Podcasts about rob how

“Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master."  Christians are called to be faithful stewards of God's resources. When we do that, we leave a LEGACY for generations. Rob talks with Tom Conway about what that means and how you do it.Tom Conway is a CPA by training, a Certified Kingdom Advisor, and founder of Legacy By Design. Tom and Rob cover these topics and questions on this episode of Faith&Finance.Rob - I think we all leave a legacy to our children and grandchildren, whether we know it or not, but there are actually three kinds of legacies. What are those and can you flesh out the details?Tom -The one you receivedThe one you will leaveThe one you are leaving every dayRob - You help families plan their legacy and this isn't a “one size fits all” process, is it?Tom -Every family is uniqueTheir situation is uniqueThe family members are uniqueRob - How exactly do you help families prepare a legacy?Tom -It starts with a conversation. involving 5 areas of their legacy:Personal LegacyFamily LegacyFinancial LegacyBusiness Legacy if you are a Business OwnerKingdom or Charitable LegacyRob - Perhaps people aren't thinking of their legacy quite this way or with the intentionality you've brought to the process, right?Tom -  The most important legacy you leave does not involve money.Rob - What goals should guide us as we think about the legacy we want to leave?Tom -Two Biblical Goals for families:1 - Hear ‘Well Done' at end of life – Matthew 25:212 - Present every man complete in Christ – Col. 1:28-29 defines this: “Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.”Rob - How have you been successful once a family realizes the importance of the faith legacy they're leaving?Rob - What about when a family realizes their kids are not "there" spiritually?Rob - How do you counsel parents who just feel like it's their responsibly to leave money to their kids?Rob - Should you struggle with treating each child uniquely?Tom -Statistically, 70 to 90% of wealth transfer plans failsIn 60% of the cases, its due to lack of communication and Trust in the Family25% is due to Unprepared HeirsCommunication is a mustI tell people, “There will be a family meeting. It's just a matter of whether you will be there or not!”Rob - What's the benefit of all this?Next, Rob answers these questions at 800-525-7000 or via email at askrob@FaithFi.com:If you're 32, have a 401(k) for which your employers matches up to 10% but you're currently contributing 8%, what is the best way to maximize plan?You're a senior and you'd like to open some sort of account that will earn as much interest as possible, where should you look?Ally, Marcus and Capital One 360Be sure to check out the rest of FaithFi.com to access our books and our many free helpful resources. You can also find us on Facebook Faith and Finance (Live) and join the conversation. Thanks for your prayerful and financial support that helps keep Faith and Finance (Live) on the air. And if you'd like to help, just click the Give button.

People over age 65 have opportunities to save on their healthcare costs with health-sharing ministries. In today's Faith and Finance, Rob West explores those options with Lauren Gajdek, Vice-President of Communications and Media at Christian Healthcare Ministries.Lauren -  1 in 10 adults owe some kind of medical debt. At Christian Healthcare Ministries we want to create a different reality for people, making sure they don't live with medical debt.Rob - It's worse for seniors, isn't it?Lauren Absolutely. As we age medical bills tend to go up. Medicare doesn't cover 100% of your costs.Rob - If you're already a member, continuing in a Christian Healthcare Ministries plan is easy, isn't it?Lauren -  Yes, at age 65 if you're already a member of CHM you can stay on without interruption. And others can jump on board.Rob - What is Senior Share?Lauren -  It isn't health insurance, but is instead a cost-reduction program. Our Gold program for people over 65 is only $115 a month.Rob - How can people get information about this?Lauren -  They can go to chministries.org or call us.Rob - This is a great option and a biblical option for anyone looking to cope with the rising costs of healthcare, isn't it?Lauren -  Absolutely. We are biblically based.Rob - For those who want to go on Senior Share, do they have to have Medicare A and B in order to do so?Lauren -  Correct. Medicare is considered the first payer and CHM is then available to help with the additional costs that Medicare wouldn't pay.Next, Rob answers these questions at 800-525-7000 or via email at askrob@FaithFi.com:Testimony from caller: He listened to the program several years ago and previously had no idea it was biblical to be debt-free. He paid off house, has an emergency fund, and have just retired.What are better options for your government retirement Thrift Savings Plan which you put in the G Fund last year and it is only earning a low fixed interest rate, if you are newly retired but don't need to draw on the funds?Will you owe taxes on the sale of a home you inherited last year from your father if he left no will and his estate is going through probate?Is it the law that you can't received Social Security benefits from the records of two husbands, if you were twice widowed after having been married for 14 years both times?What is the best vehicle to make the most of your grandson's Social Security survivor's benefits that you are setting aside for his college or future expenses?If you have a payment plan with the IRS can they garnish funds out of your bank account?Be sure to check out the rest of FaithFi.com to access our books and our many free helpful resources. You can also find us on Facebook Faith and Finance (Live) and join the conversation. Thanks for your prayerful and financial support that helps keep Faith and Finance (Live) on the air. And if you'd like to help, just click the Give button. 

On this episode of The GIG Podcast, we were joined by Rob Selley, Executive Manager, New South Wales Golf Club, located in Sydney, Australia.  Ranked #33 on Golf Digest's list of the ‘World's 100 Greatest Golf Courses' and known as one of the World's great golf experiences, New South Wales Golf Club overlooks Botany Bay where Captain James Cook first sailed into Australia on the SS Endeavour in 1770.  Designed by Dr. Alister MacKenzie, the course is a wonderful combination of undulating fairways, beautiful scenic vistas, and a spectacular clubhouse which is a magnificent combination of traditional architecture and five-star comfort. In this episode, we discussed the following questions with Rob: How do you help a new employee understand the culture of your club?When faced with two equally qualified candidates, how do you determine whom to hire?How do you encourage creative thinking amongst the leadership and front-line teams at NSWGC?In your opinion, what is the biggest challenge facing leaders in the club industry today?What is one leadership characteristic that you believe every club manager should possess and what advice would you give someone going into a leadership position at a club for the first time?What are you doing to ensure you continue to grow and develop as a leader?What advice would you give to a GM who does not have alignment and unity with their board about how to achieve that type of connection? Rob Selley has a Bachelor of Commerce degree, PGA qualification, and 20+ years of General Manager/CEO experience at some of the world's premier private members golf clubs, golf resorts, and golf estates. Over an extended period, he has established a proven track record of achieving significantly improved outcomes for the clubs he has managed, particularly where there has been an ambition to position or reposition a club and bring about positive progress. Be sure to spend this hour with us, and then return to your golf business with new tools and tangible plans for improving operations.  You're also going to learn from Rob about how to level up your approach to leading your team and learn some new techniques and tactics when it comes to the development of the team at your club.  There's no better way to learn from one of our industry's best, and this must-listen episode will surely help position you and your team for greater success going forward!

Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director, Citizen Group (San Francisco, CA) Inspired by Marc Gobé's book, Citizen Brand:  10 Commandments for Transforming Brand Culture in a Consumer Democracy, Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director at Citizen Group, started his agency in 2006 to work with entities committed to meaningful and measurable pro-social impact. His agency's proposition is that organizations build brand value when they “walk their talk” and operate in ways that enhance society for their employees, shareholders, and consumers.  Robin notes that the rise of social media has created a window on organizational operations . . . companies have a harder time projecting a “corporate mirage” that “everything is okay” when people can now see what is going on, assess practices, and ask the tougher questions. Clients today include for-profit companies, nonprofit organizations, municipalities, cities, and trade associations. Working with Amnesty International and other NGOs while he was at Chiat/Day early in his career, Robin became aware of two operational economies: “the Moneyball ad world, where money is thrown around (half a million for a 30-second spot)” and the $15k budget for creating a nonprofit PSA environment. Gobé's book identifies the trend toward citizen branding as a convergence between these two economies. At his agency's inception, Robin worked with Walmart's sustainability effort and explored how big-box retail stores needed to change their operational practices to support sustainability, creating “a race to the top for brands to reutilize, recycle, (and produce) less waste” and a model for future initiatives with other organizations. Brands get a lift from doing the right thing, he says, both for society and for the environment. In his early adulthood, Robin says he didn't know that people had human rights. He says the 30 articulated in the United Nation's post World War II Universal Declaration of Human Rights made a big impact on him. Citizen Group is involved in a diverse range of projects. It is working with: Sports apparel retailer Lids on a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiative (They Gave Us Game) to recognize and honor early Black sports leagues.  A group called Leading Age on the Keep Leading Life campaign to showcase the variety of caregiving and expert services available to people who are aging. With close friend Jordan Harris, Robin shares a concern about the need to promote electric vehicles. Citizen Group commissioned a study to investigate the feasibility of shading California's 4,000 mile aqueduct system with solar canopies to reduce evaporation, conserve water, reduce algal growth, and generate power. Annual water savings for a complete end-to-end system were estimated at 63 billion with the solar array along the aqueduct system's existing utility corridors rather than taking up working land. A spinoff company, Solar AquaGrid, will be working Audubon Society to study environmental impacts and with the state and irrigation districts to plan the first demonstration project, and break ground on the pilot (proof-of-concept) project this fall. Robin can be found on his agency's website at citizengroup.com. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director at Citizen Group based in San Francisco, California, with some other fascinating interests as well. Welcome to the podcast, Robin. ROBIN: Good to be here, Rob. Thank you. ROB: Excellent to have you. Why don't you start off by telling us about Citizen Group, and what is the firm's superpower? What are you all known for? What do you do well? ROBIN: Well, I started Citizen Group in 2006, and it was really inspired by a book of the same name called Citizen Brand. This is where I can give a shout-out to an author by the name of Marc Gobé. I was really moved by the book, written in about 2003. The thesis of the book is: sooner or later, all brands will have to behave as citizen brands. That really caught me because it was like the spear in the chest moment in terms of the societal challenges we face and the responsibility brands and corporations and civil society have. It also predated, presaged, the rise of social media that has made the rise of citizen brands possible. We expect more from the brands we purchase and are loyal to. If they're not walking their talk, it can be a liability versus when they can really take the initiative and operate in a way that enhances society for their employees, for their shareholders, for their consumers. Then that builds brand value. That was the proposition. So I started Citizen Brand, and we've been working since that time with a variety of entities, for-profit companies, nonprofit orgs, municipalities, cities, sometimes, trade associations. But what they all have in common is some commitment to have pro-social impact that is meaningful and measurable. ROB: Let's pull into that a little bit. Give us maybe an example, if you can, of a client, of the sort of work you've done together, of what this looks like in action. ROBIN: Well, in the early going, roundabout 2005-2006, I had the opportunity to work with Walmart's sustainability effort. Those were two words that didn't necessarily go together at the time. It raised a lot of legitimate skepticism. But in fact, under the tenure of their CEO at the time, Lee Scott, they really saw the future as it pertains to big box retail and how they would have to change their practices, be it in terms of packaging, creating a packaging scorecard – they created more of a race to the top for brands to reutilize, recycle, less waste. And many other initiatives. In fact, they formed 13 sustainability committees in their transportation, their energy, their seafood. That's been the model. I've also done a lot of work with what is now called the Great Sports Alliance, but it started with the nonprofit NRDC and the interest on the part of professional sports – the venues, the arenas, the teams – adopting sustainable practices, again, throughout their supply chain. Energy, waste, water, transportation, how they procure goods. That story needs to radiate through their internal supply chain to their external stakeholders to their consumers. So having meaningful initiatives that then you can start to develop stories that really show the impact and the lift that brands can get from doing the right thing – that's the common denominator. And those were two stories, ongoing, that started around the time we started Citizen. ROB: That's early, and I feel like some of that has not even arrived yet. Something I feel like we're starting to hear a little bit about is measuring the environmental impact of a business and the different layers of measurement. You're probably the expert on this and not me, but some people will say, “All of our power consumption is green energy.” It's like, okay, but – you mentioned the supply chain, you mentioned suppliers, you mentioned up and down the organization. So outside of the stick that may be coming on that, whether it's in public markets or whether it's regulatory, how do you get businesses to think about the carrot when in their own initial reaction they might say, “We do the right things here,” and it's true in maybe the first or second order effects, but when you get to the third order effects, there's a lot more to work on? ROBIN: No doubt there is. And it can be challenging. But creating an initiative that you can build the sociopolitical will for, and then building on that, creates the momentum. Creating a coalition of the willing that this is the trajectory that the company or the organization wants to take is fundamental. And it's not just environmental, by the way; it's social impact, fundamentally. ROB: Yeah, which now we have acronyms around, again. But there's a material difference, I think, between – you can check a box, you can have an ESG statement, you can have committees. It's something else entirely, I think, to not just have a committee and to actually execute. How do you think about ensuring that those committees, that those initiatives have meat to them and are not just window dressing or greenwashing or whatever else we want to call it? ROBIN: So much of it is susceptible to greenwashing, and perception is a whole other thing in reality between half-empty and half-full. Walmart took a lot of spears early on, but people have seen the credibility that has come from meaningful adoption of practices. And it's happening across the corporate world, albeit not fast enough. I'll give you a case in point. There was a vote taken yesterday on compulsory board diversity – in other words, more women, more people of color on boards – struck down because, ironically, it was perceived as discriminatory. [laughs] Here in California, where we lead, we've gone in recent years from like 17% to some 30% women on corporate boards. That's a good gain, but it ain't anywhere near 50%. We're a country that doesn't like regulation. It's something I struggle with a lot because we can talk a good game about law and order, but law and order requires rules of the road, and it requires a well-governed society to be a healthy, functional society. In the meantime, corporations run the roost. The common good is crippled under the weight of corporate good, which quickly can curdle into corporate bad. I'm talking about Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Tobacco, Big Plastic – something I'm very concerned about. That implicates Big Beverage, the Coca-Colas of the world, the plastic, the fossil fuel industry, that has a responsibility to take care of the crap they put out there. Not to mention the downstream health effects. So, you need to look at it all, and we don't have claim to the answers writ large, but we take on initiatives where there's bounds and outcomes that we can point to. ROB: Right. Sounds like you've got a lot of work to do, is what it sounds like. ROBIN: There's no shortage of work for all of us to do. ROB: That's right. ROBIN: I guess it may sound kind of schoolmarm-ish, but I really believe that – we talk about the experience economy and this and that economy; what we need right now is the responsibility economy. It's time for grownups to be grown up. ROB: Robin, you did mention the genesis of the firm. Let's talk for a moment, though, about the pre-genesis of the firm. How did you decide to start in the first place? You've mentioned the inspiration, you've mentioned the book, but what made you jump off the cliff and start Citizen Group in the first place, coming from where you were? It's not always the easiest way to live. ROBIN: No, it was a reckoning, but it was a convergence that I'm really grateful for. My story was I came up as a copywriter, a writer. Came out of journalism, music. Went into advertising and had the privilege to work at some excellent shops – Hal Riney here in San Francisco and ChiatDay. As a writer and creative director, learning the potency of storytelling, visually and verbally, in short form commercials, and even pre-internet, before we had branded content – but it was still getting you to read the printed page, telling a story on television. I had done a lot of work since the 1980s when I was in New York at ChiatDay with Amnesty International, a leading human rights organization. I got exposed to Amnesty's work because of the rock events they were putting on at the time – the likes of Springsteen and Sting and Peter Gabriel doing world tours, promoting this concept of human rights. As a twenty-something, I didn't know from human rights that we have human rights, and there's 30 of them that are articulated in the International (sic., Universal) Declaration of Human Rights created after World War II. It really struck me. I continued to do work on behalf of Amnesty and other NGOs, and I realized that two economies were operating. There was the Moneyball ad world, where money is thrown around. Half a million for a 30-second spot was not an uncommon thing at that time. And you might have $15k to put against creating a PSA on behalf of a nonprofit org. Really two different economies. And what was more important just didn't follow in terms of where we place our value. The Citizen Brand book really said there's a convergence going on here. Like I said, I had no idea that a few years later, the rise of social media would accelerate it to such a degree that companies had to walk their talk. They couldn't simply put on a corporate mirage and pretend everything was okay; people were going to look more closely at their practices and interrogate, in a healthy way. And that created the impetus for what we see more of today. ROB: You've been doing this thing for a little while. What are some of the lessons you've learned in the process of building the firm? What are some things you might go back and tell yourself to do differently if you had that chance to talk to yourself? ROBIN: Lessons learned. I might've applied more focus to social impact earlier, even though I've been doing it for a while now. I think about years – I won't say wasted. They were not wasted. Great experiences, and learning the craft of advertising is part of my skillset. But having the lightbulb go off sooner in terms of applying more of my working years to making a difference in terms of social outcome is something that if I could rewind the clock, I would put more years in that quadrant than the fun and games I had when I was youthful and indiscreet. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] You wouldn't have been as youthful and indiscreet if you had done otherwise. But I hear you. There's those corners we turn where we realize in some way or another – we get more serious; we discover a path that we can run well on, and we certainly wish we had found it sooner, had started that impact sooner, because we get so much better as we keep going. So I completely understand that. As we mentioned at the top, you are a man of many talents and many thoughts and many ideas. Something that I wasn't really aware of that you mentioned was the Solar AquaGrid. Tell us about that. I don't think those words naturally go together in most people's minds, so unpack this for us. What's going on here? It's intriguing but momentarily confusing, and I think it'll all make sense through your words. ROBIN: Yeah. One of my closest friends and dearest collaborators, Jordan Harris, we've done a lot of work together for Rock the Boat and other social causes in relation to promoting the rise of EVs, the EV revolution. It was his genesis – we both travel up and down the state, from Northern California to Southern California, seeing these open aqueducts that convey our water, and year on year, the increasing drought we have here in California. It got him scratching his head because he lives part of his time in France, where the canals are tree-shaded. They're tree-lined and shaded canals, whereas here our canals are open and exposed, and we couldn't help but think: how much water are we losing each year in terms of evaporative loss? Because heat rises. ROB: How much? ROBIN: Well, we commissioned a study. We started a project first at Citizen to commission a study. We sought out the best researchers we could find, and they're based in UC Merced, which is the home of University of California- UC Solar and UC Water. We commissioned a study that said up to 63 billion gallons of water could be saved annually if all 4,000 miles of California's canal system, aqueduct system, were covered with solar canopies. And many other compounding advantages, because when you cover the canals, you're producing obviously clean energy, renewable energy that can be used locally by the communities. We're going to need a lot more renewable energy on tap if we are going to shift towards an EV-driven economy. And then there's the avoided land costs, because rather than taking working lands, farmlands, to put solar farms, solar arrays, why not have these existing aqueducts, these existing utility corridors do double duty for us? The more we got into it, we discovered that there can be reduced maintenance costs because the solar shade over the open canals, the open rivers, reduces aquatic weed growth. So there's less dredging up of the algae underneath. And it has waterfall implications, rather than dumping more chemicals into the water. Long story not so short, one thing led to another and we started to examine holistically all of the potential advantages of such deployments. We developed a company, a spinoff that is called Solar AquaGrid, where we're consulting with the state and working directly with irrigation districts – most notably with Turlock Irrigation District in the Central Valley – planning the first demonstration project. We were successful in getting state funds to do pilot. So we expect to break ground in the fall. I'm quite excited about that because now we can really put these premises to the test. The whole idea is to study in order to scale, because you only gain the advantages of this idea, a big idea, a rather obvious idea – we weren't the first to come up with it – but now we're on a path where we are very fortunate to be able to study and build on the findings. ROB: California is a big state, lots of people, lots of opinions; are there any particular groups you're concerned about having concerns about this? Are there impacts on wildlife? Are there impacts on other things that people would worry about? It probably can be mitigated, probably a net positive, but what's the group that's going to fret about these? ROBIN: We talk about that a lot. We are inviting naysayers to come with their questions because the whole purpose is to interrogate this proposition and learn, where are there holes? We want to be mindful not to replace one problem and create others. That's not our intention. We set Solar AquaGrid up as a for-benefit company that is predicated on public, private, academic cooperation. To that end, you raised the issue of wildlife; we have enlisted Audubon Society as a research partner because we do want to learn, what are the effects, the unforeseen potential consequences of covering large swaths of the canal? So we're going to learn all this. If you want to do another podcast in about – call it 24 or 36 months, we'll have more to talk about. ROB: That'll be fascinating. The next thing that comes to my mind also is, you talked about France, you talked about their waterways. You get into some interesting questions. They have waterways. They're tree-shaded, so you could cover them with solar panels, but the trees are going to make not as much solar. Is it potentially beneficial enough to where you take down trees to put the solar over it? Because the trees are there, they keep it shaded somewhat, but it's still uncovered. It's still evaporative. ROBIN: Beautiful. There's beauty in complexity. These are the questions in terms of net positives and net losses regarding, in that case, biodiversity. By the way, we here in the U.S. are not the first to deploy solar arrays over canals. It was first done in Gujrat, India, where there are projects we've actually gone to school on and have learned from those past deployments – both what to do and what not to do. ROB: That's fascinating. We have a business partner whose primary office is directly in Gujrat, so I am familiar with it. I have looked at it. In their case, they chose to set up there because what I've learned is that India's all one time zone, and Gujrat is the farthest west you can get, just about, so you get the best overlap with the U.S. if you're there. So that was interesting. We ended up alongside an outsource team, and then we started asking why they were there, and that turns out to be the why. ROBIN: I did not know that. That's cool. ROB: I imagine the same thing applies to – I think China's also on one time, so who knows where that leads. But speaking to your journey, speaking to Citizen Group, speaking to the type of work that you do – we've talked about some things already that you're looking forward to, but what's coming up for Citizen Group? What's coming up for the type of work you do that is exciting for you? What else is next, beyond what we've already spoken about? ROBIN: It's the range of projects, the diversity of them, that makes it fun. Challenging and fun. There's so many ways to make impact, and there's new ideas to think about every day. But one of the projects that has been exciting this spring is in the area of – it goes by another acronym, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. The sports apparel retailer Lids has developed an initiative to recognize and honor the history of the early Black leagues: the Negro Baseball League, the original Harlem Globetrotters, what was called the Black Fives; before there was the NBA, there were the Black Fives. These were leagues and teams in the era of racial segregation. These are the players that invented the modern game. In fact, the name of the campaign that we've developed is called “They Gave Us Game.” It's been a blast because I'm a sports fan, particularly basketball, and going back, the whole tree of influences in terms of – much like music, how every generation is influenced by the generation previous, and how the moves and skills developed in one era that proved successful and now you can see in the game of our players today. That's been fun. So they've come up with this apparel collection called They Gave Us Game. We've also been working in the area of services for those among us who are aging. Which is all of us, right? But there are more Americans that are living longer, and as a result, there's more services available that most of us don't necessarily recognize the variety of caregiving and expert services. So we've been working with a group called Leading Age to create a campaign called Keep Leading Life that showcases the range of services available to people. ROB: Got it. We'll look forward to those things as well. Robin, when people want to find and connect with you and Citizen Group, where should they go to find you? ROBIN: We have a website. It's called citizengroup.com. ROB: That's a good website. That's easy to remember. Very appropriate. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, for all the work you're doing for all of us, and for sharing a little bit about it along the way. Grateful to hear your journey. ROBIN: Thanks for your interest. It was fun talking to you. ROB: Excellent. Have a wonderful day. Take care. ROBIN: Take care. Thanks. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

#95 | You're Not Alone: How to Deal When Life Gets Difficult Have you ever had the blahs or the blues feeling? Have you ever felt like this? It's Monday morning. You're lying in bed, in the same comfy pants that you've worn all weekend, dreading the day ahead. You feel burned out. exhausted. Anxious. Maybe even a bit depressed. While you wait for motivation (or for a latte to magically appear), you grab your phone and scroll through one of your social media feeds. There, smiling back at you, are dozens of shiny, happy people, full of energy, enthusiastic, being productive, and doing fun, noteworthy things. How are they ALWAYS so optimistic and so productive? Do they have some secret understanding of how to live life and be in total bliss, abundance, and effortless flow? You wish you could be living shiny like that all the time and spreading the joy of what you love to do all the time, too — yet you feel stuck. And today, you don't feel like crawling out from under the covers. If you can relate, you are NOT alone. This struggle is so common — especially these days — which is why I chose this topic and this question from Rob: “How do you go about your daily life when you feel really heavy, depressed, or unmotivated? Do you just push yourself and smile through the pain? Please share your secret to being able to function through difficult times.” I know that I seem super optimistic and a rah rah cheerleader type yet I'm not happy and productive all the time. Yet I do have a secret to showing up and giving my most authentic best, even when I'm in a dark place. In today's episode, I share: A mantra that was gifted to me as a child to get through the darkest moments that I still use today. 3 powerful words that can help support you to reground, realign, and shift for the highest good with a mindfulness strategy. An affirmation that can instantly lift the weight from your shoulders. A couple of stories of hope from real folks who eliminated overwhelm and lifted their depression I also share a personal story and I hope it helps you feel more supported and far less alone. Now, let's turn this insight into inspiring action. Take out your journal and take 5 minutes to reflect on a time when you were struggling with anxiety, burnout, overwhelm, or sadness. What was going on in your life at that time? How did it make you feel? What tools helped you to release, clear, shift, discern (whether you needed to show up), and then if it supported you to show up and do what you were called to do? (e.g. energy healing, meditation, program, therapy, a book, mantra, self-care practice, advice, outside help, etc.) No matter how you show up today, remember: you are showing up - however that looks. Know that your best really is always most beneficial. Promise.

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.

Kevin Roy, Co-founder of GreenBananaSEO based in Beverly, Massachusetts   Kevin Roy is the Co-founder of GreenBananaSEO, a full-stack digital ad agency, best known for search engine optimization but also providing paid media, Google AdWords, Facebook, and programmatic display services. Over the years the team has developed a number of internal systems to keep up with the work, including 24x7 online ordering system that funnels agency orders to his team and creates a workflow. Kevin says the agency always has more web development work than it can “keep up with” but over the past 15 years, it has always been a “loss leader.”  The agency's motto is “Page 1 or you don't pay.” Kevin explains that the agency does not guarantee the agency's services will get a client on Page 1. It's about whether the client pays. Unless we get our clients on Page 1 for the keywords that they pick, they don't pay us. If we don't get them ranked, they don't pay us. If we get them ranked and lose their rankings, they don't pay us. We have to get them ranked and keep them ranked Part of the “secret sauce” of the agency's success is a comprehensive understanding of Google's webmaster tools and its ever-changing rules. Websites are optimized “based on a few very important factors.” The agency has an 80-step process, which is frequently updated to adapt to Google's policy changes. As a recent example of a new Google requirement, Kevin cites desktop viewability. The agency has integrated this requirement into the websites it manages and tested the sites to ensure they meet “all those metrics.” Kevin warns against using “tricks” to “game the system” to get a site ranked. He says, “Google is always going to be bigger and have more resources” and will eventually figure out the “game.” “That's not a position you want to put your client in,” he says. He believes it is more important to “just try to provide quality and relevance” and then adds, “It does take people a little longer to get ranked when you follow the rules, but it also is harder to lose your ranking when you do.” When Kevin decided to start his agency, he offered to build websites and run SEO for three successful businesspeople on two conditions:  that they not tell anyone that he “did it for free” and that, if they were happy with his work, they would recommend him. The strategy worked. Today, the agency is 100% referral and “business just keeps coming in.” At the beginning of client engagement, GreenBananaSEO provides a free website audit and recommendations based on what it perceives to be a client's problem. Kevin says the agency is a “digital executioner” with an SEO division and a paid media division (focused on key performance indexes/conversions). He says the agency does “almost everything on a screen that's paid” including OTT (over-the-top) television, programmatic, geofencing, geotargeting, and addressable media. No billboards. No direct mail. “It's all paid media,” he explains, and the agency is “hired by people to make their messaging and their branding work.” Kevin can be reached on his personal page at: ijustmetkevin.com.or on his agency website at: greenbananaseo.com. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and my guest today is Kevin Roy, Co-founder of GreenBananaSEO based in Beverly, Massachusetts. Welcome to the podcast, Kevin.  KEVIN: Hey, thanks for having me. ROB: Great to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about GreenBanana and what you specialize in? KEVIN: We don't sell bananas. GreenBananaSEO is a full-stack digital ad agency, and we're primarily known for our search engine optimization, but we also have a significant portion of our clients run paid media, Google AdWords, Facebook, programmatic display. One of the reasons that a lot of people know us for search engine optimization is our mottol, which is “Page 1 or you don't pay.” So unless we get our clients on Page 1 for the keywords that they pick, they don't pay us. If we don't get them ranked, they don't pay us. If we get them ranked and lose their rankings, they don't pay us. We have to get them ranked and keep them ranked. And the big secret is there's no secret. You just do what you're supposed to do. Google publishes their webmaster tools. They're not fun to read. [laughs] We read them and we optimize people's sites based on a few very important factors that I could always touch on later. But you don't try to game the system. You just try to provide quality and relevance, and you magically rank. ROB: How do you think about socializing that knowledge across your team? Some people who are there might have an intrinsic knowledge of what it takes, they've digested the notes on what Google likes, what Google doesn't like. But somebody new comes in or somebody's new to the industry – how do you think about putting them on the path of not looking for tricks and of doing the right thing? KEVIN: That's a great question. We have a process. We have an 80-step process and we teach our members to follow that process. But we also have a hierarchy of SEO director-level knowledge that are always going and looking for the latest changes that Google has published that they made and how we have to adapt our process to that. Something that just came out recently was desktop viewability. It's something that Google is amping people for if they don't have the right desktop viewability, so we have to make that part of it, go in and test that, make sure their site is hitting all those metrics and adapting the site to that. ROB: That makes sense. SEO has a long history, and it's been through – you're making reference to tips and tricks, and there were all these conversations about “secrets.” There were tools people would provide that would tell you these secrets. Did you always come at it from the non-secrets angle, or was that an evolution and there were some tricks that once were kind of helpful, but have really attenuated as Google has evolved its algorithm? KEVIN: The thing that's always stuck in the back of my mind is how massive Google is. There are tricks and things that you can do to game the system and try to get the site ranked, but Google is always going to be bigger and have more resources, and they are ultimately going to figure that out, and that's not a position you want to put your client in. I always say, it's not if you get caught, it's when you get caught. So if you decide that's the game you want to play, then buckle up. Maybe that's something you want to do, but that's not what we do. It does take people a little longer to get ranked when you follow the rules, but it also is harder to lose your ranking when you do. It's a lot more beneficial. And our clients are real businesses that are really trying to promote their work, and they can't afford to get caught for something we did. ROB: Page 1, that's a great target. Are there ever keywords I would want to target where you would look at me as a client and say, “You know, I get it, but that's a no. We can't guarantee that”? Is there a target that's too high? KEVIN: There are two parts to that answer. Number one, we don't guarantee ranking. We guarantee that if we can't get you there, you don't pay us. So when people call and say, “Hey, GreenBanana, we need to get on Page 1 in a month for these keyword phrases,” I'm like, “Great. We have an AdWords campaign for that. I can guarantee you'll get on Page 1 with a Google AdWords campaign because we're going to bid higher than your competitors for that.” But there are certain things Google takes into consideration, like domain authority, how long the site has been living, how much content is on the site, and that a lot plays into how successful we think we're going to be before we start the campaign. So if you started a brand new dating website today and said, “I want to get on Page 1 for dating,” I would say, “Okay, it's going to take us about 18 months to get you ranked. This is what it's going to cost when we do get you ranked. Sign this contract.” And you'll probably say, “I can't afford this.” [laughs] Because eHarmony and Match.com and Plenty of Fish and those people have teams and teams of SEO people. So yes, we can do it, but a lot of times if it's a super broad term that is hyper, hyper-competitive, like – everyone calls us for mesothelioma. SEOs have been working on that for 15 years, so we have 14½ years of catch-up to do. It's going to be expensive. ROB: That all makes sense. Where did this whole thing come from, Kevin? What made you decide to start GreenBanana? KEVIN: I used to be the web director for a company called eRoom Technology that ended up getting bought by EMC. It's a workspace collaboration, kind of like – I don't know if you use Basecamp or Teams. ROB: I know all the stuff. ClickUp and so many things now. KEVIN: Yeah, all those collaboration spaces. The company got bought out, and I had a team of people under me, and next thing you know I was doing about two hours' worth of work doing web edit updates and going to the gym for the rest of the time and realizing my job was not going to last long. When my boss got let go, I went off and decided to start my own company. I got a good severance package, and I went around and found three people in the area that were really good, that I thought were successful businesspeople, and I said, “I'm going to build you a website for free. I'm going to do your SEO. You're not going to tell anybody that I did it for free, and if you're happy with it, you can recommend me.” That's legitimately how the business started. ROB: Wow. KEVIN: Two of them worked out. One of them, that company either moved – I can't even remember what happened. But two of them recommended me, and that started the spiral. To this day, I spend my time – we don't have an outreach program. We don't even do our own SEO. If you look at our SEO, it could be a lot better. I know the audience can't see this, but the left-hand side of this sheet, there's 30 RFPs that I had to write last week, and we're 100% referral. We just try to help people. We'll do free audits for people and say, “This is what we think you should do. Your problem may not be able to be solved by SEO” – for example, if it's a product that no one's ever heard of before, SEO Is not what you want. It's going to be programmatic or social to get in front of people that might like your product. So we spend our days doing that, and miraculously, business just keeps coming in. It's been like that for 15 years. ROB: When you mention RFP, is that an expression of interest from a client who needs a proposal, or more of a formal RFP, competitive…? KEVIN: That's a good question. I don't write RFPs. Actually, I did. I wrote two and spent weeks doing them and no one ever called me back, so I don't write RFPs. [laughs] People calling us and asking for quotes, that's what I call RFPs. ROB: Understood. So, you're turning around a proposal, someone says, “What does this look like?”, you do a little bit of discovery, “I want to rank for this, I want to rank for that,” you turn it around and tell them, “This is what it looks like.” KEVIN: Yeah. We do an audit and then come and tell them, “Hey, is SEO the right thing for you? If it is, we'll help you pick some keyword phrases.” Then we send it to them, there's usually a little back and forth, and then we decide if we want to move forward or not. ROB: You just mentioned programmatic. I know earlier you mentioned not just SEO, but paid search, and then you mentioned social, which I didn't hear you mention earlier. Scope of services is always an interesting conversation. Where do you draw the line? Are you doing paid social? Do you do organic social? Where do you say yes, where do you say no? KEVIN: It's all paid media. We do almost everything on a screen that's paid, like OTT, which is connected to television, programmatic, geofencing, geotargeting, addressable. What we don't do is anything print. We don't do billboards. We don't do direct mail. People hire us because we're digital executioners. We don't even do – if someone calls and says, “I want the sexiest branding of anybody,” that's not what we do. We're hired by people to make their messaging and their branding work. We have an SEO division and we have a paid media division. The paid media team is solely focused on KPI or key performance indexes or conversions. When someone comes to work for GreenBanana as our paid media side, especially if they're from another agency, I tell them, if you're really, really good at this job, you can sell reporting for maybe two to three months. But you can sell conversions and leads forever. So everything that you're doing, you should absolutely figure out in the very beginning. We don't start a campaign until we figure out what the goal of the client is, and then you take the media that you're serving and drive it to that goal and try to maximize it. Sometimes social, like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, will outperform Google AdWords, or programmatic will outperform Twitter. A lot of our clients will come to us with, “Hey, I want to spend $5,000 in social and $2,500 in AdWords,” and we find out after running a campaign for 30 to 60 days, “You know what? AdWords is getting you double the amount of leads for the budget. We recommend you switch and pull your money from social into that.” And they always say yes, because the client doesn't care who we're giving money to; they just care about the success of the company. So that's how we do that. Our account execs are really well-versed in every single medium, and they're medium agnostic. They don't care if budget gets pulled from one medium to another, even if it affects our margin at GreenBanana, because our job is to get the campaigns to be most successful. Those are the clients that increase budget, that stay with us forever. We have a plumber that has been with us for 13 of our 15 years, and they went from spending $750 a month to $40,000 a month over that long period of time because the campaigns that we're working on are producing results. ROB: Right. It's an engine for their business now and would be a fairly terrifying thing to switch out, I think. Also hard to get too different – even if they wanted to test out a competitive firm, it's a little hard because then you're bidding on some of the same stuff, I would think. KEVIN: Oh yeah, that's a great point. You can't run two Google campaigns because if you have two firms running two Google campaigns, Google's only going to show one, and the one that's showing is going to actually be more expensive than the one that isn't. You just outbid yourself. So if you're a company ever trying to pit one agency against the other, don't have them run the same medium. Don't have them both run Facebook or both run AdWords. It's a terrible idea. ROB: That sounds like a good way to spend $80,000 a month instead. KEVIN: It's a good way to blow a lot of money, yeah. ROB: You mentioned you had this initial flywheel in the firm, three test subjects and some referrals, and still growing and spinning it by referrals. What was the moment – your title is co-founder, so where else did this start, and when did it start to expand beyond the co-founder territory? KEVIN: It got to a point where I was – we do web development in-house. We never talk about it because we have more than we can keep up with, and for some reason, in 15 years it's never been profitable. It's always this loss leader. So I was doing a lot of web development, and I was outsourcing the stuff that I couldn't keep up with. The outsource company that was local called me and said, “We can't keep up with the demand that you're sending us. Here's a guy we recommend you send some of this stuff to.” His name is Mark, and he's my business partner now. He and I really hit it off, and I said, “Let's just get in this together because we have complementary skillsets.” So that was the co-founder piece. When it went beyond it, we didn't have any money when we started. We didn't have any private equity. No angel investors. We would save a little and then hire an employee, and save a little and hire an employee. If you look at the trajectory of GreenBanana, we've always grown, but it's been a slow, steady organic growth to where we are right now. There are companies that have surpassed us that haven't done that, and you could argue that's a great way to do it, just got a big influx of cash and hired a team. But we said, no, we're just going to keep reinvesting the money we make and build and grow and learn. As we grow, we build. We have internal systems that we've built because we have a lot of other agencies that are clients of ours. We built an online ordering system so at midnight, an agency can put in all the orders and have it funnel to my team and create a workflow. But that didn't happen overnight. It took us a year and a half to build it. ROB: Right. You mentioned this commitment to steady growth. It can be tempting to push the fast-forward button. How, over this time, have you resisted the temptation to – whether it's to take a buyout and take some growth there, whether it's to take in some money and boost some hires – how have you been thinking about that as you proceed and stuck to the path of building growth organically? KEVIN: That's a great question. In the beginning, no one was coming and asking us, “Here's a bunch of money to go do something.” So that was easy. We did have some periods that we got a lot more customers than we could handle and we made mistakes. So that also made us nervous, and making sure that if someone just handed us a blank check, we probably wouldn't know what to do with it. If the opportunity came where someone said, “Here's a bunch of money and here's the 10 agencies that we've grown exactly like yours,” that would be a lot more attractive. Now that we're at the revenue that we're at, we're actually getting people that are asking us for that. But we haven't gotten anything attractive enough to have us say, “We'll give up half the business for that.” That's actually the answer. The answer is nothing's been attractive enough. ROB: That seems to be the case in services in general. I hear, at least, quite often that you're measuring the value of the business based on EBITDA, based on your actual earnings, and maybe you can back out some expenses that have been loaded onto the business, that kind of thing. But really, if you're healthy on EBITDA, then the business needs some cash to grow and some cash to distribute, and what's the hurry on the sale? The terms aren't usually enough to make you say, “I couldn't make that much profit in three years.” KEVIN: Right. Exactly. That seems to be what's happening. Also, I don't think digital's going away. I do think that certain mediums may come and go, but we're medium agnostic, so if Facebook blows up next month, it's going to stink, but we can shuffle. ROB: As you reflect on this journey so far – I guess you're about 12 to 13 years in – what are some things you've learned on this journey that you wish you could go back and tell yourself to do differently? It sounds like you wouldn't tell yourself to go take a check and get bought out, but I imagine there are some things you would consider doing differently along the way. KEVIN: I think a lot of it is psychological for me. If I could go back and say to 12 or 13 years ago Kevin, I'd say part of being an entrepreneur is there's a lot of times where you're taking three steps forward and two steps back. But the two steps back are never that bad. I've spent countless sleepless nights thinking of the worst thing that could possibly happen, and it's never happened. Not even kind of happened. It's legitimately never happened. So, if I could go back, I'd say stop worrying about that and focus on all the positive things because that thing's never going to happen. And if it repeatedly hasn't happened in 13 years, it's not a coincidence. So I think that's something I wish I knew a long time ago. But it's also something that I continue to wrestle with because it's kind of burned in the back of your brain. ROB: Absolutely. I needed that reminder from some other entrepreneurs yesterday. You have that moment, you have that day, where something small bad does happen. We had a job offer out that I was really excited about, and the last eight offers we put out were all accepted, and this person said no. I was like, oh man, that was not the answer I wanted. But same thing – you lose a client, but along the way, you've planted those seeds so that six months from now, you're going to say, “That was a speedbump. That was not the end of the world.” We grew from there. A lot of folks said their experience has been they hired somebody better right after they got a no. It's that long perspective, and I think planting the seeds and knowing you've done the work along the way. KEVIN: Right. There's a great quote – I don't even know who said it, but you don't find a way to go around the problem; you find a way to go through it. It seems to work out. We had an employee that stole almost a quarter of our business, left with that, and we made it back in a year. It's honestly the best thing that's ever happened. So things like that, at the time, horrible. And then I wouldn't change a thing now. ROB: [laughs] You might give them 50 cents to go do it. KEVIN: Seriously, yeah. ROB: They took maybe some customers that were more challenging to manage or maybe more loyal to a person than to the process. There's a lot to think about there. KEVIN: Yeah, and it makes you sit and evaluate and say, “What things do I have to do and what do I need and what are the things that are necessary?”, and you end up becoming better. That's what entrepreneurs do. People that aren't entrepreneurs don't understand it because those people are the ones that won't take that risk and say, “I've got to go. I can't do this. I can't handle this stress.” The entrepreneurs say, “I've got to figure out how to deal with it, because this is it.” ROB: Right. Kevin, as you look ahead to GreenBanana, the future of GreenBanana and the practice areas you're in – you mentioned maybe some channels go away, maybe there are some ways you're thinking about shifting the practice – what does the future look like? What are you excited about? KEVIN: I'm excited about – technology is increasing. Whether you find this good or bad, creepy or not, the amount of data you have on client behavior is only getting better and enabling us to be more accurate in helping our clients hit their conversions. So that evolution is really exciting. With the products that we have, like Google launching GA4 – they already launched it, but GA4 is better than Universal Analytics in how you can see data. Those things inside the products are great, and there's also all these other new products that are really exciting. I'm personally really excited about decentralized finance and crypto. We're trying to figure out a way to accept crypto payments. It's a pain in the butt to figure it out, but little things like that are fun for me, and I think as long as you're excited about learning about new tech, there's always going to be a business for a digital agency. ROB: That's interesting on the accepting crypto side. Even for existing financial applications – we had a client who wanted to pay us their discovery budget on I think Venmo, and getting a business account up and running on these services from a KYC perspective, instead of a personal account – half the time it's like they never even thought about it. There's a lot ahead of us on that front, I think. KEVIN: Yeah. That's the part we're having trouble with. If you want to send me crypto to my crypto personal wallet, it's easy. We can do it literally right now. But getting it into the business, getting it into QuickBooks, getting it to my accountants – I was like, whatever. Future Kevin will work on that. [laughs] ROB: Is there any particular business that you're seeing, some type of business that is perhaps most open to paying in crypto? What's that look like? KEVIN: None of the current businesses we're working with – I won't say none of them, but most of them wouldn't consider it. It's just something I'm personally interested in and I think it's going to happen. ROB: Absolutely. A lot of these things took some time, and then it's daily happenings. Pulling a little deeper into the topic, what are you seeing in defi and crypto? What direction excites you the most? Sometimes we're placing bets; sometimes we're just thinking about placing emotional bets with where we place our attention. What's drawing you as the most tangible next few things that are going to happen? KEVIN: I'm invested in crypto. The things that have done the best for me are Bitcoin and Ethereum. I do read some other defi newsletters, but full disclosure, none of them have done great. But I haven't really gone crazy into it. I spend most of my time on my company rather than researching that. I think the ease of transaction and the transparency of the transaction is so important, and I think that is what is going to – once people start to get more comfortable with decentralized finance, the ability to send money back and forth where there's a trackable ledger of it, I think that is really going to change business. I mean, for us to get a check from someone, for us to send money back and forth, for us to do an ETH transaction, it's our billing department on a phone call with someone, it's back and forth, it's waiting for 24 hours. Wallet to wallet is a QR code and a button, and it's there, and the ledger's there. I really think that's going to start to change the world if people can let go of the fact that they're not comfortable with it. ROB: There's a lot there and there's a lot to learn from all at the same time. Some of this stuff is kind of hard, some of the fees are kind of high, but you also see – I was just out at South by Southwest in Austin, and one of the most visible activations there was for an NFT collection called Doodles. They'd let you in the activation with your SXSW badge, but they'd let you in the VIP line if you could prove that you were a holder of a Doodles NFT. Which is about 12 ETH, so it's… KEVIN: Yeah, that's a lot of money. ROB: Absolutely. Looking at that, someone was like, “Could you just buy it and sell it?” I said, it depends on whether the thing's been pumped by the conference. If it's pumped by the conference, you're going to lose 2 ETH just because you bought it at a spiky time. That's bad news. KEVIN: I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the value of an NFT because it's a picture on a screen that everybody can take. I know you pay and it's yours, but you and I could take screenshots of each other right now. It's hard to tell who owns it. ROB: In this case they actually were validating ownership against the blockchain. To get in, they were actually authenticating the ownership. But definitely hard right now. KEVIN: Exactly. It's a currency that's validated, but it's like, what's the value of having that picture other than getting an entrance? I understand that piece of it, but sticking it on your computer and saying “I own this,” like the picture behind me – it's not really worth anything. I'm still trying to wrap my head around NFTs, and that's my fault because I know that they're really taking off. ROB: There's a lot to go there. Even in the judgment of art. I can buy art at IKEA or I can buy art at Sotheby's, and those are two very different things. But I can buy art at IKEA that probably looks like something I could buy at Sotheby's. The value there is subjective, and where it lands, who knows? KEVIN: Yeah, exactly. I heard this really interesting podcast about a guy that was spending – he's a wine collector, and some of those bottles of wine are hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he said, “I drank one and it really wasn't that good.” [laughs] “You can get a comparable wine for $28.” ROB: Absolutely, or $3 at Trader Joe's, right? KEVIN: It's like, is that $400,000 better than the $3 one? [laughs] Or is it 15 times better? ROB: Kevin, when people want to find and connect with you and with GreenBanana, where should they go to find you? KEVIN: I used to lose my business card all the time, so I bought ijustmetkevin.com. ROB: Nice. KEVIN: That'll take you to my page. Or you can just go to greenbananaseo.com ROB: That is excellent. Kevin, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for sharing your experience, your knowledge, things you've learned. I think we're all better for it. Thank you very much. KEVIN: I appreciate your time. This was wonderful. Thank you. ROB: Best wishes to you and the team. Take care. KEVIN: Thanks. Take care. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Mardis & Phnam Bagley, Creative Directors & Founding Partners, Nonfiction Design (San Francisco, CA)   Mardis and Phnam Bagley are Creative Directors and Founding Partners at Nonfiction Design, a company that started originally as an industrial design firm but morphed into a future-focused studio. The studio works with startups, Fortune 500 companies, and governments to solve huge, complex problems and “change the world for the better.”  Phnam says all of their clients are long term and come to them “to solve huge problems about the future of education . . . living on Mars . . . food . . . neuroscience.”. The studio strategizes with a lot of these leaders in innovation, technology, and science to help them get their products “into the hands of people that need them.” The studio pushes clients “into extremes” to solve technical, experiential, and design problems “through ergonomics, through human factors, through thinking about behavior change.”  Mardis explains one of the challenges of this work – that people have to “fight the biases of the past.” A recent project was with Movida, the School of Lifelong Learning, which wanted to rethink the future of education. Nonfiction set up two teams, one that dug into white papers from the past, and the other, a group of creatives unexposed to this data, that freely brainstormed the future of education. In the end, both groups came to the same conclusion . . . but the creatives had actionable solutions for moving forward. What did this exploratory discover about education? In this interview, Phnam outlines a few conclusions – one, that children would benefit from letting them “be and stay absurd.” She says, “Not everything in life needs to make sense, needs to be efficient.” She adds that life would be better if we sometimes spent time “doing things that don't make any sense.” She believes today's society schedules too much of children's time. Teens, especially, need “time to rest physically, to rest the brain, to talk to other people, and to be bored” in order to grow to be healthy adults. Mardis says, “Developing a solution that's completely individual to the client's needs is really, really important to how we conduct business and how we keep satisfied clients.” With an eye to the future, the studio has started working on a “more circular economy model,” where design not only takes into consideration recycling, but also repair and remanufacturing.  The Nonfiction Studio team is diverse . . . from “many different cultures, many different countries.” Mardis, with a background in industrial engineering and branding, says they don't look much at résumés or portfolios. Phnam, an industrial engineer with a master's degree in (aero)space architecture, says the studio hires people “because they have something very interesting, and most likely that thing has to do with their past – what kind of career they've been through, what kind of country they come from, what kind of past they've had.” The husband-wife team presented “Designing the Future of Everything” at South by Southwest 2022 two times due to demand. Mardis, Phnam, and Nonfiction are available on Twitter and post future of design videos on Instagram. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Mardis and Phnam Bagley, Creative Directors and Founding Partners at Nonfiction Design based in San Francisco, California. We have a special two-guest episode because we had two speakers and they like to spend time with each other. Why don't you start off by telling us about Nonfiction Design, and what is your superpower? PHNAM: Sure. Phnam here. I'm the wife of the Bagley duo. Nonfiction is a design firm based in San Francisco. Originally it was started as an industrial design firm because that's both of our backgrounds, and it turned into this future-focused studio where companies from startups all the way to Fortune 500 companies to governments come to us to solve huge problems about the future. When we say huge problems, we're talking about education, we're talking about living on Mars, we're talking about future of food, and we're talking about neuroscience. This is what we do. ROB: That sounds like a wide range of things to solve. How do you go about knowing how to solve all these things? PHNAM: We are an extremely curious group of people. There is not one subject in the world that we don't want to tackle because, in the end, what we want to do is change the world for the better. Impact is really at the core of everything that we do, whether it's thinking about the future of future humans or what we need today in the medical industry. That's what drives us. That gives us the motivation to work and make other people's lives better. But also creating the foundation of a future that we want to live in, because when you look at the news, for example, a lot of things are not going according to plan. And I believe, and we believe, that designers have the power to change that. That's why we started this company. ROB: Is there an example, maybe, of a future that you have had to recently think through? And what did you think about it? MARDIS: Hi, this is Mardis Bagley. Great question. I think one of the things we like to do is shake up the status quo. When we're thinking about futures, we often have to fight the biases of the past. Stepping out of this entrenched thinking. One of the projects we worked on recently is called Movida, the School of Lifelong Learning. Thinking and rethinking education is a very, very complex problem. One of the things we did right off is we said that we don't want to step too deep into research and repeat all the past, or even bias ourselves in thinking about the opportunity of the future. So, as we do this, we're a number of creatives from all over the planet; we're a very diverse studio of men, women, many different cultures, many different countries. But we all have some sort of experience. We have a certain amount of intuition. We all have been through school on many different levels. How do we redesign education in the way we think? What we did is we started designing it straight out of the gate. We pushed research to the side, which sounds kind of crazy. We totally avoided research in redesigning this school and this education system, and we came up with these really unique ideas about how to approach school and expand the minds of young children in a way that spoke to their wellbeing. It spoke to future generations. When we're talking about designing education, we can't design education for jobs that we don't yet know what they're going to be or the technologies that are going to empower them using the thinking of education that is well over 100 years old in the process. While we're doing this wild ride of creativity and exploration on one side, we had a secondary research track talking to leaders in education from MIT and Stanford. But we never let them talk to our creatives on the other side. We let them have independent paths as they explored forward. What happened is after a few months, we ended up at the same exact location in terms of knowledge, in terms of understanding education, and how to break the norms – except for we were reading whitepapers that are decades old on one side, and on the other side is purely months of creativity. We got to the same exact location except for the creatives came out with solutions that are actionable, solutions that are ready to change young people's lives. ROB: It might have even been hard to get to those solutions starting from the whitepapers, right? You started from another place and maybe even went some places you would never go. Part of brainstorming sometimes is proposing the impossible, the inappropriate, the unacceptable, but then bringing it back in bounds. So, what's a solution that we didn't know to a problem? PHNAM: Letting children be and stay absurd. The fact that not everything in life needs to make sense, needs to be efficient, and sometimes spend your time doing things that don't make any sense. That's part of being a child. So, reintroducing that in the way you interact with yourself, you interact with others, and you interact with the architecture of a school – that's what we wanted to bring in there. There are certain aspects of the school that don't really have a means. So that's very much part of it. Another thing is that when you look at the schedule of children today, it's a lot of going to school and going to after-school, activity, activity, activity. Their schedule is packed, and their parents are just driving them from one place to another. Really spending the time to rest physically, to rest the brain, to talk to other people, and to be bored – that's very much part of human evolution. It's a need that we have that we've taken away with all the screens and all the activity. We want to integrate it back into the lives of the kids so they grow up to be healthy adults. ROB: Are they allowed to be lazy at the same time, or can they do that at different times? Because structured lazy time seems like it would still be kind of in the pattern, but somebody's going to go crazy thinking about letting each kid be lazy when they want to. How do you pull it off? PHNAM: Laziness is something that we know of. We call it laziness, but really it has a lot to do with physiological changes – in teenagers, for example. When you grow, you actually need to sleep more. You actually have to rest more. We've been forcing a schedule that's extremely unnatural onto growing young adults, and that's not really working. What that does is teaches humans to learn how to read their own body and to give their body what they need. That's very much part of growing up and learning about the world. ROB: I think adults could learn that, too. We still need to learn how to accept that permission. I've done the audience a disservice; I've failed to mention why you have a loud fan club behind you. The reason is that we are live at South by Southwest at the interactive portion of the conference, primarily, this big old festival of people getting together in Austin, Texas for the first time in three years. You both are here to present a session. You presented it twice. What people don't know if they have an event is you sign up for the session, and if it gets a lot of popularity, they schedule you for it again. So, you presented this twice because probably some combination of reputation, a good sizzling headline and summary, a following, and all these things. Your session was “Designing the Future of Everything.” What content, what frameworks, what ways of thinking – or was it more examples? What did you share with the audience? What did you want them to take away? MARDIS: I would say that at the foundation of our company, we like to say we turn science fiction into reality for a better future. If you step back and start to ask yourself what does that really mean, we as a company, Nonfiction, work with a lot of leaders in innovation and technology, technologists themselves, scientists. Oftentimes these technologies have a hard time getting out of the laboratory. They have a hard time getting into consumers' hands, into the hands of people that need them. We come in and make these technologies available to people through ergonomics, through human factors, through thinking about behavior change. Very much so, as the title suggests, we do it for everything from medical devices to consumer devices. We work in aerospace and we work on-planet and off-planet. Recently, we're happy to say that we won first place in the Deep Space Food Challenge with NASA as well as the Canadian Space Agency. ROB: Congratulations. MARDIS: Yeah, that's very exciting. We're building things that will hopefully leave planet and make future astronauts' lives better as they travel two and a half, three years into space to Mars. ROB: What's needed differently on that three-year journey? What did you have to design for in that context? MARDIS: I'll let my partner, the outer space architect, answer that one. ROB: I like that job title, too. Wow. PHNAM: Yeah. I actually went to school for that. It surprises a lot of people. 15 years ago, I got a master's degree in space architecture from the University of Houston. Back then, space architecture was very based on systems engineering, like what volume is necessary to help astronauts survive in space? But when you look at space today in 2022 with the SpaceX and Blue Origins of the world, it becomes clear that people like us are going to be part of the space industry in the future, whether as tourists or as people going to work up there. The reason why it's so important for designers and architects and creatives to be part of all of this is because we understand humans. We know how to ask the right questions and to turn these answers into solutions that actually mean something to humans. So far, we've been designing space interiors very much like spaces for survival. When you look up the ISS right now, it's not really a place you want to hang out in. So really thinking about making space more human is one of the models that we go after. We want to invite more designers, more architects, more creatives, more artists to really help us with that change. It does take a lot of disciplines to design for space because not everything works the same way. Here on Earth, opening a door is like you put your hand on it, you turn the knob and you're done. Up in space you have to hold on to something else; otherwise you're going to be pushed back. You have to think about food the same way – eating – what can be sent there, what can be safe to eat, what can protect you from cosmic radiation and things like that. What is the long-term effect of microgravity on your body? There's been the famous twin project, Mark and Scott Kelly. One of the twins went up to space and one stayed on Earth, and we saw the difference physiologically and psychologically, what's been happening between the two. So, based on that type of knowledge, how do we design better interiors and better products and better medical support for us to see ourselves in space? ROB: That seems like it must've had so many constraints to it, but also some constraints that maybe weren't actual – that you were told were constraints but weren't. What did you find was a constraint that helped you be creative and get to an unexpected solution? And what was something you were told you couldn't do that you found out you actually could? Was there anything like that? PHNAM: We believe that without constraint you can't design. You're just going to come up with something that –  ROB: “Let's just put a five-bedroom house in space and call it good, we're all happy,” right? It doesn't work that way. PHNAM: The constraint is space, of course. If it doesn't fit in the payload area of a rocket, as of today we can't bring it up. One thing that's very different between designing for space and designing for Earth is weight. When we design something for Earth, weight is limited by shipping. In space, weight is money. I think it was in 1981, bringing a kilogram of mass up in low Earth orbit was like $81,000 or something. Now it's less than $2,000, depending on what it is. So yeah, we have to think about things like this even before we design anything. ROB: Let's rewind a little bit. Where did this whole thing start? What made you all decide to bring Nonfiction Design into existence rather than just having a job? MARDIS: Well, Nonfiction has been around for six years. Phnam and I have been in the industrial design industry for well over 16 years now. I've had a previous career in branding, and Phnam in aerospace as well. But what really brought it into existence is we were contracting, working in many different agencies over the years – all the big names you might recognize. We felt like there was a culture, there was a style of working that maybe could be refined. And I'm probably being kind. [laughs] We just felt like we could do it better, or at least let's say different. We felt so compelled to give it a try. Some of the things that we wanted to fight against is we didn't see enough diversity or inclusion. I mentioned that earlier. We have a very diverse crew, and that's part of our secret sauce – listening to everybody, being very inclusive. But also breaking away from the norms of what we call industrial design now. It's not just shape development or form development. That is part of it, making beautiful things, but we're well beyond that. We're into user interactions. We're into designing for impact. We put a lot of things on the planet. Our efforts put a lot of things in people's hands, and many of them go to the landfill. It's a very linear model. We've started doing a more circular economy model where we think about designing not only for recycling, but for repair and remanufacturing. We're thinking about our impact and we're thinking about that lifecycle of a product along the way, and how can we do less negative impact and more positive impact? Positive impact would be impacting the planet in maybe an upcycling way or a regenerative way, but also impacting people's lives along the way. ROB: How much of what you do is somebody coming to you knowing they want that whole package, and how much of it is them coming to you having seen something you did and they want one thing, and you have to bring them into the bigger picture? PHNAM: A lot of our clients today come to us with a question. They're like, “How do we solve this endemic problem?” Then we strategize together on how to solve that problem, whether it's a hardware solution or a software solution or whatever. Then from there, we build this relationship. Every client we have is a long-term relationship. We push them into extremes. One extreme is hypercreativity. They came to us as a design studio because they want us to show them what they can't get themselves, number one. Number two is that we as a design firm are extremely technical. We're not afraid of going very deep into the mechanical engineering, electrical, firmware, all that stuff because it's necessary. We need to be part of the process. So really solving the technical problem at the same time as solving the experiential and the design problem is what we do well. As we do that, we take the hand of the clients and show them how it's done. We don't have a recipe that we apply to all projects. That's actually a question we get asked all the time, “What is your process?” We probably have a different process for every single client we have. ROB: Wow. PHNAM: Because each of the clients has very specific needs in time and space and in industry, so we have to craft something very specific to each of them. ROB: I heard you say that a little bit when you were talking about not wanting to look at the whitepapers when you're designing a solution. It's not your process is always to put blinders on and not look at what's out there, but sometimes it is, and it depends somewhat on the solution. It's also an interesting positioning because a lot of creative services firms are out there – it's almost like if you need some more of this work than you have capacity for, then go call these people. “I need somebody to do a little bit more paid marketing than I can do internally.” You all are positioned in a way where they probably don't have the technical knowledge, and they are literally saying, “We don't know what we don't know. Please help us.” How do you communicate that when everybody wants to put a services firm into a category? How do you help people find you when they don't know the category they're looking for, maybe? Or is there a word of like five companies like you, and everyone else is somewhere else, that they're looking for? PHNAM: It's funny because I can't really think of any company that does the things that we do at the level that we do it. That's why we started this company: we saw that hole and we were like, “We can be that.” MARDIS: Yeah. Getting back to the question you were asking earlier of – do we guide our clients or do they come to us with a very specific ask. I think we like to assist our clients in dreaming. Dreaming of something bigger than themselves. We have to shoot for the stars to land on the moon, right? Let's go really far and allow them to dream, and then we're really good at fulfilling that dream. We have a lot of resources in-house, but we also have really good partnerships. Developing a solution that's completely individual to the client's needs is really, really important to how we conduct business and how we keep satisfied clients. ROB: How do you think about what to partner on versus what to cultivate as your own capability? What's something you know you send out of house because it's not your lane, but you need a steady partner for that kind of capability? PHNAM: I think it depends on the scale of things. If you need just a little bit of touch-up on mechanical engineering, we can probably do this in-house. But if you need a whole program developing new mechanism and new testing and all of that, or very specialized knowledge in acoustics, for example, that's when we tap into our network. Another network that we have is in material science. None of us are material scientists, but we work a lot with materials. But when it comes to the science of it, the scalability of it, and the transparency behind the sustainable decisions that we make, we actually go to see scientists or a specialist of that kind. Over the years, throughout our career, we have built this amazing network of people who can pretty much answer everything we want. And if they don't know it, they will know someone who knows. That's very helpful. ROB: That makes sense. Sometimes the fastest way to the solution is just saying out loud that you don't know and throwing it out into the world and somebody points you there. But when you're struggling, you're like, “How are we going to do this?” You don't know how you're going to do it and you feel trapped. PHNAM: Not knowing is actually where you have to start, in our book. If you start a project and you know exactly what you're going to do for the rest of the project, you're probably going to do what someone else has already done. But if you don't know, or if you're in a very uncomfortable space where you're like, “Oh my God, this project is so big, I don't know where to start” – that's a good sign. ROB: You mentioned you all have been in this business for six years. What are some things you've learned in that time that you wish you could go back and tell yourself? A lesson or two, maybe “rethink this” or do it a little differently? PHNAM: I can give you one quick answer. Business development is extremely difficult to find externally. We've had people who helped us and it was not very successful. We realized two or three years ago that Mardis and I are actually much better at it than people who have that on their business cards, for our particular company, because we have the vision. We know what our company should be doing and what it should not be doing, and we know how to speak about it with passion. We can also modify our spiel to be a little bit more business-oriented, to be a little bit more design-oriented or future-oriented. That connects a lot better with the audience that we're going after. We don't sound like salespeople. We really go deep in conversations with potential clients very quickly, and I think they see that authenticity and they're willing to go deeper with us immediately. ROB: There's a credibility in your experience. There's the founder authority in knowing the heart of the business. What do you think, Mardis? What would you say you might do differently? MARDIS: I do think Phnam nailed it. That would be by far the biggest thing. ROB: How do you think about growth, then? Do you feel like you grow by scaling your influence together and larger engagements? Do you think there's a place where you find a “mini Mardis” or a “mini Phnam” to come in, somebody who actually does have – I mean, that intersection. I've seen folks say it before. It's like, learn how to build something, learn how to sell something, and you'll be unstoppable. You all are in that “technical but sellable” lane. So how do you scale, or do you want to? MARDIS: I don't think either Phnam or I could handle a mini Mardis or a mini Phnam. Let's just be outright about that. [laughs] Again, respect to so many other talented people that might come to work for us. We love diversity. We love having clients of all different sizes, different shapes, as we've mentioned, in different verticals. This is all really fun and exciting to us. We take knowledge and apply one aspect from one category to another all the time. In a funny way, we kind of ebb and flow with the clients, and we select them as they come. PHNAM: And I think it's kind of like the same way we hire people. We could hire people who think like us and act like us, have the same hard skills as us, and just apply them. But what we look for is people who think differently but have the same drive as us. The way we choose concepts to go forward with is not. “What do I like as the founder of Nonfiction?”, because that's pretty limited after a while. What we look for is, “What is going to blow our minds so it can blow the client's mind, so then it can blow the user's mind?” We always go for that. And then, once we've made that decision, we turn very quickly into “let's prototype it, let's test it” mode. Every time we're uncomfortable with a solution, that's usually the nugget of something extraordinary. We design the future. The future is not here yet. If we're comfortable with everything that we do, we're not doing our job. We need to make ourselves uncomfortable within our team first, welcome our clients to do it, so the rest of the world can do it too. ROB: Is there any signal that you might be just slightly too far in the future? Obviously, 20 years out might be too soon for a lot of things. How do you know when you need to pull it back just a couple of notches? How do you get there? PHNAM: Nonfiction at its core is the merging of five different disciplines. It's business, technology, science, art, and design. When you practice all of this, specifically business, you always have to make sure that whatever decision you make makes sense from the business perspective. If I'm coming out with a product in two years and the people who we're designing for can only afford $300, I cannot come up with a concept that's going to cost $2,000. So, we have to make decisions like that, check in often, and make sure that what we come up with makes sense, because in the end we are not here just to come up with concepts. Honestly, anybody can come up with concepts. Even non-designers. But the magic is how do you turn a concept into something that's real, into something that's attainable, into something that has the potential to change people's lives? That's why we call our company Nonfiction. Science fiction has been around for a very long time. We all want it. But who is going to turn that into the real thing? It's going to be people like us. ROB: That's a great positioning: to build near science fiction, but call it nonfiction to make it concrete. It's an excellent place to be. You mentioned hiring for diversity. If you look in the creative services world, I think diversity is often achieved, but perhaps it's achieved by optimizing for some people in some roles, some people in some other roles. You have 90% of this role are guys, 90% of this role are women. All your ethnic diversity is over here, all these people are white Americans. How do you think about diversity in roles and hiring for people in positions that are harder to find diversity in? MARDIS: I do think that we're very lucky that we're a small enough team where we don't have the large diversity challenges. Not to say that it doesn't exist, but we do challenge our team members to adapt different skillsets, to step outside their comfort zone, to think about it in a different way. PHNAM: Another thing is that we're not doing diversity for the sake of checking some boxes. It actually came very naturally. We don't hire people just because they're not white men. That's weird. We hire people because they have something very interesting, and most likely that thing has to do with their past – what kind of career they've been through, what kind of country they come from, what kind of past they've had. When we interview people, really what we want to hear is what kind of crazy stories they have to tell us. Do they have a sense of humor? Are they able to tell stories that I've never heard before? And then the skills are just going to come, because everything we do is for the first time anyway. As long as you have the bare minimum, you can figure it out. MARDIS: I'd say when we do hire people – it's funny; we have a joke around the office. We don't really look at resumes or portfolios that much. We look at them a little bit, but really it's a conversation. Talking to people, understanding what they're about, who they are, their personality. This is a great way to filter through people that will work in a smaller team and won't work in a smaller team. You don't always have that ability when you're in a really large organization. You're being filtered by AI or some sort of online tool long before it gets to a human, and the human has all the different constraints. With us, we have great conversations. We go out for cocktails. It makes sense. We're doing a lot of filtering long before we've got them in the office. ROB: It's very interesting. It makes sense. Even if you go back to what you're talking about with the lifelong learning school, that's going to get to the right solution when you talk about everybody's experience in school – what baggage do they feel like they're carrying from that? What do they wish school had done for them? You can get a diverse set of experiences in a lot of ways there. So I can certainly see how that would come in handy. Mardis, Phnam, when people want to find you, when they want to find Nonfiction Design, how should they find and connect with you? PHNAM: We're actually very active online. On Twitter, you can follow both Mardis and me and Nonfiction. Our Instagram is quite active as well. We post our video series on it. We have a video series on future of design. Basically, it's years of experience that Mardis and I have accumulated over time – we're just sharing that very transparently with everyone, and we're doing it in layman's terms. You can be a child, you can be someone who has nothing to do with design, you can be an engineer, you can be the head of a company – it doesn't matter. You can connect with us as designers, not as Nonfiction, as just plain designers. We share our methodologies. We share our way of thinking, and we share our vision of what the future of many industries is. ROB: I encourage people to go check all of that out. I love how you've open-sourced a lot of that. People are so scared about what they share, but there's the total package that you all have put together that delivers for clients, but there's little seeds of thinking that still help other people. They're not going to go steal your lunch money. Mardis, Phnam, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for meeting up. Congratulations on the encore session here at SXSW, and I wish you all excellent travels back to San Francisco. MARDIS: Excellent. Thank you. It's been our pleasure. PHNAM: Thank you for inviting us. ROB: Thank you. Take care. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Josh Goldblum, Founder and CEO, Blue Cadet (Philadelphia, PA and New York City, NY) Josh Goldblum is Founder and CEO at Blue Cadet, an experience design studio with around 30 employees in Philadelphia and 15 in New York.  Twenty-odd years ago, Josh worked in-house at the Smithsonian Institution, producing digital products and integrating technology into physical environments. Unfulfilled because big projects only came around every few years, Josh left and freelanced for a number of museums, doing single-touch Flash design and development. As his on-man Blue Cadet operation became a growing team, projects expanded to encompass touch tables, touch walls, and projection; technology evolved and became increasingly more sophisticated; and the organization's internal systems had to be more formalized to meet the needs of the larger business. Today's experience technology is far more powerful, interesting, and relevant than that in the past. Flash has been replaced by Real Engine, Unity, and JavaScript. The Blue Cadet studio continues to design large-touch surfaces and build immersive experiences but now works with augmented reality, haptics (touch-related communication), and using technology and digital products to make cultural content in physical spaces more immersive, engaging, and “magical.”  Although much of the firm's work is for museums, it has recently expanded to provide these immersive services for executive briefing centers and such brands as Nike and Google. Josh says it's important that the studio creates a “content experience that's not just decorative, but actually tells a story that feels true to the space.” In working with clients, Josh finds it helpful to carve out a little paid research at the beginning of a project to prepare an ideation spread where the studio can research client needs and present ideas. At the end of this initial period, the client can either work with Blue Cadet or take the ideas Blue Cadet developed and work with another studio. Josh says, “It's better to carve off a little space to redirect (the project) than to get into that death march of implementing something that's just not going to be that great.” That time upfront also helps Blue Cadet discover what it is that a client really wants, whether they can provide what the client wants, whether they want to do the project, and whether the parties can develop a solid working relationship. Josh participated in a panel session discussion of Trends and Challenges for Experiential Culture at the 2022 South by Southwest Interactive Festival. He says he is most active on LinkedIn, where he shares a lot of concept prototype material. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined live today at South by Southwest Interactive Festival by Josh Goldblum, Founder and CEO at Blue Cadet based in Philadelphia and New York. Welcome to the podcast, Josh. JOSH: Thanks for having me. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Blue Cadet and what is your superpower? What is your calling card? What do people come to you for? JOSH: Blue Cadet is an experience design studio. Most of us are based in Philadelphia. There's about 30 in Philadelphia, another 15 up in New York, and then actually, when I say “us” based in Philadelphia, we just moved out to LA. So my family moved to LA. We're the only ones out there. We're mostly known for experience design in the cultural space, and also really a lot of technology in physical space. Twenty-odd years ago, I was inhouse at Smithsonian doing digital product work, but also integrated technology into physical environments. So we've been in that experience design space, figuring out how you marry technology into public spaces, how you take cultural content and make it interesting. That's what we've been doing, and we do it across physical space; we also do it across digital products.  ROB: Got it. It rings of museums or themed places, but I can also imagine a building that wants to have something and not just be a hollow shell. What does a typical space look like for you? JOSH: We do a lot of work in the museum space, like the traditional museum space. All the big museums are generally our clients. We've worked with a lot of them. Everything from like science centers to history museums to art museums. We did a Van Gogh projected experience with the Art Institute of Chicago way before they were doing all these projections. ROB: All the immersive experiences. JOSH: Yeah, we've been doing that for a long time. But then recently we've been moving more into brand work. We've been doing some work with Nike, which has been really exciting. We've done work with Google. trying to take a lot of that museum flair, which is an obsession with content and making sure that what we're saying is true, and trying to figure out what's interesting about a brand and giving it that treatment where you're elevating the personalities, elevating the science. You're making something that's smart but also engaging. ROB: Where are they doing those things? JOSH: These are executive briefing centers, sometimes. These are museums or brands. Some of these are online. And then we started doing a little bit of work for real estate companies, just trying to – it's not for me. [laughs] Just to activate some of their public spaces as well. Again, trying to bring in content experience that's not just decorative, but actually tells a story that feels true to the space. ROB: When I think about this space, I start off thinking about the sleepy old kiosk that became a touchscreen and the keyboard is broken. Did it start there and proceed from there? JOSH: Yeah, I would say when we started out – Blue Cadet was my freelance handle. I was at the Smithsonian; I did a pretty cool project there that got a lot of attention. The Smithsonian being what it is, they only had big projects every few years. I was getting kind of bored, so I left and I started going around museum to museum. I was essentially picking up jobs doing Flash design and development. When we first started out, it was a lot of those single touchscreens and those things that were kind of cheap. No one was going to lose their job if we really screwed up. But we overdelivered. We did really great stuff, and we grew on the backs of those reputations and then started doing touch tables and touch walls and projection mapping. These days, we still do a lot of large touch surfaces and things like that, but a lot more thinking about the technologies that are more interesting or relevant. Now we're doing a lot more with AR, things that are haptics, camera vision. Also just trying to figure out how to make an environment more engaging and magical. ROB: Some of the advantage, even, of the march of technology is that probably some of those early Flash things you were doing were still rather expensive and still took a big commitment. I think some of this has allowed the technology to come down into simpler spaces. My team's done really simple electron-based kiosks with a little bit of sound, a little bit of animation, and it makes it more available to more places. JOSH: Yeah. It's interesting because Flash was an amazing tool. Flash really allowed you to do a lot of very, very cool things. When Steve Jobs killed Flash, essentially – which he pretty much singlehandedly did – there was actually a little bit of a lull in experience design where the tools had to catch up. But now you see things like Real Engine, Unity – but even what you can do with JavaScript. You can do everything that you used to be able to do in Flash now to the nth degree. And it's much better. Flash probably should've died. ROB: How often does as client come to you with an idea of what they want? How often do they come to you with a topic – “Here's this topic, here's what we want to show people; surprise us”? Or is it more “We have an idea and a direction”? Do you know how much space you're dealing with? It seems like there's a lot of variables in there. JOSH: A lot of times if we're dealing with a museum client, they might have a big exhibit or something like that. Or even a brand, they have their stories, they know what they want to convey, they have the space. But then they come to us and they're like, “How do we tell the story? How do we do this?” A lot of times even if they come in with very, very fully baked ideas, we'll roll it way back into strategy and be like, let's create a little bit of space to figure out what you can do with contemporary technology, with contemporary tools. What can you do to make sure that content or experience really shines in a way that's not been done in the same way with different content six months before? ROB: It sounds like it's really a consultative opportunity, right? To show them – maybe they start somewhere, but sometimes they don't know what they don't know, in a very good way. You have a broader span of the industry. That's why they come to you. You bring some extra ideas to the plate. JOSH: Yeah. And usually what we do – we've been doing these things called ideation spreads. Sometimes someone will come to us with a pretty big budget and we'll be like “Hey, instead of having to sign the SOW for this real big thing, give us 10% of it and give us three weeks, and let us do a bunch of sprints where we reconceptualize it and see if we land in a better place.”  Sometimes it's better, particularly if you get a brief that you're like, “This is not going to end well. This is not something we want to be working on for the next six months.” It's better to carve off a little space to redirect it than to get into that death march of implementing something that's just not going to be that great. ROB: Right. Do you ever engage in that competitive sales process where you're competing over the big pie and you take the little pie? Does that happen? JOSH: Absolutely. I would say particularly as we were earning our market position and earning our reputation, we weren't always the safe choice. We were always known for doing the creative thing and for doing something cool and new, but there were a lot of people who had done it a million times. And it was riskier for them to work with us. So that was a great way. We'd come in and do these ideation spreads and say, “Look, you don't have to trust us with this giant thing. Bring us in here and let's see if we can set the vision. You're not even obligated to work with us after that.” ROB: Right, “You own the work, go ahead and take it.” I think every creative firm benefits when they find ways essentially to get paid for discovery instead of trying to do all this guesswork upfront. But there's always the tension between “How much are we spending on this?” versus “How likely are we to get the work?” Nobody wants to be in that tension. So, the 10% strategy there makes a lot of sense. JOSH: Also, I'd much rather do that than do spec on RFPs. You don't know anything about the client and really what they want. You don't really know what the problem set is. So if you're doing spec on an RFP, you're really just shooting in the dark. Whereas if you carve out a little bit of space where you can actually collaborate with a client, you usually come up with better creative; you're actually solving the problem. But then also, you get to build that relationship and the rapport, and that's usually what carries you forward. Or you sit there and you're like, “Okay, there's not great relationship or rapport here.” ROB: You can dodge a bullet. JOSH: Yeah, you can be like, “Okay, you really did want that thing. God love ya, go on with it.” ROB: We talked a little bit about the origin story, about you going around to museums. When did you realize it was a thing and you said, “You know what, this is my job now”? What was the inflection point? JOSH: For a while, Blue Cadet was just my freelance handle. I was living in D.C. because I was still at the Smithsonian and I was picking up odd jobs. It was fun. I enjoyed it. The projects I'd get weren't huge budgets, but I was actually making way more money than I was at the Smithsonian. But I finally got a project – a couple friends and I got this grant to do an interactive documentary, like a Flash-based documentary on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This was something where we came up with the idea, we went to a foundation, and we were like “Hey, can you pay us some money to put this thing together?” The timeline was such, the budget was such that I kind of had to hire a team. We had videographers, we had professional sound people. We were basically following this high school class – it was the only high school class to reopen after Hurricane Katrina. We were down there basically weeks after the hurricane. It was decimated. But when I was on that project – it was called Yearbook 2006 – I was like, oh man, if I bring in other people, it works way better. I was still doing the stuff that was too expensive to outsource, but I outsourced some other things and it ended up being really successful. It became really popular. I was like, okay, I want to start a studio. So that was the first point where I wanted to do a studio. Then that same team, we got another project the year after that for the Pulitzer Center and we ended up winning a News and Documentary Emmy, which was a pretty big deal at the time. We beat Wolf Blitzer or something. That put us on the map, and that snowballed to where we started getting a lot of work, and I was able to start building the team from there. ROB: It seems like something in that documentary space – of all the things you can fractionalize and take some people, do a project, get done with it, it seems like something in that video space, people are kind of used to it. That's the drill; that's what you do. You film something, then you move on to the next thing. JOSH: Yeah. Basically what happened was I was living in D.C. but I was from Philadelphia; I was turning 30. I was like, okay, I'm getting to an age where maybe I'm ready to settle down a little bit. I didn't really want to settle down in D.C. So I moved up to Philly and I made my first hire. It was someone straight out of college. She actually still works for me, 15 years later. ROB: Wow. JOSH: But that was the thing. We were hiring junior people and training them up, and then we grew very linearly, 20% year over year. There were weird inflection points along the way, but yeah, that's how we got to where we are now. ROB: What's a weird inflection point? JOSH: As you're growing a studio, there are always these different points where the wheels get real shaky and the systems that were working fine in this phase don't really work as well in the next phase. There's a point where you have to get really professional about bill pay, about HR, benefits. You just have to start layering in a lot of systems at various points. And those are the points where you start getting more professional and you start having to have an org chart. You can't just have a bunch of super creative people scrambling around all over the place. ROB: How have you digested that change? Is it something that comes well to you? Is there somebody, or many people, maybe a role that's been integral to making the jumps? JOSH: Yeah, my partner Troy. We both worked as new media specialists at the Smithsonian. He was like my sixth hire or something like that at Blue Cadet. He was living in Denver quite happily, and I sort of dragged him across country to move to Philadelphia and start things. But I love Troy. I'm one of these people who can talk a really good game and I can set a vision or get really excited about the idea and what this thing can be. Troy's the kind of guy who can sit down and actually make it happen. He can actually do it. So, he's invaluable. Over the years, we've been very selective. I spend a lot of time recruiting the people that I want into the team. Very few people necessarily applied to Blue Cadet, particularly at the leadership level. I always sought out people that I thought would really fit into the studio and scale out our capabilities. ROB: That's a great opportunity, because those strategic roles are also the ones where you could actually justify bringing a recruiter to, which you can't always do in the services world. But to find those people and recruit them in . . . . JOSH: I never used a recruiter. Where you find the best people is just like here at SXSW, you're meeting people. Or you meet clients. One of the people I recruited to Blue Cadet, who actually left to take over digital at the Obama Library, was client side, and she left midway through the project and everyone was like, “Oh my God, this place is going to fall apart without her. She is so instrumental to the studio.” This was a studio I was working with, and I was like, “That sucks; the project's going to go sideways.” But then I was like, “I'm going to poach her at some point. I'm going to get her on my team.” And she was fantastic. So, I'm always looking for people that I'm like, “Wow, that person's way smarter than me or better that me at these things.” ROB: That's excellent, especially when you know the capabilities you don't quite need yet, or you don't need another person in that capability yet, and you can keep your head on the swivel, keep the mental library going of who's next. It's a fun journey to have that wish list and then fulfill on it. JOSH: Yeah. ROB: So, you're here and you have a session coming up. It is “Trends and Challenges for Experiential Culture.” What are you looking for people to get out of that? JOSH: Obviously, I've been speaking about experience design for a very, very long time. I was talking about how things were getting completely disrupted with physical space pre-pandemic. I was talking about Meow Wolf and Museum of Ice Cream and the changing face of retail and also some of the things that were happening with museums, and this was like 2018-2019. I was like, man, stuff's really going to change. I saw the trends, I saw this stuff happening. And then obviously the pandemic has accelerated everything. Who knows where the chips are going to fall, but one of the things we're seeing is a lot of people wanting to get back into physical space. Places like SXSW are now filling up again. People want to be around each other. But what are the spaces that bring out the best in us? How could those spaces operate to create better connections between people? That's the sort of thing we're really interested in. And then also, how do you discard the old stuff that doesn't work anymore? Honestly, I love museums but I also kind of hate them. Also, I know for my kids, they're not dying to go to the old-fashioned museum and read a bunch of wall labels. They're really interested in culture because they're my children, our children, but they want to consume it differently. And I want to make sure that they're consuming culture in a way that feels good to them, that's enjoyable and interesting to them. ROB: What do you think they're going to want? Where is it headed? JOSH: It's so funny; my kids like Roblox, they like all those things. I've taken them to a million museums. I've taken my son to Epcot and Disney and all the different – sometimes the things they like are the cheesy, colorful, fun Museum of Ice Cream rip-offs. But also, they would eat candy all day if I let them do that, too. So, it's figuring out, okay, what are the things that have a personality, that are fun, that are interesting, that are enjoyable, but also are not just mind-numbing or consumptive? ROB: Right. Even some of the newish stuff – I'm sure you'll see a lot of it around here at SXSW; there's different activations. There's some integration of different assets, even into the little doodles activation over here that's NFTs plus an actual physical space. How do you think about the difference between using a technology for the sake of the technology and using it because it's actually right for the environment? JOSH: I actually really like the doodles space. I thought they did a really nice job. I think part of it is a lot of times I talk to these museums and I'm like, “You should be looking more to that marketing. You should be taking a lot more inspiration from them,” because they move really fast, they put these things together really quick, they're not super, super precious, they don't expect it to be up in 5 years, let alone 10 years, let alone 2 weeks, and they're able to take more risks. Because it's sort of a one-and-done, they don't have to make sure that it feels the same 10 years from now. Obviously, that marketing is a very different business model than a museum, but I think there are things that can be borrowed. And personally, I think even that doodles exhibit – there were a lot of nods to themed entertainment. There was a lot of stenography, there was a lot of sculptural pieces. There were some really nice light applications of technology. I thought it was really successful. I would like to see museums looking more like that. ROB: Got it. I think there's times when we've probably all seen AR for AR's sake, VR for VR's sake. How do you filter “This is a good place for VR, this is not”? Or “It could be done this way but not that one”? JOSH: I used to take a much harder line on this in the past. Honestly, some of these things, you look at some of these AR experiences and you're like, what's the point? It's not doing anything except demonstrating the technology. It's like, okay, if you've never seen AR, awesome. That's really awesome. But if you have seen AR, you don't care. Same with some of these projection experiences. It's like, if you're never been in a giant room filled with Christie projectors, it's really exciting to be at the Van Gogh and see all this stuff. But then you go back and it's the same thing, but with Klimt or Picasso or Monet; it's like, “I've seen it.” So, I think part of it is I'm actually okay with technology for technology's sake where it serves a spectacle, where you've never seen it before. It makes people excited and engaged. I think where it gets old is where it's already been done before. You're not even doing that. You're just being lazy. The thing I always look at, too, is either you've got to really, really be serving that content in a way that's compelling and really getting people into it – and sometimes that is spectacle. Spectacle gets people excited. It gets them interested. But if you fail at the spectacle and then you don't provide the content, it's just a wasted experience. ROB: It seems like you're very adjacent to not only event marketing, but also perhaps even to entertainment, theme park, that kind of thing. How do you decide where you go and where you don't go in those markets, and where you compete and where you choose to stay in your lane? JOSH: It's funny; I used to be very selective about the types of clients I would take on. I was like, “I'm not working with brands. I'm working with museums and nonprofits and higher ed. That's my tribe.” The thing I realized is sometimes your tribe is not aligned to a sector. It's really just a way of being. There are people at Nike that have way, way more in common with me and how I see technology, how I see content, how I see culture than people at some of these museums. Some of the people in these museums are very, very retrograde, and they're like, “No, we need a clean white room with a painting and 7,000 words of text. Bring your seven-year-old in here and they're going to read my dissertation.” I have less in common with them than somebody who's at a brand, whether it's a technology brand or materials brand or someone selling shoes, that wants to tell this story in an interesting way or find something interesting to elevate out of it. ROB: The brands change, too. That's part of it. Once you're in the game for a while, the brands change. The legend of what Nike is has shifted several times at different inflection points. Shoe Dogs, one moment in time. I interned once upon a time at Chick-fil-A's headquarters. Chick-fil-A's museum was a little room with a trophy case and a fake vault, and they've expanded what that experience is. So, I think the brands change too, and who they are and what they need might be different from the thing you used to react to. JOSH: Yeah, 100%. Often it's just who's there and who's championing the brand, who wants to tell that story, and how they want to tell it. The thing is, there's so many projects at Nike that Blue Cadet should have no part in, but the projects we are working with them are very Blue Cadet-like projects. There's a lot of interesting content, stories. We did one for the LeBron James Innovation Center. It's all about how they use data to inform how they work with athletes, and that's really cool. That's really exciting and something that my team is very, very well-positioned to execute on. ROB: Your session also ties into trends a lot. What's next? What's something you think you're going to end up doing soon at Blue Cadet that you haven't done before? JOSH: I've actually been spending a lot of time looking at Web3 and NFTs and things like that. I think beyond the hype, there's something really interesting stuff there. I think there's something very interesting about digital ownership. I think there's something very interesting about bringing things from the physical world in the digital world, bringing things from the digital world into the physical world. I think NFTs help with that. I think there's some really exciting things happening there. Personally, I think it's a really exciting time to be in experience design because frankly, COVID screwed everything up. Everyone's rethinking things. Like, “Do I shake someone's hand? Do I give them a hug? Do I wear a mask here, do I not wear a mask here?” All the social norms, the way we behaved in physical spaces, have changed. So, now's a really interesting time to direct some innovation and say, okay, now that we're rethinking this, let's put some design thinking to it and figure out how to make these spaces better. ROB: Right. Some people shut everything down for two years, some people built nothing for two years, some people rebuilt everything during those two years. Some stuff was pulled forward, some stuff is waiting in the wings. It's very lumpy. JOSH: Yeah, absolutely. I think what'll be really interesting is we don't really know. We've all been in this one state and now we're entering into another, hopefully, and we're not quite sure how the chips will fall. We don't know what the new behaviors are going to be. It'd be really interesting to see, as you revisit the conference that you went to for 10 years or the restaurant you used to go to every week, as you start going back into those things, does it feel the same? Does it still work the same way? Does it still affect you the same way? I don't know. Does it feel great to go back to a movie theater? Maybe, maybe not. ROB: I haven't tried yet. JOSH: Honestly, I was one of those people like “Ah screw it, I don't need it.” Then I took my kids to see the new Spider-Man and I was like, wait a second. This is actually really nice. It was actually quite enjoyable. ROB: It was probably fairly uncrowded too, which helps. [laughs] JOSH: It was pretty uncrowded, yeah. [laughs] ROB: For me, same thing. We have kids, so me not going to the movies is more about me having kids and not going to the movies as much as I did when we were just a couple with time on our hands and it's like “It's Tuesday, what do we do? Let's go see a movie and get home at 11:00. Fine.” Different seasons. JOSH: Yeah. ROB: Are there any sort of behaviors that were adopted experientially during COVID that you think are going to stick? There's interesting things – I think about some escape rooms did versions of escape rooms where they would do it for you over Zoom. And they're still doing it I guess, but I don't know. Are there weird things that people did that you think might stick around? JOSH: I mean, I think remote work is not going anywhere. ROB: You're betting on it. JOSH: Yeah, I'm living in California and my studio is entirely on the East Coast. We started hiring people out of market, which we never did before. We have people who moved into the Hudson River Valley or out in the Poconos, moving away from the city, away from our offices. And it hasn't been affecting the work. So, I think that's going to be really interesting. I think also how we're thinking about the studios themselves – we have this beautiful, beautiful office in Philadelphia and New York with lots of desks, but we're like, do we all need these desks if we're not going to be there every day? Can we optimize this for prototyping spaces? We build a lot of things in physical space, lots of hardware in the office. We need that. That's part of our process. But it's like, do we need all these desks? ROB: Do you find you're still pulling people together to actually get hands on with the experience? You can do a lot of the design in your own place, but there's a point where it still has to get physical and maybe that's a good time to convene the team anyhow to build rapport? JOSH: Yeah, absolutely. And honestly, I love it. It's great to bring people together in physical space. But when there's a reason. Let's bring them in physical space to prototype, but we don't have to bring them into shared space just for another meeting. That's not worth it. [laughs] That stuff can go to Zoom. ROB: Josh, all very interesting stuff. When people want to connect with you and with Blue Cadet, where should they go to find you? JOSH: I'm probably most active on LinkedIn. Just look me up on LinkedIn. I actually spend a lot of time sharing a lot of prototypes. ROB: I was going to say, you probably share some cool stuff. JOSH: I share some really cool stuff. I at one point realized that the Blue Cadet internal Slack where we're just sharing prototypes and process stuff was way more interesting than anything I was sharing on social media, so I was like, I'm just going to share that stuff. The Blue Cadet Slack is way more interesting than any social feed I follow. So, I share the stuff I'm allowed to share off that. ROB: That turns out to be great marketing on LinkedIn, too. Some stuff people won't connect with, some stuff probably goes to the moon, and then people are like, “Who did that?” “Blue Cadet did that.” “Hey, I need that.” I don't know if it's scalable, but it also doesn't have to. I don't know how many days a week you're LinkedIn posting, but it's one or two or three days a week. JOSH: Yeah. The LinkedIn posts I'm putting up are early prototypes. They're super messy. It's a lot of cardboard and projection and things taped together. But usually then there's some really interesting technology in there, and I feel like it's an easier way to see how this actually gets made. ROB: Excellent. Josh, thank you so much for meeting up, for coming on the podcast. JOSH: Absolutely. ROB: Wish you the best on your talk in a couple of days as well. JOSH: Hope you make it out there. It'd be great. ROB: Thanks so much. JOSH: Thanks for having me. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Jennifer Brown of Jennifer Brown Consulting based out of New York, NY Jennifer Brown founded her namesake Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion consulting agency 20 years ago. The agency develops top-down DEI strategies and training programs for medium-size to large companies; sets up effective, well-aligned affinity groups within those companies; and promotes inclusive leadership through educational initiatives. Jennifer is a frequent keynote speaker, both virtually and live. She presented Beyond Diversity: Building A More Inclusive World at the 2022 South by Southwest Conference and followed that with a book signing of her third book, Beyond Diversity: 12 Non-Obvious Ways to Build a More Inclusive World, which she co-authored with Rohit Bhargava. Jennifer is the bestselling author of Inclusion: Diversity, The New Workplace & The Will to Change (2017) and How to Be an Inclusive Leader: Your Role in Creating Cultures of Belonging Where Everyone Can Thrive (2019). The second edition of the 2019 book will be released in October 2022. Jennifer says there was “a huge wake-up call in spring/summer of 2020” after the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent and still-ongoing social movement for cultural change. Jennifer feels that today's workplace is “not built by and for so many of us if we . . . don't fit a certain demographic.” Jennifer explains the importance of this “sea change”: “If people feel welcomed, valued, respected, and heard, and a deep sense of belonging and being treated equitably . . . they do better work . . . and they stay longer.” Jennifer says she is a “member of the LGBTQ+ community” who has “been out for nearly 25 years.” She believes half of her cohorts “are still closeted in the workplace,” but that, finally, people are no longer talking about “why” inclusion is important, but “how” to make it happen. She believes companies will be challenged in setting up equitable workplaces as they rebuild “post-Covid,” particularly with managing blended teams of hybrid (virtual and in-person) employees.  Jennifer warns that managers need to be vigilant in supportinging inclusivity. “Harassment has gone up in the virtual workplace,” she says. Why? “There are no witnesses,” she explains. People are “cut off from information” and don't know their options on how to escalate a complaint and whether they can trust their employer to handle the issue. Jennifer Brown Consulting facilitates the establishment of corporate affinity groups, which are often comprised of people who tend to be “overlooked in the talent pipeline because of bias” in hiring practice, promotion, advancement, and talent reviews.” Even smaller and medium-sized companies are adopting affinity groups to serve as workplace “sources of intelligence about cultural experience,” tap into what is working and what is not, and provide support and “community” to employees who may have, in the past, felt “marginalized.” Jennifer can be reached on Instagram, @JenniferBrownSpeaks; on Twitter, @JenniferBrown, on LinkedIn, and on her agency website at: jenniferbrownconsulting.com, where those interested in DEI information can find the agency's DEI foundations program. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk. I am joined live at South by Southwest by Jennifer Brown of Jennifer Brown Consulting based out of New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Jennifer. JENNIFER: Thank you, Rob. ROB: So good to have you on here. Why don't you start out by telling us about the firm, about Jennifer Brown Consulting? What is your calling card? JENNIFER: The firm I founded 20 years ago. It's a DEI strategy and training company. We work with companies, medium-size and large typically, to help them build their diversity, equity, & inclusion strategy from the top down and help also set up what's called affinity groups and make sure they're effective and well-aligned. We also do a lot of education around inclusive leadership. I have an amazing group of consultants who are, at any given time, working on client projects. And then I do a lot of keynoting – virtual, but now increasingly in person, I'm glad to say . . . as we come out of this into a new variant, I just read yesterday. [laughs] ROB: Last night, yes. JENNIFER: But anyway, I also love writing books. I just co-authored my third book with Rohit Bhargava, Beyond Diversity, and then I have a second edition of How to Be an Inclusive Leader, which was my book from 2019. I have a second edition of that coming out in October of 2022, which I'm really excited about. ROB: Congratulations on the book. Rohit was a guest three years ago, the last time we were recording live at SXSW, and then we all skipped a couple of years because of that COVID thing we were just talking about. As you're engaging with these firms – you mentioned medium and larger firms – at what point are they coming to you these days? What do they know? What are they doing right? What are the blind spots? JENNIFER: There was a huge wake-up call in spring/summer of 2020 on multiple levels. I think the big one for us, obviously, was George Floyd murder and the social movement that occurred and is still occurring. A massive shift in attention and prioritization of the fact that the workplace as it is currently is not built by and for so many of us, if we basically don't fit a certain demographic. Finally – we've been talking about this for many, many years – finally there was attention and resources available. For the last couple of years, our firm has doubled in size and number of companies, and we've been incredibly busy. We were ready for this. This is the conversation we've been having for many years. I'm a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and I've been out for nearly 25 years – I'm dating myself. ROB: Early. JENNIFER: Early, early, when we were still arguing for domestic partner benefits with big companies. Those were the early days of my own activism. Then we grew Jennifer Brown Consulting to be a full-service DEI firm. So, they come to us now and say, “Okay, Jennifer, we get it. We know that it's important. But we don't know how to tackle this, and we don't know how to equip our leaders with the skills and also to awaken their motivation to care about this.” But really, Rob, I'm so excited that it's not a “why” conversation; it's a “how” conversation now. We all are a little bit worried that the urgency is flagging as the world continues to be so chaotic and business priorities shift around, so we're trying to really make sure the burning platform of this remains on fire in people's minds. We know it's on fire, but it's easy to move on and say, “We got this. We're doing enough.” But I can tell you no company is doing enough. ROB: Right. You have two lanes. A lot of companies are going to install somebody with a title in DEI at some level, and then there's actually integrating it into the cadence of the firm. How do you make sure it sticks? How do you keep it from regressing to “business as usual” plus somebody with a title? JENNIFER: I think the way we speak about why this is urgent really matters, and how it can drive business. It drives innovation. Literally, if people feel welcomed, valued, respected, and heard, and a deep sense of belonging and being treated equitably – which means those day-to-day support mechanisms, resources, pay equity, all that good stuff – they do better work. And they stay longer. We're in the midst of a talent crisis. Literally, it is the Great Resignation, and I can tell you from my point of view, it has a lot of reasons, but one of the big reasons is toxic workplaces – workplaces that feel like “I go through my day and I don't see anyone that looks like me. I don't feel trusted or trusting of others. I have one foot out the door for something better.” So, culture can be a differentiator, and belonging can and should be a differentiator to keep great talent. But I can tell you, the workplace needs to be overhauled to be a welcoming place for so many of us. I mean, just LGBT people, half of us are still closeted in the workplace. That is a statistic from 2019. And even in the virtual world, I wonder how it's changed; I don't know. But we are not bringing our full selves to work. And that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of all the identities that aren't bringing their full selves. ROB: For sure. There's part of me that says, what company wouldn't be welcoming in some way? But that's the tip of the spear of the question, I am sure. You mentioned even the structure of the workplace. As we're resetting and coming back and a lot of companies have been virtual, what opportunities to set up an equitable workplace can companies do as they're rebuilding what it means to be in an office from scratch, what their work expectations are from scratch? What are the opportunity points? What can they do today that would've been hard for them to do two, three years ago, and now it's like “No, don't do this again when you come back”? JENNIFER: Well, let's see. So many things. We went to an open office plan for a while. That was the thing. But now data has shown that actually, that's really hard for people to be productive in. Also, the physical office was not a comfortable place. So, virtualizing ourselves actually opened up a sense of safety for a lot of people who found the physical workplace unsafe. I think we have to carry that with us and remember that that is a critical thing to leverage. But then new diversity dimensions are opening up, like who's on site? Who's able to get face time? Who's able to get on somebody's calendar or bump into somebody? There's the haves and have-nots that's opened up. In some companies, the virtual employees are the haves, actually, that are getting the flexible arrangement, and then the people who have to come into the office – but you can actually see it in the reverse, who has access to leadership. If leadership's in the office, that could benefit you. It really depends on the company. I tell managers, we have to up our inclusivity vigilance. When we are managing blended teams, hybrid and in-person, we've got to ensure inclusion constantly and be checking in with people who are virtual because we may not know they are on the bubble in terms of their own engagement and loyalty. And what we don't know can really hurt us, and often when it comes to diversity dimensions, what you don't know can make the difference between keeping that person and having them leave and being surprised. So virtually, we just have to be checking in, asking how people are. The most powerful question is something like “Do you feel included and valued in the way that we're working right now? Is this working for you? Do you feel you can thrive? Do you feel there are barriers? What can I do as your colleague, as your leader, as your manager, to address any barriers that you're experiencing so that you can do your best work? I think asking that often will build the trust and tell us what we need to know so we can architect a better situation for people. ROB: This is the second conversation I've had this week where what you're describing sounds like being a good manager. JENNIFER: Doesn't it? Strange, that. [laughs] ROB: It doesn't sound like anything to do in some ways with particular topics of diversity, equity, inclusion, while at the same time I think what's underpinning there is there's an assumption of commonality that allows people to get by without managing well. Is that fair to say? JENNIFER: Yes, fair to say. Intersectionality speaks to all the different diversity dimensions that live in a human being. And there's multiple things going on. I'm a parent. I identify as queer. I'm caregiving. I'm wrestling with mental health challenges. I'm Latinx. All of those things have an impact on our belonging. In most organizations, there's some angst and some difficulty there because, like I said earlier, workplaces are biased. Period. Any one of those things or a combination of those things may be going on for someone. They may be hearing microaggressions. They may be being harassed virtually. Unfortunately, I hate to say this – harassment has gone up in the virtual workplace. ROB: Wow. JENNIFER: There are no witnesses. Think about this. There's a lack of understanding of how to escalate a complaint and whether you trust your company enough to handle the complaint. When we virtualize employees, they're cut off from information, often, that may have been available and they would've known what sort of avenues exist. I found this harassment data really disturbing, honestly. Anyway, there's a lot of risks. Like I said, as a manager and a leader, to have somebody's identities in mind and be able to anticipate, “What's going on for this person? How can I get them to trust me enough to share with me so that I can help?” – and even if that means suggesting that somebody go to HR, suggesting that somebody seek out the EAP for mental health support. I mean, just connecting the dots is so much of our job these days, and it's been made more difficult when we're out of the loop with each other. That's a dangerous place to be. ROB: Absolutely. You mentioned affinity groups as a key component. What does that look like, building from scratch? How do you get from zero to something there? JENNIFER: It's funny; back in the day, only large companies had affinity groups, and they're like the LGBT Network, the Women's Network, the Black Network, the Asian-American Network, Disabilities, Veterans. In big companies, there's a lot. But since two years ago and everything crescendoing, even the smaller and medium-size companies now have affinity groups, and they understand that these groups are literally sources of intelligence about cultural experience in our workplace – what's going well, what's going wrong, what needs to be supported, resourced, which talent exists. Sometimes people in affinity groups are the ones that are overlooked in the talent pipeline because of bias in our hiring, promotion, advancement, talent reviews. So, affinity groups are really important mechanisms to enable people to find community, especially virtually, to share what's going on and not feel so alone, to strategize about how to be heard in a workplace that is maybe not conscious of its own bias, and then also provide that identity intelligence to the employer to say, “Hey, this community is feeling this now.” For example, Stop Asian Hate wasn't just in 2020. It's actually been increasing and getting worse over this last year and the year before. And yet employers aren't prioritizing it. If it weren't for the affinity groups that are keeping it top of mind and saying, “Hey, this is a problem” – our employees are bringing this into the workplace every day and walking around with this, if they're commuting or in their communities or in their families. People are afraid, and they expect their employer to address it and to know that it's happening and to say, “What can we, the employer, do to support you, to raise awareness, and to make a statement?” Honestly, employers also, by the way, need to be making statements about a variety of social issues right now. Otherwise, silence – look what happened to Disney not saying anything about the Don't Say Gay activities in Florida. Their employees have been so upset and writing letters to the CEO and agitating, and finally the CEO wrote a memo and it just broke yesterday on Twitter. But it took a long time, and it shouldn't take a long time. Companies should have their employees' backs. Period. ROB: And then it's even harder when you do actually say something – the rubric against which it is measured at that point is so much harder. JENNIFER: Oh yeah. There's a lot of issues, granted. But this is the world we live in. Certainly, I hear from leaders, “Jennifer, where does it stop?” I'm like, “This is your new normal. It doesn't stop. But by the way, this is an opportunity to connect with your employees on a deep” – when I feel seen and heard and valued, this is what it means. If my CEO is silent on a harmful bill to me and my community, I am out the door. I can't describe – it's like a visceral thing. Like “I can't work here anymore. This company doesn't see me, doesn't care about what's happening to people that identify like I do.” Employees are finding their voice in a way that I have been waiting for for a really long time. So really, the problem is leadership is really behind. They don't have the competency. They're not able to pivot quickly. They're like, “I can't walk and chew gum at the same time.” I'm like, no, this needs to be your new leadership skill. You have to be able to know, to be scanning your environment all the time and saying “What do I need to make sure our employees know that we're not okay with?” That needs to be the first thing you wake up thinking about every day. ROB: This sounds like it ties into some of the dimensions of the book, so let's go over that direction for a moment. Talk about the book, how it came to be – the book is Beyond Diversity with you and Rohid. How did this happen, and what should we know about it? You had a session here talking about the book. What should people know? JENNIFER: Yeah, we did. It was so great. It came out of a five-day Beyond Diversity Summit, literally, with 200 speakers. Rohid approached me. I was one of those folks part of organizing it, and he's like, “This needs to be a book.” I was like, “Oh no, 200 speakers, hours and hours of footage. How do we boil this down into a book? It's terrifying. My team will never forgive me.” However, we said yes, let's do it. We organized all of this footage into 12 themes, and those are the chapters. They're not identity themes. We could've gone that way. We could've done “This is the chapter on LGBTQ+. This is the chapter on Asian-Americans and AAPI folks.” Instead, we did education, media, workplace, storytelling, government, family. It was so cool to take all of that wisdom from a wide array of diverse storytellers in every way and figure out, where do we tell this story, that story, that story? I loved the challenge of that. I think also, “beyond diversity” to me perhaps means, yes, identity diversity, but let's look at how this plays out in these domains of life that really touch our lives every single day. We can all relate to education. We can all relate to what's happening in media. I hope the book reaches people who have dismissed this topic maybe in the past, but they pick it up and they're like, “Oh, this book makes sense to me. This is relevant to my life holistically.” And it's such a positive book. It's not a “shame and blame” book. It is full of celebrations of where innovation is occurring and how exciting it is and how it's going to better our world. I think it's a really different kind of book, and I hope it finds all kinds of audiences. I think it should be in curriculum in schools. Professors should be assigning it. My parents, in their eighties, tell me it's the best book I've ever written. They love it. They're reading it and they're able to understand it. ROB: It is very, very approachable in the structure. It's just made so that you can come in, engage with it at whatever depth you want to – not that you want to treat it like a dictionary and shop by topic, or an encyclopedia, but there is that ability. There's skimmability. There's summary. But that facilitates approaching it easily, but also the education context. You open it up, and it's credible – this book was made by people who were making a business book, not just like “my opinion and here you go.” It wasn't a memoir. JENNIFER: Yes, exactly. We actually really intentionally decentered ourselves. Even though we were writing the book, we gathered this big writing team also. So all of their hands are on the writing. And then we hired also inclusivity readers, otherwise known as sensitivity readers, because Rohit and I and the other writers knew we would still not perceive the correct language, for example. They went through the book and gave us tons of feedback. It was just a wonderful learning experience. But the book literally is all about different storytellers – unusual, unexpected, nonobvious storytellers. I hear myself talk all day, but I want their voice to be out there, and I think we were both in service of that. ROB: It is excellent. You get in deep, and then there's the contributor list – obviously voluminous, for sure. JENNIFER: Yes. ROB: Jennifer, let's rewind a little bit. Let's talk about where Jennifer Brown Consulting came from. What made you decide that you should not have a job with somebody else and you should build something, and who knows where it goes? Especially with the past couple of years with that growth now. But where did it start? JENNIFER: It started because being in the LGBTQ+ community in my early days, really way back, I was an opera singer. ROB: Wow. JENNIFER: I came to New York to make it, and then my voice kept getting injured and I had to get vocal surgery several times to repair it, but it would never – I realized my instrument just wouldn't ever do what it needed to do, and I would have to reinvent. I found my way to – I like to think of it now as a different stage, literally. I'm a keynoter now. I'm able to use my love of the stage – which I've been on stage since I was five; I grew up in a really musical family, and we are like the Von Trapp Family Singers. [laughs] ROB: Yeah, it came to my mind as soon as you said it. [laughs] JENNIFER: I was that kid. So I seek the stage. I love it. I crave it. I enjoy it. I'm comfortable on it. I think it's the best medium for me. Anyway, though, as a closeted person who was trying to find my voice, I found in those early days all of these amazing companies in New York – IBM, Deloitte, Proctor and Gamble – I didn't even know this world existed, but it was the world of corporations that were leading-edge in terms of LGBTQ equality. They were all starting to vie for us as talent and then also trying to vie for us as customers. I had a front seat years ago on those early battles for domestic partner benefits, for adding sexual orientation and gender identity to the non-discrimination policies and the language of the company. Their statements used to not include that. I hope people are hearing this and being like, “Wow, I've always taken that for granted, and I didn't know there was a time that wasn't there.” But I can tell you, there was a time. And those were really exciting days. I feel like I cut my teeth on – the way that LGBTQ employees shifted companies was super powerful for me to see and be a part of because I think it clicked that I could be a voice for change, and that change would actually happen in this massive entity with just my voice, or just the voice of a community. We were very strategic in the way we approached it. We argued the case around talent retention and recruitment. We argued the business case for customers. It trained me to think about how large institutions change and why they change, and because of what, and how to be an irritant in the system but to be strategic and grounded in their “care abouts” where it's a win-win. That is something I've carried with me as we built Jennifer Brown Consulting, and I would subsequently leave corporate America. I was an employee, like you say, and I was like, “This is not creative enough for me. I don't have enough agency. I can't have a boss. I have to start my own firm.” Very quickly, when I put my shingle out – I'm kind of a natural marketer – it became much bigger than I could manage. I started to hire people. I started to send people in instead of me and started to scale my company. In fact, one of my first hires was a COO, and I really dug deep to pay somebody six figures to build my entire backend because I knew – I was like, I don't know how to do this. And I don't want to. I need to be out there, doing what I do best in my zone of genius, which was evangelizing for the idea of the firm and also putting forth not just me, but all these talented consultants that I was able to attract and send in on our behalf to the clients that I had procured. It worked really well. I always felt it was important to work on the business, not in the business. So from the very beginning days, I was like, how does this scale? And then how do I find my way into my best role? And I'm there now. ROB: How many people did you have when you hired your COO, and were they somebody that had done that job before? JENNIFER: Like three people. And yes, they had scaled my friend's firm, a marketing agency. They had allowed her and enabled her to focus on the creative. Founders are often not the backend people. We're the salespeople. We get the attention. We know how to do that. So, he had done that, and I took the plunge and said, “Please, get everybody paid on time. Do job descriptions. Help me figure out who's my first, second, and third hire. Who should that be? Help me run my finances responsibility. Get us a bookkeeper and do QuickBooks and set up…” – whatever, there's just so much you have to think about. I never regretted it. Subsequently, I've gone through four or five COOs over 20 years. ROB: But the role is necessary. JENNIFER: Yep, and I really recommend it. If you think you've got a tiger by the tail, like I thought I did – and I had no idea what that really would feel like until 2020 – but up until that time, I was evangelizing this idea that belonging is important for all of these dimensions. Better products, better services, better customer relationships, better design. More retention. Losing people is so expensive for companies, and they don't see it as that. It's sort of this invisible cost of attrition. I mean, now they know. But I think it's been happening for years because many of us have been bailing out and becoming entrepreneurs because we literally were like, “I can't stand another day here.” Anyway, it's a big wakeup call and I'm here for it. ROB: Absolutely. I hear you on the COO side. Our sixth employee was an operations role, and she's moved up to COO. It was terrifying. I started off thinking I wanted just a junior project manager / order-taker / “do stuff for me,” and then I was persuaded by some advisors to spend the money. But it was terrifying. JENNIFER: How's she doing and feeling? ROB: She's moved up. It's great. It's a relief because I'm out here talking to people, and things still happen back home on the home front. JENNIFER: I want to share – maybe this will be interesting for your audience – my name is on the name of the consulting business, right? It's Jennifer Brown Consulting. We refer to ourselves as JBC. But we have transcended that question I always get, which is “Don't people expect you?” They don't, actually. They know about me, but they don't expect me to be on the calls. We've scaled ourselves to such a level that the team is completely empowered and completely the star of the show, and I'm not involved unless there's a keynote that's needed and wanted or an executive session. I'm off writing the books that hopefully draw attention to us. It's just an interesting thing I know founders wrestle with and thought leader-driven brands. It's this interesting question that always comes up. But I think we've done it really well. I think the secret is it's always been my plan and it's always been my expectation. I have said very clearly, it's not about me. I'm not even the most practiced expert in my company, and I never have been. My consultants are incredible, and they will solve problems differently than I will in any client engagement. They are bringing their own 30 years of looking at these things, and they have different identities than I do, and they have that lived experience that they can bring. So, it's worked really well, and it's enabled me to pull out of the day to day and speak and write, which I do think is what I have been, all these years, preparing to do. ROB: Was it easier or harder, those first couple of engagements when you were tagging someone else in? JENNIFER: I remember. If I'm on the phone, if I'm involved, how can somebody feel that they're in charge of the gig? The client is always going to be looking to me as the authority, and I don't want to be looked at as the authority. I had to be really careful in the early days of this transition of what I was a part of – that they even met me. I minimized that. [laughs] I was like, “Nope, you don't need to talk to me. Thanks for the inquiry. I'm introducing you right away to my team. They will take care of you.” We still actually do this because stuff still finds its way to me. But we're very strict, and we have protocols that we follow. I never break those because it's super important for me that my team can take care of whatever you need. I'm almost like a consultant now. The team is in charge and knows what to bring me and when that's needed. Also, for me and my wants and needs, I don't want to be in the day-to-day client work anymore, and I haven't wanted to be for many years. That's not what brings me fulfillment. So, I think for founders, commit to and dig deep to seek – know what you don't want to do, but what you want your firm to still do. That's so important. Just pay attention to that and then dig deep financially and wherever else you have to dig to staff around the work you want the group to do as a delivery but is not work you directly want to be involved in. And then make sure you're not sending mixed messages and that you're truly empowering the people you've hired to go and be brilliant. ROB: I hear you talking about handing over two separate sets of responsibilities at least, which are doubly nerve-wracking. You're talking about handing over the delivery of the work, but you're also talking about handing over the selling of the work. JENNIFER: Yeah. We're interesting because our folks don't do business development. I have been in the space for so long that our amazing marketing team who helps me get the word out – we provide so much value. We have so many opportunities to read our thought leadership, join our calls, be a part of our JBC community, that we get a lot of inbound. One of the things I've learned is you cannot force people to be salespeople if that is not what they do. I understood my role very early on. I'm here to build the house that people can live in and make sure the bills are paid and whatever, taking care of the container and making sure there's enough opportunity coming in for people to focus on being the subject matter expert and delivering the work and taking care of the relationship. We have a sales team, but they field a lot. They really more operate as “Now we have an opportunity; what is the scope? What is the statement of work? How do we price it? Who do we put on it? What's the team going to be that delivers it?” That is what happens after we receive an interest or a lead. It was the way I got around sales, honestly, because the only kind of sales I'm really comfortable with is this back-door way of putting myself in conversations, adding value, moderating panels endlessly – which is what I did for years, just going to conferences and being in the room, speaking up and offering to be helpful. And over time, now it's like, “We've wanted to work with you and your team for years. We finally have the budget!” But years and years and years of people watching us grow, and now it's amazing to get these calls from people that saw me speak 10 years ago or were in the room.  ROB: You can't be transactional about that. That's playing the long game. JENNIFER: It's reputation, it's trust, and it's generosity. We've been so, so generous. That's my MO. I see myself as part of the field. I think of it as we are a field of practitioners, and even if we're competitors, we're not. We all stay in touch with each other. When we hang out, other heads of firms, it's like this amazing, really rich conversation because it's a moment. This is purpose work. And people will find the firms that they feel the most comfort with for what they need. But honestly, it's co-opetition. I've heard that word, and I think that really speaks to that, at the end of the day, we're part of a movement and advocacy and whoever does the work, we deeply care that the work is done. ROB: Absolutely. I can see clearly that you deeply care and you have a team that does. Jennifer, when people want to find you and JBC, where should they go to find you? JENNIFER: Thanks for asking. Amazon has all my books, and then on Instagram, I'm @JenniferBrownSpeaks. I'm on LinkedIn. Twitter, I'm @JenniferBrown. Yes, I was on Twitter many, many, many years ago. ROB: Well played. JENNIFER: Well played. [laughs] And then jenniferbrownconsulting.com is our website. I just want to say if you're a new practitioner or an aspiring DEI professional, you should really check out our online courses. We're building our foundations program and rolling that out. It's just a wonderful six-week “get yourself grounded and work on your personal diversity story.” ROB: That even scales down to some people who maybe aren't midmarket enough to pay for you. Excellent. JENNIFER: Exactly. You understand. ROB: I do understand. JENNIFER: Thank you. ROB: Jennifer, thank you so much for meeting up and coming on the podcast and helping us learn well in your expertise. JENNIFER: It's a pleasure. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Shep Ogden, CEO and Co-founder, Offbeat Media Group (Atlanta, GA) Shep Ogden is CEO and Co-founder of Offbeat Media Group, an agency that helps “some of the biggest brands in the world figure out how to use TikTok, Web3, and meme marketing to reach Gen Z customers. Originally, the college friends who started the agency owned and operated an Instagram account, Humor, which drew four million followers . . . and a lot of interest from brands that wanted to partner with the account. The agency moved from working with memes to working with influencers, and from there, to developing virtual influencers. Today, the agency's clients are typically the 10% of businesses that “are constantly looking for that new thing.” When the partners realized the Humor account did not have an associated “face,” they decided to build one virtually. For the past few years, Offbeat has been working to establish “virtual influencers” to serve as identities behind “faceless” accounts. Virtual influencer development is what the agency is best known for today “and its clients are typically the 10% of businesses that “are constantly looking for that new thing.”  Shep says that today's photorealistic virtual influencers “don't look 100% real yet” and the technology to perfect them is extremely expensive. The other end of the spectrum, cartoony caricatures, does not work as well as stylized animated characters that “are not meant to trick you,” but to serve as characters “to tell a story” using “humanized responses and emotions.” The first of seven stylized virtual influencers the agency is creating for Nexus, named “Zero,” launched on Twitter in February and has drawn the interest of major investors. The agency's content studio creates a constant stream of content on the internet (mostly on places like TikTok and Snapchat) with close to a dozen shows that reach hundreds of millions of people monthly. By building virtual influencers and developing an NFT (nonfungible token) project for themselves, then iterating, testing, and innovating to improve their “product,” the agency demonstrates that it “gets” the new technology. The shows are monetized when platform partners direct ads their known audiences and share the revenues with Offbeat. The agency plans to sell NFTs to crowdsource virtual influencers' story development, help “build community,” and further monetize the agency's work. Shep talked about the intersection of the virtual influencer industry, Web3, digital ownership, and NFTs at the 2022 South by Southwest Conference. After his presentation, “The Future of Influence Doesn't Involve Humans,” he brought Nexus's Zero up on stage, on screen, to converse, unscripted, with entrepreneur Mark Cuban. Shep says the goals for his presentation were to: introduce the virtual influencer industry, establish Web3 for the audience, discuss how these two intersect, explain the agency's work and the thought behind the Nexus universe growing around Zero, and show the stuff in action. Shep can be found on LinkedIn as Shep Ogden. Offbeat Media Group is also on LinkedIn. The Offbeat-owned website, VirtualHumans.org, serves as the industry-leading website on virtual influencers. For those interested in the development of Zero, follow @ZeroFromNexus on Twitter.  Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today live at South by Southwest, interactive, by Shep Ogden, CEO and Co-founder of Offbeat Media Group based in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to the podcast, Shep. SHEP: Awesome, Rob. Thanks so much for having me. I'm having a blast. ROB: It's good to have you here. It's always fun to have these people we know in Atlanta – we know each other, but we're in Austin and getting together to talk. It's all well, good, and fun, but why don't you start off by telling us about Offbeat Media Group and what is your superpower? What's your calling card? SHEP: Our superpower has changed over the last few years. It's been a really fun experience. I'd like to back up and give you the quick origin story. We started this business while we were in college. We owned and operated an account called Humor on Instagram with about four million followers. It was a really large meme and viral community, basically. It was something that we started for fun and then it turned into something that brands really wanted to partner with us on. The next thing you know, we're helping some of the biggest brands in the world figure out how to reach Gen Z and how to do meme marketing and how to tap into an account like Humor, but also hundreds of others and then thousands of others. That led to us working with a ton of influencers, moving from just meme accounts to influencers, which then led to this whole new crazy idea, which I think is our superpower, of virtual influencers – taking this concept of an account like Humor that has millions of followers but doesn't have a face attached to it and thinking about that, but doing it with a virtual face. Building an account, building a personality, building something that someone wants to follow, but giving an identity behind it – that's the idea of a virtual influencer, and we've been doing that for the last few years. It's definitely what we're known for most now. ROB: It might sound a little bit out there to the audience; is this an influencer who is obviously not real? Or do they appear real? How does that happen? SHEP: That's a great question. Sometimes it's both. There's photorealistic virtual influencers that look pretty real. They don't look 100% real yet. There are ways to make it look 100% real, but it's very, very expensive. What we like to do, and what we've seen work much, much better with the audience across the board is more of a stylized animated character. We recently launched Zero for Nexus on Twitter, who you saw, I know. He's a stylized character. While he has very humanlike responses and emotions, and when he talks to people you get that human feeling from him, you also know instantly that he's not meant to be real. He's not meant to trick you. He's just here as a character to tell a story. I think that's what works really well in this space. ROB: And it sort of helps you get past the uncanny valley problem when they look stylized versus real. How do you go about thinking about who this character is, though? I suppose every influencer to an extent has to decide who their persona is, but you're writing a script from nothing. Or is it rooted in something real? SHEP: That's a great question. With Zero, it's not rooted really in anything real, but the way we counteract that and think about that is we're including the community. A real influencer has a real backstory and has a real life, and you can't really change their backstory, change their life. They are who they are. But with a virtual influencer, we're writing lore for Zero. Who is Zero? What's his background? But we're including the community that follows him now. The thousands of people following him and engaging with his content are helping us make this decision. We can do a top-level, “Hey, is it A, B, or C? What do you like better?” and then someone on our team will go deep into that concept and bring it to life when our community says, “We really like this direction.” We crowdsource it. We crowdsource the storytelling of these type of characters, which I think also gives the fans more satisfaction seeing them brought to life. ROB: You mentioned hundreds and thousands of these accounts before on more of the Humor and accounts like that, the non-influencer side. How many influencers are you running? How many do you want to run? SHEP: Virtual influencers? ROB: Yep. SHEP: Right now, we're running one. We launched in February, Zero. We did a lot of tests over the last few years of different types, like we talked about photorealistic, we talked about some more cartoony, but stylized is what we landed on. We built some really cool tech over the last 12 months that allows us to power these influencers in real time where you could have a conversation with them on video, and there's no animator needed. It's all happening from our studio in Atlanta. So, we have Zero from Nexus and that's our main one right now. Zero is part of the Nexus universe. Our approach towards an entertainment brand. We plan on fully decentralizing. I mentioned our community, community involvement, community governance, and helping us make decisions. We actually do plan on giving NFTs to the community, one day possibly a token where people can have ownership as well as governance of this overarching community. Over the next 18 months in this entertainment brand, we plan on launching six more. So, there'll be seven different virtual influencers or virtual creators within it that are engaging with each other, interacting with each other, and then telling a story is the biggest thing. ROB: When you talk about a universe like this, you talk about an entertainment brand, what would be a parallel of something that's already established that people might think about? Is this like a Fortnite ecosystem? Is this like a Roblox? What level does that brand rise to? Or is it like a sub-brand within Disney and you might have multiple of these universes? SHEP: That. That's spot on, that last one. The way we look at it is Offbeat Media Group as a company, we do have different arms for our business. We talked a bit about helping brands figure out TikTok and Web3 and memes. That's our agency. We have a content studio that we haven't talked a ton about, but we create a ton of content across the internet. We have nearly a dozen shows across the internet that reach hundreds of millions of people every month. But with the Nexus universe, we built really cool tech to power that. That's our first jump into building out this entertainment brand. We think about that as something like the Marvel Universe. That would be someone we really look up to. We can tell a story for decades to come and we can include the audience in helping us make some of the bigger decisions within that story. But what's really unique about it is because we have this tech that allows people to interact with our characters in real time on a Zoom call or on Twitch, they can do that with these characters. If you think about Marvel Universe and Captain America or Thor or someone like that, you're not going to get content from Thor, but once every two years, once they release a movie. He's not on social media. He's not on Twitch. You can't hop on a podcast with him. Maybe the actor, but not actually Thor, the character, because that would cost a ton of money for Marvel Universe to have Thor always on. So that's our concept. We can tell the story, a cinematic story, just as you would see with something like that, but you can also get day-to-day interaction with our characters. ROB: You mentioned the agency off to the side; I know a lot of your vision is pulling forward on what you're doing with this universe, but I think it might be easy for someone listening to actually underestimate that you have a substantive business. You've built a real deal agency and business underneath all of this. Someone might wonder, you're building this science experiment; how do you pay the bills? What's the day-to-day of what makes things operate well that allows you to also invest in the future? SHEP: That's a great question. You're spot on. Our agency does really well. It's growing. We have an awesome general manager, Michael Heaven, who has really taken charge and leadership of it. He came from one of the fastest-growing agencies of the last decade, was employee #7 at Social Chain, went to about 700, and then left and came and joined us after opening quite a few offices for them. The way we look at it is – I'll say first off, I'm in one of the few roles where being a 26-year-old CEO is a positive. People come to us and say, “Yeah, this guy probably gets it. He probably understands memes. He probably understands TikTok and is pretty much a pro.” Now, over the last couple years, we've been doing virtual influencers and we've been looking at NFTs and whatnot. Same thing there. People are like, “Okay, they probably get it. They're a pretty young and innovative team.” But then we're also showcasing to people that we do get it. We're building virtual influencers for ourselves. We're building an NFT project for ourselves. We're creating content nonstop on the internet, like I mentioned earlier, with the content studio. Both of those fuel interest in what we're doing. We're not your typical agency that just does services for others; we're iterating, we're testing, we're innovating every single day, like “How do we do this better for ourselves?” Then once we build that playbook for ourselves, we have a team that's ready to take that playbook and do it for brands. So that's why we have both of these. In the day-to-day, we're innovating on content that we can do internally. Once we find something's working, we ship it over to the agency and we're like, “Hey, no one else is doing this yet, but we just had it work really, really well for us. Let's roll this out.” ROB: How much of the media that you produce ends up being something that you can integrate a client/a brand into versus how much of it is a proof of capability that serves as marketing? Do you bring the brands into some of these, your Humor channels, and some of that? Or is it all “We saw that you could do this, now please do this for us but under our umbrella”? SHEP: It depends on the asset. With Humor, on Instagram, the one with about four million followers, we integrate brands into that all the time. We create memes, we partner with comedians, we partner with viral influencers, and we can take their branded content or we can make a branded meme and integrate it into this community really, really easily. With the shows – I mentioned we have about a dozen shows – most of those are on places like TikTok and Snapchat. We don't integrate brands into those. The way that works is we are partnered with the platform, so we're making money from programmatic advertising. When someone's watching our show, Snapchat knows the audience watching the show. They're running ads, and then we have a rev share deal with them. So, we don't have to go sell ads for that stuff. We're not really trying to turn into a production company for brands. Most of the stuff we're producing is either lightweight or partnered with an influencer. And then on the virtual influencer front, first and foremost, we're building a community. We expect that community to be a part of what we're doing. We plan on selling them NFTs. We plan on giving them governance of what we're building. We can monetize it through content. But with Zero and the virtual influencers, that is a perfect branded integration play, too. We've done a great job with his lore, where he's got a portal in his universe that he can send things through one day, but things can already be sent to him. For example, Samsung sent him their new most recent phone, and it's now his new most favorite thing. He's constantly hopping on a selfie video, and it's always with a Samsung. That's a way that we split how we think about branded versus not. ROB: How did they find you? Or how did you find them? This is an experiment for a brand. SHEP: Yeah. I was talking to somebody yesterday and they talked about how brands are typically in a 70%, 20%, 10% kind of mindset where that 10% is the ones that are constantly looking for that new thing. We usually work with those 10%. We own and operate a website called VirtualHumans.org. It is the industry-leading website about all things virtual influencers. There's nothing else out there like it. Three years ago, two and a half years ago, when we got really excited about this space, we saw that everyone was writing about it from a journalist standpoint, but there was nowhere to actually learn about the industry. There was always the same one, two, three virtual influencers mentioned, yet here we are finding 50, finding 60. It's like, why can't I find anywhere to actually learn about this industry? How are the players in it? What are they doing? How are they doing it? So, we build that website for the industry, and that has connected us with major investors, major brands, major partners, every team in the space. Anyone interested in the space typically comes to us, inbound, wanting to network. ROB: There's a recurring theme here. We see you continue to build a platform that proves what you're able to do, that people want to be a part of, whether that's on some of the meme accounts, whether that's on Virtual Humans, now with Zero. Where did that disposition towards building content platforms come from? You guys started when you were in school. Were you in film? Were you in some sort of creative endeavor? Was it just a natural, organic “this is where social is now” and who you are demographically? SHEP: I think it was fun for all of us. Bailey, Christopher, and myself are the main three day-to-day partners. We also have Kevin Planovosky, who's an advisor of ours and an early partner. All of us went to the University of Georgia. But specifically, Bailey, Christopher, and I all had our own Instagram accounts that weren't ourselves. Christopher ran a social media app for a while that had hundreds of thousands of users, and then when that ended up not working out, he pivoted to social media accounts and had tens of thousands of followers. I had this idea that you could – I owned a lot of states on Instagram, like Alabama, West Virginia, Iowa, South Carolina, and then cities and some countries, even. People just started following them, and it gave me authority because I owned the state username. It was almost as if I was the state. So, it gave me a lot of authority. I just thought it was really cool and I was learning really quickly how to gain tens and then hundreds of thousands of followers, and then met Bailey, who was doing the same thing. He was making memes. He was just posting memes and making memes. We were like, man, we think we could make money doing this, like real money. That's when we all partnered up with some experiments, and the next you know, it actually turned into a real business. Something that started as something cool to us. ROB: It's lightning in a bottle with some people. Kevin's a former guest on the podcast as well. Recorded that one live and in person at the Vert Office. That was pretty fun. Did any or all of you come from any entrepreneurial background? Was there a seed planted early for you? SHEP: Yeah, great question. Bailey has such a unique story. I wish he was here to tell it. Really, his origin story was he wanted to get a truck when he was 16 and he wanted a nice one, and his parents told him they'd pay for half of it. But if he wanted a nice one, he was going to have to figure out how to make the other half. He was 14-15 years old with no real money, and he started flipping cards or flipping sunglasses or something on eBay, and then heard about this guy in high school making real money, thousands of dollars, with Twitter accounts. So, he went and used all of his money from selling sunglasses and flipping other items to buy a couple really big Twitter accounts and start monetizing that. Next thing you know – he didn't realize he was becoming an entrepreneur, but he did. It just snowballed from when he was 14 years old up to moving into memes and all across the board. So, he had a really cool story. I think Christopher found himself in a somewhat similar boat, really just wanting to build something special. And then my background is my family was a family of small-town entrepreneurs. My dad is probably the biggest hustler I know. I grew up and we owned small rentals, a car wash, a little shop, all the kinds of things like that in a small town of 10,000 people. I loved talking about business with him, and I'm 7-8 years old. I'm like, “How'd work go today?” and I'm asking him all about it. I think that set my foundation really, really strong. I knew I didn't have to go and work for The Man. That's how I learned it from my dad. He gave me a story where he went and worked for a year or two at a factory, basically, and his dad, who was also an entrepreneur, told him, “You're wasting your time.” Which I don't think is necessarily a fair characterization, but he left and he went and started his own business and he was much better off for that. So that really inspired me. I always knew that I could do that as well, like it was a possibility. I got to see that firsthand as a possibility. And then I studied entrepreneurship nonstop for most of my high school and college career and then jumped in. ROB: It's three very different paths, and of course, Bailey's reminds me – quite often, the entrepreneurs are the folks that were flipping candy or sunglasses or you name it in high school, and they end up starting something later. I would be remiss if we didn't talk about the session that you've been here at SXSW to present. Did it yesterday, had a special guest up on stage with you. The session was “The Future of Influence Doesn't Involve Humans.” What should people who weren't there know about it? SHEP: I'll say first off, I think we chose a little clickbait-y title to get people in there. Yes, while we were showing a virtual human, which technically isn't a real human, there was a massive team working on that of all humans. So yeah, we had Mark Cuban join us. It was a really great experience. We got to really talk about the virtual influencer industry, talk about this new world of Web3 and digital ownership and NFTs and how this stuff's going to intersect and tie into virtual influencers and how we think about using that ideology. Web3 ideology is a tool to let this community actually have ownership and governance of the virtual influencers we're building. And then after we explained what this stuff was – we gave a quick definition of a virtual influencer, but it is a first-person identity built on the internet for the sake of influence. Could be for a friend, could be for yourself, could be an artist, whatever it is, but it is a first-person computer-generated character that thinks and acts as if they're their own person. That's a virtual influencer. Once we got through that, we've got to actually bring Zero up on stage, onscreen, and have him start talking to Mark Cuban and talking to us and engaging with the audience. That was I think one of the coolest experiences we've had as a company so far because so much of what we've been working on, like this idea that you can build an influencer that can engage with the world, was shown yesterday. I think the most unique thing about it was that nothing was pre-scripted. For anyone listening, typically to do what we did yesterday, to have a fully animated character engaging with someone and actually have it look real, you have a team of animators that are doing it in postproduction. They're keyframe animating this stuff. But all of our stuff, all the tools that we've built, do all of it in real time. So yes, we have someone to motion capture, but that output looks crystal clear. ROB: Yeah, it was crisp. It worked. The technology worked. I was hoping you didn't have to reboot Zero at any point. But I think had some doubts when you started doing the session, and when you're interacting over Zoom with this character. I think people still felt like it might have been scripted, but you shared with me you didn't even know what he was going to say and how he was going to introduce himself. Little worrisome even there, little fake robot voice just to creep everybody out. SHEP: Yeah, he came in – Zero's on Twitter as @ZeroFromNexus and everyone keeps calling him an AI. So sometimes when he joins in on a Zoom, he loves messing with everyone and pretending to be a robot, and then he says, “I'm just kidding!” and he starts talking to you like a normal person. I think the crowd loved that. But yeah, we planned a lot of the conversation prior that we'd be having with Mark and talking about the industry, and then we planned to have Zero give us a tour of his bunker, but that was all free-flowing conversation. There was nothing scripted. I think even Mark was like, “How much of this is preplanned?” It's like, zero. He starts asking Zero questions, and Zero's just responding off the cuff. He just had all of it off the top of his head. ROB: It sounds a little bit like improv, really. You know the beats maybe that you might go through in a given skit. You might've talked some topics, you might've done some practice, but you didn't practice what you were going to say; you just know the plot points you're going to follow. SHEP: Exactly. The way we typically plan conversations like that – if we're giving a presentation, that's one thing; we'll know almost to a ‘T' what we're going to say. Christopher, who was part of the SXSW pitch yesterday for us, knew exactly what he was going to say. For something like this, we had high-level goals. We had talking points under each goal, but goal #1, establish the virtual influencer industry to the audience. Goal #2, establish Web3 to the audience. And then goal #3, start telling them how these two intersect; goal #4, start talking about how we're doing that and how we think about it with the Nexus universe we're building with Zero. And then goal #5, actually show the stuff in action. So, we had high-level, “Cool, we've got an hour; we're going to show this stuff.” Mark Cuban is an investor of ours, and he has a really impressive knowledge of exactly what we're doing, so he was able to go off and riff on it with this as well. ROB: Yeah, he probably gives ideas from the stage sometimes where someone's taking a note and being like, “Let's put that in the mix too.” SHEP: Definitely. ROB: While this entire technical demo was going on – we're trying to picture what's going on behind the scenes – you have a whole studio set up in Atlanta that you've alluded to. I'm trying to draw metaphors. Actually, is there a way people can see the session yesterday or something like it, some reasonable recording of something like that to get a taste? Where can they go see something like that to start to understand what the experience is like? SHEP: We're going to be on Twitch soon with Zero from Nexus. But right now, Twitter. If you look up @ZeroFromNexus, spelled how it sounds –  ROB: With a ‘Z,' not with an ‘X' if you're feeling strange or fancy. SHEP: Right. You can see all of his content that he posts right now. And all of his stuff is done in real time. Because it's posted on Twitter, we do have an editor that can cut pieces off and whatnot, but the actual content production takes as long as that clip takes. We're able to move cameras around in real time. We click a button, the camera's in a different spot. We're able to teleport him around. We're able to move him all around the bunker. He lives in a bunker. [laughs] ROB: For now. SHEP: Yeah, for now. But we're able to do all of that in real time. I think his Twitter is probably the best case to see that right now. ROB: Who all is involved today? Is there a voice actor? Is there a body actor? Are they the same person? Virtual cameraman? Is somebody pushing magic buttons for teleporting? Who's involved in making a Zero moment right now? SHEP: There's a voice actor that's also the motion capture artist. And then we have our head of content, who's also helping go deep in the content we're producing. We have our tech director, which is typically the one processing those buttons like, “Cool, we're about to teleport, we're about to get a new camera scene.” So yeah, it's a pretty lean team of about three fully focused on character, and then we have a couple more in the studio, typically, that are supporting and working on things. To have one of these characters up and running, though, it takes two to three people. ROB: It's amazingly in real time. I could almost picture different places – I imagine a lot of people would want to use this – you could imagine having an Instagram live with Gollum from Lord of the Rings. You could do that, right? Maybe not on the rendering technology right now; maybe that level of realism isn't quite real time. But it's within reach. You can get there from here. SHEP: Yeah, we could. Right now, even. It all comes down to – the system we've built can render at that high level. Photorealistic humans isn't there, but something like a very high-end character rendered in real time, absolutely. You break that uncanniness because it's not a human. Once it's a human, that stuff gets hard. But yeah, that's spot on. Gollum we could bring to life. Instagram Live is kind of complicated because you have to do it from a phone, but you could bring it alive on Twitch. You bring it alive on anything from a computer that can do live. We could have a very high-end character engaging and talking to you. Maybe giving his backstory or going deeper into the lore of Lord of the Rings, in the Gollum example. Going deeper into that lore and almost giving you his personal experience. That's definitely possible with this technology. ROB: That's fascinating. I do want to see it, but I also want to pull forward to where you're thinking some of this stuff goes in terms of the Web3 technology. I think some of it was alluded to during the session yesterday, this idea of even potentially establishing a DAO, these digital autonomous organizations, around a character or even parts of the universe governance to make decisions. How wide of decisions do you think you'll let people make for these characters and this universe? SHEP: That's a really interesting question. We think about this a lot, because there's been nothing out there long enough to really see what the right answer is. The way we're thinking about it is at Offbeat, we're the creative lead. We went down the rabbit hole of like “What if we gave full control to the community out the gate?”, but there's a lot of examples where that hasn't necessarily been the best thing for the long term of the IP. Lots of times the community will do what's coolest or funniest or whatever it is right now, today, and then they might saturate the brand or make the wrong decision for the brand in the long term. So, the way we view it is we have a really, really creative team, and we can come up with concepts before we completely flesh them out and build them out. Then we can include the audience on helping us make decisions. This is where it starts. We want the audience to make sure that they're included in all the decisions we're making about the universe we're building. They'll have to own an NFT for the community to actually have that governance and help us make those decisions. But in the future, it could move to be full DAO-driven, where maybe we have a creative council at the top of the DAO that almost has a final say-so, but everyone on that council is voted for by the DAO and then they're making all the decisions, where maybe 51% can vote and say “Okay, great, this is Zero's new background. This is the content we're producing this month. This is the next character we're launching. This is what they look like.” Right now, it's going to be very – what's that “Bandersnatch” off of Netflix? It was like “choose your own adventure.” ROB: Yeah, that was a Black Mirror offshoot. SHEP: Yeah. I don't like referring to us as Black Mirror, now that I think about it. [laughs] But it is very “choose your own adventure” right now. They're part of the adventure we're building. But in the future, it might be “build your own adventure from scratch.” Like, “Here, community, what do you want from scratch?” It's definitely possible. ROB: Right. There's different variations. There's an idea where you could have the contract govern what kind of decisions can be made and all sorts of different directions like that. Interestingly, I think there's a long-term alignment. I guess an absolutist might say, “Give us full control,” but there's an alignment where, I assume, when you're thinking about these tokens, they're going to be re-sellable. You're going to get a slice of every transaction when it's resold. So your interest is still to align to an audience that wants to own and increase the value. SHEP: Yeah, spot on. The one thing I'll say is a lot of people that own these might not be IP experts. I have been chatting with a lot of IP experts that are from the world of Disney, from the world of Marvel, from the world of Star Wars, that helped build these brands and manage this decade-long or multi-decade-long IP and how they think about expanding and monetizing it. They're worried about some of these brands. I own a Mutant Ape from the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which is a big NFT community. We were talking about that because every single person that owns a Mutant or a Bored Ape owns the full IP rights to do whatever they want with it. So now there are so many companies and so many individuals creating content with that IP. It's just going to be really interesting over the next seven years. Does that saturate it? Does it keep that pristine, exclusive feel if everyone's creating content around it with totally different narratives that have nothing to do with each other? Or does it just become almost like an avatar? Which is still cool and still valuable, but it might not become an entertainment brand. Pirates of the Caribbean is a great example. It was Disney's biggest hit for about a decade. Now it's nothing. They're not producing anything new. It was their biggest hit and every couple of the years, new Pirates of the Caribbean something, over and over and over and over, and it got saturated really quickly. That's what we're really cautious of. As we think about building a lot of these characters with similar style for our universe, we want to include the community in it, but if everyone could do exactly what we were doing, then it would be everywhere and it might be too saturated and people would find it less cool. ROB: Do you see a case to be able to turn an Ape into a model in the Nexus universe? Do you see that possibility of “Verify your NFT, we'll spin up a model, you dial the knobs on how it moves, how it talks”? SHEP: Probably not for the Nexus universe, but the tech's there. We might bring a Bored Ape into the Nexus universe that's interacting, but I don't think it'll be just for anyone to join us. We're looking at building out our own avatars for the Nexus universe that have our own aesthetic. So not only do you own an NFT that helps give you governance, but then also you're following these characters like Zero, and you're engaging with these characters, and now we're saying, “Hey, here's an avatar that has similar aesthetics that you can own and control.” We could include them in our overarching lore, or in their day-to-day, they could use this as their own avatar, their own V-tuber. They could join in a Zoom call and instead of being themselves, they're their avatar. That's what we're looking at. ROB: Very interesting. Definitely plenty to watch in this area. Shep, when people want to keep an eye on what you all are doing, obviously they could follow thousands of Instagram accounts, but where should they go for the center of gravity – for Offbeat, maybe for Virtual Humans? Where are the coordinates? SHEP: I'll say three areas. And like you said, it seems to change, but add myself on LinkedIn, Shep Ogden. I post a lot about what we're doing on LinkedIn. Or Offbeat's LinkedIn is another good source that really talks about it. VirtualHumans.org is not necessarily always about us; it's actually usually not about us, but it's about the industry as a whole. So, people really curious about the industry should be on the news later, they should be following the website. Third, if you're really curious about how we're bringing Zero to life, @ZeroFromNexus on Twitter is definitely the place to be.  ROB: Fantastic and fascinating. Thank you for narrating us through the intersection of the future, but grounded in stuff that's valuable right now. I think that's a really fascinating place to live in this Web3 world where some stuff feels kind of out there, and you're bringing it to reality and making a real business of it. Congratulations on everything. We'll keep an eye on it. SHEP: Thanks so much, Rob. ROB: Enjoy. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Mike Maynard, Managing Director and CEO, Napier Group (Chichester, England) Mike Maynard is Managing Director and CEO at Napier Group, an agency focused on marketing technical products to technical audiences. Clients include major companies selling semiconductors, industrial automation systems, cellular communications infrastructure, complex software, and even a baggage-handling system manufacturer. The customer “audience” for these products is “super-targeted, super technical, and . . . demanding.” A disillusioned engineer who loved talking tech, Mike stopped designing products and re-engineered himself as a tech salesman. In 2008, he bought out the tech-focused marketing agency his company had been using – two weeks before the dot com crash. With ALL of his money invested in the agency, Mike had no choice but to make the venture succeed. Today, the agency is a mix of geeks – engineers or technical journalists who understand the technology – and marketing experts. Based in Chichester, England, the agency works with a good number of American companies to target their American customers . . . and is in the process of adding a U.S. office. Some of Napier's clients have products with fairly quick purchase/sales cycles. Others, such as the airport baggage handling system manufacturer, may have cycles ranging from seven to twenty years. When the sales cycle is long, a client is not “trying to think about closing a sale all the time.” Multi-year sales cycles require marketing to build relationships and rapport. The objective is to keep the product long-term on the minds of “future” customers by helping them stay apprised of industry trends and leading-edge developments. Mike explains that, when a product is technical, “people shortlist a very small number of suppliers.” While the customer journey for a consumer product is usually short and straightforward, marketing technical products takes a “very long time,” “involves different stages of research,” and “requires “very different information.” Mike says you have to understand your customers, what they need, and the information they need; “take this really complicated thing and then narrow it down to clear reasons why somebody should consider the product;” “keep talking to the client over a long period of time because of the long sales cycle”; and make their decision and customer journey as easy as possible. In this interview, Mike discusses TURTL, an in-Beta, analytics-rich, flipbook style content platform that tracks audience engagement – whether a document is opened, how long a reader looks at it, and how far through the information the reader gets – which allows document owners to optimize their content, enrich relevant and eliminate irrelevant information, and customize the material to the needs of individual prospects.  Instead of following “vanity metrics” (click-through rates, numbers of clicks), TURTL helps answer the questions, “What does your audience care about? What do you need to give them more of? What do you need to stop talking about? How can you optimize your campaigns?” Mike says, “It's a phenomenal superpower,” being able to “learn from the behavior of your audience” particularly when you've got the long, complex documents typical in tech industries. Mike can be reached at his agency's website: napierb2b.com, on LinkedIn (Mike Maynard at Napier), or by email at: mike@napierb2b.com. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Mike Maynard, Managing Director and CEO at Napier Group based in Chichester, England. Welcome to the podcast, Mike. MIKE: Thanks for having me on the podcast, Rob. Appreciate it. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you start us off with an introduction to Napier Group? What is the firm's expertise? MIKE: Basically, what the firm does is we get geeks and techies excited. Our business is helping people market in the B2B technology space. It's all about selling technical products to a technical audience that's making a technical decision. ROB: Got it. How technical are we talking here? Is it gadgets, is it software, or is it heavy-duty engineer cloud platform kind of software developer stuff? MIKE: It's pretty geeky stuff, Rob. To give you an idea of some of our clients, we work with one of the leading semiconductor companies in the world. We work with companies that sell industrial automation systems. We work with people selling cellular communications infrastructure. We even work with the world's largest manufacturer of baggage handling systems. ROB: It sounds like these are not Super Bowl ads, right? This sounds like pretty targeted audiences. MIKE: These are super-targeted, super technical, and generally speaking pretty demanding audiences, yeah. It's definitely not Super Bowl ads. ROB: It seems like whether you're talking about semiconductors, whether you're talking about communications, this is pretty technical stuff. I'm imagining you're largely a firm of marketers; how do you equip your team to be prepared to speak this language? Are they reformed geeks, or what is the secret here? MIKE: I'm not sure I'm reformed, but I certainly am a geek. I started my career as an electronics engineer and spent years in design and then in technical support for semiconductor companies. So I'm certainly very technical. And actually, just over half the agency is very technical, typically coming from either an engineering or a technical journalism background. So how do we equip people? The answer is we mix together people who understand the technology with people who are really good at marketing, and that's how we get the results. ROB: Got it. I am also a computer engineer by education, but now wear all the hats, much as you do in some seasons, I am sure. How, then, do you think about how to reach the audience, where to reach the audience? How do you find these very specific buyers? And these also sound like probably longer purchase cycles while we're at it. MIKE: Yeah, two very insightful questions, Rob. Talking about the purchase cycles, we do have a range of purchase cycles. With some of our clients' products, we can actually get fairly quick turnarounds, and indeed, a couple of our clients actually sell online, so they will be able to sell particularly things like development kits (the things to start a development process going) online fairly quickly, although there'll then be a development cycle involved for the engineers. But if you look at, for example, selling a baggage handling system into an airport, if you want to sell a baggage handling system, someone's really got to be building an airport terminal to buy a baggage handling system. They need somewhere to put it. Actually, you look at those sales cycles, the fastest turnaround they can get is typically about 7 years, and the sales cycle goes up to 20 years for these systems. It really is a case of not trying to think about closing a sale all the time. With a multi-year sales cycle, that's ridiculous. It's about building that relationship, that rapport through marketing, and basically staying top-of-mind, staying the product that the customers want to choose. ROB: How do you stay top-of-mind for seven years? MIKE: The answer is you have to do interesting stuff. It's really simple. In all our industries, if you look at it, there are people buying who are making very technical decisions over a long sales cycle. What these guys and girls want to do is understand what's going on in the market, because they may go for a long period of time without making any specific purchasing decision. If you could be helping them, educating them, telling them about the trends, and hopefully introducing developments that actually are leading the industry, then you're going to get them engaged. It's about presenting that kind of information in a compelling way that really gets the techies excited. It's about helping them as well as marketing to them. ROB: I'd imagine at least you have plenty of time to pull together a case study. It's not a quick turnaround, necessarily. MIKE: The problem is everybody wants case studies, and case studies are notoriously difficult to get done. We're forever trying to get case studies. Actually, the case studies are one of the fastest things that happen because typically they happen once a sale is completed and you've had a product, for example, go into production. Then you can turn around the case study really quickly. So you wait for it for a really long time – it's like being a kid waiting for Christmas. You think it's forever till it's going to happen. You know that the client's got this amazing project they're working on, and then finally you get the opportunity, and suddenly Christmas is there and it's amazing, and you get a fantastic case study. ROB: Yeah, that sounds like Christmas all over again. If we rewind the clock a little bit, what led you into this business? How did this whole thing get started? MIKE: It's a very unplanned story. I used to be an engineer, and I was designing electronic systems. I designed everything from systems that could engrave printing rollers using big industrial lasers through to recording for music studios. Then I decided I wasn't very good at the engineering part. I actually quite liked talking about the technology, so I went into technical sales. In the UK at the time, you used to get a company car, a car provided by the company, if you were in marketing. I kind of liked the idea of moving into marketing because my car was getting old, so I moved into marketing because of that and spent a few years in marketing, running European marketing for a semiconductor company. Then I went on a course. It was a residential management course, and there were a few glasses of wine on the last night, and we got into talking about what people's ambitions were. Someone said to me, “You should run your own business, Mike.” I think they were really polite and they were saying, “Oh, my God, I would hate to be your manager, Mike,” but they presented it in this lovely way of . . . “You should run your own business.” About two months later, my main contact at the agency I was using said, “The two founders are looking to retire and sell the business, and I think you should buy it.” I thought, how hard can it be to run an agency? I've done marketing. An agency's got to be basically the same as being on the client side. Let's just try it. And then I learnt. ROB: Purchasing a business can take on a few different forms. What did the purchase process and structure look like for you? I imagine there's enough distance between here and there that you can probably talk a little bit about it. MIKE: The approach actually was really simple. There were some technical issues; obviously, companies structure very differently. In the UK, you can have a partnership or you can have a limited liability company or you can have a listed company. At the time, the current company was a partnership. I basically bought the assets, put it into a limited liability company because I had no money, and certainly after the purchase, I had no money. I never really added up how much debt I'd run up because I think I would've never done it if I'd realized that. But it was a relatively straightforward process. Frankly, buying businesses is nowhere near as difficult as it sounds. But I do have one great bit of advice for buying businesses. If you're going to buy an agency that is 100% focused on technology clients, buying that agency about two weeks before the dot-com crash is a really, really bad idea. That's my advice to anyone: get your timing right. That's probably a bigger challenge than actually the whole process of buying a business. ROB: Yes, timing would seem to matter a great deal there. But perhaps then also part of going through that season has probably helped along the way. How did you make it through the downturn, the dot-com crash? That's certainly a baptism by fire, if you will, into the privileges of business ownership. MIKE: That's a great question. I think making it through was not really the problem, because I'd taken all the money I had, I put it into the business – there was no option. I had to make it succeed. I think a lot of agency owners will relate to this with COVID and typically having to leave the office, work from home – you get through that. I think the biggest problem is how that impacts you in the longer term. For me, after buying the agency, it really made me overly cautious. We were always wanting to have cash in the bank. We always wanted to be safe. We wanted to have runway. We didn't go out and invest as much as we should. We didn't actually take advantage of the cycles when there were upcycles. It really had a long-term impact on me. Agency owners who've been through COVID, a lot of agency owners have really struggled; the one thing I'd say is these exceptional situations are exceptional. And yes, there'll be problems. There'll be bumps on the road. It won't be an easy route. But I think as we come out of this horrible pandemic, we've got to look back to building our confidence as agency owners and being prepared to go back to taking the risks you were taking before the pandemic. ROB: How did that experience, and maybe the learning from that dot-com crash, affect your reaction to however much 2008 impacted you, and then what sort of footing were you on heading into COVID? You saw it. You clearly saw, “Here we go again”; how did your mind and your attitude react differently in that case? MIKE: That's a great question because I think the two are very different. 2008 obviously had a big impact on us, again, being a technology agency with a big tech downturn. But we were still running the business very conservatively. We were still, in my opinion, being a little bit overly cautious. We had cash, we were safe, we got through the downturn, and it was okay. By the time we get to the pandemic and COVID, we changed our philosophy. We were investing more. We're still running the business with cash in the bank rather than running it on an overdraft, so to some extent keeping safe. But honestly, for us – and we were lucky in the business we're in. There are other agencies that have been hit far harder. For us, we came through COVID and it was like, actually, the impact to the business was pretty small. I mean, yes, we had to move everybody, make them remote, we had to do that in virtually no time, we had to deal with communications issues. We had all these problems. But basically, the money kept coming in, and that was great. Some of the clients cut back, but nobody really pulled out. It was actually so much easier having been through financially what were far worse downturns. ROB: Yeah. Some of these products you're talking about – I think any marketer, any client, any seller, any buyer is expecting the entire conversation to last longer than any downturn, so I can see how that makes sense. I am curious as I think about it – most of what you're talking about, these things sound like they are more sold than bought, if you will. They're things where, as a marketer, you're not just trying to get somebody to check out and buy a bunch of things to outfit all their cellphone towers for their entire country network buildout. In some ways you're equipping and supporting a salesforce, I would imagine. So. what are the channels that you're reaching, and how do you come alongside when the actual purchase is probably with a human and maybe an RFP and a whole bunch of other things? MIKE: That's a great question. If you look at the research with these highly involved decisions – and I know LinkedIn has published something recently about financial purchases – actually, people shortlist a very small number of suppliers. Typically a couple of suppliers. What you have to do is really understand the customer journey. People talk about the customer journey, and you can look at a customer journey for a consumer product; it's very short, and it's probably not that involved. A customer journey for the kind of products we're taking, it takes a very long time. It involves different stages of research. They need very different content, very different information. It's about really getting into the head of those customers, understanding what they're doing, understanding what they're going through, what they need, and then delivering the right information. I can't change our clients' products, and I can't make our client always have the best product in the world. But what I can do is present the product in the best light, and I can make it as easy as possible for the customer to choose our client's product. A lot of it is about removing these roadblocks that make it difficult to choose and just making that journey as smooth as possible. ROB: It's such an interesting journey along that way. You did mention, as we were getting you lined up to be on the podcast, you're going to be at the B2B Expo in Los Angeles at the start of April. How does that fit into your mix of operating the firm? And that's a little bit of a journey for you. MIKE: Because we're in technology, most of our clients are American, or certainly most of our revenue comes from clients that are ultimately headquartered in the States. Silicon Valley is a big area for us, but also we have some industrial technology companies we work with who are based in the States. So, we've always got a lot of our business from the States. At the moment, we're looking for creative things to do. We've recently signed a partnership with a content platform called TURTL. We're looking to promote that as well, both in Europe and in the U.S. And then lastly – and this is news that very few people know outside of the company – we actually have someone who's moving out to the States in the next week or two to begin opening a presence in the U.S. We're already working for American companies to target some of their American customers, and now we're building that out. That's the next stage. All of these things came together, along, frankly, with a 50% grant from the UK government to go to the show. So it made a lot of sense to go and see if it works. It's very much an experiment for us. It could be a complete disaster, but I think like every marketing tactic, if you don't try it, how do you know whether it works? ROB: Sure. That's actually a topic that's been very near and dear to us as well. When you talk about these conferences, the decision of how much to experiment versus how much to commit – when you come to thinking about going to a conference like that, how do you think about what an experiment looks like versus a strong conviction that it's the right place? What do those different investments look like? MIKE: That's a great question. I think you look firstly at the cost in terms of money, and then secondly at the cost in terms of time. For us, we've got a number of clients in the States, and I can combine a meeting with probably three of those clients as well as the event. I can actually get these client meetings that I'd probably want to fly to the States for anyway included. That makes it very much more compelling. There's not much for time cost involved. As I say, we've signed this new technology partnership; we really want to promote that. We think there's a lot of opportunity. The company is UK-based. It's just launching and trying to build in the States. Again, it's perfect timing. You look at everything and you go, “Does my gut feel that the amount I'm investing is a small amount compared to the potential return? Yeah, I need one client from this show and I'm gold.” That's a relatively small investment. If I don't get anybody, it's not the end of the world. I've had some great client meetings, I've learnt a lot about the market, I've been able to go to the States in front of some American clients and some prospects. It almost feels like it's a “can't-lose,” even though we're doing the tradeshow route – which, particularly after COVID, feels a little bit risky. ROB: Right, it's a little bit of an experiment for everyone, but it's definitely a good perspective to think about needing one good client to rationalize the entire endeavor. It sounds like TURTL is strategic to you. Tell a little bit more about what that does. What does it do, how does it work, how does it help you? MIKE: We've recently signed up with the guys. They have a technology to present information in somewhat like a flipbook style. You go online, you read the information, and you can delve down into the topics that interest you. On the face of it, that's kind of like a number of other technologies, but what TURTL does is provides phenomenal analytics to the marketers. Typically, in our world, it's all PDF. All the datasheets, manuals, instructions, brochures, everything is PDF. You send someone a PDF. Did they open it? I don't know. Did they read the first page? I don't know. Did they get to the end? I don't know. With a TURTL document, you get information on which pages they looked at, how long they looked at it, where they delved down for deeper information. Hopefully the TURTL guys won't mind me saying this – the technology for presentation is good, it's really good, but it's not world-changing. The technology behind the analytics, though, for my clients is amazing because they're producing massive books of information, and they have no idea whether anybody reads some of those pages. Now they know, and that's so powerful. They can optimize the content. And of course, within TURTL, like many of these other platforms, you can customize the content as well. You can work on the pages that people, your audience, care about, and you can also make sure you filter out the ones that are irrelevant to each prospect. To me – and maybe this is more of a trend than just about TURTL – we've gone away from analytics being, “What's your click-through rate? How many clicks did you get?” Everyone has realized that's kind of vanity metrics, and now I think analytics are “What does your audience care about? What do you need to give them more of? What do you need to stop talking about? How can you optimize your campaigns?” That's something that, to me, TURTL will give our clients, and it's a phenomenal superpower. ROB: It reminds me a little bit of DocSend, but for a different industry. Do you know DocSend? MIKE: Yeah, DocSend. ROB: I googled them again just to make sure I wasn't crazy, and they're all about investors and investing and those pitch decks that you send to investors. But it's the same need and the same problem. It helps me picture – the displaying of the document, that's table stakes. It's necessary. It's what the product has to do. You can't do anything if you don't do that. But it's the insights it can give you that really – you know where you're wasting your time, where you're not. There's a lot going on there, what content is communicating and maybe what isn't. Or even with client needs, right? MIKE: Absolutely. It lets you really understand what matters to the audience. You could do that on an individual level and that's kind of cool, but it's that aggregate level. We produced a general TURTL document from one of our previous PDFs, did a little bit of promotion over email, and 70% of people flipped all the way to the end. We were like, 70% going to the end? I wouldn't have bet that on PDF. And okay, some of it is a new format, some of it is exciting. Then we look at it and it's like, page seven – nobody liked that. Why do we talk about this stuff? Nobody cares. The next thing we're going to do is take out page seven, and suddenly that document becomes even more engaging to the audience. So, you can really learn from the behavior of your audience, and that to me is really powerful, particularly when you've got long and complex documents, which a lot of our clients have. ROB: Mike, we talked a little bit about the past of the firm, but as you reflect – we've already shared some lessons, but what are some of the key lessons you feel like you have learned in building and operating the business and things you might suggest to yourself to do a little bit differently if you had the chance to go back and tell yourself? MIKE: Wow, that's a great question. I think looking back – I actually talked with one of my other directors, who has been with me for the whole journey, from buying the agency all the way through to today, and we said we lacked confidence. Quite often, if you don't come from an agency background, you're not used to what agencies do at different sizes. You think big agencies are some sort of unbelievable, amazing organization that you can't touch. To me, we lacked confidence to go pitch for some of the big businesses. When we look at where we do our best job, where we deliver the best value, actually a lot of the time that's with our biggest clients. Not with the small companies, but with the really biggest clients. So, I think it's about being confident in your offering and what you're doing and really being prepared to put yourself out there. ROB: I can almost see once you have that confidence, you think about “who is not your customer” more clearly, but also probably it creates an interesting perspective on what industries you see emerging and who would be a good customer. What have you seen coming to market that you would not have predicted, but you look at it and say “Hey, that's actually a great prospect for us”? What types of things have surprised you? MIKE: That's really interesting. I think certainly the comment about being prepared to be clear about who's not your customer is really important. We've turned down quite a few clients – probably more clients than we've actually pitched, over the last six months. In terms of the markets that are interesting, I think actually if you look at your business, what you need to do as an agency owner is see what you're good at and then see what's one step away. As you want to grow and expand out, you need to look at where you are one step away. A lot of what we do is around quite complex software, so we're really good at helping software companies sell a complex product. There are lots of areas in business where software is really taking over, whether that be in terms of advertising technology or whether it's in terms of purchasing or whether it's in terms of understanding maintenance in a plant. All of those are a slightly step away from what we were doing originally, but actually we're really good at that stuff because we understand how to take this really complicated thing and then narrow it down to clear reasons why somebody should consider the product, and then keep talking to that person over a long period of time, because there's a long sales cycle. ROB: In software, do you end up with anything that's a much shorter purchase cycle maybe than some of the complex hardware? Or do you find software with longer implementation cycles, more considered purchases, is a better fit? MIKE: If I'm to be honest – and this comes back to the fact that as you grow your agency, you've got to be confident about where it's not a good fit – if it's more of an impulse buy, it's a very short sales cycle, why do you need us? We're really good at taking this technical information and communicating it over a long period of time. That's what works really well. Why would you get us if it's a software where you just need to run Google Ads and people buy it? So, I think it's probably not the right fit for us. It's not somewhere we'd go, and it's certainly not somewhere we're chasing. We're definitely chasing the complex enterprise kind of software businesses because that's where we're successful. That's where we add value. ROB: There's certainly a buzz phrase circling in the software world of product-led growth. Everybody talks about PLG this and PLG that. Is that not at all relevant to some of these more enterprise solutions? Or are there ways it's creeping its way in that are worth discussing? MIKE: I think in terms of product-led growth, it's difficult. The enterprise software companies are trying to be more agile. They're trying to look more like almost the prosumer-type companies. But it is a different sale, because what you're doing is selling something that's going to handle a very large proportion of activities. It's a very complex project. It's got a lot of different processes inside it. If I'm the enterprise buying that, I kind of want to know that if it works today, it's going to work tomorrow and it's going to keep going. Stability is actually a real benefit. So, I think we are going to see the software engineering market fragment, and there's definitely the less involved purchases in software that are fantastic. You look at it in marketing, it could be anything from tools to create banner ads to some of the tools to view websites on different platforms. They're actually quite low engagement processes, and there's relatively low switching costs. They don't matter. I think there'll always be software like that, and that's great because you get very fast innovation. You get new players in the market. At the other end, you've got something like a marketing automation platform, and there, it's not the platform that's complicated; it's the data and getting your CRM data, getting things synced up, getting history, being able to get things to work based upon behavior. And honestly, if you buy a marketing automation system and it looks completely different in a year's time, that's a huge risk for anybody. So, I think different things need different approaches, and we're definitely into the complex product where a certain degree of stability is absolutely important. It's vital for the customer. ROB: Certainly makes sense. Mike, when people want to find and connect with you and Napier Group, where should they go to find you? MIKE: We've obviously got a website, napierb2b.com. People can go there. People can go on LinkedIn and find me; I'm Mike Maynard at Napier. I'm the only Mike Maynard at Napier, so that should be fairly easy. But frankly, I just love talking to people, so if anyone wants to email me, I think most agency owners will work out my email address; it's mike@napierb2b.com. Just send me an email. I'd love to hear from you. ROB: That is excellent. Mike, thank you so much for coming on, for sharing your expertise and your experience. We are all better for it, and I wish you the best. MIKE: No problem. Thanks for having me on the podcast, Rob. ROB: Thank you very much. Take care. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Annie Scranton, Founder and President, Pace PR (New York, NY)   Annie Scranton is Founder and President at Pace PR, a media relations shop that partners with its clients to discern and achieve goals through getting its clients “featured in the media.” Annie believes that traditional media (television) is still strong and its real-time immediacy “brings credibility to a person or a brand” in a way that “holds a lot of meaning and is different from a newspaper article or a digital article or a podcast.” Pace PR works with a wide variety of clientele, but its three “pillars” are business (B2B, tech startups, corporate clients, climate sustainability initiatives), lifestyle (nutritionists, authors, fitness instructors, products, and brands), and thought leadership (political pundits, financial analysts, attorneys).  Annie says her firm selects clients they find interesting and exciting . . . ones that will interest the media and have something “meaningful to say.” Clients need to “have a presence and be compelling,” to be able to explain their thoughts in a way that audiences can understand, and to provide “takeaways” for viewers. The agency “preps” clients by providing media training. In pitching, timing is important . . . media is more interested in working with clients who can speak to current relevant issues. Credentials are also important. “Did the client work in the industry under discussion? What was their exact area of expertise? How did they touch the current topic that (the agency is) pitching them on?” Get to the point as quickly as possible and clearly state the payoff so producers can easily formulate the case for doing the story. Annie says producers get hundreds of pitches in their inbox and delete 99% of them. In this podcast, Annie provides some basic interview tips. “First,” she says, “Do no harm.” Answer the questions the interviewer asks in a way that is “as concise and clear as possible.” Annie says it takes a certain level of skill to be able to bring in your own message in a way that is “natural and organic” and not too “transactional.” If it's not going to “flow,” Annie advises holding back and waiting for the next time, giving a great interview, and “playing the longer game,” knowing that, if they like you, they'll invite you back. in 2021, after 11 years in business, Pace PR brought in a consultant to finally put some structure in place: “an operating plan, an organizational chart, and a lot of other tools.” Result? More growth and a better workflow.  Annie can be reached on her agency's website, pacepublicrelations.com or on Twitter @anniescranton. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Annie Scranton, Founder and President at Pace PR, based in New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Annie. ANNIE: Thanks for having me. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Please start us off with a rundown of Pace PR. What is the firm's superpower? ANNIE: Our superpower is getting our clients on TV and featured in the media. There's a lot more that we do, obviously, and that goes into it, but at our core, Pace Public Relations is a media relations shop. We partner with our clients to figure out what their goals are, and then we help them achieve those goals by securing really meaningful, great placements in the media. ROB: I'm sure a lot of people really want that. What does a typical client look like for you? Is there a particular stage of firm, size of firm, industry? You name it. ANNIE: We're pretty wide-ranging and generalist and agnostic when it comes to the industry that our clients are in, but we do have three main divisions. We have B2B division, where we have everything from tech startups to corporate clients to climate sustainability initiatives and projects; we have a robust lifestyle division, so we have nutritionists, authors, fitness instructors, and products and brands; and then our third division is thought leadership. That's a lot of our political pundits and financial analysts, attorneys, folks that really have a vested interest in opining on cable news about whatever the topic du jour may be. ROB: Some of these are some pretty big placements, I would imagine. In client selection, how much of it is people who are interesting innately, how much of it is preparing them, and how much of it is just finding the area where they're more interesting? ANNIE: I think there's got to be an innate interest at least somewhat. It doesn't have to be a passion project or something that I personally necessarily follow, but I have to feel interested and excited when I'm talking to a prospective client because without feeling excited and having that interest, it's not going to come off as genuine when we're pitching to the media. So definitely vested interest is important. But also, we have to make sure that we feel like the media is going to be interested as well. It could be the most interesting thing ever, but if it doesn't fit into the news cycle or, as you were saying, maybe they haven't secured funding and they're super, super small . . . timing is important. We want to make sure that when we're talking about that sort of preparation, our clients are coming to us with an already established presence and a lot going on themselves where we can feel comfortable and confident that we're pitching a product or an organization or a CEO or a company that has something meaningful to say. And then we do a lot of work with our clients to get them prepped and media-ready by doing media training as well. ROB: That's a whole topic we could go down right there on the media training side. I'm recalling some conversations I've had on the topic. But let's pull in for a moment on what makes people interesting. How do you think about understanding and figuring out – obviously, there can be some subjectiveness to “This person is interesting,” but how do you think of scaling up the idea of “Is this person interesting and who are they interesting to in the media world?” ANNIE: I think interesting is a little bit individualistic, but for me, doing a lot of TV bookings for our clients, they have to certainly have a presence and be compelling just in the tonality of their voice, and be able to explain what they're saying in a way that's going to be digestible and make sense and have some takeaways for the viewer at home. Something that's really important is to make sure they have the goods to back it up. Did they work specifically in the industry that they are discussing? What was their exact area of expertise? How did they touch the current topic that we're pitching them on? Then we put our pitches together where we are highlighting our client's expertise so that way, when a producer is looking at it, they say, “Oh okay, this guest would be really great to have on air because of this specific background that they have.” ROB: Media training is such a deep and interesting topic. I've had a couple of times where, for whatever reason, I ended up on CNBC and I had to phone a friend and figure out what the heck I was going to do with this and how to do it well. There's an interesting balance. Depending on who you listen to, some people are going to talk about knowing what you want to say, and then sometimes you can very clearly tell when someone is on television and they're trying a little bit too hard to touch on their three talking points or something like that. How do you think about striking the right balance of being prepared and knowing your message, but then delivering it in a way that isn't forced, inauthentic, or just tone-deaf? ANNIE: In my opinion, I think first do no harm. What I mean by that is if you are fortunate enough to get booked on CNBC or a major TV network, answer the questions that are asked of you. I think weaving in your own specific messaging point is a skillset. It's something that may take time for some to be able to do where it feels really natural and organic. But if it doesn't flow off your tongue in a really germane and relevant way, my advice would be to wait for the next time you're on air, because first and foremost you want to develop a relationship with that producer, with that anchor, with that network. If you are too transactional on the first interview, they're going to see right through that and you're never going to get invited back on. So in my opinion, it's better to really give them a great interview and realize that there's a long game here. It's not just for a one-off interview. ROB: That's so important to remember. I think it can feel like you're playing in the Super Bowl or something when you get that TV placement, and you feel like you have to win it all at once. You make a great point; so much of business is the long game, and I think it's illuminating to people that media is not different in that regard, and you really can do this a lot if you serve the audience well and make the host's job easy. ANNIE: You totally can. I think it's also on the publicist or on your comms team to strike that balance for you. It's very rare that you're going to look up and see what would in effect be a commercial for a company or a product or a brand. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the CEO or the founder is talking about a news story that is relatable within their industry, within their area of expertise. But a publicist should be able to ask the producer, “Hey, at the end of the segment, can we have one question where we ask about the initiative that my client is offering?” or something along those lines. Generally speaking, they'll play ball with you – and if they don't, that's when the publicist needs to go back to the client and say, “Listen, I really advise that you do this interview because it will lead to other opportunities in the future.” ROB: You certainly speak with a lot of expertise, so let's uncover some of the background here. What led to you starting Pace PR in the first place? What's the origin story? ANNIE: I was 28 and working at CNBC for Donny Deutsch's show, and it got cancelled. I found myself suddenly without a job because everyone on the show got laid off. So I sent an email to everyone in my orbit and said, “I lost my job today and I need a job. If you hear of anything, let me know.” I got an email back that really changed the course of my life forever; it was from a publicist who I had worked closely with and developed a relationship with booking his clients on Donny's show. He emailed me and said, “I don't think you have any formal PR training, but I have a client. He's a broker. He just wrote a book on the market. If you know anybody on any show at CNBC that would have him on, I'll pay you $500 bucks.” I sent it to my friend who was working on the one o'clock hour and she's like, “Oh, he looks great. Can he come on tomorrow?” And that was my lightbulb moment. That's what spurred everything to happen. ROB: For sure. I of course skimmed through your LinkedIn before we hopped on here, and you can see the DNA of some of your career, and probably number one, I would imagine part of your eye for talent comes from being on the other side. Do you feel that the people you're booking with know that you have that background? Or is it more evident to them by how you probably approach the entire process with an empathy for their job and what they're looking for? ANNIE: A lot of them do, because a lot of them I'm still friends with or have a relationship with. But I do think the way I construct my pitches, the way my staff does by me teaching them, is to really cut right to it, for lack of a better phrase. Producers are getting pitched hundreds of pitches every single day. Every single day, they're getting hundreds of pitches to their inbox, and they delete 99% of them. So, it's really important to reference what is happening in the news today. You don't need a long preamble; you don't need to say, “Biden's Build Back Better plan, which was supposed to encompass X, Y, and Z…” No, just say “Biden's plan got shot down. If you want commentary on if it's going to resurrect itself or where they go from here, here is the expert. Here is what they say. Here's why you should book them.” Just make it as concise and clear as possible. I think if you do that, it's evident that you have an understanding of how TV news works. ROB: You make it sound so easy – and of course, I couldn't come up with that pitch very quickly at all. But that's why you are the professional. It's worth highlighting – I feel like it's pretty common to see a lone gun solo artist or a superman or superwoman with a couple of assistants, but you have managed to scale up the firm a little bit more. Not everybody has your experience booking; not everybody has that network. How have you gone about equipping new waves of your team to grow and scale and replicate an experience that – maybe you're able to hire a bunch of people who used to book for shows, but I imagine that's not everyone on your team. ANNIE: No, definitely not. A couple people, but not everyone. In early days, certainly pre-pandemic, I had a very small office for a number of years, and my more junior team members would sit right next to me and I would try as much as I could to use opportunities as teaching moments, as I'm putting together a pitch. I also was very much a part of the editing process and trying to have them understand how to get right to the point as quickly as possible while also clearly stating the payoff. Why should the person on the receiving end care about what you're sending? That's not easy to learn because most people, I think, think of good writing as long writing and having a lot of flowery explanations. But when you're pitching for TV, it's really different than that. Now we're at a stage of the company where we can invest in our staff in other ways, through writing courses or webinars or seminars that they may want to attend. But we just try to have a lot of visibility in terms of our pitch writing just so that the junior staff can see how we're doing it and then learn from that experience. ROB: I see. I can certainly see some proximity, some room for coaching, probably some roleplay, even, in there. Have you ever had younger staff write some pitches and have someone respond in more of a roleplay mode? Is that common? ANNIE: I guess I do that when I'm editing and writing back to them, because oftentimes I will say, “What are you trying to sell me on here?” Sometimes we have complex, complicated clients, and it can be really hard to say succinctly in the approximation of 20 seconds what point it is you're trying to get across. So yes, because when we used to work together in a small office, I would say, “Hey, Natalie, why should the producer care about this?” or “Hey, why should the viewer at home really care about this topic or this idea?” I think just making it as real as possible was helpful in those ways. So I guess so. I guess roleplaying in that way. ROB: It's interesting because there's a direction – as I was saying with the talking points – there's a point to where I think some coaching makes you sound really overly robotic, and it's almost like there's the other side of the mountain where you're talking about getting more concise, more human, more to the point. Maybe there's some New York in there, but there's a lot of media in New York, so I'm sure a lot of media talk is “Get to the point. We're busy here. We are inundated with pitches.” ANNIE: Yeah. You'll see even, if you start developing relationships with specific producers, a lot of times producers will email me one sentence. They're not worrying about capitalization and punctuation. If you work in cable news, you're producing every single day. It's a talking art, it's not a written art. Most of the times, the way they're communicating with the executive producer or the senior producer where they're pitching a story or they're pitching a guest is when they're having their meetings, so they're actually verbalizing the pitch and the guest they're getting. So they need to be able to take from the written pitch and use that language to formulate in words how they're making their case for why they should book this guest or why they should do this story. It's something that people may not have a knowledge base on if you haven't worked in TV, but that is how it works. ROB: It's such an interesting look behind the curtain. Annie, when you think about the journey so far in building Pace PR, what have you learned lesson-wise that you might wish to go back and tell yourself to do a little differently, or things you're doing differently now? ANNIE: This past year, in 2021, we started working with a consultant for the first time in 11 years of business, who helped me develop an operating plan and an organizational chart and a lot of other tools. We sort of joke around saying that we grew up this year at Pace PR. We could've done that earlier, for sure. I think I held on to that startup scrappy mentality for a little too long. It didn't hurt us, but I think it impeded our growth, because since we've invested in some of this work, we've all noticed not only more growth, but also I think an ease within the workflow in the company. So. I would say to think even bigger earlier on than I was. I mean, on the one hand, I've always grown slowly and methodically. Most startups, the reason they fail the first year is because they spend too much money, they grow too quickly. So there definitely is that balance. But I think I would've put on my business hat a little bit sooner in the duration of the company. ROB: Yeah. Did you start the firm by yourself? ANNIE: I did. I started it by myself and kind of just asked for help. I knew an attorney who I used to book on TV, so he incorporated the company. I asked a friend, “Do you have an accountant?” and they introduced me to my current accountant. A lot of it was trial by fire, and when I started it was just me, so obviously I didn't have to worry about staff and a million other things. I could take risks and do things a little bit haphazardly and it was okay. ROB: Right. Some people have that partner, that co-founder, someone who comes in operationally minded, and sometimes, as you've done, you get by on the strength of your strengths. I think it was probably a year and a half ago I hired a coach to come in and help me figure out some of these things, and it felt too early. I thought, “This is a big investment; should I really be spending this money?” But I haven't talked to a lot of people who hired a credible consultant or coach and regretted it. ANNIE: Yeah. At least where we are in the business, it just got me thinking differently. When you live and breathe your business and you started it and it's your baby, it's very hard to see the forest through the trees. It's like you only know one way of doing things. So when you get that outside perspective, at least for me, it has been illuminating. I do think the timing is important, but it's never too soon to at least start thinking about that and thinking about what the future will hold and how to scale and how you might see a growth path forward. ROB: What are some of the scale points that may have gotten in the way? ANNIE: Staffing has always been – not an issue, but it's something that's so critical to a small business. And I think time management, meaning all of us, from myself all the way on down, are very involved in the client work, in the client-facing aspect and the media pitching aspect, so it doesn't leave a lot of time or room to think about the business and growing and scaling the business. It's something that I've been fortunate (knock wood) where year over year, the company has grown. It's not to say I haven't put time and energy into thinking about how to grow; I have. But I have not ever been systematic and really intentional about it until this past year. I will say it's still not easy to carve out time in your day when you really don't have it, but I've been doing whatever I can to make the room and the space for that because it's really important. ROB: It's one level to think about the simple tasks that you can delegate, the lawyers, the bookkeepers, that sort of thing, but it's another thing entirely to really think about working on the business, on equipping things for growth. It's a different mindset, so I certainly appreciate that. ANNIE: Yeah, and if you don't have training in it or you didn't go to business school – I had never read a business book. It's hard to know what some processes can be or ways in which to scale. You may be somebody who has a ton of ideas, but then it's really challenging to put those ideas into practice. Somebody gave me the advice that as the owner of a company or someone in leadership, you should spend your time doing the things that only you can do, the things that you're really good at. I didn't excel at figuring out how to take my ideas and then implement them into different growth / revenue streams, but hiring and working with this consultant has absolutely been helpful in that way. I would recommend it to anyone. ROB: That's great to hear and great to understand. One of the ways I believe that you have chosen to scale the business is with different offices, different cities. How did you think about the right time and the right way to do that? That seems like a big step. ANNIE: Yeah. Some of it was a situation where someone wanted to move and came to me and said, “What do you think if we opened up an office in D.C. or LA?”, etc. Certainly, in this period of remote work, that's a lot easier. I think maybe a lot of businesses are having different office locations because people are living and working in different areas. But I would say for us, just thinking about the pillars of our company, which is business, lifestyle, and thought leadership, politics is a big part of that thought leadership – so having a presence in D.C. is important. It's important to get out there for meeting media and it's important for attending events that are going to be useful for new client acquisition or for strengthening relationships with the media. And then we have a member of our team out in LA, and that's really the hub of where a lot of lifestyle business is done. I think it's also important to have somebody there to have their finger on the pulse of what the trends are, what people are talking about – especially in that lifestyle space. That is important when you're having conversations with prospective clients, to say, “Oh yeah, I have heard of this.” When you have that intimate knowledge, it gives you that leg up when you're vying for the business. ROB: As soon as you said D.C. and LA. I was thinking about your pillars. It sprang immediately to mind with lifestyle, with thought leadership, absolutely. It does feel like it can be a little bit of chicken and egg in that case, though, right? How do you decide, is the thought leadership pulling you to D.C., or is it a bet based on what you're seeing? It seems like there's a bit of a risk and sequencing challenge there. Did it feel like a risk going into those markets, or did you feel like you had the evidence that made it inevitable? ANNIE: I think it's always a risk, because who knows how things are going to turn out? But like when you're saying the chicken or the egg, I feel like that is the perpetual mind state that I'm in. Less so with opening an office, because there are ways to do that where you don't have to have a ton of overhead to do that. So low risk on the financial side. But where I still see myself in that kind of scenario is thinking about hiring. We try to be prudent and hire when we have more clients that require more staffing to service those clients, but in PR, despite the fact that we have very longstanding and great client retention, it still is cyclical. We have a lot of clients that come to us on a project basis, or at the end of their first contract, they may need to shift funds to another area of their marketing budget. So it is a little bit always of that balancing act. All I can say is doing this for nearly 12 years, I think there's that bit of intuition, which is what I've come to rely on. ROB: Absolutely. Annie, as you're looking ahead for the future of Pace PR, for the future of the particular industry that you're in, what are you excited about? What's changing, what's not changing? ANNIE: I am excited about all of the many different media properties that are popping up or that are becoming more robust. I have CNN on in my office and they're promoting CNN Plus. In instances like that, for publicists, it's exciting because there's going to be so many more opportunities for clients to get them exposure. Somewhat challenging to keep up on it all, but it's a good challenge to have and I'm excited about that. However, the cornerstone of our business is traditional media, and a lot of people out there will say traditional media is dead, TV news is not going to hold the same weight as it once did. I disagree with that. I think at least in our lifetime, TV is still going to be a really important medium. Even amongst the younger generations, people, especially in big moments, want to turn on the TV. They want to see in real time what is happening. And even if they don't, getting those clips from a CNN or a CNBC legitimizes and brings credibility to a person or a brand in a way that I think is very different and holds a lot of meaning and is different from a newspaper article or a digital article or a podcast or something like that. ROB: How do you read when a media outlet starts to turn the corner? Because I distinctly recall I would start seeing these random video clips showing up in my Twitter feed of business news, and I'd sit here and say, “What in the heck is Cheddar?” And all of a sudden Cheddar's on my TV. It has crossed a little bit from being an upstart to also kind of a traditional outlet. How do you feel out – and maybe it is intuition – when things start to cross the boundary? ANNIE: I think it's a question that's kind of impossible to have an exact answer to because it's a bit of a science, but I would say for us, something as simple as in the early days, when we would email a client with a request to appear on Cheddar TV, they would always say “What's Cheddar?” And now, we don't get that question anymore. How does that happen? Probably by a million little things happening all at once and over a sustained period of time. But for me, it's less about maybe the name recognition, but what's really important is that the quality of the reporting and the interviews is very high from the early days. Cheddar always did great interviews, very professional all the way around and really well thought out. My clients always left feeling happy and like it was a good investment of their time, because even if they didn't have a ton of eyeballs watching that segment at that exact moment, as I said, having that clip and having it be well-produced and it looked good and it was a well thought out interview – that helps them in their own marketing materials to share that clip or to put it on their website or put it on their social media. ROB: Makes sense. There is some wizardry to it still. I appreciate it. That's why we need you. That's why you're there. Annie, when people want to find you and find Pace PR, how should they find and connect with you? ANNIE: I would love to hear from anyone listening. You can go to our website, pacepublicrelations.com. Or you can find me on Twitter @anniescranton. Shoot me a message and I'd love to connect. ROB: Sounds great. Annie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing from your deep expertise in this media world. ANNIE: I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. ROB: Thank you very much. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Emily Heck, Owner and Founder, Evergreen Strategic Communications (Indianapolis, IN)   Emily Heck, Owner and Founder at Evergreen Strategic Communications, started her agency in the fall of 2019. With no job in sight and no career plans, she started meeting with people, chatting over coffee, and trying to figure out her next chapter. Emily picked up some freelance marketing projects from a former co-worker and networked more intensely. Her business, helping nonprofits and small businesses organize their marketing, establish processes and systems, and more efficiently engage their audiences, grew.  Although in-person networking dropped off during the pandemic, Emily is now finding contacts she did not see during the “isolation time” of Covid eager to meet and “catch up” and more interested in re-connecting face to face. Potential clients are responding to her cold-call invitations to explore partnership opportunities a lot more quickly and with a lot less requisite “relationship building” than before the pandemic. In this interview, Emily talks about the importance of LinkedIn, “the place for silent scrollers,” for building connections. She says people may scroll through your feeds and read them, but do so with no likes, shares, or comments. Think nothing is happening? Emily says she often gets comments when she meets with people six months later, “I've really liked your content.” It‘s important to “keep posting.” Emily says small business owners and nonprofits have the same marketing struggles and are “behind” the big companies on lead generation emails, getting conversions on emails and social media, and on figuring out how to “pump that up.” “Getting there” requires guiding clients to build marketing model proficiency and effectiveness and scaling larger company processes down to something that works to help “small” grow.  When Emily first started working with clients, she spent a lot of time figuring out their processes, the location of their social media account login information, and establishing what they were trying to achieve through their marketing. Client websites, often a “mess,” may fail to “tell their story well.” “You can't really be effective in your marketing if you don't have a good base of organization,” Emily explains. So, she cleans up client websites and SEO first, as a base to “push everyone back to” from emails and social media efforts.” Email has changed a lot. Today, Emily says, “You've got to have some personality in your emails.” She recommends “changing the sender name from the organization name to a person's name” to improve open rates. Emily can be contacted on her agency's website at: evergreenstrategic.org, or on LinkedIn as Emily Hack in Indianapolis. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Emily Heck, Owner and Founder at Evergreen Strategic Communications based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast, Emily. EMILY: Thank you very much. I'm so excited to be here. ROB: Good to have you here and talk some Indiana connections here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Evergreen, and what is your specialty? EMILY: Evergreen started in the fall of 2019. I started my own business right before the pandemic; I'm not sure if that's smart or adventurous or whatever word you want to fill in, but it is our origin story. We focus on nonprofits and small businesses, which may seem like two very different clients or types of clients, but they have the same marketing struggles. We help nonprofits and small businesses get their marketing organized, get processes in place, systems in place, and then work to help start engaging their audiences more efficiently. ROB: Got it. Is that organization the common struggle of where they're starting from? EMILY: Oh yeah. That is 90% of what I see. It's interesting; when I started my business, you're so excited, there's so much energy, and it's like, “I'm going to do social media for small business” or “I'm going to do email and marketing for small business,” and I found I was spending a lot of time figuring out their processes, figuring out where the login information was for their social media accounts. I spent a great deal of time doing that because you can't really be effective in your marketing if you don't have a good base of organization. ROB: I've certainly seen that. They may have worked with somebody; that person disappeared into the wilderness or just wasn't very good or whatever, and they were the only person that knew the logins. Do you end up starting from scratch? Are you trying to figure out how to recover those logins sometimes? Even that part, what are you scrapping together? EMILY: A lot of times I try to scrap it together, as you said, and find those logins. Just recently, last summer, I went through an appeal process with Facebook to get access to a client's business suite. So I'll go that route if I need to. A lot of times it's just an email to an old coworker or something like that, trying to find those logins, but sometimes you have to get out the heavy-hitter techniques and tactics to get access to stuff. ROB: I'm sure, Emily, sometimes you start with a client and they want to do one specific thing; sometimes they want to do everything. How do you help them come to the conclusion of how to do what is the right thing, what is the right thing to do first, and what's the right thing to do next? EMILY: This is a tough conversation that I have quite a bit. I do have a lot of clients that come to me and say, “We want an email newsletter” or “We want a blog started.” It's more about “Okay, but what are you trying to achieve with this?” I take a step back; let's have that conversation, let's talk about what you're trying to engage with your audience. And a lot of times the business owner or the nonprofit executive director is right. They know their business and their organization better than I do at that point in time. So, the project usually evolves from what they originally thought. Maybe they were thinking a traditional-style email newsletter, and I start to throw out some ideas – because email's changed a lot. Even I would say just in the past two or three years, how you're communicating on email has changed so much, and they may not be up-to-date on those new strategies and tactics. That's probably the second most common conversation I'm having behind “Where are your logins and what are your processes?” [laughs] ROB: How would you characterize some of that transition on the email side? Because there's certainly this historic idea of “Let's get a good template, let's curate some content, let me dump something in there that I think makes sense, and maybe I'm going to try to close some business too.” How does that evolve into what works in 2022? EMILY: What I'm experiencing with a lot of my clients and a lot of the emails I'm sending out is you've got to have some personality in your emails. Gone are the days of just throwing together some content, a blog preview or something like that. You've got to have some personality. I have several newsletters that I'm making come from a specific person within the organization – just as simple as changing the sender name from the organization name to a person's name has helped open rates. It seems so simple, but when you're flying through, trying to get that monthly email out, it's easy to forget. I'm always talking to my clients about “Let's add some personality in this. What are things that you can really connect with your audiences through on your email?” People don't want to see this endless scroll of boring content. [laughs] ROB: Boring content, company names. When I think about getting a bunch of stuff in Gmail across a bunch of different accounts – and I have the tabs; I don't know how many people have the different tabs set up for the updates and the transactions. I don't remember what all the things are. But it's almost like when you get to the tab where the newsletters tend to sit, when you get over to that updates tab, there's a certain curiosity to a person, a human, versus a company there. It's almost intriguing on its own versus organization name and “Here's my receipt from this other thing.” EMILY: Oh yeah, it's a total marketing trick when you really think about it. We're tricking you into opening it. [laughs] Which you could argue is marketing in general. But yeah, you are intrigued by it. I want to take it a step further that it's not a trick of “This is the same old newsletter that we've been sending you for the past five years, just we put a different sender name on it.” Let's also take the content and make it more appealing for the reader so it isn't an endless scroll. ROB: That certainly makes plenty of sense there. Emily, you walked us through part of the journey. You mentioned in the tail end of 2019, you started the firm. But what led up to that? What led you to take that particular plunge to say it was time to start your own business, and what led you into that? EMILY: I was working for an organization, and I'd only been working there for about two years, so I wasn't looking to leave when I departed in fall of '19. But I got into a very toxic situation that was not good for my mental health, physical health. I was deteriorating as a professional because of it. I left without a job lined up. I just went in and resigned one day because I knew this wasn't the future that I wanted. I reached out to a colleague who had actually left a few months prior to myself and said, “Hey, do you have any projects?” I knew she was freelancing. And she did, and the rest is history. I started with a couple projects and then picked up a couple clients and really started to network within my communities. The snowball just kept getting bigger as it started rolling. An interesting ride. There's a huge conversation right now on a societal level about the Great Resignation, and I feel like I was a couple years ahead of that. So, I totally identify with those individuals that are departing their jobs; that's what I did two years ago. ROB: Sure. Even then, it's an interesting shift, because you mentioned networking. In late 2019, you had one form of networking for a few months, and then that changed. What did networking look like? Was there a pause in networking in early 2020, a regearing, or just a dramatic shift in what that needed to look like? EMILY: Oh yeah. It's funny; probably about a month ago, I had coffee with the person that I had coffee with in March of 2020. He was the last person that I had coffee with right before everything shut down. It was kind of crazy – this was in December of 2021. We had gone two years without seeing each other. When I quit my job and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I was setting up coffee appointments and networking with people. It was interesting. It was a little bit of a slower process because you go and just chit-chat and have coffee, whatever. And now I'm experiencing where I'm emailing people, I'm reaching out to them, total cold calling, or cold emailing if you will, and I'm getting responses back quicker. So, I think there's definitely been this shift in networking for sure. ROB: Is that for connecting in person now, or is that connecting digitally? Is the coffee meeting back, in your view? How is it spinning? EMILY: I'm picking up more coffee dates. I'm reaching out to people. Indiana just went through a little bit of a surge – a pretty significant surge – so everything's been virtual lately. But yeah, some people want to do virtual coffee chats, some people want to do in-person. I've actually experienced more of just emailing someone or sending a LinkedIn message and saying, “Hey, this is what I offer. I think there could be a partnership here,” and they want to chat – which would never happen before. You had to work on building that relationship. So, it's definitely shifted. ROB: Yeah, there seems to be, kind of like your newsletters, a human connection desire that's going on. It's been a discipline that we started since the beginning of the year. Every week, I'm contacting five people I haven't seen in a while and saying, “Let's do coffee, let's do lunch, let's do whatever.” The hit rate is tremendous because all of the meetings and recurring events we used to go to, none of the organizations feel confident having them. I was kind of a chicken – not chicken. My level of caution was I met people for outside lunch during COVID. Until I got my shot and my booster, I was an outside lunch, outside coffee – I was that person. Now I'll meet anybody anywhere. Some people won't. I respect what anybody wants to choose to do, because it's a hard time to know what to do. But the hit rate on in-person meetings has really been amazing to me. EMILY: Yeah. Do you find people are just wanting to chit-chat and catch up? Or is it more business-related? Because a lot of mine have been catching up because I haven't seen these people for two-plus years. ROB: That's right. I think those people probably might've seen on – the other secret weapon to me is LinkedIn. It's a real secret if we're talking about it on the podcast, right? [laughs] EMILY: Right. [laughs] ROB: But, basically, every once in a while, saying something about what we're doing. I'll see people in person – I saw people at football games in the fall and they're like, “Oh, I've been following everything you've been doing for the past two years.” I'm like, we haven't talked. I posted on LinkedIn and you never ‘liked' it. I don't say this to them, but they never engaged with it at all. But they've been reading my biography through LinkedIn. The people that I meet, most of the time it's chit-chatty, but I will also say that it tends to echo. Somebody I had lunch with a month ago last week says, “Hey, here's this person you really should talk to.” So it comes back around in that very open-handed, low expectation kind of way. That's what I'm seeing, I think. EMILY: Yeah, that's what I've experienced. It's funny that you bring up LinkedIn because just recently I came across – it may've been on Instagram or something that said, “LinkedIn is the place for silent scrollers.” You will have so many people who will scroll right past your stuff, read it, but not engage with it. They're not liking it, they're not sharing it or commenting or whatever. But then you will hear six months later, “Oh, I've really liked your content lately.” The purpose was to keep posting, even if you're not getting engagement. So, it's funny that you bring that up too, because that's the second time I've heard that recently. ROB: I don't have the discipline on LinkedIn that I do on my in-person meetings, so I wish I could tell you I found something worthwhile to publish every week, but I have to work on my personal content calendar there. EMILY: Yeah, it is definitely tough. ROB: Emily, as you've looked at how you've built things so far over the past couple years, what are some lessons that you have learned? If you could rewind two years, what would you tell yourself? EMILY: I'd probably tell myself to slow down. This is really hard – whether you're going out on your own in marketing or whatever your field is, your first thing is “I have to start figuring out how to make money. I've got to get money in the door. I've got to get clients. I've got to get work.” I wish I would've told myself to slow down a little bit because that would come – and set things up the right way. I'm in Year 2 of business, and I'm going back and having to re-set up some structures within my business that I probably should've been doing 18 months ago. That's been the biggest thing for me. It's hard. I started a business, and however many months later, a pandemic hit – and at the same time, I was also pregnant with my first child, so I went on maternity leave during that first year of business. I really wish I would've slowed down and not been in such a hurry. Even now, a couple years in, I'm like, okay, slow down. If I get a “no” from a client proposal or whatever, it's not the end of the world. Slow down. Be really purposeful. Be really mindful in what you're doing. ROB: I can't imagine trying to plan parental leave into that early moment of a business. How did you think about doing right by your clients but also giving yourself that time to enjoy a season of life that is unique and needs to be embraced? EMILY: I mentioned earlier my colleague that was also a freelancer. She and I work together a lot. I always tell people who are going out on their own, find a partner. You don't have to go into business together, but find someone to partner with on client projects, because business ownership is a lonely world, and it's good when you have someone you can collaborate with. So, I had someone that was picking up some of the work I was doing. The other thing was it was a weird time. My daughter was born in July of 2020. In 2022, July 2020 still seems like early COVID days. I was actually itching to get back to work because I was tired of sitting in the house. [laughs] It'll be interesting, as our family grows, what my approach to leave is next time, because I'm actually already thinking about it. How can I put structures in place now that I can have a full leave next time? But yeah, it was a weird year. Baby, new business, pandemic. I don't tell anyone, “Use this as an example of how to start a business.” [laughs] ROB: No, it rarely turns out that way, especially on this podcast. Many, many accidental entrepreneurs in different ways. As you think about the clients you work with, the small businesses, the nonprofits, we've talked a little bit about email and how that is changing; when people have to make the choice of what to activate first, what are some of the other things you see them needing to activate first that might not be what they expected in terms of how they need to be marketing? EMILY: Website is a really big thing. A lot of times people are thinking social media, email, website in that order, but I like to focus on the website first because that's your homebase. That's where you can push everyone back to from your emails, from your social media. We need to get that cleaned up and really telling your story well. Some people, their website's a mess because – kind of like I was a couple years ago – you're just trying to throw something together so that you can get out there and get your name out there. So, it's about going back and really looking at it. The other reason that I really want to look at websites is for SEO purposes. I think SEO was really big there in the early 2010s or so, and everyone was talking about SEO. Then it died off a little bit and no one was talking about it, and it seems to be a real buzzy word right now, about how to get your organic content situated correctly so that you can be ranking high on Google and you're providing good content. That's what I tell my small business owners especially: making sure your content is optimized appropriately and written appropriately is free. You're not having to create paid ads for it. That's probably the other thing. Social media is actually the last thing I look at. ROB: And then organic and paid social, those are two different conversations as well, right? EMILY: Oh yeah. With these clients especially, organic is where we've got to start, and then we work up to paid. It's so hard. Every social media channel is so full, so it takes time, but we can get there. ROB: Some people would also, I think, feel the same way about content they put on their website. How do you help someone think about putting out content that is actually meaningfully different and doesn't feel like it's the same as anyone else? If there's a context of maybe a specific small business client that helps tell the story, maybe that's a lens we can look through here. EMILY: I have a client here in Indianapolis that is a small plumbing company. They're very unique in that they've been around for 100 years, they're family-owned. When we're creating content for them, first of all, plumbing content is not necessarily always the most interesting thing in your newsfeed, and it doesn't change. Pipes freezing – you have the same five tips about how to avoid pipes freezing. For them, it's “Let's just get the content out there.” I know that every other plumbing company in town is putting something out right now in the winter about pipes freezing or preparing your home for winter or something like that, but we need to get our content out there. We need to be a part of the conversation. And it makes their current customers feel good. They feel really good about it and engage with it because it's like, “Oh, my guy, the guy that I recommend for plumbing services, is out there. I'm not always hearing about Competitor A and what they're saying.” It's a delicate walk. Sometimes, as the marketing consultant, I feel like I'm doing the same content that everyone else is doing, but in a lot of these small business cases, you've just got to get your name out there and in the mix. ROB: Right. It almost seems like for them – you kind of alluded to it – it's about the relationship they already had with the client. It's about the work they already did. Hopefully, they did their homework and got the client's email address while they were out doing some plumbing work, and then that seasonal tip of how to not freeze your pipes is a little bit of caring, almost. It's maybe not original, but you're showing up, and it's a good reason to be in the inbox. Nobody's super mad about “I'm reminded for the third time about how to not have my pipes freeze,” because that's a legit problem that is expensive. EMILY: Right. It's also going back to being organized. We've got that data organized so that we can reach whatever customer we need to so when there's a big winter storm barreling down on Indianapolis, we can get that email out, “Hey, here's things to think about with this winter storm.” It's a welcome addition to their inbox because it's timely and it's for them. To your point, that's exactly right. ROB: Emily, when we're talking about somebody's website content, when we're talking about having them talk about what they're doing in a way that speaks to their customer, a lot of times they've probably already tried. They already tried to write their website content, and they just couldn't find the right thing to say and the right story. How do you help someone communicate what they might not know how to communicate, but they almost feel it more than they know how to write it? EMILY: It's funny; I was having this conversation with a copywriter yesterday, and we were both talking about how we have struggled to write for our own websites. Which is why I'm hiring her to write some new pages for me, because I am stuck. Obviously, I'm a consultant, so I'm always going to say, “Hire a consultant,” but I think that shows the value of a consultant, to have someone come in with an outside perspective and really be able to put your story down on paper and make sense of it. I love the clients when I'm their target audience, a 30-something young mother or whatever, because I can bring in that perspective of “That wouldn't resonate with me as your audience member” or “Yes, that would resonate with me.” Like I said, I'm always going to be on Team Consultant because I am a consultant. But I think it's important to know that even marketing professionals struggle with it. We struggle with telling our own story and have to get outside help. So, I wouldn't expect a small business or a nonprofit to be any different. ROB: I'm glad it's not just me, because we looked at our website content and in a moment of desperation, I said, “I need to invest in our future, and I'm going to invest in having someone else do this.” They went out and talked to a few of our clients, and they told things back to us that sounded true but I could never have given the words. So I will advocate for Team Consultant here as well. I went through a StoryBrand process in our case, which was also interesting. I don't know if I would've done that – I don't know. I just know that hearing something back truthful felt a lot better than trying to make up words myself. EMILY: Yeah, it's a good level set for you. It can provide more perspectives and it gives you a good level set, and not only is it someone else translating your story – do we have time to do that? I mean, we're so busy as business owners. If one more thing is off our plate, go for it. ROB: Right, and it's a good reason to think a lot about profitability, around margins, because that creates the ability to invest into the future, the ability to have some reserves to hire people. There's a lot of moving parts there. When you look forward, when you're looking at what's next for Evergreen, when you're looking at what's next for marketing for your clients, what's coming up that you're excited about? Where is this going? EMILY: Evergreen, I am hoping to still grow and provide more support to nonprofits and small businesses – which I realize is a non-answer answer. But 2022 is going to be really the first year that hopefully nothing crazy is happening. I mean, first year of business was pandemic and baby; second year of business was still pandemic and it just seemed like crazy, crazy stuff going on. So 2022 is really going to be about finding level ground and finding a solid footing within the business. It's been exciting here; even since the beginning of the year, things are happening and things are coming together. I'm doing some awesome projects with some pretty cool clients, so that's really exciting. As far as clients, what I'm seeing and what I'm talking to them a lot about is trying to get more proficient and effective in our current marketing models. I'm talking a lot with clients – now, keep in mind these are small businesses and nonprofits, so they're a couple of years behind – we're talking about lead generation emails and how to get conversions on emails. We're talking about how to do that on social media and really start to pump that up. Like I said, these are small nonprofits and small businesses, but they are starting – I think in the big organizations, a lot of marketing ideas and processes start there, and then nonprofits and small businesses are maybe a little bit behind and start to figure it out. I'm really excited because I'm seeing that stuff start to bubble up and happen. A lot of my job right now is trying to figure out how to bring it down to a smaller size for them. It's easy when you have a 10- or 12-person marketing department to do a lot of lead generation and conversions and things like that, but we've got to figure out how to bring this down to a smaller scale. ROB: It definitely makes sense. The clients that you're talking about don't always have that margin for the experimental budget that some of the other brands will have, so being able to distill something that's actually going to work and deliver, or have a good chance of it – it's great that people have you thinking about that for them. Emily, when people want to find you and Evergreen, where should they go to find and connect with you? EMILY: My website is evergreenstrategic.org, where you can learn a little bit about my agency. And I'm a big LinkedIn-er, so find me on LinkedIn, Emily Hack in Indianapolis, Indiana, and connect. I'd love to chat on message about marketing or anything else going on in the world. So yeah, I can be found there. ROB: That's great. Emily, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for sharing your own journey and expertise. Very grateful for it, and good to meet you. EMILY: Thank you. I had a great time. ROB: All right, be well. Thank you. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Amity Warme is one of the most badass trad climbers you've never heard of. She also has a master's in nutrition. We talked about her incredible season in Yosemite including ground-up free ascents of ‘Freerider' and ‘Golden Gate', the importance of logistics in big wall free climbing, what she learned growing up in gymnastics, training plans, and eating more to do more.Check out Crimpd!crimpd.comOr download the Crimpd app!Check out PhysiVantage:physivantage.com (link includes 15% off coupon)Use code "NUGGET15" at checkout for 15% off your next order!We are supported by these amazing BIG GIVERS:Bryan Fast, Leo Franchi, Michael Roy, David Lahaie, Robert Freehill, Jeremiah Johnson, and Scott DonahueBecome a Patron:patreon.com/thenuggetclimbingShow Notes:  thenuggetclimbing.com/episodes/amity-warmeNuggets:0:06:14 – Winter weather in the PNW0:11:19 – My first impression of Amity, and her Yosemite season tick list0:13:11 – How to get good climbing photos (of yourself)0:18:05 – The prerequisite skills required to have a successful season free climbing in Yosemite, and being willing to suffer0:22:27 – Some of Amity's background in climbing before showing up to Yosemite0:25:33 – Meeting Hans Florine, deciding to go to Yosemite, and a surprise ground-up free ascent of ‘Freerider'0:30:00 – Sending ‘Golden Gate' ground up0:31:56 – Learning how to haul on the side of Will's van0:33:44 – Patron question from Cody: What is the best way to acquire the hard skills of multi-pitch and big wall climbing?0:34:55 – “It's always worth being willing to go for it”, and redefining what success is to you0:36:49 – How to care a lot about something while being detached from the outcome0:38:03 – The importance of technical climbing vs. logistical skills when it comes to big wall free climbing0:41:42 – What Amity taught Tyler about free climbing efficiency up on ‘Golden Gate', and what she learned from Tyler about logistics, rope systems, and living on the wall0:45:53 – Patron question from Nolan: Where does Amity's ground-up ethic come from?0:49:04 – Patron question from Rob: How do you prepare for a ground-up ascent?0:51:02 – Patron question from Savva about what it was like climbing ‘Golden Gate', and Amity's first time climbing the Monster Offwidth0:57:10 – How Amity plans to prepare for her next Yosemite season, and planning to train for the first time1:01:07 – Amity's background in gymnastics, and sending  a 5.10 her very first time climbing1:07:36 – Climbing as a lifetime sport1:10:52 – Residual injuries from gymnastics1:13:46 – Patron questions from Martin and Ainsley: What from gymnastics has served you most in climbing?1:15:33 – Oppositional exercises from gymnastics that Amity still does, and doing ring exercises on the road1:17:11 – Amity's weaknesses and plans for training this winter1:22:05 – Rest nights vs. rest days, and getting energy out vs. recovering to try a hard project1:25:18 – Studying nutrition and helping climbers eat more to support their climbing1:28:32 – The prevalence of under-fueling in climbers, and eating more without gaining weight1:33:29 – The complexity of the energy-in-energy-out equation, and why losing weight is a bad long-term strategy1:37:48 – Thoughts on protein amounts, timing, and sources, targeting carbohydrates around activity, and eating a variety of different foods1:42:46 – Replacing weight goal with performance goals1:45:19 – My experience with elevated blood sugar from a food sensitivity1:50:07 – How to connect with Amity, and her vision for future work and nutrition coaching1:51:51 – Patron question from Rob: How does Amity plan her nutrition for big wall projects?1:57:07 – Amity's next climbing goal, and the next step in her registered dietitian journey1:59:36 – What inspires Amity2:03:09 – How Amity hopes to empower others2:07:26 – Wrap up

Tim Ringle is Global CEO of Meet the People, an “international family of unified but independent agencies. In the three months since its inception, Meet the People has acquired 3 agency brands. Tim has bigger plans. He intends to bring in a total of up to 15 agencies, reaching from Canada and the US to Europe and Asia. “We have 400 people in North America right now. We want to be 2,000 people in at most 18 to 24 months globally.” Even though he is acquiring agencies at a fast pace, Tim says what he is not building a holding company. He explains that holding companies have been consolidating the industry, the trend a “survival response” to complications from the digitization of processes and channels and, more recently, because covid has changed how work is done. He says small agencies may need to hire one or more people “just to handle the benefits, taxes, payroll, inflation, and salary increases” of those employees who now want to work from “anywhere,” where “anywhere” has different laws, tax rates, and costs of living and working than at an agency's home office. Tim sees holding companies as a powerful trend. Even though there are 14,000 independent agencies in the United States, six major holding company networks “own sixty percent of the entire media industry within the agency space.” However, Tim says, they often don't act in the best interests of their clients because they are driven from the top by financial rather than client interests. He claims that both small, independent agencies and holding companies often fail in communicating when passing clients from one agency or holding-company-entity to the next. “They're only going to talk to each other if there's some money to be made in between . . . there's a lot of lost information . . . .” In Meet the People's “family,” the agency owns its affiliate agencies, but the people within those affiliate agencies also “own a part of Meet the People.” The network structure provides “a fully integrated approach for brands . . . to cross-pollinate across multiple services,” the opportunity for the agency to build multi-brand micro-offices, and scalable support for dealing with “anywhere” variances. Tim says, “Keep the brand, be the best you can, but let us create connective tissue between the different companies to see if we can increase share volume with a client.” Tim has a lot of experience building global agencies. He says he has learned that it is extremely important, “especially in the beginning of the engagement,” to build trust with the client. To do this, his team of disparate agencies will need to work as one. Tim is bringing his people together physically to take time to create “a deep understanding and culture between all the different offices, people, trades, and brands,” building what Tim describes as an “integrated DNA.” They also will be discussing the implementation of individualized OKRs (Objectives, Key Results), a tech tool for tracking accountability. Tim says his agency is very focused on operational excellence, on brand positioning, on bringing really good entrepreneurs . . . and on hyper-goals. He says it is important to make the right decisions now because, “if you build something with small cracks, they become massive gaps when you are at scale.”  As his agency network continues to grow, Tim is excited about finding “really talented entrepreneurs who want to change the industry who can't or are tapping out” with their skills/abilities/finances and being able, through Meet the People, to provide the experience, capital, and structure and small-enough scale “where they can actually still move things.”  Tim can be reached on his agency's website at: https://www.meet-the-people.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast I'm your host Rob Kischuk and I'm joined today by Tim Ringle, Global CEO at Meet the People based in New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Tim. TIM: Hi, Rob. Thank you for having me. ROB: It's great to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Meet the People, what is the business, and what are you all best at. TIM: I think, to understand what we are building with Meet the People, you have to understand a bit of my background. I've been an entrepreneur in the agency space – primarily digital agency space for 24 years. That sounds long but I'm also 45 years old so I can carry that. I started my first agency literally in the basement of my friend's house. We started as a SEO agency digital marketing agency, very much focused on performance marketing. I was blessed to be able to do that in '98, '99 – when this industry was about to develop and therefore was able build that business to 150 people and then sell the business. After that, I did a reverse takeover of the company that bought my business –and that got me to around 400 people in Europe. So, I started my first business in Germany – my native Germany – and we scaled the 400 people agency that was all across Europe into 1,000 people. It was stock market listed in beautiful Paris. I left that to move to the dark side of the ad industry as I call it. Having built multiple agencies as an independent agency entrepreneur, you were always battling the holding companies, right? And I swore to myself many times because they beat me and sometimes I beat them. That's how it works, right? I swore to them I would never work for them. So, I ended up moving to New York City and working for 1 of the holding companies who always wanted to acquire my business. So, I did that for 3 years within IPG. I have to say the experience was amazing. I really learned a ton of stuff that I couldn't learn from being someone who was leading 1,000 people. Now I was part of 65,000 people. I inherited an agency there – once again, a performance marketing agency – around 1,000 people – and then left it after 3 years scaling it to 3,000 people. So, I've done this a couple of times and what we're building with Meet the People is what I would say is version number four of my vision of what an independent agency network should look like. We're building it with my 24 years of experience of what I liked and disliked in the agencies that I've built in the past. What I liked the most was that people in the advertising industry are mainly driven by culture. If you're good in your trade in advertising, you can get a job anywhere on the client side in tech companies. You can build your own company because marketing, just like legal, is a service that you always need everywhere. So, selling a product, branding a product, coming up with a marketing strategy is something you can use pretty much in every business in the world. It's 1 of the integrated parts. Why do people choose to work for an agency? Because they love the culture in agencies, right? What we're doing at Meet the People – when we looked at the industry and I had – I still have the same vision. I'm building a global agency network as an alternative to the large holding companies. I figured that nobody's talking about the people anymore. Everybody's talking about technology, data, automation, and how computers will replace us, how AI will come up with creatives – all this kind of stuff. It's true that the technology has enabled us to be extremely more efficient. But, in the end, the new Coke logo or the new “just do it” from Nike does not come out of AI or a computer, it comes out of the brain of a human being a creative strategist. So, we believe (or I believe) that we have to remember in the ad industry that it's all about the people. We are a service industry. Without the people who are sitting behind the machines and using the machines, tech enabled, we're not going to produce disruptive, new ideas that actually put a brand on the map. That's why we're building Meet the People. I can obviously talk much more about it. But that's kind of it in a nutshell. ROB: When you say an agency network . . . what does that look like when it's an agency network? It's not a holding company. I'm curious about the differentiation of some of the different agencies within the network and how you think about that – because your website is very people-centric. It's more about the people, the partners, than it is about this brand and this specialization and this other thing we just acquired and all that you see in the holding company world. TIM: Correct. So, why am I not calling it a holding company? A holding company has one purpose – and it is a financial orientation. right? So, a holding company is most a holding company because it is actually managed by finance people. I don't necessarily I don't want to diss anyone. But I would say that a finance-led company most probably will be struggling with creating the best strategy, best creative, and best outcome for their clients. They might create the best outcome for themselves, right? That's why we're not calling ourselves a holding company. We are running this network of agencies who, don't misunderstand me, we do own the agencies – and the people within the agencies own a part of Meet the People. That's the concept. We are building this, first of all, to fulfill a fully integrated approach for brands so, instead of just servicing one client within one specialty with one agency, we are allowing the conversation to be elevated and to cross-pollinate across multiple services. For example, when our creative agency, VSA Partners, out of Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. Beautiful, creative design work and strategy. When they come up with a brand refresh or rebranding or brand strategy – I would love to see that through until you actually can see it on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn – wherever that brand comes to life besides on brochures, in magazines, or the logo or the CI. Many independent agencies, because of their size and their financial scrutiny because they're small, can't invest a lot of capital into innovation or additional services. They can't see that journey through. That means you have a lot of inefficient handshakes in between. That happens in holding companies because they're structured that way, but it happens in independent agencies as well. One independent agency is a hundred people might be excellent in creative. The next one might be excellent in social media. But they're only going to talk to each other if there's some money to be made in between. There's a lot of lost information when a chief creative officer comes up with a brand strategy and somebody implements that on social media in community management. We want to make that a much more seamless flow with less barriers for the client but also more excitement for the people involved because you actually see the product living there and a colleague of you in another agency – but it's part of our structure – has basically put that on the social channel or billboard. ROB: When you come to thinking about – there's, obviously, within a holding company lots of capabilities, you're talking about these more seamless handoffs. How do you think about building that team? Did you go out hunting for best of breed agencies to bring them into the group or did you build some capabilities from scratch? How did you think about this? TIM: We were going to do both. We started Meet the People three months ago and since then we had 3 agency brands join us – so we acquired 3 brands. Three agencies and we're going to bring more than 10 – probably 15 plus – companies into Meet the People as a group. We're going to do that in North America – so we already have US, Canada, some capabilities. We're going to do it in Europe and then we're going to do it in Asia. How we decide what to go for depends on what services we need next in that journey. Right now, we have a very strong creative agency with VSA Partners and we have a very strong experiential agency with Public Labels. We have certain services that sit in a similar bucket where the client sees the service, so that adjacent service is part of the scope. If we don't service that ourselves. then we should basically fill that gap either with another agency joining us or with building these capabilities organically with the acquire or actually hire before revenue. Ultimately, we want to have a seamless handshake between the different trades. ROB: We have 2 former guests who have been acquired into a similar opportunity recently – which is interesting. We had Chantel from Imagine Media and Techwood Digital were both acquired. Jared Belski, who was the CEO of 360i, has rolled up 3 or 4 agencies. That's all I know. Is this a trend or is this just 2 people that happen to have done a similar thing and why now? TIM: No, it is a trend. As much as I don't like the traditional holding company model, we have to respect that the holding companies have created an industry. Because there's 14,000 independent agencies in the United States alone. Fourteen thousand and there are six networks and the six networks own sixty percent of the entire media industry within the agency space, right? So they've created an industry. We all live in that ecosystem and that industry. The trend right now and primarily driven by the extreme success of what whatever intention Martin Sorrell, Sir Martin Sorrell, had to bid as for capital. If it was ego, if it was revenge, I don't know. He only knows. But he has been extremely successful from a financial perspective doing that because there is a gap, a vacuum in the Market. So, there's models like that that are older than the S4 Capital MediaMonks model. MediaMonks is only 3 years old but Stagwell MDC by Mark Penn is 5-6 years old and You & Mr. Jones is also 7 years old, I think. So, there's a couple of these what we call an agency rollup network model. They existed for years. What has changed in the industry is covid has accelerated the fact that independent agencies got scrutinized because of their size. Before, when you were 100 people, you could live a very good life as an independent agency. There's two real trends. One is the digitalization of processes and channels. At the same time covid is putting extraordinary pressure on talent, new work. This is all very complicated for smaller companies to handle because now your people tell you, “I want to work from anywhere.” How are you going to do that from a benefits perspective . . . tax perspective? It creates complications. Clients are the same. “Oh, I don't need you to come into my office anymore, but I want to take T&E out of your expenses.” Economy of scale becomes more and more important. A couple of people have understood that, so these networks are created over the last couple of years. But they're also created all over the planet. So there are networks in Asia, networks in Europe, networks in the US. There's only very few who can bridge multiple continents. This is one thing we're going to do with Meet the People. We're going to bridge multiple continents because we believe (or I believe) that our clients want the same quality of service across multiple jurisdictions that are not only North America. So, I've not invented this model, right? They exist. They're very successful. The main reason why they're successful is that, when you have, as I said, 100 people on your P&L, it's very difficult for you to invest a million dollars into innovation technology. You might only have a million dollars of profit and you want to keep some of that. Usually, it's very difficult for them to hire before revenue, to anticipate bigger jumps. In economy of scale, it's easier for us to say, “Ten, twenty percent of our EBITA goes to a business strategy consultancy layer that most agencies can't afford or a technology IP that you actually own as a company. We can make these investments. And that makes it extremely attractive. ROB: How do the capital markets feel about this sort of arrangement? I know there's a lot of money out there looking for yield. I could also see the case that you just have to self-finance this sort of thing if you want to. Where is the money side of the world? Are they looking to fund this sort of thing because they need something to believe in and something that's going to give them better than inflation? Although inflation is getting pretty good now. TIM: Let's make a relatable example. Let's imagine you have a million dollars excess capital right now. You have it lying around. Where are you going to put it? You can put it into crypto. Very risky. You can put it into NFTs. Even riskier. You can put it into traditional venture capital. So, there's a lot of money in the market. But there's also a lot of options in the market. You know pre-IPO, post-IPO, or FinTech, software as a service, space – there's so many categories. The service business as a sector in general or the advertising industry service side of it – not MarTech AdTech – it's not the most attractive industry to invest money. Why? Because you have no tangible assets. The desks, the computers – they're all at home right now. As people, as a company, you maybe own intellectual property. But mostly you have a lot of walking assets and that's your people. For the longest time, the ad industry was not super attractive for larger investors. That has dramatically changed because of the pressure coming from tech. Tech has gotten so heavy on advertising and so relying on advertising. Same time that there's more capital in the market and that a couple of people, including Sir Martin and others, have proven that you can make real money there. Most of the investment in this space is private equity and I would say large family offices. ROB: It's fascinating just to see this emerge. I think I hear what you're saying that you know there's all these different factors in play, right? You have some firms that are a little bit “walking wounded” due to . . . it does get complicated when people want to be in different states and now you're having to pay taxes on your payroll in different states. There's an economy to having 1,000 people, 10,000 people where you know what there's a department that handles that baked into the margins of the overall business. I totally get it. TIM: Yeah, and you don't go through this alone, right? If you have a 50-people business and 20 people decide they don't want to work from New York anymore or LA, they're going to work from anywhere, you need to hire at least 1 more person just to handle the benefits, taxes, payroll plus inflation increases plus salary increases. So, it's complicated. What's important about Meet the People is we give that layer at scale, but the agency brands stay independent in their DNA. We're not changing their brands. VSA Partners that joined us at the beginning of the year is VSA Partners. They've done that. This work for 40 years . . . successful. They're an incredible, talented shop and great people. Why would we change any of that? Doesn't make any sense. Keep the brand, be the best you can, but let us create connective tissue between the different companies to see if we can increase share volume with a client. You're already sitting on an amazing client. You define the strategy. Why don't we talk about who actually builds the website, who actually manages social media? Why don't we talk about it because we already have that relationship? That is very attractive to companies who don't have that client access. There's a lot of independent agencies who are very specialized, who would die to get into a client like Google or IBM or Ford who just can't because they don't have the gravitas.  ROB: When it comes to new and existing business, it sounds like you have some thoughts about the role of location. But the role of location is different from what it used to be. On the one hand you mentioned having offices and having people in these different geographies. But you also had this dynamic where some of the agencies that are joining the network may have played very much off a home field advantage that may not be the case anymore. So, how are you looking at the strategic role of geography? TIM: I think geography stays extremely important. I'm someone who grew up with in-person meetings and built businesses within in-person meetings. I do believe in-person meetings to create chemistry. Especially in the beginning of the engagement with the client, it's extremely important because you're not only buying a service, you're buying the trust into the person across from you. Because there's so many agencies out there. So many service providers out there. Who are you going to go for if the service is extremely comparable and they sadly so are? In the creative space, not as much, but in the digital execution, who does better search than that person – there is a chemistry factor to that. I think in person will stay extremely relevant. Our strategy here is to say, instead of having large headquarters, we're going to have more micro-offices. When we have 10 agencies, let's say in North America, it's extremely likely that we end up having 20 offices all over the place. Instead of having one person in a WeWork, we're going to have 20 people from maybe 5 different agencies in Austin, Texas. Or we're going to have the same in Dallas, or we're going to have the same in San Francisco. We already have 5 offices in North America and anyone from these companies can really work from anywhere within these proximities. We also hire outside of these proximities because we want to have at some point an office in Miami, maybe in New Orleans, and whatnot. So, I foresee that we have certain client-centric larger footprints in New York, LA, San Francisco. We have Boulder, Colorado, we have Chicago, we have Toronto . . . but we're going to have a lot of micro-offices because we need to have flexibility. That's new work. This is part of that. Maybe one of the things we got from covid . . . besides covid. ROB: Really fascinating. Tim, we quite often ask people what lessons they've learned and what they would do differently, but it strikes me that you are actually in the process of getting to do things differently. You know we say, what would you do if you were starting over? You, you have had a chance to do that in some cases. An interesting thing about this model is you're kind of starting on third base but you have agencies who have made it here on their own journeys and you're having to coalesce something together. What are you doing differently in the structuring of Meet the People that you learned in your past and said, “It's got to be different”? TIM: One thing that we're doing the same is creating a deep understanding and culture between all the different offices, people, trades, and brands. I've done this before. The last business I managed for IPG, I ended up having 72 offices around the globe. The business before had 25 offices around the globe and we made sure that these people met physically. It sounds counterintuitive during covid but, the fact that you spend time together workshopping. For example, let's say we have five companies and all their creatives can come together in one location for three days and talk about the differences of their work approach. That would be such a forming experience for them because they all are going to learn from that. You have some people who have done this for 40 years. You have some people who are doing this for 4 years. It's that culture of respect, of understanding, of bringing the different traits together. I think that is extremely powerful. I learned through this journey that you can have you can have the best product in the world. If your people don't believe in it, you're not going to go anywhere. Creating that belief and creating that culture and creating that integrated DNA is a little bit of magic that's extremely important to build a successful business. That's what I learned. What I go to do different, and I kind of promised my wife I would, is travel less. I don't think that's not happening. What I try to do is travel a little bit less because covid allows for that new model. The second thing that I learned is to run an agency a little bit more like an agile tech company. Not because I want to strip away the creativity or anything – none of none of that. The problem in many agencies is that there's a lack of accountability because of a mutual understanding that the creative process is complicated. You know what I mean. Building a tech product is as complicated and needs as much creativity. But somehow there are better levers or control mechanisms in there that allow you to achieve a target in your planning session a little bit quicker and more agile. We want to apply a little bit of startup thinking to a very traditional industry. ROB: I think anybody in the startup industry would claim the same degree of creativity and the same degree of craftsmanship. I'm very much from a software development background and if you want to talk about something that resists measurement. People always say, “Building software is not the same as building a house. You can stamp out houses, but software is a different thing.” Yet within technology there are certain constraints that you talk about. You don't get to just walk away and say, “Well I'm sorry. It'll take some amount of time and we'll show up and it'll be great. There's process to it. TIM: In the advertising industry, that is not always the case. People walk away and they say, “I'm going to come back in a week or two because I don't know when I'm going to come to a product.” I get that because it's creative and it needs time but in many of these trades you can have OKR's, for example. So you can have certain accountability factors or set certain targets. That's how you can manage a large company. A bit more agile and efficient.  ROB: Yeah, so to talk about OKR's for a moment because they're popularly said, but I think sometimes poorly understood. Where did you come to a good understanding of them and how do you think about deploying them? TIM: I've got to be honest with you. This is why I got my management team together in New York this week. They're all here in the office in New York – came in from Germany, London, Connecticut. Sounds like a long trip but we're all coming together. ROB: Can be. TIM: We are coming together right now, here in New York, to decide “how do we implement OKR's within an agency environment” and we're not done with that journey. We're not done with the discussion, but we do know we want to approach it a little bit different than the last 3 times we did it together. I think in six months' time I can answer that question much better. I do believe that OKR's need to be very individualized. Your overall underlying principles are the same, but you have to individually craft it towards your organization because you don't want to over-engineer it as well, right? You need to give people the freedom. So, I will be able to answer that question in three to six months ROB: Sounds good, sounds good. Tim, as you're thinking about what's next for Meet the People and for this evolved holding company model, what's coming up next? What are you excited about? TIM: For us, it's hyper-goals. We have 400 people in North America right now. We want to be 2,000 people in at most 18 to 24 months globally. So, we are very much focused on making the right decisions now because, once you build something with small cracks, they become massive gaps when you are at scale. So, we're very much focused on operational excellence, on our brand positioning, on bringing really good entrepreneurs. When I look at companies, we have to do the financial background checks and stuff like that needs to be in order. But I'm looking much more for entrepreneurs who see that the industry needs to change. That is where the minds are aligned with the companies we are looking at and acquiring and partnering with. That's what I'm most excited about, finding really talented entrepreneurs who want to change the industry who can't or are tapping out with their skills or their abilities or financially and asking, how do I get from 50 to 100 people? How do I get from 100 to 200 people? We bring the experience. We bring the capital. We bring structure where they can actually still move things – because we're not 10,000 people or 5,000 people like our competitors are. So, that's what gets me most excited. Then, obviously, there's always something new in our industry, there's always something new, right? It never stops. I remember when I built my first agency, I thought, when I master search, I'm going to be done with this. Affiliate marketing comes along. Oh well. Then I master affiliate marketing. Then social came and I mastered social. Programmatic came. It never ends – and that's also, to some extent, very exciting because you keep having to learn and adapt. At some point, I will age out, where people will tell me, “Tim you know what? Just drink your coffee. You know we have got it because you don't, and you don't get it anymore.” ROB: (Laughs) Ah, so it's always a struggle to try and figure out what things you might be aging out of and what things are just a little weird. It's always a little bit of both. TIM: That's right. And what's the little bit of bullshit right now in the industry that you can just face over. You don't need to go deep. ROB: I think there were moments early in social where it felt very experimental. It felt very strange. It felt very frothy. We've been through that on an influencer. You were around. I was around. You look at the crypto world and it seems almost like – I could be dead wrong – I think the thing that's most misunderstood but also well observed now about the dot Com era is everything happened eventually. But it didn't happen then. That's maybe where we're at with crypto. I'm not sure. TIM: Well, like crypto is one thing, but then think about NFTs, right?  ROB: Yeah, I'm lumping that in. Yeah TIM: Okay, if you lump it all into one OKR, fair enough. I can talk for hours about my diverse opinions on NFTs and the NFT world. Nevertheless, we have clients who are extremely excited about and who really want to deploy capital, being part of that industry because there's the strong underlying belief of making something really good at the same time. There is this unnecessary social hype on certain topics where I'm thinking, “Guys, you're destroying something that was meant to be really good. I think blockchain and crypto is falling or has fallen into a similar trap where the underlying idea . . . because technically I'm an engineer, right? I got my first pc when I was eleven. Taught myself coding and all this kind of stuff. So, I love the idea of blockchain and decentralized holding of assets and accountability and ledgers. That's amazing. It could solve so many problems in world. The problem is that when dodgecoin comes along in Shibona or whatever, the next thing is, it drags it in the dirt. The underlying technology is incredible. The sad story is people want to get rich fast and lots of them don't. ROB: That's right. It happened before. People built the worst websites in the world for a couple million bucks back once-upon-a-time early internet. TIM: But you remember when you could buy 1 pixel on a website or something like that for a thousand dollars and there were these crazy businesses out there and it's coming back, just differently now. My hope is that just like the dot com bubble . . . yes, there was a hype. Yes, there was a crash but, after that an actual industry developed. So, I'm hoping that we're going to go through the same thing with NFTs and some of these offsprings of crypto. ROB: That makes complete sense. Well, Tim, Thanks for hopping on. Thanks for illuminating us on what's going on in this holding company opportunity, what you're doing with that. I think it's interesting you started and you kind of knew what it looked like to run a large organization. I can imagine starting with 2 people in a closet might not always be the best use of those skills. It's neat to see the industry lining up in a way that that lets us see so much happen so quickly. So, thanks for coming on. Good to have you, Tim. TIM: Thanks Rob for having me. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. ROB: Alright, be well, thanks, bye.

Kevin Urrutia is Founder of Voy Media, a “growth marketing agency” focused on helping marketing executives grow their online businesses – but not from the “ground up.” Voy Media does not help companies that want to get started in online marketing, build clients' businesses, or act as any client's marketing team. Instead, the focus is on scaling successful client companies and taking them to the next level, moving them from 6 to 7 to 8 figures in monthly sales . . . and doing it fast. These clients already know what they need to do to build a business and they're doing it. They already have mature systems and processes in place for emailing prospective buyers and getting online content and reviews. Voy takes this collected information, breaks it down, and uses it to feed the creation of new ads, new videos, and new images for clients' social media – their already existing Facebook pages, Google Ads, and LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and TikTok accounts. Kevin's background is in computer programming. During college, he started a web development consulting company. After he graduated, he moved to Silicon Valley to work for Mint.com (Intuit). In that fevered e-commerce boom era (global e-commerce sales topped $1 trillion in 2012, up 21.9% from the previous year), “I kept building things. I kept going to hackathon startup events.” Frustratingly, all that “building” and networking did not result in sales.  Then Kevin discovered “marketing.” He researched SEO, found it “interesting,” and concluded that “Everything around you is really marketing, but it's great marketing when you don't think it's marketing.” He jumped to a startup called Zaarly, and then moved to New York and did what none of his programming buddies wanted to do: He started starting his own businesses. His buddies wanted “jobs.” He wanted to own something bigger and was willing to take the risk. Kevin started an online-scheduled cleaning company. and thereafter, a number of e-commerce companies, learning the lessons on switching products to drive sales and growing teams that he, today, passes on to his clients.  In this interview, Kevin discusses how the recent iOS update, iOS 14, allows individuals to turn off tracking and limits a lot of ad options that used to be available for advertisers. Now, instead of looking at the individual platforms to get information, companies must ask the questions: “How much revenue did we make from new customers this week? How much did we spend on ads? What is the ratio between new customer revenue with ad spend?” Kevin says things are more “fluffy” in one sense, but companies do have a better grasp on their profitability. He says, “People are actually building brands again, versus like, ‘Hey I just want to make quick buck online.'”  That's a good thing, he believes, because “Building a real business takes years.” Companies need to “reinvest into the branding. You got to reinvest into ads, copy, photography.” Kevin can be reached social platforms and on his agency's website at: https://voymedia.com/ where you will find case studies, courses, and Kevin's blog. Transcript follows: ROB: Welcome to The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Kevin Urrutia, founder at Voy Media, based in New York City. Welcome to the podcast, Kevin.  KEVIN: Hey, Rob. Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.  ROB: Great to have you on the cast. Why don't you start off by giving us an intro to Voy Media. What do you want to be known for?  KEVIN: Voy Media . . . we're growth marketing agency. Pretty typical, but the difference between us and other agencies is my background is in computer science programming. We'll talk about a little bit more of that later on. The way we help founders is by we come in to help you scale. We're not here to help you get started in online marketing. That's a different type of agency. We're more here for founders or other marketing executives that want help to grow their online business with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Creatives are also a big part. We're doing that now with the whole new iOS update and we're seen trying to switch around and again restructure agency to fit the market's needs too. ROB: (Laughs) I see. So, this is not, “I have an idea. I want to get the word out there.” This is “I know who my customer is but help me because I still don't know how to reach them.” Is that where you play?  KEVIN: It's a little bit after that, too, where you already spent some money and now you're saying, “Hey I have a marketing person in-house but we still need help because we want to scale” and you don't want to bring somebody new on again. So, I tell people all the time, we used to do what we said before . . . “Hey, you have a brand new idea. Let's help you” . . . and then it turned out that this was just a different type of client or customer that we didn't want to educate about what marketing was. It was just very difficult. I see some agencies do that. It's like I'm prey to you. Those clients, the ones that pay you that much, they're calling you every single day to give you an update. I think it's so funny, but like you've probably heard before, the more they pay you the less they call you. It's so true. ROB: That's amazing. What is it about a business at that stage that aligns with your talents? What's the playbook that starts to make sense at that stage that maybe isn't available sooner?  KEVIN: I think the playbook that's available is that these businesses already have systems on how to get content, how to get reviews, how to do all that stuff – just feeds our creative team to make new ads, to make new videos, to make new images for their social media, for their Facebook page. It's not like we're saying, “Hey, you should send an email out to get customer reviews.” They already are doing this, so their mindsets are already in this – “Yep, this is what we need to build a brand or a company.” It's just a different business shift of a person and for us, it's less pulling, like “Hey, we need this from you.” It's more like “Yep, this is already in our pipeline. You're gonna get it next week.” If we can, we get user-generated content every week – We just get that in the Slack channel – “Hey, guys. Here's this week's content.” They already have a process in place and we're here to help them. I tell people all the time – a lot of times business owners, in the beginning, want us to basically build their whole business for them. I say, “No, I'm your marketing team. I'm not here to build your company.”  ROB: This is our customer. What do you think? KEVIN: Yeah. I'm like, “I don't know. You have the product.” They're like, “Isn't your team supposed to do that?” Yes, but like, “I don't know exactly what you're doing” :Hey, it looks like this product. . . .like customers are complaining about this. Are you going to switch your product?” They're like, “No.” I'm like, “All right then. If your sales aren't going up, then you need to do something.” So, for me too, this comes from not just doing marketing, but because I've also had my own e-commerce companies too. So, I've had to switch products, I've had to grow a team, and that's where for me, it's like, I see you sometimes, I mean before like we work with founders, I'm like, “Hey, people are clearly complaining about this. Why aren't you switching or doing something?” And at least for me when I had my outdoor gear company – we recently sold it -- we made three to four versions of a trekking pole based on customer feedback because that's what you do as a business. You iterate over and over again. Sometimes people say, “Hey, this is a perfect product.” I'm like, “Is it a perfect product? You need to switch things around if people are complaining about it.” So, I don't know, for me, I'm trying to find people that, like I tell people all the time, the best people that we work with are people that have done it once, failed, and like, “Okay now. I know what to do because everybody has been through the trenches in the fire.” ROB: Sure. What it sounds like they have is they have a steady pipeline of content that speaks to their audience but . . . I think a lot of people's natural format is more long-form and not marketing copy, right? So, you can kind of take what they have, break it down, atomize it, align it to different channels, test some things, and then layer on a set of known tactics that work when you have legitimate content.  KEVIN: Exactly. That's what it is. It's like, “We're here to use tactics to help you grow versus help you figure out these tactics are. We can help somewhat but there's only so much time we can tell clients, “Hey, you need you see.” and they're like “Oh? why? I don't know how to go get it.” I'm like. “Send an email out.” They're like, “Oh okay I forgot this week.” I'm like, “All right. (sighs) I can't press this send button for you.” ROB: Right? Step 1 is send an email this week. Then come back and talk to me.  KEVIN: So yeah. I get it. I think for me, our agency – at least I tell people all the time – it just depends on what type of company or business you want to build. There's people that want to be in that zero to 1 stage, where it's like, “Hey, we're gonna build this system and process for you. But for me, I just don't want to be doing that. So, we're saying, we're shifting more towards – “Hey you have something and you have some sort of team. We're gonna come here implement, help you and supplement you and be that agency.” ROB: Sure. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention, I heard you mention briefly iOS 14. Obviously, the kind of individual targeting, opt-outs, all that is changing how ads run, how ads are tracked. What has been changing for you and how are you responding or suggesting people respond when it comes to the options that are no longer available to them due to those changes?  KEVIN: I think iOS 14 . . . it's interesting. I see both. For us, bad side for a lot of agencies like us is . . . I tell people, like we were, you could track everything. So, our incentives are very like, “Hey look! We spend more money. We make more money.” We see revenue going up, we can spend more money.” Because it's tracked and now that has really affected our ability to scale as an agency and again clients as well because they were spending 15k a month, now they're spending 20k, and they're just like, “Well, the results are even worse and we're not getting any sales.” So, I think, what has changed a lot is the way we're tracking because now we're so used to just looking at the platforms, Google, Facebook, say, “Yep, this is a 1 to 1 or at least pseudo 1 to 1, where right now it's even worse. I don't even know where it's coming from. So, tracking itself has changed and, at least for us, the way we're doing it now is like what people should have been doing or at least sort of had done. Which is like, “Hey, this week, how much revenue did you make from new customers? How much did we spend on ads? What is the ratio between new customer revenue with ad spend?” It's a bit more fluffy, but at least you're saying that, yes, you are profitable. So, more daily profitability sheets/ weekly profitability sheets or even monthly – like your P&L. Go into your account each month and say, “Yep, reconcile all the expenses. Were we profitable?” Great, business is still good. That is something that, at least before iOS 14, people didn't really know, which is interesting. I think any business, you have to know this stuff. People are getting a little more savvy with these numbers. At the same time, something that I've seen shift is that – I think it's good going back with my background. I think now people are actually building brands again, versus like, “Hey I just want to make quick buck online.”  ROB: Right.  KEVIN: That was something that we saw so much because it was so easy to track, like, “Hey, you like pet stuff, right? Let me make this pet niche store and for the next 3 months let me make 20K.” It wasn't like a brand where, right now, similar to any business like you probably seen . . . Building a real business takes years.  ROB: Right.  KEVIN: And there's gonna be years where you don't make money. Everybody had this weird mentality like, “Hey, if I spend a thousand bucks, I need to make 5k this month” . . . or else “You suck – not me.” This is not how you build a company. You got to reinvest into the branding. You got to reinvest into ads, copy, photography . . . I just saw this crazy, quick-flipping of businesses where ten years ago, you were actually okay, “I'm gonna mess with your cake(?) and I'm gonna make this thing a big brand and try to build something. I think that's coming back again, which is great because it's gonna be entrepreneurs that I think want to build true businesses for the long-term.  ROB: Right on. I think I may have heard this. I may have heard it wrong, but there's also an increasing challenge with now with the attribution window. Is that right? That there's actually a short, you can't, I think it's like used to be able to see if . . . so you ran an ad and somebody bought in thirty days. Mow you get what 7?  KEVIN: Yeah. You got like 7 or even like 1 day. Sometimes it's just so much tougher? Yeah.  ROB: So, it is more empirical. It's, “I spent money, am I making money? I increased my spend a little bit ago, am I making more money now?” It's trickier.  KEVIN: It's definitely trickier, like I said. I think you now need to have the stomach for it, like, “Hey, you're hoping to make money,” and I get both sides. You know there's always the side of like, “Hey, I'm not a VC-funded company.” I'm like, “Yeah, I know.” Most people aren't, but there's a reason why companies like Facebook and Google – obviously those are outliers, but other companies such as them that spend . . . like Uber, right? literally in business for ten years and every year lose money, right? There's a reason why it's like – again, that's a bigger scale but you sometimes need to think yourself as a smaller scale, say, “Hey, you're in this for the long run.” You're like, “There's a reason why everybody knows Uber, like, “Hey I'm gonna get a cab because all the brand equity of the advertising.” So, a lot of times you've probably seen business owners don't want to do that because like, “No I need to make money.” I'm like, “Yes, you should make money – but there is something to be said for reinvest into your business and saying, “Hey, I'm gonna do this as ‘quote-unquote' my life's work. It doesn't do your life, but like the next 5 to 10 years, right.  ROB: Sure. I think it's helpful. I think people are starting to get this understanding a little more – to know when you're doing brand marketing and to know when you're doing performance marketing because getting those things twisted is also a real source of misunderstanding if you . . . KEVIN: Oh yeah, there's definitely performance marketing everything and there's also brand marketing. A lot of people just want to do performance marketing but you still need to have great Instagram accounts, great Twitter accounts, great social media people. I tell people all the time, like, “Why do I need a social media manager– they don't make any money?” – But you still want people interacting with your community, talking to them. You know, some of the best companies out there do both performance and branding. Branding is one of those things that you see it when you see it. But when you're doing it, you don't see it. It's tough to put into a balance sheet but you know it when you see it. It's like Uber, you know? Lyft, you know? So it's hard. I know that for sure. ROB: And when sometimes it's even just a negative signal you're never going to see right? Somebody looks up your company. They look up your Twitter or your Instagram or your Facebook or your LinkedIn and if there's nothing there or if it's really dead, people judge that. I mean, they do. I do.  KEVIN: I know I do. I always think marketing is so funny because, like I tell people, “What do you do when you look up a business?” I know you're gonna go like look up reviews. I know you're gonna look at Instagram and then I'm like, “How come for your company you don't think you need to do that?”  ROB: Yeah.  KEVIN: They hate when it's like, “Oh, yeah. I don't know what I'm saying.” They feel dumb but I just hate saying, “I'm like you. You do this same thing, too. So why don't you do for your business? I'm like “Hey if . . . I also tell people this. I'm on calls. I'm like, “If you weren't on your website, would you buy?” And if it's a no, then, “Why do you think other customers would buy?” – So like, “I don't know.” ROB: Take us back a little bit in time here, Kevin. Where did Voy Media come from and what led you to jump off this company-building cliff.  KEVIN: Voy Media is my newest company that I started. Basically, my quick background is computer science. I was a programming major in upstate New York . . . Binghamton. All throughout college I knew I wanted to do my own startup – since I was17 – it's something I wanted to do for a long time. So, in college, I started doing one tiny bit which is my web building. I was 19 or 20. I had 2 employees working on web projects there. We were just getting customers through Craigslist – so developing stuff. For me it was mostly like I've always wanted to build a startup. After college I was like, “Okay I gotta go to Silicon Valley.” I went to work for Mint.com as a programmer and then I went to work for another startup there for 3 years. During this time, I wanted to build stuff so I kept building things. I kept going to hackathon startup events. One of the things that happened for me during this time – I have always was in this mindset of like, “Hey, if you build it, they will come.” Because, hey, if you have a great product people just naturally find you. That was the thing that programmers in Silicon Valley just said to each other. Like “Hey, if people build something great, people will just find it” is one hundred percent not true looking back – but the mindset was very different back then. So, I kept building stuff. Eventually, I was like, “Man, how come I'm not getting any customers?” And then, I started looking up “what is marketing.” I was like, “Okay, this is actually a thing.” That's when I started learning more about marketing. My initial foray into marketing was SEO, like black-hat, world-affiliate marketing, CPA stuff. That was for me very interesting. When I first discovered it, I was like, “Oh, this is very interesting.” The reason why I found it so interesting because these affiliate guys were getting these twenty dollars like, “Hey, you can make twenty dollars off this widget that you sell,” so they had to sell it for a hundred twenty bucks to make profit. So, I was like, “Oh, these guys are using cutting edge tactics.” You would join these underground forums or Skype groups of people saying like, “Hey, try this marketing message.” I was like, “Whoa!” I didn't realize marketing is like that – it was like performance for me. I always thought marketing was this branded thing. I didn't know there's this other type of marketing that was purely based on sales. That's what got me at least . . . at that point I wasn't doing ads. It opened up my eyes to this marketing world. I was like, “Oh, everything around you is really marketing, but it's great marketing when you don't think it's marketing.” Behind the scenes, there's guys pulling the levers that's doing the marketing. So, it's like one of those like realizations that you have. I was like, “Okay, this is kind of what I need to do anyways.” I came back to New York because I missed my family. I started my cleaning company called Maid Sailers and here, for this cleaning company, is where I did almost all the marketing. I did SEO. I did reviews, blogging, PPC, Yelp ads, kind of everything. I did that for about a year-and-a-half. I wanted to keep growing it but people that have a service-based company – even some like Moy media – service-based businesses can only grow as you grow people – humans, right? So, it's human capital intense kind of business, which is great to get started. So, I think I tell people, times like these are great businesses start. But if you want to grow it, I didn't think I could grow it that big. So, then I started ecommerce because at that time too I saw all my friends are doing FBA, Amazon, I was like, “I got to jump into this, right?” It's one of those things with FOMO -- I got to do it. Then I did my Montem, which is my outdoor gear company. This was more scalable because, at the time – it was much easier back then with e-commerce products like Amazon. You're selling. Then, again for Montem, when we did e-commerce, I learned so much more. This is kind of where I first started doing more Facebook ads, Google ads, review blogger reviews. We were like number 1 on Wirecutter, so we were able to do partnerships. We did retail. We were pitching retails with the events – kind of like everything involved and, at least for me, that's why I like entrepreneurship in startups because I like all this stuff I just described. If I worked for somebody, I would never be able to do it all. Because you're only stuck in 1 thing where it's like a founder you could just say, “Okay, I'm going to do it all like,” and you figured it out somehow, which is either exciting or not exciting for some people. For me, it's like, “Oh, this is awesome.” I went to China 3 times up to my factories. So that's kind of where the concept of Voy Media came – because I was doing this e-commerce stuff. And then I was like, “Okay, I want to help other founders achieve success,” – that's the inkling, the idea of Voy Media. Of course, what we are now is very different than what I thought initially because you iterate your business based on what you see. But that's how Voy Media started.  ROB: How did you navigate away from those assumptions of the business, from those predispositions that you had? I mean, candidly, folks who come from a software developer background a lot of time have a hard time taking their hands off the keyboard. They want to be writing code, right? So how did you kind of navigate to the truth of the business instead of where you started?  KEVIN: I always tell people that one of the main reasons why I always wanted to do a startup and it's something that I've always like wanted to do since I was 17. But one of the things when I was in Silicon Valley, at least for me when I was 21 or 22 – I don't know, I was probably 23 at the time – very naïve. I was looking at a lot of my friends in the space, like the programmers there, and they would just talk about stuff and I was like, “Oh, wow! These guys are really smart. I don't think I'll ever be that good. I need to do something else because these guys are just awesome programmers.” My roommate, his name was Adam. We worked at the same company and he would talk about a concept. I'm like, “Dude, I have no clue how you just got that!” I thought I was smart but that's kind of what for me I'm like, “I got figure out something else in my life because I want to make money but, clearly, you're on another level.” I was like, “Let me just do business stuff and that's kind of it for me.” Another relationship for me was that I would talk to him or talk to other people like, “Hey, why don't you start a company. You are really smart,” but they're like, “No, I just want to be an employee.” That made me think, “Hey, there's guys like me that want to have a company and then I can hire guys like him that don't want to take the risk,” and you're gonna hire these super smart people that are gonna work for you and that's where the realization came to me, “Hey, I don't have to be the smartest but there's a lot of smart people that don't want to take the risk I want to take, and they could just work for me. Yeah!”  ROB: Yeah, so that's a good lesson to pick up along the way. As you reflect on the journey so far in building the business, what are some other key lessons you might want to go back and just tell yourself if you were starting over? Some good advice.  KEVIN: Good advice is so obvious. But like hiring people – I think once you feel an inkling that a person's not going to work out, you really got to let them go because it's a drain on the company and drain on yourself. That's probably the one people always say but it's also the hardest because people with emotions and working with them. But that's really tough. I think it's getting better, at least for service-based companies, it's just getting really better at vetting the people you work with just because it's a really personal relationship and, if you already feel like they're gonna be a very demanding, upstart, they're probably gonna be demanding the whole relationship and it's just gonna be a battle to please them. That's something I tell my sales team all the time. Like any red flag. I could see an email and I'm like, “This is a red flag. I can tell already this is gonna be a terrible partner to work with. Let's not even sign them,” and they're like, “Why?” I'm like. “Trust me. This one word they said, I pretty much know what they're looking for.” I think another one that's super important, I think for me at least, it's like, “I couldn't do my theme(?) companies. Every company I've done it, it's been with a partner.” You need somebody there to talk to, to help you with the problem, because like any business they're gonna be high highs and low lows. Sometimes you need somebody else to talk to them about it because sometimes you can't tell your employees how you're feeling because then it's like, “I work for you,” and then they're like, “Oh well. If the founder's feeling this way, I can't feel that way either.” Having a partner that's on the same like equal level as you or around that area – you can like tell them the real issues and how you're feeling, so I think a partner is gonna be great. And again, it helps distribute the work depending on what you're doing and how you're splitting the stuff with the business because it's a lot of stuff to do.  ROB: Yeah, is that somebody that you had early in the business or is that somebody you brought in? Is that somebody outside the business for you? What's that look like?  KEVIN: For Voy Media, it's Wilson. I've known him since college. We've literally known each other for over ten years and we've going back to everything before like one tiny bit the Ruby on Rails company. He was my partner there, too, in Silicon Valley. When I moved there, he was in college and I just graduated. And I was like, “Yo, Wilson! I'm moving.” He's like, “I'll move there with you.” So I've known him for a long time. I tell people it really depends. There's these relationships are very . . . You need to be careful because there's a level of trust you already have so you can't really get mad at each other. But again, it's careful. Sometimes things go wrong, you get mad at each other but you know that “Hey, we're doing it because we both” . . . I I think you both need to know the goal of the business. So, it's like, “Hey, this is why I'm like upset with you. It's not that I'm upset about you personally, it's because I'm upset about the business and we both want to achieve this and we're not achieving it together. How do we get there?” So, it's a careful relationship, like any couple. Things are upsetting us. Why? Because we both want to be happy. How do we fix that issue so it's not like I'm attacking you personally? ROB: Right. And if you're partners on that, you got to solve it one way or another. You can't stay grumpy and you can't stay stuck in the mud. It can go sideways pretty quick. So, you had Wilson there really early on in the business.  KEVIN: Yeah.  ROB: What was another kind of key inflection point that you noticed, where you felt like you had to level up the capabilities of the firm? The people in the firm, the processes – were there any kind of chokepoints so far that you had to kind of reevaluate in a significant way? KEVIN: Yeah. I mean like honestly, at least for Voy Media, one of the biggest things that we made was hiring an operations person to really help clean up everything at the agency. Because from reporting to hiring, I think that really helped us. I think it's one of those things where . . . I consider one of those positions where you want to be so involved sometimes. But you need to bring on someone that can do the work for you, that's smarter than you, that you can give complete ownership. I think, with any business, that's probably the hardest part – giving up some part of the business to somebody else to run and just trusting them. That's probably some of the best things that we've done because now the agency has grown quicker. With that comes a few points. One is cash load. You have to have the money to hire somebody good or can you take a little hit on income? That way you know that this person is going to hopefully pay off in six months. As a bootstrap founder, you think about these things but hiring people like that is super helpful.  ROB: Where was the business in terms of size, however you think about it, when you made that operations move?  KEVIN: We were probably like 5 to 6 people. Now we're about 30 people. So, it's definitely grown a lot more now. But yeah, hiring those people – like higher level people are helpful because there's only so many people that are doing the work. Of course, you need those people as well. But you need people thinking about strategy, thinking about processes and systems and that's why it's helpful and again, at least for me, it's the biggest . . . honestly, one of the biggest things too is thinking about yourself as the founder, as the person running the company. What do you want to be doing? I don't want to be doing all this stuff. I want to hire somebody else to do it because that doesn't give me energy. It drains me. I want to be doing what gives me energy, which is podcasting, sales – that's exciting for me. So, I know I'm gonna do a better job and I know I'm gonna be reading books about it whereas like – “Hey, accounting, – I don't want to look this up.” Find somebody else to do it because it's going to drain you and that's going to affect your whole day.  ROB: Wow. That all makes sense. As we look ahead for Voy Media – when you look at either what the company's doing or what will be necessary in the types of marketing that you do – what's coming up that you're excited about?  KEVIN: What we're excited about right now I think, again going back to what I said before, we're working with founders building these great brands. Better for us to work with founders out in the long run – before I was quick. Like, “Hey this month sucked. You guys suck.” It's like, “Oh god, this is a stressful relationship.” It's more like, “Hey, let's build something big and great together,” and again a big thing for us too. It's gonna be the creatives. People are really open to having great images, great creatives. People are more open to trying new things now because they're seeing that Facebook isn't the only platform. There's now Facebook, there's TikTok, there's Instagram stories, like there's all this new stuff out there. It's exciting again to make content. I see that as exciting. Where before people were just like, “I just want to do Facebook ads. Okay.” “Well, TikTok.” “No, I don't know that platform.” Where people are, I think . . . I don't know . . . there's a shift there where people are more open to new stuff now.  ROB: Yeah, it's certainly a shift. It's certainly interesting in terms of openness. How do you think about the difference between what should be legitimately out of bounds for a particular brand versus what is their being flexible in a way that that is actually necessary? People have their experimental budgets. It can't all be experimental but some of it has to be.  KEVIN: I think it just depends what level you are. I think, for example, when we work with consumer companies, all the consumer platform is always great – TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook of course. But if you're a consumer company, Linkedin doesn't make sense because that's more like professional. So, there are certain industries where it's very clear cut like, “Hey, if you're a SaaS or software or marketing company, you should be on LinkedIn because that's where quote – unquote professionals are. We think about it like that. As you get bigger and you're scaling your business, you need to think about platforms outside – like billboard ads are something that's more branded but there's a lot of ways to access those now in like easy platforms stuff. Some of my friends do that because they raise money and they say it's not effective. But I think something that brands need to think about right now is that, before, it was “you just sell online.” Now I'm seeing a big shift of online plus retail as well. So, getting into the Walmarts, the Targets, the Amazon's, the stores – everything like that is so important because it's more omnichannel versus like, “Hey I'm only direct to consumer.” I'm seeing that big shift now, too.  ROB: Right on. When you say the billboard stuff is more accessible, what does that actually look like? Can I go like buy a billboard? Can I buy it where I want it? Can I set what time of day I want to see a digital like, I don't know . . . What can I do?  KEVIN: I forgot the exact website. I'll try to find it later. But yeah, basically you can do exactly that. I think it's ClearView, one of those company that owns it. They now have a website similar to what you said where you can just say like, “Hey, for 100 bucks I want an ad near Times Square.” It makes it super simple and easy. You can just upload your creatives. Before it was kind of what you were saying . . . even subway ads now in New York City, you have to spend 30K minimum to get like one car of subway ads, where it should be self-serve, right? “Okay, I want one car, one creative . . . how much is it gonna cost? All right?” Subway ads are harder because you actually need to print the thing, where some of these new billboards are digital. So yeah, you could do it. I forgot the exact platform but it's cool. I've seen some friends do it just for experimental. It kind of works but it's one of those things where you just try it out and see.  ROB: Sure. I've thought about it. There's some ways . . . maybe it's too creepy . . . but you can almost get account-based marketing. You know a bunch of people for this company come this way, light up this billboard during the commute, leave it shut down during lunchtime – like who knows, right? KEVIN: Yeah. It's funny you're saying that because there's this company . . . they were a remote job board, right? Facebook announced, I think a few months ago, that like, “Hey, starting in 2022, everybody needs to go back to work in the office.” So, then this company took out ads on that highway to say, “Hey, don't want to go back to work? Apply for new jobs here.” But exactly what you're saying. You can know where these things are, they'll pinpoint the area, and then you can do account-based marketing that way. People do this when they launch a Walmart or Target in the city. There will be billboards around there so say, “Hey, look! We're now available at Target down the street!” So, you can do that type of stuff.  ROB: Very interesting. So much to do. So much to learn. Still, Kevin, congrats on the journey so far. Thank you for coming on and sharing with us as well. I wish you well and I know our audience will enjoy what you had to share. KEVIN: Thank you Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.  ROB: Thanks, Kevin take care. Bye 

Jamie Michelson is President and CEO of SMZ Advertising, a Detroit-based agency that started in 1929, producing and distributing jeweler artwork ad kits. These ad packages, delivered as a monthly subscription service, provided graphics to promote and showcase jewelry and were used in catalogs and newspaper advertisements.  Early advertising, Jamie says, “was much more informational” than today. As advertising evolved, information had to be packaged with some entertainment and hooks to get people's attention. The agency adapted and grew through that transitional period. Today, at 92 years old, the still independent, family-owned full-service agency focuses on communications, planning and strategy, research, design, advertising heavily, retail, events, mobile, social, and “moving our clients' businesses forward.” Jamie says, “All that history doesn't mean we know everything. It teaches you to question everything.” He then describes his agency as “a team of around 40 people” . . . with “new ideas, new media, new ways of communicating” – “quietly making noise with purpose” – to keep the focus on the client. Initially, Jamie wanted no part of his family's business. A few internships changed his mind. Today two of his sisters run groups of accounts in the agency. Jamie's third sister, the fourth sibling, went to law school and serves as a federal judge.  In this interview, Jamie discusses in depth the mindsets, tools, attitudes, and strategies SMZ has used to survive so many years and how an agency changes as it is passed down through the generations. Jamie says the first generation, the founders, the creators, tend to stay involved. The second generation had to wrest control from the founders. The transition from second to third generation has been much smoother. The long-term plan is to keep the agency going as a legacy business. Jamie says the agency business can be all-consuming. He has found it important to take time from day-to-day client servicing “to think about the future, the visioning, the structure, the governance, all that.” A second tip he offers is that companies need to codify and write down their values. Driving out to his employees' homes to deliver packages of information made Jamie aware of some of his employees' beastly commutes. He says his intention going forward is to be flexible . . . in a number of ways. That flexibility has probably contributed greatly to his agency's “long life.” Jamie can be reached on his agency's website at: smz.com, where visitors can find the agency's blog, and Jamie's Generation Excellence podcast, which explores generational family businesses. SMZ Advertising is also on all of the social platforms. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Jamie Michelson. He is the President and CEO of SMZ Advertising based in Troy, Michigan. Welcome to the podcast, Jamie. JAMIE: Thank you for having me, Rob. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. ROB: It's exciting to have you here. Why don't you start us off with an introduction to SMZ? Tell us about the firm and any key metrics, any key focuses, key verticals. Go for it.  JAMIE: People like to talk about the elevator pitch; our agency is located on the first floor of the building, so it's more of a “walk in the door” pitch. I guess I would start with very few things survive 92 years, let alone biologically or in business. It's something to remember, something to know. At SMZ Advertising, we're proud of that length of time of operation. I'm proud of our long-term and enduring relationships with our clients. But it's kind of like all that history doesn't mean we know everything. It teaches you to question everything. We say we remain an independent, family-owned, creatively driven, full-service – and we like to go, “accent on the full” – agency doing work in communications, planning and strategy, research, design, advertising (heavily), retail, events, mobile, social, and more. We're a team of around 40 people, moving our clients' businesses and then ours forward. New ideas, new media, new ways of communicating. Our theme for our agency, if you will, our own headline, is what we call “quietly making noise with purpose.” There's a tension between quiet and noise. Really, it's about the spotlight shining on our clients and being humble about ourselves and very focused on them. ROB: How does that propagate out to a client campaign? Does that echo into their campaigns, where there's a “speak softly and carry a big stick” mentality in that as well? Or do they get to be a little bit more boisterous? JAMIE: There's all these books out there about filtering through the noise, avoid the noise, ignore the noise. Yet we are trying to make appropriate levels of noise, and strategic noise. I feel that our approach to it – and this goes back to roots – I'm part of a third generation of a family business where there's a strong belief in likeability. You do business with brands you like and people you like. And it's not namby-pamby likeability; it's not love or “lovemarks,” but it's just that someone likes you and they might buy what you're selling. So, we want people to really like the work we're doing and the brand and the business. Especially with so much choice and so much competition. ROB: We don't normally jump so quicky to the origin story here, but 92 years is a little bit of something. We are talking about quite a long time ago. We are talking about a Great Depression era business. What is the background here? Was it always something we would call an ad agency, or was it even something different in that regard? JAMIE: It's a great question. It's a pretty neat story. Clearly, the world doesn't look like it did in 1929. We're faster and global and colorful and we know a lot more. But the origin was a gentleman who was my grandfather and a partner. When you talk to newer agencies, oftentimes it's a partnership. A couple people have a dream, a vision. One's a business guy, one's an artist or creative. Their early work was what we would today call ad kits. It was the artwork for jewelers. Jewelry stores, jewelry retailers around North America. There was no digital way to distribute that. There wasn't even FedEx to deliver it. It wasn't even Slicks, for those who go back to those in the early print/design ways. It was packages that were sent with art that became print, catalogue, even newspaper, and that got them into some jewelers as retailers and the roots of a retail agency. This is a Detroit-based company. It was actually, weirdly, software as a service. It was subscription as a service. These people were buying this package each month so they could promote and showcase jewelry. And along came layaway and credit and these innovations in retail and business that they were a part of, and then moving that into outdoor and radio and the whole explosion of media. ROB: Wow. Thinking about that, how are you distributing what goes into outdoor advertising on potentially a distributed basis? It's more about a package and a solution than it is about hours and the hour trap. JAMIE: They talked about getting that package out, because it was very calendar-driven, time-driven. Sleeping around the agency on cots and stuff to make the deadlines. Again, what's old is new. But the idea that in the earlier roots of advertising, stuff was much more informational, and then you started to get into the beginning of having to package that information with some entertainment, some other hooks to get people to pay attention to it. It was really an agency that followed that journey. I think what it says is – as you talk about COVID years and difficult times the agency's gone through, there's certainly some level of resilience in the company that starts in 1929, hits the Great Depression, the stock market crash, world wars, other follow-on wars – there were pandemics, even, in that 90-some years. You don't assume, “We're going to make it because we've been there,” but there's something woven into – with brands, we talk about DNA a lot. I think because we're from Detroit and it's Motown and whatever, we talk about soul. There's something in the soul of this agency and its people. It's hard to describe and find, but it makes us proud of what we did and charging forward. ROB: When in your upbringing did you become distinctly aware of the business and what it was? I don't know if you knew it as something your grandfather was involved in, or your dad. When did you start to figure out what it was? JAMIE: Agency people, we have this role of you do business with who you do business with. If you have a product, you have a service, you support that. Whether they did some work for Pepsi-Cola bottlers or a potato chip company or a restaurant brand, you're using those clients' products. One of the cornerstone accounts of the agency in my childhood years was Big Boy Restaurants in what would've been their heyday. There were a lot of Sunday night family dinners at the Big Boy, even to the point of my father and his partner, who are the second generation, owning a Big Boy restaurant. I'd get to be back in the kitchen as a high schooler and experience it close-hand. But with that, I was not running into this business. I grew up around it at the kitchen table and that dinner table at restaurants. “Okay, my grandfather did it, my father did it.” When you're a teenager, typical is rebellion. You're going to do the other thing. I wasn't disinterested, because I understood – I went and studied finance; I was going to be an investment banker, the whole Wall Street thing. I'm still passionate about business. But I didn't really want things to do with this business until I experienced it firsthand with some internships and through college years and different parts of the business. Back to that soul thing. It's definitely in my blood. It's just absorption. [laughs] So I worked since college at basically three different agencies, independent agencies for the most part. Never client side. A little bit, one weird little thing. But my whole career. That's what I know, and I'm still fired up about it. ROB: Did you have siblings that also looked to get involved, did get involved, chose to actually rebel? What is that dynamic? JAMIE: I have three sisters, so we have four children in the third generation. Two of my sisters are involved in the business, run groups of accounts, and have been very involved with the agency and each had their own path or track into it. And then my third sister, the fourth sibling, went to law school and to a law firm and is a federal judge. That's what's fun. We refer to her as the black sheep. ROB: [laughs] The woman who is a federal judge. JAMIE: [laughs] Exactly. ROB: That sketchy business, right? JAMIE: Yeah. She's good counsel to the agency because she's sure learned to ask probing and challenging questions. ROB: I think there's probably an interesting season here. It's interesting that you chose to spend some time getting experience in other businesses. Clearly, the agency had to change. The whole firm went in and out of the golden age of advertising, the kind of Mad Men. How has the firm navigated these shifts of adding services, keeping a sense of identity – that balance of not getting overwhelmed with the shiny and becoming a social media influencer agency exclusively, but also not being mired in – you're not just broadcasting car dealerships, either. JAMIE: I think about that all the time, the path. They talk about sins of omission/commission, those things you didn't do or you passed on those things you did do. We talk a lot about those decisions we made or moves we made where you do them and then you go, “We should've done this sooner” versus “Why did we do this at all?” The things that we've done were good moves for the most part. Not a lot of giant blowout mistakes, disasters. I remember stringing phone line to plug into a computer to go through modem sounds, to be on AOL, to have earliest of site stuff. Our URL is SMZ.com, so to have a three-letter URL says you were in it early. But not necessarily going on all things digital. A lot of it has been your clients take you, smoothly or kicking and screaming, into some of these new spaces and areas, or you do it the same way with them. I think we've been open-minded all the time to experiment and try. It's always changing, like you said, and there's going to be that next new thing. Don't get so enamored with the shiny, but don't get to the “This is how we do it” or “It was better then” or “God, I wish it would slow down and not change.” I refer to myself – you gave my formal title, CEO/President or whatever. I talk about being Chief Agitator. I've got to keep the place and myself shaken up a little bit so that we don't rest and settle. ROB: Was SMZ a longer name at one point? JAMIE: The original company was Simons Michelson Company, SM Co. Simons Michelson Zieve for the gentleman, son-in-law of one of the founders, my father's partner, second gen. And then that got shortened to SMZ, I think for the poor person who had to answer the phone at the front desk all the time, saying that over and over and over again. [laughs] ROB: What did that transition of you coming into the business – you had some experience from other places; I guess your dad was in charge. What did that transition of generations look like? JAMIE: The transition from the first generation – and I'm a big student and have a podcast I do called Generation Excellence where I'm focused on other generational businesses and the follow-ons, G2, G3, G4. Not just because HBO does Succession and it's super dramatic, but it's a fertile area. The first generation, they're the founders, the creators. Those two guys worked, and that's what they did. They didn't really retire. They kept involved. The second gen had to wrest control from them a little bit. You're talking about guys now in their seventies, eighties, whatever it was. The transition from second gen to this third generation was much smoother. I give my father, Jim Michelson, incredible credit because it is a very hard thing to be in that command chair, be the president, running an agency, and then give away both authority and responsibility and not backtrack. Not jump back in, try to fix stuff if you don't like how it is. You're giving up control and letting others go make those mistakes you talked about, make those new moves. He did that and really set a model for me that I have memorized. As we figure out whatever's next after me – because that's the plan, the infinite game, keep this going as a legacy business – to be able to do that that same way. ROB: I interned once upon a time at Chick-fil-A corporate. I was there under the Truett Cathy regime. Truett was there for forever, and then his son Dan comes in, and the window for Dan was much shorter. They've transitioned off to the third generation now. It seemed much faster. He seemed very happy to transition it sooner than maybe he did. I don't know if you've looked at what they did and what they're thinking. JAMIE: It's a multiparty thing. And then you've got the people who work for the agency, and they're watching how this goes. You have the clients. It adds a layer on top of any other business when you add this family dynamic to it. We do have now as a company a formal written policy that next generation family members need to have some successful work experience outside the business, because it is really nice to be able to do what you do not just as a son/daughter of someone who created a business, but on your own merits. Make your own way. ROB: It's funny you bring up Succession. I didn't think about it as you talked about having these four siblings – JAMIE: It is much less dramatic within our walls and halls. ROB: But also interesting because you have three siblings. Presumably at least some of you have kids. We're on video; I can see a picture behind you of a couple of fresh faces. JAMIE: Yeah, a couple of young adult daughters working out there in the business world in both geography of where they want to be, areas they want to be in – my one daughter works out in Portland, Oregon. She's been five years at Nike. She's an engineer. She's very much involved in sourcing, manufacturing product at scale. So different than what a more boutique agency does where everything is bespoke and one-offs and ideas that you can't touch. For a lot of businesses, a lot of our clients are marketing the invisible. My other daughter is a business consultant, so more in our space at one of the consulting firms as she finishes business school this year. They're making their way. Again, grew up around it at the dinner table, and they know some things. It's really helpful to have that perspective of what they're going through. Use of social media, use of digital tools, how they communicate, remote work – every bit of those things as a mini focus group, really. ROB: Do you even have maybe some nieces or nephews that are also in that leadership pool for the next generation? JAMIE: Yeah, what they call the “cousins' consortium” in family business land. The next oldest would be my nephew, who's 20. He's in film school. Very talented creative. I think looking to go more out West and be involved in the movie business. It's still a bit of a journey for him to even join us. So, we have some things to figure out in our transitioning future, which is one of the things that excites me about the coming years of the business part of the business. ROB: Yeah, absolutely. You've done some transition, you'll see some transition. When you think about your history with SMZ, what are some things you think about as lessons you might tell on to the next generation about maybe what you'd do differently or what they should think about? JAMIE: We meet probably not regularly – you know that old expression, work on the business/in the business. The agency business can be all-consuming. Your list of things to do can be so filled with serving your clients, and you have to work to take that time to think about the future, the visioning, the structure, the governance, all that. We try to take some time to do that. In a recent meeting, I had a quote up on the screen from Tallulah Bankhead, an old Hollywood actress. She said, “If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.” The definite advice I'd give or the thing I've learned is, businesses that are longstanding like ours and legacy, when they started out, there wasn't all this content and advice for startups and podcasts and videos. They were just running a business through the Depression and then going on. The agency definitely had values, and they are woven into the place. It took us a long time. It was really only recently that we codified those values in writing, where they're on the wall, where they're on a sheet, where you share them with everybody at the agency and use that more as how we operate, how we hire, how we put that in front of our clients. That's not a new idea, that businesses are based on their values, and that as good marketers, you don't just pick the same six buzzword values that every business has. But to do that work, to have them be really true to who you are – you mentioned Chick-fil-A. They're a business that I think their values and their approach – and somewhat controversial sometimes – are so much a part of how they operate and who they are. ROB: Is there anything in particular that's happened – you could argue that for some portion of the firm, the values were intrinsic. A lot of firms starting from scratch, the values may be absent. You've seen this need to move the values from intrinsic to explicit. What do you think may have changed in your time there and your time in business – is that a necessity now? Has something changed? Or is it just a better way that we understand now to make them more explicit? JAMIE: Many of us in business have had the good fortune to go to seminars, webinars, conferences. You go to those and there's a moment, something hot for a moment, you come back, you bring it up all charged up, and then it fades off.  But I did, a few years ago, attend – Family Business has a conference called Transitions. They do it once or twice a year. You're immersed for a few days with other – these are not all marketing firms. These are just businesses that have that test of time thing to them. The title of their thing was “Values-Based Businesses Are Valuable Businesses.” Example after example was brought up of how these different businesses had used what was true to the values that they were all about to help them not just operate, but grow – whether it was Bigelow Tea, down to the detail of the person whose name is on the teabag inside the box that packaged your product. Kind of like some of the car manufacturers where there's someone who signs the engine, or one of the parts inside, or the steelworkers sign the last beam highest up. Just to be much more explicit about it. ROB: Sure. JAMIE: You see people react well to it and be involved in that process. ROB: Yeah, that involvement in the process is so key for ownership, for carrying forward. Earlier, you talked about remote distributed work. How has that played into SMZ at this point? How do you think it plays into SMZ moving forward? October 2021, some folks are never going back to the office. Some people are already back in the office full-time. How are you thinking about that dynamic right now? JAMIE: It's certainly front, middle, back of mind a lot of the time. I'll start with our feeling that our physical office we've always felt is a competitive advantage. It's a great box. It's colorful, it's alive, it's well-designed, it's functional. We like being there. We like working with clients being there. Great. At the same time, we've had some creative people who have worked remotely for 15, 20, 30 years and interacting with people at the agency. We've had others who have had all kinds of different flexible schedules and been accommodating that and learning from that. So at least for us, it wasn't a full 180 or whatever, like maybe for many other businesses. We're so open right now to the idea of how this is going to work, listening to our people, and using it to hire and fill new positions – which we're able to do. It's hard, but hybrid – my next car will probably be a hybrid. We talk about hybrid a lot in other categories and stuff that mashes together. One of the things that was eye-opening to me was one day I took some packages and delivered them, driveway deliveries, to almost the entire employee list. My wife helped map it out on a map thing. A few of the people I got to, that commute for them, the most outlying spots, the time that they get back if they can have a few of those days where they're not having to come into the office and can work from home – that's life-changing. So, we're going to embrace it. We went back mid-July to three days in, two days remote, everybody in on Wednesdays, and we had to revert back a little bit to an all-optional in the office mode. So, there's always somebody in each day, but it's small groups. ROB: It seems like the most important thing is to have an intentionality about it. Some of that's going to be aligned to the culture and the place where you are. It seems to me that somebody around Detroit can work virtual for anyone, but they've chosen to be there. I think there's an extent to which if you're in digital marketing, if you're in Detroit, you've chosen to be there. JAMIE: Correct. ROB: So, giving people more reasons to be there and to enjoy why they're there is meaningful and life-giving. JAMIE: I'm glad you brought up Detroit. We're a proud Detroit-based business. That's our roots, physically in the city for 50-some years in operation. A bunch of clients that are Detroit downtown-based, or the whole city. We love our region. Nationally or internationally, it gets some press reviews that aren't fair and accurate. It's a great place to live and work. So, there's that spirit that people have here about our hometown, and we want to have people from here work here and be connected to here. At the same time, this place is still a community that makes a lot of stuff. Manufactures and builds. Those operations, you can't do that from your kitchen table. You've got to go to those buildings and warehouses. It's still 30% of people that have this luxury of remote or this tech work, and everybody else has to go to the hospital, go to the school, go to the manufacturing facility, go to the supermarket, do those jobs. That's going on around us. We're part of that. We'll figure it out. The biggest part for me is – we're having this meeting right now. It's virtual. If it were physically in the conference room with a couple clients and you were in there with them, Rob, I might just walk by – our place is a lot of an aquarium. It's got a lot of glass boxes. [laughs] You can see in most everywhere. Pretty transparent. You see these meetings going on and you can stick your head in and say hi, and you can see clients and you can see people. That's the biggest miss for me, those little, quick – you just don't know those things are going on. Not to disrupt them or interrupt them, but just to wave. Just to see that that meeting's going on. It's actually uplifting. You see those meetings going on and go, “They don't need me in there. They're doing great in there.” [laughs]  ROB: It's meaningful for you, it's meaningful for them. It's meaningful for the client. I don't know if there's going to be a client situation – JAMIE: Clients love getting away and going to the agency. We've got a dog running around or somebody's dog running around. It's just a different environment. ROB: It's going to be hard for them to get on a plane to go to an agency. At some scale, yes, but mostly no.  JAMIE: It's taking a while. It's really productions or major things that our people are getting on a plane or those people where, again, you have to be somewhere, versus it would be nice to be there. ROB: Jamie, when you think about what's coming up next for SMZ and for the marketing landscape that you're in the middle of, what are you excited about? What's next? JAMIE: We talk about that history and we use that number 92. What got us driven a little bit more a year and a half ago was we embraced a program called EOS, if you're familiar with it. Entrepreneurial Operating System. We used that. That 100-year milestone is a pretty neat concept/sound. What are we going to smell like, look like, feel like when we get there? I'm really excited about being this smart, steady, scrappy, creative – still creative; I think ideas still matter – growing agency, celebrating that in the right way. Not just “We made it” and it's a moment, but that whole year should be something, and that should be a stepping stone to what's next. So that excites me. I mentioned before, mapping out, going to visit people who work for the agency. That's what we do for clients. We ask them that question all the time. “Where are you trying to go? What are you trying to be? How do we get there?” We don't always do it as well for ourselves as marketing firms. So doing that work and doing that visioning. And when you do that and you have goals and you write it down and say how you're going to get there, you tend to not only get there, you tend to get there faster and even a little better. The other thing that excites me is I was really caught up or hung up with the trend – and it was real, and we faced it. Clients were in-housing a lot of stuff. This whole great reshuffle of everything that's going on from where ships are to where chips are to where people are is upsetting that, too, for in-house operations. I think it's going to yield opportunity for, as your podcast is for, marketing leadership and marketing firms of all shapes and sizes. They're like, “I can't get the people to do this,” so now they've got to go back to outsourcing and finding folks to help. We'll certainly going to be there and do that. I hope I'm right on that. ROB: That's definitely a tricky wave. Sometimes it's even very client-specific. I'm usually in Atlanta, and to an extent, the fabled Coca-Cola company is perpetually on one end of the pendulum or the other on in-house, out-of-house. Certainly, macro trends also impact that. JAMIE: Yeah, there's that whole thing of get closer to the data. I get that. But when you said growing up around agencies, or my sense of it, that concept of being – we talk about being partnerships or even beyond a partnership with clients, stakeholders and very involved, but still objective outsiders at the same time. That combination can be powerful for client operations. We think we age well with the client relationships. We learn more and we get better. ROB: Jamie, you mentioned a little bit earlier on the digital real estate, but when people want to find you and find SMZ, where should they go to find you? JAMIE: It starts with smz.com, which is our website. That also houses our blog and the podcast I do called Generation Excellence, which is for those who are really interested in that very niche-y space of generational family businesses. And then SMZ Advertising is on all of the social platforms, sharing stories of our people, our clients, our work, a little thought leadership, little bit of our fun and things that we do to stay connected, which is a big effort right now inside of work and outside of work. I guess that would probably be about it. I welcome anyone who wants to reach out to me via the email address on the site, or call me. I'm open to talk about this business. I'm very fortunate to steward a unique and special place, and I want to put my energies against it being successful, but I love helping others. ROB: Definitely. Congratulations on being 92 going on 100 as a firm. That is exciting. JAMIE: For those who can't see me, the firm's 92. I'm a little bit younger than that. ROB: [laughs] Yeah. We'll see what a 100-year-old SMZ looks like. We'll look forward to that. Jamie, I wish you and the team the best. Thank you for coming on the podcast. JAMIE: I thank you for having me on this. I like that you blend the individual story and the business story, because they are intertwined and interconnected. ROB: In this kind of firm, absolutely. They're inseparable. JAMIE: Yep. Thanks, Rob. ROB: Thanks, Jamie. Be well. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Sara Helmy is CEO at Tribu (tribe in Latin), a 20-employee digital marketing and branding agency that prides itself on “building tribes for the brands that we serve.” Sara, with a passion for SEO, started the agency ten years ago with about $6,000, no outside funding, no debt . . . and for the first three years, doubled-down, boot-strapped, added things over time, and eventually morphed the agency into a branding powerhouse with close to $3 million in service revenue this year. Tribu serves a diverse group of clients . . . facilitating government-supported projects (like San Antonio's 300-year anniversary celebration), B2C (Devils River Whiskey), B2B, and healthcare . . . but most clients have one thing in common: They have high, ambitious growth goals . . . and they want to be disruptive in some sense. Tribu's view of “brand” is far broader than having a logo and a website. Sara includes in “brand” the assets a company creates and deploys, the nurturing, the daily “rock pounding,” the tribe growing, the follower building, and the activities compelling potential customers to sign up for email lists. Branding efforts may be for a brand that never existed before or for existing brands that are looking to “reinvent themselves.”  Sara says that branding (and rebranding) are more about identifying and extracting value that is already there, something unique that will resonate with customers, rather than in creating something new that didn't exist before. The invention part comes in creating a new way to communicate that message. When the agency works with a new brand, there is more freedom . . . but, without an existing customer base, Sara says, “You're a little bit more blind.” A brand may think it knows itself, but often, Tribu has to collect data from potential customers and focus groups to show companies how they are “seen.” Sara says “95% of good businesses are going to choose to honor their customers.” When a company already has an existing customer base, rebranding may be easier because customers will tell you who you are . . . but it is also harder because, if the business direction changes substantially, you risk alienating existing customers who got you to where you are.  In this interview, Sara offers two important business tips:  Invest in “A” players, because they are the ones who will solve your problems, help navigate, and help your agency grow. Plan, nurture, and control your culture . . . the health of your finances will often match the health of your agency culture. Sara can be reached on her agency's website at: Wearetribu.com – and from the beginning to this day, the onsite contact form goes straight to her personal mailbox! Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Sara Helmy, CEO at Tribu based in San Antonio, Texas. Welcome to the podcast, Sara. SARA: Thank you for having me, Rob. I'm excited to be here. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by introducing us to Tribu? What should we know? What is your specialty? SARA: Tribu means “tribe” in Latin. We pride ourselves on building tribes for the brands that we serve. More literally, I guess you could consider us a digital marketing and branding agency. We've been around since 2011, so this year will be our 10th year in November. We're very excited about that. In general, that's Tribu. We're a tribe of 20 people today. When we started, we started with about $6,000. No outside funding, no debt. Just doing really good work and climbing ladders. We're still a small agency. We'll do probably about $3 million in service revenue this year with our tribe. (That's what we call our team of 20.) But in 10 years, no outside funding, no debt. That's just been organic growth by serving a whole bunch of partners we're really thrilled and excited to have every day. ROB: Congratulations on 10 years, on $3 million, on 20 people. I'm sure there's days when that feels like a lot of responsibility. Dig a little deeper with the brands you serve. Is there a typical example you can give us of who you work with, what the scope of the engagement or the range perhaps can look like? SARA: Absolutely. We're actually a little bit everywhere when it comes to industry. We don't have a particular industry niche. But most everybody that we work with has really high and ambitious growth goals, and they want to be disruptive in some sense. So far, for us at times that's spanned government – it's a lot of B2C, B2B, healthcare. We're literally everywhere. What they have in common is they've got some project or some initiative that they consider disruptive and they really want to grow it fast. More specific examples. Devils River Whiskey was one that we worked with for very many years. Travis Park, which is one of the oldest municipal parks in the United States, was one that we rebranded and revamped. When San Antonio turned 300 years old, we helped them put on that celebration. Then we'll also serve the plastic surgeon who's got really high ambitious goals, or we'll partner up with a private equity who buys companies and turns them around and plug in as their marketing partner. So we're a little bit everywhere in that sense, but what they all have in common is they want to disrupt and they want to grow very fast. ROB: It seems like that branding component of what you do – I think a trick with branding agencies can often be the “What next?” I did the brand and then the engagement falls off. It sounds like you have this pairing of people who are using the rebrand as a jumping-off point to get more aggressive overall. SARA: Yes, I would say that's pretty accurate. It's either a ground-up brand that hasn't existed before, or there's a big rebrand initiative in there somewhere. One of the things we deal with all the time is that your brand is so much more than a logo and a website. Those are assets that you created, that you smartly deployed, but brands aren't created just when you create those things. They're created through nurturing, through pounding the rock every single day, growing a tribe, amassing a following, giving people a compelling reason to sign up for an email list. When we say brand building, we mean so much more down the line than just getting a new website or designing a logo. ROB: Sure. Brand is also partly who you actually are. It's who you actually are when you are out in the market. How do you take a client who is looking to rebrand and get past who they think they are or who they think they should be and get to who they actually can be and break through with that? SARA: I love that question. I think a lot of people think when you're rebranding or something, you're creating something new. In actuality, you're extracting, with a very good strategic understanding, what's compelling that lives there. A lot of times, a partner or business will come in and tell you all about their brand, all about what they do, all about their history. I think what we're doing is inventing the way that's communicated, but it's so much more than inventing things to invent things. You're extracting something that's there. Typically there's a differentiator. There's something unique about them, and it's just hidden. When we enter a rebrand, or when we decide we're going to brand something from the ground up for somebody, we're extracting more than we are inventing what's valuable there. What is there that would truly resonate with a tribe or an audience? Who is that audience, and where's the match? So it's more extracting. It's more strategic identifying of those things, and then you build a brand around that – the more traditional, well-known aspects of it, like what it looks like, the tone of voice, the colors and the typography, and our strategy for getting in front of this tribe, or what most people refer to as target audiences. ROB: Is there an aspect of that that is easier when there's also an existing customer base? Because in some cases then the customers actually tell you who you are. SARA: Yeah, it's easier and harder when there's an existing customer base, I think. Easier in the sense that you've got the best resource ever. You've got customers, and exactly what you said, you can ask them and they'll tell you. Harder in the sense that if the business's goals are to substantially change, you have to consider the existing customer. You can't just 180. You've got to love the people that got you where you are. So preserving equity and being mindful in how you do that sometimes makes those circumstances more complex than when you're starting something at the ground floor and you have a little bit more freedom to work with. But also, you're a little bit more blind because there's not a customer base that you can tap into at that point. ROB: How do you help someone when they have this conception of themselves and there's a better dimension of themselves that they actually need to be highlighting, because they really can't inhabit the brand of what they think they are? SARA: I think you show them. That's one of the most beautiful parts of the digital marketing world and living in the technology we live today. There's a way to show them. There's data, where maybe previously marketers had to fly a little bit more blind. It's super easy these days to ask a question and get a response. You don't necessarily have to always have a 10- or 15-person, immaculately sourced focus group, conducted very formally. So in that situation, you show them, and at that point you let the business decide. I think 95% of good businesses are going to choose to honor their customers. ROB: I get it. You mentioned 10 years ago, $6,000 to start; what led up to that moment, though? What led you to say, “I have this $6,000” – maybe you saved it up, maybe you didn't – “and I'm going to put it on the line to make Tribu happen”? What did that look like? SARA: What a bootstrap startup, right? I was young. I was 22 years old at the time. My father had passed away, unfortunately, probably two years before that. So I had learned life is short, and I was a little bit less scared of entrepreneurship failure potential as a result. Also, when you're young, it's easier to get something off the ground when you consider that you don't have a mortgage to worry about or a family to feed at that point. I happened to be working in SEO, and I absolutely love SEO. That's the service in this world where I got my start. I was fortunate to, at such a young age, be an operations manager for an SEO division inside of an agency. The entrepreneurial itch, the combination of losing my dad and realizing that life is short, finding an industry that I absolutely loved, a field of study I was completely passionate about – it collided. Also, because I was young, I just didn't really have that much money. Hello. [laughs] So $6,000 was what I could put in. I was fortunate enough that I had a little bit of a measly extra that I could live off for that first year, really. So it had to work within that year, at least enough to get me to the next year. That was pretty much the backstory of how Tribu started. ROB: When you're bootstrapped, it's a little bit harder to decide those moments when you're going to actually – you make decisions to invest in the business sometimes, especially in the services thing, no investors. You can take the money out or you can double down on certain aspects of the business. What were some of those bets you made early to invest in particular aspects of the business that were maybe some key decisions? SARA: In hindsight – I don't know that I was doing this then; it just seemed like what you had to do when you're bootstrapped. But I think we doubled down a zillion times. I paid our staff before I ever paid myself. There were several years in Tribu's early start that I would pull enough out in terms of – I didn't get a salary. I would distribute enough that I could eat a meal if I needed to. In the meantime, there were graphic designers who were employed and we were doubling down in the sense that the money was going to that. We doubled down when we purchased our own building, probably about four or five years in. I hope I didn't fail to answer your question, Rob, and go roundabout, but I think there was a series of doing nothing but doubling down in those first three years, probably, of Tribu's life. ROB: Sure. There's an extent to which every hire is an investment into the business. Some make you choke on payroll a little bit harder than others, when you're like, “We're going to hire somebody who makes what?” Then you have to say, “Yeah, I guess we're going to do that.” SARA: [laughs] Yep. ROB: How do you make the jump, or connect the dots, then, between SEO and brand? I might see a shadow of it, but it's not a common conversation, right? Most folks in SEO don't get really excited about rebranding, except for what keywords they're going to target. How did you get there? SARA: I love that question. Honestly, I think when you get really, really deep into SEO and you start trying to guess the algorithm and what Google's up to and what it's going to change towards and what's going to be their next move – the deeper you go, the more you find that the algorithm – my theory is that it's going to go towards what is genuinely, authentically inspiring to another human being. That's what we want to show in our result when someone enters in a query. And that's what led me to, okay, brand really, really matters from SEO, if that makes sense. I think that's where the connection was made. I also think good SEO strategies, good organics, really focus on – even though it's not stereotypical in an SEO's mind, engagement rate really matters. What's your popularity? That's a very big one in terms of SEO. In order to get there, sure, you can do all these little tips and tricks and technical hacks, and it's really good to know them, but in order to get there you've got to have some substance. You've got to have a good brand. That's where the interest came from. I also think previously, I was very rebellious when I was young. [laughs] I did not know that I was going to necessarily love a subject of any sort in school, but I absolutely loved creativity. I know this is marketing, but business and entrepreneurship is a very good way for a rebel to be a productive person to society. So you take that and you combine that with creativity and this fortunate thing that I landed in SEO, honestly, and it all hodgepodged, and that's how we went from SEO to brand. ROB: The connection's definitely there. There's all of the parlor tricks, and then there's the conviction that eventually what Google's going to keep doing is optimizing for giving people what they want. If that aligns to who you are – the essence of the brand is who you are, and the essence of SEO is what people want, and you put those together. It ties, but it's not often in the same conversation. I haven't heard it very much. It's fascinating coming through who you are. SARA: It makes it an interesting combination for Tribu, honestly. It's a cool combination for our partners to enjoy. There's that very technical, astute digital marketing aspect and strategy, but there's also that very award-winning, strong creativity coming out of Tribu. I feel like a lot of times when partners or customers in the marketplace hire agencies – not every agency puts them in this, but a lot of agencies put you into making a choice. Like, “I can hire really good strategy, really good technical stuff, or I can hire really creative stuff, but I don't know that the message is ever going to completely go as far as it could go.” We're not the only agency that does this, but we do pride ourselves on it at Tribu. We try really hard to be the agency where you don't have to compromise between creativity and strategy and the digital, technical stuff that helps brands really grow. ROB: Absolutely, for sure. It's very self-aware, and I think it's important for entrepreneurs to keep in mind their rebellious streaks. I went through a profile of one sort or another this past week, and basically, I scored ultimately on this axis where it's like “If somebody tells you to do something, you're probably going to do the opposite.” Another entrepreneur who was in that conversation – I think a lot of us, especially in the services world, have this acquisition fantasy that someone's going to show up someday and drop a big pile of cash on the front door and acquire your business. But most of the time, that actually ends up looking like an earnout. So someone I know who's in the middle of that had this rebellious streak, the want-to-be-the-lead-horse streak, and this particular analysis – they didn't know anything about what the person's experience was, but it said, “Something in your life is out of alignment here. At work, you are not being that lead horse that you usually are.” It was because they had a boss. Have you ever contemplated this sort of agency acquisition fantasy that some of us have? Or maybe you just realized that wouldn't go well? How do you think about it? SARA: I don't know. I hope I'm self-aware in that regard. What you just explained, I am so guilty of, which is like as soon as you add the boss on top of me, I'm a miserable person, even if the boss didn't tell me anything. [laughs] But yeah, in terms of Tribu's future, I don't know, maybe one day there will be an exit. I'm not ever going to say never. But we're not working towards that right now. That's not our strategy. That's not where our eyes are at. We're still at that phase in business where we're realizing our own best and obsessed enough with figuring that out for ourselves and especially for the people we serve. I think knowing about exit strategy, even not wanting to right now, is valuable in the sense that what you have to do to prepare for an exit makes you a better business. It makes you cleaner on financials. It makes you put together core processes that help everybody get more aligned. So we like to know about exits, and sure, we think about them sometimes because it makes you a better business, but we're not coming at it from the perspective of hoping for an exit. That's not in the plans right now. ROB: That's so key, and people don't realize it when they start to look at the checklists of especially what makes a services firm worth more than like 1x revenue on an earnout. It's all of those things. How well does this thing operate without you? How are the processes? How are the renewals? It's all of these things. Do you have a particular set of tools you have found work really well for you to store and maintain and update processes in a way that everybody knows where to look? Do you have anything that's working? SARA: We struggled with that for a couple of years when we started. Where we landed was Asana, which is our project management system. It's also where we store all of our core processes so that if you're working at Tribu, the program that everybody, regardless of your position, is working in is also the place where you can find all the core processes. That's pretty much what we landed on in terms of tools for that. We at one point had one-sheeters on everything we could think of in Google Drive, and then everybody would forget what one-sheeters existed. I don't know if that was too literal of an answer, or if that's what you meant by systems, but literally we decided to store them all in Asana. ROB: That's right. It's interesting at two levels. There's one that is the lesson that there is one place and that's where you go. You don't have to say, “Is this in Drive or in Gmail or in Dropbox?”, all the way down the line. I think it helps you realize why there's so many of these systems out there, but also why people switch. People switch when they can't find a way to invest enough in their PM tool to make it the source of truth. SARA: Yeah, honestly, in marketing, that's one of the things that's happening in general. There's so many tools out there, so many things you can use. I think in marketing in general, that's one of the things that makes it more fun – I like change – but it makes it harder to play. I mean, how much momentum and how deep can you get if you're changing the tool you're using every four months? We just made the decision that we don't need it to be the most perfect thing, but we need it to be a stable thing. We need it to be a constant thing. We need it to be a thing that maybe doesn't have every feature that we want, but is going to do the job really well. ROB: But commit to it. SARA: Yes. ROB: Sara, when you rewind this journey, these 10 years so far, what are some lessons you've learned that you might wish you could go back and tell yourself to do a little bit differently, if you were intercepting yourself in that moment of the business? SARA: Oh God, so many. I think we're a great business today, but we're definitely not perfect and we have our moments in history where we look back and go, “Uh, we should've thought about that one a little bit more.” I think the biggest takeaway is ‘A' players. Nothing replaces ‘A' players, whatever ‘A' players is to your agency. There were times where I think we compromised out of desperation. We grew too fast, like “We need to fill this role – someone get a body in there.” But we've I think learned the hard way that you never compromise on ‘A' players. You figure out whatever you have to figure out, but get the ‘A' players in because they're going to solve the problems. You get them in, you take care of them, and you trust them. They're going to solve the problems. They're going to help navigate. They're going to help grow. That was a big lesson learned for us, painfully at times, as we were getting to where we are today. Another lesson that I think goes along with that is – and it's the most stereotypical thing; you hear it all the time – but culture. Culture is the thing that has to be managed and taken care of and nurtured and planned and intentional and worked at. Don't just let it be a thing that roams free and gets away from you. Controlling that is so important. I've seen times in these short 10 years where I wasn't very proud of the culture we had at that moment in time, and I've seen times where I'm like, oh my God, how can I clone this cultural moment? You can basically put those times alongside our financials, and they match. [laughs] The good times, the finances look good; the times that culture's not so great, the finances don't look so great. So ‘A' players and culture. Those are things I would've – it's 20/20 hindsight, always, but I would've put more importance on those things earlier if I could go back in time. ROB: That's another area where I think we get tempted to fake it, on culture. You feel like you need to make up some values or something like that. But it doesn't work until it's real, and you can't keep the ‘A' players until that part's real also. A question that comes to mind right where we are right now, October 2021 – I'm sure you spent at least some, if not a lot, of last year working apart where maybe you were accustomed to working together. How do you think about spreading, driving, reinforcing culture when you're not in the same place, and maybe the patterns that helped form it before aren't available? SARA: How do I answer that? There's so much to say there. That's such a great question. That was actually something that in some ways we did so excellent last year, and in some ways we did so poorly. It was such a year of learning. One of the things I think we did excellent in terms of “How did we do that and retain it?” was just surprises. When you're inside an office, operating in a good culture, there are pleasant surprises that happen in your day that you don't necessarily think about because that's just your day. That's just every day. So being intentional about creating those surprises when we were all apart from each other, whether that was mailing everybody a cookie kit or something that they didn't know was going to come, but they can do with their kids and send pictures and create conversation about that maybe had nothing to do with work, but to make up for that passing hallway conversation that you miss out on – those are things I look at last year and I'm like, that was pretty cool that we did that. Patting ourselves on the back, that was smart. There are other things that I look at that we did last year as we were learning to navigate remote where, now that we've been doing it longer, I'm like, we should've done that better. Like making time to say, “How are you?”, not “How's this project?” And then also – and this one surprised me – I think most executives were worried about productivity drops. We had a productivity skyrocket. People could not turn it off. So something that I didn't learn, because I was actually expecting in part an opposite result, but we had to help our team turn it off. That was a surprise to us and something I think we would've done better, or do better now, honestly. When you've got Slack going and everybody's remote, it's so easy for someone to send you a Slack message at 8:30, 9:00, and it's totally fine to let that wait till the next morning, but you just don't want to do that to your peer, your coworker, your friend. And then eventually it just never stopped. So that was a surprise to us. ROB: Definitely, my own habit, I'm a sloppy Slacker. I tell everybody involved with me, look, if I don't send you this Slack message right now, I'm going to forget this thing, and it's important, but you should not respond to it if it's the weekend, if it's the evening. SARA: Of course you can read it, right? [laughs] ROB: You should just hold it right there, and when you get to work on Monday or in the morning, pay attention then. Please do not – unless I tell you “Do this now,” which just doesn't happen – because if something's on fire, they're already responding to it. They understand urgency. That false urgency is potentially pretty dangerous. Sara, when you think about what's coming up for Tribu and the kind of work that you all do, what are you excited about? What's next? SARA: Again, bootstrapped, organic growth. We've had to add things over time. We recently this year formally added videography and production in-house. We were collaborating with an awesome group of freelancers and many people before to fill those needs. I'm very excited about having that in-house. It makes everything else we're already offering much more powerful. And then in general, the industry, what's coming up that I'm super excited about – and I think all of us at Tribu are – things like TikTok. Not necessarily that there's a new social media platform. It's more so the format change that a platform like TikTok is driving – that informal, very human, fun, relatable, just people being goofy. That type of content. That's just so exciting that brands are going to get to play in that space. As the world's moved – we talked about it when we were talking about SEO – whatever's really core and authentic to a human's heart, to those tribes, seems to be the good business move in terms of brand building as well. So to see that that's an opportunity for brands to have more fun and be lighthearted and participate in those types of conversations, to show more of their human side because of platforms like TikTok and the formats they're encouraging, that I'm very excited about. I think we all are at Tribu. ROB: It's a great point. It's almost like TikTok broke all of us, in a way, because you could kind of pretend that every channel was the same if you really were committed to it, and it just breaks the narrative. I think it helps you be who you need to be on Twitter versus LinkedIn versus Facebook. It fractures everything by making more than one message. I think it helps people get channel-specific, even if they're not even touching TikTok, because sometimes it might not make sense. Maybe it always makes sense if you can figure it out. I don't know. SARA: If you're on alcohol, they don't let you play on it right now. So sometimes even if it did make sense, it's not an option yet. [laughs] But yeah, for sure. You said it so spot-on. TikTok really is breaking that format, and it's going to inspire a lot of channel specificity in marketing, which we're excited about. ROB: Especially with that video capability. Sara, when people want to find you and Tribu, where should they go to connect with you? SARA: Oh, thank you. Wearetribu.com. A little fun secret is that as we've scaled, the one thing I refuse to change is that that contact form goes straight to my inbox. So if ever anybody wants to send in a message, I'd love to hear from anybody. ROB: Fantastic. We'll get the site dialed into the show notes as well. Sara, congratulations on everything so far. Looking forward to what comes next as well. Thanks for coming on and sharing with us. SARA: Thanks for having me. ROB: You bet. Be well. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Matthew Berman is President/ co-founder of Emerald Digital, a full-service data- and creative-driven digital marketing/ public relations agency that specializes in generating quantifiable leads and sales by: Mapping and generating consumer-journey-stage-specific touchpoints across multiple digital channels,  Developing and delivering personalized, consumer-journey-stage-specific content.  Typical clients are B2C premium consumer goods providers, B2B clients, and professional services (legal, healthcare, and some financial companies). Matthew talks about journey stages as being three funnels: awareness, consideration, and purchase. Awareness involves highlighting a consumer's major” pain points, introducing the client, and clearly presenting the client's unique benefits. At the purchase stage, where the user is already familiar with the client and trust and authority have been established, the message can be “a little more aggressive.”  The client, its product, and its target market determine the mix of content, platform, audience, and messaging needed to best address the target audience at each particular stage. Although the agency's focus is digital, Matthew says it will get into whatever space their target market is in. Matthew cites the example of a pet brand client with “two audiences.” When communicating with “the general public (traditional consumer channels), the focus is on digital with some print media, and media buying. For the industry-specific retail buyers (industry trades), the media mix is more traditional.  It has been difficult in the past to track billboard impact (except perhaps by sending viewers through distinct contact options). Today, companies can purchase digital space for times when prospective customers will be passing by that billboard, change up the message more frequently to keep it “fresh” or to meet the client's changing needs and goals (to increase business, build brand, hire new employees), or try to ping passing cell phones to track “views.” Matthew started his career in music production, selling songs through NYC ad agencies to support large brands' digital content. He partnered with a creative director contact to create Chunnel TV, a video curation and production platform. Funding for that evaporated with the Great Recession and Matthew moved to a traditional marketing agency in New Orleans to work on social and ambassador programs.  A few years later, he started Ember Networks, which provided other agencies with white-label social, web, and SEO support, and often consulted and collaborated with a close friend who owned Herald PR in New York City. On a joint project in the Turks and Caicos, they realized their teams were already integrated and that they would be able to tackle larger projects and work smarter if they combined the two companies. Ember Networks and Herald PR became Emerald Digital. When COVID hit, both locations shut down. Growth was exploding – the company probably tripled last year. Finding, hiring, and integrating new employees into the team was a challenge when everyone was remote. Processes needed to be thoroughly documented, mapped, and assessed; SOPs written, organized, posted, and automated; and communications tools updated and unified. In this interview, Matthew explains how a key tool of the agency's operationalization, a program called ClickUp, has allowed them to aggregate all their documents, automate processes, streamline reporting, and handle client communication.  Matthew is excited about how, today, his clients can tell never-ending stories and have ongoing narratives broken into digestible pieces across multiple platforms and multiple touchpoints and, even more so, how technological advances, AR, VR, AI will impact storytelling in the not-so-distant future. He can be reached on his agency's website at: https://emerald.digital Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Matthew Berman, who is President and Partner at Emerald Digital with offices in New York, New York and New Orleans, Louisiana. Welcome to the podcast, Matthew. MATTHEW: Thank you so much for having me, Rob. ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don't you start by introducing Emerald Digital and what it is that you all are excellent in doing for your clients? MATTHEW: Absolutely. I am the president and a co-founder of Emerald Digital. We are a full-service digital marketing and public relations agency. Our superpower is we are exceptional at generating quantifiable leads and sales. We do this by mapping out and generating consumer touchpoints across multiple digital channels, and we strive to engineer these consumer touchpoints by the stage which the consumer journey and the user is actually in. If they're at the awareness stage, we have different content pieces generated just for them and personalized just for them. If they're at the consideration stage, we do the same thing. ROB: You've kind of teased it; give us all the stages as you all think about it. MATTHEW: Sure. At a very general level, let's think about awareness, let's think about consideration, and let's think about purchase. We can break them down into those three major funnels. We try to identify, based on the client that we have, what mix of content, what mix of platform, what mix of audience, and what mix of message we need to best speak to our audience at that particular stage. If we're just trying to generate awareness, we want to highlight what their major pain points are. We want to introduce who our client is, and we want to distill our message such that it can focus on the unique benefits that our client offers in an easy-to-understand way for our target market. If it's at the purchase stage, we would generally have communicated with that particular user several times by now, so we've built up trust, we've built up authority. Our messaging is going to be a little more aggressive. ROB: Give us a picture here. Dive down a little bit. Are there typical clients for you? Particular industry, particular size? What's the wheelhouse? MATTHEW: I think in general, we see two different kinds, although it certainly extends beyond that. But the two different kinds that we have are a B2C company, generally consumer goods, with a product or service that might be a little more premium, a little more expensive, whether that be a luxury hotel or a private jet or a luxury villa or a more expensive food item. So we see that. On the other side, we handle a lot of B2B clients and professional services. We deal very frequently in the legal and healthcare and sometimes the financial space. ROB: I can't let it just sit there – I need to know more about expensive food items. MATTHEW: One of the examples is we're working with one of the most premium hotdog manufacturers and sellers in the United States. You would normally think about a hotdog as just a few bucks, and the ingredients that would go into that are maybe not the ingredients you would want to eat. We're working with this great brand where all of their ingredients are ultra-premium. It tastes amazing. It might cost a few dollars more than your typical hotdog, but we have to break down, where would this product be sold? Who would it be sold to? What type of benefits would a prospective buyer be looking for? That might be health, that might be ease of making it, things like that. But they do taste great. [laughs] I always love working with our consumer brands, especially in the food and drink business, because one of the benefits that we get is we get to try the product. I've probably worked with 50 alcohol brands or something by now, and that's always fun because you have to try it out. You have to make recipes, you have to shoot the product. You get to meet fascinating people all over the country. ROB: That might help with recruiting too. MATTHEW: [laughs] It's always a fun gig. ROB: You're like, “Hey, come here. Here's who we work with.” That makes sense, especially on the premium food side. There's a trend here that is fascinating. You're talking about educating people around considered purchases, but it is interesting how it spans across consumer versus the business side. The awareness, the consideration, the purchase, that's all there. You're not very much into the transactional world. You have digital in your name, but I would imagine you also – how do you think about traditional media as part of the media mix when you're talking about these long-term considered purchases? MATTHEW: Oh, without a doubt. Our expertise is certainly in the digital world, and that's where my background comes from. But I think as our business grows and as we take on more mature clients, we very much had to get into the space where it's also billboard, it's also print. It really matters where our target market is. I'm not going to only focus on a digital solution if my client's market isn't active there. We're working with a pet brand now, and we have two audiences that we need to communicate with. We need to communicate with the general public; those would be our more traditional consumer channels, and for us, we definitely highlight on the digital side there. But we can also focus on print media. We can focus on traditional news, media buying, things like that. But then there's this other audience, which is very industry-specific. Those are your retail buyers, your industry trades. Things like that, we might go with a more traditional mix than a more digital mix. But I've been a big proponent of this digital revolution for many years. It's sort of mirroring what my own personal habits were. I'm 34 now, so I've seen – I'm at that age where when I was younger, it was only traditional, and I've seen more and more brands moving to the digital space. If the last few years have taught us anything, we went from where you had to sell clients on the concept of digital 10-15 years ago, but now they all understand that that's where they need to be. They just need to know exactly what they have to do and what exactly they should be doing. ROB: It probably gives you a pretty good advantage. A lot of traditional media is digitizing in the buying, whether you're talking about billboards, out of home, whether you're talking about TV and you have the OTT stuff. That becomes an increasingly digital buy, I think. You might know better. MATTHEW: You're absolutely right. We were hesitant to recommend things like traditional billboards to our clients in the past. We're this interesting marriage of being data-driven but also creative-driven. If we couldn't get the right data for why we were buying something or why a client should be there, it was hard for me to make that recommendation. I might say, let's conduct some hopefully siloed experiment where if we buy this particular billboard without digital capabilities, let's see if we can see any noticeable lift in sales or phone calls. We can have a tracking number. We can send them to a unique URL that's on the billboard. But if it was hard for us to measure, it was hard for us to manage. With billboards now, especially in the digital space, there are Bluetooth – I'm not sure what the phrase is, but there's this Bluetooth tracking on it so it can try to ping all the phones driving by to give us some information on that. We can also purchase particular space if we only want it between 12:00 and 2:00 and 4:00 and 6:00 when people are driving back and forth. It just gives us more options than a general “This billboard is on the corner of X & X.” ROB: I'm just curious, because I've seen things on billboards that I would never have expected would have the correct ROI for the cost. What is the cost and entry point to get into a digital billboard placement? I see restaurants hiring for chefs and I'm like, man, how does that ever ROI? Or maybe they're thinking more about awareness. It seems like it doesn't add up to me, but how does that work? MATTHEW: There is such a variation in what these prices are. It's tough to give you an exact number. I would think there might be a branding component there. We bought a billboard for a client a few weeks back, and we were looking at rural markets versus urban markets, how many people. The urban billboard, I think we were looking at something like $15-$20K a month versus the rural one was maybe $800 or $1,000 or something. ROB: Wow. MATTHEW: So there's a wide variation of what those costs should be. With a message like “We need to hire someone,” that's not the message you would expect. [laughs] I'm not tracking that; I don't know what their ROI is. It's possible they just really needed workers. But it's also possible they're thinking about it from a brand place. ROB: Right, I get that. It's like, “Hey, we're a restaurant, we're here.” Even maybe an opportunity afforded by digital is you get to shift up the creative more often, sometimes saying you're hiring and sometimes talking about your fish and chips. MATTHEW: That's exactly it. ROB: Rotating the message. MATTHEW: Yes. Frequency – we have to heavily consider that, because you don't want to give the same individual the same message 10 times in a row. It will fall flat. It may also be that that particular restaurant purchased a set amount of billboard space, and they were committed to that for X amount of months, and it came to be that they were already busy, or perhaps COVID changed things for them, and they decided, with the digital billboard, “Let's allocate 15% of that space to hiring. We've already accomplished some of the goals we intended to here, and the money has already been spent, so let's use it for something that can affect us right now.” ROB: Matthew, let's rewind the clock here a little bit. Talk us through the origin story of Emerald Digital. Where did this business come from? What led you to start it? What were you leaving behind? All of that. MATTHEW: Let me give you a little run-through here. I got into this marketing world – I've been a musician for over 25 years, and in my late teens I was heavily into music production. I started selling songs to Heineken, Hennessey, and some other large brands for the digital content they were at that time producing. I was able to do this through some ad agency contacts in New York City, which ultimately led me to partnering with one of the creative directors there, and we created a video curation and production platform called Chunnel TV. After the Great Recession hit, we were unable to raise any more money for that, and I moved to a traditional market agency in New Orleans, where I was heavily involved in social and ambassador programs. A few years later, I decided to start my own firm. This is I think where the story of Emerald begins. At that point, I started a firm called Ember Networks. We focused heavily on social, web, and SEO. A lot of the time, there were other agencies that were hiring us. They would say they were able to do XYZ, but they either didn't have the bandwidth or the ability to, so they white-labeled out. More and more over time, I began working with a firm called Herald PR, which is owned by one of my dear friends. He was in New York City. He was my college roommate, so we were always bouncing ideas off of each other. As an agency owner, it's always helpful to have that bouncing-off point. “How are you doing this? How are you doing that?” So we started working together more and more on escalating projects. After a few years, we had a client who was a villa in the Turks and Caicos. Villa Bella Vita. It's absolutely gorgeous. We went down there, we were shooting drones and doing pictures, and we had brought some of our other clients down. We said, “Why are we doing this separately? Our teams are already integrated. They're already working together. We're able to take on larger projects together and work smarter than we are alone, so let's create a joint venture.” So Emerald is a joint venture between Ember and Herald PR. And you get to work with your friends. ROB: And hopefully you get to go back down to that villa every now and again. MATTHEW: Yes, we do, actually. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] That's good, to revisit the origin a little bit in that way, for sure. MATTHEW: Yeah. That's one of the benefits of working a little bit in the luxury space. You get to look at some of these beautiful places. ROB: As we follow the narrative of Emerald Digital, that's a good starting point. What have been some key inflection points, some times in the business where the difficulty level ramped up a little bit? MATTHEW: Well, an obvious one I think would be last year. I think everyone was under similar stress. We had to shut down both of our offices, but at the same time, we were growing at a tremendous pace. We were hiring, hiring, hiring. I think our team tripled or something last year. We were trying to identify people, work with them, merge them into our team, and inculcate them on the business without being in the same physical space. So I would say that was particularly challenging. That very much led us to hyper-focusing on the documentation of our processes and making sure that we had the right communication tools in place to try to break down these physical barriers that we have now, because we have people all over the country now. While our team was mainly focused in New Orleans and New York, during the last year we've had people want to move out of Manhattan; we've had people trying to move a little closer to the middle of the country, whether that's the Midwest, Michigan, and we've had a certain amount of team members moving to Florida. So how do we collaborate? How do we communicate? How are we working efficiently in this environment where we're all separated? That was a pretty major challenge. But it really led us to hyper-focusing on what these processes were and then implementing a toolset that was able to mold our workflow so that we weren't looking at “This thing is on Dropbox and this thing is on Drive and this guy communicates on Zoom and this person communicates on Slack.” It was looking at all of the different things we were doing across two offices, and now we're trying to operationalize this entire business. ROB: That's a really interesting thread to pull on. What are some of those key tools, practices? What makes distributed work for Emerald? MATTHEW: The first thing was we had to write all of these SOPs. First it was, what are the different stages in the work that we have to do, whether it's account service, biz dev, sales, the content creation process – everything from the brainstorm to the client revision to the scheduling to the ad buying? It was mapping out each of these different things we do. I think one of the first things was we wrote this book. I think we had 91 individual SOPs. And it didn't at that point cover everything. So it was like, all right, we have all of these SOPs. No one's going to read 91 separate things, so we need to put them in a single place that everyone can see at all times, and we have to add video. We added GIFs. We unified all of the documents. We had that all in a drive. But then in the last few months, we moved over to a program called ClickUp. It's been fantastic. We're very happy to have moved over because we can aggregate all of our docs. We implemented all of our different processes into the actual software, so we were able to automate a lot of different things. We were able to streamline a lot of our reporting as well and a lot of our client communication. If there was a particular deliverable we had, we were able to have that automatically pull up. So if we have a social client that needs XYZ, when that job is created, it will pull in the SOPs that we have made and automatically pull in some of our primary documentation so that the employee doesn't need to go looking for it or even realize they have to pull that up. It'll just have it right there.  ROB: Sure, and then nobody has to ask where something is, right? They can go look for it, actually, which is helpful. MATTHEW: Yes. Not only be able to look for it, but to remind them that it's there. I think that first month when everyone was working from home, it was, “Where is this thing? Where is that thing? Which folder?” It was a big organizational task. Not only to have it where it's all in a place that the person can find, but it's to create automated reminders and touchpoints on our end so that we don't even have to find it. It's right there. “Hey, by the way, since you're making a social media post, here's a few things that might help you out. Here's previous creative. Here's file assets. Here's a step-by-step on how to do this. Here's a video. And if you need help, here's a simple form that you can fill out right there, and that form will automatically be sent to your superior, our management team, or even our leadership.” ROB: Has it been difficult for everyone to make that transition? It seems like that's a cultural shift, and with that comes the privilege of being able to be distributed, of being able to move to Florida whenever you want. But has that been a tough transition across the team in some cases? MATTHEW: I want to point out that I'm so happy with the way our team has adapted. Everyone has done a tremendous job, to the point where I think in many cases we're more efficient now than we even were before. But I think on a personal level, for many people, with that shift in not going to the office and being in the same house with all of your kids who can't go to school for months at a time, or for even the new hires, there's certainly difficulty there. Or we have employees who have older parents. So there's certainly difficulties. But I think on a professional level, our team has adapted to it tremendously. ROB: That's good news. It's a tricky transition. Now, as you're spread apart, how are you thinking about in person? Is there a cadence of getting together, or is it off the table for now? MATTHEW: That's a great question. With your previous question, you asked what some of the challenges are, and I think one of the biggest ones, especially for me and our creative team, is there are these great ideas that happen off the cuff around the water cooler, and you can sit around a whiteboard in the same physical space and be like, “Wouldn't it be cool if we did XYZ?” There is absolutely something to being in the same physical space. I don't want to discount that. Where I believe we will be moving to as things open up is a more flex time model, where you can come into the office two or three times a week and then you can work from home the rest of the time. If you're not in a location where one of the offices is, then obviously you cannot come in. But wherever possible, I think we're going to identify physical opportunities for everyone to get together, whether that's once a quarter or – we're not sure exactly what that frequency is. But we have several different cadences now for our team to brainstorm, to basically connect. We have an all hands meeting every Monday, every Friday, and then each of our separate teams meets every single morning. “What are we doing today? What are our goals? How did yesterday go?” Those are our primary touchpoints. Most of us are in communication with each other throughout the day anyway, but it's still good to get everyone on those face-to-faces. On a digital face-to-face, I should say. ROB: [laughs] Absolutely. Matthew, as you think back on the journey so far, what are maybe some lessons you have learned that you would tell yourself to do a little bit differently if you were starting from scratch? MATTHEW: I think to document these processes is something I would've done much, much sooner. It would've helped us scale a lot faster, and I think a lot more efficiently. So certainly that. And it would have allowed us to train and hire people in a much easier manner, and I think for us to even identify what some of our own roadblocks were and to have a better understanding of what repeatable processes we have and where we can identify pain points and how we can grow those. And certainly another one for myself – for many years, I wanted to see every creative and had to approve it. It was almost like all roads went through me. That's a tough thing to let go of, but as a business owner, you have to. You have to trust the people that you're hiring to make the decisions that you hired them to do, and only to come to you when they need you, or for you to bring them that strategic vision or directive. But give them enough room to do their job properly. So I would say, “Chill out, Matt. Let go.” [laughs] Bring on the smartest people that you possibly can. That's a really major part. You as the business owner want to be the dumbest person in the entire room. Your job is to hire the smartest people for the best job that you can find, and hire them no matter what it takes so that you can trust them to do what they do well. ROB: How do you time that transition? Because clearly, you start the thing from zero and you're going to be working in the business, necessarily. Very few people – I know one guy that bought five agencies and he just starts being in charge. But for most of us, you're starting with a special talent. You're starting with that skill that you have being the reason that people come to you, and then you start having people fill in some of your weaknesses, and then people who also have your strengths. How do you think about when to start turning the corner on getting yourself out of every piece of creative? How do you time that? MATTHEW: That's a great question. Certainly bringing in smart people and then making sure they know exactly the job they're supposed to do, and then giving them – maybe working with them for the first month or two, where you are a little more hands-on, and just ensure that your processes work. Just oversee. Say, “I built all these processes out. I have trained you. Here's enough room for you to do it yourself.” And you set, “Every Thursday I'm going to dedicate three hours to ensuring that this foundation that we've made is actually working.” You start with different topics. Maybe I'm going to let go of all of the creative when it comes to social posts and video production, but I'm still going to hold on to this web dev side. For now, I want to be able to test everything and I want to be able to overlook the code. I just want to make sure everything's working properly. I think one by one, start making sure that each of those teams has that process down. I would start thinking about what unique assets you have. Are you the best at social? Are you the best web guy? Are you the best for overall strategy? Did you create a web firm because you're a killer coder? Start thinking about the things that you can offload that maybe don't fall into your expertise as much as the others. ROB: That makes perfect sense. As we look at the future of Emerald and of the work that you do for clients, what's coming up? What's the future look like? What's exciting there? What should we be looking out for? MATTHEW: Awesome. If we talk general industry – and I kind of mentioned this before, but it felt like for many years we had to pitch about why you should be in the digital space at all. That conversation, especially in the last two years, has really shifted to “You know that you have to be here. Now we can do some really interesting things.” Our clients are much more on board with this concept of telling a never-ending story, having an ongoing narrative that can be broken up into digestible pieces across multiple platforms, multiple touchpoints. I think that's very exciting as a storyteller. We can create video, we can create audio, we can do all these interesting things. I think that's really fun. That brings us to what's on the horizon. We're not going to be using the same platforms forever, and they change all of the time. More and more, we're seeing movement in the AR, VR, and AI space. I think it's really exciting. There's this fantastic firm up in New York that we are friends with, and some of the stuff they create is this marriage of a digital space with a real-world space. I think as a storyteller, that opens up so many different avenues for us, because now all of your content and all of your communication doesn't have to be flat. It can be 3D. It can be all-encompassing. You can build things that can sit on someone's table and look like they actually exist. So I'm very excited for that AR/VR space, and then on the AI side, it's certainly helping us to more intelligently gather and parse out what our data means, but also to create content faster. ROB: Lots going on there. It would probably be a whole interesting other conversation to get into the level and approach and who's appropriate to get into AR/VR. But I think with the right creative people, a lot is certainly possible. MATTHEW: Yeah. I definitely think we're still a few years out, and it's probably a matter of one of these big tech firms releasing the Apple Glasses or a contact lens. I think the general user hasn't adopted these yet. We're very much still in the first mover advantage. It's not quite there. But part of our role as a business owner here is to set the business up for success 10 years from now. We don't want to be the best Facebook ads guys in 10 years. We want to be the guys that are doing the next thing great as well. ROB: Excellent. Matthew, when people want to track you down, and Emerald Digital, how should they connect with you? MATTHEW: Check us out at https://emerald.digital. ROB: Awesome. We get these hot new domains. I kind of want to get a .digital myself, but maybe just to track my billboard ads. I don't know. We'll get there. [laughs] MATTHEW: Yes, done. [laughs] ROB: Thank you so much, Matthew. Thank you for coming on, for sharing. Best wishes to you and the whole Emerald team. MATTHEW: Thank you so much. ROB: And all the good stuff going on in New York and New Orleans and beyond, right? MATTHEW: And beyond. ROB: Excellent. Have a wonderful day, a wonderful week, and thank you so much, Matthew. MATTHEW: Thank you, Rob, for absolutely everything. Cheers. ROB: Cheers. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Heather Isch is CEO and President at LKF Marketing, a B2B-focused full-service marketing communications company that specializes in working with manufacturers with complex, often highly technical products and complicated sales channels; governmental agencies working on regional economic development; and local community-focused arts organizations and nonprofits (the agency's give-back “passion” projects). Heather describes the process of getting to know LKF clients as a “deep dive” – into understanding all of the different industries they work in, the “customer levels” within each of those industries, who clients are trying to reach (which may vary by product application), what clients are trying to sell, and how they are trying to solve their customers' problems – and compiling that information into “customer maps.” In addition to questioning clients, the agency gets industry information through accessing existing research, consulting with trade partners, following industry trade journals, through trade shows (when possible), or by, when something is completely new and needs to be “explored,” commissioning paid research. “We spend a lot of time with engineers,” Heather says.  Another piece of the “deep dive” is market research: finding and figuring out how to effectively reach target audiences – where these people are, how they make decisions, their internal “cultures” and inter-relationships, and the right media mix to support client messages. LKF started in 1989 with two partners, graphic designer Charlie King and strategist Brad Lawton – and soon added media buyer Carol Fricke. After a number of years, Carol bought out her partners and invited Heather on board. In 2015, after Heather had served in the role of vice president for about 8 years, Carol retired and Heather took over as owner. Heather says that this transition was “always part of the plan” and that “when you plan for . . . transitions, they go a lot smoother.” Even now, Heather is working with her team so that when it is time for her to go, her current team of leaders will have everything they need to make the transition seamless.  In this interview, Heather talks about how her team of 17, each of whom has a specific “area of expertise,” has maintained relevance through the years. She explains that the agency's culture supports “keeping ahead of trends” and not fearing trying new things or failure. The agency actively promotes continued training, attending seminars, and trying out and leveraging new client-appropriate tools and technology . . . all with a focus on delivering results for LKF's clients. A recent example: LKF developed a trademarked Content Management System, McConimore, to facilitate rapid/ agile Web development and overcome some of what Heather describes as WordPress's “intrinsic flaws.” Heather takes a very holistic view of her organization. She explains that LKF's passion statement, “Assisting the people in our family to thrive,” applies to the agency's clients as well as the agency's internal work family, employees' families, and the community the agency serves. Heather can be reached on her agency's website at: lkfmarketing.com and on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm excited to be joined today by Heather Isch. She is the CEO and President at LKF Marketing based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Welcome to the podcast, Heather. HEATHER: Thanks. I'm glad to be here. ROB: Super great to have you here. Why don't you kick us off by telling us what LKF Marketing excels in? What's your specialty?  HEATHER: We are a full-service marketing communications company. We primarily serve B2B. We like really technical, confusing kinds of clients, so we have a lot of clients in the manufacturing space. We also have a lot of digital skills, so a lot of web development, that kind of thing. So helping clients with complicated sales channels, complicated products, that kind of thing. ROB: Got it. When you say “technical and confusing,” let's pull on that thread for a minute. What would something technical and confusing sound like? Even though once you describe it, it may not sound so technical and confusing. HEATHER: A lot of our clients serve highly technical clients. They might be working with highly engineered products that might be sold into packaging or beverage or wastewater treatment. Sometimes in the medical industry, like for MRI equipment. So a lot of our clients have technical products that you really have to dig in and understand, spend a lot of time with engineers so that you understand what you're talking about, first of all. But then those clients typically have very complicated sales channels, and it's understanding how to get to and share their messaging in a variety of different industries to a variety of different levels, whether they're influencers or the buyers. In other markets that we serve, we work in economic development, so we have a lot of development clients working with, in our case, the state of Michigan working to understand brownfields and redevelopment credits and all kinds of crazy stuff. And then we have some of our more fun clients that might be a little bit more – those are our passion projects, more in the community that we live in. We like to give back, so we'll be working with people in our arts community or some of our nonprofits. But we're not typically the consumer products group, if that makes any sense. ROB: It certainly does to an extent, although I'm now also contemplating who a wastewater influencer is. [HEATHER laughs] When we get into the particulars of it, take us down a layer on that. The complexity affects who you're targeting, it affects your marketing channels. How do you take a problem like wastewater treatment – I imagine the client is very helpful in informing you of what they know, but they also might not know, and the knowledge may not transfer over the same way as if you're in a core B2B context. HEATHER: Right. With a client like that, it could be a wastewater treatment plant, it could be – here's one for you. We've started working with some of the people that are trying to do extraction in the cannabis market. That's really been more of an exploration. Who is making these decisions? Same thing in wastewater treatment plant. It may be the facilities manager that we need to get to; it could be an operations person in a specific area, but then you may also need to be speaking with the director of public services, depending on the different cities and states. A lot of times it's doing a deep dive with our clients to really understand all of the different industries that they're working in, who they're trying to connect with, what we're trying to sell them, or how we're trying to solve their problems, and then really going to work and putting together all of those customer maps. Sometimes there's research that exists; a lot of times we rely heavily on some of our trade partners. We've spent a lot of time with engineers. And in some cases, there might be actual research that we commission because we're really in exploratory mode. If the client's trying to launch something new, then we have to go down that paid research path. ROB: It seems like some of these prospects for these products – they're almost going to be pleasantly surprised if you can reach them with a convincing message directly. But how do you think about reaching such a specific customer? This certainly doesn't sound like billboard and TV ad territory. HEATHER: Not typically billboards, no. Usually there's heavy emphasis in the different – there's trade journals for everything under the sun. We work with a client that makes products for linemen to keep them safe when they're up on utility poles. You would be amazed at how many trade journals there are for that industry and for very specific titles. So for that particular group, we might be doing a combination of traditional print mixed with some social media, heavy web presence. Honestly, it's trying to do the deep dive by industry, figuring out where these folks are, and doing the right media mix. Sometimes it's tradeshows thrown in there, although COVID has not done us any favors in that department, so we've had to get a little more creative with how to reach our customers. ROB: That's wild, because I'm also thinking that linemen are probably not on LinkedIn very much. Maybe less than other industries, if you will. HEATHER: Right. ROB: I can't imagine all the trade journals you get at your office. That must be a heck of a picture on its own. HEATHER: Yeah, we have a lot of trade journals that come here. Also, I think one of the things that has been fascinating is the connection that linemen have with each other. There's a very tight, almost like a brotherhood. There are a lot of ways to reach this group, but they're also very connected and become very attached to their brands, and we are lucky enough that our client is very, very well-known, and linemen ask for it by name. That's been an interesting little twist in their industry. And we find that across the board. Every industry is very different, so you really have to figure out what's going to get the best result based on the market. You learn to talk. You learn to figure out where these people are and how they make decisions. ROB: It's interesting, especially with the linemen. When someone's going to get up near high-energy power, downed lines, all that stuff, when they ask for safety equipment, I feel like you listen to them. [laughs] But I don't know. Also, you're talking about getting deep into an industry. It seems to me there could be some big opportunities – if somebody's been marketing with a firm that doesn't take the time to get in deep, there could be huge uncovered opportunities that are maybe even pretty low-hanging in the content and search world. Have you found examples of keywords that are lying out in the wide open for the taking, but weren't claimed by the industry? HEATHER: Absolutely. ROB: What's that look like? HEATHER: I think that's probably one of our key strengths. We are hell-bent on getting results for our clients, and the way you do that is really digging in deep and understanding their business and what they're making, what they're creating, what that end game is. We have search engine optimization talent on staff as well as usability experts, and a lot of this is really just years of learning to understand, I guess as best as anyone can, Google. They change everything every day. That's a full-time job. But I feel like we're pretty gifted in that department. ROB: Heather, let's rewind the clock a little bit on this. What is the origin story of LKF? Where did this business come from? HEATHER: This business was actually created in 1989, and there were two partners, Charlie King and Brad Lawton, the ‘L' and the ‘K' in LKF. Charlie was a graphic designer and Brad was a strategy guy. Then they met up with Carol Fricke, and she was a media buyer. She came to Kalamazoo after a long stint in Atlanta, Georgia, and she teamed up with this group. They formed the trio, Lawton, King, Fricke, and operated for quite a few years together. During that time, I was actually a kid fresh out of college and I met Carol while I was selling ad space for one of the papers. I continued to have that relationship with her for many years. I left publishing and became a marketing manager for a manufacturing company, which is where I probably learned to really love all of those nerdy technical things. She and I stayed in touch, and actually LKF did a lot of design work for the manufacturing company that I worked with. During one of our lunches one day, she told me she wondered what was happening with me. I said I was negotiating hopefully what I thought would be “the job” with a local agency, and she said, “I don't think so. I don't want you to go work for another agency. I just bought my partners out, so I think you should come and work for me.” So I did. I worked with her for many, many years, and in 2015 she was ready to retire, and I took over as owner. ROB: Congratulations. It's a good long story, and some of the best stories are those long stories. I find that every change of control of an agency is a little bit the same and a little bit different. What do the mechanics of assuming ownership, as it were, of an agency – I mean, you don't have to get into particulars and percentages, but how does that even work? These are often somebody's baby, but they also don't want to care for it anymore. So what does that look like? HEATHER: I think one of the things that was really beautiful about our transition is Carol and I had talked about that early on. That was always kind of the game plan. Neither one of us really had an end date, but we worked towards that, and I worked as the vice president for about eight years before taking over as owner. I think your point about the same yet different – there are so many things that make LKF who we are today, and we have always been uber-focused on delivering results for the client. That's just embedded in who we are. I think the culture piece also. We've always had this – it's overused, but “work hard, play hard” focus. We always enjoyed each other's company. Carol made it possible for me to be a vice president, help run the company, but also raise two small children. I had a very flexible schedule throughout that time. I think when I took over, I wanted to put a bigger light on that, taking that to the next level, really looking at giving our team the ability to take care of their own families but be wildly successful here at the agency. I think we've been doing flex schedules – it was fashionable before COVID made it fashionable. [laughs] So we're very blessed in that department. Our passion statement is “Assisting the people in our family to thrive,” and in the LKF bunch, we describe our family as our clients as well as our internal work family, their families, and the community that we serve. I feel like that has just gotten bigger, I think, in that transition. But it was planned for, and I think when you plan for those transitions, they go a lot smoother. ROB: How does that inform where you sit now? I'm sure someday you are planning to not run the agency anymore. How are you thinking about even the next generation? And really, you're talking about handling a 50-year-old agency before too long, 40 even sooner. HEATHER: That's my goal. I would say my vision is that my current team of leaders are getting everything that they need so that the day that it's time for me to go, it's really seamless. I think good leadership is not about the who or the personality cult of what's at the top; it's what has made us who we are. Is everybody trained and schooled in all things LKF Marketing, the LKF way? How do we push that down in the organization so that there's a seamless transition when the time comes? ROB: Nobody's surprised, right? HEATHER: Nobody's surprised. ROB: It makes logical sense to everybody involved. HEATHER: Yep. ROB: That is quite a journey, and congratulations on everything so far. In the time that you have been there, when you track back to 1989, in terms of skills of the team members, some things are still very valid and helpful. There are still media buying elements there. But how media is bought and the other marketing channels that are involved have shifted entirely. How has the team over time been able to continue to stay relevant? You mentioned even getting up into social, and then there's stuff beyond that. There are so many places where an agency can get stuck in media, in SEO, in PPC, and others keep going past that. How do you think about these practice areas, which ones are ready to adopt for the agency, and how to either upskill or add skills to the team to get there? HEATHER: I think that's always the question. How do you keep yourself relevant? One of the things that we've always been very good at is not being afraid to fail and not being afraid to try things. Having experts – our team is very small. There's 17 of us. But every person on the team has an area of expertise, and they're really charged with keeping ahead of trends. We put significant emphasis on training and making sure that we're attending seminars, that we're trying out tools, that we're figuring out which tools make sense for our client base and how to apply them so that they're getting the best results and we're leveraging the right technology, and we're not becoming irrelevant. I think that's also something that has happened during the past 18-20 months, this explosion of digital tools, technology. And that's what we're excited about: how are we going to harness some of this new technology and really apply it to our client base? One of the things we had started working on pre-COVID was a new web development platform. We in the past have had a proprietary development platform, and over the years we've realized that's just not a thing anymore. But we've also seen the need for some tools to allow rapid or agile development. WordPress is always the thing that people are all about, but we've always felt like it had some intrinsic flaws. [laughs] So we went to work and have come up with our own product in that category. It's been trademarked. We're really excited about using that, alongside many other tools. But I think that's a testament to how we're staying relevant. We're constantly saying, “This is good. We tried this; it didn't work. That's okay.” And honestly, every client, because of the industries that they're in, they're pushing us to try things that might work for them but don't work for one of our other clients. So I think that also helps us to stay relevant and on top of what's out there. ROB: Very, very interesting. Very tricky, of course. You're saying you've built a new CMS up from scratch? Is that my understanding, or did I miss a detail there? HEATHER: Say that again? ROB: You have a new CMS that you've put together? HEATHER: Yes. ROB: Wow. What's it called? HEATHER: It is called McConimore and we don't widely – it's really only available to our customers. ROB: Pretty interesting. There's always room for new ideas there. That's a category where everybody's always trying to dominate it and nobody ever does. It's sort of the tale as old as time. WordPress is always there, but you've got your GoDaddys, your Webflows – all of the things. But nothing ever dominates. It's pretty interesting. Heather, as you look at your tenure, as you look at your time in LKF and overall, what are some key lessons that you've learned as you've been leading that you might want to go back and tell yourself if you could rewind a little bit? HEATHER: I think for me personally, I am a thinker, a big picture person. I love data. But once I have enough data, I'm definitely ready to move, and I think my younger self could get talked out of moving as quick as she would like to go. [laughs] There has to be calculated risk. There has to be data, all of those things. But I think that is part of, in our industry, staying ahead of everybody else. Failure or trying things on, that's all part of the learning journey, and I hope that's one thing that we instill in our teams: to never be afraid to try something and see if it works. I think that's probably it. ROB: Very good. As you're looking forward at the future of LKF, the future of marketing in general, what are some things you are looking forward to? What's next? HEATHER: I think really taking our team to the next level. We are training up newer teams, and I'm looking forward to being able to serve more clients. We're ready. I also think harnessing all of these different technologies and leveraging them for our clients. There's been a really big shift over the last 20 months, and I think as people get back online, helping them to really innovate and think about how to solve some of their challenges – that's been a topic of discussion for us because I think we've been so focused over the past 18 months on tomorrow and next month. We've got to get people asking different questions, thinking about how we're going to do it differently, how we're going to tackle this problem in a different way. Some of the previous solutions just don't work. So I'm excited about what's next for our clients and how we might go to market and start looking at things from a different perspective. ROB: Absolutely. I always enjoy thinking through the individual contexts of where people are. It sounds like you are very aligned to your local community, to the art community. If someone has not been to visit you in the place that you call home in Kalamazoo, what should somebody go see? What are some of the highlight reels of your home? HEATHER: We have a beautiful downtown that is very vibrant with lots of fun little boutiques and breweries. Wonderful little shops. We also, on the outside edges of Kalamazoo, have a wonderful Air Zoo, which is a great museum to take your families to. We also are home to Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo Valley Community College. We are a town that is very focused on education and keeping our talent here in Kalamazoo. We are also home to The Promise, if you've ever heard of that. The Kalamazoo Promise has been talked about all over the United States. We have a very philanthropic community. So lots of good reasons to come and visit. ROB: It sounds wonderful. I always like to dig in and honor – my team is around the country, and I just like to have us all think about what makes each other's homes special. So thank you for sharing that. I know we always see Western Michigan jumping up and biting some other team in college football that wasn't expecting to get beaten that week. They're one of those upstarts that likes to surprise people, but it sounds like the people there are not surprised. HEATHER: Kalamazoo is a great place to live. ROB: Heather, when people want to get in touch with you and with LKF, where should they go to find you? HEATHER: You can find us at lkfmarketing.com. You can also find us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. ROB: Fantastic. Heather, thank you so much for your time, for sharing your journey, for sharing that unique depth of understanding that you get into with clients to sell things that I think are hard to sell by a formula. That is very much to your credit, so congratulations. HEATHER: Thank you. ROB: Be well, and we'll look for more great things from LKF. HEATHER: Thanks, Rob. It was great talking to you. ROB: Thanks, Heather. Take care. Bye. HEATHER: Bye. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Scott Couvillon is CEO and Executive Strategy Director at Trumpet Advertising, an agency that strives to create purpose-aligned, believable ads. Scott says that companies succeed with their advertising, not only because their creative product promotion is compelling, but more so when the ads “compel an honest connection between a person and a brand.” Scott says there is a lot of talk in the advertising industry about purpose. What is more important is “What do you do with it once you've got it.”  Scott holds that advertising needs to be aligned with a company's core beliefs. Organizations need to think holistically and ask, “If you put purpose in the center, how do you: Get the company culture aligned with that purpose?” Get the advertising and communications pieces aligned with that purpose?” and  Get the customer experience aligned with that purpose?” Advertising agencies typically work on communications – but may neglect a company's culture and customer experience components. Focus on product characteristics does not build relationships with customers, instill customer loyalty, or keep a company's product from becoming a commodity. Trumpet clients have a common understanding – “They will sell more product by selling that product within the context of what they stand for.” Scott explains, “Brand connection is an invitation to participate in a culture that is very intentional.”  Holistic alignment is what sells premium brands like Apple phones and BMW SUVs. If you don't have holistic alignment, Scott says, the best you can hope for is that people will not dread the absence of holistic alignment. The product is okay . . . and the customer only hopes the experience won't be bad. Because transformational organizational alignment involves a deeper client-agency relationship beyond mere “communications management,” Trumpet typically engages with organizations in one of two ways:  High-level management will bring Trumpet in to force “purpose alignment” on its marcom operations.  Trumpet will start out working with marcom. Once Trumpet has proven itself, it uses its analytical performance to talk with the leadership team about a more holistic brand and organizational alignment. Scott presents the example of one client, a “very profitable credit union” that Trumpet turned into “a very meaningful credit union.” “Meaning” made the credit union “even more profitable.” Although increased profit wasn't the first goal, it was the result of the client's focus on purpose. He refers to Raj's Conscious Capitalism, and these “firms of endearment,” as “the companies that we don't dread.”  Communications should be locked in with company culture and customer experience, all three driven by clairvoyance and purpose. Scott asks key questions. “What is the core belief?” “What would the world lose if this company went out of business?” and then delivers an indicting punchline to the last query: “If the answer is a product, then you're a commodity and somebody else can do what you do. He warns that commoditization often happens when companies internalize the advertising function, communicate on self-serve platforms, and focus more on selling product than on “what they stand for.” Scott can be found on his agency's website at: https://trumpetadvertising.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Scott Couvillon, CEO and Executive Strategy Director at Trumpet Advertising based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Welcome to the podcast, Scott. SCOTT: Nice to meet you, finally. ROB: Yeah, awesome to have you on here. Sometimes these things can take a little bit to schedule, but this is the moment. Why don't you start off by giving us the rundown on Trumpet Advertising and what your superpower is? SCOTT: I guess the thing about a superpower is normally the world can either see you running really fast or a human flying, and ours is maybe a little more backstage than that. But it's nonetheless clear to us and to the clients we're working with. It's pretty simple. It's the focus on believability and being purposeful as an organization as an underpinning for the things that we actually do every day, which for us is being an advertising agency. For them, it's running operations and trying to grow their organization. We just try to do that a little bit more meaningfully than I would say agencies that we've all worked for, and even in some cases the agency that we were 10 or 12 years ago. The idea that agencies are responsible for compelling creative is a prerequisite, and let's just assume that all good agencies can buy media and do the analysis and reporting and optimize and come up with great ideas for that engaged attention. But there's a difference between compelling creative and trying to compel an honest connection between a person and a brand. The most successful companies right now are doing a better job of that. Advertising works. We know that. Analytics tell us. America being overweight and in debt, advertising is alive and well. But not every business is able to truly create the connection that allows month over month growth to be sustained in the long term. That requires a more fundamental relationship than just window to window promotion success. ROB: That sort of strategy, to really execute it, it seems like that would require necessarily partnership from the client as well. How do you think about that and that initial client-agency dance of figuring out if they're really interested in that level of connection and genuineness in what they're doing? SCOTT: There's a lot in that. How do we proactively go after business? What is our posture or the conversation when we're, for example, answering an RFP or an open call for agencies? The reality is that if we are dealing exclusively with marketing communications, it would be very difficult to think so holistically about the spirituality of an organization in order to bring some level of alignment between what we're saying externally through communications and what the experience with the company is ultimately going to be if our only connection to the organization is marcom. So yeah, frankly, it requires involvement and buy-in from the leadership team. The relationship's got to go a couple of ways. Either we have a very legacy-oriented, thoughtful, and extremely intentional CEO that brings us in and forces us upon marcom, or we'll work within the marketing communications sphere for a while, really prove our practical worth, that we have good ideas and good tactical execution that shows that we know what we're doing, and then we almost use analytical performance with the leadership team to start having conversations about more of a holistic brand alignment at the organizational level, not just within communications on its own. And again, it clicks for some organizations and definitely not others. ROB: If we can, let's get a little bit more concrete with an example. Is there a particular client you can talk about that typifies what the engagement looks like, what the structure is, as well as the go-to-market message? What's that look like? SCOTT: We are not category specialists. This is a methodology and a perspective that is applicable to a very specific mindset of an organization. What our clients have in common is that they believe they will sell more product by selling that product within the context of what they stand for. They're not constantly just putting something to buy out there; they're being clairvoyant on what people are buying into via that purchase. Structurally, from a relationship standpoint, we have a big financial institution in Texas and expanding out into more and more markets every year, it seems like; we work in healthcare, we work in tourism and destination management, hospitality, but what they all have in common and the structure that's the same is by identifying the purpose of the organization – what is truly the core belief? Our industry has beaten the tar out of “figure out your why and your core motivation” and all that stuff, but what our industry has done a very poor job with is getting beyond the cosmetic application of that “why.” It's easy to turn why we exist into beautiful brand creative, but if the brand, if the company, isn't living that in any real way, it's disingenuous at best and a lie at worst. Our scopes are focused on articulating what that belief is, getting that right and bought into by every level of the organization. When we were working with that financial institution, it was very much led by really, truly an unbelievable CEO who pulled his executive team along with him and really got them all bought in. There were years of internal transformation about “Look, this is the organization that we were, and this is the organization that we are going to be. We're going to move from a very profitable credit union into a very meaningful credit union, and that meaning is going to make us even more profitable.” The profit didn't come first. It got relegated to a result. That became really, really clear, because there became a spirituality at that organization that employees, stakeholders, customers, everybody was truly able to validate and then buy into. They were more than just checking account for a free toaster. The way that process went was getting very clear on that narrative, figuring out what the utilitarian expressions of that narrative were going to be – what products were they going to stop offering? What were the kinds of products they were going to develop? Because their product offering was going to be truly a manifestation of what they stood for, not just different ways for them to make money for shareholders and stakeholders. That kind of internal, truly product holistic thinking first prior to a total renaming and a new identity, new uniforms for employees – how are we going to retrain those employees in the new spirituality of the company while we're handing them a new shirt, as opposed to just handing them a new shirt? That's really how these things, in a perfect sense, go when people are buying into it wholly. There's been plenty of clients that we've talked about this upfront, we've gone through the purpose identification in each standpoint, and it inflects in some of the product expressions and some of the customer experience in a retail sense – certainly we're talking to it from a content standpoint in advertising, marketing, and social media stuff – but never really get invited into the inner sanctum of operations and HR practices, orientation and internal transmission to every employee at the organization. As an egomaniac, those aren't my favorite scopes because we're not able to do the true holistic alignment with every element of the business with a core belief. But it's better than just offering free shipping and extra cheese and hoping for month over month improvements. ROB: Right. It's necessary for you to have the conversation at a higher level in the organization, which is usually where you want to engage. Maybe not sometimes; sometimes the CMO has tons of power and big org. But when you're talking about essentially a credit union, a bank, it's a commodity to people, just like an airline can mostly be a commodity to people unless you are let's say Southwest and you do the work over time to sustain a differentiator. Even when everyone else is charging you for a checked bag. SCOTT: I think you look at the companies that get put into a very specific cohort that we pay a lot of attention to. It's really these believable, more purposeful companies. Raj Sisodia, great TED Talk, talks about conscious capitalism, talks about these firms of endearment. It's the ones that always get talked about at ANA and every conference in our industry. It's the Caterpillars and the Starbucks and the Disneys and of course the Apples and Intuit. It's that category. It doesn't have to be consumer. But these are organizations that are truly aligned, inside and outside, with an idea, not aligned more practically with an IP or a product or a manufacturing process. You bring up Southwest; identical equipment, flying from the exact same building as other companies. It's as commoditized as rice. But there is an affinity and a preference for airlines that we all have and that we use for specific purposes. Yes, there are times that we pinch the nose and it's the cheapest or it's the only one going where I need to be, but we're dreading that experience. And when we go in as a consumer with dread, the best you can have is the absence of dread. I defy you to find a leadership team whose mission statement is “Let's provide an absence of dread to the world.” That's not going to make our stock price soar. But that's where they're landing, whereas Southwest, as you bring up – JetBlue I'd say is another one. They've got a commodity product, and they've really focused on the only thing that there is to focus on, which is the morality and the spirituality of the organization and allowing people to really buy into it. Their turnover is lower. Vendor relationships are better. It is an easier company to run because there is alignment beyond the practical. Don't be late and don't lose bags. ROB: How disruptive – you talk about that feeling of dread. Names pop to my mind. Airline names pop into my mind when you say “dread.” What a heck of a brand. You're the airline of last resort and of dread, but hey, it's cheap. But let me digress a little bit from there. Walk me through the origin story of Trumpet. How did Trumpet start and get to be where it is now? What's that journey look like? SCOTT: Trumpet was founded in '97. It fell out of another agency. Just three guys took the phones and ran and opened up a new agency. That's kind of the late '90s agency founding story. It was a designer and a writer and an account guy, and they started with some real clients, and despite being in a Tier 3 city like New Orleans, over the years they've done some great work for clients like Gatorade. Not nobodies. Launched FreshDirect in New York. It wasn't just car dealerships and plaintiffs attorneys. In fact, those are the two categories we won't work in. They really grew into a creative powerhouse when I was exposed to them in the late '90s and met the founders. At the time, I was in San Francisco. I'm from New Orleans, but I was working out there for years and was loving that, and every day being the dumbest guy in the room and just trying to stay on my toes and not get discovered. But then when I came back to New Orleans, I got reintroduced to Trumpet. The idea at the time was they had amazing creative, but really not a strong, or as strong as it could've been, strategic underpinning. So I joined, maybe narcissistically, thinking that there was an opportunity to bring some strategic scaffolding together with the creative superiority they were wielding. It took a while to be heard and understand it and figure out how our personalities were going to coalesce, but getting into about the last four or five years here, we were on a clip, winning advertising agency accounts like an advertising agency does, talking about case studies and making result promises and case studies that are completely non-verifiable. But we didn't really have a perspective that made us different. We were frankly commoditizing ourselves with all of the other agencies that are able to execute, come up with ideas and get them into the market. But the development of this perspective – and not only adding the brand consulting mindset, if not the brand consulting scope to our scopes of work with clients, but that shift of perspective to, how do we stop lying? How do we stop running ads that test well and analytically prove in the near term that they work better than the old stuff? How do we let advertising be not a short-term tool, but really have a long-term impact? And how do we stop talking about things like brand ads as unmeasurable? How do we start talking about brand ads as being really the only promise we're making? Advertising, when it's seen as a trigger or stimulus for sales, if that's how you see it, that's what it's going to be. That has become the most ignorable stuff in a consumer's day to day, when they're seeing on average 3,600 ads a day in different format. And we're calling three from the day prior. There's a ton of waste. Advertising agencies say, “Yeah, but the waste is so cheap, you can afford it.” But when you look at advertising as truly an invitation to participate in a culture of a company – even when you're promoting, even when you're doing something of a more retail nature, but definitely when you're doing it in a brand sense – you have to be making plain and clear what experience you're going to have if you were to engage with this company via a product or social media visit or whatever those things may be, so that that experience can actually validate the promise we made in advertising, because that's when you get the connection that Raj is talking about in Conscious Capitalism. Those are the companies that we don't dread. In fact, those are the companies that we re-purchase from. The Apple phone that costs twice as much as a Samsung is not twice as good. It just costs twice as much, but we don't think twice about it because we have an affinity. We have a preference for that company, and if they tell us we need a watch – I didn't, but many people did go and get one. People don't want an SUV from BMW. They want the ultimate driving machine. They want the connection with BMW, and they just had too many kids. That brand connection being meaningful isn't throwaway, unmeasurable stuff. It's frankly the most important stuff, especially when the organization sees it as an invitation to participate in a culture that is very intentional, because the leadership that's approving the ads is also using the same idea that's easy to capture in ad creative and doing the harder work of trying to figure out how to keep that alive or to program that into the organization itself and into the customer experience itself. ROB: That's definitely a very compelling challenge. I think one part of the journey that's worth underscoring for you is – we're always talking to the challenger, the independent agencies, not the holding companies. But you've got even a different perspective. Those are quite often typically operated by somebody who was there on Day 1. Talk about your own transformation from joining the agency to being the CEO now. SCOTT: There's been a lot of leadership and structural capitulations over the years. Let me start by saying, too, that while we were a small agency in New Orleans – at our biggest, we were under 50. We really enjoy remaining at about that 20-to-25-person range, because we focus primarily on creative and strategy and project management. We do not have PR and social media and media planning and buying under roof. Now, we have media planners, but they're working with external groups in our network to plan and buy media and reconcile and optimize and all that stuff. The reason for that is because every place that we've ever worked, when you have a media department, that media department's mentality is kind of what every client that we win gets. And while it might be appropriate for consumer packaged goods, it might not be right for pharma or a healthcare system. But tough; that's our media director and that's your plan. Not all flowcharts look the same, but they could. That's the risk. We don't think downstream execution is unimportant; we just don't want to subject a client we haven't met yet to a downstream execution philosophy. That's how you wind up becoming a categorical agency, and we're trying to avoid that in order to fully administer the perspective regardless of category. That said, when you see the agency that way, it's not like you have a CEO sitting atop all these profit silos, because the only silos that are at Trumpet are really creative and strategy, and then the execution that comes from our client services division, which is split between project management and relationship management. But regardless, it's not a very complicated business to run. That said, the leaders of these disciplines are really empowered. The distance between CEO and the leaders of the silos is not very distant. But in order for the vision to not be lost in day to day execution, that's really where my focus remains. Right now we're in the process of trying to extract ourselves to the degree that we can from the day to day so that we can focus on the collective vision of the day to day. I say, how do we think a little less about the busyness of the agency and think more about the business of the agency? Not to be cavalier, but clients come and go, but the agency is either going to be defined by our relationships and whether we're right about to get fired or our clients love us, or we're going to have an idea as an agency that clients are going to find valuable or they won't. That's really what we're shifting to: trying to make it very, very clear, inside and out – just like we profess to our clients – let's make Trumpet a place very clearly inside and out that our employees and our clients are all clairvoyant on our value. Because if they want it, we'll be around for a while, and our retention increases and our connection with our employees increases the more transparent and clear we are about what's different about working here and working someplace else. There's no greater commodity than an advertising agency. ROB: It doesn't take a lot of capital to stand up something. SCOTT: Yeah. It takes three people and a client, and sometimes not a client. And sometimes not three people. [laughs] But there's a lot of talk in our industry right now about purpose. This should not be the 75000th purpose podcast because there's plenty of that. What this should be is one of the few that says, what do you do with it once you've got it? If you take it and run it into brand ads that are beautiful but aren't what the company is really rallying around, I think you're frankly doing a disservice. You're probably better off sticking in promotion land. That's been around since the '50s. ROB: Oh yeah, that's a well-trod lane as well. I think what's interesting maybe also is stepping into that CEO role, what are some things you might wish you had done sooner stepping into that seat? SCOTT: Actually, I've thought a lot about this. I mentioned this to you, but there's a difference between showing up to work every day as an account person or a team member or director of a discipline and trying to do the whole. But I think what has happened successfully here, in my personal path and matriculation, is we didn't miss the opportunity to shift from being in the mailroom to being an account guy to being a strategist to now being CEO. It's not like strategy is king now, like the ops guy takes over the CEO role and now ops is king, or the marketing guy takes over the CEO role and marketing is king. We are being disciplined enough to have Trumpet become associated operationally with an idea. There is very intentional alignment between Trumpet as an organization and the products and services that we provide. So those products and services being rendered on behalf of this portfolio of clients does not wholly define Trumpet. There's an idea of Trumpet: how do we make companies more believable? Advertising has a role in that, but advertising is a very narrow solution to that. Brand consulting or internal operational consulting has a role in that, but operational consulting is a narrow solution to the complex problem of how you get the customer experience, separate and apart from the company culture, separate and apart from the communications from that company, aligned with not a product, but a belief. Product innovation: awesome, you need it. But it's a very narrow solution to the satisfaction of that complex problem. There's three legs to that stool. If you put purpose in the center, how do you get the company culture aligned with that purpose? How do you get the advertising and communications pieces aligned with that purpose, and how do you get the customer experience aligned with that purpose? That requires very intentional, top-down commitment from the organization, and in our case it requires us challenging those organizations to think that holistically. Advertising agencies typically just exist in that communications third. I think we have a responsibility not to take over the whole, but to understand or to be able to provide a perspective that not only should communications be tied, locked in with the company culture and the customer experience, but all three should really be driven by clairvoyance and purpose. What is the core belief? What would the world lose if this company went out of business? If the answer is a product, then you're a commodity and somebody else can do what you do. But how you bring that product to market and what you stand for more spiritually than practically – you get that right and you will be more successful. Ironically, you will sell more product by talking about what that product is a means to what end. Becoming the CEO of the organization of Trumpet has been a challenge to not just let this be, “Oh my gosh, what clients are we about to lose or which ones do we really want to get?” and more, how do we keep this idea clear and alive internally and externally so that everybody, from our employees to our partners, in whatever executional hallway we partner with networks, and our clients – that idea of Trumpet is alive in all of those conversations? So that you don't get lost in the execution and confuse successful execution and analytical awesomeness with the idea of the company. Because that's not the idea of a company. That's the commodity part of advertising agencies. None of us should be bad at creative, buying and measuring and optimizing media and reporting on results. We should all be good at that. But that's all short term. What's the long term? Long term comes from brand, and not the unmeasurable ads. ROB: Right, and it's at a fractal level. Most individuals don't want to just buy and sell ads and measure them, and most organizations would be better not to. There's an alignment from client to organization to person that is going to put off some people who want to go in a different vision, but at least you're not adrift without direction and just commodity all the way down. SCOTT: And look at what the industry has done relative to that mentality. It's why agencies have been complaining for years that they're being marginalized. I don't lament marginalization. I think frankly, our industry deserved it. We allowed ourselves to be commoditized. The media commission structure lived on way too long and was disproportionately beneficial to agencies a long time ago, and has just been eroding and eroding and eroding over time. Now bring in the democratization of media buying and content development and clients can internalize a lot of this stuff. That democratization of the ability to execute elements of communications through self-serve platforms, and you don't need IPG anymore to run national broadcasts. Ironically, the democratization of the ability to participate in advertising, from a local one-off car dealership to a global superpower, is moving businesses farther away from a focus on purpose. They're like, “Man, this advertising thing is something we can just do. Let's internalize it. Let's run this with greater control.” What winds up happening is that the distance, the separation, the space between consumers and companies is widening because there's just less and less focus on companies being clear about what they stand for. They're providing consumers fewer and fewer opportunities to have a referendum on whether or not they like them, so products get commoditized. You'd better lower your expenses if you hope for net profit. ROB: Thank you for all that, Scott. When people want to find you and connect with you and with Trumpet, where should they go to find you? SCOTT: The internet is an awesome place, so you can google Trumpet. If you just scroll past the instruments for sale, you'll find us. But we're not hard to find. We're in downtown New Orleans now. We love our hometown, but we just as much love airports. We do not restrict our client base to here or really even the region. Have perspective, will travel. We're really just looking for those types of companies that are interested in holistic alignment, if not holistic transformation from where they were to a much more intentional place of where they want to be headed, and then right size our relationship to what makes sense for the individual company. ROB: That is excellent. Scott Couvillon from Trumpet Advertising, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing the transformation of your firm and thoughts on how we can all be transformational individually, organizationally, and brand-wise. Thank you so much. SCOTT: Thanks for the time. Love what you're doing. ROB: Be well. Thank you. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Bill Durrant is President at Exverus Media, a paid-media agency (TV ads, print advertising, sponsorships, and other types of media) that serves culture-creating, growth-stage brands. The agency's focus is not so much on big-budget, long-term brand building as it is on consulting with clients and recommending “how best to invest” to produce significant, trackable and measurable short- to medium-term results. Bill says, “all media is performance media” and that it can be very challenging to quickly determine the effectiveness of branding efforts and traditional marketing media. To address this, his agency tries to establish a “performance mindset” and “a structure to capture things that aren't directly trackable.” Bill finds it exciting that today's solutions for modeling are “significantly less expensive” than those that were available in the past. He says modeling has been “democratized” – that you can build and launch a model in weeks, update it continuously with sales and investment data, and track performance across a variety of marketing channels. Work that used to be done over a period of months by costly data scientists and analysts can be done now by utilizing a combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The agency's name, Exverus, is Latin for “from the truth.” In this interview, Bill explains how the name reflects the agency's values and the importance of transparency in how the agency conducts business, manages its clients' finances, and builds, over time, trust-based and truth-based client relationships. In a typical engagement, the agency consults with growing-brand clients and follows a step-by-step process that involves: understanding at a deep level client needs and stakeholder goals curating campaigns rooted in science and best practices  incorporating customized measurement solutions that prove campaign impact even when immediate, vendor-driven measurements aren't immediately available. The agency's “roots” are in a consumer-facing infrastructure. Over the past year, B2B clients have increased as brands “tired of being bland” seek to get more involved in being “adjacent to culture, creating culture, or participating in culture” in order to increase their visibility and cultural involvement. Bill can be reached on his agency's website at: www.exverus.com or on Linkedin at Bill Durrant (with two “R's.”) To make it easier to find him, add “Exverus.” Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Bill Durrant, President at Exverus Media based in Los Angeles, California. Welcome to the podcast, Bill. BILL: Hey, how are you? Thanks for having me. ROB: I'm excellent, and it's good to have you here. Why don't you start off, Bill, by telling us about Exverus and what the firm's superpowers are? BILL: Yeah, we do like to think of ourselves as superheroes every now and again. The first question we always get is “What does Exverus mean?”, so I'll start there. Exverus means “from the truth” in Latin. I think that as a paid media agency, which is our area of expertise, that can extend to things as rational as transparency in how we do our business and how we manage our finances for our clients to really the crux and the core of how the agency has been able to thrive over the past several years, which is trust-based and truth-based relationships with clients, building that over time. As we think about the mission for the agency and what the agency stands for, it's right there in the name. As I mentioned, we are a paid media agency. We like to think of ourselves as the paid media agency for culture-creating, growth-stage brands. I guess that's really where our superpower comes in. Our superpower is growing culture-creating brands that don't necessarily have the eight and nine figure budgets to invest in paid media and need their dollars to work harder. That's not only what we've found we're best at, but it's also what we've found gives us the most personal fulfillment as an agency team and as a leadership team within the agency. So it's something that's really easy to stick to, and that's something that we're very proud of as well. ROB: Does that pull a little bit more then towards consumer? Or do you also see some B2B brands you would also dub as culture-creating in their own way? BILL: It's funny; we've been having more interesting conversations with B2B brands probably over the last year. So it does extend to that space, even if it certainly has its heart, and certainly our roots, in more of a consumer-facing type of communications infrastructure. But yes, it's really interesting to see how B2B brands are now saying, “The idea of being adjacent to culture, creating culture, or participating in culture is to help stand out, to help gain association and equity from existing cultural platforms; why does that necessarily exclude us? Why does everything that we do need to be so bland, so to speak?” It's been really fun having those conversations. ROB: You mentioned a judiciousness required around the resources. Is it possible maybe for you to dive down into a client or two and share what it looks like to spend those budgets in a way that really has to deliver in a near- to midterm-way, where they can't just say “We're investing in brand, we're investing in brand”? I assume you're not posting Coke ads for Coca-Cola, right? BILL: We do some work with Coke. We can't say exactly where or how, but we do some work with some of their brands in Atlanta, your hometown. But yes, you're right; it's not about having that long-term branding campaign that's on a very long leash from organizations that are used to having the discipline and the budgets, frankly, to be able to support that and not stress about what their investment's immediate return was. That's a constant conversation that we're having with our brand partners, and helping them understand how best to invest. As we think about that, there are two axioms that we like to share with our clients. Number one is “all media is performance media.” Whether it's something that feels like a longer term-ish, traditional branding campaign, there is still a performance that's being associated with that. There is still a short-term lens that is almost always associated with that. So we want to make sure we're understanding that to satisfy and appease the stakeholders in their organization who are looking for those short-term or more “prove it to me” type results. As we think about what the science tells us, what an analysis of the world's most successful and least successful and average-success brands tells us about how to invest dollars, we know there is a huge economic argument to be made from having that kind of brand-led communications. It really comes down to how you measure it. If you have appropriate measurement in place that can measure things that aren't as immediate as “tell me what the return on ad spend was for my campaign on Amazon,” for instance, then you're going to be in solid shape. So what we try to do with our clients is really understand what their needs are, what their stakeholders are looking for, and then curate a campaign that is rooted somewhat in science and in what works best at growing brands, but does that in a way that also has measurement incorporated so they can prove the impact of what they're doing if it's something where that immediate, vendor-driven measurement isn't right away available. That's how we approach that, and it is absolutely central to our conversations with our brand partners. ROB: Does that focus on measurability in any way impact the selection of marketing channels? You mentioned selecting for the measurement and thinking about the measurement of the channel correctly. Is there anything that's completely out from a measurement perspective? BILL: That's kind of the knock on a lot of traditional media, that it's very challenging to measure them in a more immediate way. Really what you're looking at there is you're trying to put a structure in place that can capture things that aren't as directly trackable. That's where you're looking at, what kind of marketing mix model is my organization using? If my organization spends $10-20 million plus on media or on other important marketing channels, I may already have a marketing mix model in place. Let's figure out how we can align with that and ensure the decisions that we're making are able to be picked up by that measurement. But if you're not, then you might say “I need something that can help me understand what the impact was of a TV spot or radio spot or an outdoor ad” – all things that we know work but are really hard to pin down exactly how they worked for me exactly last month. That's where we're looking at more customized measurement solutions, and that's stuff we can provide directly to a client, to one of our brand partners. We're very proud of being able to do that, but it does require some – we'll call it hoop-jumping. I think that the prize is absolutely worth it, because you've now got a more balanced media mix that's proven to be more effective, 100%, in driving a return for the brand. So jumping through those initial hoops around measurement and setting that up is always worth the investment of time and energy and money. ROB: That's such a neat area to pull in on. I do think a lot of marketers, when they hear “media mix modeling,” it sounds like a high-class tool. Is there a size of brand or a size of budget where it's more viable? Or is it really just a limitation on thinking and it can start from just one or two channels? BILL: I grew up in my career to some degree working with Nestlé. Nestlé has a number of billion-dollar brands and significantly more nine-figure annual sales brands. Those brands very often had access to marketing mix models, and it did feel like a high-class tool, especially at that time. What we've actually been able to figure out over the last three years is that there are now solutions in place for modeling that are significantly less expensive. They're essentially utilizing what we hear about when we hear about AI and machine learning. They're essentially utilizing machine learning in a very efficient and democratized way where you don't need to have expensive data scientists and data analysts running analyses over the course of months. You can now actually build a model over the course of weeks and then have that model in market and be continuously updating it with sales figures and investment figures across different marketing channels, not just media. The fact that that's now democratized is a huge win for brands who aren't spending $10 million plus in their advertising and marketing efforts. We've actually had success modeling out the impact of a campaign that was in the low six figures for an extremely well-known national client, a Fortune 5 client that was really looking to drill down for one of their subsidiaries and understand what the impact was of their spend so that they could then scale it out further, but didn't know where to scale it. To be able to show this channel versus this channel versus the third channel, and this was the relative impact and this is how they all work together – which is another important element – in a way where they spent five figures to have that analysis and had it done in less than eight weeks is a very powerful example of how that works best. ROB: It certainly seems democratizing not only for the brand, but also on even the agency side, because this sort of tooling sounds like the thing that you had to be in a holding company agency at some point, or a very large brand or house of brands, to even consider having access to. BILL: Yeah, that's exactly right. I grew up in that space, working with Nestlé, working in a large holding company for whom I still have a lot of heart and love, and that was the case. It was also the case back then that you really needed to be in part of one of those infrastructures in order to get strong rates for your brand. That's shifted now as so much of our media inventory has become biddable. The standards around how we negotiate, how we manage media for clients, have changed. It really is a golden age for the small- to medium-sized brand or marketer, the growing marketer or brand, to get into the marketplace and to be a meaningful player from Day 1 and not feel like you're being outgunned by these massive organizations. It's very exciting for us. ROB: Indeed. Let's pull on that origin story thread for a moment here, Bill. How did you go from that Nestlé, that holding company agency world, and decide to jump off the cliff and start Exverus? BILL: This is always an interesting question to answer because there was no real one point where it all happened, which is usually the case for most agencies. It happened very organically. I had decided to shift from going full-time, working in one space, to freelancing and to working as a consultant, maybe 10 years ago. As I was doing that, within about three or four months of doing that, I got a phone call from one of my favorite people on Earth, a client of mine from Nestlé, who said, “Hey, I'm over at Clif Bar now. We're really shaping up how we look at media and advertising across our brands. Would you be interested in taking a stab at essentially being a one-person media agency for Clif Bar?” Of course, in my mind I was thinking “there's no possible way I could do that,” and my mouth was somehow saying, “Yes, I'll give it a shot.” [laughs] That began a really wonderful relationship with Clif Bar, and that relationship grew as their investments grew and their need to grow new brands and new product formats grew. Between them and Creative Artist Agency (CAA) and their extremely wonderful, award-winning marketing team, which is now known as Observatory, I think they hit a point where the amount of work was too much for one person plus a few helpers on the side to handle. We had a lot of built-in credibility, working with an organization that's probably over a billion dollars in sales annually in Clif Bar, and CAA, which is the world's best-known talent agency from a marketing standpoint. Impeccable reputation. So there was a lot of built-in credibility. There was new demand. We just made the decision – I still remember my Head of Operations saying, “We have to go for it,” driving to a soccer match one Wednesday night. And thus Exverus was born. We said “we're really going to give this a go” about five and a half years ago now. ROB: Wow. Congrats. A lot of companies don't even make it that far. You've got a team around you now, and it feels probably pretty real. I think the timing that a firm starts always confers some advantages and disadvantages. Your firm started around I guess 2012-2014, depending on where you are in that slow-motion window that you referred to; in performance marketing, that's an interesting time within the evolution of the different channels. How do you think that timing informed how you attacked the market? BILL: It did a few things. At a macroeconomic level, I think unfortunately it created a scarcity mindset because we had just gone through a massive crash in 2008. By the time I really started, there was no very clear boom and very clear recovery happening. That was a more recent thing. So there was a bit of a scarcity mindset, which took a long time to work out of and to shift into more that abundance mindset. I think that can keep you conservative, which is a good thing sometimes, in some years. In some years that holds you back. So from a macro standpoint, that's how the timing maybe helped and maybe slowed things down over time. As I think, too, about where the industry was, really from Day 1, it reaffirmed that even though it was much more straightforward to start a media agency and to focus on digital channels – there was much more access; it was a much more equitable system with a lot less in the way in terms of gatekeepers like there are with some traditional media – even though it was a little bit more challenging to have those other mediums in place, being media-neutral and being able to offer all media, even if we were still digital-first, was a really smart strategic decision. As the rise of performance media has come in, and now for many organizations performance media has overtaken brand media by multiple times over – knowing that that trend was happening and having a strategy and a perspective of neutrality really helped us a lot. It helped us to build more trust-based relationships with our clients because we weren't trying to push them into the latest fad or the latest channel or the latest tactic for its own sake. We were always trying to do that based off of what was best for their business, what was best to grow their brand. That helps build trust rather than saying “We're focused in this particular area which is hot right now.” So I think that can be great to be a particular specialist, even within the specialty of paid media, but I think that our timing really reaffirmed our strategy and our approach to market, and it's one that's seen us continue to grow and be successful into and beyond 2021. ROB: For sure. It's an interesting time. You got to start past the social for the sake of social, social as the source of infinite free growth, but also social as the bucket of infinite budget without accountability. It's interesting you mentioned the gatekeepers. It's almost easy to forget the times when if you wanted to manage let's say your Facebook ads, there were only a handful of companies you could talk to about that. BILL: That's right. ROB: That's a whole different world. BILL: And to see how much – at one point I was doing the Facebook ads, 9 or 10 years ago, and it was exhausting keeping up with the changes. Every three months, something minor would change that you used daily, and every six months it seemed like they were completely renovating and revamping the entire process. It was so funny to see that TV couldn't change fast enough, print certainly couldn't change fast enough, and here you had social and other channels that were changing so fast that it was almost impossible to keep up with them. It was certainly an interesting time to start things up. ROB: A friend of mine used to work for one of those vendors. They had to keep up with all the changes, and they used to call every Tuesday “new bug Tuesday,” because there would be something new they had to go out and fix. You probably had to deal with the other end of that stick. BILL: That's right. ROB: Bill, as you reflect on the journey so far with Exverus, what are some lessons you've learned along the way that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting clean, from scratch? BILL: Things that I would do differently. I think that we were never slow to meet our clients' needs, but we were sometimes slow to say, “This is a macro trend and we should have a whole staff around it.” One of the examples is more performance-based media. The reason I say that is because we have plenty of team members, particularly today, who are world-class experts in performance, but a few years ago we kind of missed the boat a little bit because we thought that by satisfying our clients' immediate needs and performance, we were doing our jobs. What I missed was that this was a strategic exercise. There needed to be a strategic team of people that were focused in the performance space. One of the reasons why was that it wasn't that they needed to have a particular technical skillset; in many cases we're talking about the same media channels that can be used for very different purposes, like search, like social, like digital video and digital display. But what we were doing was missing the mindset. Those folks who really excel in performance have a completely different mindset and approach to how they manage media and how they manage client relationships to get to specific results. There's plenty of reasons for that, which all make sense. But missing that mindset was number one in terms of what we could've done better, going back probably 3-5 years ago. The other thing, too, is I think really understanding the business and the business side of being an agency leader. The ups and downs are not communicated to you when you are working at an agency in a way that's terribly transparent, or frankly often necessary. You're usually hearing the very big undulations of the waves. “Things are amazing. We won this huge account” or “Things aren't great and we need to have layoffs.” Those are the types of things you're hearing. What you don't realize is that as an agency owner, things are up and down on an hourly basis, some days on a quarter-hourly basis. There is a mindset and there is a psychological helmet that you need to put on to be able to manage that in the context of doing all of the wonderful work that your clients are contracting you to do. I think that is one thing that I certainly didn't know about, and that's something that lives alongside what all business owners learn, which is that you're responsible now for every element of the business. I was ready to do the accounting. That's easy. [laughs] I went to an accounting school for college. But it was the psychological aspect of being in our business and being comfortable with the way that our business works that, if you're someone without a very risk-tolerant mindset, might be a bit jarring. ROB: How do you process that over time? I know certainly initially, a lot of your team, you feel like you can't tell them a lot of the gusts. Sometimes they'll surprise you and they'll have a great solution, and sometimes they won't know what the heck to do and you might just freak them out a little bit. How do you think about processing, learning some of these blind spots, those shifts that we all have to make? BILL: That's a great question. From my standpoint, we try to be as transparent as possible with our team. Today we actually just had our quarterly state of the union. This time we didn't go into as much detail as normal, but we try to be transparent. “This is what's going on. This is where we're struggling. We're struggling to fill this particular role. Do you have any solutions? Do you think you might be able to help? Or if nothing else, please know that we're working on it still, because we know that's had an impact on some people's workloads.” We'll be very forthright with everything that we can. Without being obligated to or sharing specific numbers financially, we will share where we are in terms of reaching our goals and what it means to reach our goals. Is it just profit for the sake of profit? Or does profit open up new doors and new opportunities to all of us for strategic partnerships? That's a very different conversation, and it's one that I think our team appreciates hearing. One great piece of advice that I got during COVID was actually from Simon Sinek, Start with Why, very famous guy. Incredibly intelligent. Everyone knows his public persona. He's a family friend; he's been good friends with my wife for over a decade. We were chatting about there are certain things that we just don't know what to do and how to move forward in COVID, and he said, “Put it on your team. Share it with your team. Do that in a thoughtful way and say, ‘I don't know the answer to this. I'm not going to pretend that I'm the person who has all the answers all the time, and I'd love to hear what your input is and what your feedback or solutions are.' You'll be surprised as to what you get back. Your team isn't necessarily thinking about your business all day long, but they are working in it, and they are people that you hire specifically for their intelligence. So see if that helps.” And it really did. I also think it made for more open dialogue, which in today's age of transparency is really valued by employees and by myself and the rest of the leadership team. ROB: All such really good points in there. Reminds me of a very recent experience where for a long time, I had been suggesting a certain sort of client engagement model. I tried to communicate why, but I maybe wasn't really getting my point across. In a totally different conversation, I expressed a particular business goal in terms of margin – and to your point about profit margin, the key of telling people where that goes and what that gets us when you're growing – you need cash just to be in cash reserves. You need to have good financial cushion on the business. You need to invest in growth. You need all those things. Helping them know why you need profit helps instead of just thinking you should break even and everybody should take all the cash out. But I shared a particular goal in terms of profit margin, and I had somebody super brilliant on my team who said, “Oh, why don't we engage more in this model?” It was exactly pretty close to what I had suggested before, but without the full picture and the rationale and the transparency, it was just hanging empty. And everybody does things better when they think it's their idea, and that's okay. I don't have any problem with that. So really good point. BILL: From your standpoint, where do you feel the line is in terms of transparency, in terms of how you communicate with team members? ROB: That's a great question that I'm still learning. I have typically been a tremendously private person on these sorts of things, and over the past year I engaged with a business coach about a year ago who came recommended by people who have billion-dollar companies. That was good enough for me, and I could still afford them. He's just continued to push me on the value of what I'll get by sharing more with the team. Where that stands for us right now, to be real specific about it, at an exec team level, we're talking about – in a services organization, on our services side, we're talking about revenue per employee. We're talking about target profit margin. We're talking about what that actually looks like. And that's uncomfortable for me. I could regret it. I could learn something from it. But it's going in the right direction. BILL: That's great. I think we've probably had a very similar experience. I may not dig into some of the KPIs that you do quite as in-depth, but sharing that information can be liberating when it's done properly, and it can show a lot of faith in the team. For me it was a great learning experience, and it was a great moment of growth starting to share that information. ROB: I'm glad to hear and gain some comfort. The worst story we ever had on here about somebody sharing stuff was someone who had an employee suck out $300,000 in payroll taxes that they were personally liable for, and they had to drive ahead and build the business and dig their way out. But that's a different lesson to be learned. BILL: Yes, and I don't necessarily think we should be giving access to the finances to everyone. [laughs] ROB: Totally agree. Bill, when people want to track you down and track down Exverus, where should they go to find you? BILL: Probably the best place for Exverus is our website. It's www.exverus.com. For me, I can be found on LinkedIn. I'm Bill Durrant with two R's. No relation to Kevin. I'm pretty easy to track down if you add “Exverus” to the end of that in the search queue. ROB: That's good. It's good to know we can't track down KD through you. We'll have to find our own way. BILL: Just want to set expectations. ROB: [laughs] Thank you so much, Bill. Congratulations to everything you and Exverus have accomplished so far, and I wish you the best. BILL: Appreciate it. Thanks, Rob. ROB: Take care. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

With Escape Room Tournament of Champions hitting theaters this week, we decided to mix it this episode up a bit.  You see, your respective hosts each have an unfounded confidence that they are, in fact, the most talented Escape Room-ers, that probably ever existed.  I say this because, JUST last weekend, the AE crew traveled to Escape in Time - Madison to test our wits in their new Cryosleep room. The short story is, we only used one clue and made it out of the room with 20 whole minutes to spare and basically we all think we own the place now. That said, the experience left us with lots of questions. Rob: "How much of the experience is automated vs. managed by the Gamemaster's manual control?" Carrie: "What's the weirdest thing you've seen on the hidden cameras?" Tim: "Do you give discounts for superior human beings, who are able to navigate complicated clues more quickly than anybody you've ever seen?" So for this episode, we have the pleasure of sitting down with Sara and Cheris the owner and Gamemaster at Escape in Time - Madison, to find out from the experts how Escape Room Tournament of Champions stacks up AND to ask the obvious question "which of us really was the best player"? Note: this is an "Spoiler Free" episode, but expect a series of grunts and moans and "mmmhmmmms" as we try to have a knowing conversation, void of explaining any of the twists. In worth mentioning, Carrie and Tim commiserate on Black Widow, Rob takes on the task or reviewing Space Jam: A New Legacy and Tim reviews the new Nic Cage flick, Pig (which he kind of loved, to the surprise of nobody). Tune in and we hope you enjoy this fun episode! ***************************************************************** Love the Podcast? Leave us a review! Other places to follow Alternate Ending. Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | Twitter Tim Letterboxd – Rob Letterboxd – Carrie Letterboxd

Beth Trejo is CEO at Chatterkick, a digital marketing agency that focuses on using social media platforms to connect businesses in a “real way” with their customers and drive to their businesses forward. Beth warns social media is complex. Time is everything on social and companies do not have the luxury of crafting content and sending it through committee approval processes. She cites studies that show that “about 80% of all businesses are not responding to their social media messages” – they only look at Facebook Messenger, skip the other places messages come in, and potentially miss out on big opportunities. Beth believes that many companies cannot effectively manage social media internally. They may not have the time to handle the volume of content needed to build relationships. Coordinating messages across the range of platforms customers may be using adds to the challenge. In addition, businesses often do not realize that these platforms are communication channels and can used for far more than just advertising and promotion.  Beth says, “It's a lot of time to manage a social account. And if you have seven channels and lots of content going out, that's a big job.” Chatterkick's role is to help clients forge strong social media bonds and execute outreach expansion strategies. These “real connections” help companies: build employee and customer loyalty  gain competitive advantages  understand and clarify what return on investment can really mean to them. Beth explains how important it is to get employees of a company to share their employers' content. Things that can impact employees “sharing” include: Are they proud of how the company portrays itself online as a business? Do they like the company's website? Do they like the content? (Put out content that makes them proud.) Do they even know the content went out? (Tell them what is going out, when, and where and remind employees to share it if it is something they care about. Make it easy for them to share.) Do they understand the underlying technology? If they share something, who it will go to? How will they do it? What will they say? What should they say? (They may need some training.) Do they feel “authentic” in their brand amplification conversations? (Chatterkick believes that authentic content and real photos are what work on social platforms) Beth believes a strong indicator of employee pride in their company and what it is doing is when they share the company's social media content, not only with potential clients, but also with their friends and families. She has also found social media platforms to be a cost-effective way to recruit new employees – and “it's not all just a LinkedIn game.” The biggest thing to think about when recruiting is not compensation, but the value proposition. Potential recruits are more responsive when presented with visual and digital representations of the company's culture.” Even subtle differences can make jobs “stickier.” Chatterkick had elements of distributed work long before Covid. Beth says remote work takes “constant work,” open dialogue, and a lot of thought about team needs, removing communication barriers, and preventing communication overload. These needs will change, depending on the teams involved, client needs, and community impacts.  Beth can be found on her agency's website at: chatterkick.com or by email at: beth@chatterkick.com Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Beth Trejo, CEO at Chatterkick based in Sioux City, Iowa. Welcome to the podcast. BETH: Thank you so much. Great to have a conversation with you today. ROB: It's great to have you here. Why don't you start off by introducing Chatterkick and what areas of excellence the firm focuses on? BETH: Yeah, I'd be happy to. Chatterkick was started 9 years ago. We really saw the need to help connect our business partners with real humans on the other end of logos. We use channels and platforms that are relevant, which happen to be social media, and we believe the power of those connections can help drive business forward. Some of our partners use us to build loyalty on behalf of their employees or their customers; other times, they use our support to help gain competitive advantages or really understand and clarify what return on investment can really mean to them. We are often categorized as a digital marketing agency, which we definitely fit into that category, but really focus on the social media platforms and how they can impact business. ROB: Got it. It might help to dig into a client as an example, because it sounds like you are perhaps more focused on the conversation aspect of social rather than the broadcast side. I might not have that quite right. Can you get us into what this might look like with a client?  BETH: Oftentimes we find that businesses don't have the time or the expertise to handle social media internally. We started on that premise and still fulfill many of those needs today. A business will come to us and say, “Hey, we need support. We're just posting every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's, and that's the extent of what we're doing on social.” So, we help them develop a strategy and then execute the strategy to form those bonds from two-way communication as well as with advertising, marketing. We're seeing a ton of digital recruitment need right now. These platforms are communication channels, and I think sometimes we forget about that as business owners. There's a lot of pushing of ads and promotion out there, and that oftentimes does work. But there is so much more that can be had on these platforms, and that's where we see an opportunity for our business partners to get ahead. ROB: That's a great point to push in on, that substitutionary effect of content and objectives focusing more on maybe recruitment than some traditional messaging. How are clients looking at that? Is that an easier ROI for them to get their heads wrapped around, or is it just different? BETH: I think it sometimes is easier. It really depends. There's two things we see from return on employee engagement or digital recruitment strategies. The easiest one is “I was spending XYZ a year in the traditional ways to acquire new candidates, and I was able to save money (XYZ percentage) using some of these social tools.” Sometimes it's just as easy and simple as that. When it comes to employee engagement, it's very similar to how you would measure your customer engagement on these platforms. The most manual and probably painful tracking way is to literally tag and count, tally up, who is engaging, how much they're engaging, and digitally what does that presence look like with your team and your colleagues. Then there are other softwares and tools we can use to speed up that tracking process. But ultimately, that's where we see the businesses have some of the most success, because your employees are already connected to your customers. If they're sharing your content, even if it is bleeding out to their friends and family, that's how you know you have really proud employees that care about what you're doing. They want to spread the word personally just as much as professionally. ROB: That's an excellent point. It can be such a tricky thing to thread because people really are often proud of the work that they do but can also feel inauthentic to an extent. We just had a team retreat, and one of my team's suggestions – certainly not mine – was that the team could amplify our social content. But it also feels awkward to ask them to do that. How do you think about helping employees to feel authentic in their brand amplification conversations? BETH: That's a really good question. You never want to force people to do it. I think there is a fine line. I see a lot of businesses try to give incentives or find ways to gamify that, and I do think the concept of gamifying that is interesting. I've seen it work. But if you want to stay authentic, the best way to do it is put content out there that maybe different business units or different teams are really proud of. A lot of the hesitation when it comes to why your employees aren't sharing your content, from what we've found, is technical. Some people are still really scared and they don't know how to do some of the technical things on these platforms. They don't know, if they share it, who it will go to. How will they do it? What will they say? What should they say? If you have people that are naturally not digital natives, there may be some learning. That's the biggest barrier they're having. The other barrier we see is they just aren't proud of how you portray yourself online as a business. Ask your employees: Do they like your website? Do they like the content you're putting on social? If there's a big gap, chances are they're not going to share it. Then the other thing is a lot of people miss things in your content. It's not a matter of they don't want to; it's just they didn't know it went out. There's eight different platforms they're following; they're not thinking about searching you out. So, you need to make it extremely easy for them, even if it's as simple as sending it out in your update, like, “This is the content that's going out this week. It's important to us because of this.” Maybe you hit up your Slack channel and say, “Hey, this post just went out. If this is something you care about, please share it.” Just little reminders make the biggest difference. ROB: That nudge there certainly seems helpful. When we're talking about recruitment, I've seen billboards for restaurant jobs; I've seen online ads for executive jobs. Is there a sweet spot for you? Is it more in a B2B context, white collar? Is it consumer and retail and that sort of thing? BETH: I think the beauty of it is we're doing everything from filling food processing manufacturing jobs to high level white collar leadership positions. Again, if you just think of these platforms as communication channels and not as solutions, different strategies definitely work on a lot of the platforms, honestly. It's not all just a LinkedIn game when it comes to recruitment. The biggest thing that businesses really need to think about is, what is the value prop you're putting out there on the job? So many people are still using the “We're looking for an energetic self-starter.” When you are in a very high demand employment category, you have to offer something different. You have to find that one little thing that makes your company unique as an employer brand and lean into that, because that is what will attract the right type of candidates and the ones that maybe you're having a hard time finding in other traditional ways of recruitment. ROB: And it's not going to be as transactional, either, as the “We have $13, $15, $20, $25, $30 an hour jobs,” because what you lead with is what you get. You're going to get someone who's chasing a dollar and they'll take $5 an hour more somewhere else when they can find it. You're leading with who they can be and become. BETH: Right. If you really have it dialed in – some of the employers we're working with that are recruiting both production type jobs as well as leadership positions really have a visual and digital representation of who they are from a culture perspective. Those little, subtle differences oftentimes will help make jobs stickier. It makes a big difference when it comes to – you'll get that passive candidate that's sitting in front of their TV watching movies. Your job has to be positioned well enough that they will take action. Very different than if they're searching on Indeed and actively trying to find a job. That's where social media is extremely powerful. It's that “Would you go to a job if you didn't have to work nights and weekends?” One of our best performing ad's copy units says something along the lines of “If you can't name one reason you like your job, it's time for a different job.” It's funny because we could put every incentive out there. You'd think that's what would really drive people – sign-on bonuses and all of these very attractive financial rewards – but that one is the one that actually gets the most people to apply. ROB: That's really, really interesting. Beth, you mentioned that Chatterkick's been around about 9 years. Take us back a little bit and maybe share, how did the business start? What led you to take this dive? BETH: I did not come from an agency world. I created an agency that I would want to work with. Prior to starting Chatterkick, I was at a regional Chamber of Commerce. I was an account management position where I would go out and visit with businesses and literally ask them, “How can I help you on behalf of the Chamber?” What that led to is a lot of answers that fit into buckets of they needed to communicate with their potential employees or their potential customers. They were kind of stuck at that time – this is 12 years ago, probably – about how to navigate the digital trends, how to understand the power of their website. I saw these conversations and they were happening more and more and more, and people were looking to me for the solutions, and I was saying, “Okay, there's Facebook. Try it this way,” plug and playing all of the different platforms. I was also in in-person meetings – committee meetings, coffees, lunches – and was watching the purest and oldest school form of social networking, handshakes and connecting with people in real life and forming relationships. I really saw the power of that. I was taking that same model and helping businesses move that to the digital world. That really was the premise on how Chatterkick was born, and why I still believe in that power of a real person on the other end of some of our digital elements and platforms. I think that is a differentiator in many categories today. ROB: And your clients will certainly see that as well when you have that personal touch, that personal handshake – although some of that has been limited a little bit over the past year, limiting even for teams. Have you been able to get together with clients? Has your team been separate? How have you thought about that personal touch when the physical touch has been maybe easy, maybe not easy to find? BETH: We're a remote team anyways and we've had different elements of remote over the last 10 years. But even in the last 5 years, we've definitely hired team members in different markets, and our clients are all over the country. So that wasn't a huge change, but one of the biggest changes that we had to overcome was our content captures. One of the ways that we're a little bit different than a lot of agencies is we believe that authentic content and real photos, regardless of the type of business you have, are the things that work on social. So, we include that with every engagement, whether they're in New York City or in the Midwest. That content capture – and this is content specifically designed for social media, so it's a little bit different than a commercial photo shoot – but we had to reconfigure what those looked like when the pandemic hit. What we ended up doing was we did them virtually. It was almost like a podcast episode, and we would take the audio and use it for content. We would take the quotes and use that for Instagram stories. We would take screenshots of the person and what they were saying and develop that for thought leadership pieces. It ended up working well for a lot of our businesses that couldn't have people onsite even if they wanted to. It still allowed us to get that real content from the leadership team and from the employees working at the business without having all of the work on them to source up the photos and the pieces of content that work on the platforms. ROB: You're in this somewhat unique – not completely unique, but relatively so – position where being distributed was nothing new to you. What have you found to be some of the key factors to making distributed work and cadences of gathering, if there are any? BETH: We were just having these conversations internally, too. I think the biggest thing that I've learned about remote work is it's constant work. You need to constantly be thinking, “How can I help my team? How can I remove communication barriers? How can I help prevent communication overload?” Because that is also a real thing that happens with everybody online all the time. So it's a constant conversation that we have, and I think it's going to continuously change on what that looks like depending on the team we have, depending on the client's needs we're addressing, and the different parts of what our communities look like. Some of them are wide open right now and others are a little bit less. What does that look like for different thresholds and tolerances of gathering right now? An open dialogue and communication is really where we're starting. We did open our office. We have one primary office that is almost like a co-working flex space that we're keeping right now to let people come together locally if they would like to. We're kind of leaving it in their hands. And then our remote team, which is probably 60% of the total workforce right now, are welcome to go to co-working spaces, but many of them are still working directly in their home. ROB: That's such an interesting dynamic even in and of itself: who chooses to go out and work somewhere and who chooses not to. You see trends emerge, but it's so much deeper and more complicated than that for everyone's situation. BETH: It really is. I think just having the mindset of flexibility is really important. I know I like that. Like, “My house is going to be quiet today so I'm going to work from home,” or on the other side of that, “My kids are going to be around and having their friends at the house, so I want to be at the office today.” [laughs] I think that is really nice to be able to offer and have that flexibility on where you work, because your days all look different too. ROB: Absolutely. Beth, you mentioned how this thing started. What did it look like when it started to grow? How did you think about what goals were key to bring on, when it was key to maybe bring on someone else essential on the executive team side, that sort of thing? BETH: I have an interesting story. I started out myself, and I had an administrative partner who was more than just administrative. Almost a key executive that was able to help me ramp up the business. She wasn't working full time in the business; more of a support system. I am great at speaking and leading teams, but the details are not necessarily my friend, especially as it relates to starting a business. So, she was really able to come in and help align some of those weaknesses and things that slowed me down. Because when you're starting, you need to get customers. We ended up landing a pretty large customer in the beginning. While I thought I would be cold calling all day long, I was really working directly servicing customers. Then we had an intern come in and hired her full time. That was our first full-time employee. It was one of the scariest things I had to do as a business owner, especially at that time, because it is scary to hire someone. Once we got to a three-person team is really where I felt like we could gain a top of opportunity and momentum. We were all on the same page. We had our defined skillsets. We were able to move quickly and adjust quickly and get a lot accomplished during that timeframe. Actually, when we scaled, we kept that model and, in some regard, reverted back to these three to four people dynamic teams that surround each of the customers. In social, time is everything. You don't want to spend 4 hours creating one Facebook post and then send it to four copywriters and approval process. Overwork is a thing when it relates to content. We didn't want to have these two silos like traditional agencies have in some regards of creative on one side and execution/implementation. It was too many account management barriers. So, we created these teams that can work quickly on content and have those conversations on a regular basis. If someone needs to change copy a little bit or an employee is no longer there and they need to take them from the website, that can happen a lot quicker than trying to make it through four different departments and leadership teams. ROB: I think that's a great takeaway, that pod approach. You're not having some sort of interchangeable copy team trying to learn brand voices they haven't seen in 6 months. It makes a ton of sense. As you reflect on the business so far, what are some other lessons that you have learned where you might have course-corrected sooner in the business if you had learned these lessons sooner? BETH: I think one thing that has always been challenging for me – and it still is, and it's one of those things I continue to work on – is I often avoid conflict. Because of that, I've probably avoided tough conversations a little too long, whether that's with clients or team members. Not addressing things in a fast and immediate fashion has let things dwindle and bubble up in ways that never really was my intention, but I have noticed that can really impact the organization, again, on both the customer and the employee side. That's one thing I am continuously working on, being able to move into an area of conflict in a quicker manner and address things – still kindly and not trying to be a jerk, but sometimes those tough conversations are the ones you need to have the most. ROB: It's definitely a balance in there somewhere. We all know the stories of the closely held business where the person in charge is just kind of a maniac. BETH: Right. [laughs] ROB: How do you reflect and find those moments where sometimes it's time to let something go a little bit, sometimes it's time to lean into it and address it? BETH: Oh man, if I had the answer to that, that'd be awesome. That is something that is really hard. I think a lot of agency leadership struggles with that because, you're right, you don't want to make hasty decisions, either, and you need to have the right information. But sometimes you won't have all of the pieces of the puzzle to actually make a decision. Sometimes you've just got to move on with it. I have looked at some awesome models out there, like “Is it urgent? Is it immediate?” and better prioritizing and planning on that decision-making, but it's still tough. [laughs] ROB: Sometimes we just need to know that, too, and that helps to know that it's tough for us, absolutely. Beth, as you reflect on what's coming up next for Chatterkick and your clients – I feel like we're a little bit away from the new and exciting channels conversation for the most part. It used to be the channel of the month or the week or the year. There are still new channels, but it feels like it's less about the flavor of the day. What's coming up that you're excited about? BETH: This is probably a unique answer, but I'm actually excited that some of these platforms and the people that are using them – businesses, agencies – are reverting back to “Maybe we should look at something a little bit simpler,” or “Maybe we need to answer all of our reviews in our comments” or “Maybe we do need to take a stand on something that's important to us as an organization and put it out there into the world, or showcase our people more.” I think that is exciting to me because I've seen things become so ad-heavy, so commercialized that we forget who we're talking to. We always talk about, “Would you click on that?” I mean, how many times do we as businesses put content out there and say, “I wouldn't click on this. This doesn't look interesting to me”? There's an element of that that I think we forget about. I have seen the trends of people – and there's data that supports it – that businesses are looking for customer experience and forming those intimate relationships with their customers, and that wasn't always the case, especially in the consumer goods category or the fashion industry. But there are brands that are doing it really well, and they're seeing market share shifts. That is what really excites me because I really do think we want to know what our lipstick brand is all about. We want to have that information so that we feel like we can narrow our choices when it comes to products or services, both in the B2B and B2C space. ROB: It sounds like it ties back a little bit to that differentiated hiring conversation. We're in, as you mentioned, various stages of reopening from COVID. We have companies that need employees, we have companies that are trying to reacquire customers, we have new entrants. It seems a little bit like the transactional commodity value prop. Maybe for the moment it's even being a little bit priced out of the ad mix. Everyone needs the same ad space, the same inventory. BETH: Yeah, I definitely think that. I see, again, businesses taking a step back and saying, “We have 500 priorities today” – small businesses as much as large entities. “How are we going to prioritize what really matters to our customers, what matters to our teams that will be supporting these customers? Is what we are selling or telling a good use of our time, and does it reflect what we're about?” I have noticed that shift a little bit. I've also noticed people ignore that, and they're struggling when there's a crisis. They're struggling when some of their employees post something bad about them. They're struggling when they get a negative review. If you can't get ahead of it, you're going to be in that scenario where you're constantly playing defense. I just think that's a hard place to be in the digital space. ROB: Absolutely. When you're talking about employee reviews, is that more Glassdoor or more Yelp? BETH: You see it across the board. You see it from people posting on their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts to people posting on your employer review sites – Glassdoor, Comparably, Indeed. But then you also see it coming in your comments on your platforms. Maybe it's on your Instagram post, maybe it's on your LinkedIn post. The statistics still say that about 80% of all businesses are not responding to their social media messages, and I think a lot of that is because they're just checking Facebook Messenger. They're not checking all the other spots that these messages come in. I always tell our partners, Step 1 for ROI is just answer your digital phone. You have to be there, you have to respond. It's just the way that people want to communicate these days, and if you're not there, you may lose out on a big opportunity. ROB: That's an interesting rise that you're alluding to. The consumer-facing social is what we've historically thought about as social, but it almost seems like businesses that are smaller than would usually need a CorpComms department now have a CorpComms function to their social. BETH: Yeah. We see that even with businesses that never thought they would be – their audience isn't on Facebook, their audience isn't on Instagram. What they don't realize is they're in different mindsets. Go grab your customer's phone. Is Facebook eating up their battery? Are they on Instagram? Chances are, they are. They're just maybe not in that same mindset, or maybe they're looking at it differently. But if you're not there to check the messages, you can miss big deals or customer service complaints or just contact requests that don't get followed up with. They'll come through those channels, oftentimes. ROB: That sounds more than a little bit overwhelming, but I'm guessing that's why people call you. BETH: [laughs] Right, exactly. That's the other thing we have really tried to educate people on over the last 9 years. I understand the allure of “This is an intern's job; let's go grab an intern. They can do all the things.” But if you've ever done all the things, you realize the width of how many platforms and how different the platforms are, and then the depth and how many steps need to happen before one Facebook post or one LinkedIn post goes out. So, I think it's really important for leaders and executives to understand that this isn't just a simple thing anymore from a technical perspective. It's a lot of time to manage a social account. And if you have seven channels and lots of content going out, that's a big job. ROB: Absolutely, it is. Beth, when people want to get in touch with you and with Chatterkick, where should they go to find you? BETH: They can go to chatterkick.com. It's spelled just like it sounds. My email is pretty easy to access; it's all over our website, but it is beth@chatterkick.com. ROB: Sounds great. Beth, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, for sharing the Chatterkick journey, for sharing the fits and starts of reopening and all that means for teams and marketers and businesses as well. It's been really helpful. BETH: It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. ROB: Thank you, Beth. Be well. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Sandra Fathi is President and Founder at Affect, a public relations, marketing, and social media agency that focuses on B2B technology, healthcare, and professional services. The agency clients range from “startups to large multinational publicly traded companies.” B2B tech includes such things as “cryptocurrency, data, cybersecurity, supply chain and logistics, mobile application development, and cloud computing.” Healthcare includes healthcare IT, devices, MedTech. and services but stops short of highly FDA-regulated areas. Clients' products tend to be complex but further challenges for the agency include multiple decision-makers and multiple considerations. Sandra says people seek out her agency because they appreciate the agency's focus on business outcomes and want an agency with “deep technical expertise.” To meet this technical challenge, the agency selects its team members based on three criteria.  The ability to communicate verbally . . . to explain complex ideas to others, to translate expert or technical information so that non-technical layman can understand The ability to write in a compelling fashion, to mirror the voice of the client The passion to excel at customer service and have the self-driven motivation, curiosity, and interest to “dig deep” into its clients' products and services Sandra graduated early from high school and, after her first year of college at NYU, went to Israel for “a year abroad.” She stayed 11 years, spent 2 years in the Israeli army, and completed her degree before working for technology publishers IDG and Ziff Davis, where she produced the first internet world event in the Middle East. A job with a videoconferencing company brought her back to the US and she spent a number of years in “the agency life.” 9/11 proved pivotal for many people. Six months-of-thinking later, Sandra realized that she loved her work . . . but she didn't love the company she was working for. On impulse, she quit to start her own agency, one where both she and her employees “would love to work” because it was “just time.” Her former employer became her first client. Her agency grew by word of mouth, the application of her marketing expertise, and “farming out work to friends and colleagues.” Within six months, she added two employees. Today, Affect tries to keep most of the work “in house,” unless it is something they don't do, like coding or graphic design. Over the past year, even in the face of Covid, and unlike many other businesses, the agency grew. Sandra says the agency had “terrific year from a financial perspective, even though it was such a difficult year from a personal and global perspective.” Sandra says it is important, when faced with challenges, that organizational leaders know how to make tough decisions quickly – to “do the right thing for your team in the long run.” Otherwise, it's like “death by a thousand cuts.” Affect employees found they could be more efficient working remotely – but are gradually working their way back to the office -- there are just some things that cannot be replicated in a virtual environment.  Sandra credits the advice of “a community of trusted advisors” for helping her avoid and navigate the numerous challenges the agency has faced. She can be reached on her agency's website at: Affect.com or by email at: sfathi@affect.com.   ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Sandra Fathi, President and Founder at Affect, based in New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Sandra. SANDRA: Thank you so much. Glad to be here. ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don't you start off and tell us about the specialization of Affect and where you are most effective?  SANDRA: Thank you. We are a public relations, marketing, and social media agency. Our focus is really B2B tech and healthcare. That can run the gamut. Almost every company, every organization today has a technology piece to it, and it can be everything from any type of tech or electronic gadget that you have. But we tend to go deeper and it tends to be everything from AI, cryptocurrency, data, cybersecurity, supply chain and logistics, mobile application development, cloud computing. We like to get really nerdy, is basically where we like to spend our time. [laughs] Then on the healthcare side, it's a lot of healthcare IT, healthcare devices, MedTech as well as services. We don't get involved in things that are very highly FDA regulated like drug development. That's a little bit of a specialty that we don't fall into. But we love working with everything from startups to large multinational publicly traded companies. Most of them, why they come to us, there's two reasons. One, they want that deep technical expertise – somebody who's really going to get in there, get under the hood, and try to understand the product, the market, the competitors, the value proposition, so we can then go out and evangelize the company and their products and services. You can't really do that well if you don't truly understand the products themselves and the pain points for the customers. Most of the products that we represent are pretty complex and have multiple decision-makers and multiple considerations, so we really have to dig in deep. The other thing that we really specialize in is focusing on the outcomes from a business perspective. A lot of firms will talk about, “These are the activities we're going to do for you. We're going to do media relations, we're going to talk to the press, we're going to help you key messages,” and they might have outputs, like “We're going to issue four press releases a month” or “We're going to write 10 articles.” But the outcomes are really where you're moving the needle for the business. If someone comes to us, one of the first things we want to understand is, what are they trying to achieve from a business perspective? Are they entering a new market? Do they have a sales goal? Do they have a number they have to hit for lead generation? Are they pivoting their positioning? We try to match all of our activities to help drive those outcomes. The holy grail could be revenue, but for some of the clients we're working with, their sales cycle might be 12 to 18 months depending on the size of purchase, so we might focus on a lot of the milestones that are leading to revenue – again, lead generation, traffic to the website, registration for product demos, registration for events, and of course, eventually contracts and actual dollar amounts. We do spend a lot of time mapping to those business goals to make sure that everything that we do is really making a difference. ROB: There's a lot of richness in what you just said. You said it so casually that I think we missed 10 levels of detail we could probably dig into. You talk about the sales cycle and you're talking about different points in the – I don't know if you talk about the customer journey much, but you've implied it without even saying it. Maybe that's the real magic of it: not even needing to name check it. But you're talking about all these different points along that stream. One thing that strikes me – you talked about technology being technical, of course, and healthcare, when you talk about some of these different types of products and solutions in that space, is also technical. I wonder a little bit, when you're building your team, how do you find this magical unicorn of marketers who are going to understand cryptocurrency and get current on nonfungible tokens as that becomes a prominent thing? How do you filter for that talent? SANDRA: We talk about looking for triple threats when we look for team members. [laughs] The first step starts with excellent communication overall. You're looking for someone who, whether it's verbal communications, written communications, any form, they are very good at expressing themselves and explaining complex concepts to others. A lot of what we're doing is really translating, in many ways, from a technical audience to a non-technical audience, or from an expert to a layman. So we want to have great communicators. The second thing we want is great writers. It's one thing to be able to communicate, but also to write in compelling fashion, whether that's mirroring the voice of the client or the company or writing marketing copy or a tweet or ghostwriting a book on behalf of a CEO – those are things that we definitely look for. The third thing that we look for is people who are fantastic at client service. Ultimately, we are in the service industry and we are looking to serve our clients, and we have to know that we'll do everything that it takes to make them happy so they'll be satisfied with the work. Those are the three core elements. Then layered on top of that, if you will, yes, we do look for people who have B2B tech and healthcare experience, and it's great if we're able to find them. Not everyone goes into college and says, “I'm going to major in B2B tech PR.” [laughs] That isn't typically where their aspirations go. They want to work in the music industry or they want to work in fashion or sports marketing and all these other places that seem a lot shinier and flashier. But for those that do, and especially for those that have what I would call an innate curiosity, people who are lifelong learners, who want to know – I'm not saying they have to do a degree – and I don't think you can even get one yet – in cryptocurrency. But people who are interested and willing to spend the time, watch the videos, do the research, do the searches, go to events, listen to experts. And that's more something that people come to the table with. It's either you have that trait or you don't. I'm a person that every time I meet a new prospect or client, I'm fascinated by their business and understanding what the founder's story was, how they came up with this product, how it was developed. Give me the background and what makes you different. I love that. That gets me excited. And I don't want to be an expert just in one thing, but I want to constantly be learning and developing professionally. That is more of what I look for. How can I find people who have that self-driven motivation, that curiosity, that interest so they'll be willing – when they have an opportunity to work on an account that's about artificial intelligence in the healthcare arena, they're going to dive in, roll up their sleeves, and learn as much as they can so they can be that much more effective at their job. It really is “every day something new.” A few weeks ago, we worked on a pitch for a prospect that was in the clean energy space. Clean energy is a big umbrella. It's hydro power, it's solar power, it's wind power, it's so many other aspects. So even when you have experience, there's always something new and something interesting. I think what we don't look for, if I were to put the opposite, is folks who are comfortable. [laughs] What I mean by that is if you want to keep the status quo and you're like, “I've been there, I've done that, and I just want to stick with what I know,” then this isn't the right place for you. But if it's someone who is always wanting to learn what's next, what's new, and how to pique their interest, then it's a really good fit. ROB: Right. There are plenty of firms out there. If you just want to do corporate communications press releases, there are plenty of places you can go for that, and it sounds like it's not with you at Affect. Sandra, when you think about the background of the company, what was the origin story? What led you to jump out there and decide that you were going to do your own thing instead of the potential convenience of someone else paying your paycheck and helping you find the business? SANDRA: I've always had an independent streak. That didn't always make my parents happy as a child. [laughs] You want to have kids who are independent, but it's not easy to parent them – which I know because I'm getting the payback now from my own children. ROB: Right. [laughs] SANDRA: But if I were to go way, way back, I didn't have a traditional path, so to speak. I grew up in New York and Long Island. I graduated a little early from high school because I just couldn't wait to get started with life, and I did my first year of college at NYU. My second year was meant to be a year abroad in Israel, and I actually wound up staying for 11. So I did go to Israel for what was supposed to be a 1-year program and I had an incredible roommate who turned into my best friend, and we're still very close today. One of the biggest gifts she gave me was convincing me that we needed to drop out of college and join the army. She was right. We both did. I was 2 years in the army in Israel, and when I graduated, although I did come back for a short period of time to the U.S., I wound up deciding to go back to Israel and finish my degree there. My first job once I graduated was a reporter for a division of IDG and Ziff Davis, which, if you're not familiar with them, are large technology publishers. That kind of started me on the path, if you will, to this interest in tech. It was very early days. I laugh about it now, but one of the first projects I worked on was a book – a printed book – of email addresses for CEOs of tech companies. Now it's laughable, but at the time it was very cutting edge. [laughs] I worked for that publisher for some time, and it was very interesting because not only did they publish books and magazines, but they also produced events. I produced the first internet world event in the Middle East at the time. It was really when Israel as a country was just starting to develop that startup nation mentality and reputation. I did wind up going in-house and working for a company in the videoconferencing industry. That moved me back to the U.S., and I was there for some time. Then I wound up going to Nokia and later to one of the largest global PR agencies, in their tech division. I loved agency life in terms of the pace and working on multiple clients and getting to talk to the C-suite and really being able to see the ROI of the work that we were doing and how it impacted everything from their ability to make their quarter to their stock price to outcomes for employees or hiring. That was really exciting for me. What was not suitable for me was the bureaucracy, the politics, occasional compromising of principles for process. [laughs] There were a lot of things about that particular experience that taught me what I want to do and what I don't want to do. When people say, “What have you learned from your managers or great bosses?”, I feel like I've had both, and I have learned just as much from those that I would never wish on my worst enemy as I have from those that I absolutely adored and loved. That definitely sparked the desire to continue this path in PR specifically, and also to build my own agency, but it also shaped very much the focus on being an employee-centric, team-centric organization, and one that puts culture ahead of the almighty profit or clients at times as well. ROB: I know people who've been very much in that similar sort of organization and possibly that same organization, and 15 years after you left, I hear some pretty similar stories. You probably know some folks that are still in there. You can rest well in that decision. Tell me about the story arc – you started the firm, and what's the initial trajectory of going from a client to a few clients and you versus the learning process of building a team? SANDRA: What I can say is for me, the final straw in my corporate job was actually 9/11. It was a pretty pivotal moment for me, and for anyone, really, who was impacted by that day or living in the Tri-State Area. Although, thank God, nothing happened to my immediate family, it couldn't help but be a watershed moment where you reevaluated your life in so many ways. As I mentioned previously, I was clear on “I love what I'm doing; I don't necessarily love the company I'm doing it for.” [laughs] I needed to reevaluate. It took me a few months to crystallize that I wanted to leave. I had gone on vacation with my husband, and I came back to work on a Monday and I think I called him at noon and was like, “I have to quit today.” He was like, “Please come home and let's have a discussion.” And I quit the next day. It was somewhat impetuous. I think I had just reached that level of like “I have to jump,” and there was never going to be the best time to do it. It was 6 months after 9/11, so I do remember my boss at the time – he kind of took my hand, like a dad, and was like, “Are you sure you want to do this?” [laughs] I was like, “Yeah.” I became very fortunate in that my former employer became my first client. I was very lucky that I was able to basically turn that into my first client. Then I slowly started getting enough work from word-of-mouth and from using my own marketing skills to promote the company that I was farming out work to friends and to colleagues. I think it didn't take more than about 4 or 5 months before I hired my first two employees. It was very organic. I wouldn't say that I had a grand plan when I made the leap. I think in many ways that helped me because the pressure was not to build a grand agency, but to provide for my family and build a career for myself – but the person I was really trying to meet the standards of was my own rather than some sort of third party. I did have a daughter at the time who was only a year and a half old. Not long after, I also had my son. So I had two young kids at home not long after starting the agency, which is always challenging. But if you want something done, as they say, give it to a busy person. Somehow you make it work. Those first few years were definitely – I worked harder than I ever had, but at least I was doing it for myself and not for someone else. That to me was very rewarding, and knowing that I was building something that I believed in and building an environment where not only did I think other people would love to come to work, but I enjoyed, and I would love to come to work and be proud of our team and our agency and the work that we produce. That gives you a little bit of the generation story, if you will, the inception. ROB: That certainly makes sense and adds some color to the conversation. One thing you mentioned is I think an interesting thing to reflect on: all throughout the agency world – you mentioned farming out work, and I think that's an ongoing dynamic for most firms that we talk to. How do you think about the balance between how much work you farm out versus when you bring a role in-house and that juggle of the full-timers, the contractors, etc.? SANDRA: Today we don't farm out work. We try to keep everything in-house as much as possible unless it's a skill we don't have, a specialty area. Like we don't code and we don't do graphic design, but we also don't have enough projects per se to supply an individual like that with a 40-hour work week's worth of work. Sometimes it is better to go to a specialist who can swoop in and work on something and provide their expertise and then hand it back to the internal team. But overall, we really only work having full-time team members in-house. There have been years where we have used freelancers on occasion. I think with the difficulty of COVID, the entire year of 2020, we really wanted to keep everyone in the lifeboat, if you will. We wanted to take care of our people and take care of in-house – and, knock on wood, we did not have to take any negative steps. Our team actually grew. We had a terrific year from a financial perspective, even though it was such a difficult year from a personal and global perspective. But we've really tried to keep full-time team members to ensure that we're also consistently delivering the quality of work and the type of work that our clients come to expect from us. ROB: Yeah, that step function of adding team members versus contractors. I think the biggest the team is, the more flexibility you have where you're not trying to decide whether you're going to overload somebody by 50% to avoid farming it out. It certainly makes sense. A topic of the moment you touched on there: how are you thinking about reopening of business and the return to in-person versus remote work over the year ahead? SANDRA: It's interesting because we obviously just passed the 1-year anniversary of when the world shut down, the apocalypse. We were just talking about it as a team the other day. We literally sat as a team together on a Thursday morning in the office and we're like, “Okay, looks like we're going to take our laptops and go remote. Make sure you download your files, take any technology you need. We'll probably be back in two weeks or so.” [laughs] That's what we naively thought at the time. Everyone went home and turned on their laptops on Friday and we just kept working. We've been very, very fortunate that in our business it really has not presented any obstacles in terms of being able to work and be productive from a full-time perspective in a remote environment. We luckily were also set up technologically that everyone had access. We didn't have any issues in setting anyone up to work. As long as you had your laptop and a good internet connection, you were ready to go. So our clients did not experience any service interruption, so to speak. We did also implement a number of initiatives to try to replicate as best we could the in-office environment, if you will. In the first few months of the pandemic, we had daily 10-minute stand up meetings. Those meetings were often more about checking in on everyone's physical and mental health and families than they were about the work. I think we all needed that just to stay motivated and positive and focused. When we reduced it – over the summer, we reduced it to only three days a week – I missed my team. I'd wake up on the days we didn't have them and be like, “Is this the way we start the day? I need to see everyone.” We moved a lot of our social experiences into the online realm. For Pride Month, we had a drag queen do a performance for everyone and we did bingo with her, which was a lot of fun. For the holidays, we did some holiday baking with a professional chef from South Carolina. We've done trivia, we've done escape the room. Again, all in a virtual environment to try to replicate that feeling of camaraderie and fun. But I think if anything, our clients have actually gained from our remote work. Everyone is no longer commuting; they're actually probably working in some ways longer hours and more productively because they're much more flexible in their ability to choose when they're working and balance their responsibilities at home or just do the things they need to for self-care, whether that's going to the gym or meditating. I think our team has actually become more productive during this time. In terms of going back to an office environment, we have been opening our office one day a week I think since July. We've only had a handful of people come in. It's all on a voluntary basis. We are definitely planning to go back to an office environment, but it will never be the same. We don't expect to be a five day a week company. Maybe it's going to be two days a week in the office, three days a week. We recognize that there are things we cannot replicate in a virtual environment, and especially for junior team members, that ability to learn from your colleagues, the casual conversations, the creation of friendships at work, learning by osmosis by hearing the person sitting next to you pitch a member of the media or being called in spontaneously to a brainstorm – it's very hard to replicate that effectively in a virtual environment. We feel that we need that, and when it's safe and folks are vaccinated, we'll be working towards getting back to that type of setup. But I think if you asked anyone on our team, especially those who knew each other prior to this pandemic and worked together, I think they feel closer now than they did before. In the collective trauma we've all been through this year, I think we've gotten a lot of comfort and support from our team members, and that's really made a difference to the unity of the team. ROB: Sure, and it'll be even better when those relationships can also break bread together. That's going to be a good, good moment. SANDRA: Absolutely. ROB: Sandra, if you think back on the life of the firm, what are some things you would go back and tell yourself, the first day of the company self? What advice would you give to that person about the journey ahead? SANDRA: I wouldn't want to scare her. [laughs] There were a lot of things – you don't know what you don't know. I think when you are a founder of any company or you're a risk-taker, you have to be an optimist. You wouldn't do it if you thought you were going to fail. You wouldn't jump off that cliff, you wouldn't quit the job, you wouldn't take out that loan, you wouldn't find that partner if you thought it was doomed. So when you're an entrepreneur or a business owner, you definitely have that optimist bent in your head. I think that sometimes can lead you to think things are rosier than they are, or to not read the signs, so to speak. If there were things that I regretted, it was not making decisions faster, especially when they were hard decisions. Maybe there was an employee that I had a gut feeling about or wasn't working, and letting that languish for 4 or 6 months and trying to turn things around until I finally was like, “Okay, it really is them, it's not me.” [laughs] I was usually right, right up front. Or COVID is a great example. The companies, especially agencies, that were hit hard, many of them were hit very hard because they did not make the tough decisions quickly enough. Then it was like death by a thousand cuts. So I think if anything, I would say trust your gut, act quickly, and you do sometimes need to make the very hard decisions in order to do the right thing for your team in the long term. I'll also say that you need a community of business advisors that you can trust. You need to learn from their lessons. It can be very lonely. As the senior executive, you can't necessarily share with your team that you're afraid you won't make payroll this month or that you're watching the bank account dwindle and you're scrambling to get a loan or a line of credit. You have to keep up that brave face, but you need supporters to help you navigate that, and navigate so many different things that come up when you're owning a business that you don't expect. It could be labor laws, it could be insurance issues, dealing with a landlord on your office space. I really feel that building that community of trusted advisors and taking their advice is very important. ROB: How have you found that community? SANDRA: I have had a number of vendors over the course of building my business that have really been instrumental in helping me navigate crises, but also avoid crises with their good advice. It could be as simple as a lawyer who's looking at your contracts or a great accountant who's watching out for you from a tax perspective. Or it's another business owner that I meet with and we share stories of the difficulty we're having with an employee or on the hiring front and hearing their advice. Or tools and technology. I'll give you a really good example. We were actually a founding member of something called the With Global Alliance, and we founded it in January of 2020. Fantastic timing. It's an international group of B2B tech agencies around the globe who all offer similar services, and the intention, of course, was to help us offer our clients access to international markets. We started out at one of the most difficult times, and we were five firms covering 10 countries. But during the last year, we've grown to – I think we are now 12 firms offering services in 26 countries. But being able to get on calls with agency leaders from all over the globe and find out what's happening in India, what's happening in Singapore, what's happening in China – they've gone back to work fully. COVID is over in Asia. Or how is the agency in Australia handling it, or what's happening in the UK, where they might be a little behind us or the regulatory systems call for different types of actions. It's been so rewarding to hear from other agency owners what they're doing, how they're grappling with the situation, how they're helping their teams, what ideas they have, what technology they're using. That's been really beneficial. More than what we initially thought the original business purpose would be, since there was less international activity for everyone across the globe, but that's been incredibly rewarding and comforting to have those opportunities and to have those peers to be able to go to and discuss those tough issues and ask those tough questions. ROB: All good stuff, Sandra. When people want to get in touch with you and get in touch with Affect, how should they find you?  SANDRA: The easiest way is to go to Affect.com. Or hit me up at sfathi@affect.com. ROB: That's fantastic. Sandra, thank you so much for joining us today. I wish you the best as we all have an eye on emerging from our homes and seeing some people. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing. SANDRA: Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. ROB: Be well. Thank you. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Steve Denker, most recently Vice President of Marketing and Digital for Turner Classic Movies, chats with Rob at the virtual 2021 South by Southwest. In this interview, he gives his perspective on what he looks for when “working with agencies.”  In the mid-90s, Steve worked for Aramark at Fulton County Stadium/Turner Field, managing relationships with the brands and products that were part of that stadium experience. He observed how fans interacted with Coca-Cola and highlighted opportunities for Coke to increase sales and strengthen the link between the experience and the product. Coca-Cola liked his approach and brought him onboard to develop the experiential look and feel of Coca-Cola in a wide variety of venues.  After a while, Steve understood that Coca-Cola was large enough that it would be a long time before he would have the opportunity to manage people, explore the emerging field of digital marketing, and gain product sales experience.  He took a position with RentPath, leading the marketing and advertising outreach for apartment guide publications at Apartment.com. From 2001 to 2008, Steve worked directly with companies that “touched” the rental process . . . selling digital advertising to utilities, renters' insurance companies, and movers and helping people find the right place to live. “Moving is an incredibly stressful time,” Steve says. In 2011, Steve joined Relocation.com, doing lead generation and business development out of New York. He connected with an individual who owned the Beach.com domain. Together, they planned to build the world's largest and most comprehensive database of beach and beach destination information. When heavy competition from Travelocity and Expedia prevented Beach.com from getting the desired level of traffic and sales, Steve decided it was time to move again. He values his involvement in this “failed venture.” “I can't tell you the lessons learned from that experience I have taken through everything else I've done, both personally and professionally.” All that “good stuff” found its place when Steve joined a consulting firm in Atlanta. (Steve's Beach.com partner still manages the reimagined site.) In 2016, an old buddy from his Coca-Cola days invited him to build a marketing department at Turner Classic Movies. Steve was at TCM for 4-1/2 years. Outsiders may think large organizations have such a wealth of internal resources that they don't need help from agencies. Far from the truth, Steve says. Agencies are important for their unique talents, expertise, efficiencies, and ability to help “execute the vision.” Steve describes what he looks for in agencies. Once agencies get past the first cut of “Do they have the ability to do what we need them to do?”, he needs to know that they “either already understand our business and who our customers are or have the capacity to understand that in a very short period of time.” He thinks organizational leaders need to have a laser focus on what they are trying to accomplish and understand both functional and emotional business priorities. Steve recently started thefasttimes.net, a weekly culture e-zine for Gen-Xers and wannabes, and reaching out on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and continuing in our South by Southwest series, I am speaking today with a friend, a friend of the podcast, and not an agency owner but a marketer with a tremendous history that I think we will all benefit greatly from. My guest is Steve Denker. Steve was most recently Vice President of Marketing and Digital for Turner Classic Movies. He's based in Atlanta like me, but we are still in COVID quarantine, talking online. Welcome to the podcast, Steve. STEVE: Thank you, Rob. Thanks for having me. It's been great running into you at local marketing and industry events over the past probably 8+ years, and at South by. Hopefully I'll have a chance to work with Converge and/or Bellwood Labs in the future. ROB: I appreciate that. I think I met you one fine day when you wandered into the Flashpoint Startup Accelerator here in Atlanta in the season of Beach.com. At least, that's a memorable moment in your career. But you've done a great deal of things. Why don't you start off by running through your journey and path in marketing, to give us an idea of the context you come to us from? STEVE: Sure, thank you. And I do remember that day when we met downtown. I started out – I'll back the train up a couple of stops. I grew up in Philadelphia and went to school in New York and came down to Atlanta in the mid-90s for a company called Aramark that was responsible for the concessions, the merchandise, and general operations at stadiums and arenas around the country, among some other businesses that they're in. I started working at Fulton County Stadium and eventually what became the new Turner Field. My position really was more in an operations role, but I was responsible for the relationships with all of the brands and products that were part of that stadium experience. I was working with the Budweisers and Starbucks and Bluebell Ice Cream, Coca-Colas of the world. Any product that was looking to get in front of those fans. It's interesting how I eventually used that relationship to transition to a role at Coca-Cola because I was watching the fans and seeing what they were doing at every game. I had the opportunity to watch their behaviors and see their traffic paths and their buying habits and so forth. So when Coca-Cola brought a team down once or twice a season to take a look at their assets, I had the opportunity not just to nod my head and say, “Yeah, the umbrellas are faded” or “We need new menu boards,” but really share with them what was going on and how the fans were interacting with Coca-Cola and how it was part of the experience to watch a Braves game. By putting together some plans and sharing with them where I thought they could not only accelerate sales, but also make the brand more part of the experience, I caught the attention of a few folks within that sports and marketing group, at the time called Presence Marketing. Not long after the Olympics, I transitioned over to that group at Coca-Cola and was then part of that experiential look and feel of Coca-Cola at stadiums and arenas, Disney, Universal, and so forth, in a creative capacity. It was a terrific move. The group was run by Steve Koonin, who is just Atlanta royalty and the CEO of the Hawks and State Farm Arena. He really was bringing so many innovations to this group and to the way that Coke was marketed. I was really fortunate to be part of that team and that group. From there, a couple of years later, I had an opportunity to go to a company most recently called RentPath. At the time it was called PriMedia. Also here in Buckhead. What was missing at Coke at that time when I left – I think there were three things I was really looking for that were going to take a while. I was looking to manage people and learn how to do that. I felt that was a good next step for my career. That would've taken a while within that multinational structure. Digital was something that, in the early 2000s, was really the forefront of what the next part of marketing was. Coke wasn't paying as much attention to it as other companies were. Then finally, I was looking for something that would give me real sales experience, not just internally and working with other groups, but actually selling products. Again, I thought that would be something at the early stage of my career that I would learn and use for the rest of my days in terms of working in any capacity. So RentPath offered those and more, and I went over and led the marketing and advertising for the apartment guide publications at Apartment.com. This was early on lead gen and getting folks into and around their apartments, their living situations. It was really interesting, because it was working directly with any company that has to do with that process, whether it's your utilities and your phone, renter's insurance, physically moving – anything like that were opportunities for myself and my team to sell advertising to. These were the early days of digital advertising, if you can imagine: banner ads with CPMs of $60-75 and relatively no accountability. Not even serving accountability. Forget about click-through rates; did you actually serve the ads I just paid for? That was even, at the time, a little murky. Companies just wanted to be part of it. As long as they went onto the website and saw their ad, they said, “Keep serving it.” It was really interesting to see the growth of the industry from, again, banner ads and text ads to what it is today – particularly at that time of 2001 through 2008, when it really exploded into the framework of what we see today with data and analytics and accountability. It was exciting to see that grow. I left for a company called Relocation.com, which was lead generation and business development out of New York. I'd spend a week a month in New York and then back to Atlanta again. I connected with someone in New York who owned the Beach.com domain, and we had plans to build the world's largest database of beach information. Not just every beach in the world, but hotels, vacation rentals, restaurants, activities, local information, local concierge services – really anything that would have to do with a beach destination or vacation, and build out this massive portal. At the time in 2011, this is when people really were using Travelocity and Expedia. There was heavy competition from these other sites. We went ahead and raised some money, built a plan, and it just didn't take off. It didn't get to the level in terms of traffic and converting users into revenue and sales that we had hoped for. All shook hands a few years later, back in 2013, and the site is still live right now. My partner at the time is still running it with a couple of different objectives. But I can't tell you the amount lessons learned from that experience I have taken through everything else I've done, both personally and professionally. I look back at that and have no regrets on taking that business risk. I think if we had done a couple of things differently – many things differently – we would've had a different outcome. But again, we pivoted. A lot of key learnings from that that I've been fortunate enough to share with other folks. That's what I did after that at a consulting firm here in Atlanta and had some great client relationships with companies like PDS and a company called AGRO Merchants Group, a healthcare company, we did some work with Blackstone. Eventually, one of my earliest relationships from Coca-Cola, a woman named Jennifer Dorian, who is a mentor and a friend and could not be a bigger rock star – she's now the CEO over at Atlanta Public Broadcasting & Radio. She was on Steve Koonin's team as well. I worked with her in the Coca-Cola days and had stayed in touch with her really for 20 years. We were having coffee or lunch once or twice a year just to catch up and so forth. She at the time was general manager of Turner Classic Movies and gave me a call and said, “Hey, we're looking to build a marketing department and expand what we've been doing.” This was in late 2016. She said, “Would you like to come over and interview with a bunch of people?” I did that, and a couple of months later I had moved over to Turner and had an amazing four and a half years there. ROB: It's quite a journey. I think it's interesting to point out that all the way through Beach.com, and probably a little bit after that as well, you were in early on the customer journey. Moving, to an extent, is kind of the ultimate customer journey. You combined that in the digital space. You mentioned the high CPM, but the customer lifetime value is also quite high if you can get somebody into an apartment for a couple of years. STEVE: Absolutely. That's a great point. Not only is it part of that initial customer journey – wherever that came from and whatever company claimed to own that verbiage and so forth, it was the beginning of that – but it was also, I think, a very critical time when working with customers. I was working in industries where you really can't screw it up. In other words, moving is an incredibly stressful time. If someone doesn't find the right apartment, if you haven't given them all the information – and again, we were the connector. We weren't the apartment complex, but we were certainly helping them find that right place. But if they didn't move into the right place, if they found out it was an hour commute from where they worked and they didn't realize that, or if they moved into a place in Alpharetta and their friends were all in Buckhead and they didn't realize it was a 45-minute drive, not 10 – all of these different things, they looked back and they were upset with us and the recommendations we made. And on the moving side, same thing. Again, it's very stressful. If that moving truck doesn't show up on time – think about all the things physically connected to moving your stuff. You're trying to time everything out on a particular moving day. It could be hooking up utilities or having to be out of one place and into another. If something isn't right and you realize that all of your possessions are now on an 18-foot U-Haul and that is broken down on the side of a road, it's not good. So I think it's understanding how important it is to take care of the customer and really understand what it is emotionally they're going through when they're finding a place to live, when they're physically moving. At Beach.com, it was your vacation. Most people have two weeks a year, and that vacation is very important for them to recharge and connect with family or friends. It's an important part of your life. If somehow I was part of an organization that screwed that up, it was on me, and it was something that I took very seriously. ROB: Definitely a lot at stake there. Steve, one thing I think you can shed particularly interesting light on is maybe your time at TCM. You have a unique perspective for a guest on this podcast. You're kind of on the other side of the table from the marketing agency, so I think it would be interesting to explore TCM through the lens of what that brand–agency relationship can look like. STEVE: Sure. Absolutely, I'd love to do that. At TCM, we really looked at ourselves as part of the larger Warner Media portfolio. I think every brand looks at themselves as their own business, and we were certainly no different in that we had a very clear set of objectives and goals in terms of growing our brand to the audience, making sure that people not only tuned in and watched, but also couple participate in other ways if they didn't have TCM on cable. Now there's HBO Max and ways to watch, but also, there are a lot of other events and other enterprise businesses that TCM was a part of. Running all these events, I think some people from the outside may look at a company like Warner Media, AT&T being the parent, and say, “Oh, there's got to be so many resources within the company that there wouldn't be a need to tap into agencies.” That couldn't be further from the reality. I've worked with agencies for a very long time; they bring unique talent to a company like Warner Media and particularly TCM. We would work with agencies for their expertise, for their efficiencies, and for them to help us execute the vision. They were a very important part of what we did. We had a couple of different ways we could structure relationships. Certainly, there were some contractors or freelancers that could come in for some very small projects or very specific projects that maybe had to do with production or one part of a creative execution. But for the most part, working with agencies was something that we did, and we worked with a couple of Atlanta agencies that really knocked it out of the park for us. On the TCM side, early on when I started, we had a product called FilmStruck, which was this amazing streaming service of independent, foreign, and arthouse films. It was the first streaming service that Turner had launched, and eventually it was shut down to make way for HBO Max. But as we launched it, we worked with Nebo here in Atlanta. This team really dove into that customer journey and what the needs were, really end-to-end, of generating subscriptions and long-term value from those users, and ways to distribute and share what we were offering and get it out there. Again, these were not things that internally we had access to. I think a lot of us had pieces of the puzzle in our backgrounds and we had some very good folks internally that had acquisition experience, subscription acquisition experience even. But tying it all together – if you think about every customer touchpoint from copy for the website, both the frontend and the backend, things like thank you emails, things like the weekly newsletters and drip campaigns to get people excited about new content and new programming coming, ways to reengage folks, knowing how much time they're spending on the service and ways to get them excited about spending more time, sharing with friends, seasonal deals like “Hey, get this for someone for Mother's or Father's Day or a holiday subscription” – all of these different occasions to buy and reasons to stay are things that they helped us with in terms of those campaigns. ROB: How did you think about the agency selection process? Did you have a bake-off of some sort? Did you know what direction you were leaning? Because knowing the Turner/Warner Media ecosystem – I know local shops who have built web games for Falling Skies; I know global agencies on the PR side who've done analytics work for TBS and TNT. So you could really run the spectrum. How did you approach that selection process? STEVE: Right now – and this wasn't available for a couple of years while I was there, but has come on – there's now a database within Warner Media. Folks that work with agencies all around the country or international ones put in – it's not a scoring process and you look for the 90s or above, but it's more or less, “Hey, I had an experiential agency work on a large outdoor event with us. They did an amazing job. Here's the contact information, here's what they did, here are some pictures.” That exists now. So that's certainly a tool that I think some folks at Warner Media are using. When we selected Nebo – and more recently 9Rooftops, which has a great office here in Atlanta, that did some great work for us as well – so much of it is word of mouth and being in the Atlanta community, being part of AMA. That's exactly what I did. I reached out to a good friend of mine, Joe Koufman, at a company called Setup, and said to Joe, “Listen, I'm looking for an agency. This is what we need them to do. This is an outline of the project. What do you recommend?” He came back with three or four really strong recommendations, and that's where I started. Then from that, we sat down with the agencies – and I'm not a fan of having agencies do work for free. I don't think that's right. I don't think that's a way to start the relationship. So we didn't ask any agency to produce work; we really just had conversations with them to share ideas. We said, “Here's what we're looking to do. Come with some ideas.” Each of them got a time slot, and we, again, just had a conversation with them. For Turner Classic Movies – and I imagine this is the case with a lot of either networks or other brands – the number one thing that I look for in an agency is that they either already understand our business and who our customers are or have the capacity to understand that in a very short period of time. Certainly the agencies that I spoke with all got it. They came to the table with ideas around that. Now, they don't know all of our business, and that's completely to be expected. We didn't expect anyone to understand some of the internal ways that we connect with our audience. Those are things that as soon as we awarded the business, very early on we sat down and shared that. It may have even been at a late stage pitch that we shared it. But we're looking for an understanding of what we do and why we do it. If an agency gets that – because every agency we're talking to already has the technical capabilities. There's no doubt. There's a ton of talent. But it's a matter of, do you understand what we're trying to do? And then really understanding the logistics of who's going to be working on this and your process, the best way to establish how we communicate together, how we discuss the deliverables together, and who leads that on each side. ROB: That's a great client-side perspective. The empathy required, the value of reputation, the value of community engagement. It's so interesting. I'm in this mode now where people we're talking about working with – people still want to get together for lunch. In spite of, and maybe especially because we've all been in our houses for the most part for the past year, people are like “Let's catch lunch outdoors.” That's in bounds for me right now; some people are holed up. But geography, it seems, is still going to matter quite a lot. At least people will say, “I want a company with a local presence.” Nobody really even knows what that means sometimes, but it's what we want. STEVE: Again, there's so much talent in Atlanta. I think looking outside of Atlanta in most cases is really not necessary. The talent is here. It is really nice to have face-to-face meetings. We all know they'll be coming back. Even now, I've had several meetings outside at large picnic tables at a park or a restaurant with folks. That's really how you get to connect with people you're working with, especially on these types of relationships where it's really important that everyone understands what the objectives are together. I'm just a believer in face-to-face when it comes to things like that. I know certainly working remote right now has worked for many people, and even if agencies are local, they may have folks on your account that are in other cities. We worked with a company and that was the case; someone happened to be very talented on the digital team that worked out of South Carolina. And that worked out fine as well, but it was still nice to be able to have some reviews together in person. Again, I'm such a believer in Atlanta being this epicenter of culture and talent and tech, and that's who I want to work with. ROB: That's something for us all to think about as we start to emerge. Steve, you had some thoughts on some key lessons you've learned along your journey as a leader, as a marketer, as an executive. What would you reflect on if you could talk to your younger self about what to think about as you develop? STEVE: [laughs] I don't know where I'd start. That's funny. I think looking back, Rob – and it's such a great thing to do every once in a while, even if you're not talking about it to other people, but just to reflect on things you've learned. I can think of several in particular, and a lot of them are coming out of the Beach.com experience I had, but I think some of these apply throughout my career. Certainly engaging with customers to understand what it is they want, how they want to receive your information, when they want to receive it – you remember the beginning of that whole integrated marketing push? That's what people said integrated was. I think there's a through-line to everything we do now. There are so many different ways to receive information, so many platforms. But at the end of the day, if you don't understand what your customer wants and how they're going to react to what you're sharing with them, what that call to action is, then I think there's always going to be a miss. That's something I've learned that I took with me from those days on throughout the consulting and throughout my time understanding our audience at Turner Classic Movies and HBO Max. Next, I would say having someone that has either domain or IP expertise on your team or advising your team is so critical because again, that's the type of experience – when I was at Beach, we really would've benefited from having someone in the travel and hospitality business being a close advisor to us. I think we all thought because we were customers, we knew what other customers wanted, but we weren't seeing the big picture. I was just seeing it at the time for myself, married and two young kids, “This is how I vacation so everyone probably vacations like this. This is how we plan,” not knowing that that's a very small segment of how it's done. So I think having that advisor or having someone baked into the company that really understands – that domain expertise is critical. I would say probably the most important thing I've learned over time is just having a laser focus on what it is you're working on and really understanding both the functional and the emotional priorities of the business. And that focus isn't just for entrepreneurs; I think it's just as important in mid-size and large multinational companies. It's a challenge when you manage high-achieving and creative people. They always want to bring new ideas and new innovations to the table, and that's a great thing. That's what you look for as a leader. But I can't tell you how many times I said to my manager at Turner, “Look, this is only going to take 5 minutes” when nothing takes 5 minutes. What a lot of people don't realize, and it took a while for me to learn, is that it doesn't just take time away from what you're currently working on; there's an opportunity cost as well when you try to veer off the course – even to do something that wasn't necessarily in your plans, but eleventh hour, something popped up and you thought to yourself, “We should add this in.” Sometimes you need to make concessions and figure out a way to make it work, but I would say most of the time, all it's going to do is create a distraction. It's easy for that to happen. You could have marketing plans and then something like Clubhouse pops up and you're like, “We need to be on Clubhouse. We should create a room and get some experts to join us and talk about our product or service.” That might be a great part of the strategy, but if that's not what you were initially planning to do, then 9 times out of 10, it's better to continue to focus on what it is you were doing and then work that in as your next objective. I think that focus – I had on a whiteboard in my office at Turner the word “focus” for all 4 years before we got shut down and everyone worked from home. The word “focus” was in my office, and I saw that word every single day. Of everything that was written and erased and written and erased on the whiteboard, that was the one consistent thing. Never erased it. That was my constant reminder that nothing takes 5 minutes and that you've got to really keep driving those clear objectives and deliverables and not create unnecessary distractions. ROB: Right. It's such a good practice to, number one, not do something that's going to blow up in your face, and number two, not discard the thing you've already been very intentional about putting together. Steve, we normally wrap these conversations with a couple of different questions. I think they tie together for you. Number one is typically “Where should people connect with you?”; number two is “What are you excited about that's coming up marketing-wise?” I think you have those things linked together where we can get a much bigger dive into your mind and connect with you as well. STEVE: Sure. Again, this has been such a fun conversation. I would say in terms of the future and what I see, I don't think marketers should be thinking about things ever going back to normal. I think how we play and consume media, entertainment, food, healthcare, all of this, this whole sense of community is being redefined in front of our eyes. It's a generational opportunity that's going to impact customer behaviors from now on. It's not a trend; it's really a seismic shift that's going to resonate across the culture and economy and all of our personal and professional relationships. It opens up an opportunity to be more creative and more innovative than ever before, and I think there's going to be some things we've done in the past that we're going to have to decide to let go. Other things we're going to hold on to. Those are some of the things that excite me right now. I do think as a society, we need to get a little bit higher up right now. I think we need to work on making people feel less isolated and part of a community. I don't think that's going to go away when people can start gathering in small groups. The pandemic has exposed a real ripple in people feeling alone, and that's something that I think marketing can play a big role in: really helping people find their community or communities. Personally, I've had a lot of meaningful conversations since I left TCM and Warner Media, exploring high growth in entrepreneurial opportunities, looking to where I can create long-term value at scale and really do good. So that's what's on the horizon for me in terms of what I'm looking for. And then on the side, I started something really fun with my wife and some good friends of ours. We started an e-zine called The Fast Times. We always talk about how Generation X, which I'm a part of, sometimes gets the short end of the stick. We weren't born with a cellphone in our hands, and we certainly didn't save the world like the Greatest Generation. We just listened to really cool music and watched really fun movies and were latchkeys and came home to an empty house and made the microwave dinners and so forth. So we thought, what could we do to really have some fun with Gen X and the fringe on each side of younger Boomers or older Millennials? So we created this e-zine. We're sending it out once a week, and then a special edition on Mondays. It's taking a look at culture and how it intersects with both nostalgia from the '80s and early '90s and having this modern lens on things that are happening today. It's kind of with this smart snark, I would call it. It's the fun voice of the '80s, voice of that Gen X. Lots of sections in it like “We Got the Beat” and “Channel Z” and “Parents Just Don't Understand,” all very brand-driven throughout it. Ultimately, this may be a vehicle for sponsors and advertisers as our subscription base grows. But right now, we're doing it – I love reading. I read probably at least an hour a day and love writing, and it's a fun way to stay sharp and create something. Again, we'll see where it goes. ROB: Congratulations on that launch. Where do we go to find that? STEVE: You can sign up for that at thefasttimes.net. Even the address is nostalgic, the .net. Go ahead and sign up and give it a shot. We also are having a little bit of fun on social platforms, on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter. We hope you like it. ROB: That's excellent. Steve, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for sharing. I certainly look forward to connecting back in person. I look forward to seeing what else you take on next. It seems like it'll be a natural continuation of a really good story, so thank you for sharing with us. STEVE: Thanks again, Rob, for having me. As I said, I really believe you're the epitome of this. Everything that people are reading about in terms of the surge in Atlanta, in the tech space, in the companies interested in coming to Atlanta, you're the epitome of this. You started Converge bringing in outside investment and then growing it here in Atlanta and being part of the innovative labs and teams here. This is exactly what it's all about and what everyone is hoping this unwritten story of Atlanta is, and you are a very early author of it. Thanks for having me. ROB: I appreciate that. You're very kind. There is a lot of good stuff going on here in Atlanta, and we'll keep on sharing it. Thanks so much for coming on, Steve. STEVE: Thank you. ROB: Take care. Bye. STEVE: Bye. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Amy Balliett is Founder and CEO at Killer Visual Strategies, an agency that specializes in visual communications design – creating such “products” as info and motion graphics, data visualizations, virtual reality, and interactive content. An Inc. 5000 company for four years in a row, Killer, now part of Material, has won over 30 excellence in visual communication awards. Clients include such Fortune 1000 companies as Amazon, Boeing, the Discovery Channel, Edwards Lifesciences Corporation, and Microsoft. In this interview, Amy talks about the “spammy” beginnings of infographics, when people slapped up on their websites images that had nothing to do with their brand.  She says, a high-quality infographic visually communicates significant meaning so efficiently and effectively that little text is required. Amy notes that around 10,000 infographics are released daily . . . and 99% fail. The 1% that succeed don't use much text, use custom (as opposed to stock) illustrations, provide proper data visualization, and clearly show attention to detail and time put into the design. The agency's services keep evolving to meet changing client needs. The biggest challenge is “to find that one illustration style that won't go out of style.”  HubSpot reports that “91% of audiences prefer visual content as their primary, secondary, and tertiary form of information delivery.” A visual strategy would consider the first, second, and third pieces of content a prospective client might see going into a funnel. Amy says, “Content is king . . . visual content reigns supreme, and visual strategy is content strategy, just leveled up.” Amy recommends a 90-second “motion graphic” as the most important piece of visual strategy content a company might invest in now. That 90 seconds can be broken down into “dozens of visually designed scenes” that can be used on social media, stacked to create an infographic, or paginated to create an eBook. She notes that visual content has to be matched both to channels and to audiences.  Killer evolved over the years . . . through a pivot that exploded . . . first in a good way . . . and then not. Exhausted from the frenetic pace, the agency had never stopped to consider such core questions as: “What's the type of client that we want? What's the type of work we really want to do? What's the type of person we want to be bringing on to our team? What are the values of this company that are going to drive these decisions?” Amy hired a business coach for herself and the team (probably the best decision she ever made) and an HR consultant to help establish policies. A new focus on building a values-driven culture and hiring and firing employees and clients based on these values changed “who we were, our level of productivity, and the clients we attracted . . . our revenue went up 50% in one year.” The agency's values are simple: Keep Learning, Inspire Others, Lead by Example, Love What We Do, Embrace Change, and Respect Others. Amy can be found on LinkedIn at: Amy Balliett on Twitter @amyballiett. Her book, Killer Visual Strategies, available on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Killer-Visual-Strategies-Amy-Balliett/dp/1119680220), was recently awarded “one of the best marketing and sales books of 2020.” Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Amy Balliett, Founder and CEO at Killer Visual Strategies based in Seattle, Washington. Welcome to the podcast, Amy. AMY: Thank you so much for having me. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. You have one of those excellent names for your firm that I think probably tells us what you do, but why don't you tell us about Killer Visual Strategies and what the firm's superpower really is?  AMY: Definitely. To tell you that, the best way to say it is our original name. Our original name was Killer Infographics, so even more focused on what we were doing. At the time, we really focused on developing high-quality infographics for marketing needs and things like that. Over the years, our services kept evolving based on the needs of our clients. But ultimately, everything still lives on the foundation of what we view as our superpower, which is visual communication design. A high-quality infographic is something that you don't have to read; instead, you can look at it and cull important information from it without diving into paragraphs of text. So everything we do centers on that. It's about graphically representing information to efficiently and effectively create meaning and using as little text as possible. That's really what our superpower is. ROB: That's interesting. As little text as possible. What do you recall in your own mind as the emergence of infographics? When did they start catching your eye? When did it become so obsessive for you that it seemed like the business? AMY: It's so interesting, because infographics have a very rich history. The very first known infographic was the 1600s, although you could say cave paintings on walls were the first infographics. They've been around forever, but around 2008 they started to be used more regularly for SEO needs, for link-building and other forms of content marketing. I started to slowly get into them because I was heading up SEO at a company here in Seattle and really wanted to use them for the link-building value. But the company I was at never really wanted to use them. So, when I left to start my own company – which was actually a completely different business model than what Killer is today, and which had a bunch of different websites that I was marketing – I started creating infographics to do link-building for all of those websites. That was June of 2010. At that point, infographics were this big trending thing, and everybody was questioning how long that trend would last. Everybody really thought this was something that was going to be a one-and-done trend, and by 2011 we were going to move to something else for content and content marketing. So I got on it at a time that I thought was the very end of a trend. [laughs] And it turns out it was the very, very beginning. ROB: How has the use of infographics evolved? There was a point in time where it felt like a well-designed and executed infographic targeted at the right audience really extensively lived as a life of its own, but the fad didn't end as a fad; it just integrated into the visual language of the internet. AMY: That's exactly right. The thing is, at first infographics were so spammy. People would put out content that had nothing to do with their brand, nothing to do with their website. They just really wanted to put out something controversial that was driven by visuals because today's audiences crave visual content. They were really trying to use infographics to hook somebody and get backlinks primarily. After that spammy part of the fad started to die down – which happened because Google kept changing their algorithm, and when Google did their Penguin and Panda updates back in 2010 and 2011, all of a sudden the big content farms that were really being fueled by infographics started disappearing from Google. As a result, infographics stopped being as spammy. The market stopped being flooded with these really spammy designs, and instead large brands started to take notice and said, “Oh wow, this is an amazing way to connect with my audience and really get them to understand our brand, our service, our products without having to give them a big long whitepaper.” The trend was moving away from whitepapers and moving more and more towards media as a form of entertainment and education in all forms. ROB: That's a really fascinating evolution there. If we look at today, is there still that link-building aspect to it? Or is it more broadly about brand at this point, and about speaking to an audience coherently with your brand attached to it? AMY: It's about speaking to your audience coherently with your brand attached to it. Links definitely come with infographics – not like they used to. In 2010, I put out some awful infographics because I was still learning, and they'd get thousands of backlinks. Anybody would celebrate anything with the word “infographic” attached to it, whereas today, we have far more discerning eyes. If you jump back to 2010 versus today in 2021, the fact is, media within the internet has evolved so much. There's so much more of a wow factor in everything we see. That also has led to a heightened expectation for what a good infographic is. There's still about 10,000 released a day, but 99% of them fail. The 1% of them that truly succeed are the ones that don't use a lot of text, the ones that use entirely custom illustration, proper data visualization, and the ones that clearly show attention to detail and time put into the design. But if they're slapped together, they're using stock imagery, or if there are paragraphs of text next to a small illustration, things like that, they're going to fail. People are still jumping on the bandwagon because they think they're going to get a bunch of backlinks, but if they don't actually execute them properly, they're not going to get backlinks, and they might even hurt their brand on top of it. ROB: It's good to know the danger there. In the evolution of your firm, you can see this evolution where the infographic is part of a broader visual strategy, probably with a much more expanded vocabulary. What are the elements you see now as the language of visual strategy as you think about it? AMY: It's so interesting. There's this really great stat from HubSpot that 91% of audiences prefer visual content as their primary, secondary, and tertiary form of information delivery. When we think about visual strategy today, we think about the top of the funnel and we say to ourselves, what's the first, second, and third piece of content somebody's going to see as they're going into that funnel? Then we start to identify what channels those people are living on to deliver that content, and the channels and the audience define what type of content we choose to put out into the ether for the visual strategy of the brand. Sometimes it might be short form social media images with at most 6 words on them. Sometimes it'll be a visually rich eBook where each page has at most 200 words. Other times it's a motion graphic. I always say to anybody who's thinking about getting into visual strategy for their own brands, the most important piece of content that you can invest in right now is a motion graphic. That's going to give you so much to work with. It's usually about 90 seconds. It should never be over 90 seconds. It's usually about 90 seconds of content that breaks down into dozens of visually designed scenes that you can pull out and use on social media. You can stack the scenes up and create an infographic. You can paginate the scenes and create an eBook. You have so much more than just a motion graphic if you invest in one. You have dozens of other pieces of content you can produce out of it. It's really about identifying the right content for the right channel for the right audience. I know that's kind of the answer to all contact marketing, really, but with visual content there's definitely different types of visual content that work on different channels. You really have to understand that landscape and choose what's going to connect with that audience the best. ROB: Sure, and there's a distinction in there. Much like the graduation from infographics to visual strategies, when you're referring to a motion graphic, what I'm picturing is that explainer video, is what some people would call it. Some people would come to you saying they want an explainer video, but I think what you're saying is that's not really what they want. If they just got an explainer video that didn't consider this trend that comes and goes online but is always true, this atomization of content where you can take something and pull it apart into individual pieces that are bite-size and put them lots of places – just asking for an explainer video doesn't get you there. AMY: Exactly. Today's marketers are using 12 to 14 types of visual content just to accomplish singular goals. It can never be one-and-done. You always have to consider all of the different ways you can use that content. You can create derivatives to develop even more campaigns and strategies around it. It is really content marketing. The concept that content is king, which comes from a Bill Gates article in 1999, is still true. Content is king. But visual content reigns supreme, and that's really what we have to focus on when we think about visual strategy. It's content strategy, just leveled up. ROB: Right. One thing I think about in this category that maybe isn't thought of this way when it comes out is Mary Meeker annually puts out this internet trends deck at the turn of the year. Have you run into that before? AMY: Yes, definitely. ROB: It's hundreds of pages, hundreds of slides in a PowerPoint deck. If you said, “Do you want a 200-slide deck from a venture capitalist?”, I don't know if you do. But then you look at the pieces of it, and each slide – you know better than I do – seems like it has pretty good value. It seems like it tells a story as a whole, and it seems like it builds a brand for her in whichever firm she's with. AMY: Exactly. That's so spot-on. That's the entire point. If that were 200 pages of paragraphs of content, do you think it would be given the same level of attention it gets today? Not even at all. Not close. ROB: Nobody anticipates that one. AMY: Exactly. ROB: Amy, you alluded a little bit to the journey, your own journey in starting the firm. It looks from your LinkedIn like, as you mentioned, you were working in SEO. You had a job. You had someone else who was responsible for your paycheck. What led you to turn that corner and go into this process of being responsible to kill what you wanted to eat and then to eventually be responsible for an ever-growing – or maybe not ever-growing, but in many cases a payroll of people who depend on you, and it's a lot of responsibility? What caused that transition? AMY: It's so odd because it's hard for me to pinpoint an exact time. I owned my first company when I was 17. I actually owned an ice cream parlor and candy store in a summer vacation resort. It was open only during the summer, so it didn't compete with school. That was my first foray into entrepreneurship – and I hated it, I'm going to be honest with you. I loved it and I hated it. I was working 80+ hours a week during my summer breaks my junior and senior year of high school. That gave me a sour taste in my mouth. But then about – jeez, I don't know how long later; maybe it was about 6 years later – I came up with an idea for a social network. This was before Facebook had opened up to non-.edu email addresses. I didn't even know that Facebook existed yet. I came up with this idea for a social network, but all I had was the idea. I could not execute on the idea because I had zero coding skills. At the time, I was a video editor; my degree is in film, so I was doing video editing and motion picture marketing and really couldn't bring much to the table for this idea. I had my cousin join in on the idea, and he could bring everything to the table. He's a full stack developer and the best designer I've ever met. So here's this guy taking on the weight of the world, basically trying to make my idea come to fruition, and all I can do is try to market the idea, try to build a user base. It failed really quickly because you can't just come to the table with an idea. You have to be able to execute on that idea. We got to a point after 6 months where it became clear that this was just way too much to put on one person. During that 6 months, I started to learn SEO and online marketing, so I decided to pivot my career into SEO and online marketing. In that part of my career, I learned web development as well. It really just came down to I had started to stack up a series of skills – nothing that I was fantastic at; everything I was good enough at. If you're trying to be too many things at once, it's like trying to learn 10 instruments at once. You're never going to master one instrument. But I was good enough at enough skills. I was good enough at graphic design, good enough at animation, good enough at development that I was finally in a place where I felt like I could do all of this on my own. I had tested a few proofs of concept within the last company I worked at, really seeing if I could create new revenue streams for that company. Once I did, I realized, crud, I'm bringing in millions in revenue streams to this company; why can't I do this for myself? You get to a point where you have the confidence in your career to take that chance, but I also got to the point where I had enough in savings to take that chance. I'm not going to lie, that was incredibly important to me. I think I would not have taken the risk at all if it weren't for having a nice safety net of cash just in case everything failed.  ROB: Amy, a lot of people have that interesting stack of skills, but they may not recognize it. They may not know how to apply it. To your metaphor, they may still be trying to be the best at a particular instrument when it's really the intersection of several skills that is where they can be truly unique in their world. How did you come to understand that concept of the stack of skills and see it in yourself?  AMY: It was really just every idea I came up with, I started to realize, “Crud, I need a designer for this, and I need somebody to develop this.” I just started thinking about all the things I needed for somebody to execute on the work. I'm a control freak. I really am. So I started to say, “I need to learn these things myself because I can't really give away trust too easily and put that work on somebody else's plate.” For me, that's really what made me realize I needed that stack of skills: wanting to execute on so many ideas, but not having the capacity to do it myself. I'm really glad that over the years, I learned to release the reins, because every single employee I've hired is 20 times better than me at any one of those skills. And that's really important. You always have to hire somebody who's much better than you. But the fact that I've been able to play every single role in my company and that I have played every role, that I've sat in their shoes – it's so much easier to manage everybody because I know what they're going through. I know how long it would take me to do a task, so I can judge how long it would take somebody on my team to do that same task. I know what expectations to put in front of them, and I also know when to pull back and let them take the lead and run the show. ROB: Right on. I've certainly experienced, at least in my perception – and you never know whether you're wrong in your perception at the top; it's always worth questioning. But when I'm hiring people within my stack of skills, I feel like I can get to a decision faster, and I feel like I almost get to be the Pied Piper a little bit. There's a sense of trust and safety that they may feel where they felt wary. I tend to hire software developers for a lot of what we do, and there's almost an unspoken bond that moves quickly when you can send the right signals, I think.  AMY: That's so, so true. That's exactly how it's always felt. I remember when we brought on our first developer to the team and I sat down with him and I was talking about a couple of lines of jQuery. He looked at me and said, “Wait, I haven't had a boss who knows jQuery before.” It was just this weird “aha” moment. ROB: It's such a good discussion, the skill stacking thing. I think I have often heard of it spoken of on – there's a podcaster, James Altucher, and I think he talks about it a good bit. But I don't know – have you had any good sources for these concepts? Because I think it's underexplored, and maybe there's a book or something that I'm less familiar with. AMY: I haven't necessarily dove into any books related to this specific concept, no. It really has more come through networking with the right people, getting to know more people who have faced the same types of challenges, but also, again, surrounding myself with such a curious team, a team that will never rest on their laurels. One of our values at Killer is “keep learning,” and it's probably the most embraced value in the company because everybody's just trying to stay on top of trends and stay ahead of trends. I think that's also a part of it. There's a bit of a competitive attitude where all of us want to be in the know of what that next big thing is. ROB: It's such an interesting through line. You mentioned that Google's obviously changed algorithms, and it feels like they're a lot closer to trying to provide the result you actually wanted. But there was an era of SEO that was very competitive; it was very much about tactics and how ethical those tactics were. Kind of secret knowledge. But some of that transitions well, probably, into process around visual strategy. There is always something to learn. There is always a new cutting-edge frontline of what's working and what's not. You have to keep learning, just like you did in SEO. AMY: Exactly. It's so true. What's interesting is with SEO, you're trying to game Google's algorithm, for lack of a better phrase. It is really what you try to do in a lot of ways, whereas with visual strategy, you're trying to consider so many disparate audiences. What's going to trend for one audience isn't going to trend for another audience. There's not one universal algorithm to break. Instead, it's really identifying all of the different aesthetic directions that could impact Audience A over Audience B over Audience C and so on. ROB: It's an infinite game, too. You can't just go for the moment. You could position the whole thing as being there to hack the human brain, but in the context of a brand, you also have to consider how people feel afterwards and in the long run. It's not a short game. It's not “look at this graphic,” right? AMY: Exactly. And you also have to consider the timeline of that campaign, because sometimes we'll have a client where they want a visual language and aesthetic look and feel to uplevel their brand, but something that's going to last for decades to come. That's a whole other feat to accomplish, trying to find that one illustration style that won't go out of style. That's been an interesting experience. ROB: Absolutely. Amy, as you reflect on building Killer Visual Strategies, what are some things that you've learned along the way that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting from scratch? AMY: The biggest thing I've learned is about being proactive versus reactive. Killer was a pivot from a completely different business model, and because it was a pivot, we didn't spend a lot of time thinking proactively about what we wanted the business to be. Instead, we just lived in a reactive state for about 3 years. We basically went from our very first quarter of work being 14 orders to the first month in our second quarter being 40 orders, and it just kept going up and up and up and up. The first 3 years or so, we were just so exhausted by reacting to the demand that we didn't take the time to say, “What's the type of client that we want? What's the type of work we really want to do? What's the type of person we want to be bringing on to our team? What are the values of this company that are going to drive these decisions?” All of those things that seem corny initially – when you're an entrepreneur and you want to start a company, the last thing you say is, “What are the values going to be of my company?” It's rarely something an entrepreneur does first. But had we done that first, I think we would have grown faster and even more intentionally than we did. Our first 5 years felt like a wild, wild west, and we had a culture inflection point at Year 5 where, honestly, almost everything exploded. And almost everything exploded because we were not a values-driven company. We had a great team; we knew we wanted to go out and get a beer with everybody, but we didn't all approach conflict in the same way. When you have a values-driven company, you have a set of guidelines with which to attack conflict together as a team, but we didn't have that. Nobody really knew what our values were, even though they spelled out the word “KILLER.” So we had to reset and focus on building a values-driven culture, hiring and firing by our values and hiring and firing clients by our values as well. That drastically changed who we were. It also drastically changed our level of productivity, the types of clients we attracted – I mean, our very first year of really paying attention to that, our revenue went up 50% in one year. So there's more than just the corny feelings that you get with coming up with your mission, vision, and values. When you actually truly embrace those and live those and lead by those, you'll see a team that is so much more inspired, so much more willing to take on the hardest challenges with you. You can really grow your company by leaps and bounds when you do that. That's the biggest lesson I've learned. ROB: Was it the explosion that pushed you to this realization of the need, or was there another catalyst in your life? AMY: It was the explosion, it really was. And that explosion was such a slow burn. That powder keg – we knew it was going to explode at some point, but we were still being so reactive that there wasn't time to pay attention to it. By the time it happened – we actually joke in the company and we call it “emailgate” because it all started from an email. [laughs] But we brought in the right people at that point. I hired a business coach to come in and coach myself, coach my leadership, and coach the team as a whole. I hired a really good HR consultant to come in and do the exact same thing, to really help us build the right policies in that arena. By bringing on the right experts, I was really, really lucky. I was also somebody who kept saying, “Why do I need a coach? I don't need a coach! This isn't a sports team!” [laughs] It turned out that having a business coach was probably the best investment I have ever made, and I know my team feels that way too, because they saw me change as a result of having somebody really help me look at problems differently and react to critiques from the team differently. When you're a business owner and you're at the very top, it is extremely lonely. And when you're in a creative firm where everybody is really emotionally driven – because to be creative, you have to bring emotion into your work. When you're that passionate – that's what I mean by emotionally driven – you're going to be passionate about what's working and what's not in the company, and you're going to be very vocal about that. I used to take that as such an affront to me. I would get offended by really positive critiques, people coming to me with good ideas, and maybe I would just look at it as them critiquing me instead of an opportunity to improve in the company. So having a coach really helped me look at that very differently and embrace the amazing feedback of my team. ROB: I think it's so helpful for you to share that, Amy. The perception people have is – in some cases it's true that a cheesy coach is cheesy and cheesy values are cheesy. Sometimes I feel like I can sound a little bit needy in the course of a conversation because I will tell people about my coach and my therapist and my entrepreneurial support group. But I think we just need to talk about it. For me, those things are all healthy, but maybe there's sort of the cult of the CEO, where we feel like we need to have all the answers. AMY: Yes, that's exactly it. You get imposter syndrome when you don't necessarily have the right answers. I also have an entrepreneurial support group, and that has been immensely helpful for me. Just talking to other business owners – they don't have to be in your same industry – and realizing, “Oh, hey, these problems exist across all businesses, not just a creative content agency, or not just a mom and pop shop down the street.” There's very similar problems that exist across any culture, across any work environment, and when you can get other business owners to tell you what they've gone through and game a solution together, it is so much better than just being in your own silo, trying to figure it out yourself. ROB: Such a healthy conversation, Amy. You've really shared the journey and shared the experience. When people want to connect with you and when they want to connect with Killer Visual Strategies, where should they look you up? AMY: You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. Just Amy Balliett on LinkedIn. You can find me on Twitter @amyballiett, although I'm not nearly as active as I should be on Twitter. Then you can also check out my book, which is Killer Visual Strategies, on Amazon. It was just awarded one of the best marketing and sales books of 2020. ROB: Congratulations. I think we all needed a nice visual book along those lines in 2020 – something to think about aspirationally and not just looking into our own basements. AMY: Right? That's so true. Oh my gosh. Good old 2020. [laughs] ROB: Yeah. Hope is on the way. I'm tremendously hopeful for the year, and I think probably you're very similarly positioned with your positioning and with what people are about to need to do with you as a partner. AMY: Yeah, definitely. I'm very excited for what 2021 has in store for us. ROB: Excellent. Amy, I wish you the best. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I encourage everyone to look Amy up, look up her book, and I would imagine that Killer Visual Strategies probably has a solid couple of social feeds to pay attention to as well. AMY: Definitely. Thank you so much, Rob. I really appreciate it. ROB: Thank you, Amy. Be well. Bye. AMY: You too. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Esther Raphael is Marketing Officer at Intersection, an out-of-home media and technology company that uses proprietary technology to electronically paint its client's stories on busses and city, transit system, airport, and interior and exterior “destination” walls around the country . . . anywhere outside the home where brands can deliver content, information, and wayfinding to consumers as “they journey through cities.” Intersection's technology supports dynamic program execution and unique campaign flexibility. A Harris Poll survey reported that 69% of urban consumers are noticing “out-of-home” now more than they were pre-pandemic.  Headquartered in NYC, the agency has offices around the country, so the six-year-old agency has always had a bit of “remote” about it.  Esther was on this year's South by Southwest panel discussing “When ‘Go Away' Is a Powerful Brand Message.” The agency partners with Foursquare and uses that platform's aggregated location data to display hourly traffic levels in vicinity grocery stores and pharmacies – optimizing safety by providing consumers with information on the best times to shop to avoid crowds. Intersection also partners with Foursquare on content – showing client ROI and tracking opt-in user experience data.  Intersection is best known for “Link NYC,” a product which provides “localized messaging, transit and community information, and creative partnerships with local nonprofits and institutions. Consumers have come to rely on the wealth of curated advertising and editorial content displayed on Intersection's screens as a source of information as they travel around the city. Just as on other media platforms, advertising partners with content. “We don't have any billboards,” Rachel says.  “We are focused on being alongside a person while they're walking around the city.” Intersection started its first branding campaign, “Go There,” in spring of 2020, which has been “taking off” this spring. Initially, Go There was about “those first places you would visit when they opened in spring of 2020” and thinking about that feeling. The meaning has expanded to include “the places Intersection can take a brand to” . . . but also to “do something you have never done before.”  Esther says that out-of-home creative can be powerful and drive results. It can also drive “social media interaction and engagement” because of its large and unique canvas. She says, if you only deploy a mobile/desktop strategy, “you're missing people when they're (outside) feeling joy.” Intersection just launched its first in-house creative agency, Creative Lab, to help small- to medium-sized businesses understand out-of-home marketing campaigns. Esther can be reached on her agency's website at: https://www.intersection.com/ Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and we are diving into our annual South by Southwest series. Of course, South by was virtual this year, so we are virtual. We can't wait to be back next year at the lounge at the Four Seasons, recording with some awesome guests live. But today I am joined virtually by Esther Raphael. She's Marketing Officer at Intersection, based in New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Esther. ESTHER: Thank you, Rob. I too cannot wait to meet you live and be there live next year. ROB: We'll buy you a coffee or a beverage of your choice at the lounge. It'll be fantastic. With our South by Southwest series, on an average episode, we're talking to marketing agency owners, founders, etc., but we find really interesting opportunities within the South by Southwest speaker ecosystem. Esther, why don't you start off by telling us about Intersection and where you sit in the marketing ecosystem?  ESTHER: Love that. Intersection is an out-of-home media and technology company, and we have advertising products in cities, transit systems, airports, and key destinations all over the country so that brands can speak directly to consumers as they go about their journey through cities. We know from recent research that people are more engaged now than ever with out-of-home. Think about the past year and everything that we've all experienced. Being able to leave your home sometimes was that moment of fresh air, that moment of relaxation, that walk around the block, running an errand. 69% of consumers that live in urban areas are saying that they're noticing out-of-home now more than pre-pandemic, and that's according to a Harris Poll survey. We are right in that sweet spot, right in the place where brands can speak to consumers in a way that they feel engaged and happy. ROB: Very interesting. It seems to me, my perception, that out-of-home continues to digitize. I'm in Atlanta and we have more and more digital billboards going up. Is there even something in perhaps the technology that's going into out-of-home, even in terms of brightness in the product that's being put out there, that's increasing the visibility/noticeability of it? ESTHER: For sure. On one side we have proprietary technology that gives our partners – the transit authorities, the cities – the ability to deliver information and content and wayfinding and all these services to their consumers. Then on the advertising side, one of the things we're most known for is our technology, allowing brands to do dynamic executions and unique campaign flexibility. It's something we're pretty proud of and focused on. ROB: It's kind of happening before our eyes, but it's really fascinating to get an expert like you in place to really illuminate. It happens slowly but quickly at the same time. If we tap in a little bit to your South by Southwest panel, the topic was “When ‘Go Away' Is a Powerful Brand Message.” Take us into the details of that session and what you were sharing with the community in that talk. ESTHER: One of the products that we're most known for at Intersection is Link NYC here in New York. If you ever come to visit, we could take you on a market ride. We have an editorial team who is dedicated to curating content on the screens – thinking about the consumer experience as they journey through that city, not only from the advertising perspective, but from the editorial side. Our content suite includes localized messaging, transit and community information, and creative partnerships with local nonprofits and institutions. Because of this, consumers look to our screens for important and helpful information. As COVID entered the story, we had to quickly pivot some of our content and our storytelling to better serve the community as they were dealing with this new world. We all were. One of the ways that we did this was through our partnership with Foursquare. If you think back to one of the greatest everyday stressors we've all experienced over the past year, it's getting groceries and supplies. When do you go? How do I avoid the lines? Is it going to be safe? That's really what we wanted to solve for. Using Foursquare's aggregated location data, we were able to display the average hourly traffic levels for nearby grocery stores and drugstores on thousands of Intersection streets. This was designed to give consumers a heads up on the best time to shop to avoid the crowds. The title of our South by panel was so catchy, and I think what's really important to point out about this partnership is that it's not about deterring visits. We weren't telling people, “Don't go grocery shopping.” It was more about optimizing, how do we help people do it safely? ROB: Right. It's sort of in theme with – I'm getting a sense as you talk about the Intersection product line – and I can certainly picture an experience, and I can't wait to be back up in the city and I can picture those Link NYC displays. A lot of out-of-home advertising – historically, billboards, now digital also – you don't really get an impression of it being helpful. So I wonder a little bit, how do you keep that conviction of being helpful throughout? It seems like it's a real core of your product and something a great deal of thought goes into instead of just maximizing inventory and then throwing in some wayfinding. ESTHER: That's right. When we really were evaluating our product line, and right when Link came out, one of the things that we spent a lot of time thinking about was media in general. When you think about other media platforms, like TV, magazines, which is what my background is in, podcasts, even – you come for the content, and advertising is a partner in that. They're along the journey. The exception to that was out-of-home, and that's what we really wanted to change. We wanted to be the first, and we were the first, to do it in the out-of-home space – creating content not only for Link, but for our entire network across the country so that consumers and people walking around the city would look to the screen for information that was interesting to them. During COVID, of course we worked very closely with the city and with all different government agencies to put up really important, relevant, timely information – campaigns like the Foursquare partnership. But year round, we do things like events in your neighborhood, local offerings, things that are helpful, interesting, something you'd be excited to see or would be helpful to your life while you're walking around the city. ROB: The company has been around for a little bit now, right? ESTHER: Yes. ROB: How long has it been around? ESTHER: 6 years, about. ROB: It's interesting, that inflection point of digital displays. As you talk about that sort of editorial approach, I'm picturing even let's say 15 to 20 years ago, you started to see these little tiny displays pop into elevators. The philosophy seemed a little bit similar. It was a little bit of what's helpful to you and a little bit of news or editorial content, but the screens were tiny. Now the screens are – I think Times Square, at least for a while, had room for people to spend however much money on a digital display for the attention. But it seems like the economics of these displays must be shifting radically at this point. ESTHER: We at Intersection are very thoughtful about our screens. We don't have any billboards. We are focused on being alongside a person while they're walking around the city. Street, maybe exterior of buses, inside transit or airport systems, or inside destinations. We have a network at Hudson Yards, New York inside the shopping complex and outside. We really want to be a part of your experience, not necessarily something you just pass by in your vehicle. So that's also a very big part of our strategy at Intersection. ROB: That's fascinating. Again, you're making me long to be back up in New York and back up to Hudson Yards. All in good time, and possibly quite soon. I think one part of this conversation that may be surprising to a lot of people is your mention of Foursquare. Foursquare, formerly one of the breakout darling hits of a South by Southwest once upon a time, and still kind of useful at South by, since fractured into the Yelp-like Foursquare app and swarmed still for those who can't keep themselves from checking in, which is admittedly kind of me. But I think a lot of people might turn up their nose to the idea of Foursquare as something that is a thing from the past. What's their data quality looking like, and how are they pulling that off when they've left the zeitgeist? They're not the “it” thing anymore, but there have been some very interesting campaigns and studies around Foursquare that I think surprise people when they look at it. ESTHER: We'll have to save that for our next podcast when we bring on the Foursquare team. [laughs] They can speak more to you about their data. But we partner with them on a lot of different things. This is one of our partnerships on our content side. We also partner with them on the other side of the business, which is showing our clients' ROI. Foursquare has a ton of data capabilities. Based on their opt-in users who share their geographic location and allow them to collect research and survey information, we're able to tell our clients who run with Intersection a little bit about that user experience when they see their ads and the interactions and actions they take after seeing it. Foursquare has a whole data side of their business which I'm not an expert in, but we are lucky to have them as a partner. ROB: Excellent to hear. It's definitely become such a key revenue stream for them, if you get in and do a little bit of homework. One transition we're clearly getting into a little bit is reopening. I think marketers everywhere are having to think a great deal about what reopening looks like, what things to promote, what things to hold off on. How are you – probably obviously with data, but how are you navigating this next stage where we're not quite wide open, or not at all, or maybe somewhere in between, and how new messages enter the conversation? ESTHER: I love this question because I've been thinking a lot about this. I'm one of those people who's so social that this year's really taken a toll on me, especially in the beginning when we thought about sitting in our home offices – which for me, it is my bedroom. [laughs] I sit in here all day. You lack that interaction with your colleagues who once brought you this tremendous amount of energy, or your friends who make you smile in a different kind of way that you really miss. One of the things we started at Intersection in spring of 2020, but it's coming back full force this spring, is a campaign called Go There. It was our first ever, really, branding campaign at Intersection. Go There to us has so many meanings. It was thinking about those first places you would visit when they opened in spring of 2020. Go back to that feeling. I know where it was, and I will be vain and share it: it was to the hair salon. [laughs] As I am sure so many other women would admit to. I remember sitting in that chair thinking, wow, these moments that we have taken so for granted are so special all of a sudden. So Go There really plays off of the hope of the places we'll return to, but then it also has this business side of the places Intersection can take a brand to, really go there to the cities with us, but also go there with your creative. Do something you have never done before. Really dare to challenge yourself and to speak to people in a different way. That's something I am working on for a huge launch in June, which I am really passionate about. Yes, we're all going to turn to data, but I think we're also going to turn to what's inside of our hearts and makes us happy when things open, and that's the part I think there's so much to be said and done around. ROB: You raise a meaningful point with your home office in your bedroom, as I imagine is quite common. I've stayed in Airbnbs and different places, and the ones in the five boroughs tend to be a little bit tighter, shall we say, space-wise. So I can picture things. How has Intersection overall navigated probably having a deep concentration of your team in the city where their home office is a bedroom? And then you probably have some folks who've been commuting in from an outer suburb that are on cloud nine. How are you handling geography as things come back? Have some people distributed out to the winds? Is it going to be completely back in place in the office? ESTHER: We're figuring that all out right now. One of the things that's so wonderful about Intersection is that it is and always has been people first, really thinking about what's best for the employees and for the team that makes us Intersection. They've done the best to keep us happy from home, give us the resources, the tools. I told you before we logged on this call, IT helps you the second you raise your hand that you need help. People just seem to want to roll up their sleeves and make sure you are extra comfortable, extra productive. The truth of the matter is, though, Intersection has so many offices around the country. We were always slightly remote. So while I am physically based in the New York office, my team was in West Coast, central region, all over the East Coast. We were always on video. This isn't that much of a change. I think the thing that's new for us is that people don't get to go to the office. Sitting in your home, that's the part where you have to personally reflect on change and think about how to be more productive, especially when there's little children running outside your door. But I think as a business, we figured this out long before we had to be home because of our offices geographically being located all over the map. We will come back; we're planning a return, and hopefully it is very soon. ROB: We are hopefully planning a team gathering in June or July, but it's all subject to what people feel comfortable with to a certain extent. It's interesting how you mentioned the distribution of the company. It really reminds me, too, of some of those old TV and radio stations, the local media conglomerates with the local offices. It seems like there's probably an extent to which you've been taking the lunch of the local TV and radio station. Has that been a significant factor? Were you missing that in-person salesperson in Topeka, Kansas – I don't know if that's even a place you're at, but it might be – talking to the local car dealership? ESTHER: That is exactly why we're in all of those markets. We have offices in almost every market that we represent, and we have people on the ground going to those local car dealerships, local businesses. I think it makes Intersection feel like a small business within each city that ladders up into the unit that we are. I think it's one of the beautiful pieces about having a regionalized business like that. ROB: I wonder a little bit, as we get past the initial reopening, it seems like there is this – we all talk about the things we're going to do next, where we're going to go. There's going to be a pent-up demand for, I think, advertisement as well. How are you thinking about inventory, and how should marketers be thinking about your sort of inventory as we move into what could be a little bit of a super-heated time for competing for eyeballs? ESTHER: This is something that I also addressed at our South by Southwest panel, so great segue. People have been living their life outdoors in a different kind of way – working out outside, restaurants outside, dining outside, curbside pickup, walking, biking, more than ever before. Because of that, people are feeling an extreme level of screen fatigue. They're on their computers all day, they're looking at their phone, they're working. When they finally go outside, they're ready to leave that screen behind. We talked a lot about how if you were deploying only a mobile and desktop strategy, you're missing people when they're feeling joy. When I get my screen report on Saturday or Sunday night, I feel such a pit in my stomach. The phone knows how long I've been texting people, the phone knows how long I've been on social media. It's not a good feeling. [laughs] Whereas on the other side, when you go outside, you feel that breath of fresh air, and that's where out-of-home sits. I think advertisers have noticed that over the past year, and we've seen a huge shift in some business categories coming to the out-of-home space. I think we're going to continue to see that. The out-of-home space was actually having a huge uptick in business in 2019. I imagine this little blip in all businesses in the world over 2020 and the first half of 2021 will have a quick departure and we'll continue to see people outside, advertising outside, being a part of that journey, that experience, that breath of fresh air. Here's to the second half. ROB: Indeed. When people think of the future of out-of-home, I think one version they probably think of, if they think about it for a little too long, is the sort of Minority Report, screens everywhere, scanning your eyes and spamming and whatnot. That's probably not where we're going, and even that vision of things is probably 10 or 15 years old now. When you think about the next 5 years of out-of-home, what do you expect we're going to see? ESTHER: I think you'll see more content, more and more out-of-home publishers using those screens to talk to people, to talk to them in a helpful way. I think you'll continue to see technology improve in a way that will just blow our minds. If you think of where we were 10 years ago and where we are today, you can only imagine where we'll be 5 years from now. I think those would be my top two answers. ROB: Got it. One company I encountered was heavily digitizing advertising in places like NASCAR tracks. What's going on in the sports venue side of out-of-home? Is that something you intersect with at all? ESTHER: We have such a big network outside of sports arenas, specifically in Chicago, in Philadelphia. It's a huge part of how we speak to our clients in those markets. If you think about fans of sports in Philadelphia and Chicago, that is a world I cannot even begin to understand. [laughs] But we do a lot of work with our partners to make sure they're there on opening day of the Cubs. So yes, sports is way on the top of the list as it returns where you're going to want to see more people talking to that audience. That's a special group of enthusiasts who people want to talk to and reach. ROB: Link NYC from a transit perspective is one of those crown jewels where there's a sufficient critical mass of people, there's a critical mass of network. I imagine, because you're in these different local markets, some of the things that you see in New York start to move downstream – in other words, smaller and smaller transit networks and places become valuable to do this sort of thing. Where are the places you think we're going to start seeing digital out-of-home content that we're not seeing? Maybe it is in a smaller town, maybe in a smaller place. ESTHER: Austin, we just won the Austin market. It's such a hot market. I think you'll continue to see tremendous growth in the digital out-of-home space and even the static out-of-home space in Austin. We also have moved into LA, which of course is so well-known for their billboards and driving down Sunset and seeing every single celebrity pay homage to themselves on the screen. [laughs] But we have all of the transit system there, which we will also be investing quite a bit of time into thinking about what those screens look like and the type of information that is given to them. I would say LA and Austin are way at the top of certainly our list at Intersection. ROB: Got it. With Austin, is that primarily the transit system, or are there other adjacencies there? ESTHER: Right now it's the transit system. ROB: How do you think about, then, scaling down editorial a little bit? Or is it not necessary anymore? Is Austin still big enough you can have a pretty meaty content organization around it? ESTHER: We haven't started Austin yet. Austin right now is predominantly static for us. We're looking into how we bring content to all of our markets. We have Link in New York, Philadelphia, and Newark; they have a large content suite. Then all of our other digital markets – LA, Minneapolis, the list goes on – we do quite a bit of content. It's not the same level that we do in New York where we focus on events and Heritage Month and things that are so unique and special to all things New York City. But we're spending quite a bit of time now thinking about how we do the same, how we mimic what works so well in New York and Philadelphia and Newark and bring that to other cities so that consumers begin to understand that out-of-home is a different kind of media, and that you should think about it, you should look at the screens in the same way you do other media formats. ROB: Esther, you certainly put a lot of time into preparing for a conversation like the one you had at South by Southwest. What have I not touched on yet that we should be talking about? ESTHER: One of the things we really should cover is creative in out-of-home. I think there's this renaissance right now where you're seeing people do things in the out-of-home space that are so breathtaking, powerful, but also effective, also drive results, but drive social media engagement, drive interaction and engagement because of the canvas that out-of-home gives you. Because of that, we've just launched our first in-house creative agency. It's called Creative Lab. Even advertisers, specifically on the regional level – or beyond; we'll help anyone – but we talked a lot about how smaller businesses on the SMB side of the business in each of our markets want help thinking through what a campaign in out-of-home looks like. How do you do something so impactful, just a wow moment, but also that will drive results for your business? We have a team of designers around the country who are ready to go. ROB: With that creative agency aspect, it seems like it naturally flows into the conversation around measurement. Obviously, measurement has been a little bit different over the past year, but do you have anything before then or even leading into post-COVID to think about measuring results outside of just, obviously, impressions and people in the area? ESTHER: Yes, absolutely. We have spent a lot of time pre-COVID, but also during, making sure that our clients know the level of return on their investment that they'll receive. We have a complete measurement team dedicated to attribution, thinking about brand awareness. If you want to measure actual store visits, if you want to measure digital event measurement – did somebody actually download my app? Did somebody actually make a purchase? Pre-COVID, there were so many stats about consumers' behavior and the power of out-of-home driving, for example, in-store traffic. If you look at the Nielsen out-of-home study that came out at the end of 2019, you saw this wonderful story of 39% of people noticing their out-of-home ads, 20% of them immediately visiting a business after seeing that ad, but 74% of those visitors making a purchase as a result of that ad. There is definitely this power to out-of-home to take action. It's one of the beautiful things of media. ROB: It makes sense and it's believable, and I know I find myself noticing so many more of what's around me. I know you're not in the billboard land and I'm not on Atlanta transit lately, but definitely seeing a lot of that good information. Esther, thank you for sharing your insights from your talk at South by Southwest. I'm really eager – I think we all are – to meet back in person and do Austin right next year and see some of those campaigns going up there as well. ESTHER: Sure. Can't wait. Barbeque next year. ROB: Oh yeah. I had a reservation for some barbeque. I have 5 pounds of the best stuff that they owe me on credit. Literally. They wouldn't give me a refund. They just said, “Hey, come back and tell us we owe you. Bring the email.” ESTHER: All of our South by Southwest media posts said “bring your own barbeque,” so you're onto something. I'll have to follow up with a brisket tonight. [laughs] ROB: Love it. I'm inspired as well. Thank you so much, Esther. Be well. ESTHER: Thank you. You too. Bye. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Ashley Logan is the Founder and CEO at Yakkety Yak, a full-service purpose-driven content marketing agency that provides blog writing, social media marketing, video production, and website design and development for brands and organizations that want to make the world a better place.  Ashley says that the agency's “sweet spot” is content creation and storytelling. She believes alignment with the greater good and “giving back” are two things that are necessary for changing the world. “You have to be purpose-driven,” Ashley says. “You have to stand for something.” A writer from age 5, Ashley graduated with an undergraduate degree in creative writing and landed a job selling for a private label candy manufacturer. She was  “a creative person trapped in a corporate world.” As she traveled around “slinging candy,” Ashley saw that widely different companies used the same words talk about themselves in the “digital space.” She decided she wanted a “bigger ticket” career and moved to commercial real estate.  To appease her creative drive, Ashley volunteered and created content for nonprofit organizations. Social media platforms were just starting to rise. She wondered, “How could you turn those social media engines into a marketing machine?” In 2012, Ashley finally understood that she needed to combine all of her “passions for business, storytelling, content, and nonprofit work.” She went back to school to pursue a master's degree in Journalism in a program renowned for teaching people how to write for target audiences.  Ashley officially launched Yakkety Yak in 2014 and took clients as they came . . . until she realized she could no longer tell stories and work hard for jerks. The agency now maintains a focus on content and storytelling for a far more restricted clientele:  Organizations that “do good” (nonprofits),  Have, as a component of their organization, the intention of “giving back” (perhaps a part of the company raises funds to donate to non-profits), or  Are amenable to adding a “do good” component to their organization (Yakkety Yak works with these organizations that do not yet have a purpose-driven mindset to help them define and build that “piece” into their company culture).  Ashley thinks it is important for its clients to inform people of their “contributions to the greater good” by “putting it out there in your story, putting it on your website, weaving it into your social media, holding your teams accountable, and shouting it from the rooftops.” She thinks high quality video will become an increasingly more powerful marketing vehicle. Ashley is working with a designer to “revamp” Yakkety Yak's office space with improved ventilation and flexible seating and intends to “open the doors” after Memorial Day. Ashley sees “the new office” as a safe place where “people can come and work if they want to escape” and gradually get people back together with flexible hours and a combination of in-person and remote work. She misses the “vibration” that comes from having a “team all together” but also notes that COVID has done wonders for work-life balance. Ashley is best reached on the agency's website at yakketyyak.com, where visitors can find links to all of the agency's social channels. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm excited to be joined today by Ashley Logan. Ashley is the Founder and CEO at Yakkety Yak based in Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to the show, Ashley. ASHLEY: Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me here. ROB: Absolutely. Why don't you start off by telling us about Yakkety Yak and what makes the firm unique? ASHLEY: Yakkety Yak is a full-service content marketing agency based in Chicago. We do everything from blog writing, social media marketing, video production, website design and development – basically any mechanism to help our clients tell their stories, we work with them. I guess what makes us unique is that we focus on working with brands and businesses that care about doing good. We're a totally purpose-driven agency working with brands and businesses that want to make the world a little bit better. ROB: What does that look like when we actually get down to a client? What does a client look like who has this purpose-driven focus? Are there maybe some examples you can share of how they're getting out in the world? ASHLEY: Absolutely. That can be nonprofit organizations, of course. They fall into that category. We work with many patient-facing organizations like the American Migraine Foundation, the American Brain Foundation, and other brands in that category. But purpose-driven doesn't have to be nonprofit; it can be an organization whose culture focuses on giving back. They have volunteer events where they donate proceeds to a nonprofit organization. Ultimately, that alignment with a greater good is our sweet spot because one, it helps with storytelling, but also, in this day and age, giving back is such an important part of changing the world, making it a little better. ROB: Finding that sort of specialization and alignment can sometimes be a journey. How did you come to focus on that as a specialty? ASHLEY: That's such a great question. When I founded the agency back in 2014, we didn't have the luxury of selecting the types of clients that we worked with. I'm sure you've heard this a lot with your guests. We worked with some people that we probably didn't want to work with. Ultimately it came down to that if we're going to tell stories and work hard, we don't want to work with jerks. [laughs] So we didn't. We stopped working with jerks, and that's it in a nutshell. Is that terrible? ROB: No. I mean, who wants to work with jerks? I don't know anybody who says they do. I haven't heard that strategy yet. I'd be fascinated if we have somebody listening who has a strategy built around working with jerks and charging a premium for it. I'm here for that conversation. ASHLEY: [laughs] I love it. So that's really what it came down to. We also help businesses who don't have a purpose-driven mindset to build that into their company culture. Maybe they came to us and wanted to think about “How do we put our story out there in a way that has more employee retention, that we can attract more visibility from our clients?” We always say you've got to be purpose-driven. You've got to stand for something. So, we've also helped coach our clients into getting into this space, too. ROB: What does that transformation look like? Maybe an example of where a company was starting. The purpose is usually there, much like your own firm; you just have to find your way to it. ASHLEY: That's exactly it. Just setting the intention, putting it out there in your story, putting it on your website, weaving it into your social media, and holding your teams accountable too, and just shouting it from the rooftops. That's especially applicable to clients of ours that aren't necessarily nonprofits but are doing something to give back – make sure that their employees know about the work they're doing at an executive level and then down to a grassroots level. A little bit less in COVID time but coordinating fundraising events or teambuilding events around giving back. ROB: It sounds like it would almost pull you towards being involved in – if an organization didn't have core values, you might not even be working on marketing. You might be working almost on their internals before they get to the externals. Do you end up getting pulled in that deep? ASHLEY: Sometimes, yes, we do. But I think that primarily our sweet spot is in the content creation and the storytelling. That's where we really like to be. Certainly, we will help clients define their brand strategy, and that includes core values and messaging. But we definitely like to focus on the story element. ROB: Understood. You talked about not having as much of a focus when you started, but let's even go a little bit further behind that. What led you to have the sort of audacity to create your own job and create some other jobs along the way? How did you get into that lane? ASHLEY: I love that word. I love the word “audacious.” Let's see, I've been a writer for my whole life, ever since I was in kindergarten, I think. I won a Young Authors contest for a short story I wrote called “Crystal Met the Ogre.” I still have it. Kind of funny. But I've been a writer my whole life, and I loved to tell people stories, but I also had a knack for business and trying to create processes and connect people. After I finished my undergrad at University of Tennessee – I was a creative writing major; I worked at the school paper – I ended up in a sales position. I wasn't expecting that I was going to be in sales, but also that I was going to like it so much. I started off working for a candy manufacturer based in Chicago. It was a great experience. I was 22, had half the country as my territory, was flying all over, slinging candy. But I wanted a little bit more of a high-volume sale, and I moved into commercial real estate. Through that experience, I was a creative person trapped in a corporate world and interacting with people at the C level. What I found was that all of these brands and businesses didn't know how to talk about themselves. They were all innovative. Every single one of them called themselves “innovative.” All of them called themselves “streamlined.” I realized it was a problem that in this digital space, people didn't have the words to differentiate themselves from one another. You could close your eyes and hear across multiple industries and see people using the same exact words to describe themselves, with no differentiation. So that was an observation. In the meantime, I was volunteering for nonprofit organizations in Chicago and helping them with content creation. This was that sweet spot when social media was just starting to go from being that you needed a .edu email address to that anyone could sign up for Facebook at this time. How do you turn those social media engines into a marketing machine? I cut my teeth on that through nonprofit work and ultimately decided that I was onto something and needed to combine all of my passions for business, storytelling, content, and nonprofit work. So I left my career in commercial real estate and went back to school to earn a master's in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. They have a great program for writing for a target audience. I simultaneously founded Yakkety Yak, and the rest is sort of history. ROB: That's a great upscaling moment on the writing there. I like that. I wonder a little bit – I'm just going to pull on a thread here that's a little random, but we'll see where it goes – if you don't mind me asking, what was the candy? Who were you selling to, and what made it desirable for them to buy this candy? ASHLEY: [laughs] It was a private label contract manufacturing. That's what we pitched. I worked with Cost Plus World Market and Harry & David, and we were doing premium toffees. We would produce it for them under their own private label brand. Coming from Chicago, we'd make the candy and then it would be in like a Harry & David package, for example. They also did those really beautiful Christmas candies, ribbon candies. That was it. No chocolates and no gummies, but pretty much everything else. It was cool. There was a factory. The CEO of the company gave me my first job out of school, tolerated me, trained me in sales. He actually passed away a couple of years ago, and he just made such a positive impact in my life, giving me this opportunity. It was pretty cool getting to walk through the candy factory and make friends with the factory workers and be part of creating something from end to end. ROB: That's very cool. Those are typically, in my reckoning, pretty high end, nice candies. It's a creative process. It's not what it sounds like at first when you say sales. I think we all sometimes miss doing tangible work, something you can put your hands on and something you can see sitting on a shelf. ASHLEY: Yeah, it was cool. And it was fun. It was my first experience in business. We would go to these candy conferences, and I was the youngest by far. I was the only female, interacting at Happy Hour with the good ol' boys who'd been in the business for 40 years. It was fun. It taught me a lot about how to defend myself. It taught me a lot about how to keep composure as a woman in business and overcome challenges. That experience grew me really well for commercial real estate, which was a little bit more of a cutthroat type of industry. ROB: Right. You went from a boys' club to a mean boys' club. ASHLEY: [laughs] I did. ROB: Even trickier. Maybe a little bit gentler in a more creative space. But I think what's interesting is the through line is, as we all know as an agency owner, you are selling, but it sounds like a common thing across your sales experience is you're really helping people get what they want – which is much easier than trying to convince them they need something they're not aware of. ASHLEY: I think so, yeah. ROB: Very interesting. Ashley, as you reflect on – you said 2014 was the starting of Yakkety Yak? ASHLEY: I have two dates. 2012 is when I founded the agency and I went back to school, and I had a few very small clients at the time. But 2014 is when I hired my first employee and Yakkety Yak became my full-time job. So I use that as my real date. ROB: Got it. Over the course of that 7+ year time, what are some things you've learned that you might do differently if you were starting from scratch? ASHLEY: That's a great question. My journey has been really interesting. I built the agency from scratch. I had no outside investors. I'm pretty risk positive; I'm comfortable in a space of jumping and leaping to the next level. It doesn't make me nervous. I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on mistakes made because I do believe that every experience leads you to the next, and you've got to build upon it and take with you the tidbits that help make you stronger. For example, looking at my career trajectory, the candy business, while I knew it wasn't my life's passion, that sales experience helped take me to the next level. Any adversity that I faced in commercial real estate, I took that with me to become a founder and CEO and be gutsy as hell. But one thing that stands out for what I would do differently is I think in the area of hiring. I have worn every hat in the agency, and I wish that I'd had more help sooner because that would've helped me scale faster. I haven't mentioned this part yet, but I've got three really little kids – and a COVID baby. It would've been great – when my second son was born, it was 2018; I was 38 weeks pregnant, and I had an employee resign, which meant that I was not going to get any maternity leave. I had my baby on a Tuesday and I was back to work on Monday. If I had built a deeper bench, then I would've been able to have a little bit more balance early on. ROB: What do you think it was that prevented you from building up that team? ASHLEY: I think when you're an agency starting out and you're competing in a market like Chicago – we have some major players here. I'm going up against, from a benefits standpoint, a salary standpoint, and a credibility standpoint, some powerhouses. It took a little bit of time to earn some credibility and name recognition. People, I will say, do remember the name Yakkety Yak, so I am proud of that. Recruiting top talent takes time and building up a team and building that referral network where people say “Hey, that's a place where I really want to be and where I want to work.” ROB: Got it. What were your first couple of hires when you went from a team of one to a team of more? ASHLEY: Oh gosh, one of my first hires was – and he's still one of my favorite employees; he moved back to California and is doing some really great things right now – a graphic designer. I had the way with the words, and I was bringing in the business but also doing a lot of the content creation, and Curtis was doing the graphic design elements. And then support from a writing standpoint, so I eventually started to be able to outsource that and build a team. I shouldn't say outsource; I mean delegate. That's the word I mean. And finally, 2018 was a breakthrough year for me where I finally was able to build – we had more than 15 people. Now we're a team of 20. It's great to have such amazing talent at the agency now. I wish that I had done that sooner. But when you're bootstrapping your own business, it's kind of part of the deal, I think. ROB: Congratulations on that growth. You mentioned a COVID baby, so I'm sort of expecting, by your story, that maybe you did get some maternity leave this time around? ASHLEY: [laughs] I didn't. Well, lesson learned from the second child, but we were in crisis – not crisis, but I didn't think that it would be good for me to have no visibility to my team when we're all suddenly working remotely and in the middle of a global pandemic. So, I made sure to still be around for internal purposes, but I did remove myself from some client-facing work for a period of time. I had my baby Memorial Day weekend, and by Labor Day my clients were seeing me on the regular again. ROB: Got it. I can definitely see a case for visibility to a team in a time where everybody's in uncharted territory. ASHLEY: Sure. ROB: Where are you and your team in terms of office? Did you have an office, do you have an office? Are you going to have an office? Are you keeping the same geographic footprint moving forward? How are you thinking about physical space in the context of Yakkety Yak? ASHLEY: That's such a great question and something that's so relevant right now. We have this awesome office in a loft building right near the train station, Union Station in Chicago, and it's great. I love the space. It's got that brick and timber feel, lots of natural light, open area. But we jammed a lot of people into that space. I'm currently working with a designer, Lauren Ashley Allan. She's a really awesome up-and-coming designer. We're revamping and rethinking our space so that it is comfortable for people when we return to work. Flexible seating options is what we're focusing on, in addition to little booths so that people who are a little more conscious or want more privacy can work in a confined space that has ventilation. The goal is that we're not going to mandate that the team come back to work, but we are going to open our doors after Memorial Day, and I'll be there and give people a place that they can come and work if they want to escape and gradually start getting people back together. I think what I've been noticing is I miss the vibration, like the good vibes that come from having a team all together. So, we're putting some thought and intention into how we're designing the space, and we'll move forward from there with some flexible hours, combination of remote work and in-person. ROB: Right, but you're probably not going to have folks moving to Portugal and being fully remote, that you could think of? ASHLEY: I don't think so. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] It sounds like you're being very intentional about your space, which is compelling, and it sounds like even within the office environment, you're really differentiating that work environment. Knowing Chicago, knowing where you are, you have a benefit of accessibility and transit and that urban lifestyle for those who choose it. And obviously, in Chicago, you can get into the city from very, very far out on a train if you want. And then not knowing the specific block you're on or whatever, during normal times, there's probably a good vibe, good places to grab lunch together, grab Happy Hour together. It's not just some nameless office park. ASHLEY: Right, exactly. That camaraderie is just important. I really felt for people – especially those who are in there, mid to late twenties, single, living by themselves, and stuck at home during COVID. That's a lot for people. I think that we've got a lot of healing to do as a country when it comes to finally starting to emerge back into everyday life. I want to be there and I want to create a safe space for my team to come in and get work done and feel welcome and safe and so we can continue doing the excellent work that we've been doing and build off of that energy. ROB: That sounds excellent. How's your team thinking about that? I know everybody's all over the spectrum, at least from people I know. Some people would be in a closet together tomorrow and some people are waiting until they get a shot or even longer. What's the range of what you're seeing? ASHLEY: A range, you're exactly right. I'm giving people space to make the decisions on their own for now. We continue to check in on it. I've said that in 2021, at this point, we're probably not going to do a mandate to go back to work. But we will open the doors and encourage people to come in if they want to. The beauty of the transition that's taken place from a remote workforce standpoint is that now we see that we can work remotely, that if you've got to coach your kid's softball team in the afternoon, you can work from home, and that's going to be fine. We're going to be able to connect, and no one's going to miss anything. I think this has done wonders for the work-life balance, and I hope at least at Yakkety Yak, that's a trend we're going to really continue to let permeate our office culture. ROB: I love the intentionality of it. I'm a little bit jealous. I'm a little bit more of a “ready, fire, aim” sort of person. Over the course of the past year, the last four people we've hired have all been remote, and we're going to figure it out later. I'm hoping that late fall/early winter, we'll get together and visit one of our team who lives down in Chile. It's completely different. Walking away from the office and loading the furniture into our basement kind of made it real, you know? ASHLEY: How did that feel for you? ROB: I am very comfortable with the change. The thing I don't like in my basement is there's no people there. There's fresh air and light. It's a little rustic, shall we say. I do miss the getting together, but if part of it means that instead of being in the office and doing little things, we get to do something more pronounced like spending a week in Chile and getting some different gatherings, I'm interested in it. It's a change of pace for sure. Ashley, when you think about the future of Yakkety Yak, the future of marketing and how you're working with businesses that give back, what are you excited about in the future that's coming up? ASHLEY: I couldn't be more excited about video. We are doing some really, really, really incredible work when it comes to especially the patient space, telling people's stories about how they've been impacted by various health conditions, diseases, disorders. I love using video as a mechanism for storytelling, regardless of the target audience. There are so many cool things now with TikTok and how to use visual elements to show a progression, and people are doing that every day in their homes as amateurs, and how that's going to translate to professional level videos I think is something that is so cool and something you're going to see exploding in marketing space over the next 18 months. ROB: One thing I wonder about, if you have an opinion on it, is when I think about audio and the way it's going, I see a lot more attention going into the sound on versus sound off experience and accommodating people who might be muted. What direction do you see that going? Are we going towards where every video's going to adapt, or are we going to where we're assuming that so many people have some sort of Bluetooth headset in that they're going to have audio on? How is that trending? ASHLEY: That's a really great question. I'm going to answer it in two parts. One, I think that the pandemic has shown everyone the importance of quality A/V, like when you can't hear someone on Zoom or there's a delay in a recording when you're watching things virtually. I think that high quality video and audio is something that's more of a priority than it's ever been. With that said, I think it depends on the platform. We wouldn't necessarily, for a virtual fundraiser or virtual event, have all of the text scrolling at the bottom of the experience, but when it comes to ads and what's happening when people are scrolling through Instagram, I think it's absolutely vital to have the words there because people are scrolling through Instagram in their beds at night when they're not necessarily wearing headphones and they don't want to wake up their partner, or they have babies that they're feeding and don't want to scare the babies. That's my personal experience, but I think it applies across a multitude of scenarios. And people are multitasking, too. They might have one window open or be on a conference call or a Zoom call and scrolling through Instagram. You can't have that dependence on the audio in those scenarios.  So, when it comes to social media, the text is vital. When it comes to other experiences where you're holding people's attention for a little bit longer, then I think you're okay without it.  ROB: Very, very interesting. Thank you for illuminating the topic. Ashley, when people want to find and connect with you and with Yakkety Yak, where should they go to find you? ASHLEY: Our website is the best spot to find us because you've got links there to all of our social media channels. You can find us at yakketyyak.com. The spelling isn't necessarily intuitive. ROB: How did you choose the spelling of Yakkety Yak? ASHLEY: [laughs] I don't know. I think it was probably the domain that was available at the time. But it was important that we were Y-A-K and not Y-A-C-K, so we went from there. ROB: Perfect. Ashley, thank you so much for joining the podcast and sharing your experience. I definitely wish you the best as you get that revamped office up and humming and get everybody back working together in person. ASHLEY: Thanks, Rob. I really appreciate your time today. This was fun. ROB: Thank you so much, Ashley. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Melanie Querry owns Beyond Spots and Dots, a full-service advertising agency that frames its work around analysis, keeps client budgets on target, and utilizes proven marketing success in one industry to help businesses in other industries grow. Spots and Dots has been on the Inc. 5000 list five times.   In this interview Melanie discusses how her agency helps clients understand the customer journey and how prioritizing and implementing tactics will do exactly what a client wants . . . and meet budget constraints. Melanie claims that, for a roughly equivalent impression count, digital marketing can cost one-third of what traditional marketing costs. Still, all the layers have to work together. “You have to have synergy within your marketing budget,” she says. Tactic selection and prioritization are critical, customized to meet a client's needs, and are based on a mix of Beyond Spots and Dots' experience, knowledge, and research.   As an example, Melanie talks about geofencing, creating a technological fence to target programmed advertising to a specific audience. Another tactic she presents is secondary search retargeting, which uses proprietary software/connections to capture someone searching for information on a third-party website and then follows that individual with ads on the internet. Melanie informs us that “there are three satellites above us collecting every bit of data that we are doing on our cellphone, our laptops, our TVs, our computers, our desktops.” Legally, large companies (Oracle, BlueKai) can disperse that collected information. Beyond Spots and Dots is one of only a few companies allowed to utilize the information . . . which they can pass on to their clients so that their clients can target these potential customers.   Melanie wanted to be in advertising from an early age. After she earned her advertising degree, she took a job selling advertising at KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, then another with a cable station to learn “the cable side.” Melanie says these organizations “didn't know about their clients, didn't know about their customers,” and only focused on rating points and the number of “spots” they got. She left the cable station almost on a whim (just because it was “time”), started her agency as a media buying firm that would be “Beyond the Spots and Dots” focus of her previous employers, and took on a Pittsburgh mega car dealer as a client “for the cash flow.”  Melanie convinced the dealer to fund a digital campaign at a time when even car manufacturers were not “doing digital.” The car dealer's business grew so significantly that it eventually hired ten people for an internal digital department. Melanie jokes that. while the dealership provided sorely needed cash flow in those early years, she was not able to “use them for profits.” Today, Beyond Spots and Dots provides advertising, public relations, marketing, branding, and digital services. Once things are “back to normal,” Melanie looks forward to reopening the agency's physical locations in Pittsburgh and Columbus, OH – she prefers working with clients face-to-face “120% over what we're doing currently.” Interestingly, even with clients “everywhere,” the agency does not charge clients for its travel expenses – Melanie considers travel as a way to reinvest in her company.  Melanie can be reached on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and on her agency's website at Beyondspotsanddots.com.  Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm excited to be joined today by Melanie Querry, owner of Beyond Spots and Dots based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the podcast, Melanie. MELANIE: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I certainly appreciate it. ROB: It's a pleasure to have you here. Tell us about Beyond Spots and Dots. Where does your firm excel?  MELANIE: We really excel in helping businesses grow. We understand what it takes to grow. We've been on the Inc. 5000 list five times, which we're very proud of, and hope to continue to be there again in the future. We are able to take our experiences and really utilize the marketing efforts and successes that we have had with various industries and apply those to other industries. Our real growth has been in the digital world. We started as a media buying firm, so I kind of laugh and say that we do media buying with our eyes closed. However, the digital media buying is new and evolving, and we've been doing it for 15 years that we've been in business – which is great. Not many agencies can say that. So, we really excel at implementing those tactics for businesses, but helping businesses understand where their budgeting should be. I think what makes us different is that we really stay in line with budgets for clients and on behalf of clients and rein them in when they get out of line with budgets or things that they want to implement. Something that makes us very different is while we have super killer creative and award-winning creative, we really take an analytical approach to everything we do, including creative. That's pretty different from most agencies. Most agencies want to just be creative shops or digital firms, and we really do take a full-service approach. ROB: Got it. Congratulations on the 15 years, on the Inc. 5000 list. Those are all things – it doesn't pay the bills, but it is a recognition of that ongoing growth that you also seek for your clients. You mentioned being able to transfer tactics and strategies from some industries that we might think of perhaps to some industries we might not think of having such successful digital and media tactics. Is that the case? Are there some unexpected industries you've found yourself in the middle of? MELANIE: Yes. We really don't want to put all of our eggs in one basket. We started in 2006, and in 2008 had the economy fall out beneath us. Nothing like COVID, but certainly at the time, and through those years, we learned a lot and a great deal. What we did learn is not to put all of our eggs in one basket. We pride ourselves on working in various industries. Business is business, and while industries do have niche audiences or niche ways of advertising or marketing, there are still businesses that are being run through operations that really follow through all types of business. We have been able to successfully help businesses grow in various industries, but some of the industries that have been unique that we didn't seek out, if you will, have been property management, for example. That was one where we didn't seek it out. They sought us out. But we were able to be very successful with one property management company, and it filtered through to many others because of the tactics we implemented at a low cost and we were able to help them grow. ROB: In that case, were they seeking more properties to manage? Were they seeking tenants, renters? Not to focus in too deeply, but as a means of exploring what you do. MELANIE: Sure. Their goal is to seek out renters. They have several properties around the country, and near one of our offices – we have an office in Columbus and also Baltimore. In the Columbus market, they wanted to sell out a particular building, which was very specific, and they did it so quickly when they started working with us that they actually shut their advertising off early, but then diverted their dollars to a completely different market. That was really interesting and fun. It's fun for us. ROB: And probably meaningful for them. Behind the scenes, not always, but a lot of times in the real estate world, having something fully leased or above a certain percentage is a meaningful financial milestone. It lets you collateralize or sell the property. It's a big deal beyond just filling the space. But then on the “who you're targeting side,” finding a place, whether it's an office or a residence, is a customer journey. What does that journey look like, and how do you tackle people along that journey? MELANIE: That's a great question. You're speaking my language, Rob. [laughs] We do take that customer journey fully into consideration when we are making a recommendation for any type of creative assets or messaging and also the placement of the ads themselves, and whether it's a recommendation to do PR versus traditional marketing or advertising versus some kind of new media. In targeting, it's really fun to look at the customer journey because you have these five steps, if you will, from the point of time when someone is not even familiar with your service or product all the way to the point of no return where they have to make a decision and their decision is either “let's do it / buy it,” whatever it is you're asking them to do, or “let's not.” That customer journey has steps throughout in between those two aspects or behaviors, and there are advertising tactics that make sense for certain parts of that journey. In the very beginning, when you're trying to just make someone aware of your product, your book, your property that you have available or whatever it might be that you're selling, there are tactics that work better for that part of the customer journey versus the middle of the journey where they're now aware, they might be talking to their friends about you, they're doing their research, which is part of that journey – and then they're trying to figure out what makes sense for them and what's best for them, and whether or not they're going to buy. We utilize that customer journey for everything that we do, and we're always presenting that to businesses to understand the different parts of the journey. A lot of people will come to us and say, “We just want an awareness campaign,” and I ask them, “Why?” That is valid and relevant, and sometimes an awareness campaign is all they want or all they think they can afford, so we help them to understand that journey so that they understand the different tactics within. ROB: Right. It would seem deeper in the funnel, there's some tactics you can't afford to not do. I can imagine – and I'm just making things up here, because I don't run, let's say, an apartment complex – but if someone comes and they book a tour, they're so deep into that funnel, two things seem true to me. Number one, it seems like a lot of businesses – and I'll broaden this beyond real estate – would find it hard to operationalize the information of who has booked a tour in a timely manner. But it also seems like one of the best ways you could possibly spend your money is, let's say, remarketing to an email list of people who have visited you in the past X months. How do they operationalize that successfully? Or am I way off, number one? Number two, if I'm in the neighborhood, how do you help people meet some of those time-sensitive communications that would need to happen to execute on that sort of thing? MELANIE: We try to implement new media because of the technology behind it. Depending on a business's budget, our job is to help them understand those tactics that they can implement to do exactly what you're asking within the budget. Based on our experience and based on our knowledge and based on research, we will help that business to prioritize those tactics. For example, a tactic might be geofencing, which is one of the new ways of advertising through programmatic advertising. We can literally draw a fence, if you will – it's technology for sure, but you are drawing a fence around something. We've drawn fences on roads before, trying to reach people driving into a college when a competitive college wants to reach those potential students. We have drawn fences around convention centers, trying to target tradeshows for particular audiences. So, the geofencing is really cool. That's one tactic that we can utilize to grab people now. With COVID, obviously things have changed with geofencing because people aren't out and about and aren't going to these big events or aren't going to big tradeshows. That will start again, but there are other tactics. There's another tactic that we can utilize called secondary search retargeting, and that's one of the newest and latest and greatest, and a lot of fun to work with. We had a company that was very niche; they were implementing services to small to medium size businesses for Mac users specifically, but for companies frankly like ours, where we have mostly PC-based computers, and we have a few Macs because we have designers, and they need their Macs. This company would target businesses that were utilizing both PC and Mac, and they were specialists in the Mac realm. When you buy a Mac at the Apple Store, you can go online to search for companies like this to help us network the Macs with the PCs. A lot of companies are getting into this because people do like their Macs and they're very loyal to their Macs. This particular company was able to utilize secondary search retargeting by targeting third party searches. This is outside of the Google world and outside of just your search bar in Google. We've also been able to utilize on the spot, like you're asking, secondary search retargeting for students. College students are searching online for lots of things, for different programs, for different schools. they're searching in all of these third parties out there, and we're able to actually tap into those searches. It's really wild. ROB: What does that mean? Explore the tactic with me a little bit. Does that mean you're on something like US News, World Report, looking at college rankings, and you're searching for something and somehow that's able to feed back into search targeting? Where does this information come from? MELANIE: That's right. To give another example, probably an easier one to visualize is real estate. We have worked in the real estate realm and been very successful with that industry as well. A secondary search tactic that's really cool allows us to target – let's say you're buying a home and I'm a real estate company, and I want your business because you're buying a home and I've got homes to sell. But you are really hard to catch unless I can catch you through geotargeting by visiting other open houses. Right now, during COVID, we know that's not happening so much around the country. There are open houses, but they're few and far between. So. a different technology you can use is this secondary search retargeting. You might be searching on Realtor.com, and if you're searching for a home value or the home sale price, then I can capture you doing that search on that third party website. And when I capture you doing that through my technology, I can physically follow you with ads through the internet, which is the retargeting part. The way that that's done, to answer your question, is there are three satellites above us collecting every bit of data that we are doing on our cellphone, our laptops, our TVs, our computers, our desktops. All of our actions are being collected through this data, and huge companies such as BlueKai and Oracle now legally are allowed to spit that information back out. Companies like ours – and there are only a few companies like ours around the country that are allowed to utilize this information – we're able to use that data of that behavior from someone like you and give it to our real estate company and target those people. It is wild. It's pretty cool. ROB: That's remarkable. There's great power and there's great responsibility. I feel like I need to go close my blinds or something. MELANIE: Yes. [laughs] ROB: It's really just what I type into the computer that's probably the problem here. Take me back a little bit, Melanie. Tell us about where Beyond Spots and Dots came into existence. What led you to start running your own business that was not by any means guaranteed to be a multi-time Inc. 5000 company and so on? MELANIE: As a young child, I always wanted to have an advertising agency. And I don't know that I even knew what an advertising agency was at the time or what an agency really did, but I followed that. I probably at the time thought of more of the creative side, which is what most people think of when you think of an advertising agency. I really followed that through school. I got a degree in advertising. Back then, there were only three colleges across the country that actually offered a degree in advertising doing creative and media buying. Not many colleges and universities offered that then, but they do now, which is great. Once I graduated, of course, at that time I learned that TV was the most complicated of all media, and when doing media buying, TV was the most complex. So, I really wanted to learn about the inner workings of TV. I graduated from college, I moved to Pittsburgh – being a Penn Stater, I got to know Pittsburgh when I was very young – and started at KDKA-TV, which was the first TV station ever. That was really powerful to me. I worked like a dog as an entry level person. At the time, they also didn't allow entry level employees, so I really had to show them what I was made of to be able to even keep my job. I barely made a salary at the time. I think I made more in college waiting tables than I did at my first job at KDKA-TV. [laughs] I was going to power through it. After KDKA, I went to the cable side because I wanted to know and understand both sides of TV, broadcast and cable. One day I decided, okay, there's never a real good time, so it's as good as any. I put in my four weeks' notice and I just quit. I resigned cold turkey. I didn't take clients. I didn't do anything like that. I just stopped one day and resigned, and the next day I said, okay, I've got to figure out how to start a business. I started making phone calls to the state on how to register a business, and “What the heck is my name going to be?” When I worked in these big mammoth companies, Comcast and CBS Network, I worked with big agencies, global agencies, and they didn't know anything about their clients. They just didn't know about their customers. All the media buyers cared about were rating points and “How many spots am I getting?” The name actually came pretty easy to me. Beyond Spots and Dots became the name because I wanted to go beyond that. I wanted to go beyond the number of spots someone's getting and the rating points they're getting. And the name stuck. The first day of the business, I went out to celebrate and I met who would become my husband, which was awesome. ROB: Wow. Good day. MELANIE: Yeah. He was a finance major and he helped me with the books, and as I got revenue in, I needed someone to help me with that side of it, the business side. He ended up coming on board, we got married, and now we're a full-service firm. At the time, he was already developing websites and doing Google ads. So, Day 1, we picked up website development and Google advertising, which was really great. ROB: What did those first few customers look like? Who did you start working with initially? MELANIE: I made phone calls, of course, Day 1, and said, “I now have an advertising agency. I would love an opportunity to work with you and to handle your advertising.” I was willing to do what it took to get business as far as services that I wasn't familiar with. I was willing to learn new services. One was a mega car dealer in Pittsburgh. I had talked to them about some Google advertising, and at the time, manufacturers weren't doing that. So, I implemented a digital campaign for them 15 years ago. In order to get their business, which was big, I needed the cash flow. They needed someone that knew digital, and it was a win-win – except that from a cash flow standpoint, I was able to use them as cash flow; I just wasn't able to use them for profits. [laughs] I felt that it was a necessary evil. I loved working with the general manager there, and I knew that I could help their business grow, and we did. We were able to take their business to a digital standpoint that, at the time, neither manufacturers nor car dealers were able to do. They were able to hire 10 internal people as a digital department, which was unheard of at the time. This was during the time right before the fallout in 2008, so yeah, pretty cool and definitely a good story and something that I look back on, for sure. ROB: Right. What did the budget of a car dealership like that look like at the time for traditional media? Has their overall ad budget changed much, or has it just shifted a percentage to digital? MELANIE: Certainly, the traditional media spend was big. It was bigger. That's the beauty about digital; you don't actually have to spend as much in digital. You just don't, and you can reach – the impression count is similar by spending a third of the amount. Traditional media is more expensive on a cost per spot basis or a cost per impression basis. Our job is to help the client understand all of that and what that means and how they should be spending their money. So there always was a bigger spend for them specifically in traditional, and at the time, of course, the digital was just really hitting. I mean, 14-15 years ago, digital wasn't that big. You didn't have to have it. You dabbled in it and you knew it was coming and you knew it was out there. So, we helped them to utilize some of this new media at the time. ROB: What was someone like that spending on traditional per month? Was it $10,000, $50,000, $100,000? What's the ballpark? Or am I even low? I don't know. MELANIE: This particular dealer had multiple manufacturers, multiple brands, and each manufacturer would offer them incentives, and they had budgets that they had to spend by manufacturer. So, it would vary. In general, a dealer like that could spend anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 a month. It truly varies. It varies throughout the year, it varies by the incentives the dealer is receiving, and it varies by the number of cars they have on the lot. There're so many variables when it comes to spending for something like that. ROB: It's helpful even just to know a general direction. I've certainly seen an increased appetite for digital, and I've seen even new real estate developments looking for very sophisticated website buildouts and that sort of thing. It starts to make sense when you put it in the context of the traditional ad budgets. If they've started to turn the corner on digital, you can start to understand that increased degree of investment in some of the places – a website used to be an afterthought. You might not even have one for a development, and now it seems to be a hub of activity. MELANIE: Sure. A website is a walking salesperson. I don't care what you're selling or what you're offering, any industry should have a decent website because that's where people go. And even social media. We find, in our experience – and I'm kind of floored by it, but it is what it is – people will go to social media. They'll go to a business Facebook page before they ever even get to the website. Which is also very interesting in my mind. To your point, the layering of dollars so that you can layer your tactics – your marketing tactics, your advertising tactics – the layering is what's really critical. When you have a budget – and we've worked with very small budgets and have put people on TV before, even with a smaller budget. It's all about the layering and where you're going to run and what the messaging is, and it all works together. It really has to be cohesive. I feel like the word “synergy” is so cliché, but it's true. You have to have synergy within your own marketing budget. ROB: Really interesting threads to pull on there, Melanie. When you look back at the history of Beyond Spots and Dots, what are some things you have learned along the way that you might do differently if you were starting anew? MELANIE: I wish I would've started sooner. [laughs] I had this in the back of my mind. I'm very fortunate to have started when I did. Today's my birthday, actually. ROB: Happy birthday. MELANIE: I'm turning 45, and I'm blessed to have what I have and to have been able to work this hard thus far. I have a child now. We have a little kiddo. But prior to that, working your tail off – I wish I started sooner. I wish I'd started earlier because having the energy and not having a family at that time and being able to work the 80 hours I used to work before kids – it's hard to do that. As you get older, it's tiring. So, I would recommend just doing it. You only live once. I think that's one thing. For the future, growth. Growth is important. We plan to get back where we were. We were on a roll. We have good planning. We've got the tools internally to be able to expand and scale at this point. So, we do plan to open other offices. We have an office in Baltimore and Columbus right now, and Pittsburgh, obviously; that's our headquarters. But we do want to keep growing. We want to continue to help mentor others and also continue to grow and help businesses grow. ROB: How do you think about that office planting strategy? Is it rooted in some of your clientele having a local base and being able to be in person with someone? Do you spin up a small lease, or are you in WeWork land? How do you think about the planting strategy? MELANIE: Part of it is a real estate strategy with respect to investing, and that's a whole other conversation. As we diversify our own portfolio, if you will, personally speaking – and from a business standpoint – real estate is important to us. Long term, I don't plan to purchase real estate all over for office buildings. I do have to tell you, you kind of hit the nail on the head with respect to having an office and then working with a local client. We've lost business, presentations we've made, because businesses want an agency that's right in their backyard. When COVID hit, I thought to myself, does this change the way businesses believe they can do business? For example, we own our building currently in Pittsburgh, and we have an empty building right now because we have our whole staff working from home. We will keep them working from home as long as we feel that we need to, to keep everybody safe. Hopefully, that ends soon, but the reality of it is, we are doing business and conducting business all over the world from home. There are a lot of securities that go behind that, and we're dealing with a lot of data and customers' data and customers' information. The security has changed, of course. But does it change the way businesses think in the fact that we could do business – I don't have to be right in Columbus to do business for you or to handle your native or your advertising. It's an interesting open question that I ask myself as well. ROB: I understand that. I think there will always be a certain scope and scale of client that you're going to want to go see in person. When everything's normal, there's just a certain size of client that you're going to win more or not lose if you're giving them some attention in person. MELANIE: Agreed. ROB: I'm a firm believer in that. I agree, it's a whole other topic that I think we'll probably pass exploring on this podcast. Most people don't want to talk a lot about profits, but profits are important. I come originally from a software background and now also have some services work that we do, but within a services firm, there's only so much reinvestment back into the business that makes sense. It's not like a software company where you're infinitely scaling and pulling additional capital. So, figuring out what to do with profitability is its own interesting topic, I think. MELANIE: Yeah. And to answer that, for us at least, I agree with you fully. We prefer to be in person. That is why we opened offices in Baltimore and Columbus specifically, because they are nearby; it's quick and easy for us to travel there. I do have family in Baltimore, so selfishly, I'm thrilled to have an office there. [laughs] It's an excuse, anyway. Doing business in person is way better, I believe. I prefer it 120% over what we're doing currently. And we do reinvest our profits into travel. We don't charge our clients for travel. Our hourly fee has been the same for 15 years. We know what it takes timewise to do business. Now that we've been in business 15 years, we're more efficient at what we do, so it doesn't take us as long to do things. So, I don't feel that I have to gouge clients. It's just not necessary. Those profits we do roll back into travel, and we travel to our clients as much as we humanly possibly can. I think the same goes for getting work done in person. There's something to be said for our staff to be able to walk upstairs and go talk to the designer real quick or go downstairs and pull our copywriter in and say, “Hey, what do you think about this tagline?” There's some camaraderie there, and that's missing during all of this COVID. But that's reality, and we divert, and we will – I'm positive; it's a new year, and we will get back to where we were. We definitely will. I think the world will as well. But as a business owner right now, you just have to go with the flow and figure out your plan and keep at it and stay positive as much as you can and be able to stay on top of it. ROB: That's excellent. I really do like that thought of travel as a means of reinvesting in the business. I think that's a solid way to think about that, investing in relationships there. Melanie, when people want to find you and when they want to find Beyond Spots and Dots, where should they go to connect with you? MELANIE: Sure. I'm a believer of connecting. I certainly have a LinkedIn page, and I appreciate when people do connect. I love to mentor, so I love when young people reach out. I probably volunteer a little too much for mentoring, but I'll take it. I'll do it all day long if it helps someone young who's trying to get into the business and break through. As long as they're a hard worker, they're going to be successful. Beyondspotsanddots.com is our website. You can also google us and find us. Lots of places. We have a Twitter account, Facebook page, and all the good things. ROB: Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Melanie. It's been excellent connecting with you and learning for you, so thank you for coming on and sharing. MELANIE: Thank you so much. I certainly appreciate it. ROB: Be well. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Joel Matthew, Founder and CEO at Fortress Consulting, started his company after his experience selling advertising at CBS radio and television. When he “could not make the sale” because the companies he approached did not want to drive prospects to  their poorly-designed websites, he took action. Joel figured he could solve their problem (and his) by finding creative agencies to build content and great technical website and app developers to get out their messages. When he could not find that marriage of creative and technical in one organization, Joel founded Fortress Consulting to “bridge the gap.” Fortress Consulting began as an advertising agency, web designer, and app developer, but settled on being a digital marketing agency. (Joel says he loves the trackability and measurability of digital.) The agency's focus expanded to include  content development, video podcasting, and creating customized, tailored digital marketing strategies to drive increased traffic and revenue to client sites.  Fortress serves clients worldwide in a wide range of industries but finds the “sweet spot” for its strategies and price points with companies with over $20 million in revenue. From his seven pre-agency years in media, Joel learned customer relationship management and how to build friendships with customers. “Fortress family,” he explains. “That's how we treat our customers and our employees.” Before COVID, he relied on face-to-face social interactions to forge strong client relationships. The pandemic has “leveled the playing field,” so that customers now focus on the “value you bring, who you've worked with, and your results.” Joel continues to “show the love” for his clients by contacting them to see how they are doing and by returning to them a percentage of their marketing investment in the form of thoughtful, personal gifts. He reminds us that 80% of a company's business often comes from 20% of its customers . . . and it's those customers he wants to reward. While a business might need more margin in order to afford to “gift,” Joel says it's not so much about the cost of the gift as it is about thoughtfulness. He repeatedly emphasizes the importance of really knowing clients.   Income streams for Fortress are diverse. Retainer clients for digital marketing, social, SEO, pay-per-click,  content, or even integrated campaigns provide long-term recurring income. “Homeruns” come when the agency builds client websites and apps. Launching a site is a cause for celebration . . . celebrating the client in much the same way as does the earlier-mentioned gifting. Expanding services have brought in new levels of clients and the ability to justifiably increase fees.  Joel can be contacted at his agency's website at gofortress.com or on social with screennames that are some combination of Fortress or GoFortress. He also started a higher education company this past year. Beyond Academics' purpose is to “discover, design, and deploy” strategies that enable higher education and lifelong learning initiatives to thrive in the “new normal.”  Information about Beyond Academics, which sits in the position of a “client company” of Fortress, is at beyondacademics.com Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Joel Matthew, CEO and Founder at Fortress Consulting, based in Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to the podcast, Joel. JOEL: Thanks a lot, Rob. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about the focus areas of Fortress Consulting? What is it that y'all are known for? JOEL: Sure. When I first started, I struggled with how to describe it because we're part advertising agency, part web solver, app solver. So I just defaulted to saying we're a digital marketing agency. It's evolved over the years. We're heading into our 10th year in business. The way that I would say it's presently constructed is a lot of brand strategy, marketing, consulting, go to market strategy, but then our bread and butter and our passion lies in digital. Digital for us includes website design/development, building apps, and then customized, tailored digital marketing strategies to get our clients more traffic and more revenue to their sites. ROB: Are there any particular segments you focus on, whether that's a size of firm or a particular vertical market? JOEL: Yeah. We've gone through exercises to try to define this. As far as verticals go, we're pretty broad, more of a generalist approach. We've got clients in real estate, in legal, in technology, in retail – everything you could think of. Higher education, large nonprofit. But that's been really where we've focused: trying to serve everybody. We now have focused that a little bit more. Our ideal target are companies over $20 million because, based on the price points and based on the strategies that we like to employ, that seems to be a sweet spot for us. But we've got clients larger, smaller, everywhere in between. ROB: Is there a geographic pull around the Chicagoland giant area? Or has it become pretty dispersed on that side as well? JOEL: It's all over. Yeah, we have clients outside of the U.S. as well now – France, Canada, all over. But I'd say about 60% is in the Chicago market and 40%, we've got clients on both coasts and south and pretty much all over now. ROB: That's such a fascinating aspect. We really haven't talked much on the podcast about how there are so many agencies and consulting firms – and these clients you're talking about, these are meaningful, material – $20 million in revenue is a real size client. There are probably a bunch of agencies and development partners in their local area that they could work with, and they might like to meet up for a meal or coffee. But generally they just don't. You don't see an agency that's hit any sort of meaningful size and scale – I don't see them where they're just in their local area. How has your journey been in finding these clients outside of your geography? How do they come to you? JOEL: That's a great question. I look back at my career, 7 years in media and corporate for large corporations and television and radio, and I look at what I learned at each of those places, and one of my findings of what I learned from my time in television was customer relationship management and building friendships with my customers. I really took that when I started Fortress. We have this phrase, “Fortress family,” and that's how we treat our customers and our employees. A lot of that is entertaining and face to face and taking them out for games and taking them out for drinks or dinner or whatever that looks like, but especially with COVID, the game has changed. That is basically off the table. So now it's all about what value you bring, who you have worked with, what results you can show. It's kind of leveled the playing field a bit. So that's how we've been able to attain clients from all over the country. They see what we're doing for our clients that we started with locally, and it's more of the thought process of “How do I get some of that?” Now especially, people who work from home, they're virtual, they're remote, and it's less about taking them out to a nice dinner than it is about, “Hey, jump on Zoom, tell me how it's going and let's connect.” But there still is that personal aspect where you want to know what's going on with them in their lives or their families and what they're about, a vacation they just took, so you have those human touchpoints as well. ROB: Is there anything in your client entertaining – have you adopted any sort of gifting strategy or something to still show some love, even though you can't get together? Or has it been more on the personal side? JOEL: My wife and our CFO are not fans of this, but I'm big on gifting and going big on this. I look at it as a certain percentage of the revenue, and our clients get hooked up. I want something that's going to impress them and something that is going to be memorable, not “Hey, here's a branded phone charger” – which is actually what we did last year, which I still think is kind of lame. But yeah, I want to go big for the guys that – they say 80% of your business comes from 20% of your clients. I'm going to take care of those guys in a major way. ROB: You mentioned as a percent of revenue; even if you said 1% of client revenue is a gift, that's a meaningful thing. How many people are on your team right now? JOEL: We've got 15 here in Chicago and then we've got 40 guys overseas. ROB: You extrapolate that out – this is, I would imagine, a multimillion dollar business. So even 1% of revenue is a lot of money on gifts. JOEL: It is. ROB: How do you think about giving the right sort of gift for the client? Is that natural to you, or by having a meaningful allocation, do you find you can give an impactful gift without knowing exactly what they want? JOEL: It goes back to that personal aspect of knowing your customer. When Apple released AirPods, I was going to get AirPods for everybody. I found out from talking to people that some people didn't like AirPods. They liked the Beats version better because they worked out and it was a better fit. So just talking to people and knowing your customers helps with that. But I get a lot of joy from giving gifts and taking care of our clients, so it does come naturally. I see it as they've been with us for this long, and I want to make sure we take care of them and surprise them in some kind of meaningful way. ROB: I want to take some notes on that. It's such a good point. Some agencies you talk to keep a very thin margin and are very efficient, and they can deliver lower cost, but I've found that with that comes a limited ability to be generous in how you serve them and how you give back to them. So I think it's good to think about how to run a business with enough margin to gift the customer well. JOEL: Right. Yeah, it doesn't need to be anything big; it's not necessarily that you have to spend a lot of money. It's just the thoughtfulness of it is huge. For one client who I knew was into working out, we got him $99 Beats headphones and he was very excited about it. Obviously, they can all afford it themselves, but there's just a different element when your thoughtfulness goes into it. ROB: Early on, when you mentioned website development, app development, there can be such a range of expectations, particularly on the website side. You can really get into some engagements where somebody has a small site and they want small changes and they expect it to be done with a very limited budget – how have you found to manage expectations on a minimum project size for web and mobile development? Has that come naturally from that $20 million minimum revenue target? Or how have you navigated that? JOEL: That's been a challenge for us too. Obviously, any entrepreneur knows that when you're first starting out, you're doing stuff for cheap just to get some experience or to build up your client base or network or portfolio, and then the floor rises and all of a sudden you're doing a site for $1,000 and then it becomes $5,000, then it becomes $10,000, then it becomes $20,000 and so on. It has been a challenge because, for instance, one of our clients who's a private equity firm in LA has been working with us for years, so any time they buy a company, they come to us for all the branding and the digital assets and the websites. Three years ago, our pricing was probably a quarter of what it is now. Fast forward 3 years, now they're coming to us and saying, “Hey, we need an overhaul on our site.” Our pricing is now 4x what we charged their portfolio companies. But the feedback I'm getting is, “Wow, your quality has increased a ton. We can see you have people, you have a process,” so it warrants the price tag. ROB: A lot of times that price tag grows gradually and you kind of grow into it. Has there ever been a proposal that you sent out and internally, your jaw hit the floor when you realized what you had written up and the price tag you'd put on it? JOEL: [laughs] Yeah, I'm starting to have those realizations now more because we've actually grown quite a bit this year. Our average size of client has risen as we get into different services. But I don't send anything out without the expectation that we're going to win it and we're going to get it. I very rarely leave a pitch where I don't think we won it. Not much of it catches me by surprise, but yeah, there were a couple deals this year where it's like, hey, that's an extra zero than what we're used to, and it could be a game-changer if that comes in. So yeah, there are those. ROB: Congratulations. Joel, when we rewind the clock on Fortress Consulting, what's the origin story of the company? How did you come to start the company and what were those embryonic next couple of steps that made it into what it is now? JOEL: I would say it was always a desire to start something and do something. I really looked up to my older cousins, who were entrepreneurs and business guys. They were my role models for starting something. That's why I initially called it Fortress Consulting, because I wanted it to be broad enough where I could go in a bunch of different directions. But ultimately what was the lightbulb moment for me – I was working at CBS Radio and Television; I met with five clients in a row and they were all like, “Joel, I'd love to advertise with you, but my website's horrible. I can't send people to this website.” So for me, that was my lightbulb moment. I was like, I have a background in technology. I know how to code. I could probably hack this together or I could find some people that can do it so that it would be a mechanism for me to get more advertising revenue. Ultimately I started doing some research in the Chicago market for companies that could handle the creative side like an ad agency and the technical side of a web developer/app developer. I didn't really see anybody talking about it that way. What I found in my research was there were a ton of very creative advertising agencies that were building beautiful things and creating great campaigns but couldn't write a line of code. On the flipside of that, you have all these great developers and tech shops that would launch a website and then just pat you on the back and you're on your way and didn't think about the creative side or business side of how to generate traffic, how to generate venue. What happens after we deliver this technology platform? That was ultimately my lightbulb moment for creating Fortress. Initially our tagline was, “We bridge the gap between creative and technology.” That was how we started. ROB: That's an interesting mix. We've had this conversation a couple of times lately – the project-oriented nature of delivering a lot of websites and some applications versus the potentially ongoing partnership on the marketing side. But also, those are two different beasts. Delivering a software product or a site can be a little bit objective. It's done and the client is a lot of times the client itself. With marketing, you're getting outside of the client's world and asking to get a customer or a consumer in. How do you think about the different degree of accountability for results? For me, building a technology product, there's a level of certainty to it, and there's a high degree of uncertainty, I think, on the marketing side. But maybe you see it differently. JOEL: Yeah, it's definitely very nuanced and there are major differences. But the beauty of the way our business is set up is we have our recurring revenue from retainer clients who are on the digital marketing side or they're doing social with us or they're doing SEO or pay-per-click or content campaigns. Or often now it's integrated campaigns. They're on a monthly retainer with us. But then we hit these homeruns with these websites and apps, and those are the peaks and valleys of “I just closed this huge deal and this is major revenue on this project.” But yeah, ultimately what we've been focused on lately is really defining the scope of what we do so that we have a clearer understanding of what “done” looks like – because “done” to us may be different than “done” to the client. So we're very buttoned up on what the scope looks like. But the beauty of this business and why I started, and my frustration when I was working in television and radio, is a client would hand me $250,000 or $500,000 to run a campaign and there would be no tracking or attribution or data or analytics. I would have to go back to them 30 days later and say, “Hey, how'd it go? Are you selling more cars?” or “Are more people coming to the bank?”, and I felt like that was such a blind spot. So for me, that was one of the major reasons that I started Fortress. With digital, the beauty of it is every dollar they give us, I can track it and I can track it all the way down to the sale, down to the conversion. Based on the access levels that we have, I can track it from the ad to the click to what happened on the website to the actual sale. On the digital marketing side, it's great. We're really focused on data and analytics of proving the ROI. You gave me a dollar; I turned it into $1.50 or $5.00 or $7.00, whatever that looks like. On the website side, it's easier to quantify because you can see it, you can feel it. You know what your site looked like before and now you know how amazing it looks now, and you see it. What we're getting at now more is just making that more of a celebration, a launch party for when we launch a site. It goes back to the earlier topic of gifting, making it more a celebration of “Hey, you guys launched. Congratulations. Here's all this stuff.” With the digital marketing campaign, it's more of an ongoing, you're in the trenches on a long-term basis. And we want to keep those guys on forever, but it's a challenge for us to keep delivering quality results. ROB: What are the core marketing channels that you and your team are focused on, and what are the things you're maybe experimenting with right now? JOEL: The core marketing channels – we're really focused on content and video. It used to be “Hey, we'll do SEO for you and we'll do pay-per-click or search engine marketing and we'll do social media.” A lot of it is focused on content now. We put people in three tracks, typically, on our social side. One is they're not great at creating content and so we help them with that; they are good at creating content, so we can help them with strategy and scheduling; and then there are the guys that don't know what they're doing at all, and we can help them with strategy and content. So content is really something that we're focused on. Creating video. We have somebody in-house now who's really talented. She's originally a journalism major, but she's got great skills on video as well, so now we're starting to crank out these 1- to 3-minute videos, getting into helping our clients get on podcasts. Those are newer channels that we're exploring now. One of our clients that we helped launch their podcast were spending six figures a year in radio with programming and actually getting their content on radio. Since then, they've seen this shift to digital and podcasting and streaming, so they pulled all of their terrestrial radio, traditional radio budget and basically handed it to us and said, “Hey, navigate us into this digital world.” So podcasting and creating content is a huge focus for us right now. ROB: Got it. That makes sense because once you have the content, then the distribution mechanism can really vary with the client, vary with the strategy, vary over time, and vary with what's working. I would say amazingly, the podcast world still tends to be a little bit of a Wild West in terms of, if you're a listener, finding something you want to listen to; if you're a podcast host, finding guests; if you're a guest, finding hosts. How do you look to navigate what can be a very dispersed world, I think? JOEL: Yeah, you're totally right. It's almost like everybody you talk to has a podcast and it's like, “Hey, subscribe here, subscribe there.” I talk about this with a few of my colleagues. There's just saturation of everybody has a podcast. So now it's, how do you make it more meaningful? How do you make it more impactful? How do you think creatively on how to deliver the content? One of the nice things that we're doing with this podcast that we just helped launch for a client is they have the content, they interview these high level thought leaders, and then at the end of it, they have this roundtable, almost like kitchen table talk of dissecting what they just learned or heard about. So you get to hear from the same people over and over again. I thought it's just such a great idea of differentiating yourself in the podcast space. ROB: Got it. When you think back on this journey, Joel, of Fortress Consulting, what are some things you have learned along the way that you might do differently if you were starting over today? JOEL: I look back and I think everything, the good and the bad, are all learning lessons. So I don't know what I would do differently. I think what has helped make us successful is I've really latched onto mentorship and putting smart people in a room and trying to learn as much as I can from them. I would probably accelerate that more. One of the learning lessons for me that I've learned as our team has grown is I was always quick to hire and slow to fire, and that was a major learning lesson for me. At first it's like, “Oh hey, you want to work for us? Cool, come on, you're in” and not as focused on, do they fit our culture? Are they about our core values? Are they the right fit, not just with their skillset? Now we're pivoting that into much slower to hire. They have to fit a lot more boxes to come on board with us. And then just having a shorter leash on the flipside of that too, not to drag things out that need to be nipped in the bud sooner. ROB: How do you think about that filtering for culture? A lot of times results can be objective; culture fit can be subjective, particularly when it comes to how you do the work. How do you ask those questions up front? JOEL: I attended a conference and I was floored because they had something called their Culture Deck. It was modeled after Netflix – they have their Culture Deck, and it is like 100 pages about what they're about, what they stand by, what they believe. So we created ours, and we called it Fortress Foundations. It was eight things that we're about – seven or eight things; it's evolving. We have it up on a poster on our wall in our office. So now we're focused on hiring based on that. We actually have it on our website too. We'll have people that want to come work for us see that and say, “Hey, I'm on board with this. This is what I'm about too.” So it helps with that cultural fit when you have it documented, you have it displayed, and you proclaim that “This is what we're about. This is who we are.” You'll start to find more of those people gravitating towards you. ROB: What are some of those key things for you? JOEL: It's evolved. The number one thing is “We over me.” It's focused on what we can build together as a team. I tell people all the time, even though I'm the owner, it's not about me. It's about what we can do together as a team. We'll go further as a team than we will with me just as an individual. That seeps into how we tag-team on work together. You'll have designers jump in and help do quality assurance testing on a website, and we'll have developers give feedback on design. We'll have copywriters that sit in on a sales meeting. It's focused on teamwork. Really, when you asked about why I started and what was the push, it was really I saw how it was in corporate America, how it was just this rat race. There was no love, no loyalty, politics and all the above. Really, I strive to create a culture and team where that didn't exist. We're at a good size now where it's not an issue and we're all rowing the same way at the same speed. So “We over me” is one. Another one is “Family first,” which is something that is antithetical to what you hear at a business. But I really do firmly believe if you don't have peace and happiness in your family life and personal life, you're not going to perform at your highest when you're in the office. So if somebody has a personal issue or issue with their kid or a loved one, I'm like, “Get out of here. Go handle it and then come back when you're ready and you have your game face on.” I really do believe family is first. I expect everybody to have that balance between work life and home life. ROB: It's so valuable, and I think it really helps set apart an independent firm versus – we were talking beforehand a little bit about how people can go work for a big, big company and they can optimize their entire career around salary. That won't always happen in an independent consultancy or agency, but they can like coming to work and they can like who they work with in a way that sometimes you just can't on the enterprise side. JOEL: Right, exactly. It's interesting; I've hired two people that I used to work with in corporate. One was a manager level and one was more on the analyst side, more of the level that I was at when I was there. I joke around with them like, there's a whole reprogramming process here where you don't have to worry about somebody micromanaging you. You have authority. We'll hold you accountable, but you have authority to make decisions, and if it's the wrong decision, it's okay. We'll deal with it. But there's this whole corporate reprogramming that I joke around with our team about. This is a different way of doing business that I find the team really buys into. It fires them up, and it's just a different vibe, different mindset here. ROB: Excellent. Joel, when you think about what's coming up for Fortress or for the broader marketing world, what are you excited about? What's next? JOEL: I'm really excited about the ways that people are consuming information and consuming content. I have another company that I've started this year in the higher education space. We're all about how students are learning – and we don't even want to call them students anymore; we want to call them learners and focus on lifelong learning. You can't do the same things over and over again. As much as the pandemic is tough on people and has forced us all to think differently and shift and disrupt, it's a good thing overall. Businesses are adapting, people are adapting, people are pivoting. They're innovating. I'm excited to see what comes out of this, and I think the people that are doubling down on marketing and advertising and learning more about who they are and their customers are going to come out of this 3-4 years ahead of their competitors that went into self-preservation mode and just tried to survive it. ROB: We're certainly entering a new season as well, because a lot of the pandemic ad inventory has been aligned with the election. Now that we're post-election, for the most part – we're in Georgia; we still have a Senate runoff here – but I would imagine to an extent, there's inventory freeing up for people who are ready to double down. What have you seen? JOEL: Yeah, that is absolutely true. I spent 7 years in the media, and during political times it was overrun with political, and political got special rates, so it'd bump out other advertisers. We've got several clients that were just waiting for this election to end so they could start releasing budgets and really getting after it. But yeah, that's exactly right. There's less clutter now. I wish there was clear, definitive answers on things already, but we're heading into a season where marketers can really stand out and ad dollars are slashed. I was talking to another agency owner just yesterday about it, and he's like, “Man, all our friends in media are getting crushed. They're getting their ad budgets slashed and people are tightening up.” But that means that it's an opportunity for the advertisers that do want to be there to get great rates, to get placement that they normally wouldn't have, to have their budgets go further than ever before. ROB: Wow. That's definitely fascinating. I take your point about – two things. Number one, there's still some remnant political advertising going on. Number two, there's still some uncertainty that clients are probably not ready to fully pull the trigger on until we have tremendous clarity. I would just say when we have one person who says they're going to be the president and one person who says they're not, that's probably going to be the real comfort level for people. JOEL: Right. ROB: [laughs] Hopefully that's about as unpolitical as I can say that. I don't know. JOEL: No, you're right on. ROB: [laughs] Very good. Joel, when people want to track you down and when they want to find Fortress Consulting, how should they connect with you? JOEL: They can go to our website at gofortress.com. You'll find who we are, what we're about, some of the work that we've done, and what we do there. But yeah, the best way is to go to our website or follow us on social. We're at some combination of Fortress or Go Fortress as our screennames. But the website would be the number one place to go at gofortress.com. ROB: If people want to dig into the work you're doing in the education space, what is that? JOEL: I'm glad you asked. That's at beyondacademics.com. That's something that we're really excited about, me and our other two co-founders, about what the future of education looks like and how that industry is going to completely change in the next year to 3 years. ROB: Just on a little detour, nuts and bolts, in terms of structuring, how have you structured that venture alongside Fortress? Are they completely separate? Are they linked in any way? JOEL: They are completely separate, but the beauty of Fortress is it's almost like Beyond Academics came      meetings and our copywriters and our developers and just lay out what they need. So we're able to support Beyond Academics through Fortress, and it's just a great relationship where essentially Beyond is a customer of Fortress, and we get to see this whole thing develop from just a concept to where we're at now. ROB: Fantastic. We'll get that into the show notes. Joel, thank you for joining us. Best wishes to you and to Fortress as you finish out the year. JOEL: You as well, Rob. Thanks very much. ROB: Be well. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

In 2006, Carlos's fiancée (now his wife) was approached by a client to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click). Carlos got into the agency in 2008 when the economy “tanked” and the funding for the startup where he worked dried up. From 2008 forward, the agency has been “tapped” on a regular basis by traditional (radio, print, TV) agencies needing digital services for their clients. Bloom works with a variety of different industries – retail, B2B, government agencies, and some non-profits. Hospitality, which is big in British Columbia, is currently challenged because of the pandemic. Over the years, the focus of needs has become more complex – from a “We need to be on FaceBook” to “We need to be on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Instagram.” When asked why these traditional agencies did not develop their own digital services in-house, Carlos explained that many digital marketers who started in the mid-2000s were self-taught. They learned the craft by “reading blogs, by attending conferences, by networking with other marketers.” He says, “It takes time to build expertise and a skillset where you're able to run big-enough campaigns.” Partnerships with Bloom meet larger agencies' needs for solid, experience-based digital expertise and have given Bloom the opportunity to work with larger clients than they might otherwise have had.  Carlos gave a nod to Converge's marketing performance reports by relating that the number one complaint that he hears from clients coming from other agencies is, “We get an invoice every month, we don't know what our agency is doing, we don't know what they've been working on, we don't know what the next steps are.” Carlos notes, “You can save so much time and deliver so much better quality and end results using the proper tools.” Communication with clients is critical. Carlos commented on the problem that good digital marketing people are hard to come by and even harder to retain. He says, “Once somebody becomes skilled at running campaigns with six-digit budgets every month, they get poached.”  In this interview, Carlos discusses how Covid has changed his business and how the marketing industry has “always been on the leading edge of change.” He is looking forward to a disrupter in the digital marketing industry because there are no barriers to becoming an expert, no licensing, and the service is becoming commoditized. What that new model will look like . . . and who will do it . . . who knows? Carlos can be reached on his agency's website at bloommarketing.ca – (.ca for Canada), or on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Carlos Obregon, Co-founder at Bloom Marketing based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Welcome to the podcast, Carlos. CARLOS: Thank you very much, Rob. It's great to be here. ROB: I'm pleased to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Bloom Marketing and what focus areas the firm excels in? CARLOS: We started Bloom Marketing back in 2006. Initially it started as a result of my then-fiancée, now wife. She was approached by a former client, and she was invited to become a contractor doing SEO, doing PPC. That was the first client. I joined the company two years later as a result of the 2008 financial problems. I was working for a startup, and at the time all their funding dried up as a result of it, so the staff was laid off. We were then expecting our first child. There is nothing to light up your entrepreneurial fire like having a mortgage and a baby arriving soon. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] Yeah. So, you started off in that SEO, pay-per-click; where has that path taken you in terms of the specialties of the firm now? What does a typical client engagement look like? CARLOS: We started our agency and organically, we started getting approached by traditional media agencies wanting to build up their digital marketing expertise because invariably – we're talking about 2008-2009. This is when they were doing radio, print, TV. They were asked by their clients, “We now need to be on Google, we need to be on Facebook, we need to rank better on organic searches.” That led to us developing several partnerships with traditional media agencies. That became our social growth. By having access to larger clients than what we would have had otherwise, we were able to nourish and develop these partnerships. That happens still today. We still maintain most of these partnerships. That has allowed us to tap clients that we probably wouldn't have access to because we don't have a radio department, we don't have a print advertising department. So more or less, that's been our path. We didn't really plan it that way, but that's how it's been working out. ROB: That's an excellent path. I've definitely seen a lot of these traditional media purveyors – they're used to selling TV ads, they're used to selling radio ads. Actually, some friends of mine were involved in a company that was acquired by Gannett, who was one of these big old school media companies. They tried to equip the sales folks to go out and sell digital, and it didn't go very well. What do you think it is in these organizations – by now they certainly could have built an in-house practice and an in-house capability. What do you think has made it hard for them to turn that corner? They really do need these partnerships. They need you. CARLOS: I think in part it's because those of us who started mid-2000s with digital marketing, we're all self-taught. There were no programs in universities or colleges for digital marketing. So, we just learned as we went by reading blogs, by attending conferences, by networking with other marketers. It takes time. It takes time to build expertise and a skillset where you're able to run big enough campaigns, where you're able to communicate with the client. That's a crucial part of the business, communication. I know you're involved in the reporting side of the tools. That's probably the number one complaint that we hear from people coming from other agencies, from past experiences. Communication. So many times we've heard, “We get an invoice every month, we don't know what our agency is doing, we don't know what they've been working on, we don't know what the next steps are.”  I think it takes time to build the marketing expertise. Once somebody becomes skilled at say running campaigns with six-digit budgets every month, they get poached. We're all trying to make a living, so understandably. ROB: Right. That training effect is challenging I think also, especially where you started out in some of that SEO and PPC world. I had some friends who ran an online marketplace for building products, essentially, and these two guys are running this $20-30 million a year business, and the founders are still doing a lot of the PPC because every time they get somebody up to speed, they get poached. CARLOS: Yeah. I've seen it over and over again. At one point I remember one of the biggest agencies here in Vancouver, a traditional agency, their entire digital marketing team was two people. They were both entry level, and here they were running gigantic companies. [laughs] ROB: Yeah. So, you had those beginnings in certain areas, and the marketing world has changed quite a bit since you started the firm. What are some of the more services you offer now? What different expertises are you working with clients on? You mentioned where the clients are coming from; what does a typical client look like?  CARLOS: We're actually involved in several different industries. Hospitality is pretty big here in British Columbia. At the moment it's going through challenges because of the pandemic. We're also involved in retail, B2B, and we have also done some nonprofits as well as government agencies. One key difference now is before, we would be approached and they'd say, “I need to do SEO because I need better rankings.” What I think now is the needs of the customers encompass more. Right now we get approached and they say, “I need to be on Facebook, I need to be on Instagram, I need to be on Google, Microsoft ads, on LinkedIn, on Twitter.” There's a lot more of a whole vision of what the needs are and all these different channels the business needs to be visible on. I think that would be the main change. More than one channel, now it's multichannel. ROB: When someone comes to you and they want to order everything on the menu, how do you help them in that decision process? They still have to choose where they're going to allocate more of their effort and budget, and also maybe some channels aren't quite appropriate for them. How do you think about that guidance?  CARLOS: Again, we go back to the communication. We have an onboarding process where we meet with the prospective client or client and first we try to understand, what are the goals? Usually you get an answer like, “I want more business.” Well, yeah, but what does that look like? Do you mean more subscribers initially? Do you want more people signing up for a trial?  Do you want more people ordering a sample? Do you want to get appointments? Do you want to get viewings for real estate? When we start narrowing down the goal, we say, “You're a business-to-business company, so perhaps Facebook is not the ideal channel if you're selling industrial equipment. Why don't we explore LinkedIn first, where you can target people based on which companies they work for and their job titles?” For the most part, it's a back and forth. We agree on what the goals are, we agree on how we're going to measure, what kind of timelines we have – because as you know, some products have a really long sell cycle, so it makes it tricky to measure sometimes. But again, it goes back to making sure you align and you understand what the client wants and they understand what you can deliver and how long it will be. That would be more or less how we approach it. ROB: That certainly makes sense. On this journey, you already gave us a little bit of a picture of the origin of the firm and how it sounded like your wife started the firm and then a couple years later she let you into the business. CARLOS: [laughs] Pretty much. ROB: How many people were on the team? Were you Employee #2, or were there some other people that had come in between the two events? CARLOS: We had contractors from the start. I was not Employee #2 per se. I was “Person on the Payroll #2.” Up until today, we continue to work mostly with freelancers and contractors who are part of our team, but they're not under contract. They're not just working for us. So I was #2 on the payroll but not necessarily #2 in the company. ROB: That's an interesting thing. I'm going to pull on that a little bit. When you talk about contractors, what percent of your team would you say is full time versus contract? CARLOS: I would say full time is about 40% and contract about 60%. ROB: That's a strategic choice, right? I know people who say that their target is 30% contract, but at the end of the day they can't help themselves and they end up being much more towards 100% of it being full time, or maybe 10% on contract. How have you reached that decision strategically? What led you there? CARLOS: We didn't really choose it; it just kind of happened. People we found that were really good at what they do usually wouldn't want to commit to working full time for any one firm. I think it comes down to quality and reliability. The contractors we work with, we know they're never going to come and work exclusively for us just because they've achieved a certain level of success and they want flexibility. They want to be able to turn down work occasionally. So it just happened that way. Now, looking back, I think it was a good thing that we learned how to work with contractors early on and how we maintained those relationships, given the changes that we're undergoing right now. A lot of people are working remotely. Those who already have practice in working remotely, it was an easier transition. Some other ones were more abrupt. But I feel like the days of huge agencies and huge offices are probably behind us. ROB: Is your team in any office right now or is everybody completely remote still? CARLOS: We're a hybrid. We do have an office, and I go about three times a week or so. But we have contractors who live 2,000 miles away from here, just as an example. We're never going to have them in the office, and that's fine. ROB: In that sort of environment, how are you thinking about people knowing each other, working together, team-building? What do you think that looks like right now, number one, and then number two – suppose we're in full regathering and getting together mode, but you're still distributed. How are you thinking about team? CARLOS: I'm a really social guy. I miss being able to hang out with groups of people. I really, really miss it. In some instances it's possible to have most of our team in any one place, especially at certain times of the year or if there is something happening in Vancouver like a big conference or some reason for everyone to be together. But I think moving forward, we're going to have to do a hybrid where those of us who are close by might be able to meet up and be physically in the same boardroom, but I think from now on we're always going to have people remote conferencing. ROB: It's definitely something I've been trying to sort my way through. Before, we had an office. I liked having an office. I wanted people who wanted to be in an office. And then I just kind of changed my mind. In February, we made a hire who's an American, but in Santiago, Chile. We just hired someone in Sacramento. We're looking at people in Chicago and Tucson, Arizona. I'm thinking a lot about how we get together, whether we have some sort of annual team event or what it looks like. I don't quite know yet. So I'm asking a little bit for myself as well. CARLOS: Yeah, we're definitely in – none of us were planning for this to happen, for these drastic changes. Who knows? Perhaps next year we'll be somewhat back to some normal, but I think especially in our industry, we're always at the leading edge of change. Things were changing rapidly in our industry to begin with, and now with the work from home revolution, perhaps we're going to have team members that we never meet in person. But I don't know if it happens to you – to me, I have people that I work with remotely and have for years, and even though I don't see them physically very often, I feel like I know them really well. It's like we're buddies. So, I don't think we're giving up that much by not meeting everyone in person frequently. ROB: Really interesting. It's good to have thoughts on that. It's good to talk to each other about that. Carlos, as you reflect on the path of the business so far, what are some lessons you have learned along the way that, if you were starting over today, you might do things a little bit differently? CARLOS: Definitely. You know what the number one is? ROB: What's that? CARLOS: I wouldn't accept every client that comes through the door. I learned that initially because I started working in the firm in 2008, and there was a lot of uncertainty. Huge banks were going under. Huge insurance companies were going under. Everybody was kind of in panic mode. So, I started getting customers and I would say yes to everything and everyone because I didn't know when the next one was going to be. I had bills to pay, I had a mortgage, I had a kid on the way. Looking back, I could've been pickier because with some of those projects, I had no alignment. I didn't really connect with the client. Perhaps I didn't understand their goals, they didn't understand me and how I wanted to deliver. Although we never really had any frictions or difficult breakups with clients, there were a lot of projects that I did not enjoy. We're in a free market and we obviously need to make a living and grow and prosper, but we also need to enjoy what we do as much as possible. So that would be my number one learning. Don't accept every gig. I put it down on paper here in front of me for our chat today. That would be my key takeaway. ROB: It's draining on your energy, those things that you take on that maybe don't align. There comes a point – and you probably have realized this at different times – there comes times when you're at capacity and you end up almost having to say no to something you'd rather do, or at least scramble to figure out how you're going to do it. It can be hard to keep the quality level high when you're scrambling for a solution. CARLOS: That, and obviously the contracts and the projects that you enjoy, we all do better. We're more creative. We come up with better ideas on projects we enjoy rather than something like, “I don't even know how to sell this product. What does the end customer want? Do I really want to be promoting this? I don't believe in this product or this service.” So yeah, definitely a learning. ROB: I think we all need reminders of this. It's so easy to get off track so quickly, and then you get into the mode where you're just handling the decision that you've made. Are there any tools you have found that have helped you think ahead and think about working on the business? Because you have a lot going on and a lot of people involved. CARLOS: Yeah. I love finding new tools and experimenting, whether it be marketing automation, reporting, or analytics. You're an expert in this industry. You can save so much time and deliver so much better quality and end results using the proper tools. Now, as you're fully aware, it's a highly competitive industry. There are so many new tools. It's hard to keep on top of it. You have to do a lot of reading, which I happen to enjoy. But we definitely love using and finding and testing new tools. I remember when I first started working in-house, running a huge technical company, I was doing the SEO for this company, for this startup here in Vancouver. It was comparison shopping. I was doing the SEO, and from one day to the next, the person who was running the Google Ads left. The CEO approached me and said, “Can you take care of this, at least on an intern basis, while we find somebody else?” I was like, “Okay, yeah, sure.” It was a six-digit budget in Google Ads. And this was in 2005. The days of Google Ads Editor were not around yet. [laughs] We had to download all the data to spreadsheets. The campaigns were so gigantic – we were bidding on over 100,000 keywords at the time – that Excel kept crashing. Whenever we tried to do any analysis of bids and conversions, it would always freeze up. Thinking back, if I had the tools we have now back in the day, oh my God, I would've done a full day of work in one hour. ROB: [laughs] Wow. If only you could travel back in time with tools, you could take over the world. One thing I think that's interesting that you have uncovered in your story – we've had guests before whose spouse is involved in the business, but they were very vague. They wouldn't really admit it on the audio. It's really interesting that you brought it to the forefront. What have you found makes it work well to work on a business, on an entrepreneurial venture, with your spouse? CARLOS: We can go back even further than that. I'll give you a little bit of background. I actually met my now wife at a marketing conference here in Vancouver. She was working for an agency at the time; I was working as in-house SEO at another company. So, we met, and that's how it started. We actually met because of digital marketing. Then we got engaged, and that's when she started working freelance. Then I joined in 2008. It's been 14 years and we're still happily married. I can't deny that there have been difficult times where we don't agree and I want to do things one way and she wants to do things different or vice versa, but for the most part I think we complement each other really well. There are areas of the business – a lot of guys will agree with this – I don't get involved in the finance. She's the treasurer. [laughs] I like to socialize and meet people. I do a lot of the business development. It's something that she doesn't enjoy. We've made it work that way. I keep my hands off the money and the checkbook, and then whenever she gets a new lead or someone that needs more information, I usually do the communication. We've made it work. Just for mental health, we work with different clients. She looks after some clients, I look after different clients. Occasionally we work on the same project, but we keep some things separate. ROB: That sounds like a good tip in general. That's good for division of work, I think, in any company. You want people who work on some clients and not others. You want some people to work in their area of strength in finance, and others in business development. We do that, but I think there can be maybe this pull as co-owners to have your hand in a little bit of everything. It sounds like being able to split that up a little bit has served you well just to not be all in each other's business literally every day. CARLOS: Yeah. When we're at home, we have a rule of no business discussion. We talk about the kids, we talk about dinner, and we talk about vacations. We try to stay away from work because otherwise you end up working 16 hours a day, one way or another. ROB: That makes sense. Carlos, when you look ahead at what's coming up in the marketing world, what's coming up for Bloom Marketing, what are you excited about? CARLOS: I think the digital marketing agency world is ripe for disruption. I don't know who's going to do it, but if you recall, real estate was revolutionized by Re/Max. They completely put the business model on its head by giving realtors a lot more control of their commissions and how they split costs. I think this industry is ripe for disruption somewhere along those lines where perhaps rather than having an owner, a founder, and account managers and strategists and business development, I wonder if it could be pooling a partnership of frontend developers, backend developers, usability experts, web designers, SEO experts, PPC experts, and put them all in one company, split the costs, and somehow share revenue. I don't know what that would look like, but I'm hoping there's disruption because we're becoming commoditized. Every week I run a search on Google for “digital marketing agency Vancouver,” and every week I see new names coming up. There is no barrier of entry in this industry. You just put up your website and you say, “Okay, I'm a digital marketing expert,” and you are. It's unregulated. It's not like you have a license. ROB: Huh. That's interesting. It's interesting to think about the different ways that we get clients and the different ways that realtors get clients. The real estate industry is set up to equip the realtor to focus on a few things and other people in the process – different people are – let's say most real estate firms, for instance, don't have handypeople on staff to fix up the house before listing it. They just don't. It's all parceled out. CARLOS: Yes. ROB: So, it's interesting. What's possible, what's not possible? I wonder, what are the next couple steps that would prove that to be more possible and more true? CARLOS: I'm sure there's going to be a better way of creating a digital marketing agency business model, different than what we have right now. But if you come up with it, remember me. Call me, okay? [laughs] ROB: [laughs] Yeah. One thing I have seen – I'll share this; it's been a little while since we talked about it on the podcast, but it's come up a couple of times here and there. There is one firm that we've spoken with that was a co-op. They were structured as a co-op, where they were owned by their employees, and when the employees left, they gave up their ownership in the company. Soze was the agency there, out of Brooklyn. It sounds like a very Brooklyn kind of thing. But I just swapped emails with Michael Skolnik, who's their – I don't know what you say – he's the founder, I guess, but I don't know what his official title is within that mix since everybody owns the business. But he's going to look at open sourcing the local documents once they've got all that ready. I've got him on commitment to check in with in the new year. That may not be exactly where things go, but it is an interesting model because it does feel strange. I guess as a founder, you take the risk. Some people would look at it and say, “Fine, you take the risk, you get the reward.” But there's other times, I think, where you have a business that's doing well, but its service is revenue, so there's only so much of it you're going to reinvest in the business. And when it's going well, maybe it feels like it flows a little bit too much to the owners. CARLOS: Yeah. You're saying the co-op models – yeah, that's one way. I'm sure some smart guy will come up with a really good business model for the 21st century. ROB: [laughs] Perfect. We'll keep our eyes out and we'll keep talking about that here. Carlos, when people want to find you and when they want to connect with Bloom Marketing, where should they look to connect? CARLOS: Our website is bloommarketing.ca – .ca because we're in Canada I'm also active on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. That'll be the easiest way to find us. ROB: Excellent. Carlos, thank you for coming on the podcast. Best wishes to you and to Bloom Marketing going forward. CARLOS: Thank you. All the best, and thank you very much for the invite. ROB: Thank you. Be well. CARLOS: Thanks. Bye. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

In 2009, Yoel Israel, founder at WadiDigital, Israel's leading full service digital agency, was pursuing his MBA at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Israel. A friend sat down with him for a cup of coffee and said, “Dude, you've got to get on Twitter.” Yoel fell in love with it, set his university up on Twitter (which brought in some international students), and got a scholarship for the effort He graduated and returned to his job at Xerox in his hometown – Philadelphia – and ran a social media management side gig (Facebook and Twitter) for small businesses. When he discovered the Facebook dashboard, this finance major found that he not only got to look at data . . . he could manipulate it. He was hooked. He learned Google Ads, started his own company, and moved back to Israel where English is the “B2B tech language. When LinkedIn rolled out lead generation in 2017, the agency took off – a “first mover advantage” payoff. Yoel explains: LinkedIn ads may be expensive, but they are powerful because of the discrete targeting capability the platform provides. Today, WadiDigital focuses on LinkedIn advertising, SEO, and lead generation for B2B technology startups, who, most likely, have already gone through Round A, Round B funding. After 3 customers asked for cybersecurity marketing and cybersecurity influencer marketing. WadiDigital decided to build a platform. Currently, a dozen cybersecurity companies are using an affiliate cybersecurity influencer distribution platform where influencer affiliates “can manage and track their own clicks.” WadiDigital's new platform launches in January and will consist of two parts: Cybersecurity clients and other cybersecurity companies can share and distribute blogs and non-gated content. Influencer CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers) can retrieve these links, share them, and get compensated based on clicks. WadiDigital cohosts and curates webinars where cybersecurity company experts present content for different groups of influencers. Cybersecurity companies get to showcase their expertise. Well-vetted cybersecurity influencers (who get up-to-date information at a fraction of the cost of what they would pay Gartner or SANS), can post the information and get paid. Yoel says, ” We bring them good content and they get compensated for it.” In this interview, Yoel discusses some of the security risks individuals and companies take, when to hire and the questions to ask when you hire, and the importance of processes in keeping things going. Yoel recommends that people follow him on WadiDigital.com, Yoel Israel on LinkedIn, (send a connection request and tell him you heard him on the podcast), and eventually cyfluencer.com, the distribution platform (again, January launch). The company will soon be hosting a cyber intelligence magazine: Cyber Intel Mag, details on all the “new stuff” to follow on LinkedIn and the agency website.  ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm excited to be joined today by Yoel Israel, founder at WadiDigital based in Israel. Welcome to the podcast, Yoel. YOEL: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for having me. ROB: Why don't you start off by running down for us what WadiDigital is excellent in?  YOEL: Actually, our focus is LinkedIn advertising and SEO. We're very focused on lead generation, and all of our clients are B2B technology startups. They usually have at least Round A, Round B funding. A large majority of them are cybersecurity, especially because we're in Israel. It's like the cybersecurity hub of the world. So, we do a lot with cybersecurity there. We also now do cybersecurity influencer marketing. We have a cybersecurity influencer distribution platform that we're still building, and we're currently using but we're building a new one right now. We do a lot of influencer marketing in the cyber space. So, we do a lot, but our focus is B2B LinkedIn, SEO, lead gen, and influencer marketing for cybersecurity. ROB: That's probably an underappreciated and unknown aspect of Israel for people who don't know. In the technology space you get a flavor for that deep security knowledge and that expertise in the venture funded companies in Israel, but a lot of people may not necessarily make that association, so I'm glad we get to dig into that a little bit. I want to pull on the thread a little bit – when you mentioned cybersecurity influencers, that's interesting. I'm sure it looks a little bit different than what people may commonly think of as influencer marketing. What does influencer marketing look like in cybersecurity? YOEL: We have two parts. How we got into it was a few years ago, a cybersecurity client of ours asked us if we do cybersecurity marketing. We just said no. Then two months later, a different cyber client asked us the same question. We looked around online like, “All right, let's help them,” and we didn't find anything. There's nothing really for B2B for influencer marketing, and if there was one, it was more like an Upwork where they come in and make the connection and there's nothing special about it. It's definitely not cybersecurity focused. When a third client asked us, we decided to build it. So, the influencer marketing, right now we're actually developing our own that will be ready in January. We spent over $60,000 on it. It's going to be epic. But what we're doing right now is using an affiliate network to manage and track clicks, where basically every affiliate, which is influencers, can log in and have their own unique tracking. We have about a dozen cybersecurity companies on our platform. There are two parts to our influencer distribution platform. One is where our cybersecurity clients and other cybersecurity companies want to share and distribute their blogs and their non-gated content, and then influencer CISOs and such, mostly in America, get to go grab these links, share it, and they get compensated based on the clicks. That's one. The second part that we're doing is now we're offering, within our pool of dozens of cybersecurity influencers, some of them are writers and they're real experts within their space, within cybersecurity, so we're not just writing content, but we're also co-hosting webinars. If you were to do a webinar with SANS or Gartner, it might cost you 15 grand. However, there's no reason to do it twice because they send it to the same audience. What we do is set up our cybersecurity clients with different influencers every single time, and those influencers promote their content in the webinar. They each bring a different and important audience to each webinar, not to mention it's a fraction of the price if they were to pay SANS or Gartner. ROB: Got it. In one case you're providing them a platform to showcase expertise alongside people they'd want to be appearing alongside, and on the other side it sounds almost like you are helping the influencer solve a problem. It's often not really the case in influencer marketing. The problem you're helping them solve is they want money. But in this case, it sounds like part of the problem somebody who would be sharing one of these links would have is actually that they want to talk about the industry. They want a source of good, credible content, and you're able to connect content with people who want to share good content. YOEL: That's correct. We're curating. These people are already sharing and engaging with excellent cybersecurity content that they're sharing, but now in addition to what they're sharing, we're curating that content from about a dozen companies, and more are joining, that are able to then go and grab your content, and they can share it. It's really fantastic that we make it so easy for the influencers. We bring them good content and they get compensated for it. ROB: That's a really interesting model I haven't heard very much about before. YOEL: That's why we had to make it. ROB: [laughs] That's why you had to build it. Especially considering, from a product perspective, how do you think about elevating towards quality? Because that is one of the problems in the affiliate and link sharing world; it kind of has a bad reputation. How do you evaluate that experience? YOEL: We don't let anyone who wants to come and share links. We review anyone that wants to share a link. We go to their profile, we see all of their posts, make sure the overwhelming majority of their posts are cybersecurity related. We look at their engagement, their follower count, their work experience. So, you have to apply to be an influencer and we manually choose who can and cannot be influencers. That's how we get rid of the junk, and then the companies, especially when our platform will be ready in January, get to choose what companies they want influencers from, if they only want to pay for clicks from what countries. So even though you might have gotten clicks hypothetically from Pakistan, you don't want to pay for those, so we're not going to charge them and we're not going to pay out our influencers that way either. We have a lot of control over it. It's not just like “set it up and do whatever you want.” Especially the cybersecurity audience, they're very conservative. They're professionals. They do things by the book. By definition, they kind of need to. That's just how they are and who they are, so we need to make sure everything is very clean and kosher. ROB: Excellent. I love the clean and kosher. Yoel, if we rewind this business a little bit, how did WadiDigital come into existence? What led you to start the business and how did you arrive at that point? YOEL: It was weird. In 2009 I was getting my MBA at Bar-Ilan University here in Tel Aviv in Israel, and I met with a friend of mine who's a huge tech influencer in Israel. I wasn't friends with him at the moment; it was in 2009, and he took me out for some coffee and he goes, “Dude, you've got to get on Twitter.” I'm like, “What's Twitter?” This is 2009, right? I really got into it and I loved it. It was a real intro to social media. I'd been on Facebook a little bit, especially from college for my undergrad when that was up and coming. But I got on and I set up my university on Twitter and they were able to get some international students. They actually gave me a scholarship, so I knew I was good at something here.  I went back to Philly, where I'm originally from, and went back to work for Xerox. On the side I was doing social media management organically on Facebook and Twitter for small businesses. Then I had a client ask me to take out ads on Facebook, and then I saw the whole dashboard and I kind of fell in love. Originally, I have a finance background, so I do love numbers and I love looking at tables of data. But once I understood that I could actually manipulate that data, I knew this was what I wanted to do for a living. Then I got trained up in Google Ads from a friend of mine and then started my own business and started selling Google Ads. I moved back to Israel after two and a half years in Philly. That was 7 years ago, and then naturally, because everything here in English is B2B tech, I started getting more into B2B and Google Ads and then getting all-in on LinkedIn ads, and we grew from there. Once LinkedIn rolled out lead generation forms on April 1st, 2017, we went all-in and we skyrocketed, bringing in enterprise leads and business because we were first mover advantage. ROB: That's a good wave to catch. For a while, a long time, you would hear that LinkedIn ads were expensive and that's all you would really hear about them. Then I think there started to be a transition at some point – I don't know whether it was an evolution of the platform or in strategy, but you started to hear instead that LinkedIn ads were expensive but effective. What do you think fed that transition, and what was your experience in that? YOEL: It's definitely expensive relative to other platforms, but it's totally worth the money. You can target whomever you want professionally on LinkedIn. You can't do that on any other platform. It's extremely powerful. ROB: Talk more about that target. What's that look like in practice to be really effective? YOEL: In practice, if I want to target CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers) at Fortune 500 companies only within the United States and who have just switched jobs in the last 90 days so they might be looking for new security opportunities for them to secure their companies, we can do that targeting. ROB: Got it. Does it line up a little bit with that enterprise hunting, account-based marketing mindset? YOEL: You could also do account-based marketing. You can upload a list of companies that you directly want to target and do that too. But then they also have different target options that you can choose, like the industry and the company size within that industry that you want to target. There's a lot of different ways – not just choosing what companies, but there's all kinds of different ways that you can target by company and you can target by the individual based on their experience. ROB: Got it. To justify the expense, do you look more at something that's in a lead capture mode? Is there any place for just pure brand and awareness marketing in LinkedIn? YOEL: Oh yeah, for sure. If you're a startup or you're a disruptor, people don't know that you're solving an issue that they don't know they have. They're not searching for that solution. Therefore, you can't use Google, but you can put in front of them the solution that you provide. So, awareness is fantastic. Video is very good. It's not necessarily good for lead generation but creating awareness videos and then remarketing people that viewed 50% or 75% of the video and then hit them up with a lead capture, you'll do very well. ROB: Wow, that's an interesting direction to take things. You started this and you got this thing moving; at what point did you realize that you were going to have to grow the team and this was really going to have to be something bigger than yourself? YOEL: When I stopped getting enough sleep. [laughs] I was working wire to wire, and then you get this really hot client. It was like, “Ugh, I'm totally full with time. I shouldn't take them,” but it was someone you really wanted. You're like, “Okay, now I need to hire.” That's how it happened. ROB: Got it. So, you just basically got to full capacity and then you said, “Well, I've got to do something that is beyond me.” YOEL: Right. ROB: Are you still in that sort of mode, or have you shifted in terms of capacity planning and hiring to some different metrics? Or do you still think about getting a little bit too busy? YOEL: I always try to make sure we're stretching before I do my hires. We're already 11 people full time, and I just signed last Thursday night a huge senior, the only other person that's worth – let's say it's someone else in Israel that's got perfect English, has LinkedIn ads, Google Ads experience, worked in an agency, built a team. So, I just made a big hire, a very expensive hire, who will be starting in January. I'm continuing to grow and I'm all-in, and I'm putting up a few more job postings now. To really build up a perfect team obviously will cost us a lot of money in the short term, but I think the medium and long term will be happy. But in general, as a rule of thumb for others that have agencies, do as much as you can, learn as much as you can, save up as much as you can, work wire to wire until you absolutely need to hire. Then hire. Too many people try to apply the 4-hour workweek before – the whole point of the 4-hour workweek is to escape the wire-to-wire working. First, you've got to build the business, build the revenue, and get all that. Then you can learn how to step back. Don't step back and start outsourcing things until you're really working like crazy. ROB: I know I've certainly had that experience of hiring for the business I wish I had instead of what's right in front of me. Have you had any either fractional or full-time hires that you've learned you may have made prematurely and had to pull back from it? YOEL: I used to say I hire on personality and then I learned that's not nearly as important. I think having a good work ethic is more important than anything. That's what I really learned. You need people to have a good work ethic. If they have a good work ethic, they're competent, and they really care about the quality of their work, I think that's the number one most important thing. ROB: How do you think about screening for a good work ethic and evaluating that before someone's on board? YOEL: Make sure they have a full year of working somewhere. If you're in marketing, digital marketing, maybe a 1 year of white collar, making sure that they haven't been fired, and calling the references – were they on time? I really think speaking to the references and making sure they actually have some full-time employment. You should be able to get it from the references. Make sure to ask difficult questions to the references. A lot of people try to be nice to references because they're being kind with their time, but that's really the way to know. ROB: Not only that, but people will often give you the good references. It's hard to get to sometimes the references you really need to understand the full picture of the person. YOEL: Right, but you need to ask the hard questions. You've got to pivot it and do it like this. Let's say Peter. “Is Peter more of an introvert or an extrovert? Does Peter excel better working alone or excel better working on a team?” Don't say “Has Peter ever been late?” They'll say no. You frame it as, “How many times a month has Peter been late?” Then you hear if they think or not. You get an idea. So when you frame it that way, you get a better idea. It's how you frame the question, you'll be able to get an honest answer. Also, ideally, when you do these reference calls, if you can schedule a video call because then you can see their reaction. If you can avoid the telephone and do a video call, which everyone now knows how to do because of the pandemic, you'll be better off. ROB: That's definitely an opportunity I've seen in this time. People are much less weirded out by a video call because we're all used to it. If you had told someone you wanted to do your first screen on a video call two years ago, I don't know if you would've had the level of adoption that I'm seeing with candidates now. YOEL: Right. It's a hiring market. Employers have a lot of leverage in a difficult economy. If someone asks for a video interview, I couldn't imagine anyone saying no. If you really want to weed people out, find out those that aren't willing to do a video interview. ROB: People find a lot of ways to weed themselves out. It constantly surprises me. Someone will spend the time on a video call, but then they won't follow up timely on the next step you ask them to do. It's a real tell. YOEL: It is, yeah. For those looking for employment, just a little tip: don't forget to send a thank you email after the interview. ROB: Man, it's such a way to stand out. YOEL: It's sad. I studied finance and they taught us a lot about business. We used to send handwritten letters. I'm not that old, man. I'm turning 35 next month. [laughs] I don't write in cursive and all that, but there's something to it. You want to stand out, you send a handwritten letter. You'll get that job. ROB: I think it's also interesting to recognize that one of the ways that I think you're really able to make those good premium hires you're talking about is in your choice of market. You're not talking to somebody who's selling a widget for $5 bucks a month. The cybersecurity market – the threats continue to grow. There's a lot of money on the line. What are you seeing when it comes to categories of cybersecurity that's emerging, trending? What should people be scared of that they don't know about yet? YOEL: Don't worry, all our clients are B2B. We're not selling VPNs like B2C to end users or anything like that. But everything and anything can be hacked. If you really want to be scared, to be honest, under no circumstances should you have TikTok or WeChat on your phone. They're stealing your texts. Anything you copy in your clipboard, even when you're not using the app, it's sending it to the Communist Chinese Party. That's the simplest and easiest thing you can do. I could really scare you, but I'm not going to do that. You wanted an easy answer. [laughs] ROB: I wonder if maybe there's a novel category of solution that you've worked with, a client you've worked with that people wouldn't even realize was a problem or a solution. YOEL: I don't use Zoom. Most people do, but we use Google Meet because Zoom is hosted in China, so it's not secure. And most of our clients are cybersecurity. A few of our clients don't care; most of them do. There's a lot. You have no idea. People know everything about you. They've watched you do everything on your phone through your camera, heard every conversation. They're recording everything. Everything you think Google's recording, which it's doing legally and with your permission, imagine what foreign governments are doing and getting information on you. I don't think anyone can run for office in a free country in the future with foreign adversaries knowing everything about you. ROB: Right, or they can and then it becomes a security risk. YOEL: Right. You can see that right now. ROB: Exposing the information is actually – you do that, you can never use it again. But if you hold it over someone's head, you can influence them for a long period of time. YOEL: Correct. That's what's happening right now maybe in America with Hunter Biden, with everything that he has on him and on Biden. It's a little worrying. But we'll see. ROB: You really do have to wonder. I hadn't thought about it too much. If someone has the dirt on you –  YOEL: People don't think about it. And they have the dirt on you. That's the thing. They have it on me. They have it on you. ROB: So turning over the dirt is the nuclear option. YOEL: You don't turn it over. It's taken from you. ROB: Yeah. But them releasing the information is the last play. There's a lot in between. It's really interesting. Some interesting trends I have seen in this world – I don't know what you've seen here – is an increase – we have one client who is moving to virtualized desktops. It was an S&P 500 company and they got ransomwared, and they're just over it. So they are deploying – all of their developers are going to be developing on virtual Windows boxes, I think on Amazon's cloud. Virtual desktops. YOEL: Yep, not surprising. You hear a lot more than that. I give examples of what people can do as individuals, but my clients are B2B, so it's more like how they present a ransomware, patching solutions, things like that. Having different keys in order to access different information, using cryptocurrency and things like that. All kinds of different technologies in order to be able to prevent different kinds of penetration for IT and OT and industrial and ICS. It's amazing. Think about it; if they take down the energy supply, you're screwed. You have no food. Nothing gets to you. They can't even pump the water that comes out of your faucet. Everyone's out in the street killing each other. ROB: We got a scary sneak preview. I don't know what the immediate COVID-lockdown experience was for you, but you realize how overoptimized and how fragile our supply chain is. What was your experience? YOEL: Yep, yep, yep. A lot. ROB: What could you not get and what can you still not get? YOEL: I have a couple old B2C clients from back in the day back in the States, and they're ecommerce. Ecommerce was through the roof when people couldn't go to the store. I was like, “Yo, we've got to up our budgets. This is amazing. Our ROI is like 5x the previous month. This will only last as long as the pandemic or until things open up.” He goes, “I can't. My supply chain is screwed.” We had to cut budgets, and it was time to rake it in. He couldn't supply. We had to go through and start removing products on their website. They sell beads for arts and crafts, high end beads and all that, like African beads. Just to get an idea. And that's not even important stuff. Then you talk about all of your medication and all that. I know we're totally off topic, but that's fine. All of your medication ingredients that go into medication and all of your technology and everything is made overseas, not to mention your master PPE equipment and everything. Nothing was made here at the time. Big changes have been made in the last 6 months, thankfully, for America to be able to centralize and other countries to start bringing their manufacturing back home. It's become a national security risk. ROB: Yeah. I was going to say, that's a good security story as well. We talked a little bit about some things you'd learned along the way. What are some other lessons you have learned from building WadiDigital that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting from scratch? YOEL: Starting from scratch? It's such a simple question but I never thought of it that way. I would've maybe hired a little bit earlier. I would have taken processes more seriously. I never worked at another agency, so I would've hired a consultant that worked at another agency to give me some tips on how to do and build things, processes, streamline, and save time. Oh, another thing I did, if you own an agency: get a personal assistant. I learned between me and let's say one junior when it was just the two of us, only one person working under me, all my time was client-facing, and then I would assign tasks on Monday.com and she would do them. But then my other time went a lot of times to stuff in my personal life. So you can hire someone pretty cheap either locally, in my case – I hired someone on my block – or you can hire someone virtually to do a lot of the stuff you need to do in your personal life. I freed up almost an hour and a half of my time a day. That's three client calls a day. That's a lot more work and business that I can take on. I only started that a couple months ago. After I got used to the personal assistant, I was like, “Why didn't I do this years ago?” ROB: [laughs] Right. What I have found is you start off thinking of a few things you could delegate and hand off, and then you just keep on realizing things you can hand off. There's a freedom that starts to come when you start to think about the additional things you can take off your plate instead of having the mindset that you have to do it. YOEL: It's a shift. It doesn't make any sense to people that don't. Once you start delegating and handing things off, your life changes. ROB: I think to some people it sounds very indulgent. It sounds like one of those first world problems of whether or not you have an assistant. But when you're trying to build a first class business, it's hard to imagine how you can go without it. After a time. Maybe not when it's just you. YOEL: But it's not even that. I know a lot of people, they're employees themselves, but they hire some help at home to help with the kids and dishes and cleaning and things like that, and it makes a huge difference. Then they can stay later at work, maybe earn more. And these aren't people building a business; they're employees. They just need some help so they can mentally recharge, so they're not up all night cleaning up after the house and the kids or whatever or helping with tutoring with children. In a sense, it's all a personal assistant in a way. ROB: Right, especially now, probably, to have someone who is in your inner circle, who you know and trust their habits. In the middle of the pandemic, I'm not scared, but I am careful. The list of people I'm going to call to babysit my kids has gotten a lot shorter right now because I want to know how you're living your life. YOEL: Yeah, I feel you, man. My wife and I went through the same thing. There's less babysitting. ROB: For sure. You mentioned processes. I think a lot of us, especially the creative class, “I'm going to go start a business,” bucks at the idea of structure and process. It almost feels like rules, but it's also kind of like having a bionic exoskeleton sometimes that can help you be a lot stronger than you would be on your own. What was it that helped you realize – was there a particular process that you realized needed to be tightened up or some experience that made you turn the corner on processes? YOEL: I found out that one of my competitors had some processes that I wasn't doing, and then I really looked into it and I figured out, “I need to get it together.” [laughs] I went all-in on these processes. I started making processes and spreadsheets, processes in Monday.com, processes on what I do before and after a call and everything. It's almost automatic. I don't think about it. It's become a habit, and everything's documented, and no work ever gets forgotten or unchecked by doing things a certain way. Processes are important. But you don't notice you need it until you either hear complaints from a client or you find out what other people are doing in the industry and you're like, “Oh, I should be doing that. Why aren't I doing that?” Which is why I recommended earlier to bring in a consultant, because you don't know what you don't know. ROB: Right. Those experiences beyond yourself, certainly. YOEL: Correct. Especially because I haven't worked at an agency, so I haven't really learned how to do that. I don't have that experience of “Here's how we do things, here's how we do training, here's how we do keyword research,” and the processes of hiring. You need other help sometimes to see things differently if you don't have that experience. ROB: We've had a couple of those sorts of folks on. There's a couple of gentlemen, David C. Baker and Blair Enns, who co-host the 2 Bobs podcast. They've both been on here, and they are both consultants to agencies that just have that longitudinal visibility. Even right now, if you want to say, “Hey, what are people doing? How are people's bookings? What categories are hot, what categories are not hot? What are people doing about office space?”, these are all things where you need some perspective. YOEL: Right. But get more specific. I don't follow what people do; I try to do the exact opposite of what everyone does. But when it comes to processes, you need to get specific. Don't follow the crowd per se, unless you want to enter a rat race, but sometimes you're straight-up missing the obvious, which you don't even know. ROB: Very solid. Yoel, when you think of what's ahead for WadiDigital and marketing and maybe cybersecurity, what are you excited about that's coming up? YOEL: We're trying to transition from a cybersecurity marketing agency to a cybersecurity marketing and media agency, so in addition to influencer marketing and doing those things, we're building some reading resources, websites, cybersecurity news websites, cybersecurity TV show. We're trying to do – that's for a few years from now. We're really trying to make the destination for everything cybersecurity marketing and media so if you're in cybersecurity, you're a fool not to work with us. ROB: Where's that going to live? Do we have a future parking spot domain for that, or some digital properties? Or just follow WadiDigital? YOEL: You can follow WadiDigital on LinkedIn, but right now, cyfluencer.com. “Cy” like cyber. That's our distribution platform. That's going to be launched January. There's a LinkedIn page we literally just made, and then Cyber Intel Mag is going to be where we do our cyber news and all of that. It's a cyber intelligence magazine. And then there's some other things I can't really share just yet. Just follow me or WadiDigital on LinkedIn to learn more. ROB: Got it. Is it WadiDigital.com? Where do we go to find you? We can find you on LinkedIn. YOEL: Yep, wadidigital.com, but the best is search “Yoel Israel” in LinkedIn. Send me a connection request, tell me you heard me from here, and I look forward to following and engaging. I'm very active there. ROB: Awesome. If we google your name, there's a nice Google ad that runs right up top too. It's pretty sweet. YOEL: As it should. [laughs] Control your name. ROB: Very good. Yoel, thank you for taking the time to share your experience. It's great to learn about what you're doing both within cybersecurity marketing, but also that goal and the thought and the distilled knowledge going into the platform and the media side. It's really, really instructive. YOEL: Awesome. Thanks. My pleasure, and I appreciate you having me on. ROB: Thank you so much. Be well. Bye. YOEL: Cheers. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Lucas DiPietrantonio is CEO and co-founder of Darkroom, a 3-year-old creative e-commerce growth agency that launches new brands to market and grows existing brands to maturity through four robust and specialized verticals: branding, technology, video production, and growth marketing Darkroom often serves as an incubator and marketing partner for companies so new they don't have a brand, a visual identity, or a tech stack. “But we are selective,” Lucas explains. A typical client company profile would be a consumer-facing, consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) brand with a strong founding team and enough raised capital or the ability to bootstrap that the company could rapidly scale. Darkroom launches 7 to 9 new companies a year. As an example, for the past two years Darkroom has been incubating an internal venture with one of its external partners: a collection of high-quality, limited edition, luxury, athleisure performance “sneakers” unlike, Lucas says, “anything you've seen.” Both Nira sneakers and the pre-launch site https://www.nera01.com/ go live on December 15th and are designed to organically grow the word of this shoe. A main site for the brand will target different demographics and have a different purpose. In this interview, Lucas explains how different approaches to video affect its effectiveness. Many companies will engage agencies that are strictly performance-focused and do the creative in-house or engage another agency to do their creative work. Over time, this dichotomy results in a lack of strategic focus and content cohesiveness. Lucas claims that people come to Darkroom because the agency's integrated production, creative, and performance team can develop a company's content strategy, with the “two sides (creative and performance) of the same brain” operating in synchrony. The close fit between performance and creative creates a consistent “content engine” with a “feedback loop.” The result? The highest-quality-currently-available content over a long period of time at about the same cost as in in-house marketer. The agency's high performing, converting websites work because visual identity and marketing create a cohesive digital experience that maps onto the customer experience of other things like packaging. Lucas says everything needs to feel cohesive.  Lucas writes a number of online columns and recommends people check out his informative entrepreneur.com. He is available on LinkedIn as Lucas DiPietrantonio, on his agency's website at: darkroomagency.com, or by email at Lucas@Darkroomagency.com. Rob: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk. And I'm joined today by Lucas DiPietrantonio, CEO and co-founder of Darkroom based in Los Angeles, California. Welcome to the podcast, Lucas. Lucas: Yeah, Rob, thanks so much for having me, really great to be here. Rob: Super to have you here. Why don't you start off by giving us a rundown of Darkroom and where the agency excels? Lucas: Yeah, of course, of course. First of all, just wanted to thank you for having me on the show, really appreciate it and excited to talk about Darkroom. This was an agency that me and my co-founder Jackson Corey, we founded about three years ago. And it's really evolved quite rapidly in the past year or so I'd say has really just become something different than what it was, but at its core we're creative growth agency specifically built for e-commerce. And we're really predicated on doing two specific things: launching new brands to market and growing existing brands to maturity. And we do that through four major disciplines which I think are quite rare in the e-commerce space: One is branding, two technology, three video production, and four is growth marketing. And I really think we found service market fit in the past like three months or so and it's just been a scale-game-since year, but yeah, it's been really interesting and fun growing the company, but you'll notice we do quite a bit. Each of those verticals are pretty robust and specialized. Rob: I'll be eager to dig into those. The two different segments of clients you mentioned, it seems fairly interesting, especially when you're talking about that embryonic sort of brand. How do you think about when you're looking at a new e-commerce brand looking at client selection, because there's an element of, to get them somewhere you have to see something in that client that you believe is meaningful in the market. Lucas: The brands we work with from conception, first of all, we are pretty selective with any of the companies that we do end up engaging with. But those that actually want to work with us from conception, they don't have a brand, they don't have a visual identity, or any sort of tech stack. They have an operational idea, an assemblance of what they want to do. We'll come in and serve as their marketing partner. With a lot of these pre-launch companies, we service them almost as if we're an incubator, which is incredibly fun and rewarding to work with them on, but we are selective. My co-founder Jackson is the only person who will touch branding engagements for the firm, that's just by virtue of having quality control over our creative output on the brand side of things. So it's minimal.  There's probably seven to nine brands we'll launch each year and we are pretty particular about it. Some of the formula things that we look for are CPG brand, consumer facing, really strong founding team, most often raised capital of some degree so they can eventually scale or has bootstrapped and has the ability to scale pretty rapidly after launch. That founding team needs to be strong operators and people we really believe in. We work with people as if we're investing in them. It's important for us to feel really good about the partnership. On the incubation side, that's how we really engage with companies and what we look for. Rob: Interesting. Is there an example you can give, just to fill in some of the context here, of a brand you've kind of taken through that early launch stage that maybe we can go out and check out when we're done with this conversation? Lucas: Yeah. There's one that's really top of my mind and really close to home for me. It's what I've been working on for the past two years or so. It's not exactly launched just yet, but it's going to be launching in the next two months so I might as well mention it. It's a sneaker brand called Nira. It's actually a Darkroom internal venture that we've been incubating with one of our partners outside of Darkroom. It's a sneaker brand we've been working on it for the past three years. It's a long incubation period, and that's just because we've really been more involved on the operational side of things to sourcing and being hands-on more or less as founders rather than just marketing partners. But what that relationship has really looked like has been coming up with the actual brand story based on the vision of the founder distilling that into a visual identity, moving to technological specs. So we have a pretty robust pre-launch site that we're going to be launching as well as a main site, both of them are aimed at different demographics and different purposes and then we're going to be doing all of the ongoing growth initiatives. Along the way, we traveled to Italy three times . . . these sneakers are being made in Italy. They're inspired by Italian Motorsport culture. So you really get this rich vibrant marketing plan and visuals, which we've really enjoyed a fast shoe, fast sneaker, but for people who are going to listen to the podcast these sneakers are going live and our pre-launch site is going live on December 15th at nirashops.com. And, you know, that's about a month and a half away, and it's a pretty big launch that we're gearing up for one that we're really excited about. Rob: How many varieties are you launching with colorways? And is there an angle for the collector market when you're in the sneaker land here? Lucas: Yeah, so all of these sneakers are limited. We're only producing like a few hundred pairs of each sku, so we definitely wanted to go into this with the idea of quality over quantity, perfecting our craft. We're using some of the best craftsmen and all of Italy. We've vetted quite a few different factories they're being made in the Abruzzo region near LA marsh. And you know, each individual shoe probably touches 44 different hands and takes 48 hours to build so they're very high quality. We're launching with only seven different skus -- so not too many. they're going to be tranche out in terms of releases. But we've got so many different shoes that we've made along the way that we're hoping to release that we just can't release. So that pre-launch site that I was mentioning on December 15th, we have these really limited, beautiful sneakers, they're unlike anything you've seen, it's like an athleisure performance shoe, but it's luxury And you know, you're not going to run with it.  And it's like a suede shoe So it's, it's interesting, but it doesn't look like a common project or what you would typically expect from a lot of these USD to see brands popping up from Italy so it's definitely got its own niche. But that site on December 15th that we're launching because we have all of these prototypes it's going to be for our friends and family that we've been talking about for the past three years. And they're like, hey, when can I get a sneaker, when can I get a shoe? Like those look awesome, when can I have some more information? What we're going to be releasing is a prelaunch site aimed at just kind of growing the word of this shoe organically. So there'll be some referral structures built in, but everyone who sort of accesses that website will have an opportunity to, you know, get a free pair, but also get a prototype. So, a pair that will never release ever . . . one that is a one-on-one sneaker. I mean, you have to do a few different things to actually be able to qualify to get that sneaker, but that's how we're really going to give them back to our community who supported us early on. Rob: That's excellent. I think you've given us a pretty good walkthrough and how you are even thinking about branding and how that would translate through to clients. You started to bridge, I think, a little bit into the technology, but e-commerce is a wide berth when it comes to technology. Paint a picture of what your range of engagement looks like on the technology side. Lucas: Yeah, so for most, I would say probably 80% of our business is e-com and that's just because we've really built an agency that can service SMBs or larger mid-market e-commerce brands really well, because we just know that customer. We're launching our own brands in the e-com space and we know exactly what they need and know exactly what they don't need and don't want to pay for. On the technological front in e-com, your website is your storefront. It needs to be highly optimized. If it's not, you're just leaving money on the table. We build really high performing, converting websites that are also just top-notch from a brand perspective. Because we're doing your visual identity and we're also doing your marketing, we can maintain cohesion across the digital experience and how that maps onto the customer experience – like packaging. You want everything to feel cohesive.  At the simplest and most important level we're doing digital products for e-commerce brands. For ongoing engagements, we'll do things like conversion rate optimization, web support, really being that back engine driver of an e-commerce brand. And you'll really talk about me say Darkroom being an engine, or like a Ninja for an executioner for a lot of the companies that we work with because we're genuinely trying to position ourselves in that way. We have an office in Odessa and Ukraine spent quite a bit of time and money and resources figuring out the perfect market for affordable, but really high-quality labor for a lot of these brands. They're not going to pay American engineers who are working on software, and if you don't want to touch, you know, Woo Commerce or Shopify or your headless website unless they're getting paid, you know, 180K annually plus . . . that doesn't work for a lot of SMBs. So we've invested quite a bit in our infrastructure and overseas markets and we've worked with people from everywhere and just landed on Odessa and Ukraine as a perfect market for our use case and our needs. And you know, just for your insight – Darkroom, we did start as just a design and development agency so we've got a pretty high competency on, on the technological front. And, you know, the other 20% of our engagements are Darkroom digital engagements, where they might be more robust digital applications, things of that nature. Rob: Yeah, you mentioned a few different platforms and there, you mentioned Woo Commerce, which some people may know, you mentioned Shopify, which is a big, big name. And something you mentioned that people may not be as familiar with is the headless situation, which it's a content system, but I assume you're building perhaps sort of a bespoke front end, but still using a backend e-commerce engine? Lucas: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of different ways to approach that. Shopify has also become headless recently, so it just depends on like the specific needs of the client and what they're looking for. I think you're going to start to see the e-commerce landscape move more in the headless direction. Also the no-code direction, using platforms like Shogun and other sort of systems that come up for these SMB convents specifically. The digital landscape on the e-commerce front is definitely changing pretty rapidly, People want more flexibility. They want it to be easier, quicker, that's a lot of the stuff that we do. Some people just don't want to deal with their technology, but there are a lot of brands and companies coming out with interesting solutions for clientele across the spectrum in terms of size. Rob: You seemed to be very interested, especially in your own work, but in general, in working with non-commodity brands. How do you think about, when you're working with them, the distinction between what commerce they want to have on their site or other places they may want to sell? It seems like almost every big brand wants to be a marketplace now. I think Target even, they'll sell stuff that they don't stock – so how do you think about where your clients should be selling? Lucas: Yeah. It's definitely determined on a case by case basis. You'll have some products that are going to do really well on Amazon or other channels and others that, we might recommend just strictly to see and try and build out that brand. For our clientele, we definitely prefer working with really strong, authentic brands, people who either really know their customer and have developed great relationships with them. And I can think of a number of different companies that we work with off the top of my head that really satiate that criteria. And the other thing is like for me, the agency is all about the people and the sort of talent that we attract and I genuinely want our people to feel happy and fulfilled on the work that they're doing. And that necessitates founders who have built great products or are doing something different or are doing something positive to really excite our staff.  Everything from there follows: you have high employee satisfaction, high client satisfaction, the retention rate goes up across the board, and you also get a great portfolio off of that work. I definitely try and look for brands that are a good fit for us. There are definitely some brands that are not a good fit for us and we'll just say that off of the gate, out of the sales process. But ultimately that's where we perform best because we're definitely a brand-focused agency. We want to see our clients succeed. Sometimes it's hard to tell a client what to do if they don't want to do it. Rob: Certainly, I can imagine, if you have an undifferentiated product, if there's low margins, all of those things are going to reduce the flexibility increase. Now, not to say there shouldn't always be pressure to perform because e-commerce is definitionally pressure to perform, but the margin of creativity and in a low margin business can just be such a challenge. Now, you mentioned another discipline that you do work in is video production. I'm sure some clients come to you thinking the key to their entire future is that viral video that's going to get out there. Everybody's going to beat down the door to their site and buy all their stuff. But how do you guide a client's expectations on what is necessary at what stage of the business in terms of video marketing? Lucas: Yeah. Expectation-setting is baked into every single step of our process. It's only when you have a client who's really dialed into their goals, but is not over-projecting what they've like unrealistic expectations, where we can really sit head-to-head and come up with a strategy for success. On the video side of things people come to us because we are generating the highest quality content in e-commerce right now. And that's by sheer virtue of our talent – people we've attracted and how we're doing e-com content differently. Every e-commerce company – they're interested in performance and performance marketing, but they'll engage agencies who are either strictly focused on performance and are not thinking about creative because they just don't have that side of their brain operating. So they'll engage your performance agency and then they'll do their creative in house, or they'll engage in another agency who's doing their creative – but these people are not actively thinking about their performance because they're just not operating in the ad account. Or they're not actually deploying those videos, or they don't know exactly how to create videos that will go viral or will perform really well. You have this like separation between creative and performance and it makes no sense. What we've done is we've integrated our video production team, our creative team, and our performance team. Our growth channels and our creative teams operate as two sides of the same brain. What you get is this really nice feedback loop where performance informs creative and creative tests hypotheses and you constantly learn. The way our video production services work – they are meant to be a content engine for a lot of these e-commerce brands. E-Commerce brands traditionally will do things in house, they'll do a sporadic photo shoot when they need content and be like, “Oh, I need this now because we're getting ad fatigue or things aren't performing well, or we need more video content. There's no strategy really behind that. Or you'll engage a production company every six months with a new concept and they'll execute on that. There's no cohesion with the content. If there is, it just takes more time and effort, you need an internal creative director, or whatever it might be.  Our video production service offering, you get a team that is with you from the start, they figure out your content strategy for the next six months, and then we execute against that. So you get consistent content over a long period of time and it costs you about the same as when you've got a producer director, video editor, the entire post team from pre to post – it costs you the same as an in-house marketer. So that's been one of our most popular services, which has been awesome.  On the viral side of things, sometimes we'll layer UGC some of our video that we take on set with our influencer marketing service offering, and we can definitely tap into vitality, just it needs to be done, right. And by reality is all about just experimentation testing hypotheses and seeing what sticks. Rob: I have to ask while we're talking about production, how did in March the COVID-19 pandemic onset affect your production? How was your handling of video production shifted over the course of the past six or seven months? Lucas: That's a good question. It definitely took a hit at the beginning of what we were doing – just business in general, there was a little bit of a slide. I think people were really scared, they didn't know what was going to happen. There was definitely fear in the marketplace, a lot of young SMB startups were like, “Are people going to be purchasing my products anymore? Are they going to have the disposable income to do that?” There was definitely a fear. I wrote about it quite extensively in some of my columns, but what ended up happening, and I think as everyone knows, is e-commerce is really having its moment right now. So, our growth really just started popping off quickly thereafter. We were set up in such a way to help a lot of these brands who are like, “Oh my God, we need to shift, we need to focus more on e-com. Our content is now so much more important. How we're communicating online is now critical to our success.” We were really positioned in a great way to just have those conversations early on and help a lot of our partners that we were talking to who needed some of these things. And it helped that we had been investing in video production to the past two years, built a great team off of Oliver Salk, one of my great friends and coworkers now. He's just exceptional and he's building our video production team. We've made the right choices. That we invested in all of our equipment and we invested in our studio in downtown LA. That's afforded us the privilege and freedom of not being constrained to rentals or venturing out. We could do things really safe and protected in LA under our roof. So that was advantageous. Rob: You mentioned your columns in passing. What are the columns, where should we go to find those, if we want to kind of read some of your perspective, are there? Lucas: Yeah, I think the most informative one is going to be my entrepreneur column. So just going to entrepreneur.com. Honestly, searching anything about e-commerce . . . coronavirus, I'll probably pop up. Rob: Excellent positioning there. Lucas, as you reflect back on the journey so far with Darkroom, what are some things you have learned that you might do differently if you were starting over from scratch today? Lucas: That's tough. I don't know that I would do to anything differently per se, because they've all been pretty critical building blocks on the journey. One thing that agency founders need to understand is building an agency is incredibly tough, it's really difficult. There's so many, and there's so many different things that go into it. Figuring out how you're going to be set up for scale is one of the early challenges I think, beyond getting clients and doing good work and all of the other things that just go into making a profitable service business. I think people sometimes underestimate the difficulty associated with it. One thing that I would have maybe done differently is, and it's tough to really say this, but I'll give you my thoughts. One thing that I may have done differently is literally just focus on one vertical so quickly. It took us a little while to adopt this e-commerce-specific focus and change our messaging and our core competency towards this one vertical. It's no secret, I've been working in e-commerce for a while. So has Jackson, my co-founder. We both started fashion and apparel e-commerce businesses, that's how we met – that's how we started collaborating. But when we started our agency, we were doing work for everyone . . . we didn't actually hone in on that demographic and really become specialized. And I think there are two ways to build an agency. You either really become specialized and understand your customer and when they come to you, you're like, “Hey, we've done this for many other brands just like you and we can definitely do this and accomplish what you want.” That makes your sales process so much easier with that specific client. Or you can say, “Hey, we do everything and you're going to have a much lower conversion rate because they're going to be competing against the other agencies that are being specialized. But you can say, we're going to learn it, you get the benefit of us doing a lot of different things and having competency in a lot of different areas and we want to be generalists.” But that, I think only takes you so far unless you're a behemoth of an agency. So, I may have become specialized a little bit sooner because as soon as we started doing it, we started to scale at a crazy pace. But again, it was part of the journey. We needed to figure out what we liked, what we were really good at, where there was opportunity, and white space in the market. For us, that just came by looking at the competition in the e-commerce DTC agency space, which now we're scaling. I think other people look at our brand compared to some of our competitors, and these are just our competitors right now and it's just a no brainer. Rob: It's so critical. You mentioned earlier the fit, you feel like you found with your service offerings in the market and especially in startup world, they also talk about South sort of a founder market fit. And I think the journey of a lot of agencies that do well is using the market as sort of a painful tool to figure out who you are. And oftentimes, you know, it's almost like you wish there was a personality test you could take up front to help you see “Here's who you are. Here are the vertical markets that fit you. Here are the service offerings that fit you. Here are the things you wish someone could tell you.” But it seems like quite often you have to just learn some lessons along the way. Lucas: You got to just figure it out and the only way to figure it out is by doing it and screwing up and realizing, “Oh, this isn't going to work.” When that happened, it was so many different times that now I can get on a call with someone who's vetting us and describe my service and describe why that service is better than every other agency who hasn't figured it out yet. And when you're speaking from experience and just empathizing with the customer, you know, it makes your life so much easier. It's not a sale anymore it's just, you're providing them with a service that they genuinely really need and would be better than any other service that they engage in. And that's what a lot of my job has been. it's been making sure the services are as value-packed as possible and building out each vertical individually. So, the branding service, the technology offering.  The technology offering is one of the best out there in the e-commerce space, because there is so much BS and noise coming from development agencies who are just flat out lying. And it becomes a really big vulnerability for a lot of e-commerce brands who engage with other agencies or freelancers or whatever it is, and they don't have consistent support. So, the development offering, that's something I've been working on past quarter. Video production, same deal, just building that engine, building it out from our foundation and making it really value-packed. The amount of deliverables and hands-on content you get from our production department right now, it's unheard of. I've had other production agencies, or honestly, some of our hires who've come from other production agencies and they're like, “Wow, you're offering this? This is crazy. How are you doing this? We should be charging more.” And I'm like, “No, I want this to be value-packed. I want to deliver crazy value to our clients.” So yeah, it's just really being detailed about the services and knowing what's going to work. Rob: Sure. Coming from a development background myself, I can imagine. It seems like in all three of those initial disciplines you mentioned in branding and technology and video production. Lucas: [Inaudible 28:42]  Rob: Yeah. There's a potential high element of trust, like a lot of those things don't really work until they're done. And you can show progress along the way, but I think people have probably been bitten in all three of those areas by someone taking their money and not giving them a finished product. Lucas: Yeah. Especially in development, right. That's just always happening. Or it's like, you know, four months in, when you're supposed to have a delivered product, it's like, this is going to take a long time. Like this is going to take required 10,000 more dollars or timelines shift, or your code is just crap . . . there's so many different things that could go wrong there. And that's just all about trust, right? So now we're at a place where we've got dialed-in processes that are cut and dried. It's like, “This is how it's going to go.” You can see it in all of our work products. You can see our portfolio and especially in the e-commerce space again, where I feel like there is a lack of creativity unless you're paying top dollar for it. Unless you have a great creative idea as a founder and you can get it done and know how to piece these things together, which is always the case and it has been the case for a while. We'll deliver a website. People would just be like, “Wow, this is incredible.” Some of our web work is we go above and beyond. Rob: Lucas, when people want to find you and connect with you and with Darkroom – maybe see that portfolio as well – where should they go to find you?  Lucas: They can go to LinkedIn. Type in Lucas DiPietrantonio, or check out Darkroom's website, darkroomagency.com. Reach out to us. You can reach out to me via email Lucas@Darkroomagency.com. I'm usually pretty responsive and try and reach out to everyone or get back to everyone who reaches out to me.  Rob: Super legit. Well, Lucas DiPietrantonio, thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing the story of Darkroom with us. Be well. Lucas: Yeah, Rob, thanks so much. I appreciate you having me on here, it was fun.  Rob: All right. Thanks. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how converged can automate your marketing reporting, email info@converthq.com or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

James Kwon is Founder and CEO of Figmints Digital Creative Marketing, a 20-person, full-service, multi-seven-figure digital marketing agency that specializes in accelerating leads to sales. The company utilizes SalesAmp, which James describes as “business development representative as a service.” SalesAmp came under the Figmint's “umbrella” when James and April Williams, now Fitmints President, merged their two companies. (The way these two companies “came together” is described in a short video on Fitmints' website's About page.) Eight years ago, when James discovered that his first chosen career in culinary arts did not provide him with sufficient creative opportunities, he started Figmints with a focus on providing UI/UX (User Interface and User Experience) web services, which he did for number of well-known companies back when few people were doing it. In this interview, James discusses the sales process gap the often occurs because “sales and marketing typically don't like each other” – the marketing department wants the sales team to take leads earlier, while the sales team wants marketing to push leads further along before the “hand off.” In 2018, James was looking for a partner to better fulfill his vision for where he wanted his company to go. The synergy between Figmints HubSpot operations and North Star Marketing's SalesAmp, a marketing process focused on building pipelines for individual salespeople, created a marketing powerhouse that far exceeded the expectations of the two merged companys' leaders. Today, the now-expanded Figmints develops the right content for the exact right audience. As individuals respond (download information, attend webinars, engage with content, open email), the SalesAmp piece takes over with Figments' internal sales team reaching out to prospects on behalf of clients. Over time, Figmints delivers a thought leadership, content marketing, and funnel program that nurtures customers through the client-journey until they are comfortable enough to talk with the client's sales team.  Unlike most agencies where generated leads are handed off for follow-up to client sales/ boiler rooms (which may or may not get the message right), Figmints operates as an “educational ambassador,” running the inbound HubSpot process on behalf of its clients' salespeople. Most of the Figmints' clients have long, complex sales cycles. When the questions get too complicated, the client takes over. In his HubSpot Inbound 2020 presentation, “My Cheat Sheet: How to Growth Hack Five New Companies or Offerings This Year” at HubSpot Inbound 2020, James promoted the idea that entrepreneurs should consider starting multiple companies at a time. He lists a number of reasons that this practice makes sense and lays claim to launching close to nine sub-brands, of which four or five are still active. James is a big proponent of systems, optimization, and efficiency for everything from workflows to automated engagement to follow-up processes. He says he uses “several dozen pieces of software that combine together to make my workflow easier.” But, he admits, people are complicated. Early on, the agency experienced high employee turnover. “There is no way to love people efficiently,” he says. Today, employees stick around a lot longer because the agency invests in employee growth and meeting with them for frequent one-on-ones. He highly recommends utilizing Entrepreneurial Operating Systems (EOS), as described in Gino Wickman's book Traction. James is available on his agency's website at: Figmints.com, by email at: james@figmints.com, on Twitter at Twitter.com/figmints, and Facebook.  ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by James Kwon, Founder and CEO of Figmints Digital Creative Marketing based in Providence, Rhode Island. Welcome to the podcast, James. JAMES: Thanks so much for having me, Rob. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Figmints and what is the superpower of Figmints? Where do you excel? JAMES: I like that. Figmints is a 20-person, full service digital marketing firm. Started here about 8 years ago. My personal background – I guess I'll tell you a little bit of the story. I started in UI/UX and design. Actually, I have a degree in culinary, so that was where my creativity journey started. Got to find out that I couldn't be as creative in the kitchen as I'd like to be, and I wasn't that good at it, so I left to do design work. I could be more creative in front of a computer, so I started to do design and became what I call one of the first UI/UX designers because that category really didn't exist when I started. I was Employee #5 at CVS.com, helped them launch that award-winning site at the time. Worked at BEAM Interactive, got to work on some really high profile, awesome sites like Mini Cooper, Virgin Mobile, Deutsche Bank, the list goes on and on. Name drop, name drop. I started the agency because I really enjoyed working with small to medium size firms. Fell in love with marketing somewhere along the lines. I fell in love with business, fell in love with marketing, just this infinite pool. Today, we're really focused on accelerating leads to sales through a program we call SalesAmp. It's like a BDR as a service. What I've learned through the years – I don't like the term serial entrepreneur, but I guess it describes me because we have probably four or five different sub-brands that I've launched. Over the years, actually, it's like nine. But today we're still working on four or five of them. I've had a blast getting to trial things very quickly, test things very quickly, trying to measure the growth very quickly. And we do that for clients as well as ourselves. ROB: Right on. BDR, business development representative – a lot of times this is somebody who's banging the phones, banging emails, possibly even sourcing or scraping leads or has some process feeding into that. How does that thread go from a background in UX and UI to sales assistance? JAMES: Great question. What I love about design is coming up with creative solutions, and when I started the business 8 years ago, I realized that you get to really be infinitely creative in business itself. There are major levels you can pull within business operations, HR, people, but especially, of course, in sales and marketing that was the area that was closest to the world we were already living in, doing websites and branding and brand story. We merged about 2-½ years ago now with another agency. The CEO there is now our president, April Williams. She had developed a system that she called SalesAmp, and we really added a digital layer as they've folded into our agency. That process, we think, is really transformational. We have a lot of great clients. Philips Healthcare is a client of ours. That's probably our biggest. GE ABB is a client of ours. Lots of medium size clients as well. But the whole idea is sales and marketing typically don't like each other. Well, in a lot of businesses, they typically are frustrated at each other because marketing wants sales to take leads earlier, sales wants marketing to push leads further. There's this gap that happens in the middle, and we thought this was a tremendous need. So we actually developed a process to not only develop the thought leadership, the content marketing, the funnel, but also have an inside sales team that reaches out on behalf of the client to hand-hold that prospect all the way through till they feel comfortable having a conversation with the sales team. These larger organizations have felt tremendous benefit from having this service from us because it reduces that frustration. Salespeople are busy; they flat-out just don't want to do it. [laughs] So yeah, we've had a lot of fun putting this together. ROB: That's really interesting, and that makes your journey make sense. If we were doing conferences this year in 2020, you and I might have been speaking face to face at HubSpot's Inbound conference, where you were speaking. We've recorded there the past couple of years, and quite often we've talked to BDR/SDR as a service companies, but they're usually coming more from the perspective of building lists and then banging out calls for those lists. Do I understand that you're actually generating warmer leads and then also pulling those leads through to some point where you hand them off in the sales process? JAMES: Yeah. Not to give away too much of the special sauce, but for the value of this podcast, for the value of your listeners, I'll share with you what we've found to be more impactful is actually running the good old-fashioned HubSpot inbound process specifically for salespeople. We run that process on their behalf – because you're right, a lot of these outbound sales/boiler room type of “I'm going to call 1,000 people a day,” those tend to fail because they don't get the story right. The game is just numbers, “I'm going to call as many people as possible.” But the inbound process is all about connecting the right content, having as much helpful content as possible to that exact right audience. What we're doing is combining both of those worlds. We want to develop that content, do it on behalf of the sales team, and then as people engage, we're reaching out to those individuals. As people download, as people attend the webinars, as people start to engage with that content or even open an email, those are the people we reach out to. And then on the calls, we're actually leading them into more content, bringing them further through that journey. That I think is pretty different than a lot of companies out there that are just a roomful of salespeople reaching out. ROB: That definitely makes sense. Where do you get to the point where you hand that lead off? Are you sometimes able to bring them all the way through to closing sale, or is there typically a point where you're handing them off to an account executive, an AE or something like that? JAMES: Yeah, we're working on a program where we can bring the deal all the way to close. Of course, there's a lot of complexities. Most of the clients we work with have long sales cycles. They're very complex deals. You have to have some industry knowledge to be valuable there, to actually make the close or get people to sign on the dotted line. But what we do is become educational ambassadors. We know enough about the business to be able to guide that individual, and once it becomes complicated or once the questions become a little too complex for us, we'll immediately tee it up for that salesperson at the company. ROB: Got it. I want to pull on one thread you mentioned earlier. You mentioned a point of merging with another agency. Quite often, especially when you get to being more entrepreneurial, I think a combination of let's say ego and logistics and financial concerns can be an obstacle to getting together – JAMES: Just those little things. [laughs] Yeah. ROB: [laughs] Nobody has those problems. How did you come to this point where it just seemed to make sense to team up and pursue a whole that was more than some of its parts? JAMES: I'm going to throw a lot of that to April, who was the CEO of this previous agency and is now our president. There was a lot of humility from the start. We met each other actually at a faith-based Christian CEO roundtable group, and we've known each other for a few years. That story – we like to use the word supernatural. It feels like it was more about the things that were happening, and we were going along for the ride, really, and submitting a little bit to what we felt like was the best way to move forward. You can see that story, and I would highly recommend anybody to check out that full story, on our website, on our About page. I think there's a 4- or 5-minute video that explains the process there. But all the work that was done to start that humble process was really from April, and I was following along. ROB: We will look to get that video into the show notes. It's a great point that so often, some of these roundtables, some of these accountability type groups where you open up a little bit could be a place where you open up enough to figure out how you and someone else can work better together. Makes a ton of sense there. We mentioned Inbound, and at Inbound you gave a talk, and your talk was “My Cheat Sheet: How to Growth Hack Five New Companies or Offerings This Year.” Tell us about that talk and what some of the key takeaways and maybe even key questions were from that. JAMES: That talk came from our merger, I'd say was really the catalyst. It freed me up to dwell and live in – I think my gifting is ideating, looking towards the future, thinking about where we could create new products, new offerings. In the past, we really only ever had time to do half to one product or offering at a time, and we'd slowly test them. I realized that this probably means we're spending too much time trying to develop that offering before we launch it out. Obviously, as a speaker, I wanted the title to be as provocative as possible, so I made the argument that you shouldn't just start one offering or one new company; you should try to start five. It's kind of an arbitrary number. Three, five, ten – you should start as many as you can that warrants – that you think is a good idea. Go and test those MVPs (minimum viable products) out there. Very quickly into that segment, I talked about a few different reasons why you would want to do that. One, 80% of these ideas are going to fail, whether it's a new company or a new offering. So hey, if you start five, maybe one will succeed. It gives you this massive leap ahead. It gives you this opportunity to play in this blue ocean where your competitors may not be thinking smaller, running those MVPs, making sure that you're testing the biggest parts of the idea. It forces you not to spend too much time on it. And then of course, you get some thick skin. After failing many, many, many times, it becomes second nature, and you start to move forward much more quickly. ROB: This may tie together; you mentioned that your company had at one point up to nine offerings, and now there are five. Are there lessons and maybe an example of one of those that was an experiment and one that was put to rest? JAMES: Yeah, there's so many failures in there. [laughs] Happy to talk about it. Very early on, we built a platform for the wedding industry. Early on, when we introed video as a service, we were doing videos for weddings to make ends meet. We quickly knew that this needed to be not part of our brand, so we created a separate brand for that. The wedding industry is an entire universe. For any of your listeners who might be in the wedding industry, it is complex and unique and special, and there's a lot of people that you need to know and a lot of ways that you do business in it that are different than other industries – which I guess you could make the argument is true for every industry. But we quickly realized that we need a champion for this. We need a champion for any of these products that we create or sub-companies we create, and I couldn't be the best champion for it It did fail. We wound up twilighting the offering. There was actually a software component that was added onto it. But it was a lesson learned that the offering was a little too far away from what we do. Today, a lot of our products that we're testing are things that we can actually use ourselves or we can use for our own clients, which makes it a little bit more – the resources make sense to allocate for ourselves. ROB: How do you think about when it's too soon to put an idea to rest or maybe recognize after the fact that it was a little later than you should've turned it off? JAMES: I think it's always later. In hindsight, we should've stopped maybe at the beginning. [laughs] But I think you realize when you run out of money, certainly. I set some ground rules. “Hey, this can't take more than this much time” or “You can't spend more than this many dollars” or “We want to see this many customers come in and this type of feedback.” It's a good example of where everything was going the wrong direction. Our feedback was starting to get worse, it started to slip way behind in the priority, we couldn't devote as much time or dollars to it, and so we made the – I won't even call it a difficult decision. We made the very real decision that we needed to put an official stop to that project and move on. ROB: When you talk about feedback, some people are very numbers-driven and some people are very intuition-driven. Was that assessment of the feedback and the priority more of a gut feeling, or was that a measured consideration? JAMES: I'd love to sound smarter and say it was very measured. [laughs] At the time, that was one of our early ones, and it was a little bit more gut, which means we probably spent more money than we wanted to or needed to. But today we have much more strict measures of when things are going off the rails or when it feels like it's not getting the attention it deserves or we're getting feedback from our clients. I think you need both. You need to have some soft measures, asking people what they think, scale of 1 to 10. You start to create metrics around soft measures, which I'm a fan of. ROB: What's another offering that maybe is a little bit further along that was an experiment, but now looks a little bit more promising? And where did it come from? JAMES: At the end of my talk at Inbound, we created an offering that was born from this process. I give a little story about Tim Ferriss, which I'm sure you've heard of and maybe your listeners have heard of. Tim Ferriss is a prolific startup and entrepreneurial writer. He wrote The 4-Hour Workweek. There's a story about how he wrote the second book, The 4-Hour Body, and the way he arrived at the decision to write that book was really clever. Instead of surveying people or writing a chapter or anything like that, he designed a handful of book jackets and went to a bookstore – if you remember what bookstores were, they were these places people go to buy books. [laughs] This is probably illegal, so I don't recommend this necessarily. He took the books off the shelf and he swapped the jackets with his book jacket and he put it back on the shelf, and he stood back and actually tallied as people stopped, picked up the book, opened the book. He would give them scores – a point for stopping, 2 points for picking up the book, 10 points if you tried to buy the book. Then he arrived at the decision to write 4-Hour Body. And the subtitle of 4-Hour Body is “An uncommon guide to rapid fat loss, incredible sex, and becoming superhuman” – why would you not want to read that book, right? But that process, since we don't have bookstores anymore, or I don't recommend this same sort of process, we've developed a similar system using Facebook advertisements and other advertisements where we create what we call fake ads. They look like real ads, but they point you to a very generic landing page that captures information and lets you know that this is coming out later. This program, we like it a lot. We think many companies would benefit from it, and we've developed a separate offering just to do these validation tests. We call it BentoSpring. Bento like bite-size, spring like launch, so bite-size launch. The term “Bite-Size Launch” was taken, I think, so BentoSpring was our next best name. We're piloting that now. We're getting that off the ground. I think it's definitely still valid. But this is a great example of a product that we could use that we offer to our clients. It's relatively inexpensive, so when we offer it, we say, “Oh, we actually have an offering we call BentoSpring.” It could be its own separate company, but it doesn't need to be its own separate company. We have the offering out there, and if people want to engage with it, they can give us some money and do it. ROB: I can certainly see that sort of thing – from a distance, you can see the tea leaves. Even if you told somebody, “We have a scoring system like Tim Ferriss's. We give points for likes, we give points for comments, we give points for clicks, we give points for form fills” – the actual process of doing it could very easily be something that a client doesn't want to do. JAMES: Sure. They don't know how to do it. They don't know how to do it, they don't have an ad platform set up. Again, this is designed even if you wanted to start a brand new company and you have two or three in your ideation phase. “Gosh, these are all great companies,” or “These are all great things that I could be doing. Which one should we do?” Well, let's go test it. Let's go build out a bento test and test some ads out there. Let's see which ones are easier to set up, which ones can get the most impressions versus will see the most click-throughs. And then you have these prebuilt ads. Once you get that up and going, you can just re-run the ads and point them to real offerings. ROB: Exciting stuff there, James. JAMES: Thanks. ROB: We've talked a bit about your journey along the way. As you reflect on the 8 years since you took the leap and started the business, what are some things you've learned along the way that you might do differently if you were starting over? Maybe some broader lessons on running the show, more than maybe individual offerings. JAMES: One of the biggest lessons I've learned as an entrepreneur – and about myself, so this may not apply to everybody or all of your listeners – but for me, I'm a fan of optimization and efficiency. I love setting up systems. I think that's why I fell in love with marketing. I fell in love with HubSpot because we can create these systems, we can create workflows. You can automate a lot of that engagement and follow-up and process. I use sequences every day. I have probably several dozen pieces of software that combine together to make my workflow easier. But here's what I found out. There is no way to love people efficiently. You cannot do it. Loving people is designed to not be efficient, or relationships are designed to not be efficient. So early on, there was a lot of friction in the business because I would hire employees and they'd stay a year or two, and I'd get frustrated when people get that millennial itch. I had somebody say, “James, I've been here two years. I learned everything I could. I think I'm going to leave and travel the world.” And that guy did really well. But today, we've held our employees a lot longer. We're invested in our employees to see them grow, painstakingly taking time out of the day to set up one-on-ones with every individual, more one-on-ones with the people closest to me in the leadership circle. Those are the things that have been very painful lessons, but such powerful lessons growing the business to where we are now, about 20 employees, multi seven-figure. But that's something I think could be its own book of lessons, per se, for loving people, caring about people, just treasuring this opportunity that I have to make an impact on their lives. ROB: Really helpful. One-on-ones are such a key connector of that. You mentioned days. Are you doing those mostly weekly, or more often or less often? You said some people are a little lighter cadence if they're not as close to you in the organization? Maybe you do more of a touch base on occasion? JAMES: One-on-ones seem like such a simple answer. If I say it, some of your listeners might think, “Of course, I'm going to do one-on-ones.” But you wind up not doing it unless they're really regimented. I recommend highly that – first of all, we run on an operating system called EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating Systems), a book called Traction by Gino Wickman. Once you start to get into peer groups, you'll hear the EOS model over and over and over again. So I highly, highly recommend looking at EOS because it gives you a framework for meetings, a framework for how you do business, how you set it up, how to look at finances, how to look at hiring, core values, etc. It makes the argument that every business runs on an operating system – some on purpose and some not. The EOS model recommends doing one-on-ones at least every other week. I would say as the visionary or the leader of the company, with my integrator, who's April and my number two, she and I meet every week and we have a one-on-one cadence there. Then with the rest of the leadership team, I meet with them at least once a month. I do two or three one-on-ones a week, and the gaps are filled with the rest of the team. Other members of the team might have rotations with me once every 6 months, which I think is fine, but they're doing one-on-ones with their direct reports at least once every other week.  ROB: It's such a helpful tool. It's so good for empathy, for relationship, and coupled with process. When we do our one-on-ones, I have a cheat sheet. I take notes. I don't take the best notes on it, but even the simplest things of making sure you jot down the names of their family members and key milestones, those sorts of things – it's process, but it's process that, to your point, helps you love people well and maybe at a little bit better scale than just relying on your brain. JAMES: Totally. 15 minutes. Here's just a few of the questions we like to ask. One, we always start off with that personal touch: “Hey, how's your wife doing? How's your husband doing? How's your boyfriend/girlfriend? How are the things that we last talked about? I heard that you just bought a house. Congratulations. How's that going?” Then we dive quickly into “What's going well? What's not going well? What would you be doing differently if you were in my position? What information can I give you that you might be curious about in the company that you may not have regular visibility into?” This is a key one. I love when we both share, “What can I keep doing, start doing, and stop doing?” This is a really helpful framework. Keep doing is an opportunity to say “Hey, you're doing a great job. Love that you're doing X. Please keep doing that. I notice that you weren't doing Y. Can you start doing N? Also, I noticed this thing. Maybe you should stop doing that.” But the opportunity for the other person to say the same to me – what should I keep doing, start doing, stop doing? – opens it up. And honestly, if we'd had the opportunity to do that earlier on, I think we would've kept employees longer, they would've been happier, and I think we would've been able to see those frustrations or those pain points that there're bottling up internally and made decisions about those and tried to make some shifts around those sooner. It's pretty simple. I think employees just want to be heard. ROB: Absolutely. Much like killing a product offering, it's one of those things you will only realize that you started doing too late. We were talking a little bit before we started recording about taking your office virtual during COVID, so I'd imagine one-on-ones are an easy habit to keep going, but in terms of other habits and systems and things you had going in the name of the culture of the organization and connecting people, how has that changed and what are you doing differently now that you've embraced virtual? JAMES: What a great question. I wear this very proudly, so I'm going to take off the humble hat and say that I think we've been doing really well culturally as a remote agency. We've been practicing going remote once a month for the last 5 or 6 years just because we're very capable of it, and employees like going remote. We actually give all employees a day a week where they can go remote themselves. We were built to transition to remote fairly easily. We use Slack, and we have our virtual meeting rooms and things like that. But I'm very impressed by the way April and the team have risen to the challenge and stayed together culturally. We've always done a Monday morning huddle with the team, and that's continued, but we added a second meeting, a Wednesday morning check-in where we don't do any work talk. Or typically we don't do any work talk. We actually play a game together virtually. This has been really fun. We do online Pictionary, we've played Scattergories, Taboo, Bingo. We told scary stories. It's 30 minutes, 9:30 on Wednesday, and it's just a lot of fun. We make it the team's responsibility, so every team member, we rotate, they bring their game, and then they teach the game and we just play. That kind of culture has just kept us sane, I feel like, and it's kept this rhythm of “Oh, it's easy to keep this process going.” So that's been really helpful. And now, as the restrictions ease up a little bit, we're actually starting to do the opposite where we're trying to meet together more often and do things outside, have barbecues, bonfires, and have drinks together. We did a kayaking trip. Here in Rhode Island, we have the beautiful ocean. We're the Ocean State, so we have beautiful water activities we can do. So, keeping those things fresh has really helped our culture, and I feel like we've done a tremendous job at that. ROB: That's super solid. I think you are pulling towards what I'm seeing emerge also. “The new normal” is overused, but I think historically, many companies, including yours, and mine for that matter, have been default in the office. Not in the office is unique. We're probably moving more towards default remote and sometimes you're going to do something together. That's kind of what you're describing. There's a coworking space here that has an outdoor – they have like 50 picnic tables, and it feels nice to be near people without feeling uncomfortable being near people. I know that's kind of a weird, convoluted thing, but in our reality. I think you're really interestingly there. JAMES: Yeah, totally. There's just new things that we need to consider. Like since we're saving on office snacks, we just started to give our employees a stipend so that they can buy their own snacks or buy remote work setup that they can do. We're shifting some of the dollars that we did spend or we have been spending over to areas that make more sense. Those get-togethers or working together, sometimes we have a Zoom room open where we just aren't talking to each other; we just have it open and see each other's faces while we're working, which is really nice. Or getting together one on one to work together for half a day and just work next to each other. Not for any particular reason or particular meeting, but just to be in the same space, which is I think helpful for your psyche. ROB: Awesome. James, when people want to find you and they want to find Figmints, where should they go to find you? JAMES: Figmints.com. Fig like the fruit, mints like the candy. You can reach out to me, james@figmints.com, or on our website I think we have most handles @figmints, so Twitter.com/figmints, and Facebook. But email is pretty good, website is pretty good. We're not so big you can't get in touch with us. [laughs] ROB: Excellent. James, thank you so much. Maybe someday we'll go back to conferences and hear you speak live. Until then, thank you for joining us here virtually. JAMES: Yeah, Rob. Thank you so much for inviting me. I appreciate it. ROB: Be well. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

This is the weekly free edition of Marketing BS. Every week I share one piece premium of content from earlier in the week. This week I am sharing the Wednesday Interview. You can (and should!) subscribe to get all the content. Most members expense the subscription, or get it as part of my company wide offering.What you missed this week:* Monday: Essay on Reviews and Ratings. What really matters on collecting reviews, and the math behind “review gating” (i.e., only collecting reviews from satisfied customers)* Tuesday: Weekly briefing coving everything from the 230 hearings, Kazakhstan's marketing play, Interplanetary Law as a PR tool, FICO Score inflation, DoorDash white labeling, Commuting impact, Long Lived Institutions and more…* Wednesday/Thursday: An interview with Rob Singer, CMO of Remitly (Part 1 transcribed below)Coming next week:* Monday: An essay on why polling did not predict the election as well as was expected, and what that means for how to implement (or not) market research* Tuesday: Weekly briefing coving the ballot initiatives, Facebook employee survey, money's impact on changing opinions, Spotify's price discrimination, smart TVs, Walmart robots and more…* Wednesday/Thursday: An interview with Matthew Quale, president of Bask Bank - the only bank to offer American Airlines frequent flier miles for interest (instead of dollars). Really fascinating way to leverage a loyalty program.Subscribe now so you don't miss it!Today's interview is with Rob Singer, CMO of Remitly, the leading mobile-first global remittance company and former CMO at Ancestry.com.You can listen directly through the email, read the transcript, or subscribe through any standard podcast player. Subscribers who want to get access to premium episodes will need to subscribe to the a private feed to get it in their podcast player. You only need to do this once. Simple instructions here.TranscriptEdward: My guest today is Rob Singer. Today, we cover Rob's career and path to CMO—James Madison University, Charles Schwab, StubHub, ancestry.com. Rob is now CMO of Remitly, a leading mobile-first global remittances company that has raised over half a billion dollars in funding. We are lucky to have him here today.Rob, you started your career in credit risk management and then moved into marketing through the CRM function. Your first CMO was ancestry.com. Talk to me about how you got that first CMO role.Rob: I would say, I've taken one of the most unusual paths to becoming a CMO, and that I am at least the only CMO that I've met that has never actually done a true marketing function before. As you mentioned, I grew up in the world of credit risk management. As a math major coming out of school, I moved straight into the analytics function, and then as I moved from credit risk into marketing, it was really just ancillary into marketing. I actually didn't ever report up through the true marketing department.My focus was on analytics, business intelligence, data warehousing, and information management. I then moved into the world of CRM. It was just a logical progression as to where I was going into my career. I was running that at Bank of the West, and then I was hired into ancestry.com under a very similar role as the VP of CRM.The one thing that had always been interesting in my career though is that starting with StubHub, there was always a very large gap or void in the CMO's seat. When StubHub was bought by eBay, the current CMO, Mike James, of the company left. They had opened up the role of CMO. For the remaining two years that I was there, it was never filled.Ray Elias who ran acquisition, myself who was in charge of CRM, business intelligence, and analytics—we were essentially the co-CMOs that were holding down the fort until they hired a permanent CMO. We did that. I got a lot of exposure to the marketing world by being in that place. They never hired anybody. At two years post-acquisition, I left and then moved on to Bank of the West.Interestingly, Ray became the sole CMO and they just officially anointed him that role at that point. I went to Bank of the West, and just a couple months into my tenure there, the CMO of Bank of the West left. They went on an extensive search for that. By and large, as the most senior person in the department, I was the interim CMO. I was never even given that title, but I was the one that reported up into that seat. I was the one that was responsible for essentially managing that function there.When I moved into Ancestry and the same exact situation that happened with Josh, it was just a very natural thing for me to do to just assume a de facto leadership role within the context of the marketing department. After they had searched for a while, they realized that they just wanted to turn that over to me. That is ultimately how I ended up getting my first CMO role.Edward: Why do you think that landed on your lap rather than the other function heads? Why was it the head of CRM versus the head of paid search or the head of brand that was taking on that interim CMO position?Rob: That is a great question. It was one that I was also asking at the same time when they did. Honestly—and this is the one thing that I've found throughout my entire career is that—the reality is I feel like what I'm good at is being a leader. Leadership is something that I've always felt comfortable being in a leadership role. I like accountability. It had a lot less to do with direct skills and direct experience.My philosophy has always been to hire the best people that I can find. People that have gotten far more about their craft and I will ever even dream about knowing; and providing strategy, leadership, and the vision as to where we wanted to go. I think these companies, what they saw was the person that they wanted in the seat was the person that could set the right vision, the long-term strategy for the department. Even if this person didn't have the direct hands-on experience that could just jump in and bid on paid search for the rest of it.That has been the story of my career. I have moved forward simply by being willing to step into leadership roles, being willing to be extremely uncomfortable, and really just having a lot of trust and a lot of faith in my team knowing that we are a team and together we are going to deliver on these things. I think that CEOs—as they were looking at their certain situation—that was just something that they appreciated and they felt comfortable with.Edward: How are the other peers feeling about that? Because I'm sure most people—at least at that level—think of themselves as being able to lead and manage people. And effectively you're taking on that role not because you have better marketing skills, but because you are a better leader and manager.Rob: Also a great question and probably a much harder question for me to answer. I will say that I have—by and large—maintained incredibly good relationships with the peers that I was working with at that time. I love collaborating. I love teamwork. I think that has been really a hallmark of my approach in general. That I always, always have believed that a strong team that is in sync will always be a strong collection of individuals.I love sports analogies. I've always discussed that my approach has been—if you look at the NCAA tournament—I love to build those teams that are these small schools that most people haven't heard of, but they've got five seniors that have been playing together for four straight years, and they make these deep runs into the tournament because they know exactly what their role is. They know where their teammates are going to be versus these teams that have these one-and-done phenoms that come out.Throughout my life—whether it's work, sports, or anything else—I've always had that philosophy. I love being on teams. I love playing a role in teams. I have always built really good relationships and really strong foundations with the people that I've worked with.I think the other thing too—and I do want to be clear about this, so I don't come across incorrectly—I've never asked for any of the roles that I've moved up. In fact, when Tim called me and said, “Hey, have you actually thought about putting your hat in the ring to be the CMO here?” My answer was like, “No.” I had no interest in any of those things. I've never expressed interest in those things. I've never been driven by being promoted. I've never been asked for it, never looked for it.I think that people were literally just happy that one, the role was filled internally versus bringing somebody else in. I was a known [...] to them at the time. I think everybody knew that I wasn't gunning for the job. I wasn't trying to stab them in the back. I wasn't trying to do any of those things. I feel like what it did was it gained a fairly authentic level of trust. But I also think the one advantage I have—having not done any of the functions within marketing—is that nobody lost any of their autonomy. No one's ever lost any of their control.I have always looked to my leaders to lead, to own their function, and to drive and hold them accountable to that. Ultimately, I'm sure there was disappointment at not moving up, but nothing negative came out of it for them. I think that that was a big part of the change management.Edward: How do you manage a team when you've never run those functions before? I know part of it is trust them, but I imagine that if someone says, hey, trust these developers. Go and manage these developers. I don't know enough about engineering development that I would trust myself to be able to hold their feet to the fire. How do you oversee areas where you have not had any functional experience in?Rob: I think there's a couple of vectors against that. One, I do always lean back on and rely on the things that I do know. The one thing is I'm very data-driven. I grew up as an analyst. I then moved into business intelligence and information management. I can always lean back on that. I'm very good at looking at numbers. I'm very good at assessing situations that way, and I'm very good at asking questions that the data put in front of me.Minimally, I can ask questions about what I'm seeing. If you think about it, even though I wasn't in the marketing department and doing those functions, my job was the major partner to them and providing the data and the analytics. In many ways, some of the frameworks around a strategy that we needed as a company to be successful. One, I've always been able to lean back on that.Then two, the best advice I ever got was from Tim Sullivan. He was the CEO of Ancestry. He could tell I was pretty nervous because he even asked me if I wanted the role and I said, no. He said, “Look, here's my advice. If you think of yourself as the head of HR for marketing, you're going to crush this thing. That's how you should always be thinking of yourself.” It just so resonated with me because it put into words, something I had always been in my head in my approach, but I'd never really thought about it that way.I know what I know. More importantly, I know what I don't know. I know what I'm not good at. I over-index where I hire into those areas. I spend a lot of my time building out the team and making sure that we're bringing in the right people so that I can ask them the right questions. But ultimately, at the end of the day, I'm always just awed by the people that I work with. It's hard for me to even put into words, but the people that are on my team are so good at what they do.It is just awe-inspiring for me to work with them. And because of that, it gives me the ability to lean back on what I know I do well, which is to build a team, provide a vision, aim for the stars, and really think about where can we go to make the crazy seem real. But at the same time, I can always lean back and say, okay, I think I'm seeing an issue here, but knowing that I can ask the questions and get really good answers from the team.Edward: Where do you think you developed that skill set? I don't even know if it's a skill set. That mental space of being able to go and get into the details, dive into the data, ask the questions, and still set the vision, create the leadership, and drive your people. Where did that come from?Rob: One, on the analytics side of things, part of it is just I can always go back and thank mom and dad. My dad was a math teacher and my mom was an accountant. The math gene runs deep within me. It's funny when I look at my journey through college and what I thought I wanted to do. I went in as a physics major thinking I wanted to get into physics. Then I moved into chemistry.What I realized is that, no, what I love is math. The application and all the rest of it weren't actually working for me. Going into the labs didn't work. But once I switched into being a math major, I was so happy. I was in my happy place. I'll never know if this ended up being the right decision or not.All I wanted to do was get my Ph.D. in theoretical math. But due to my financial situation—everything pressed so that I took a job right out. I said I'm just going to go work for a couple of years so I can afford to go back to grad school, then I never did. But I love math. It's always just been something that's been rooted. I feel like I got a really good education in that.But then coming out of school and immediately being able to put that to work and building predictive forecast models within credit risk management and moving that forward, I feel like I've gotten just a really good training in that. It's just the way my brain works. I was wired that way when I came out to think analytically and be able to look at data that way.The other facets of it, I also am going to put some genetics. I feel like my dad is one of those. I've watched him teach. I've watched him coach. He's a natural leader. I had a very good mentor just watching what he did. For me, it actually started when I was young and being in sports. I was a point guard in basketball. You would never know by looking at me. I stopped growing when I was in seventh grade. I was the quarterback on the football team. I was a basketball player, and then I stopped.I started to move again to the other sports that size was less of an issue because I did stop growing after that. But what I really just discovered was I loved that facet, and I think I took a lot of what I learned being in sports, being an athlete. Especially when I went to JMU and I was in college, I found a lot of outlets that enabled me to really learn about my leadership style, allowing myself to just learn my way into it.I've always sought to make myself uncomfortable. I've always found that I'm at my best when I'm nervous, when I'm harried, and when I feel like I'm drowning a little bit. I think I've just naturally found myself into those situations, and it's parlayed itself into what it's led itself into.Edward: What were the biggest failure points in your career? Where did things not go as expected?Rob: How much time do you have? I can fill the space with that. Oh, wow. I love this question by the way, and I apologize for soapboxing. If you go back and just delete all this, I totally get it. It's so funny for me—especially in corporate America—that everything is about showcasing what you do well. Everyone is like, here's what I did that was amazing. Here's what I did that helped inflect the [...] when I'm growing. It makes sense, right?. We're all trying to move up. Everyone wants to get a raise. Everyone's scared of losing their jobs. It's all about showcasing what you're good at.But the simple reality is step-function changes in companies and in people, and everything else happens when you fail—if you learn from it. You fail, you learn, and you go. We have a cultural value at Remily. Well, we have two of them: aim for the stars, and don't be afraid to fail. I love those. I actually think that the biggest part of my job and the biggest thing that I look at for companies is do we have a culture that encourages people to take major risks, knowing that if they fail, it's great. Just tell us what you learned and how are we going to do it better next time.I have quite a few failures and maybe this is just my way of reconciling it. I would say, one of the biggest ones that we made was certainly at Ancestry. This is even fairly early-ish on in my tenure as a CMO, so I was definitely not feeling very good about this one.TV was our big workhorse. That was our biggest channel on Ancestry. We're about 70% of our media span, which was a significant media span went into TV. It was just a great medium for us to get our message out. We're building category as well as really trying to inspire people to come in and do a hard hobby. That was our big channel, and we were pretty dialed in with our media mix.We knew who our target market was. We had an agency that understood who our market was. We knew what worked. We had a great attribution model, and we could easily steady as she goes with it. It was really incrementality that we were always looking for it on TV. There were small changes and tweaks that would enable things to get better. But I really wanted to see if there was a way to expand our market, become more relevant to a much broader base of people, expand our demographic.We took some chances before the upfront so that we could learn as we headed into the upfronts. For those of you that haven't bought TV upfronts or when you buy your media a year ahead of time, which locks you into your media bias in many ways. But it's the way to save some money and get yourself guaranteed impressions. Because we spent so much, we spent a lot on the upfront.We did some testing and what we saw—at a very top level—was that this is working. We went on to Comedy Central—Ancestry was not a Comedy Central advertiser—and we were seeing great spikes. We'd run this thing and we'd see spikes, but what we're seeing were spikes and traffic. But that was our early indicator that this was working. We were like, this is amazing. We have never seen such pops before.We actually had it to the upfront season and we moved some of our core channels. We moved money from our core channels that are just, hey, these look great [...] consistent. We started to move a lot of money into these new channels that were going to explode the growth of Ancestry, and they didn't. In fact, it wasn't good.We were looking at traffic. We didn't take the time. We were not rigorous enough. We didn't look at things that adapt. We didn't go into our attribution model. We just saw these early indicators that had always worked for us in the past, but we didn't think through it enough, like, hey, we made some big changes. And it didn't work. It was a lot of looky-loos, people had clearly never seen our advertising before, wanting to see what it was about a lot of mobile traffic that wasn't converting.It was not good. It was the first time that we were missing our numbers in forever. Here I was, the first person to start missing numbers at Ancestry. Unlike digital, which is in many ways, self-healing, you can go fix these problems relatively quickly. It doesn't work that way on TV. It took us 6-8 months to dig ourselves out of that hole.Now, the good news is we got really, really, really, really good at TV analytics. The best I've ever seen, and it took it to a next level at Ancestry. That was the moral of the story for me. We then went on to have the best years. The following two years were two of the best years in the history of Ancestry because not only were we able to get ourselves out of the hole, but we had learned so much from that process that we applied back, and it made us a much, much, much better marketing team.Again, I'm going to give Tim a lot of credit for this because he let us fail. He didn't panic us. He didn't fire everybody. He didn't lose it. He gave us the space to go fix it. He expected us to get it fixed. My big takeaways were it's a great way to lead. It's a good way to get people to think right. It's a good way to hold people accountable to it while at the same time, forcing that accountability into learning. That's what I'm going to carry forever, especially when you're talking to private equity firms in a process and having to explain this number.Edward: Rob, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much. We're going to wrap up now and we'll continue tomorrow with part two.Rob: Sounds great. Thank you. 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David Sonn is the Founder and President of Arc Intermedia, a HubSpot certified, digital only agency that focuses on “customer acquisition using digital strategies and digital tactics.” David ran a web development company for 13 years but found that he and his partner had become “production monkeys,” delivering a commodity and competing with offshore developers. “You never want to sell or have to build a model based on price,” he says. Ten years ago, when people started requesting Search Engine Optimization, David found his niche. Intrigued by the ability to precisely measure results, he founded Arc Intermedia -- and got out of the website building business and into the business of building businesses.  David may have started his agency “really slow and really small,” but he didn't start “really cheap.” He hired the most experienced SEO and paid search experts he could find, people who could lead practice area development. He says, “When you're a somewhat small agency that we are, every person counts.” Hiring and investing in the right people is critically important. In this interview, David provides a wide range of tips on building a strong digital business. Marketing initiatives need to start with strategy. When clients try to tell Arc Intermedia what they want the agency to do, David says it is critically important to understand “the good, the bad, and the ugly” about that business, to get to know the client well enough to discover things of which even the client may be unaware, and to know the client's goals – what the client is trying to accomplish – before building the strategy and implementing the strategically determined tactics. As many people in marketing say, content is king. Marketers need to know how to leverage that content through SEO, distribution, credibility, and across social platforms. While a variety of tactics can be used get leads, to drive people to a website, to fill out a form, to give them “stuff,” people often resist filling out forms because they don't want the sales calls that immediately follow. David recommends giving people something of value in exchange for their personal information.  The key to building customer relationships is nurturing potential clients through broad exposure on a variety of platforms and providing a variety of (non-sale) interactions. Use marketing automation to nurture clients to help close the deal. Clients often come to Arc Intermedia and request adding a particular tool, such as SEO, to their marketing mix. David reminds us that today's digital marketing requires an integrated process to succeed. SEO, social presence, publication on an industry website or blog . . . these things “loosen the soil” and build the familiarity and credibility that makes a paid search or display ad work.  Customer acquisition is what “moves the needle for the bottom line of a company.” Paid search has evolved to a high level of sophistication. Precise targeting produces a wealth of data. Advertising on social platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – should be backed by “great strategy.” Knowing when to pivot, why you need to pivot, and having the ability to pivot is critical.  David describes paid search as a “sprint,” and SEO as a “marathon.” He feels that it is important for both parties to set their expectations realistically about what's going to be accomplished when. He requires SEO contracts to be for at least 12 months – SEO takes that long to show a return. After a year, when he shows clients where they were in month zero and what has been accomplished in the year that followed, “the contracts basically renew themselves.” SEO on paid media optimized for terms and topics in high demand? He says, “It's infinite traffic if you do it correctly.” David can most easily be found on his agency's website at arcintermedia.com.   Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by David Sonn, President and Founder of Arc Intermedia based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the podcast, David. DAVID: Thank you. Hi, Rob. How are you? I appreciate you including me today. ROB: Great to have you here and have a little pre-call with you before this. Tell us about Arc Intermedia. What is this agency, and how did it get started? DAVID: Arc Intermedia is what I call a digital only agency. Why I need to make that designation is I've been around the block for a while, so I have experience in traditional advertising and that kind of thing, but with this agency, when I built this agency 10 years ago, I wanted to hyper-focus only on digital strategies and digital tactics. We basically will come to a customer that needs more customers. I don't care if you're Apple Computers or you're a two-man band working out of a garage; everybody needs more customers. So we built this agency on customer acquisition using digital tactics. ROB: Got it. How long has the business been around? DAVID: I founded this 10 years ago. Oh, by the way, we're 10 years old this year. ROB: Happy birthday. Anniversary, whatever you want to call it. DAVID: Thank you. [laughs] Yes. ROB: The digital tactics even over that time have changed a lot. What were the tactics on Day Zero when it's you and – were you by yourself? Did you have partners in the earliest stages of the firm? DAVID: I'm going to back up and tell you a little different story. I promise, promise, promise to get there. Before I had Arc Intermedia, back in 1996 I founded one of the first interactive firms in Philadelphia. When we went into business, and I had a partner at the time, we built websites. At the time, 1996, a lot of companies didn't even have websites yet. There was no roadmap whatsoever. We thought this was a fantastic idea. We thought, hmm, this internet thing has a chance to stick around. So we built a company around it without a real plan. We raised some money from friends and family and just got after it. We made a lot of mistakes, but it was all good. 13 years of success proved that out. But I did find that when I had that web development company, we basically became production monkeys. Clients began to tell us what they wanted, what colors, this, this, and this, and we just became builders, not thinkers or advisors. When you're in that space and you begin to try to build a commodity like that, you're now competing against the whole world. And oh by the way, it's really hard if you think you're going to compete against offshore solutions on price. You never want to sell or have to build a model based on price. I began to look at the business and say, hmm, is this really what I want to continue to do? Near the tail end of it, we began to get more and more requests for SEO, search engine optimization. We were building these websites, but no traffic was coming to them. Clients wanted us to do SEO. I began to get my hands involved in SEO, and then jointly, paid search – way, way, way back, the origin of that was – I don't know if you remember the GoTo Network? It was the beginnings of all of it. ROB: Oh yeah. DAVID: I got my hands involved in the GoTo Network, and I got real excited. I'm like, look, we can build out some strategies. We have some money, and we instantly can begin to drive traffic to these websites. Then I had clients calling me up and telling me that they were getting all these sales leads and things were changing, and what was going on at the website? That was a light bulb moment for me. I really didn't want to be involved in the web building business anymore. I wanted to be in the business building business. I got real excited. Being an entrepreneur, I started to get that itch again. I'm like, I built this company and it's now been 12-13 years. I think it's time for me to bust a move into something else that I want to do. This customer acquisition piece – the part that actually moves the needle for the bottom line of a company – became very exciting to me. Then I did, and now back to your original question, I began to explore some of these original tactics much further. I didn't see any companies out there specializing in it. The agencies of the land, the traditional ad agencies, still wanted to spend your money on radio and TV and that kind of stuff and things that couldn't be measured. As scary as digital is in that you can measure right down to the penny, to the click, to this, to that, that actually was really, in some weird way, extremely enticing to me. That we could see it, we could measure it, and I could stand up and find the client and say, “I succeeded” or, hopefully not, “I failed.” But for some reason that was an incredible, incredible attraction to me. I decided that it was time to dissolve the web development company, and I launched Arc Intermedia, but this time I decided to start really slow, really small on purpose. It was myself and Mike Maier, who came over with me. It was just the two of us, and we started the company. We hyper-focused on some of the basic tactics of the day. There was SEO; it was much different than it is today, but it was SEO, and there was the paid search and that piece. Then as I began to see what was working for customers, the different technologies and tactics that were evolving, I began to build the experts around it. I went out and got one of the best SEOs, Ron Sansone, in the Philadelphia area, and he began to build out our search practice. From him, I added more people with SEO experience, paid search experience. Rasheed Hendricks heads up our paid advertising department, and he's just absolutely fantastic. That piece is ever-evolving. And then, as you probably have heard from doing many of these interviews, content is king. You need to know how to leverage content. Content can be leveraged from an SEO standpoint, from a distribution standpoint, from a credibility standpoint, from a social standpoint, all of it. You and I were talking a little bit about how we're HubSpot certified. Katie Schieder on my team is in charge of content and content marketing, and she does a fantastic job with her team. There's a lot of different pieces, and I know I'm maybe sounding like I'm rambling right now, but hopefully I answered your question. ROB: One thing I hear in there is a strong recognition and appreciation for a team of experts in the different subject areas. One thread I want to pull on a little bit that's unique about your story is you mentioned in your previous business, the web development shop, that you had investors. We talk a good bit about investors, but what we most often talk about on this podcast is people who are proud and grateful to not have investors, and maybe sometimes a chip on their shoulder because they know other people who have raised money and have gone out of business. What did you learn from having investors, and what would you say to other people who think they wish they had investors? You mentioned it was friends and family, so we didn't go out and raise $100 million, but still there are entailments to that. DAVID: There is nothing – nothing – sexy about having investors. Zero. Now, I was super fortunate that we ended up raising money through friends and family. And oh by the way, that was because no bank would touch us. When we had a plan to build a web development company back in 1996, every bank says, “Oh, that's fantastic, but I need a 150% collateral that we are going to freeze for every dollar that we give you.” If I had a 150% collateral that I could do, I wouldn't be sitting at that bank looking for money. That was just silly. So obviously that never went through. But we were fortunate that we were able to do it through friends and family and a lot of people who supported us. I will tell you, there's an incredible extra weight on your shoulders because you don't want to fail them. In my mind there was no chance, ever, in any way, shape, or form, that I wasn't going to return every dollar back to the people that invested in us – and then some, of course. My success was definitely going to be their success, and I was going to make sure that happened regardless, even if it meant that I was going to pay that money back personally. I was going to get it done. When you're taking VC money, that's a different approach and you can't always do all of that. But having investors is not sexy or anything that you should really go for unless you absolutely have to. Now, when I had Arc Intermedia, the one thing that was to my benefit was that I was going to start small, and I'm also now a little bit older, a little bit wiser. I self-funded my whole thing. The beauty there is, I never had anybody standing on my shoulders. I never had anybody that I had to answer to in that regard. So my advice would be try, try, try to do it on your own or figure out a way to do it on your own or try to figure out where you can get investment from people that trust and believe and love you, and then the VC thing is separate. Last. ROB: Right on. I think I would perceive in the web world, when you talk about the '90s, you'll hear a lot about some of the sticker prices people paid for pretty simple websites by our standards. You'll hear half a million, a million, 10 million. You mention competing with offshore now and this race to the bottom. Certainly it has been cheaper and cheaper to get a pretty good website. You can pay a kid from a high school and get something pretty decent. You can pay a pro less than you would pay one person in a year for sure. You don't see that same race to the bottom in the marketing world. You can't get 10 times as much marketing for the same price as you could 5 years ago. What do you think it is that keeps it from becoming a race to the bottom where some high school kid can hop out and just crush your B2B marketing? DAVID: Because there's so much more that goes into it. The tools now are very sophisticated with paid search and all the data you can get back and the targeting you can do, if you're going to do advertising on social platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all that. But at the end of the day, there has to be some really great strategy in there, and there has to be the ability to pivot and the eye to know when to pivot or why you need to pivot. Then the other part of it is the customer. Can the customer tell you what their cost of acquisition needs to be? Or can you then prove it out? For example, Rob, if I said to you, “Hey, you give me $1,000 bucks, and for every $1,000 bucks you give me, I'm going to give you $10,000 back in business,” you would do that all day long. You would figure out how many thousands you could give me so I could give you tenfold back. To answer your question, I think that only happens if you really have the people that have the expertise and the daily eye on this stuff to really know what works. The customer acquisition piece and the journey and all the points in between, it doesn't happen by chance. It's not by luck, and it's also not subjective. You used websites as the example. We can sit here and argue that the homepage needs to be a shade of blue or maroon or what have you, and maybe we're both right. Who knows? But at the end of the day with digital marketing, either I'm driving results and giving you a positive return or I'm not. I think that's the difference. ROB: That makes sense. There's infinite rounds of competition, and there's a level of spending that's always going to meet the value. The value of what people buy online keeps on going. People are buying more stuff online, and you need smarter people to drive those tools as you go. You mentioned some key folks that you have on your team, and you had clearly built a team before with your web dev shop. How did you think about assembling your team differently as you were building your second business? DAVID: This is probably an old adage that you've heard before, but it's always hire slow, fire fast. Thank God, I've not had to fire anybody at Arc Intermedia. I've got that great of a team. That's actually one of the things that I really do hang my hat on. In 10 years, we've never had anybody leave but one person, and it was more or less just a career change in that case. We still remain friends with that young woman to this day. But hiring the right people on the front end and making an investment in the right people is critically important. What my process was – and I'm going to use the SEO one as an example because it's clean and easy – I began to see in the marketplace that SEO was critically important, but I also could see that I could build a business around it. When I wanted to go and build the SEO, I didn't want to just hire a mid-tier person or an entry-level person or something where we were going to, together, learn it on the fly. Rather, I thought the most important or better move was to make the investment in a senior level person who had been doing it and we could build off of that person and let that person build out the practice, if you will. That's my approach. When you're a somewhat small agency that we are, every person counts. We're mean and lean and there's no place to hide, and everybody has to be able to show for what they bring to the table. My entire team, basically, is built with fairly senior level people that I would say are experts in their field. It's just been a much better approach than what I've seen others do. ROB: How do you think about positioning? When you have a senior person, that SEO offering also has to be a little bit of a premium offering. SEO certainly can have one of the highest long-term ROIs, but it can also be one of the slowest marketing tactics to start to bear fruit. How do you walk a customer along expectations around the sticker price you need to show them to bring the team that you have to bear on SEO? DAVID: You actually used my word, expectations. You've got to set the expectation correctly up front. As a joke, we say SEO is the marathon, paid search is the sprint. If you begin to lay out and set those expectations, both parties can get their head around what's going to be accomplished when. Part of that is, with SEO, we will not take on a contract that's less than 12 months, and the reason being is it is completely unfair to judge us on anything less than 12 months. 3 months in, if you were to look at what we were doing, you'd say, “You guys don't know what you're doing” or “This is a complete waste of money.” And they'd be right, because there wouldn't really be the return in 3 months. Wouldn't really be the return there in 6 months. But what you've got to do is look at a plan that's been executed correctly over a 12-month period, step back and say, “This is where we were month zero. Now look where we are.” Honestly, the contracts basically renew themselves because once you can show what can be delivered with SEO – and the beauty of SEO on paid media – it's infinite traffic if you do it correctly. If you're optimizing for terms and for topics that are in high demand, you can drive a great deal of traffic. And then if you have set up your customer journey correctly on the website and begin to show those conversions and whatever it may be, whether it be ecommerce or registrations or sales leads or what have you, it kind of sells itself if you do it correctly. Now, as far as a high ticket, SEO is a very difficult industry. It's getting a bit better, but we're constantly up against the – I don't know what to really call them outside of where they begin to make promises for SEO for $200 a month. We're always fighting against that. But our price point – and you've got to remember it's all labor-based, so people need to get paid. Especially when you have senior level people that you alluded to, they've got to get paid and you've got to offset those costs. So yeah, good SEO is not cheap, but I will tell you this: look at an SEO contract for 12 months, the cost of it, and compare that to some kind of media play. Compare that to a TV or radio campaign. Or even sometimes the money we really need to move the needle in paid search just because the search terms may be very costly, and if you don't have X amount of dollars, you're spitting in the wind. You'd be foolish to think you're going to get any kind of return because you can't drive the volume to get the return. In the grand scheme of things, SEO is actually not expensive if you're comparing it correctly. ROB: Right, it just doesn't track as quickly. “I did X dollars of SEO this month and it generated this amount of results.” You have to be more patient than that. We have talked a good bit about SEO. I know that is where you started, but I know you've also been thoughtful about layering in other service offerings to the business. What have you added in, and how did you reach those decisions of starting to embrace something where a lot of times agencies will partner on offerings they're not ready to do or ready to do yet? DAVID: I often find clients will come to us, and sometimes they will have a need. The need may be that they need more sales leads or they need to sell X amount more widgets. But often they come to us with a tactic in mind. For example, “We need to do SEO.” “Why do you need to do SEO?” It's just because that's what they've been told, that's what they've heard, that's what they may not be doing. They may not be coming up in the search results, so they think that's what they need. But really what we're seeing today now in digital marketing is it's more of what we call an integrated approach. It's the SEO, it's the presence on social, it's the being published on an industry website or a blog that begins to loosen up the soil so that when we do finally hit them with a paid search ad or a display ad, they've seen us before. There's some kind of credibility that's been built up just because they've seen us in multiple places, and we've nurtured them along and we can close the deal. Many of these things now work so hand-in-hand, and again, we always want to start strategy first. Don't tell us what to do; tell us what you're trying to accomplish. Then once we understand the goals and we're all on the same page with the goals, we'll build out the strategy. Then the strategy will dictate the tactics. That then leads into, what did we think made sense to bring in-house? With SEO, the counterbalance was the paid search. We had started doing some paid search from the very beginning, but not to the level of what we're doing today and what we needed to. That was a no-brainer, to make sure we headed up that department with paid search. Paid search is nice because people are looking for your exact service. In fact, paid search is one of my favorite forms of advertising because it's people actively looking for what you have. You just need to get in front of them. Conversely, people who are a bit more passive or are not actually searching, we need to prospect. And the best way to prospect is through display advertising or social advertising and those kinds of things. Again, having that piece of the pie just made a ton of sense of another piece that we need to layer on. Now, we can talk all day long about different tactics of driving people to a website, to filling out a form, to be giving them stuff, but the place that I see people now fall short of is you've got the sales lead; now what? The customer fills out a form. One of the reasons they don't want to fill out a form is because they know immediately they're going to get a phone call from a salesperson, and that's the last thing they want. So you've got to look at it a bit differently. “Hey, fill out this form and I'm going to give you something of value.” I always say you've got to give something to get something. Maybe they fill out the form to get some kind of a free tool or a download or a piece of advice or a consultation or something like that. But if you're really, really going to do this and you think you're going to get a return on that initial investment, you'd better be able to nurture. The nurture piece comes in with this marketing automation. For example, I know I've already said it before, but we're HubSpot certified, and that platform allows us to do a lot of different things. We can do email marketing and we can manage the workflow all the way through. If they open this email and they click on this, we know that they're demonstrating X interest in something, and we can then take them down the next path of providing them the next piece of content. We can nurture and we can build that relationship without the phone call, without the salesperson getting after them. So having the marketing automation piece was something we absolutely needed to bring in because we were doing such a fantastic job with driving leads on the front end that we needed to have the nurturing piece on the back end. ROB: It seems like you not only are comprehensive in the different services you provide, but you have to be comprehensive in your understanding of the business to be able to nurture leads along. You can get a first conversation, but to be able to nurture and build trust and credibility with somebody else's customer is not something you can get from just an onboarding form for a new client. How do you get to that depth of knowledge where you're actually building trust on behalf of a business that's not yours? That's a challenge. DAVID: You're right, it really is. I'll tell you, we get down into the weeds to the nth degree of some stuff that I never thought I needed to know about, from tuberculosis testing to hospice care to minor league baseball to all kinds of stuff. If you're willing to make a commitment to a new client – and to be honest with you, we do say no. There's times that we're like, “This isn't going to be a fit for us for XYZ reasons.” But when you finally say, “I am going to commit to you,” commit means I've got to learn your business, and I've got to find the skeletons in the closet. I've got to understand the good, the bad, and the ugly. Honestly, it's a constant learning process. We often will do onboarding with a client and we'll try to learn and glean as much information as we can, and as we launch programs, we begin to understand that what they were telling us is completely wrong. And they didn't even know it. So there's that piece of it too. Also, there's times where we'll do pilot programs of things just to begin to gather data. I'd like to believe that our team is very smart, and we have a lot of experience to begin to make some great guesses. But at the end of the day, we're not always right. You've got to look at the data. You've got to really look at what's happening in a given space and then be ready to pivot and think about things completely differently than when you went into it. But it's ongoing. There's no end to it. I'm still learning about tuberculosis and all those kinds of things. [laughs] ROB: It's more and more valuable for more and more people to be marketing online. David, when you are looking at what is next for you and what's next for Arc Intermedia and marketing in general, what are you excited about? DAVID: One of the things I'm excited about – we're in a horrible global pandemic, and one little tiny, tiny good thing that's come out of this from a digital marketing standpoint is I'm now having clients who we've been talking to about this for a long time understand that the lion's share of the budget really does need to start going to digital. Digital can deliver. It can be measured, and it's the one actually bringing in the leads. Just in this past 6 months, we've had a number of clients tell me that they're going to do major shifts in their budget for 2021 more towards the digital space. Why that makes me excited is if you give me more budget, I can do more things. I can expand out that integrated approach. I can go deeper in different tactics and strategies that we maybe have been pushing for that we couldn't just straight up because of budget. We can get after more of the content marketing piece, the content distribution piece. We can begin to see how we can tie different paid tactics to some other things that we're doing on the site. We can also look at different offer types and incentives to help ring the bell. ROB: That makes sense. The margin for execution on a small budget – there's just not a lot of room for mistakes or a lot of room for experimentation. I can absolutely see where having real digital budgets is a meaningful thing. David, when people want to track you down, when they want to connect with you and with Arc Intermedia, where should they go to find you? DAVID: Of course, we have that wonderful website that we've just done some updates to. We've even got our anniversary video out on the homepage, so I would direct everybody to arcintermedia.com. A lot of people find me on LinkedIn because that's a super easy way. Occasionally some people may find me over on Twitter. But I would say website. ROB: [laughs] Sometimes we find a different version of ourselves over on Twitter. DAVID: Yeah, I think I'm pretty good on that front. [laughs] For the most part. You won't me on Facebook, I will tell you that. ROB: Got it. Just have to have a shadow account to manage some of the client relationships? [laughs] DAVID: We have a love/hate relationship. I love the data that Facebook gives us to market on behalf of our clients. I'm not super fond of participating on Facebook myself. ROB: I understand completely. Even after they ban QAnon, who knows what's next? Or if they'll actually accomplish that. Who knows? Anyhow, David, good to connect with you. Good to have you on the podcast. Congratulations on 10 years of Arc Intermedia, and really of making a living going out and killing your own food for much longer than that with the web dev shop before that. DAVID: Yes indeed. Working without a net. ROB: [laughs] Indeed. Thank you so much, David, and be well. DAVID: Rob, I really appreciate your time. Thank you. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Rachel Wilson Thibodeaux is Founder, Brand Strategist, and Professional Speaker at SWAG Strategy Solutions a boutique consultancy that helps clients design unique brands to “better position their offers” and market them at least twice as effectively as they were in the past. Clients include women entrepreneurs, as well as service providers and experts, people Rachel says want to make a big impact and income. Building blocks of what Rachel connotes as “brand curation” include:  Asking clients, “What do you most want to be known for?” Identifying the audience, even down to the one person who will most resonate with the client's offering Establishing the most effective way to connect with that individual. Rachel majored in finance and marketing at the University of Houston and spent the first 16 years of her career in financial services. In 2013, she left her “good-paying, good-benefits” six-figure job to chase her entrepreneurial marketing dream.  How does someone make that kind of transition? Rachel believes that it important to communicate to your community, the groups to which you belong, what you are doing businesswise, “even if you don't yet have a product or a service out there.” She provides a number of questions that can help build the kind of engagement which can turn into future buy-in. She says that success requires disciplined consistency in doing the hum-drum activities; e.g., making a certain number of phone calls to connect with customers. In this interview, Rachel talks about when and how to reengage humor and the importance of sensitivity to what is going on in terms of the pandemic, social unrest, the fact that it is an election year, and concerns about the economy. When posting to social media, Rachel often posts questions she thinks will “bring a smile to someone's face,” help them escape for a moment what they are going through, and increase “connection.” The most important thing? Know and respect your audience. Rachel had an Ask Me Anything Live session at virtual HubSpot Inbound 2020 where she fielded audience questions about Brand Development, Positioning, and (especially) Social Media Marketing, as well as offering guidance on posting and engagement in  the “new normal,” connecting with people, managing COVID impacts, and online responses to the pandemic and the changes it has brought.  She also addressed social listening, paying attention to the data available online, your audience feedback (comments, likes), and engagement to identify what works and what doesn't, create better campaigns, and communicate better. Rachel can be reached on LinkedIn at Rachel W. Thibodeaux, Instagram at @rachel.vswagstrategist, and on her company website at swagstrategy.com. She has a Facebook group – Brand, Sell profit – for entrepreneurs/brand-builders/experts. She offers a virtual program for strategic pivoting called “Pivot to Profit,” with a free “sample portion” (one of the five parts) available at: bit.ly/pivot2profitnow. Check it out. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Rachel Wilson Thibodeaux, Founder, Brand Strategist and Professional Speaker at SWAG Strategy Solutions. She's based in Houston, Texas. Welcome to the podcast, Rachel. RACHEL: Thank you so much, Rob. ROB: Why don't you start off by telling us about yourself and about SWAG Strategy Solutions and what gets you going and keeps you going? RACHEL: Oh boy. That can be a dangerous question when you ask a speaker to talk about themselves. But I am in the Houston area. I'm originally from North Texas, from the Dallas/Fort Worth area. College brought me to Houston. I've been here almost ever since. Not quite. I did return home for a few years after college and then came back to Houston around 2008. Even saying that is a little scary because time has really flown by. But I spent about 16 years in corporate America, working mostly in financial services. I was a double finance and marketing major at the University of Houston, so I went in the finance route. Marketing, though, was always a passion of mine. I know “passion” sometimes is an overused word, but that word comes to mind. Throughout my corporate career, I was always still focusing on and doing things on the side that were entrepreneurial and also that allowed me to feed that hunger, if you will, in terms of the whole marketing and brand aspect. I kept getting this pull, this entrepreneur pull, when I was still working in corporate America, and more so the last 2 to 3 years. So in 2013, I left my good-paying, good-benefits-having job, as I've referred to it before, because that's how my mother referred to it as she was asking me, “Are you sure you're leaving that good-paying job?” “Yeah.” [laughs] Since then it has been quite an adventure. My business, SWAG Strategy Solutions, which is a boutique consultancy, has certainly evolved over the last 7 years or so. Now we focus primarily on brand development, and as I like to say, helping clients curate a brand. I use that word more than “build” because I think with curating something, more of a design comes into place. We want to help you design a brand. We want it to be very unique. Sometimes when you build something, it's based on instructions. It's based on a model, almost like a model home. Other homes in the neighborhood tend to be modeled after that home. So; I'd like to think that I'm helping clients curate a brand as well as better position their offers and market better – at least twice as better. We work a lot with women entrepreneurs along with service providers, experts – folks really looking to make big impact and income. ROB: Doubling your effectiveness is certainly a big difference. When we are breaking down brands from the big picture into some of the pieces and parts, what are the components or building blocks of a brand you think about when you're starting to work with a client?  RACHEL: First and foremost, I usually ask prospective clients as well as clients – and this is something I've shared when speaking, in blog posts; I think it's such an important question – “What do you most want to be known for?” I emphasize the word “most” because many of us are good at more than one thing. Many of us are multifaceted, multi-passionate, multi-something. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can make things more difficult in terms of really creating a brand and niching down and honing in on what you can most be effective at. That is a key question. I think it's important to really get foundational, if you will, and look at how you're most wanting to effect or impact your audience. You also want to get clear on who that audience is because it really should not be “everyone” – although I know, especially with newer entrepreneurs, and sometimes not just new, we tend to think we can help the world. We want to change the world, and we sometimes think of that literally. “I want to help everyone.” But it's important to really zero in on who is that audience, who is that group. It helps to even get it down to thinking of one person who's going to most resonate with what I have to offer, and how do I connect with that person? ROB: That focus, I'm sure having that external perspective from you is helpful in even getting to that understanding because sometimes we don't fully know ourselves. You mentioned a little bit into your origin story, and your last 2 or 3 years in corporate America, you had this longing on the entrepreneurial side. What pushed you over the edge? It sounds like you were thinking about it, but that means you were also thinking about not doing it, and at some point you overcome that tension and you make the leap. What was that process like for you? RACHEL: I had been doing entrepreneurial things almost throughout my career. Not quite throughout, but from different ventures I was involved in. For example, I did some consulting. I helped form a real estate investment group with three of my buddies. That happened when we were in our mid-twenties. We were kind of crazy kids, or somewhat kids, exploring real estate development. The last 2 or 3 years or so, things had started to change at the company where I was and even in my role as well. At the time, I was a relationship manager – which I enjoyed. Even at the time when I left, I still enjoyed it, although I didn't feel quite the same about it. The writing was just on the wall, as it often is in these situations. There had been changes in leadership; the direction of the company and our division in particular was really going in a different direction that I didn't really like. I often tell people, I was not fired, but it was one of those situations where I felt I didn't really have a choice because of some things that happened, what transpired to make me take that leap. Frankly, I had considered leaving a few months before that. I actually left my last job in August of 2013. I seriously considered leaving in May because of another situation. It wasn't the right time. I didn't feel it was the right time. I wasn't totally sure it was the right time when I left, and I tell you, Rob, my eyes were glazed over for about two weeks. I was in a state of “Huh . . . I really did that. I left.” [laughs] I left my six-figure corporate job that at one time, certainly when I started and probably even during the first year or two, I figured I would be there long term. I wasn't convinced necessarily I'd retire there, but I figured I'd be there longer than I was. It just goes to show you how things can happen. There was certainly some fear. I say all the time, everything was certainly not perfect. It wasn't close to being perfect when I actually left. My husband has been in law enforcement most of his career. He had just gotten back into law enforcement at that time, had started a new job. His benefits had not even kicked in. We had savings, but it still wasn't an ideal time. But again, I felt it was time for me. ROB: Congratulations on that. Now if there's anything concerning in the business, you've just got one person to look at, and they're in the mirror, so that's a little bit different. We were originally looking at connecting around HubSpot's Inbound conference, which is a great conference. Happens every year. Normally, past couple of years, we record it live with speakers like yourself, so we always love connecting with HubSpot speakers. You had an Ask Me Anything Live session on brand development, positioning, and social media marketing. What kind of questions did you expect coming into that, and what were some of the themes of what you did hear from the audience? RACHEL: Going in, I figured I would get questions about brands, about branding, certainly about social media. I got more questions, though, about social media, which is kind of interesting since that was the last thing mentioned. But I think it just goes to show you social media continues to be a hot topic, especially among marketers, whether online or traditional marketers. There were several questions about social media. There were a couple of questions as well about how to navigate this “new normal” we're in, how to manage what's going on with COVID, things to do online in light of the pandemic and the changes that has brought about. So yeah, there were some questions along those lines too. ROB: How do you suggest people think about marketing in – I don't even know if there's a new normal. It seems like things just continue to change, and we keep adapting, and you wonder what you can say, what you should say, what you shouldn't say, and what to start doing and what to stop doing. How are you thinking about all this, and what do you have to tell the audience here? RACHEL: One thing certainly is I don't think it's a good idea to ignore everything happening. I've seen that with some brands and marketers. Not many. Frankly, I think most are addressing what's going on – and when I say what's going on, I mean it's more than one thing because we're dealing with a number of things in this very interesting year of 2020. You've got the pandemic, obviously. You have this social unrest going on. It's an election year. There's challenges and certainly concerns about the economy. So, there's a lot going on. I think any really great marketer – and this is part of being connected with and knowing your audience – you have to speak to that. It doesn't mean that you dwell on it all the time, but in your marketing, in your messaging, I think it makes sense to address these things. I have a big sense of humor, sometimes a quirky, sarcastic sense of humor, and I'm big on incorporating humor. I think sometimes it helps, certainly. If you can put a smile on someone's face or help them escape what they may be going through, even if it's for a few minutes, a day or so, that certainly helps. So, I think in terms of posting on social media, for example – and I'm also big on questions. I love posting questions. It could be, of course, related to business and related to brands, or it could be something, again, to put a smile on people's faces. I've asked the question before to parents, “Have you had any brown liquor before noon today? I'm just curious,” because a number of parents I know are really going through it. I think that is really important, and connecting even more. Obviously, connection has become a big thing, or bigger, I would say, over the last few years. I think consumers are wanting to connect more. They're expecting more, or have been, even before this year, expecting more from brands. I think it's really important to engage. Social media is social. I think sometimes people forget about that. They think it's a one-way conversation when it's definitely not.  ROB: Hmm, so you're saying that clear liquor before noon is okay? RACHEL: [laughs] Maybe. You might be able to get away with it, Rob. The brown, you've got to be careful. You've got to be careful about that brown liquor. ROB: Yeah. Even on a podcast. It's interesting – even where you went with that, the humor you used there, it's relatable and it acknowledges the moment without engaging in humor at someone's expense. It's kind of humor at our own expense. I was speaking a while back with someone who's involved in marketing at Buffalo Wild Wing, and they said with the pandemic, they basically cut – they engage in humor a lot, but they cut it all. They went transactional and they're killing it in ecommerce now. Their best day used to be the Super Bowl. Now every day is the Super Bowl for them for online ordering, which is fascinating. They really had to overdo and redo their ecommerce systems. But how do we figure out when it's okay to reengage humor, how to reengage humor, how to not do so in a tone-deaf way? RACHEL: I think what you said is key. You don't want to offend people – at least, I try not to offend people. Now, it's possible that could still happen, I suppose, but I don't try to offend people. Again, this is your audience, or typically you're speaking to your audience, so you want to respect your audience. You don't want to be offensive. Now, having said that, I think being bold is different from being offensive. What you believe in, what you stand on, I think there's nothing wrong with communicating that and standing your ground on what you believe. I think you let that be your guide. ROB: Definitely makes sense there. The Inbound crowd in particular can be a little bit more of a business-to-business marketing audience. Quite often, although you get a mix because it's a big, big conference. When it came to social media, what sorts of questions – where do people fall on the spectrum? Was this B2B marketing, “How do you even do this?” Were there questions about emerging channels or channel selection? What were people wondering along the lines of social media? RACHEL: I don't recall there being anything specifically about B2B. The questions had more to do with, to some degree, posting, engagement. That came up. I answered that question in terms of engagement because it was related to – I think that was all the same question, how to engage now, given the environment. I spoke to that in terms of engaging now, giving everything, going on, and connecting with people, and the humor and that kind of thing. There was also a question – and it threw me off a little because I have heard this term, but there's different versions of this term. A question came up about social listening. I have heard more so of social media listening, and then there's another version I'm not remembering right now that's similar to that, although there's a slight difference. So that question came up. Social listening is really about taking data, using the data available to you online. It's using feedback that you get from your audience, whether that's through comments, likes, you paying attention to the comments, the likes that you're getting, different parts of engagement, and using that. There's one thing, collecting that data, and then the other part is what you do with it. You certainly use that data certainly to your benefit. You can use that in helping you create better campaigns, communicate better, paying attention to when you are posting, what works and what doesn't. ROB: That all makes sense, especially within the context of the conference. I do hope that you will be back to share in person next year. I hope we can do that by September of next year, but I guess we will see. RACHEL: Yeah, that would be cool. ROB: Maybe we can meet after noon so that we can choose whichever color of liquor we prefer. [laughs] It's about creativity here. Rachel, when you reflect on your journey, it sounds like you have honed in on some focus areas for SWAG Strategy Solutions. What are some lessons you've learned since jumping off on your own and building and growing the business – lessons you might do differently if you were starting afresh today? RACHEL: Ooh. How much more time do we have, Rob? [laughs] ROB: [laughs] We have as much as you need. RACHEL: You absolutely learn a number of lessons. Or you should, I think, especially in 7 years or so. One lesson certainly that I've learned is how important it is to build or create an audience, a community if you will. I didn't realize how important that was when I first started. When I left my job, I was on social media, I was on a few platforms. At the time I was using LinkedIn somewhat a lot, Facebook – but Facebook completely socially – and Twitter. I am also somewhat – I like to think I'm recovering – somewhat of both an information and a political junkie. So, as you can imagine, I spend a lot of time on Twitter. But again, not as much for business purposes. When I started my business, I figured the skills I had before and that I had utilized in corporate America were transferable. And to a degree, they are. But it really makes a difference when you have a community. That can show up in different ways, whether it's an email list, whether it's a Facebook group, some other group. When you have people who really understand what you're doing in terms of business – and even if you don't yet have a product or a service out there, you're talking about it, you're getting them to buy in even before you put it out there – that turns into, often, your customers, your clients, and folks who can sing your praises and help you get more customers and clients. That is certainly one lesson. Also, consistency. Again, some things you think that you get. “Yeah, I know I need to be consistent.” But I really didn't. Not the way running a business really requires, being really committed to doing certain things – and certain things that are not necessarily sexy, certain things that are not what you jump out of bed in the morning wanting to do, whether it's blogging, whether it's making phone calls and making a certain number of phone calls, whether it's an actual phone call or a text. However, you're reaching out to people, connecting with people, pitching, these are things that really make a difference in a business and help you move it forward. Those, as some people refer to them, revenue-generating activities – that is what you most need to be consistent about. That's something else that I have learned more since starting my business. ROB: That's very consistent. I can see why HubSpot brought you in. Last year they mentioned this flywheel concept. It was a little bit forced, but basically it's a similar thing. They talked about talking to people and building a community and serving them well, and then it turns into business. But then business turns into service. You still have to service those customers well. It turns into word of mouth, it turns into marketing. They had this flywheel effect. I think a challenge many people have here is with consistency. Some people are very, very natural community builders. You watch them, and the moment they decide they're going to have a new business, they're building the community before you even know what the business is, and maybe before they do. For someone who it's not as natural for, how do you think about getting to consistency, getting to the right audience, if maybe you don't know who that audience even needs to be? RACHEL: I am really big on feedback. If that's something that doesn't come quite naturally to you, and certainly if you're not quite sure of what audience or what group you should be connecting to, look around at your own network, even if that's very small. That may be coworkers. That may be subordinates. That may be even friends and family. It could be someone in a Facebook group that you're in. Start asking them questions along the lines of what you want to do, what you're thinking of doing, or if you do have something that you're working on or maybe even you've completed, ask them questions about that product or that idea. And really pay attention to what they say. Also ask them and the people closest to you, like friends and family, how they see you. What is it that they feel comfortable and they feel pretty confident coming to you for? I think those basic questions, that can also be profound, can be underrated. Sometimes I think we also underrate or discount our friends and family, but those are the people closest to us. It's not to say that that's necessarily your target audience, but it's a starting point just to get that feedback. For folks who are not natural, I would say, or it doesn't come as natural to them for building a community, you have to find the way that works for you. It may not work as well for one person to do a podcast or to create a blog. It may work a lot better for them to build an email list, to put something out there of value that they can offer free and folks jump on it because they do find a lot of value in it, and they just communicate through email. It all depends on you. It's not just about what you're comfortable doing. I do think you should enjoy what you're doing, and specifically in terms of building community. But realize it absolutely may require you – probably no “may” – it will require at some point for you to step out of your comfort zone. So, make sure that you're balancing comfort rather than hate. You don't want to do anything you hate, but at the same time, don't rule out certain things because you're not comfortable with it, you're a little fearful or it doesn't come naturally, as you say. That doesn't mean necessarily that you should not be doing that. ROB: That's such a great distinction between the things that you hate versus doing the things you're uncomfortable with. That's a great point. The people that know you well are going to be able to give you good feedback because people you don't know, so often, will tell you that your idea sounds nice because they don't have the relationship to tell you the truth. RACHEL: Yeah. ROB: This is really, really good stuff, Rachel. Tell us, when we want to go out and find and connect with Rachel Wilson Thibodeaux and when we want to see more about SWAG Strategy Solutions, where should we go to connect with you? RACHEL: I hang out a lot on LinkedIn and Instagram. Those are probably my two favorite platforms. I kind of have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, but that's another conversation. You can find me there too. But you can find me on LinkedIn under my name, Rachel W. Thibodeaux. You can find me on Instagram @rachel.vswagstrategist. On Facebook, I do have a group for entrepreneurs, for brand builders, experts if you will – those looking to curate a brand and to do that better and market better. That's called Brand. Sell. Profit. It actually is also the title of my latest book, Brand. Sell. Profit. And then my website, of course. You can find the website at swagstrategy.com. And I'd like to offer your audience a gift, Rob, if I can. ROB: Please do. RACHEL: I've been talking a lot, as many people have, especially people in business, about pivoting and the importance of being able to pivot, especially in this environment. That has probably become a buzzword, so while I think it's really important to pivot, I think there is a way to pivot. I like to think it's better to pivot strategically. So I have a virtual program called Pivot 2 Profit, and I have a portion of that – I'm offering one of the five parts of that that you can check out. There's a video. It's absolutely free, and I talk about a couple of those ways to pivot in a strategic way. You can find that by going to – and this is a shortened link – bit.ly/pivot2profitnow. ROB: Fantastic. We'll work to get that into the show notes. I imagine you have some excellent points there. You pivot, keep one foot planted if you move the other one. If you move both feet at once, it's just dancing. There's some good stuff to find there. We'll get it in the show notes. Rachel, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on the talk at Inbound. I heard they had very, very large audiences for that. RACHEL: Yeah. ROB: I hope they have us back in person next year. I'd love to connect up and record live. RACHEL: Absolutely. Thank you. ROB: Have a great one, Rachel. Be well. RACHEL: You too. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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.

In 2007, after nearly a decade of experience in numbers-focused direct-response marketing, Matt Weber used a business broker to buy a small jack-of-all trades agency that provided sales training, traditional media marketing, and a small bit of web development. Over time, that agency became ROAR! Internet Marketing, where Matt is now President. The agency's forte today? Measurable actions. In this interview, Matt explains what a buyer can expect from a business broker, how to select one, broker limitations, and a broker's role in facilitating business acquisitions. He warns that it will be challenging to evaluate transactional opportunities in the next few months. But, he also expects to see a lot of merger and acquisition activity as companies adjust to the COVID-impacted business environment. Matt's general tips? Agencies will need to be more aware of costs now, “throttle back” on anticipatory hiring, , and eliminate “tool bloat” (buying multiple tools with the same functionality).  Matt is no stranger to change. In 2007, websites were little more than glorified brochures. Matt shed virtually everything of the original business, rebranded it, and focused heavily on digital marketing conversions and direct response. Early on, 85-90% of the agency's revenues came from web development. Today, 80% of his agency's revenues come from recurring digital marketing services, primarily for three verticals: elective medical (almost recession-proof), recurring-business home services (need-based), and manufacturing (which has a completely different cycle than consumer-based marketing). Matt says, when you focus your efforts on a limited number of verticals, you “leverage your success more effectively,” and follows that with the comment: “Diluted focus yields diluted results.”  Matt has created a free tool, Smylelytics.com, which he compares to a car's “check engine” light. (It won't tell you what is wrong, but it will tell you when to take a look.) Twice a month, Smylelytics evaluates a company's Google Analytics, translates the information into memorable, themed photographs, and emails the company with the (good/neutral/bad) “news.” Matt serves as a national trainer for the Grow with Google program, where he presents small- to medium-sized businesses with a one-day class that covers Google My Business, Google Analytics, and Google Data Studio tools. He also speaks at conferences, frequently on the topic of, “5 Things Your Website Is Trying to Tell You but You're Afraid to Ask.” Here, he provides a brief overview of those 5 things: Does your website, as a salesperson, feel confident in selling your business? Is it effective in turning leads into sales? Where should you focus your limited time and budget?What do the analytics show you about which efforts are paying off and which are not?  Is your landing page making a good first impression? What does your landing report say about what your first-time visitors do on their first visit? Who likes you best? Focus your efforts on communicating with those who like you the most. Are certain pages repelling your customers? Stop serving the bad pages. Mayt is available on his agency's website at: RoarontheWeb.com or on Twitter @BestWebDesignFL. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Matt Weber, President at ROAR! Internet Marketing based in Altamonte Springs, Florida just outside of Orlando. Welcome to the podcast, Matt. MATT: Thank you. Great to be here. Been looking forward to this for some time. ROB: Excellent to have you here. I've been looking forward to this as well, especially with some of the interesting nuances of your own history and background. Why don't you kick us off, though, by telling us about ROAR! Internet Marketing and what the company specializes in?  MATT: Our real specialty is conversions. We've been around since 2007, and back then we started lead tracking, lead recording, and a focus on measurable results. That came from my background in direct marketing. I did direct mail. I did nearly a decade of direct response marketing where if you couldn't measure it, you didn't do it. Back in 2007, that's not what websites were. In 2007, websites were kind of glorified brochures, and nobody was really talking about conversions and goals and tracking things. That was our entrée into the marketplace, and we were really one of the pioneers in that area. We've continued to evolve that – to the point, though, where we've gotten a little bit less into web design and more into digital marketing. When we started the agency, 85-90% of our revenue was web development, and now 80% of our revenue is recurring digital marketing services. So our forte is measurable actions. ROB: Who were some of the first sorts of clients that were really open to thinking about their website as less of a brochure and more of a destination and opportunity to actually get action? I think some people were willing to spend more money on expensive brochures for a while, but who started turning that corner to thinking more progressively about their websites? MATT: Elective medical. Cosmetic surgeons, LASIK, cosmetic dermatologists. They came into 2007 with a fairly refined understanding of how much a new patient is worth, and they had some sensitivity to cost per lead. So that's where we get our start, and that was the segment that was most receptive to our messaging, followed by home services. They were also receptive to that because they were prolific direct mailers. So, they did receive that message well, and we're still in those two verticals today. ROB: That makes sense. Certainly, a lot of elective medical can potentially be fairly large tickets, fairly decent margins, and probably also so on the home services side. Was it larger project stuff, or were you also finding things even down to emergency plumbers? MATT: More things that had a recurring value – your pest control company where it was an average lifetime value rather than a transaction value. They got it pretty quickly. Let's say you engage with a pest control company; you're going to typically stay with them for 2+ years at $70 a month or $80 a month. Those companies understand lifetime value as opposed to transaction value, so this worked well for them. ROB: That's a great line of thinking, especially to find your way into some of those good long-term customer lifetime value – not so much restaurants and that sort of thing. You started in 2007. You started at perhaps an inopportune time, much as anyone who started a business last year may feel right now amidst this coronavirus crisis/shift/recession, whatever we wish to call it. How did those next couple of years going through that financial crisis with the business change your thinking, and how is it shaping how you think about the virus era and post-virus era that we are in and heading into? MATT: I want to answer the second part of that question first because we have always run our business imagining that we were always in the worst of times – because we were, in 2007-2008 and early 2009. We were in times where we were watching this deposit so that we could make this payment. We were running checks to the bank and then saying, “Okay, now we can make this payment.” Everything was almost on a minute by minute basis. We never forgot that. I think it's a lot like people listening who might have grandparents or great-grandparents from the Depression era and how that affected their spending all the way up until their late life. That happened to us and a lot of businesses, so we always managed the company as if times weren't great. That's helped now. We're in a stronger financial position, we're a financially strong company, and a lot of that is the attitudes that 2007 and 2008 brought with us. ROB: How much of that comes naturally for you? I think any entrepreneur, and especially in the marketing and agency world, one of the first questions you're asked when you meet anybody is “How many people do you have?” It's this tempting ego number to hire a little bit ahead of need. Probably throttling back on that along the way, was that a natural thing for you? Or was it an acquired discipline? MATT: It's an acquired discipline. You brought up a great one: labor. I think a lot of agencies do hire before the need. Another one is tools. I run into a lot of agency owners that have six or seven or eight different tools that duplicate functionality. These tools reshape themselves, they come out with something new, so the agency buys a subscription to this one without canceling the subscription to that one, and all of a sudden they've got what I call “tool bloat.” They've got subscriptions to a bunch of different things they didn't even know they were subscribing to. That happens as well. Being mindful of that I think is a result of the 2007, 2008, and 2009 experience, where we track everything we spend on a recurring basis, what we've committed to, and we're very cautious about our labor expenses. ROB: How do you manage those labor expenses when you do start to get close to the margin? I think we've all had that experience where we have a little bit more work than we can do or maybe a lot more work than we have capacity to do. How do you think through some of those inflection points? MATT: We've got quite a few spreadsheets and calculations that we do behind the scenes, and there's a premise behind it, and that is: we don't want to be that agency that hires up, loses an account, and lays off. We mathematically figure out not only what the point is when we need to hire somebody, but what's above that so that if we lost anything, we don't want to lay off. I'm happy to say that since 2007, we have never laid off a single employee because we've lost an account. We've eliminated a position because the scope of work changed, but we've never eliminated a position because we've lost a client. Now, when we go to hire people, yes, people are looking for money, absolutely. But at some level, they're looking for stability. A little bit lesser so today than maybe 6 years ago, but we get to tell those people, “This is our philosophy. We don't want to hire up and lay down. That's not who we are. We want to build a team, a coherent team, and we want to build for retention.” We've been very fortunate in that. We've got folks that have been with us for 10 years, 8 years, 7 years, and it's because of that philosophy. They know underneath it all, we're trying to build something progressively stable. ROB: That's insightful. One thing that goes along with that dynamic you discuss of losing an account and laying people off is also revenue concentration. Some agencies can be anywhere between let's say 30% and 70% all-in with one client. How do you think about revenue concentration? Is it something you try and manage, or is it something you just deal with and manage around? MATT: We definitely try to manage to it. In fact, we not only manage revenue concentration within a client, but we try to manage revenue concentration within a vertical. Our three verticals are elective medical, home services, and manufacturing. Those were chosen because elective medical is almost recession-proof. In fact, a couple of our cosmetic surgeon clients had some of their best years in 2007 and 2008, surprisingly. Home services are need-based, so it's hard for a consumer to give up let's say their pest control company, as an example. Then manufacturing has a completely different cycle than some of the consumer-based marketing that we do. So, we not only look at revenue concentration per client, we look at it per vertical. We don't want to be heavily invested into any one of those three verticals. ROB: Really interesting, and makes a ton of sense. Matt, how did you get into this business in the first place? What led you to move from whatever you were doing before to starting ROAR? MATT: I was working for the broadcast industry. That's where I grew up. I spent 15+ years in the broadcast industry. Then I worked for an exciting and fast-paced direct response marketing company, and I was in a job that was very challenging. A lot of travel, a lot of 65+-hour weeks. My wife at the time also was in a very challenging position, and our daughter was about two years from graduating high school. We looked around and said, “What does life look like after our daughter leaves the house?” We came to the conclusion that if you are going to kill yourself for somebody, why not kill yourself for yourself? So, we went on this process of buying a business. Interestingly enough, we ran into a business that at the time – and this is early 2007 – was a high-end luxury home theater business. I was going through the financials and going through the business, and it was owned by a gentleman who was an extremely smart engineer, and he had a great business from a technology standpoint, from an execution standpoint – but he was a horrible marketer. I thought, “Ah, this is for me because that's my strength. I'm a great marketer.” I was just about to put pen on a contract to buy that business, and our business broker called and said, “Hey, there's another thing out there. Why don't you take a look at it? It's an advertising business.” Of course, business brokers call everything an advertising business. So we went and looked at it, and it was a guy who had started this small shop that did a little bit of everything – it did sales training, did traditional media, and it did, back in 2007, a little bit of web development. We looked at 2007 and we said the future is digital, the future is web, the future is not traditional, and the future certainly wasn't sales training to us. So, we bought that company in early 2007 and began to morph it. We got rid of its traditional market offerings, got rid of the sales training, rebranded it, and got heavily invested into conversions and the direct response portion of digital marketing. And that's how we got into it. ROB: I think a lot of people may not be familiar with working with a business broker. Is that something you had done before? Is that something you would do again? Maybe in this season there's other businesses that would be worth acquiring? MATT: I think so. You're right, I think we're about to enter an interesting time for merger activity and acquisition activity. I do think a business broker is a time saver. It doesn't give you a pass on doing your own homework because business brokers can never be an expert in your line of work. In the acquisition opportunities that we've evaluated since then, that is very apparent. They don't know the metrics to ask and they don't know how to peel back the onions of the financials to look for what really is a healthy agency. But they do save time. In fact, a lot of agencies that might be for sale – how do you find out about them? It's not like you can drive by and they're going to put a “for sale” sign on the outside of the building. The only way you might be able to find out about them is if they're represented by a business broker. So, I do think if you're looking to acquire something in the coming months and years, definitely find a business broker that you can trust and build a rapport with. I think it's a little bit like buying and selling a home. You have to have a rapport with your real estate agent, and that real estate agent needs to have some level of expertise. You wouldn't engage with a real estate agent who doesn't really know the neighborhood that you're buying in, and you might not do the same thing with the business broker. Don't engage somebody who doesn't have at least some high level awareness of the type of business that you're looking at. But they are not going to be the expert, and you're going to need to bring a fair amount of analytical power to the evaluation of any potential transaction. ROB: That's a very timely insight, I think. For someone who hasn't worked with a business broker before, I think a lot of times when you generally talk about acquiring or selling an agency, quite often they're revenue and retention financed. How does that dynamic work with a business broker? Is it similar, where there's an earn-out and payback period? Or is it a little bit more of a buyout and transaction since there is a middleman in there who isn't involved at all in retaining clients the way you might be doing if you were acquiring an agency more directly? MATT: Yeah, brokers aren't really keen on the whole earn-out scenario. [laughs] But they're going to attach a value to the transaction regardless of how that transaction is funded, ultimately. So, the broker is going to seek its commission based on what that topline value is, and it's going to be paid at the beginning portion of that transaction. If the transaction takes years to complete, the broker will get his money upfront. ROB: So, the rest of the transaction, are you then able to still revenue finance it and set those terms directly with the owner? MATT: Yeah, and that's part of the negotiation. I think we're going to see changes in that upcoming. I think that we're going to see some vulnerabilities for shops that are heavily invested in these segments that we just talked about. If you're running a digital agency and 80% of your revenue is coming from restaurants right now, I sympathize with you. You're in a tough spot. If 80% of your revenue is coming from travel and tourism, I empathize with you. You're in a tough spot. So, what is that owner going to do? Maybe that's an agency where that owner says, “You know what? Maybe it's time for me to look at other things.” You have to then bring in the power of where that revenue came from, what it could be, and could you potentially help diversify that revenue? It's going to be a challenging time in the next few months to evaluate transactional opportunities. ROB: Going back to the start of the business for you – you talked about how you've navigated a previous financial crisis, but I think another thing you've navigated is in 2007, as you mentioned, websites were essentially glorified brochures, and social media was in an infancy if at all. LinkedIn I think was around, and Facebook I think was around for college kids. As additional marketing channels have come online and become viable, how have you navigated the process of when this is relevant to someone in manufacturing, when it's relevant to someone in elective medical, or when it's time to sit on it and tell them to take a back burner and maybe it's not time to put their business on TikTok? MATT: Great question, and this is where analytics comes in. This is why it's such an exciting time to be a small or medium sized business owner. If you think about where it was to be a business owner in the early 2000s – and way before that – the data was in the hands of agencies, and the data was in the hands of media outlets. You really couldn't answer that question that you just asked with clarity. But now the data is in the business owner's hands. The paradigm has changed. It's not a matter of speculating whether TikTok is of value or whether Facebook is of value. It's a matter of making sure you have the measurements setup in place and answering that question objectively. We have this conversation a lot. You've got a lot of companies that are way too heavily invested into social media because they thought it was cool, because it was the thing to do and everybody was writing a blog article on how you have to use Facebook 5 years ago. But then when you got into the numbers and you broke down the facts, a lot of folks weren't getting the ROI off of that investment they made into social media, and they were overly prioritizing it. So, the answer to your question is you've got to have the analytics and you've got to get the data set up, which has grown so much since 2007. Now everybody has the key to unlock the answer to that question with clarity. ROB: Very, very interesting. It makes sense, too. Data-driven decisions help here, especially when you have these transaction/conversion focused clients who know what a lead is. It's always easier to have an objective discussion around that. Now, if you rewind and if you were going to do this whole ROAR! Internet Marketing thing over again from scratch, what are some of the things you would consider doing differently if you were starting over? MATT: The biggest thing I would do differently is we were way too late to get into the game of specializing in the three verticals that we've chosen now. We at one time were proud of the fact that our portfolio contained everything from A to Z, and we would look at the world and go, “The world's our oyster! Everybody's a great prospect!” Ultimately that turned out to frustrate our salespeople. It sounded good, but it really wasn't a smart thing to do. When you focus your efforts on a limited number of verticals, all of a sudden you prospect better, and the biggest thing that you do differently is leverage your success more effectively. When you look at any particular business that knocks on your door as a prospect, you typically may not have a great story to tell them of what you've done in the past. When you narrow your focus and somebody knocks on your door in one of those verticals, you're very confident that you have a success story to share with them, and that becomes compelling. So that's absolutely the one thing that I would do differently faster. I would focus faster. ROB: There's so many interesting levels of discipline in here, because I think some people get into the entrepreneurial world and they think about the excitement, they think about the risk-taking, and I think they think about that correlating highly with running a successful business. It sounds to me, if we peel back the DNA here a little bit, it sounds like you have built in habits that lead to running a healthy and successful business that is good for your team, that gives margin to invest in them, and candidly – at least, a lot of people I know who have this sort of habit – it's actually better for their personal bottom line than having a bunch of employees and an infinite number of lines of business. How have you thought about the difference between a healthy business and the ego around it? MATT: I think running a business sometimes is kind of like the Olympics. For most folks, you have to specialize in a particular event and do well in it, but there are those rare individuals that can participate in the decathlon and be good at 10 events. I found out that I'm not one of those people. I need to focus on a particular specialty. So that's what we've tried to do. We've tried to focus on being a fantastic digital agency that produces results and tried to attract employees that share that singular vision. We're not thinking about this exciting app that we could do next week, and then we've got this idea for this other app that we could build the month after that. Not that we haven't tried to expand beyond our range; we have. But it's been cautious and it's been measured. I had a former boss tell me one time, and it sticks with me for a long time, that diluted focus yields diluted results, and that is something that I continue to live by. I'm very conscious of where our mental time and attention goes. If our mental time and attention gets diluted, we see it. We see it show up in the numbers that we track. Sometimes it's my role as the president to bring us back and make sure that we're focusing. ROB: Matt, outside of ROAR, you have a couple of other interesting things that you shared, and probably some other interesting new hobbies amidst this pandemic. Among some of the professional things that you do, interestingly, when people are traveling, you go on the road and speak with Google, actually. What do you share about, and how did that come to pass in the first place? MATT: Yes, I'm a national trainer for the Grow with Google program. About 10 years ago, a call came into the office and our office manager answered it and she said, “Hey Matt, Google is on the phone for you.” I said, “Sure they are.” There's all these people masquerading as Google. But I pick up the phone, and indeed, it's Google. On our website at the time, we had some videos that were called “60 Seconds to a Better Business Website.” We did this series about helping small and medium sized business owners get better results from their website, and they somehow found it. They saw I'm in the video, and they said, “Hey, we'd like you to come to Atlanta and audition for this program to be a trainer.” At the time, the program was called Get Your Business Online (GYBO). So I went to Atlanta, I auditioned, and I got the job. For the next 3 years, I traveled all over the country for them, teaching Google content. They disbanded the program, and then about 2 years ago they brought it back under a different name, GWG (Grow with Google). A little bit different content. So, they host these events all throughout the country. They're typically a day long, and in that day of presentation where they invite small and medium sized businesses, they'll do a class on Google My Business, they'll do a class on Google Analytics, they'll do a class on the Google Data Studio tools. I'm one of the people – there's 13 of us – that teaches those classes. All totaled, I've gone to 37 different states teaching for Google and teaching those classes, and it's been a blast. It's been a real blast. ROB: That's a really good credential. It's a good tip of the hat to what you know and the business you've built. Specifically, you've presented on “5 Things Your Website Is Trying to Tell You,” I believe you said that you're afraid to ask. What is our website trying to tell us that we're scared of? MATT: this is a program that I do outside the Google confines for a lot of conferences and trade events. It's called “5 Things Your Website Is Trying to Tell You but You're Afraid to Ask.” Real quickly, the five things: Number one, it's trying to tell you whether it feels confident selling your business. Ultimately, your website is just a salesperson. That's all it is. Just like you would measure the effectiveness of a salesperson – how many leads did they turn into sales? – you really need to be doing the same thing for your website. It's going to tell you whether it feels like it's doing a good job at that. The second thing it's going to do is it'll tell you how to prioritize your time if you let it. We're all investing in these different marketing activities, and if you look at your analytics, they're going to tell you which ones are paying off and which ones are not. We really need to focus. Unless you've got an unlimited budget and unlimited time, you've got to stop doing maybe your organic efforts because your paid is so much more profitable, or vice versa, stop doing your social because your organic is – but if you've got limited time and budget, you've got to focus. Your website will tell you how. The third thing that your website will tell you if you let it is, are you making a good first impression? One thing that's never changed is that you never get a second chance to make a good first impression, and that's true everywhere, and it's true with websites. If you look at your landing page report, it'll tell you what first-time visitors due when they come to your website for the first time. It may not be making a great first impression, and that could be costing you money. The fourth thing your website is trying to tell you is who likes you best. It's 2020. We don't market to everybody anymore. That's ridiculous. Let's shave that down and we'll find that women are more receptive to our message than men, or 35 to 54s are more receptive to our message than 18 to 24s, or we'll find out that people in the city are more receptive to our message than outside of the city. Whatever that pattern is – there's always a pattern – somebody likes you best. Let's spend our time and energy talking to them rather than trying to convince the whole world that they should buy our product or service. The last thing that your website is trying to tell you is some of your food is not very good. It's trying to tell you that some of your pages are just flat-out repelling people. If you imagine being a restaurant owner for a second, and every single time you put down a particular dish on a table – every time – people looked at the dish and they got up from the table and walked out of the restaurant – imagine that happened to you. Ultimately, what would you do pretty quickly? Stop serving the dish, right? If you think about websites, you know what we're all doing? We're still serving the dish. Because we do have a page that you can look at the statistics and go, oh, people look at that page and go, “Ugh!” and they get up and leave. If you look at your exit page report, you'll see what pages that's happening, and you've got to cure that because if you don't, then you're just like that restaurant owner who's continually serving that dish that's forcing people to walk out the door. So those are five things that your website is trying to tell you, but you're afraid to ask. ROB: I can definitely see why a lot of us would stick our head in the sand on that and try to do the thing we do every day rather than looking in the mirror and actually thinking about the data on our website and the page that everybody bounces from. It's straightforward, but I think we all certainly need that reminder. One other thing in your background I can't pass up and I have to ask about is Smylelytics. That's just a fun, catchy name, but what is Smylelytics that you have created? MATT: I've met a lot of small and medium sized business owners, and I talk to them about data like you and I are talking about right now, and they nod their head politely – and yet even my own clients, who I try to make data a little bit more accessible and enticing to them, they've got busier things to do, frankly. A lot of my clients are owner/operators. They're running the business, they own the business. So, I thought, how do I get this treasure trove of data that can be fundamentally business-changing to them in a way that they want to look at it? What Smylelytics does is takes your Google Analytics data and translates it into memorable photographs. So you can go to Smylelytics and you can pick a photo set – maybe you like sailing; there's a sailing set. Maybe you like dogs; there's a dog set. Maybe you're into cute babies; there's a cute baby set. You pick that, and then Smylelytics is going to send you an email twice a month, and it's basically going to turn your analytics data into red, yellow, green. Super simple. If things are going well for your amount of visitors, then you're going to get a happy baby face if you selected the baby. If things aren't going well, then you're going to get a sad baby. You don't have to think about it, you're not worried about charts, you're not worried about graphs, you're not worried about formulas, you don't have to dig your way through the weeds of Google Analytics. In a nanosecond, you can get the Smylelytics email, which comes out twice a month, and you can instantly know, “Hey, things are going well / things are going not so well.” It's kind of designed to be like the check engine light on the car. The check engine light doesn't tell you anything. It just tells you that you should go talk to somebody. That's what Smylelytics is designed to do: give you the confidence that everything's going okay, fantastic. If it's not, you know it, and whoever that trusted resource is in your life, then you ought to tell them, “Hey, we should look into this.” Maybe it's nothing. Just like that check engine light, sometimes it's something significant, sometimes it's not. But you should pay attention to the check engine light, and that's what Smylelytics does.  ROB: The way you describe it – we can't tell because we're on a podcast, but it does make me simple. Is that a paid tool? Is that a free tool? MATT: It's absolutely free. ROB: Great. We'll get that in the show notes as well. It's Smylelytics.com, is that right? MATT: Right. ROB: Excellent. Matt, when people want to track you down and want to find out more about you and ROAR! Internet Marketing, where should they go to find you? MATT: We are RoarontheWeb.com. That's where you can find ROAR! Internet Marketing. And on Twitter, I am @BestWebDesignFL. ROB: Legit. You can tell you started up in an SEO environment. That's so important to this day, amongst all the other things you've learned along the way. Thank you so much for joining us, Matt. I think you've had a lot to share that's really helpful, and we can all bring a smile to our faces and websites in this time. MATT: Great. Enjoyed talking to you. ROB: Thanks so much, Matt. MATT: Bye bye. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Jeff Jordan is President and Executive Creative Director of Rescue: The Behavior Change Agency. Rescue offers a broad range of marketing services for government agencies (public health departments, state and federal agencies) and non-profits seeking to promote positive changes in public health related behaviors.  Jeff started his agency when, as a high school student, he volunteered for his local health department's youth-targeted anti-tobacco program. He transitioned from volunteer to contractor, tweaked the anti-tobacco program to approach teens in an innovative way, and grew the agency through “a lot of referrals.” He opened his first office while he was in college and continued his focus on behavioral change for social good.  In this interview, Jeff tells us that marketing tactics that are used to sell products don't necessarily work in changing “fundamental behavior.” His team has to be expert, not just in marketing, but also in behavior change theory, psychology, and sociology . . . and know how to appeal to different subsets within targeted cohort groups. Jeff says that it can take years for a consistent message to bring measurable change, and although there is nothing equivalent to “sales data” to gauge message impact in “real time,” he has found there are some measurable interim “markers” on the path to behavior change. Tracking and measuring specific behavior-related attitudes or beliefs or pieces of knowledge over time can predict subsequent behavior changes. About 7 years ago, Rescue won a $150 million FDA youth tobacco prevention contract. These funds allowed the agency to increase in size from 50 to 150 employees in 3 years. Today, Rescue's 175 employees work out of 6 offices around the country. They serve government agencies and nonprofits in 30 states. Rescue creates programs for these organizations, but also has a library of campaigns that can be licensed. Over the years, Jeff has learned to say “no” to opportunities that are not right for his agency. Budgets that are too small can limit a campaign's success . . . . and blame for poor results will invariably fall on the agency . . . not on the tight budget. The smaller a client is, the more they tend to demand. Jeff has observed that agencies end up over-servicing smaller accounts to keep them, tie up senior personnel in servicing these smaller clients, and underservice their larger accounts. Jeff warns that really small accounts can hold an agency down. Jeff applauds the move away from condemning people who choose unhealthy behaviors and the increasingly broad awareness of underlying lifestyle situations that contribute to these behaviors. Jeff's agency attracts employees who want to do something good in their careers. He describes the agency as “responsibly rebellious,” and explains that is manifested in the way the agency encourages clients to take risks in a responsible way. Jeff can be reached on his company's website at: Rescueagency.com. The agency runs what Jeff describes as a “pretty robust YouTube Channel” at: youtube.com/rescueagency. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Jeff Jordan. He's the President and Executive Creative Director at Rescue: The Behavior Change Agency. Welcome to the podcast, Jeff. JEFF: Thanks so much, Rob. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Why don't you kick us off by telling us – it's right there in the title, a little bit – Rescue: The Behavior Change Agency. But tell us a little bit about Rescue and where you excel. JEFF: We are a public health behavior change-focused agency. What that means is that we exclusively work for campaigns that strive to change health behaviors for social good. Almost all of our clients are public health departments, state and federal agencies. When we say behavior change, we refer to actually changing a fundamental behavior that a person is performing. So rather than changing what we would describe as a brand preference of someone who drives one car, changing them to drive a different brand of car, we're looking to change that fundamental behavior of actually driving the car and converting them to ride a bicycle instead. Or in other health arenas, things like quitting smoking or eating healthier, etc. ROB: Perfect. Is that something you've actually engaged in? Encouraging people to ride a bike instead of driving a car? JEFF: Not that one. [laughs] But it's an example people tend to understand. ROB: What are some examples, digging a little deeper, of campaigns? You mentioned smoking cessation. There's probably some other interesting things you've worked on. What are some examples? JEFF: We work from simple behaviors like quitting smoking or not using drugs or not vaping and things like that to more complex behaviors like healthy eating, where we're actually promoting specific types of foods, specific changes to what they eat, as well as mental health behaviors that are even more complicated – trying to get people to reduce stigma and recognize when to seek help, when to do something about the feelings they're having, and whatnot. ROB: Very interesting. You mentioned brand preference; in some cases, I think people think of brand preference as being kind of pliable. Maybe it is just as difficult to change as some health behaviors. How do you think about, or how do your clients even think about, measuring these behaviors over the long term? I imagine the feedback loop on one of your campaigns might be rather long in some cases, given the research required to gather those results. Or maybe there's something unexpected I'm not thinking of. JEFF: You're absolutely right. Behavior change, we usually say you need a couple years at least of consistent campaigning to really see a measurable change. Unfortunately, we don't have sales data to look at to see what's happening in real time, so we rely on self-reported surveys and things like that that either our clients perform or that we help them perform to see what people are saying about the behavior. You do have some interim steps that you can measure on the path to behavior change. Whatever your underlying theory is of what you think is changing in order to change the behavior, such as specific attitudes or beliefs or pieces of knowledge about a behavior, you can measure those, and then those can be pretty predictive of a behavior change later down the line. ROB: One benefit it seems like you might have in your industry – is the behavior change industry perhaps a little bit more open about what works and what doesn't than maybe some particular vertical market, like marketing soda or something? JEFF: I think it's a double-edged sword there. It's more open in the sense that you can survive on theory for a longer period of time. In the commercial world, you can have a great theory, but if it doesn't turn around sales in a quarter, you're kind of out of luck there. In public health, you can survive on theory for a few years. So that does allow you to explore more options. But that also allows bad work to remain for a long time. We see that there's a lot of mistakes and common pitfalls that clients fall into, usually when they work with traditional agencies, that just happen over and over again because it works to sell a product, but it doesn't work to change a fundamental behavior. ROB: What about openness in terms of tactics? In some cases you have organizations like the UK's famous – I may be misattributing it, but their Nudge Unit there. You have probably published research in some cases around behavioral change. How much of your work is synthesizing and adapting those things to a community and to availability of resources versus cooking up something completely out-of-the-box and new? JEFF: There's a lot of theory and approaches already within public health behavior change. I think the UK is interesting in that they tend to have movements that occur there within behavior change. 10-15 years ago, they were really social marketing, and then it switched to Nudge, and they seem to all move a little bit more cohesively, maybe because it's a smaller country. Here in the U.S., we don't see as much cohesiveness in the approaches. The latest and greatest CDC strategy or FDA strategy, those do have a big influence on the work, but a lot of states are making decisions for themselves and applying the theories and approaches that they're comfortable with – everything from states that might still be using hardcore scare tactics like the '90s in their drug prevention work, all the way to other states that are more open-minded in realizing things like adverse childhood experiences influence how people make decisions about risk behaviors later in life. That's something that the state of California is really looking at. You have a really wide range of approaches and comfort level with those approaches. One of the things that we have to do that is kind of unique to our industry is we often have to share some of that education and some of those case studies from other states with potential clients so that they can understand, these are your options. You don't have to just do the scare tactics. That's not the only thing out there, and actually it often doesn't really work. So, we have to be the experts not just in marketing itself, but in behavior change theory, psychology, sociology, all these things that go into it. ROB: It sounds like there's a difference of tactics, a difference of outcomes. Are you seeking cessation? Are you seeking some sort of treatment? Are you just seeking a reduction of use in something that is now legal in certain places? It sounds like you are able to pool that expertise and help – in the ways that many agencies are, but you don't think about it so much in public health – bring those best practices and learnings from other clients. That makes me want to pull back and dig in. You're in a very unique area of focus. I think we've done probably 120 or so episodes right now, and we have not been in a conversation with an agency owner who is in public health and behavioral change. You mentioned you've been in the agency, at least, for 20 years. Did you start off with that area of focus? How did Rescue come to be? JEFF: We are definitely a unique agency. I actually started the agency when I was in high school. I was a volunteer for my local health department's anti-tobacco program. That was a youth program. They worked with a local agency, and after volunteering for about a year, I noticed that the kids we were reaching, the teenagers we were appealing to, were not current smokers, and they were never going to be smokers, whether we existed or not. These were good kids. They were leaders. They wanted to put this on their college application. There was really no change I could see that we were causing, even though we were successful from the sense that there was a lot of youth involvement and we were doing a lot of things. Fortunately, we had an advisor at the health department that was also pretty savvy in terms of youth culture. I like to joke that she was a break dancer when she was in high school, and she was maybe 7 years older than me. So, she was still pretty connected with what high risk youth culture might look like versus low risk youth culture. I said, “Why are we spending all our money on these youth?” She was open to allowing me to move from being a volunteer to being a contractor to start to provide some of these services that would change who the program appealed to. That continued for the next year or so in high school, and very quickly we started to innovate in a way that just wasn't happening in public health, particularly with teens. That turned into a lot of referrals. While I was in college, we grew a lot through referrals and got our first office when I was in college and things like that. So, we really grew organically, and from Day 1 have been exclusively focused on public health. ROB: What does the team look like today? What are some of the scale points and key hires to where the team of the agency is now? JEFF: Today we have about 175 employees, six offices around the country. We are the largest marketing agency in San Diego, but most San Diego businesses can't hire us. [laughs] Our work, though, is spread around the country. We don't have a specific geographic footprint. There's not one place where our clients are clustered. We work with about 30 different states and with the federal government, with the FDA, as well as Veterans Affairs and others. Some of the big scale points that have occurred – there's been a few. The biggest one was about 7 years ago, when we were about 40 or 50 people at the time and we won a contract with the FDA to do youth tobacco prevention. That contract was a $150 million contract for an agency of 50 people. We very quickly grew thanks to that contract. We brought on our CEO, Kristin Carroll (who's still with us today), at that time, who helped us grow quickly. Within a matter of 3 years, we went from about 50 people to 150 people. But in that time, we've continued to grow with other clients as well. Some other notable wins are the California Department of Health's nutrition campaign as well as some other states that have brought on larger contracts. ROB: You mentioned that many San Diego businesses probably can't work with you. Does that reflect a change in the overall deal size that you've pursued? JEFF: No, no, that's just mainly because we don't do commercial marketing. You have to be a public health oriented campaign. We work with the local county health department, we work with the local school district, and we also work with the district attorney's office. So, we work with a lot of local government agencies, but we don't have any commercial customers here or anywhere else. ROB: I see. Once many agencies scale, and especially north of 100 people, I think a lot of times they become very focused on just the FDA size deals. How do you manage that different granularity of client size within one organization and not become really fixated on hitting those homeruns? JEFF: That has definitely been a problem of scaling up. There aren't that many FDA size deals in our space, so we're forced to continue our more modest deal size – which we're very happy with. But I think the biggest challenge that has occurred is being careful not to try and apply universal lessons to the entire agency. Some things that we do for our largest client don't necessarily apply to our smallest clients. We've gotten in trouble sometimes in starting to do things for our smaller clients the way we do it for our larger clients and then going over budget and overcomplicating things when they don't need to be. And vice versa, also making sure we don't get too simple with our biggest accounts. We have to operate in this limited budget standpoint for some of our accounts and then a more open budget to explore different things with our largest accounts. That's probably the biggest thing we have to remind ourselves of and be cautious with. Really, we're operating like two different agencies within one. ROB: We are chatting here right in the middle of the spring 2020 COVID-19 epidemic. How has that changed your mix of business? Do you have clients that are working within – do you have some stay home campaigns running and that sort of thing as well? I imagine any work you've done, you've had to learn very quickly. JEFF: Surprisingly, we haven't gotten into any stay at home work, mainly because we tend to focus on long-term campaigns so that we can measure these long-term changes. It does affect COVID because a lot of the reasons that people are passing away because of COVID is because of preexisting conditions that we're trying to prevent with some of our other behaviors. So in a way, they're all connected. But when there's an emergency like this, communications get out pretty quickly and go viral pretty quickly. You don't really need the traditional long-term campaign to figure it out. The one thing that has changed the most for us is the production of new creative and new messages. Right now we're focused almost exclusively on creating animated work and infographics and things like that. Our clients still want to produce the work, still want to put new messages out there. Right now, people are consuming media more than ever before, so we're still cranking away new stuff. ROB: That's excellent. Jeff, you've been at this for a little bit; you've built the largest agency in San Diego, which is quite a thing. What are some things that you've learned along this journey that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting Rescue all over again? JEFF: There's so many lessons you learn, but you almost need to learn them in order to grow from them. I think that one of the things that we learned was not to be afraid to say no to an opportunity if that's not the right opportunity. I have to teach this lesson to every new business development person we bring on or client service person we bring on. It might feel weird to say no to a small client, but keep in mind that if they don't have enough funds for us to do a good job, they won't blame the budget; they will blame us for not doing a good job. And without fail, the smaller the client, the more they ask for. Oftentimes I've seen a lot of agencies get stuck in this world where they are over-servicing smaller accounts to keep them and underservicing their larger accounts, and it's usually top-heavy. It's usually more senior people that are servicing these smaller accounts, who are now not able to go out there and pursue bigger work. So, you really have to be careful of the really small accounts holding you down. ROB: How do you think about positioning and communicating the scope with the small accounts so that their expectations are aligned? Or have you found it's hard to manage them and you just have to pick the right ones and let someone else have the ones that are going to ask for the full buffet for 5 bucks? JEFF: We definitely let someone else have those. [laughs] It's about being transparent upfront and saying, “Look, this is what it takes to do good work, and this is why. These are all the components that need to go into something.” We have found ways of being able to accept smaller accounts with different strategies. For example, something that's completely unique to our space is we actually license campaigns. We have about four different preexisting campaigns that governments can license from us and that are reused over and over again across the country. That has allowed us to open the door to some smaller – not the smallest, but some of the smaller accounts that don't have the funds to create new campaigns, but do have enough funds to implement a licensed campaigns. That's something that could never happen in the commercial world; no one would ever want to share anything. But in our space, the government loves to share, and they actually love the reduced risk that comes with knowing this has already run somewhere else. ROB: Right. I can see you coming with some results, and they can see what the campaign looks like out in the world. They can probably even go and visit and see in some other place how this campaign looks in the wild, which you can't do, to your point, for most businesses. Maybe you could get away with it in – I don't know, if you were just serving one lawyer per market, or one plumber, or something crazy like that. But even then, they probably wouldn't want to share. JEFF: Right, exactly. There's so many things that we do here because we are focused on this space that would just not be possible if we were a generalist agency. And that's part of our argument for potential new clients: look, you can hire your local ad agency that everyone has heard of that has done all the car dealerships and local banks and things like that, or you can hire a specialist in public health. What's going to happen if you hire a specialist in public health is you're going to get all this institutional knowledge about how public health marketing is different from commercial marketing and be able to be more effective, more efficient, and have all this research and tools at your disposal. ROB: Jeff, at 175 people, you're up above that 150-person Dunbar number that many people talk about as that maximum number of people you can be in relationship with, or people might phrase it differently. How have you thought about structuring, organizing, and persisting culture as you break through dozens and then triple digits and then over 150? JEFF: We had a pretty strong culture before I knew that company culture was a thing. It comes from the culture being embedded in the work. A lot of times, folks try to put this layer of culture on their organization that doesn't really have anything to do with anything. That's where culture tends to fail or feel shallow. Where culture is really strong and real is where it manifests through the work. For example, one piece of our culture is that we describe ourselves as “responsibly rebellious.” What that means is that we want to push our clients to take risks within a responsible way. That is manifest through a lot of decisions that we make for our clients, things that we present to our clients, ways that we approach how we work with our clients. Then, when we say that's a part of our culture, it's true. It is a part of our work. It's part of what we do. When we talk about being science-based, we have a giant in-house research team that does presentations for us that is then infused in the creative and in the strategy. So, I think the best way to maintain culture is to just have an identity that is real and that you truly apply every single time you do the work. ROB: It almost seems like some of the culture would be self-selecting. Not to say that people might not view Rescue as a very attractive place to work, but it seems like an odd company to sign up for unless you have a real interest in messages of public health and in helping people and helping communities. Do you find that in the interview process? JEFF: Yeah. This millennial generation that's now dominating our workforce, we are the ideal kind of company to work for. They want to cause social change. They want to have an impact, and we can allow them to have that impact. So, definitely the people that come in are people who have an interest in doing something good with their career. And that helps. Everybody in the agency wants to have a good outcome from that campaign on a deeper level than just simply delivering for a client. ROB: That makes sense. Jeff, what's coming up for Rescue that you are excited about? Or maybe it's even something in terms of either broad messages that you're seeing trends in, or even tactically? JEFF: One thing that's pretty exciting is that we're seeing a broad awakening of the underlying lifestyle situations that lead people to choose unhealthy behaviors. The best example of this is what's happening in California with the new – California has a Surgeon General for the first time, and she is focused on infusing adverse childhood experience understanding, which is this area of health research that talks about if you had these really, really big things happen to you when you were a kid – things like divorce or a parent dying or domestic violence or mental health in the family, these heavy things – those things set you on a trajectory to take on much higher risks later in life. And if you can embed an understanding of who people are and where they come from in your work, you can be more effective with these populations. So, an understanding of that, an understanding of mental health, an understanding that people don't do risky things in isolation. They do them from a complicated equation of everything that's happened in their life. That was just not existent for the past 20 years, particularly in things like drug and alcohol prevention, where it's like “people who use drugs are just making a bad choice, they're just stupid, they're just bad and they need to be told to stop doing bad things.” [laughs] That's just not how it works. It's really nice that a lot of public health is moving away from that perspective and instead moving towards a deeper understanding of the complexity of human identity. ROB: Absolutely. It brings to mind for me – you have a responsibility; the messages you're putting out there are not messages for any particular – you probably work with governments of every political party possible. JEFF: That's right. ROB: But we live in a world where – what you're saying even hearkens back to partisan politics. How do you think about putting messages out into the world that have to transcend politics and party? JEFF: I think we all suffer, across industries, across topics, from talking to ourselves and not understanding someone who's different. One of the things I like to say that I feel makes this so different is applied empathy. It's not just that we have more empathy than someone else, but that we actually apply that empathy to how we create our messages and can articulate, when we're going to create a campaign for rural men, why that campaign has to be so different from a campaign, for example, for African American women. What is different about their life experience, their attitudes, their worldview, their values that will change the way we communicate to them – but also change what we're saying. A great example of this is that we do a ton of tobacco prevention work, still, with teenagers, and you can talk to an alternative teen in an urban area who listens to rock and things like that – you can talk to them about the evilness of the tobacco industry and all the horrible things they've done, and they will get fired up. They'll say, “I don't want to support an industry that's destroying the world and manipulating people.” So, you can motivate them not to smoke just by talking about the tobacco industry to them. But then you take a rural teen, a country teen who maybe is a younger version of the right side of our political spectrum, and you talk to them about the tobacco industry and it just doesn't even faze them. They're like, “Well, that's their right as a company and you have the right to choose what you're going to do, whether you do that behavior or not. It's all about personal responsibility.” If you don't know that difference and if you don't know that they are processing information differently and caring about different things, then you're just speaking to yourself. You're just speaking about what you care about. And that can apply to so, so many different things. Within politics, its' so interesting to see people just yell within their bubbles about things that they care about and are baffled by why no one else cares about them or why the other side doesn't care. All you have to do is just spend a little bit of time on the other side and you'll understand why they don't care about what you're talking about. ROB: It's a great thought for all of us on meeting people where they are instead of where we think they are. Jeff, when the audience wants to get in touch with you and with Rescue, where should they look for you? Where should they find you? JEFF: Yeah, definitely. Rescueagency.com is our website. There's contact information there for different folks. But also, if you're just interested in what I was talking about and learning more about public health marketing and behavior change and things like that, we have a pretty robust YouTube channel, youtube.com/rescueagency. Lots of actual workshops and videos that we've done explaining our approach and research and some examples of the work. ROB: Perfect. Jeff, thank you for joining us. Thank you for the thoughtful work that you do. We're grateful for it, and look forward to a lot more of it in the future. Congrats on all the success. JEFF: Thank you. Thanks for having me on. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Dave Nobs is the Managing Director and Chief Growth Officer at Lavidge, a highly awarded, employee-owned, full-service advertising agency with ever broadening horizons. Lavidge started in traditional advertising in 1982, then added public relations in the 90s, digital marketing in the 2000s, and multicultural marketing about 5 years ago. A couple years later, the agency broke down the walls between what had been its divisional siloes. Subject matter experts now look at the totality of a client's issues holistically. Dave notes that the agency's work focuses on projects that meet client-specific and industry-specific benchmarks, most commonly tracked through brand awareness and sales. He explains that his agency strives to make a difference for clients, employees, and the community. Lavidge added multicultural marketing to address cross-cultural messaging needs in a state with a strong Hispanic presence . . . but multicultural marketing is not just about language differences. Dave says marketers serving a specific cultural market need to be aware of the different, and almost intangible. “tones,” strategies, and tactics needed for a client to gain credibility within that community. “Truth, inspiration, and action” drive the agency's projects:  Truth “happens” when the agency and a client collaborate to research issues, develop strategy, evaluate data and analytics, and go through the give-and-take-process of participating in focus groups, interviews, consumer intercepts, and experiential observation – and synthesize all that market and client information to understand what the client is “about,” and what the client “needs.” In the inspiration phase, the agency and the client work “hand-in-hand” on the marketing story, the design and art direction, and the feel of the narrative.  The action part includes media and channel placement and assessing responses and brand impression dynamics – getting the message to the masses and hearing their reply.  As Chief Growth Officer, Dave generates new business, grows existing client business, attends to agency marketing issues, and develops strategic client innovations. In this interview, he lists assets that he attributes to Lavidge's success:  An attitude of positivity  Daily communication with clients large and small The agency's focus on the client . . . and on using “every experience, tool, trend, skill and insight at our disposal to create immediate and lasting connections between brands and human beings.” Over the years, Lavidge has evolved to concentrate on a number of core verticals: healthcare, education, retail services, homebuilders, and sports. Dave discussed re-reading a Harvard Business Review article on how to market in a recession. The article's author asserted that tough economic times were “not the time to cut advertising.” Historically, brands increasing advertising during a downturn, while their competitors cut back, “can significantly improve market share and return on investment.” Dave reminds us that “It's also important to be aware of tonality . . . to be authentic . . . to be helpful” and highlighted several companies that are taking action to do just that. Dave is available on his company's website at: https://www.lavidge.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Dave Nobs, the Managing Director at Lavidge based in Phoenix, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast, Dave. DAVE: Thank you, Rob. It's a pleasure to be here. ROB: Fantastic to have you here, Dave. Why don't you explain to us where Lavidge really excels and what you're known for? DAVE: Sure. We are a full-service advertising, digital, public relations, and multicultural agency here in Phoenix. We've been in business since '82. We were founded in the '80s as an advertising agency, added PR in the '90s, digital in the 2000s, and then multicultural marketing about 5 years ago. We are one of the largest agencies in Arizona, and certainly one of a handful of full-service agencies, meaning all of our services are in-house under one roof. ROB: Perfect. You've been around for the addition of that multicultural line of business; what were some of the things you saw in the market that pulled you in that direction and caused you to commit to that line of business? DAVE: We're always looking at innovative client solutions, and multicultural marketing, particularly Hispanic marketing here in the Southwest, is particularly important to our clients. We started with McDonald's, which was a big client of ours, and then we added multicultural marketing to a number of our other clients, particularly in healthcare, like Banner Health, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and others just because it was a need that they have. Multicultural marketing is very different than general market in tone and some strategies and tactics specifically geared to accomplish results in that area. ROB: How in particular? What are some of the ways you would say in detail that things need to be different when you're speaking to that sort of audience? DAVE: I think different strategies and tactics resonate with the Hispanic market better than others. Obviously, digital is very important. Events, immersive/experiential marketing sometimes is more important than others. But really, for us, it's more a client solution than it is anything else, particularly for our clients that has that audience, and that's important for them. ROB: I would imagine a part of that is really almost subjective in the eyes of the person being marketed to. It's this overall sense I think we all have when someone knows and understands us versus where someone's intruding into our world but doesn't really belong at the party. Is there an intangible dimension to it, do you think? DAVE: I think that's accurate. ROB: Perfect. Tell us a little bit about how the agency started, if you can get into some of that, and then how you came into the picture as well. DAVE: Sure. As I mentioned, we were founded in '82. We have a staff of just over 70 people. We have $70 million in capitalized billings, and we're employee-owned. I believe we're the only agency in Arizona that's employee-owned. We're proud of the fact that we've been voted Best Place to Work eight times and the Top Agency in Arizona six times, Best Place to Work for Women, and just recently – this month, as a matter of fact – we were named AZ Big Media's No. 1 Advertising Agency for the ninth year in a row. We're very proud of that. For us, it's really about solving client problems with strategic thinking and sharp creative views that go well beyond producing ads. Our agency mantra is “be creative, work smart, and have fun.” We live and breathe that every day. ROB: With an agency that's been there for a while, and you said it's also employee-owned, how do you think about leadership transitions within that environment? Because 33 years, you didn't start the thing but you're running a lot of the show there now, and someone will supersede you. How does that work in that sort of environment? DAVE: Good question. My role is that of a Chief Growth Officer, so my focus is generating new business, growing existing client business, agency marketing, strategic client innovations. I've been here 10 years, and I'm part of a management team of eight people. If you can believe it, I'm the newbie. The rest of the management team members have been with Lavidge for more than 10 years. The industry has changed so much. It certainly has become more project focused. What we need to do, and what we're focused on, is really – our purpose is to make a difference for our clients, our employees, and in the community. Our beliefs are really around truth, inspiration, action. What I mean by that is for our clients – and we're very collaborative; we like to involve the client at every step of the process, from the outset of the campaign to the strategies and tactics to the implementation and to measuring the results. So when I mention our purpose, making a difference, we're looking for truth. You hear a lot in our industry about finding insights, but the truth for us is really strategy, research, the conversation with our clients, including the hard conversations, looking at the data, analytics, focus groups, interviews, consumer intercepts, the experience. All that we put into place to gather these insights. The next step for us is really the inspiration, which is the motivation, the motion, the design, the art direction, the experience, the usability, the feel – to tell those stories, because for us, like most agencies, it's all about storytelling. Then it's the action, getting the results that our clients need. That's looking at media, looking at the channels, looking at loyalty, all of the brand impressions, clicks, visits, awareness, decision, movement, all generating the results our clients are looking for. ROB: It sounds like quite a range of things to think about. I appreciate what you're saying about the insights and having some of those hard conversations around the insights. In some ways, coming into digital, even coming into PR before that, in some ways the numbers that you can present to a client have changed, but the bottom line of business in terms of doing well for your clients, doing well for the business, doing well for your employees – those haven't changed. What are some of the key numbers you see that are really relevant to clients today, that help them understand and help them come to grips with maybe a hard conversation? DAVE: That's a good question. Most of our clients – and this is historically true for the industry as well – are looking at two things at the end of the day, usually: brand awareness and sales. The trick is to develop programs that are specifically geared toward our clients' benchmarks. They're different by industry and they're different for each client. I think it's particularly important these days to develop tailor-made solutions because each client is different, each challenge is different. Oftentimes, there are different projects for some of our bigger clients, and they all have different metrics. ROB: Yeah, especially when the clients are significantly larger. It can make a difference. When it comes to Lavidge, is there any particular sweet spot for you in terms of industries and client size that you maybe see a cluster of clients around that helps develop some particular excellence in that area? DAVE: Some of our core vertical experience – healthcare, certainly we have a number of healthcare clients such as Blue Cross Blue Shield, Delta Dental, SimonMed, Sonora Quest, Banner. So healthcare is certainly a specialty of ours. Another one is education. Arizona State University is one of our larger clients. It's interesting – I say Arizona State University; it's really 12 or 14 different clients because we work with their enterprise marketing hub and all the different schools and divisions, such as Barrett Honors College, Thunderbird, Cronkite, the Alumni Council, the athletics department. It's a number of different clients under that one banner. So healthcare, education. Retail services is another core area of expertise for us. We do a lot of franchise marketing in the retail space. We worked with Massage Envy for years and years and years in virtually every year of marketing and communications. Re-Bath is another significant retail service client of ours. If I had to mention three, those would be it. Healthcare, education, retail services. We also do a lot with homebuilders. We've done a lot in the sports area as well. We're a full-service general market agency, but those are some of our core areas of expertise. ROB: Very interesting. It makes sense. Some of those are very familiar, although even with the educational focus, in some ways it maybe looks more like enterprise than ever before, because what you're describing to me sounds almost – you mentioned their marketing hub – it sounds like a center of excellence that any enterprise brand might have. Do you think they have had some inspiration from that world, or some learnings from the center of excellence approach? Or maybe even the enterprises learned from them. DAVE: Yeah, I believe so. For ASU, it's really all about innovation. They're proud to be named the most innovative university. Obviously Michael Crow, their president, deserves a great deal of the credit for that. But ASU, for us, that's a great example of our collaborative approach. We really do work hand-in-hand with them. It can get messy at times, and we like that because we think involving them, again, early in the process and working with them – daily communications, weekly status calls, monthly reporting – that helps generate best results as possible on their behalf. ROB: It's really interesting because you jammed through that cadence of the daily, weekly, monthly. A lot of times when we talk to even very successful agencies, especially because I think maybe people come from a creative place, they don't mention that sort of process. How do you, with I think you said around 70 some employees, think about establishing that as a standard? How do you communicate those standards of cadence and make sure they're listened to and followed throughout the organization? Because they come from a place of wisdom. DAVE: Right, and that's really our commitment to our clients because things change so often. Daily communication is vital – not only for our big accounts, but also for some of our smaller accounts. We have, like a lot of agencies, larger agency of record relationships, and then we also have standalone public relations clients or website clients or creative services clients. It's important, no matter how big or small they are, to communicate daily. Again, that's part of our commitment. Then the weekly calls keep everybody on track – not only us, but also our clients. Particularly helpful for the larger clients. One of the things that we like to do is have one point of contact for our clients so they're not making four different calls. They're calling one person who can marshal the internal resources that are needed. One of the things we did that I think is interesting, a couple years ago – we used to have a standalone advertising division, a standalone interactive division, a public relations division, a multicultural division. We broke down those walls and those silos a couple years ago and implemented a more unified approach. It's not about whether they're an advertising client or a PR client; it's much more about what that client needs. Does it need strategy? Does it need creative? Is it a user experience website/responsive design approach that's needed? Is it content? Is it social? Is it search? It could be a number of things, and it's really about answering clients' needs and offering one-stop client solutions on their behalf. ROB: When you made that transition, did they have an account manager in each of those divisions before and you were able to streamline that to one trusted point of contact? How did that realign when you made that switch? DAVE: It was actually fairly seamless. We had, obviously, experts in each one of those areas, and we had a head of advertising and a chief creative officer and the head of our interactive division. Breaking down those silos – we still have subject matter experts, but it's about bringing them to bear on our clients' behalf rather than looking at it division by division, if that makes sense. ROB: For sure. DAVE: The reason for that is we found that it's like – what's the old saying? Trying to force a square peg into a round hole. We were slotting different clients into different divisions, and that's not always the case. They could be primarily a public relations client, but they're going to need a website or they're going to need a special event or they're going to need print or digital magazine execution, video. It's really about being more client-service-focused than anything else. ROB: Dave, what are some things you've learned as a marketing agency leader that you might do differently if you were starting again 10 years ago, or even further back in your career? DAVE: That's a very good question, Rob. I think the one thing that I would've done differently is I would have taken one of the client side opportunities that came my way over the years, because I've been in the agency business – all my career has been spent on the agency side of the business. Talk about a glutton for punishment. [laughs] But I probably would have taken one of the client side opportunities that came my way. I think I would've liked to have that experience, sitting in the client's chair and having the final say and making decisions on which campaigns run and why. In fact, one of those opportunities was in your neighborhood, with Turner Broadcasting System, interestingly enough. ROB: Oh, interesting. It's very common, I think, for people to bounce from brand side to agency side, sometimes drifting over to the vendor side. I think there is value in that empathy. I'm sure you have had plenty of people on your team that have had that experience, right? DAVE: Yeah. I think it's useful. I also teach a sports marketing class at ASU at the Cronkite School, and that question comes up a lot with students, because of course, they're thinking primarily, in sports marketing, “I want to work for a league or a team,” and they don't really understand all the other avenues of career development, whether it be in an agency like ours or a corporate sponsor or some of the other suppliers that are involved in sports marketing. But I do always recommend having both experiences, and again, I would have probably done that differently, to answer your question. ROB: You can also see quite often how many agencies, some of their longest running clients come from the relationship you're talking about. You have a relationship with the university, and the university is also a client. It's not a quid pro quo, but it's a relationship business. Someone who spends 5 years inside Coca-Cola, 5 years inside Home Depot, 5 years inside Blue Cross is going to have some very longstanding relationships to pull on. Not to say that you don't have those from being a trusted agency partner for people; it's just in some cases, it's different because you may have a former agency you can't pull that client from the same way you can if you left the brand and you're on the agency side. DAVE: That's a good point. I remember when I was general manager of Rogers & Cowan in Los Angeles, which is the big entertainment publicity firm, we had a number of different divisions, like television, film, music, product placement, consumer, etc. It was interesting; I always talked to the CEO about how there were really, really expert people, but they were what we call an inch wide and a mile deep, meaning they knew everything in the world about music, but it was hard to transfer those skills to say consumer marketing or corporate communications. I think this is true of clients as well. They get so deep into their area of expertise. I think it's the role of the agency to really bring best practices and other solutions, perhaps from other industries, to the table to get them to thinking beyond just what works in a specific market. ROB: One thing I imagine that's probably relatively new for Lavidge, and you're learning a little bit, but maybe you also have some lessons to learn, is this thing that many of us are doing perhaps not by choice right now, which is working in distributed teams, working remotely. You can't even get in a room if you want to, or at least you probably shouldn't amidst this coronavirus/COVID-19 crisis. What are some things you're learning, especially since you mentioned these cadences that you had? Are you learning some different habits that are helpful for teams that are at a distance now? DAVE: That's a great question, particularly given the challenging times that are upon us. I think one overriding principle is to be determined in what you do and not be fearful. Despite the current circumstance, there are opportunities. I'm very proud of our agency, as an example, because we quickly, a couple weeks ago, switched over to working remotely. It's been seamless. We just had an all staff meeting on Wednesday that we did remotely, and it worked remarkably well. We're doing that for our client teams. So there are some opportunities. I think in general, one of the things that I'm seeing is that brands can use this opportunity to step up and take action. There seems to be a common thread around brand purpose. You hear a lot of words like “authentic,” “useful,” “helpful,” “purposeful,” but I think it's really about leveraging brand power for good. ROB: It's a good reminder. You mentioned “helpful,” and I think if we all take a step back as marketers and as people who are communicating into the lives of other people, we probably realize – we should always be helpful, but I think it can get a little bit hard to remember that sometimes. When people are just out there spending money, everything's fine, people are looking to buy stuff, I think we can lose some of that helpfulness and get a little bit flashier. I think we maybe realize right now, this is not the time to ask for stuff from people, but it's time to be helpful to them. DAVE: Yeah, no question. Just the other day I was rereading the Harvard Business Review, an article about how to market in a recession, and maintaining marketing spending is important. It's not the time to cut advertising. It's well documented that brands that increase advertising during a recession or a situation like this when their competitors are cutting back can significantly improve market share and return on investment. But your point is well taken. It's also important to remember tonality. It's important to be authentic. It's important to be helpful. You think about some of the recent examples, like Ford and Tesla are using their factories to make ventilators, or Anheuser-Busch are using their distilleries to make hand sanitizer. Just a couple of examples of being authentic, being useful, being helpful. ROB: For sure. In some cases, with Budweiser, with Anheuser-Busch, I'd imagine that's even coming to them a little bit at the expense of their actual business. Ford may not be needing to make as many trucks, but if my social feeds are anything to be believed, Anheuser-Busch and their competitors are doing pretty well right now. A lot of people seem to be buying their product and talking about it. [laughs] DAVE: That's right. That's very true. But again, I think it's really about their brand purpose. I imagine they are doing very well, but it's also about being helpful and being purposeful in what they're doing to consumers at large. ROB: Perfect. Dave, when you're looking ahead – you mentioned in this time, you see opportunity. This is a time to seize opportunity. This is certainly not a time to be shy right now. We all feel probably some moments when we want to just chill out and check our brains out, but when we're done with that, what are some things that are coming up for Lavidge that you're excited about? DAVE: I think we're very excited about a number of areas. In this particular situation, the coronavirus/COVID-19, crisis communication is obviously important. We're staying very busy in that area, public relations experts. Two other areas that we're looking at are certainly ecommerce, given the remote learning and the remote situations that both we and our clients are facing, and then cause marketing – again, really talking about what you and I were just discussing: brand purpose, connecting a brand purpose with their business goals and making sure they stand for something that their consumers care about. So those are three areas that we're looking at. Before this came upon us, we were also looking at a number of other areas. One was the rise of experiential marketing as a strategy to engage consumers, using branded experiences, live marketing, event marketing. The whole idea is creating a memorable impact on the consumer. Obviously, two other areas that our digital team has really focused on is increased artificial intelligence, in-depth information about what consumers want and how that can be personalized and how that can personalize the buying experience based on someone's preferences. And then one of the areas that I'm really interested in personally is the whole brand solving business challenges by engaging young consumers through their passion for e-sports, gaming, as an example. Those are the areas we're looking at. ROB: It's really fascinating because a lot of times a 30-some-year-old agency would be very steeped in things they've done, but it sounds like, especially with that leadership team that you have around you, this company has been through multiple downturns and has grown and is still one of the largest in Arizona. I can hear in your description of the things you were thinking about, the things you're thinking about now, it's intentional but it's not opportunistic. It is tied to things you've been dong, but it's not overly tied to the plan that you had, and you're still trying to push really hard to find some way to do branded experiences. There may be something that emerges from that, but you're not going to do a big brand activation in a physical place right now. DAVE: Correct. I do think, to your point, it's important to be flexible. I think that's one of the reasons we've been extremely successful for almost 40 years. We do have a number of client innovations that we've developed for our clients, whether it's introducing new services such as account-based marketing or programmatic digital media, but it's also about improving traditional marketing methods. Innovation is not just about coming up with new solutions, but it's also about improving marketing and advertising, digital, public relations, social, website design and development, etc. So I think innovation comes in two areas: both coming up with new solutions as well as improving solutions that you've employed for clients in the past. ROB: Excellent. Dave, when people want to find you and they want to find Lavidge, where should they look? DAVE: We are in the Biltmore area of Phoenix, which is right on Camelback very close to the Biltmore Hotel, if you know where that's at. Certainly centrally located. Again, we're a full service agency, and I think that's important. Not that we don't have standalone clients, but usually we like to think of ourselves as a one-stop client solution. Those services include strategy. We do a lot of branding work, a lot of corporate communications work. That includes market research and customer segmentation. And then we have our creative services, so that's TV, radio, print, digital advertising. We have our own in-house video production capability, so it's not just TV ads. We're doing a number of videos, whether it's corporate videos, product videos, training videos, only videos. Then our digital expertise is really in two areas. One side of it is the website design/development, microsites, landing pages, mobile apps. The other side of that is all forms of digital marketing – search, both paid and organic, email marketing, lead gen, lead nurturing, ecommerce that I mentioned before. We even do custom loyalty programs for some of our clients. That's helped by the fact that we have our own in-house analytics department as well. Then in the public relations area, it's both traditional corporate communications and product publicity, but also content. As a number of agencies do, we're doing more and more content creation/content management, whether that be videos, blogs, infographics, whitepapers, etc., and mapping that out to make sure it syncs with traditional public relations. It's nice to have all those client solutions, if you will, under one roof and available to our clients. Now, some of our clients are using all those services; some are using the services that are most needed for them. ROB: Got it. That's excellent, Dave. It looks like they should also probably, if they're looking for you online, go to lavidge.com. Is that right? DAVE: That's correct. Lavidge.com. You'll see on our website a lot of the information that I just talked through. You had asked about some of our core areas of expertise, and in three of those areas – there's more, but certainly using healthcare as an example, we did our own marketing report. We literally conducted research to determine which messages are most resonating with consumers, which marketing tactics are more successful than others. So we did a whole research study, which is available on our website. Additionally, that's reinforced by a number of whitepapers that were written by our subject matter experts, whether it be digital, creative, strategy, to really walk through and bring to life some of those findings. All of that is available on the website, Lavidge.com. ROB: Perfect. Thank you so much, Dave. It's been great to have you on the podcast, and I'm grateful for all you shared about the journey of Lavidge and how sustained that business has been in a really admirable way. DAVE: It's my pleasure, Rob. Thank you very much for the time. I enjoyed it. ROB: Take care. Thank you. DAVE: Thank you. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Laurie Keith is Vice President of Media, Social & Emerging for the Ad Council, “where creativity and causes converge.” The Ad Council, a non-profit organization, coordinates “contributing partners” to address the most important issues in the US and globally, including social and environmental concerns and national crises.  Laurie started her career working with big media agencies, but her heart was in her volunteer work. Joining the Ad Council in 2010 allowed her to meld her love for media strategy and planning with her passion for social good. Today, she manages the organization's relationships with major media, tech, and entertainment companies, including large tech platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Apple, Amazon, Pinterest, Reddit, eBay, and Twitch.  Since its start in 1942, the Ad Council has, over the years, produced many iconic messages. Two of the earliest were: “Loose lips sink ships” (a wartime reminder that divulging sensitive information could result in American deaths) and Smokey Bear, (who always seemed to be saying, “Only YOU can prevent forest fires.”) Other iconic messages include: “Friends don't let friends drive drunk,” Crash dummies, and the current “Love has no labels.” In this interview, Laurie explains how the Ad Council's partnership model works and how it has grown:  Nonprofit and government agency “issue experts” need help to communicate critical messages to their target audiences.  U.S. creative agencies (and the Ad Council's Creators for Good team) donate time to develop creative strategy and content  The Ad Council deploys this information to media volunteers The media volunteers provide pro bono digital “real estate” – the platform Today, these large media companies often contribute on creative side as well, honing material to produce platform-optimized messages. Before the COVID-19-precipitated cancellation of the South by Southwest 2020 conference, Laurie was scheduled to moderate a panel, “Marketing in the Age of Digital Community,” exploring the power and rise of digital communities. Here, Laurie discusses the power of Reddit, a community where anonymity opens the opportunity for people to more freely talk about sensitive issues, and the potential gains (and caveats) for brands that decide to work in that space.  Laurie talks about how the Ad Council's current “Alone together” message, encourages social isolation to slow the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic while communicating that doing so brings people into a “group” taking action together. Alone. But not alone. Laurie says she has been thrilled with the level and depth of brand involvement in communicating COVID-19 information to various audiences. Laurie can be reached on Twitter @lauriekeith, on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/adcouncil, and on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-advertising-council/. The Ad Council offers an audio/video/print “finished content” COVID-19 information toolkit for people or organizations with outreach capabilities at: coronavirus.adcouncilkit.org.  Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm excited to be joined today by Laurie Keith. She's the Vice President of Media, Social & Emerging for the Ad Council based in San Francisco, California. Welcome to the podcast, Laurie. LAURIE: Thank you so much for having me. ROB: It's fantastic to have you here. I think a lot of people, the name “the Ad Council” is familiar to them, but they might not be able to tell you off the top of their heads what it is, how it operates, what the deal is. I think people don't even realize how many iconic campaigns the Ad Council is associated with. So why don't you give us the big picture of the Ad Council and what the Ad Council excels in?  LAURIE: Of course. We like to say the Ad Council is where creativity and causes converge, put simply. We are a nonprofit organization. We've been around since 1942, and we bring together unique convening partners from the creative minds in advertising, media, technology, in order to address the nation's most important causes. We convene all of the partners that we have in all of those industries to tackle the country's toughest issues. We are a national nonprofit, so we're really focused on issues at home. Of course, if there's an issue of global importance, we also will take those on as well. It's a really unique intersection in that we're able to work with the nonprofits and government agencies – they really act as the issue experts – and our “clients” – the media, technology, marketing industries – in an effort to get these critical messages out there to the audiences that we're trying to reach. And then the advertising creative industry are really tasked with developing and coming up with the creative that you see out there. As you alluded to, we have created some of the most iconic campaigns in advertising history, from “Friends don't let friends drive drunk” to Smokey Bear. Our most iconic campaign right now I think is “Love has no labels.” We really are the convener, as I said earlier, to bring everyone together so that we can make sure we're getting these critical issues out there.  ROB: For sure. And even I believe going all the way back to Rosie the Riveter, at the origin? Is that right? LAURIE: That was up for debate for quite a long time. [laughs] I don't think we can claim that one, but our very iconic campaign was “Loose lips sink ships” back in World War II era. That was I think one of our first campaigns, along with Smokey Bear. ROB: Crash Test Dummies, McGruff, do you get to claim those? LAURIE: Yep, Crash Test Dummies, McGruff the Crime Dog. Those are also our iconic campaigns. I should mention we have a long history of creating campaigns in times of national crisis. I just mentioned World War II; we had a big September 11th “I am an American” campaign. Also, any time there's a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy. And of course, our most recent efforts that we have on the ground right now to spread awareness on the slow of the spread of coronavirus, COVID-19. We're currently spinning on all cylinders getting those messages out to the public. ROB: It's quite a charge to make these memorable and meaningful campaigns. I don't think a lot of people would think about having interesting and memorable government advertisements, but yet that is a place that the Ad Council has absolutely excelled. Let's dig a little bit into your own journey. How did you come to be at the Ad Council in the role that you are in now? LAURIE: In my role as Vice President of Media, focusing on social and emerging, I really work in this unique intersection of the tech media industry, and I manage our relationships with major media, tech, and entertainment companies, using their platforms to develop largescale, innovative, social good partnerships. I oversee our partnerships with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Apple, Amazon, Pinterest, Reddit, eBay. I'm always worried like I'm missing someone. Twitch is a big one. A lot of the large tech media platforms really fall under my huge umbrella. Your question was how I got here. Prior to the Ad Council, joining 10 years ago, I worked at big media agencies. I started my career at Starcom MediaVest Group in Chicago, and then I moved to Los Angeles, where I worked for Mindshare, working on the Ford Automotive account, and then moved over to Initiative, where I worked on the Carl's Jr./Hardees QSR account. I reached a point in my career 10 years ago where – I went to school for advertising, I went through the media track; I really loved media. I've always been super interested in media as an industry. I was really enjoying the strategy that went behind building a media plan, understanding the specific targets and how they're consuming media and what we need to do creatively in order to get the message in front of them at the right time so they're going to take the call to action that we need them to take. But my client at the time, as I was going through this life shift, was a fast food restaurant. So, I was realizing I was doing such cool, innovative partnerships – I did one of the first text messaging campaigns for Carl's Jr./Hardees – but I was not really passionate about the brand that I was working on. It was like getting men 18-49 to continue to eat fast food hamburgers. I was also doing a lot of personal volunteering and helping out a lot in my local community in Los Angeles. I reached a point where I was like, how do I work in social good and help people, but also continue to work in advertising and media? Because I love how this industry is constantly changing and there's new technologies coming out all the time. So, I was trying to figure out how to bridge the two together. It was a long journey, which I won't get into on this podcast, but I ended up getting accepted to the United States Peace Corps, and I was thinking about going to – they wanted to send me to Kazakhstan to do youth and community development, and I was going to be the only Peace Corps volunteer. My parents are usually really excited about all of my adventures and ideas, but they were like, “Is that really what you want to be doing?” I was at the point in my career where if I were to leave to do something like, it would probably drastically change the course of my career. That was when I found the Ad Council. I was driving down La Cienega in LA. I was driving down a street that I normally wouldn't have been, but I was on jury duty during this time, so I was doing a lot of things and doing a lot of soul-searching, trying to figure out my next steps. I passed this billboard, and it was right after the Haiti earthquake, and it was a partnership that the Ad Council had with the Red Cross. It said “text (whatever) to donate to the Red Cross to help with the Haiti earthquake efforts.” It was just one of those lightbulb moments. I've had a couple in my life, and I'm grateful that the Ad Council really came to me in this way. It was like, “Who is the Ad Council? Maybe you should look into what they're doing. Clearly, they have this big billboard on La Cienega, and maybe they're a company that you should look into.” Everything just was clockwork after that. I reached out to the person that ended up becoming my boss and let them know that this was really my passion. My passion was social good, but my talent, so to speak, was media strategy and planning, and “I would love to come in and talk to you.” That turned into an informational interview, which turned into they were looking for someone with exactly my experience, which was local and national media strategy. Also, at the time in 2010, Ad Council was really starting to build out their partnership model. Of course, we've always worked off of a donated media model, and we run all of our PSAs through donated media, which we're so grateful to get from the industry. But at the time, the partnership model – which is “How do we develop custom content together? How do we bring in a measurement study? How do we develop an innovative product that can help get the message out there?” – that was when they were starting to think in that vein, and that was really what I wanted to be doing for them. So it was just a perfect timing situation. The job was in New York City, and I was really excited about the opportunity to live in New York City and jump-start my career there. I took the job about 4 months later and have been with them for the last 10 years and have really, like I said, grown the digital/social/emerging part of the Ad Council, which has been really the highlight of my career. ROB: That's such a fascinating transition to bring you out to the West Coast again and really to identify – it seems like a lot of the technology opportunity – is it really donated media from them as well? Just as perhaps airtime on radio and on television would be donated, these platforms may also donate part of their own real estate to these causes? LAURIE: Yeah. Every time you see an Ad Council PSA advertisement, whether it's in your Instagram feed, whether it's on a billboard on the highway, whether it's on the radio or a podcast that you're listening to, all of that is donated to the Ad Council, which I think puts us in a really unique position because we're able to get our messages out there on all these different platforms. It's really the generosity of the media community that allows us to do that. So yeah, it's a very unique model. I think it's also a testament to the relationships that we have with these media companies that when we do need to get messages out there, they're raising their hand and they want to support it. It's a really great place to be. ROB: Wow. For them to donate that time, there has to be an element of trust that what they're going to be using that airtime, that screen space for, is going to be of excellent quality. Who actually creates the campaigns and creates the content? Are they also donating their time? LAURIE: That's a great question. The creative is really twofold, and I feel like it's one of the things that keeps evolving. Traditionally . . . our traditional model is that the advertising agencies in the U.S., the creative agencies in the U.S. – we call them volunteer agencies, and they will donate their time pro bono to develop the creative strategy and come up with the actual creative idea that we then deploy and put out there in the media. I feel like more and more, especially with the accounts that I manage, the media companies themselves not only want to donate the media, but they also want to be very heavily involved in the creative process. Facebook has Facebook Creative Shop, Pinterest has their own creative team, Snapchat has their own creative team. So oftentimes media companies will also step up and say, “Listen, we want to donate X amount of media, but we also want to work with our creative team to develop a custom filter or come up with a new video social campaign that is very specific to this platform.” And we welcome those opportunities. Obviously, these media companies know what creative is going to perform best and what the best ways are to reach audiences on their platform, so we welcome that. Oftentimes we do work with media companies, and they will donate their time to develop content similar to advertising agencies. But of course, our agency model is very strong because there's so many media companies out there and so many ways to reach people through multiple media channels that it's important for us to have face-to-face campaign creative and have creative that's ready to get out there on any platform at any given time. ROB: That makes a lot of sense. I can definitely see, especially in your department, when you're dealing with these technology companies, even the way they would execute a campaign, they would probably like to execute it in a way that is very native to each platform that they're on in a way that might make the entire campaign different. LAURIE: Yeah. I should also add we have a whole department at the Ad Council called Creators for Good. Again, it's another small and mighty team, but they are working with talent. Anyone from digital talent, digital creator influencer, to celebrity talent, comedians, musicians. They also develop content for us and their voice, lending their talents to get these critical messages to the public. It's great. We have basically content coming in from all different directions in order to get the messaging out there. ROB: Perfect. I think very relevant to this, you were prepared at South by Southwest to be a part of a talk called “Marketing in the Age of Digital Community.” That's very relevant, I think, to this conversation. What was going to be in that talk? And maybe we'll get a chance to hear it if it comes out in digital format later. LAURIE: Yeah. It was a panel that I put through. I was planning to be the moderator, and it was with Will Cady, the Head of Brand Strategy at Reddit, Addie Marino, who's the Global Prototype Lead at the Creative Shop Studio I just mentioned – we work with them – over at Facebook, and then Adam Warrington, who is the Vice President of Better World, the CSR arm of Anheuser-Busch. The panel was going to be focused on the power of digital communities and also the rise in digital communities. 81% of companies, up from 67% in 2012, report that they have a community-centric approach to marketing. And then at the same time, there's been a significant increase in the number of internet users that engage in online forums, blogs, subreddits. Reddit did a study called “The Era of We,” and it went from 72% of global internet users saying that “yes, I engage in these online communities” and that has increased to 76%. It's this really interesting phenomenon that more and more people that are active internet/social media users are part of some type of community. Maybe they're part of one, maybe they're part of several. And at the same time, companies that are starting out or companies that are evolving are making sure that they have a community-centric strategy. We basically designed a panel around that, and as a brand, how do you authentically insert yourself into let's say a subreddit community that has millions of followers and people that are really passionate about an issue? You as a brand have a big stake in the ground, and how do you enter that community but then also do it in a very authentic way to where the people in that community are really receptive? That was another part of the panel, too. Reddit did a separate study that found that 82% of community users are receptive to brands participating, and they really respect when brands make an effort. So this whole idea of – this is a huge marketing opportunity for brands to come in and insert themselves into these communities, but doing it in an authentic way that really fares well for your brand. Of course, brands have a lot of guidelines on how they can show up and what they can say and do. How do you do that in a space that is very authentic? You don't want to stand out. You don't want to do anything that could make you come across as you don't know what you're talking about. So it was a really awesome panel that we had designed to talk about this, because I think a lot of brands are trying to figure out how to enter this space. ROB: An interesting panel for that. I would say perhaps Reddit is the place you can insert yourself into community and be most quickly corrected if you have done so in a way that is not right for that community. LAURIE: Yes, absolutely. I think Reddit is also super unique – and we were going to talk about this in the panel, too – just the anonymous nature of the platform. A lot of people are joining subreddits, but they don't reveal their real person, whereas on a Facebook, you are showing up as who you are. I think what makes Reddit so special is that you can be part of this community, but not have to reveal who you really are. From an Ad Council perspective, we've found this to be really powerful for campaigns like our Youth Suicide Prevention campaign, like holding a Reddit AMA and reaching out to different communities to get people to talk about the issue of mental health that maybe in a public setting, that's difficult to talk about. It's a sensitive subject. So we are able to see a lot of success in raising awareness on our campaigns when we do it in a really unique way on Reddit. ROB: Reddit is certainly, by contrast, also a place where if you do things right, the rewards are tremendously rich and robust. I think maybe relevant to that, you're at an intersection that is very interesting today amidst this COVID-19 crisis. At the Ad Council, I believe the day that we're recording this, there've been a couple of new ads that have come out. I think when you're talking about digital platforms, often younger audiences might be some of the folks who feel like they have the least to worry about with this COVID-19 crisis. How is the Ad Council working into this crisis and getting what messages out to the right places? LAURIE: It's a great question, and thank you for asking. We have a huge campaign, and it has a lot of legs. We actually announced our campaign on March 19th, and we are working in partnership with the White House, the CDC, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to develop this largescale national PSA campaign in order to get messages to the public. To your point, there are a lot of different targeting sets of people that we're trying to reach. We have a lot of different campaigns under this one COVID-19 umbrella, so to speak. We worked with NBCUniversal. They created a series of videos, TV, and digital and social graphics both in English and Spanish that are reaching the high-risk populations as well as the general public. Those ad sets talk about the steps that people can take to protect themselves. Then separately, we worked with ViacomCBS and really leveraged their portfolio of brands to develop a multiplatform PSA campaign that targets more of the Gen Z/Millennial, younger, low-risk, I think we're calling them – like the 16- to 35-year-olds that might be a carrier or might have had the coronavirus but had mild symptoms, but of course, are a carrier of the virus and can spread it quickly. That campaign is called Alone Together. We're partnering with Twitter, we're partnering with Snapchat, we're partnering with TikTok, all of the targeted media platforms, to really bring light to that campaign. It's also social and talent led, so we have a bunch of celebrity talents that have lent their voice to get the message out there, of course. They're really big on social platforms, so partnering with them was really important for the campaign. In addition to that, we also just launched new PSAs that feature the Surgeon-General, Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci, the health officials that really get the message out there on social distancing. Those are also targeted to the low-risk group of Americans. And we have more and more, it seems like every day, more and more media companies coming to the table. We're now working with The Atlantic's internal creative studio to develop customized digital creative. iHeartMedia just raised their hand and they're going to be developing audio and radio spots. Wall Street Journal, I just heard this morning, and Hearst are going to be developing custom print. And then of course, the partners that we work with out here in San Francisco, our social and emerging media partners, have all – we basically reached out and asked for their support, and every single one of them is stepping up, whether that be through donating a significant amount of media to get these already-created assets out there to developing custom content. Snapchat, their creative team is developing custom filters as well as designing some new creative that will live within their app. We're partnering with TikTok and some celebrity, talent-led creative. Reddit is doing something really unique in that we're doing a trending takeover on their front page, and we're also going to be developing custom content with them. I could talk forever on all the companies that have stepped up, but it's really been an industry-wide effort to not only develop content that reaches these very specific audiences, but donating media and each platform lending their own creative team to make sure that we're getting this message out there in the way that their audience is going to consume it best. It's been definitely the highlight of my career in these last 10 years I've worked with the Ad Council. We always take the call. We take the call when there's a national crisis and a national emergency. I never thought in a million years that we would be dealing with this in our country, but it's so amazing to work at a company like the Ad Council that is really on the frontlines on this communication and media strategy in order to get people to do what we need them to do. ROB: You must really feel like this is such an opportunity to actually – I think more tangibly. Many of your campaigns have been out there to save lives, even going back to “Loose lips sink ships” or the Crash Test Dummies. I just think there's something a lot more tangible about the immediate opportunity here. I'm amazed you can keep all of that that you just shared even in your head. LAURIE: [laughs] It's hard. ROB: How do you think about organizing moving parts and partners with so many different campaigns in flight, so many different placements in flight, different contexts? LAURIE: Thankfully, we have such an incredible team at the Ad Council. Our media team at the Ad Council is really broken out in that we have different specialties and different focus areas. Of course, our team in San Francisco, we're really focused on social and emerging media companies. Anything we're doing with any of those companies, we're really leading the charge in developing those partnerships. We have another team that's focused on audio and podcasts. We have another team that's focused more on TV and radio. We have a whole team of people that are working tirelessly with all of their partners in order to get the message out there. And then, of course, we have our talent team that's leading the talent-led efforts. We have our campaign teams that are in charge of managing the relationships with the CDC and the White House. It honestly is a whole team effort. It really makes me take a step back and go, wow. I'm happy to be where I am during this crisis. Ad Council, we have the convening partners of the industry to enable us to do this. I've got to say, it's really awesome that we have a system set up for when there is a crisis and that we can get the messages out there so quickly across the entire industry. ROB: It sounds like you're saying there's a value of specialization, but there's also a value of coordination and having the right people in the right seats and enough of them to make sure this whole thing works together. LAURIE: Totally. ROB: You have the quantity and the talent. Perfect. In these moments of crisis, one thing I saw maybe right around the time that cities were beginning to lock down – there are always loud voices on Twitter, but I saw very intelligent people who were calling out and calling on some of these – probably companies you work with, the Facebooks, the Twitters of the world, and saying, “Why aren't you helping? Why aren't you getting the word out?” What do people not realize is going on behind the scenes? Because I'm sure they're talking about it. When these companies are thinking but haven't quite acted yet, what's going on behind the scenes that people might not appreciate about these companies? LAURIE: I think that's why we at the Ad Council work directly with our PR communications team, because it is important for us to get the message out there that these companies are standing up. I know we just came out with a press release last Monday talking specifically to the tech community and what they're doing to step up. You just mentioned Facebook and Twitter; they're both doing a lot for our campaigns. Facebook is donating a significant amount of media for us to get the message out there, and Twitter is developing a custom emoji that will show up any time someone types with the hashtag “#alonetogether.” It's important for us to get the message out there that these media companies are stepping up, and we do that through a press release so that we can make these announcements and so the press can write about it. Obviously, sometimes that's not happening at the same exact time these questions are being asked, like, “Why aren't these companies stepping up?” But we were able to turn around a press release within a matter of 3 days. I think these companies, beyond what they're doing with the Ad Council, I'm reading every day – Apple just created a COVID-19 special section. Facebook has a COVID-19 special section. I know Twitter does as well. So I know beyond just what they're doing with the Ad Council and helping us get these messages to the public, I do think a lot of them are doing way more beyond that. They're actually using their product to get the message out there as well. I don't know if that helps answer your question, but we try to raise awareness on the fact that they're supporting through the press that we put out there. ROB: It's yet another example, I think, of the high-level, three-dimensional chess that you all have to play that very few people have to do. There's a PR dimension to what you're doing, but very rarely do you see such a deep level of also execution, also distribution, also partnering and coordinating, all within one organization. I think it's a tremendous amount to appreciate. LAURIE: It's a well-oiled machine. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] It sounds like it, especially to be all virtual now. Laurie, when you are looking at the future, what's coming up for the Ad Council and for the industry that you are excited about? LAURIE: It's a big question. For me personally, where I sit at the Ad Council and focusing on social and emerging media and having a pulse on the frontier of what's happening and where we should really be inserting ourselves, there's a couple things I think that I'm excited about. We're talking to some companies right now on the idea of a virtual concert where you essentially can join virtually, whether you have a VR headset or you just – you don't need a VR headset to join; you can also just join and experience it from your regular desktop or mobile phone. This idea that we can bring thousands if not millions of people together in a virtual space, share our messaging, whether that be – I think we're talking about bringing in some artists, some talent – but really getting everyone in a virtual space. Obviously it's hard in person. There's a lot of logistics that go into actually planning a physically live event. But the idea of being able to pull something off like this in a virtual space and have different messaging points, different levers that we can pull, whether that's getting a reward within the experience or maybe collecting user-generated content where people can share their own experiences as it relates to that issue – of course, there's a donation stream, if we wanted to raise money for a specific nonprofit. So I'm really excited about that potential, especially after we're living in this COVID-19 space where there is so much happening in a virtual world. I'm excited to see where Ad Council can take that, especially with our partners like Twitch and other leaders that are really driving the VR space. And then I think separately, it's this whole idea of purpose-driven marketing. I think we're going to see more and more brands really step up and make sure that they stand for something that's beyond just the product that they're selling and going beyond just their pocketbooks and giving money to causes – which of course is super important, but how can they actually develop unique experiences that happen in the communities of people that follow them and help make the world a better place through the causes that they care about? I think you're going to see more and more companies step up. Of course, that's an exciting opportunity for the Ad Council as well because we work with so many brands that sit on our board of directors, so how can we really play a part there, knowing that Ad Council invented this model of purpose-driven marketing back in 1942? How can we work together? We have a separate arm at the Ad Council that is focusing on this as a revenue stream. It's called Ad Council Edge, really helping brands and other nonprofits with their purpose-driven marketing strategy. So I'm really excited to see how that will play out over the next couple of years. ROB: It's amazing to see so much agility in a nearly 80-year-old organization. You mentioned VR there for a moment; I believe you've done some speaking and thinking on VR, but then you overlaid that onto our current moment. How much of things that you've seen and thought about in VR do you think are getting jammed into our lived experience of normal work and life right now? What's stuff we've talked about for VR that just became life all of a sudden? LAURIE: I went to F8 last year and they talked a lot about the Facebook Watch platform, and they showed an example of – it was two women. Her mother lived in Australia and she lived in Los Angeles, and they were watching Red Table Talk through their VR, like Oculus headsets, sitting in their living room, watching the show together and commenting. This whole experience of, okay, we're not physically together, but we are physically together because we are watching this and feeling this through this virtual experience. I see that, especially in where we are sitting right now with this shelter in place and people staying at home, this whole idea of watch parties and watching comet together and being able to respond in real time – just like you would if you were sitting in a living room with someone watching a show together. You might pause it and say, “Oh my gosh, what did you guys think about that?” or what have you. I see this really starting to pick up in a virtual space, being able to watch content together, experience content together. And then when we get out of this space and we eventually can get back to our normal lives and be together again in community with each other, I can see brands taking advantage of this whole – we have this online world, this online community, we're doing something together online, but then facilitating how those online connections can live out in the real world and in real life. I'm interested to see how brands will really scale that. I think we'll see more of these online-meets-real-life experiences happening. ROB: Fascinating. It will be interesting to see the before and after around this forced technology adoption. People are learning things they probably would have not learned for 5 years right now. It'll be fascinating to see what that means for the community that you are involved in and the companies you are working with. LAURIE: Absolutely, yeah. It's a huge opportunity for virtual companies and really digital companies that are thinking in this way to really take advantage of this time and figure out how they can evolve their products to fit in this space. ROB: That's all brilliant. Laurie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and for sharing. I think we all learned a great deal. When people want to find and connect with you, where should they look for you? LAURIE: I'm pretty active on social media. That should not surprise you. [laughs] My Twitter is just my name, which is @lauriekeith. I'm always welcome to be hit up on Twitter through DMs. That's probably the best way to reach me. And then I did want to also plug our Coronavirus Toolkit, if I can. ROB: Absolutely. LAURIE: For anyone that's listening to this podcast and has the ability to reach people, we have a toolkit set up. It's coronavirus.adcouncilkit.org, and you will find everything from all of our PSAs to our social media assets to sample television and audio scripts if you want to develop your own content. I just wanted to make sure I plugged that, because I know a lot of people and companies are trying to figure out how they can help. I think it's a good one-stop shop of how to get our assets and get them out there. ROB: Super solid. Thank you so much, Laurie. LAURIE: Thank you so much. Hope you have a good one. ROB: You too. Bye bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

How RESP Grants Work  Rob: Hey guys, today we're talking about the RESP grant, how it works, when it makes sense, how much you can get, what the limits are, and how to take advantage of it. I'm Rob Tétrault from robtetrault.com, head of the Tétrault Wealth Advisory Group here at Canaccord Genuity Wealth Management. To my right, your left is Adam Buss, Senior Wealth and Estate Planner here at Canaccord Genuity Wealth Management. Adam, we're thrilled to have you. Thanks for coming in.   Adam: Thanks for having me again.   Rob: Alright, RESP grants. Adam, first of all, how do they work? What's the basic percentage and what do you get when you make an RESP contribution? Or first of all, what is an RESP?   Adam: Whoa, that's a great question. So Registered Education Savings Plan, the grants is kind of the whole concept as to why you should put money into an RESP. You get 20% of free government money added to the RESP account for every contribution that you make.   Rob: All right, so I put 1000 bucks in…   Adam: They'll throw on $200 extra for you, added to the pot to use towards future education.   Rob: Do I get that as cash or does that go into the account?   Adam: Goes into the account.   Rob: Okay, I knew that. Just testing!   Adam: But it's good. But, of course there's maximums. They're not going to say, oh, okay, well Rob put a hundred thousand dollars into the RESP, let's give him 20 grand. That's not how it works.   Rob: There's a maximum per year.   Adam: There's a maximum per year. And there's also a lifetime maximum.   Rob: The maximum per year is…    Adam: Is 20% of up to $2,500 contribution.    Rob: $500 in grants.   Adam: $500 per year. However, you can make up for past unused contribution room of up to $5,000 that you put in, the government will throw in $1,000.   Rob: All right, so that's per child.   Adam: Per child.   Rob: I'm lucky I have four kids. I could in theory put $10,000 into my RESP per year and I would get $2,000 of grants every single year.   Adam: Correct.   Rob: And if I forgot to do it last year, I could do $20,000 this year,   Adam: Absolutely.   Rob: Okay. And I'd get $4,000.   Adam: But if you decided to do $21,000, they would not give you any additional grant money on that extra thousand dollars.   Rob: Now how would that be set up for me if I wanted to do it that way. That would likely be set up as a RESP family plan.   Adam: Correct.   Rob: We put all the four kids – Alexandre, Arielle, Angéline, Aubrie – all in one plan and then they all get to use the grants effectively.   Adam: Yeah. The best part is any of the children can use that grant money when they go to post-secondary education.   Rob: If one of your, kids decides they don't want to go to post-secondary education, you don't lose that grant.   Adam: Don't lose it.   Rob: Very interesting. I'm sorry, go ahead.   Adam: Yeah, sorry. I did mention there is a lifetime maximum as well. It's up to $7,200 of grant money per child.   Rob: Okay.   Adam:So they do cap it.   Rob: Oh, okay. So $7,500, that'd be like $37,500 of contributions. Okay. So that's quite a bit of contribution amount. Yeah. All right. Clearly this can't be tax free, right?   Adam: It's after tax dollars that go into the RESP account.   Rob: Okay.   Adam: You pay tax on it and then you put the money into it. Unlike in RRSP, which is often confused. And when you take the money out down the road is when it's taxable as withdrawn. So your money you put in is withdrawn, tax free. The government money and any income or growth has been generated in the account is taxable to the beneficiary when withdrawn.   Rob: We always like to say the grants and the growth.   Adam: Grants and the growth.   Rob: The grants and the growth are taxed. In theory, the way this works out is, in my mind anyways, is hopefully the kids have a much lower income bracket than you do. And when they're pulling it out, most of it is likely tax-free.   Adam: Yeah. Ideally they're in university, they're poor students and don't have necessarily that income level. And they also probably have additional write-offs from education credits.   Rob: Right, right.   Adam: Essentially, they hopefully will pay as close to zero taxes on that money as possible.   Rob: Okay. It's the first year, my son's in university, we submit a confirmation of enrollment. This could be for pretty much any post-secondary education.   Adam: Yeah. There is a list on the government of Canada website as to qualify post-secondary education institutions. It was a little bit more limited when the program came out, but it's pretty wide variety now, including some international schools as well.   Rob: International, some trades.   Adam: Yeah.   Rob: Some traditional universities, colleges, those are all candidates.   Adam: Fairly flexible.   Rob: And I know there's a limit in your first 13 weeks.   Adam: I think it's $5,000 if I remember correct.   Rob: $5,000 bucks your first 13 weeks, and after that effectively the sky's the limit. Let's talk about the Canada learning bond and how that works. So that would be for lower income families?   Adam: Yeah. So that is additional money that they throw into the pot. It has nothing to do with your contributions, so it doesn't even matter if you throw any money into it. They will add money to the RESP free of charge based on your income level.   Rob: If you open the RESP,   Adam: If you open the RESP, and they'll continue to do so and as long as your family income is within a certain level.   Rob: How long can I contribute for my kids RESPs, does it end at some point? Can I contribute all the way until they're 18?   Adam: Generally, you would contribute to the end of the year that they turned 17 because that is the last year that you can qualify for the grant money. Really you can contribute beyond that. But what's the point if you're not going to get the government money?   Rob: Absolutely. How long do these things last? I imagine I have to pull the money out at some point.   Adam: There are different restrictions in place. It depends as to when the plan was established, how old the kids are. Those are all different things that we want to work with our clients on. Hopefully take out the money early on when the first child goes to school, and that way we can close it later on. Full Video & Blog Article on How an RESP Works, and RESP Withdrawal Rules    Rob: It's basically a really neat tax arbitrage strategy.   Adam: Absolutely is great.   Rob: Yeah. What happens if none of my kids go to university?   Adam: Okay, well if none of your kids go to school, you still get your money back. You essentially get all the growth and income that was generated on your money. All the government money goes back to the government. That's only fair. Your kids didn't go to school. There is a penalty that the government does charge, which is approximately 20% which equates to the growth on the government money as they put in 20%... anything that you take out and you get your money back, tax free, any income is you can either roll to your RRSP if you have the enough room in your RRSP, or where you take it out as taxable income.   Rob: The RESP grant, pretty neat stuff. Makes sense for a lot of families out there. Some of them super important to consider too. I would say be an important part of a financial plan, right? When you're building a financial plan, you want to factor in this and any other education goals, right?   Adam: Yeah. If the goal is to help the kids pay for post-secondary education costs is a fantastic program to do so.   Rob: All right. Adam, thanks so much for joining us today. Adam Buss, Senior Wealth and Estate Planner here at Canaccord Genuity Wealth Management. If you have questions on this or your portfolio, go to speaktorob.com, and book a no obligation consultation.

On today's episode of Gritty Founder, Kreig Kent talks with Rob Biederman about his entrepreneurial journey and how he built Catalant Technologies. Rob shares valuable advice on fundraising, productivity, and the type of mindset founders need to achieve success. Rob Biederman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Catalant Technologies, the market leader enabling the world’s leading organizations get from strategy to execution faster. Biederman is also co-author of a book titled Reimagining Work: Strategies to Disrupt Talent, Lead Change, and Win with a Flexible Workforce. Some Questions Kreig asks Rob: - How has the product at Catalant Technologies changed since the early days? (21:06) - What do you think is the most important ingredient for a founder? (21:58) - What advice can you give to a founder who is thinking about raising money but is not sure if they should bootstrap their company instead? (31:48) - When you invest what is the most important thing you look for in a founder? (37:01) - What is one thing about life that you believe to be true that most people would disagree with? (38:00) In This Episode, You Will Learn: - About Rob’s background and how he became an entrepreneur (4:28) - About Catalant Technologies and how Rob started the business (7:54) - Advice on when and why to raise money (32:09) - How to think about regret (39:43) - Why you need to prepare to win rather than just wanting to win (43:55) - Why coffee is a productivity killer (49:34) Connect with Rob Biederman: Twitter Catalant Also Mentioned on This Show... Rob’s favorite quote: “The pond is fed from within, and pleasure can only spring forward from true internal alignment and congruence. Whereas happiness can be achieved through money or other artificial means.” Rob’s book recommendation: The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz More Resources: Good to Great by Jim Collins

Rob Blake created the fashion brand "nobody died" so he has a voice in the fashion industry. Let's bring Rob Blake to a streetwear fashion panel talk! This man has questions. I also had some questions for Rob: * How does one become an artist, how did you notice you are one? * Creative Process * Money & Art * Success * What is "nobody died" about? I find our conversation was inspiring, deep and light at the same time. I am impressed and hope you will be too. Enjoy listening. https://robblake.tv Book recommendation: „Operation money on spaceship earth“ by Rob's recommendation to buy clothes: Adbusters Magazin:

With Ross Peterson gone fishin' Andrew Downs fills in and along with Chris Williams they chat more Cy-Hawk Reaction, Chris talks about how he and AD are similar types of fans on opposite sides of the rivalry and how neither is anti Iowa or ISU, though AD is very anti Wisconsin. They talk a good deal about the animosity in the Cy-Hawk rivalry and get into Kirk Cousins vs Mitch Trubisky and the woes of Minnesota Vikings at both quarterback and kicker before Rob How of Hawkeye Nation talks about how Iowa capitalized and took advantage of their opportunities for the W

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.

How would you overcome the fear of aging? Can you use TEAM for sports psychology? Describe your typical day, David-- do you ever get down or anxious? Hi Listeners: Thanks for your many and awesome questions. I love to answer them! And there will be more to come in future podcasts. Your questions are GREAT!  Vipul: Tell us about your new book, Feeling Great. How will it be different from Feeling Good? And can people with schizoaffective disorder be helped? (story with Stirling Moorey) Guy: What’s a nervous breakdown? Rob: How would you treat a field goal kicker who’s afraid of missing the winning field goal? Would you use positive visualizations? Michael: How would you treat someone with the fear of aging? I turn 60 in a few months, and have been experiencing anxiety around not be able to do some of the things I love as I age. Hidem: How fast is fast? I notice your frequent use of the term "High Speed Recovery" (and even Warp Speed) when describing the benefits of TEAM CBT. How rapidly does the average patient recover? Brittany: I had an idea that I think would benefit a lot of us. I’d like you to do a podcast on a week or a day in your life. The ups & downs of your moods, triggers, etc., & most importantly how you deal with them. Do you write out your own Negative Thoughts a Daily Mood Log? Thank you for all of your great questions, comments, and testimonials! Rhonda and I really appreciate that!   David and Rhonda PS Here's a great question we did not get to today. We'll do it in a future Ask David, as it's really important.  Rubens: What can you do when you can’t identify your negative thoughts? I get anxious, but don’t seem to have any negative thoughts. Is it really true that our feelings always result from negative thoughts?  

On this episode: - Father's Day recap with Mike and Rob - How to enjoy Summer break with your kids   - This week's Bad Dad goes too far   Have comments, suggestions or just want to say, "Hi!"?  Have an embarrassing fact that you want to learn about Mike?  Email us at thestandupdads@gmail.com  Find us at https://standupdads.podbean.com/ or on facebook @standupdadspod Find Mike's site at https://pencilforhire.myportfolio.com/ Find Big Nick's Gag on This Podcast at https://gagonthis.podbean.com/   Links to the articles mentioned in the show are below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZwyKkv36dc (Ali Siddiq's take on Father's Day.  Thank you Comedy Central!) https://messymotherhood.com/survive-summer-break-five-amazing-tips/ https://www.ahaparenting.com/parenting-tools/traditions/Summer-Activities-Kids-Home https://www.huffpost.com/entry/baby-killed-after-video-game-loss_n_5cd17caae4b0548b735fd86c Thanks for listening!

Do I have ADHD? Is it a real disorder?  Hi podcast fans, Today we've got some terrific questions that you have submitted. General Questions Jose and Bri both asked: How would you treat hypochondria? Christian: How would you treat an abuse survivor? I’ve heard that talk therapy is inadequate for healing trauma! Ted: Is there such a thing as healthy euphoria? Hillary: Would you do a podcast covering the treatment of mania? Jim: I think I have ADHD, but some doctors claim it’s not a true diagnosis. What do you think? Dan: What your thoughts are on LSD in the treatment of depression and anxiety? I could not get to all of your excellent questions in the time provided. The next time we do Ask David with general questions, we will include these: Guy: What’s a nervous breakdown? Rob: How would you treat a field goal kicker who’s afraid of missing the winning field goal? Would you use positive visualizations? Michael: How would you treat someone with the fear of aging? I turn 60 in a few months! Hidem: How fast is fast? You seem to get super-fast recoveries from your patients most of the time. How about other therapists? How rapidly does the average patient recover>  Rubens: What you can do when you're upset but can't identify any negtaive thoughts? Next week, our Ask David will focus on questions about relationship conflicts and problems. Rhonda and I have lots of other cool programs planned in upcoming weeks. Thanks for tuning in today, and over the past months. We will hit one million downloads in a week or two (this is April, 2019). Rhonda, Fabrice, and I deeply appreciate your support! David and Rhonda

Episode #393 of the podcast features a continuation of the discussion we started in Episode 392 about how to recover from a bad client experience. The post 393: Bryan & Rob – How to Deal with an Upset Client Part II appeared first on Sprout Studio.

Episode #392 features a discussion with Bryan & Rob about how to deal with an upset client when expectations didn't match up with reality. The post 392: Bryan & Rob – How to Deal With an Upset Client appeared first on Sprout Studio.