time, and I even use thesaurus.com although I pretty much hate it. But it's very convenient. So I do use it rather than lugging a book around with me. I find thesaurus.com is very poor at alternative meanings and concepts that are close to the words that you're looking up. There are some just outstanding omissions from thesaurus.com. Rob: Are there any other books that you keep close at hand as you're doing naming aside from those two thesauruses? Clive: Not for every project, no. I mean, clearly there are lots of books that I use, whether it's books on mythology or astronomy. You can get a lot of this online, as well, but I still like having...the way that you use a book is less linear than the way you use online resources. Rob: Right. Clive: And so, I like the fact that it takes me in different directions. If it's Bulfinch's Mythology, I end up looking at different things than I would if I had looked up Wikipedia for "Roman gods associated with agriculture" or something. Having those books around is very useful, but I would say that I probably use the thesaurus on 95% of projects that I work on, and then the Oxford dictionary and the other Bartlett's Roget's that I have, those I use pretty frequently as well. Beyond that, it's really specific to the individual project and brief. Rob: What about websites other than dictionary.com, are there any that you just find yourself going back to or...you know, even if it's not on 95% of the projects, even if it's only 25%. Clive: The things that I keep bookmarked are foreign language dictionaries and Forvo, which is a place you can go to to find the pronunciation of—by native speakers—of foreign words, which is kind of interesting. Rob: Interesting, how's that spelled? Clive: F-O-R-V-O dot com. There is one that I have been using in the last year or so. I think it's more of a crossword type dictionary. One of the parameters for a name is often length, and the thing about a crossword dictionary is that it will offer you solutions that are, you know, all the solutions that are five letters long. And that I find useful for projects where length is particularly important—if it's going to be on a name badge that has very little space, for instance. I think it may be OneAcross.com. Rob: Oh. That makes sense, speaking of names. Clive: What it lets you do, and this is what I was trying to think about earlier, is find every six-letter word of which the last three letters are "con," for instance. But at OneAcross you can put in three question marks, "C-O-N," and it will come back with everything in the dictionary. Rob: Exactly. Yeah, this can be very helpful. Clive: Yeah. And you can switch that around as well. You can make it "two blanks, "con," two blanks, or something like that. And it's surprising what it will come up with. Rob: Is there anything that you've done to get past that inevitable writer's block at some point when you're on a naming project? Any tips or tricks for other namers to help? You mentioned working out; I think that's a great one. Clive: Pretty much anything that takes you completely away from what you're doing is really what you need. I mean, going for a walk in the country, going for dinner with a friend. You'll get into conversation and your subconscious still has the brief in it, and you'll find that you'll find yourself bringing your pad out at the dinner table. "Excuse me a minute, can I just make a note, I just had an idea." And they all think it's very fun. "Oh, he's being creative again." So yeah. I mean it generally is not a social faux pas to do it. It opens up a whole new direction of conversation. As long as you walk away—physically walk away—and go off and do something else, whether it's a DIY project or whatever, it will help you to take a new perspective on what you're naming. The thing about exercise is that it's been scientifically proven to really help freshen up your brain. Rob: I don't know how often you have the opportunity to work with newcomers to the field of naming, but I'd love to hear any tips that you have for them or any mistakes you see them consistently making that you think you could help them steer clear of. Clive: I used to come into contact with them much more. It's funny, because back in the days of Lexicon, almost everybody did brainstorming sessions, which brought together—physically brought together—as many as a dozen people in a room. It did become obvious that a lot of people had...the way their brain worked meant that their creative output bore a very distinct resemblance across projects, even though those projects weren't necessarily related. So look at what you've put down as names over maybe five unrelated projects and look for patterns. And if you see them, be aware of them, so that you can break them. Rob: That's interesting. So, I almost imagine printing out those lists and circling anything, or highlighting anything that you see across lists and recognizing your own biases. Clive: Yes, exactly. Yeah, it is, it's biases. We all have ideas that we like and we are desperate to have them expressed in some form or another. And it's astonishing the lengths that we will go to to get them represented. And it's really good to be aware of them so that you can say, "Ok, I've got to be careful not to just fall into this pattern again," and find a way of breaking it, and find a way of expanding beyond it. And you can do that consciously. And if you don't do it, you'll probably find that unconsciously, you will continue to regurgitate the same stuff again and again. Rob: It feels a little bit like when you're new to naming, it's more about just sort of what interesting words do you know? And you're very tempted to throw those words into the list, whether or not they make sense. And maybe the more mature you get, the more you really stick to what is the brief asking for, and start there, as opposed to just having hopefully too much of your own bias to put into it. Clive: The other thing I would say—sort of advice to the young namer—is that you will be terribly disappointed, time and time again, by one, the names that get chosen, which will always be...they will always ignore the names that you think are the best. Rob: That's so true. Clive: And that's partly because a brief is a terribly inadequate way of communicating what a client actually wants. And it can be a very frustrating experience being a namer, because either you never find out what the client chose anyway, and you feel like you're just throwing this stuff into a black hole, or you find out afterwards that the whole directions—all the directions that you were working on—were not the direction they ended up going in. Or they abandoned the project, and it sounded wonderful, and you came up with all these great names. It's very easy to get dissuaded at that point and feel like a very small cog in a much larger wheel. And it's only by being a project manager as well as a creative that I have been able to understand how what I do fits into a bigger picture and not get frustrated about it. Rob: Absolutely, and I remember as a junior namer, it's not only the client. It's also if you're junior and you're on a larger team, it's the rest of your team. I remember feeling like my boss didn't get it. You know, they didn't get the names that I'd come up with and they weren't choosing my best names to even present to the client. Clive: The single biggest problem with naming, the single biggest thing that goes wrong from anybody's point of view, is that somebody in the company—somebody at the client—is not brought into the process early, even though they have veto power over the name. And very often, it's somebody down the line who is protecting their boss from getting involved because they don't want them to have to put time into this, and then they're saying, "No no no no, he's got much more important things to think about. We'll handle this." And then they come up with a name and they put it in front of this person who has not been involved, and he looks at it and goes, "No." And you know they, well, yeah. You know, the answer is no because you didn't ask him what the question was in the first place. Rob: It's a classic problem and we've all seen it too many times. Clive: It is the single-most frequent way that the wheels come off the project. You've got to involve them from the start. Ignore the fact that they have very busy schedules and that their calendar is all booked up. If you don't get them involved at the start, you are risking wasting everybody's time. Rob: Well just the last question, just for fun: You've been doing this for so long, I'm curious what do you like about it? Do you have sort of a favorite thing about naming and name generation that makes it something that you want to keep doing? Clive: Well I'm in my sixth decade now, and I am grateful for anything and everything that keeps my brain ticking over. It is really good to have something like this that makes me not just think conceptually around a problem but, as I said before, that gets me out of the ruts that my brain is in. When I come to a project, I try as hard as possible to make my brain do what is unfamiliar, because I really do think that that is part of what keeps my brain ticking over at a reasonably good level. Rob: There you go, naming keeps you young. Clive: Yeah. Keeps the brain young, certainly. Yeah. Rob: Thanks again Clive. Clive: You're welcome. Rob: I'll talk to you soon. Clive: Yep. Have a good day. Rob: You too. Bye bye. Clive: Thanks, bye.  

Listen now: Anthony Shore is one of the most experienced namers out there. He has over 25 years of experience in naming and has introduced more than 200 product and company names to the world. Some of the names he’s created include Lytro, Yum! Brands, Fitbit Ionic, Qualcomm Snapdragon, and Photoshop Lightroom. In 2015, he was featured in a New York Times Magazine article titled “The Weird Science of Naming New Products,” which tells the story of Jaunt, a VR company he named. And a BBC News article called him "one of the world’s most sought after people when it comes to naming new businesses and products." Anthony has led naming at Landor Associates. He worked at the naming firm, Lexicon, and now he runs his own agency, Operative Words, which you can find at operativewords.com. I had a great time talking to Anthony. He shares a bunch of knowledge, some great tips and examples, and we even got to nerd out a bit talking about recurrent neural networks. Anthony's using artificial intelligence to supplement his own name generation; it's fascinating to think about how tools like these might be used in the future. Anthony also gave a great overview of his naming process and provided a list of tools and resources he uses when generating names. Some namers I've talked to seem to prefer analog resources (i.e., books). In contrast, Anthony almost exclusively uses software and online tools*, including the following: Wordnik ("a great resource for lists of words") OneLook Rhymezone Sketch Engine (a corpus linguistics database) TextWrangler (a plain ASCII text editor) BBEdit Microsoft Excel Anthony and I rounded out the conversation talking some of his least favorite naming trends, as well as what he likes most about being a namer. I highly recommend you check out Anthony’s website and blog at operativewords.com, where he has a bunch of amazing content that goes into way more detail on some of the topics we discussed. Below, you'll find the full transcript of the episode (may contain typos and/or transcription errors). Click above to listen to the episode, and subscribe on iTunes to hear every episode of How Brands Are Built. * To see a complete list of online resources listed by namers in episodes of How Brands Are Built, see our Useful List: Online/software resources used by professional namers. Rob: Anthony, thank you for joining me. Anthony: Thanks so much for having me, Rob. Rob: One of the first things I wanted to ask you about is something I don’t talk to namers about that much. It’s artificial intelligence. So, I saw that you’ve written and talked about the potential for using neural networks and brand naming. Can you tell me a little bit about what made you start down that path and then maybe how it works today? Anthony: Sure. I love talking about this. Artificial intelligence, and really using computers in general as an adjunct to what I do, has always been near and dear to my heart. Way back in college, I created a self-defined AI major. And so, when recurrent neural networks started becoming available and accessible over the last few years, I took an interest. And a woman named Janelle Shane, who is a nanoscientist and a neural network hobbyist, started publishing name generation by neural network. And this really caught my interest. And she was doing it just as a hobby and for fun, but I could see that neural networks offered a great deal of promise. And so, I engaged with her and asked her to teach me what she knew, so that I could also use neural networks to help me create brand names, in addition to using the other tools that I use, like my brain and other bits of software and resources. Rob: And is there...how technical is it now in your use of it? Is it something that anyone could do or does it really require a lot of programming knowledge? Anthony: Well, right now I’d say it’s not for the faint of heart. The only interface that really helpful is through command line, really using a terminal. So it’s all ASCII. It’s done in Linux and there’s various and sundry languages that have to be brought into play like Python and Lua and Torche. Rob: So you’ve got to know what you’re doing a little bit. Anthony: Yeah yeah. It’s not something that’s just a web interface that you plug ideas in and it’s going to work like a charm. Now, that is right now and it’s changing constantly. I mean, even in just the few months, six months that I’ve been doing this, I’ve been seeing more and more neural networks front ends on the web pop up. But their results aren’t very good at all. But it’s clear that that’s going to change. Rob: And I saw that Janelle has named a beer I think using her neural network it’s called The Fine Stranger which is a cool name for an indie beer. Have you had any success using it yet for some of your naming projects? Anthony: I’ll say this: that neural networks have, in my use of them, have illustrated to me some really interesting words and ideas, and clients are interested in AI and neural networks as part of the creative process. But there haven’t been any names yet that a neural network I’ve trained has generated and the client said, "Yes, that’s going to be our name." But it’s only a matter of time before that happens. But I’m bullish on AI and neural networks. Rob: Well, it’s funny because, I know this isn’t the same thing, but every now and then, I’m sure you see this too, there are these doomsday proclamations of naming...the human aspect of naming dying out because computers will be able to do it themselves. What are your thoughts in terms of how people and computers will interact in the future to do this job? Anthony: Oh, without a doubt, accessible AI tools for name generation will increase everyone’s access to interesting names. But just because you are shown a word or a list of words doesn’t mean that you’re going to know, as someone in the company for instance, is this really going to be the right word? Does this have the potential to become a brand? And there’s other aspects of naming such as understanding and ascertaining what the right naming strategy should be. What should the right inputs that an AI should be trained on? You know, what kinds of words should the AI be trained on? Helping a client see how each word in a list of words could become their future could become their brand, and helping them to see the the assets and potential of each of these names. That’s not something AI is going to do. So there’s still a place for professional name developers. Rob: I want to back up a little bit and just talk more generally about about name generation. Can you just give me a 30,000-foot view of the entire naming process before we dive into some of the specific steps within it? Anthony: Yeah, sure, I’ll be happy to Rob. So, I’ll be briefed by the clients, and maybe they’ll provide me with an actual creative brief, or not, but from that, I’ll develop name objectives that succinctly capture what the name needs to accomplish; what it needs to support or connote. And once we agree on those marching orders, I’ll get into creative. Now the first wave of creative is a mile wide and an inch deep, where I explore many different perspectives of the brand, different tonalities, different styles of names, different executions. And that process takes about two weeks of creative development. At the end, there’s probably a thousand or several thousand words that have been developed. I’ll cull the best 150 names and run those through preliminary global trademark screening with my trademark partner, Steve Price. And from that, there’ll be 50 to 70 names, and I’ll present those names to the client. And I present them in a real-world context so they look less like hypothetical candidates and more like de facto, existing brands. And I present each name in the exact same visual context to really keep the focus on the name and not confound variables by changing up the color or the font. I present each name individually, talk about their implications and what they bring. And at the end the client gets feedback—what they like, what they don’t like, what they’re neutral about—and that informs the second round of creative work, which is an inch wide and a mile deep, where I delve into what was really working for them. And, it’s important to have a couple of rounds of creative because it’s one thing to agree in an abstract brief, but what clients really react to are real words, and that’s where you can really find out what’s going on, because it’s difficult for people to really understand what they like and don’t like in a name until they see them. And so that second round of work focuses on what’s working for them. And that process again is about two weeks, thousands of names developed, 100, 150 go into screening for trademark and domains, and then 50 names plus are presented to the client. And the client chooses from all of the names that’ve been presented across both rounds—typically over 100 names. They bring a handful of names into their full legal screening. Maybe there is cultural and linguistic checks that have to happen, and their full legal checks and then they choose one final name to run with. Rob: What steps do you take when you just start generating names? Anthony: All right, so once we all agree on what the marching orders are. The process looks like this: I’ll first bring up my go-to set of software and applications and resources that I use pretty much in parallel, and I bounce between them as I go through development. So, I’ll bring up I’ll bring up Wordnik, which is an important piece of software online, a great resource for lists of words. I use OneLook, Rhymezone, an engine called Sketch Engine, and various other applications. And I will use those to identify words, word parts, that are interesting to me. And so over the course of that development I will use different techniques in order to unearth every possible idea I can find. I will also go through prior projects that I’ve done through Operative Words, and if I find a good word for this project, I’ll search on my computer for all files that I’ve worked on that also contain that word, and so I’ll be able to mine from my prior work. And so, that creative process happens for about two weeks. At the end of two weeks I will have amassed thousands of ideas, and if I bring neural networks and software-based combinations and permutations there are literally tens-of-thousands of ideas in the picture. Rob: You mentioned Sketch Engine awhile ago as one of the online resources that you use. I’ve seen that you’ve written quite a bit about it and how you use it. But can you just briefly explain what it is and why you recommend it so highly? Anthony: Yes, Sketch Engine is a corpus linguistics database. So, let me explain that. Corpus linguistics is using a very large body of real-world language. That’s a corpus, and it’s plural is corpora. And using computers to sort of analyze and tag and organize what’s in there. So a corpus might be, for instance, the one I use is all of the news articles that have been published between 2014 and 2017. All of that real-world text—that’s 28 billion words—all of which have been tagged by part of speech, and it’s recorded all of the words that live next to all of the other words. In other words, it records what are called "colocations." Now, colocations are useful because you can learn a lot about a word by the company it keeps. So if there’s an attribute that a client is interested in, let’s say ‘fast’ or ‘smart,’ I can look up a word like "fast" or "smart" or any other related word, and discover all of the words that have been modified by it. So, therefore I can find an exhaustive list of things that are fast, things that are smart, or verbs related to things that are fast and things that are smart. And so, the benefit is, one, is exhaustiveness, two, is also linguistic naturalness. That is, you’re finding how words are used in a real-world context, and I believe that linguistic naturalness in names is very important for names being credible, for names being relatable, and for names feeling very adaptable. You’re not foisting ideas on people that make no sense. Rob: It rolls off the tongue, to use kind of the layman’s term. Anthony: Yes, that’s right. Rob: You’ve mentioned so many online tools, I’m just curious, is there anything offline that you frequent? Anthony: I’m typically watching some kind of movie or TV show or some other sort of visual stimulus while I’m doing my creative development. Rob: Interesting. Anthony: And those things provide visual stimulation and there is dialogue and other ideas that come up that provide an extra input to my creative process. Rob: Do you choose what you’re watching based on the project, or is it just whatever you happen to be watching anyway? Anthony: No, no, I do. Absolutely. So, with projects that are very technologically driven or scientifically driven, I’ll watch something that’s sort of technological or scientific. Rob: That’s fun. Do you ever just, you know, there’s been a movie that you’ve been wanting to see anyway, and you feel like, "Oh, that fits this project," and you put that on? Anthony: Yeah, absolutely. Rob: Another technique that I saw that you wrote about, it’s called an "excursion." Can you can explain what that is? Is that related to the idea of watching a movie while you’re doing naming? Anthony: In an excursion, you identify a completely unrelated product category. Sometimes the less related the better. And you look for examples of a desired attribute or quality from that category. For instance, if you’re naming a new intelligent form of AI, let’s go ahead and consider examples of intelligence from the world of kitchens. Let’s look for ideas of intelligence in the world of sports. By thinking through an attribute as it appears somewhere else, you are able to find ideas that are differentiated but relevant, because when you take a word from a different category and drop it into a relevant category, it immediately becomes relevant to that new category. People are very comfortable with this technique. Rob: I have a couple of tactical, logistics questions that I’m curious how you would respond to. What about the actual medium that you use when you’re writing down or documenting your name ideas? Do you do this in Excel or do you have a pad of paper with you while you’re doing all these other exercises, and you’re just furiously jotting down ideas? Anthony: I’m using Microsoft Word, by and large, for this. I also use another text application called TextWrangler. I use Excel when I’m charged with developing a generic descriptor for a new product. Rob: And what is TextWrangler? Is there an important difference between that and Word, or just, you happen to use both? Anthony: TextWrangler is a text editor. So, there’s no formatting whatsoever. It’s plain ASCII text. It has another sister application called BBEdit, and these applications are very useful when you’re working with pure text, and it has some terrific tools like the ability to eliminate duplicates, the ability to use pattern recognition, something called Grep, in order to find words that include certain patterns. So, very useful tool and an adjunct to the toolset that I use. Rob: And then the other logistical question is just about timing. You mentioned usually a two-week period of time for your first run at name generation, but I’ve heard other namers say they like to have a four-hour window to really immerse themselves in a project anytime they sit down to do name generation. Do you have any rules of thumb that you adhere to in terms of timing? Anthony: Over the course of two weeks, the process is, I will immerse myself completely in a project maybe for four hours, maybe for a day, maybe for two days, or three days even. And then I put it away. And then I forget about it, and I work on something else for a day or two, and then I come back to it. And so, I have this repeated process of immersion and then incubation and I repeat that in order to do creative work. That’s a process that’s been demonstrated and proven to help maximize creative output. Those "aha" moments—those Eureka moments you have in the shower—happen because you’ve been thinking about something and then stop thinking about it, consciously anyway. But meanwhile there’s something bubbling up under the surface that comes out when you least expect it. Rob: You’ve mentioned a lot of things that you could use if you get stuck on a project. Do you ever get writer’s block so to speak, and if so, is there anything that you haven’t already mentioned that you would use to kick yourself back into naming gear? Anthony: Sure. You know, the writer’s block happens when a client is looking for something that isn’t different. If their if their product or their brand doesn’t really have something new to offer, that’s a more difficult nut to crack. And so, in those cases, I will look at projects that are utterly unrelated in any way, or other kinds of lists. And in this way, I expose myself to words that have nothing to do with the project whatsoever. But, because of how I see words and how I think, I can look at a list and look at a word and go, "Oh, wait a minute. There’s a story there." I can see what would be related or that would be interesting. So, really, it’s a process of compelling me to look at words just in order to see what happens. It’s a little bit stochastic. It’s a little bit random, but it’s actually very useful and interesting and new ideas can come out of it, even for projects where there isn’t something wildly different under the surface. Rob: I like to ask whether there are any names or naming tropes that you see that you’re getting sick of. You know, like any other creative process, there are trends in the industry—startups ending with with "-ly," for example. Are there any specific name ideas or trends like that that you want to call out or that you wish would discontinue? Anthony: Well, Rob, there’re always trends that I wish would go away. In fact, any trends, by and large, I wish would go away, because they’re unoriginal and they don’t serve the brands that they represent. They look derivative. They look unoriginal. And what does that say about their company or their products? So, yes, I’m not crazy about the "-ly" trend that’s been going on, just as I wasn’t crazy about the "oo" trend that was happening after Google and Yahoo found success, just like I wasn’t crazy about the "i-" or "e-" prefix trend back when that was happening. You know, I’m just fundamentally opposed to these ideas because they don’t they don’t serve their clients and they, I think, reflect a company that isn’t truly original. I’m also not crazy about the trend to randomly drop consonants or vowels, or double them, because it’s clear that it was done just in order to secure a dotcom domain, and it feels like domain desperation. Rob: Right, it feels forced. Anthony: Exactly. And linguistic unnaturalness, where you do these things in order to shoehorn words in order to get a free dotcom, I don’t think serves a brand well either, because they’re immediately off-putting, they look unnatural, and they’re difficult to relate to. Rob: The last question I like to ask namers is just what your favorite thing is about being a namer or coming up with name ideas. Anthony: Well, I really love the process of identifying, exhaustively, every possible perspective of a new brand. If I’m looking at a list of a thousand potential names, those are a thousand different perspectives, a thousand different ways of framing you looking at this company. And those are a thousand potential futures. And then seeing when a company finally adopts a name that I’ve helped them with—to see how they adopted the name, breathe life into it, and then run with it, and do their own, get their own inspiration from the name. So, as an example, a while ago I worked with an architectural and design firm called Pollack Architecture, who needed a new name. And eventually, I worked with them and developed the name "Rapt Studio" for them, R-A-P-T, "Rapt Studio" for them. And they do brilliant interior and architecture work and branding work as well. Really brilliant and wonderful people. And so once I gave them "Rapt Studio," they ran with it and they called their employees "Raptors." I didn’t give them that idea. They have meetings once a week, which are called "Monday Rapture" meetings. All right. So, I love when a name can inspire a client with great ideas. That makes me very happy. Rob: That’s great. Well let’s leave it there. And I just want to say thank you again for your willingness to share some of your thinking and how you do what you do. Anthony: Well, thank you so much, Rob. You know, I really do this for selfish reasons because I hate ugly words, and names are an unavoidable part of our environment and our habitat, and wouldn’t you much rather be surrounded by beauty and gardens than blight? I feel that way about names and so I give away what I know, because I want other namers, even my direct competitors, to come up with with great names so that they can also populate the world with words that are interesting and creative imaginative, and words we like to have around. Rob: Well, you call it selfish but it seems selfless to me. I really appreciate it and thanks again. Let’s go make some more beautiful words out there. Anthony: Yeah, let’s do that. Thanks, Rob. Rob: Thank you.  

SK and his band of cohorts are tired of the accurate assessments of their acumen. So this week the Lousy San Francisco Podcast focuses on smart sounding words like "palindromes" and "perambulations" (One of Emily Dickinson's lesser known novels). With animal obituaries, instead of discussing Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo, we cogitate the predicament of Sticky the bearded dragon. We discuss current events such as public housing and Ed, I saw Harpo Marx ram Oprah W. aside. The Titans of Mavericks gave us ample opportunity for exciting conversation as we discussed the big waves, the inclusion of women into the contest, and a good round of rooting for our champion, Colin Dwyer: "Yo! Banana Boy!" And of course we get philosophical with the usual profundities such as, Borrow or Rob? Do geese see god? Was it a rat I saw? and King, are you glad you are King? Even a message from Bridal Fitness coach showed prudence. Doc Note: I Dissent. A Fast Never Prevents A Fatness. I Diet On Cod. And we also talk about SF baseball stuff. So give episode 52 a listen. It's Never odd or even. No Mel Gibson is a casino's big lemon.

No episódio de hoje, Affonso Solano, Diogo Braga e Roberto Russo Estrada escandalizam a culinária!E na Voz do Robô: Do sofá para o prato! "Quero que mate meu filho... no videogame". Nada de álcool para vocês, russosTambém comentado nesse episódio: Promoção Enigmas de Londres no Facebook do MRG! Participe! Vídeos de russos malucos no HBDia, site do nosso amigo Izzy Nobre! Esse sábado tem evento no RJ com o Affonso, Draccon e Carolina Munhóz! Vamos?RE-ASSINE O FEED DO MRG: http://feed.matandorobosgigantes.comSiga-nos no TWITTER: @DiogoMRG @BetoMRG @AffonsoSolanoCurta nossas páginas oficiais no Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/matandorobosgigantes http://www.facebook.com/BetoDuqueEstrada http://www.facebook.com/DidiBraguinha http://www.facebook.com/affonsosolanoE-Mails:Dúvidas, xingamentos e excuse-mes para matandorobosgigantes@matandorobosgigantes.comQual a Caixa-Postal do MRG? Caixa Postal 2571 EQS 212/412 CEP: 70.275-970 Brasilia, DFOuça no player abaixo ou faça o download da MP3 aqui (clique com o botão direito do mouse e escolha a opção salvar destino como)!