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In this episode of Building Texas Business, I sit down with Rob Holmes of Texas Capital Bank. Rob shares the bank's dramatic turnaround story since he became President and CEO in 2021 amid challenges, including a failed merger. Rob explains how Texas Capital improved its standing through strategic moves like fortifying capital levels and attracting talent from global institutions. We explore Texas Capital's community focus through initiatives increasing volunteerism and launching a charitable foundation. Rob highlights how their junior program brings diverse talent while nurturing a vibrant culture. Wrapping up, Rob discusses maintaining liquidity amid regional banking stress, their strong capital position, and diversification that sets them apart. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Rob and I discuss the transformation of Texas Capital under Rob's leadership since 2021, highlighting the strategic moves that improved the bank's financial standing and attracted top-tier talent. Rob explains how Texas Capital's strong capital position and strategic diversification helped it navigate the regional banking stress of 2023. We explore Texas Capital's commitment to community engagement, including extensive volunteer hours, the founding of a new charitable foundation, and various philanthropic activities across Texas. Rob elaborates on the bank's innovative junior program, which has attracted diverse and talented professionals to Texas Capital. We discuss the importance of maintaining a respectful, collaborative workplace culture and the value of in-office collaboration for fostering a strong, healthy culture and achieving better customer outcomes. Rob shares insights on the challenges facing the banking industry, such as regulatory inconsistencies, the inverted yield curve, technology integration, and commercial real estate risks. We discuss Texas Capital's strategic initiatives to expand services, including public finance and equity research in oil and gas. Rob reflects on the lessons he has learned from his career, emphasizing the importance of candor, transparency, and servant leadership. Rob recounts personal anecdotes about his first jobs and leisure pursuits, offering a glimpse into his personal life and leadership style. We touch on the role of media in shaping perceptions of regional banks and the distinct advantages of regional banks in serving local communities and businesses. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Texas Capital GUESTS Rob HolmesAbout Rob TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode, you will meet Rob Holmes, President and CEO of Texas Capital. Rob shares an inspiring story on how Texas Capital has rebuilt itself and become the first full-service financial services institution headquartered in Texas. Rob, I want to thank you for joining me here on Building Texas Business. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Let's start. I know you're the CEO Building Texas Business. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Let's start. I know you're the CEO of Texas Capital. Tell the listeners a little bit about what Texas Capital is and the type of services it provides here in Texas. Rob: Great. Well, thank you very much for having me. So Texas Capital had a very proud founding in the late 90s by Texas business people to found a bank to serve Texas businesses with local decision making. After all, the banks failed in the late 80s and they had a very proud run and 05 went public and did very well. Then about the mid teens we kind of started going a little sideways and by the time I got there the bank needed to be kind of rebuilt and so we had a failed merger with a bank about a third our size and that tells you anything, and really because of COVID. But after that they needed new leadership and so what we did was we started over and we went fast. So we raised a perpetual deferred deal with sub-debt securitization, got out of a line of business correspondent banking that attracted a lot of capital and improved the capital by about 270 basis points in about eight weeks, and that's my bet as we run the bank very conservatively. We also brought in a lot of new talent. So the entire operating committee is new. We have a new junior program we can get into that later. But then we started on the journey to build and this is kind of interesting. I think you'll find it interesting. We're the first full service financial services firm ever to be headquartered in Texas and if you think about it it makes perfect sense. So in the 80s you had Glass-Steagall and stuff. You had a lot of big banks. They failed. They were replaced by larger institutions from out of state that saw this as a very attractive market. But the in-market banks never went into the full service direction. So regional banks are made from community banks and they get bigger and they didn't have the products and services. They just had NIM banks, if you will Sure. Chris: Well, that's an impressive thing to have a claim to being the only one headquartered in Texas. I would not have thought that, you know, given some of the other Texas yeah. So I mean you're not kidding when you said a full restart just a few years ago. Rob: Full restart. So we have think about who we're able to attract, and this says more about Texas than Texas Capital. But the woman that runs treasury services for us ran treasury services for JPMorgan Chase globally. Our chief risk officer was the head of risk for JPMorgan's investment bank and then chief risk officer was the head of risk for JP Morgan's investment bank and then chief risk officer for the commercial bank and then head of risk for real estate globally. Our head of ops was a head of ops and tech for Stan O'Neill at Merrill Lynch. The CEO Started in the mailroom, ended up reporting as CEO head of ops and tech for Merrill Lynch. I think he can do it here and that so and that just kind of it keeps going. Our CHRO came from Cilindes and our CIO has an impressive background. Our head of commercial banking all of them had bigger jobs at much larger institutions. Chris: Yeah, what that tells me, Rob, is that those people saw a bright future in the business climate in Texas to make those kind of moves to join you and the Dallas headquarters. Rob: There's no doubt about it and, by the way, I wouldn't have tried this anywhere else, I mean for sure. So, as you know, texas is eighth largest economy in the world, second largest workforce, youngest workforce, fastest growing. We've created 46,. We've created more jobs in 46 last 48 months, so it's a very attractive place to be overall? Chris: What was it about just speaking to you? I know you joined in 2021, that based on the career you had built to that moment where you saw this as the right opportunity for you. Rob: I was very happy where I was. So I was primarily in the investment bank at JPMorgan Chase, but my last 10 years I ran the large corporate bank and the commercial bank ended up taking that to 22 countries. So I ran that business. Globally it was over $180 billion in assets. It was a third treasury, a third lending and a third investment banking. Great business, great people. But when this bank kind of went sideways, I had two or three people call me and say, hey, I'm thinking about this, would you come run it? And it surprised me. I'm like, why are you calling me? But then I started looking at it and, like you, I'm from Texas. I commuted to New York for 25 of the 31 years that I worked for JP Morgan. But people kind of said, why don't you come home and build something special with where you're from? And that, through more and more dialogue, became very appealing to me and I did not know and shame on me that as bad a shape as a bank was when we got there. But it ended up being a blessing because you know like today it'd be very difficult to do what we did. I mean to have a board, investor base, regulators, constituents. Let you reinvest. We reinvested over a third of our non-interest expense and then more, and we said to the investor community and the board and others that we're going to have negative operating leverage for about a year and a half. That'd be very hard to do in this climate, right? And so the other thing we had to do became a blessing because you had to do it all at once, and so I'm glad that's behind us. Today the bank is. It used to have just mono banking, like a community or regional bank. Today we have segmentation, so you have business banking for small businesses, middle market banking for a little larger businesses, a little more sophistication, and then we have a corporate banking group like a money center bank. And when you have a corporate banking group you have to have industry expertise. So we have energy, diversified FIG, government, not-for-profit healthcare, tmt and mortgage, so we have the industry expertise of any money center bank right here in Texas. And then we have private wealth and then we rebuilt all of treasury. So it's a brand new bank. We have a new payments platform, new lockbox, new card, new merchant, new digital onboarding that we came up with. And so we people say the banks can't compete on technology like with the big bank, but we can because we have one platform. Those big banks have many platforms because they're a combination of many banks. We can go in that if you want. And then we have one platform. Those big banks have many platforms because they're a combination of many banks. We can go in that if you want. And then we have, as I said, private wealth, investment banking, and we can go into as many of those areas as you want. Chris: So you basically built it like you said. As businesses are coming to Texas, you're ready to serve whatever need they have. Rob: For sure. So we want to be very relevant to our clients and we are a one-stop shop, so you won't outgrow us. We were a top 10 arranger of bank debt for middle market companies in the years. We've done about $110 billion of notional trades in about 18 months. Wow, it's profitable. Chris: So what's your vision for the future, then for Texas Capital, and kind of, how are you working to achieve? Rob: that it's actually pretty simple. It's maturing the platform that we built. So we are the number one lender to Texas-based businesses of any Texas-based bank. Now that's new. We've had tremendous success. Business owners and decision makers love the local decision making. They love the fact that when they hire us, they're getting a very talented, experienced MD working for them instead of maybe the money center bank, whatever, a VP or something assigned to it. They just like the local decision making, local access. But the go forward strategy is People ask me this all the time what's next? And they think that we have a big bang answer. The big bang answer is delighting clients and banking the best clients in our markets, and we've always said, or I've always said we'll be defined by our clients, and so we have been blessed to have clients be attracted to the strategy and platform. So we're going to just do more of what we've done. Chris: So what I like about that strategy is the simplicity. I think there's a lesson there for entrepreneurs and other business owners in what you've done in the last few years, and that to me is get the foundation right and your core right Correct, and then do the fundamentals really well. Right, it's blocking and tackling is what you're doing. Rob: It's executing now for sure. And I had one CEO of a very renowned New York financial firm ask him to come see me. They had heard about what we were doing and he wanted to understand it because we actually we took what he would say was the very best person from his sales and trading floor who had been there 18 years. He didn't understand how we could attract that person because that person drove a U-Haul to Dallas with his wife and kids before we were even open. And he said tell me your strategy. And I went through it and, to be honest with you, I was hoping he would like it because I was pretty long the strategy. And so he did. And I said what do you think? He said I think y'all are going to be very successful. And this was early on. And I said why is that? He said do you have a differentiated strategy with differentiated talent in a differentiated market? And I think that's true. But then he said what do you think? And I said well, our talent's really. This is back in 21. Now we've done all these things, but I said that the talent is really good, but we've got to do everything with this jersey on now and delight our clients with TCB jersey, not another jersey. And he said look, rob, do it once, it'll be hard, do it three times, you'll be good. The fifth time you're an expert and I kind of he kind of and he's pretty renowned. It was a pretty simple lesson but it's kind of true. And now we have done it and we are good at what we're doing. But we still can mature the platform, that treasury platform we talked about. It's literally second to none. We're doing open banking for clients. We're doing a digital onboarding. You can open a commercial account tomorrow at a money center bank. That take eight weeks or six weeks. But that platform to scale to get the most out of it, I mean we could run it without any more investment for five years. So we got to scale the business and, by the way, it's happening. So that treasury platform is it's called P times V, price times volume that's how many transactions are going through the factory or warehouse financial transactions. That's usually for a bank it's a 2% business at best. It grows the economy, it grows the GDP. We're going 17%, quarter over quarter, year, quarter after quarter. That's remarkable Because of new clients moving to the platform. So it is scaling but we just need to continue to do that Right. Chris: So you talked about the platform a couple of times. What type of I guess technology or emerging technologies do you see having the biggest impact in the banking industry over the next, say, three to five years? Rob: I think real-time payments, I think open banking, and people don't really understand what open banking is. What open banking is? It's actually very simple, so think well, here's, here's one simple way. Part of it is you don't have to leave your internal financial platform to go to our platform. We'll put an API on yours and so you can just push a button and be into our system and send ACH or wire or what. So I think AI, I think open banking and I think real-time payments. Okay. Chris: Well, I can speak from experience, as we transitioned to Texas Capital a year ago and, to your point of the ease of that transition and being able to deal with decision makers made it seamless. Good Well thank you. It's been a great relationship for us, for sure. Rob: Good Well thank you. Chris: What you're saying is true, Well, thank you. It's been a great relationship for us for sure. Good, Well, thank you. I can attest to that. What you're saying is true, Well, thank you. Let's talk a little bit about where you see corporate leadership whether that's your C-suite or just the company as it exists and community impact. What type of initiatives is Texas Capital working on to be a meaningful member of the community? Rob: Yeah, well, that's a. Thank you very much for the for the easy pitch. So I think we do. We bat way above our weight in community impact. So we do tens of thousands of hours of employee volunteer in the community. We, as part of this transformation, when we were investing in the platform, we took time to also found our first foundation. We never had a foundation before. So we have a foundation and we do volunteer hours and we just were part of the group that bought Opal Lear Newhouse. We were the first one to open a branch in West Dallas. We gave the founding seed money for Southern Gateway in Dallas. We're big supporters of Rodeo here in Houston. Last year I think we sponsored the opening night, so I think you're going to see us pretty much all over the state of Texas in terms of giving and more than just money but time, resources, expertise to philanthropies. We hosted a great event about three weeks ago. People came from all over the country and it was for veterans and we had veteran not-for-profits and we had veteran-owned businesses and we just brought them together and talked about issues and how they could work together and synergies between the two and advancing veterans on a go-forward basis, and the people that came would just blow you away and the feedback of it. I happened to be out of town on a three-day weekend afterwards out of the country and somebody approached me and I didn't know them and they didn't know me, but I guess they'd seen my picture or something and they thanked me for having that veteran event. Wow, and so it had a far, far impact. It will do things like that. We have a nonprofit event in every city, getting nonprofits together, helping them learn how to raise money and trade best practices, and we do that and we'll do that in every city during the summer. So you know, our giving is good, Our volunteer hours are fantastic, Our sharing of expertise is good. Our investment in the community is great, Good. Chris: Let's circle back to because that kind of made me think of team building, right, so you talked about basically a wholesale change with the team around you. What are some of the things that you look for to make sure you're you know, through that recruiting and hiring process, that you're getting the right person for the position? Rob: Yep, so this is a great question and this was the key to what we've done so far and how we're going to reach our 25 goals. So in September of 21, when we announced a strategic plan, which was pretty dramatic, we said we're not going to achieve our financial goals until 25. With that came a lot of change and a lot of talent. So 80% of the people at the firm are new since I got there. That's 80% of over 2,000 people. So that's a lot of change, managing through a lot of change through a transformation, through a regional quote, unquote regional banking practice that I'd love to talk about, regional banking practice, regional banking stress that I'd love to talk about transformation. So there's a lot going on there, both internally and externally, that we had to manage through. And what we did is we started at the top and the bottom, so we put new leadership with new skill sets and new expectations and new goals of banking the best clients in our markets instead of just being a bank, etc. And we also started a junior program. It was the first junior program in the history of the bank. Chris: You mentioned that earlier, so tell us a little more about the junior program. Rob: It's awesome If you have a kid and they want to get into finance and they don't want to go to New York but they want to work at a great financial services firm to have them join us. So we post in. So I got there in January of 21. It so I got there in January 21. It's COVID Nobody's in the office. We'd just been through this internal stress with the failed merger, new CEO, the whole bit. I said we need a junior program. We posted 60 positions. We got 800 applications. We hired 60-something. A third of those had their masters. That wasn't required. The average GPA was over 374. So people love what we're doing right. The next year there's over 2,000 applicants and our junior program is great. And, by the way, I helped build one in the investment bank in my last firm and one in the commercial bank in my last firm. I thought they were both very good. This one's awesome. So you come in, you go through four or five months of training and then you go into your line of business. But we probably hired you after your internship the summer before, if that makes sense. Sure, the program has some of the diverse classes I've ever seen in banking and we didn't do that. This may be controversial. We do that on purpose. We did that because we hired the best people Exactly and they're the most diverse classes, and so we're really excited about that. And then the attrition rate there isn't nearly what we thought it would be. We built it for a higher attrition rate because those kids usually leave a large percentage after third year. Sure. They're not leaving. Rob: They like it, so that's been kind of fun. It's a good problem, right, it's a great problem and we'll use all of them. And, by the way, after that change you should just know the attrition stuff has dramatically slowed as the transformation slowed. We got all the talented people in place that we needed so we are ahead of corporate America, finance and Texas companies for attrition and excited about that in the new culture here. ADVERT Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders. Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom and thanks for listening to the show. Chris: Well that you know that low attrition rate leads to what you talked about earlier better customer experience, more stability. Rob: We need stability. Chris: Everybody needs stability. Yeah, for sure. Okay, so you mentioned regional banking stress. Tell me what you're referring to about that. Rob: Yeah, last spring of 23,. Eb failed, first Republic and the like. We were fortunate. So, november of 22, we sold a business to Truist for $3.5 billion with a very big premium on it. With the sale of that we became if you compare us to any $100 billion bank or above in the country or any Texas public bank we have the third most capital and I think in the next quarters we'll have the second most but third and we're number one in equity tangible common equity assets. So we're the least levered. We have third most capital. Our highly liquid assets are like 29% our cash and securities. Our AOCI problem, which is the mark on the bond portfolio. Banks are struggling with that. We're very good there. So our capital, our liquidity, et cetera, was very strong. So we didn't experience outflows of deposits or anything. What we did experience was a rotation, like every bank in the country, from non-interest-bearing deposits to interest-bearing deposits. So all banks if you want to call this cost of goods sold went up. But the regional banks for us the reason I wanted to come back and talk about that people call it a regional banking crisis. It was not. It had to do with certain banks were of the size that they define regional banks that had the wrong strategy, the wrong concentrations, and they failed, right. That's not because they're regional banks, right, they just happen to be that size. By the way, credit Suisse failed too. It is a global bank, right. So you know, I think this is sometimes where the media gets the message wrong and puts fear into the market, and they love it, and they love it and so I'm really proud of what the regional banks do and how they serve their clients in market and their local communities, giving back to their communities, being Main Street lenders, and I'm really proud of. You know how we do that. I think I told you before we went on the air. We're the number one lender of Texas-based businesses, of any Texas-based bank. That's a big deal because these money center banks they may be in the state or super regionals in the state or even regionals in the state but, if they decide, oh you know what, it's not okay to bank an energy company, they don't Well, guess what? We have those decisions here. We don't have somebody else deciding our social norms. Chris: Right, right, that's a great selling point. Going back to the kind of the junior program and this new team, let's talk about culture, I mean. So how would you define the culture at Texas Capitol and kind of, what do you think you've done to kind of foster that and what do you see as necessary to keep it growing? I think? Rob: the culture is transparent, curious, candid and relentless dissatisfaction, as my general counsel calls it. So, look, we've made a lot of change. We'll continue to make a lot of change. We just hired somebody to run public finance for us. We didn't have that before. Lot of change we just hired somebody to run public finance for us. We didn't have that before. We started into the foray of public equity, research and oil and gas. We're going to keep growing and building, doing things that serve our clients and our clients' needs. But the one thing that we kind of talk about a lot is and I'll say it little softer is you know just no jerks allowed. You could talk about, you can talk about Ivy League. You know culture and they have you know big words, but the simple thing is like we're gonna treat people with respect, period. Right now. You can be tough and you can be hard, but you gotta be fair, right, and you gotta be polite. And you know you can be hard but you've got to be fair and you've got to be polite and you can have high expectations while being compassionate. So we have high expectations, we are moving fast, but we do treat people with respect and we like working with one another and that's been part of the fun is, we've been in office because we think that's how you build a career and not a job, and that's how you collaborate to serve your client and that's what's best for our clients and best for employees. And we like being with one another. We don't want to work remote from a beach and not share life's experiences with our colleagues. Chris: Yeah, couldn't agree more. I mean, we got back to the office in May of 2020. I believe, and my partners here, you're a part of an organization for a reason. Organizations are a group of people together, right, correct, and we learn from each other. We can collaborate in a customer service-related industry. Like you and I are in the customer does better when we're collaborating to serve them, you and I are in the customer does better when we're collaborating to serve them, and we do that when we're together. Yep Hands down, no question. And we've been like you. We've been in office in person for a while now and you read as much as I do for the last six, seven months. You just see the pendulum swinging back because the other organizations are realizing they're losing customer satisfaction, they're losing engagement with their people. You can't have a culture if you're not together. In my view, or you can. Actually, you can have a culture. It's just not a healthy one in my view. Yeah, it's really bad, that's right. Rob: So, look, looking back, it seems like a really easy decision and, by the way, I was back in the office in 2022. But at this room, I didn't get there until January 21. Nobody's back in the office. You meant 22 as well. Yes, I did. I did. Excuse me, I did, but you know I got here in 21. We went back to office Memorial Day the Tuesday after Memorial Day of 21. And it was a harder decision then. It seems easy now Because, like even the day before, there was rumors of everybody in our ops organization that they were going to protest and walk out. You know at 901 and we decided, we made a conscious decision that this is what they're going to do and we wanted the people that wanted to be in the office right, and we may lose some people, and that's fine, and it would be harder in the short term, but the people that would be attracted to the platform and the business and us would be people that wanted careers, not jobs, and, by definition, those are the better employees, right, and I think those people attract those people and that's how we were able to transform so much while other people were sitting at home. Chris: Yeah. Now to your point. I mean, if you have a long-term strategy right, then you're willing to go through some short-term pain to get the right people that are going to help you achieve that For sure. A little bit about just your thoughts on what are some of the biggest challenges you think facing the banking industry as we sit here today and maybe for the foreseeable future. Obviously, for the last couple of years, every month everybody's watching the Fed, so that may be part of the answer. But just what do you see as the challenges? Rob: Yeah, so there's plenty for most industries though, too. So one is, and this is an excuse, but it is a challenge. The regulatory body needs to come together and be consistent and apply things consistently. That'd be helpful. We have an inverted yield curve now for the longest time, one of the longest periods in history, you know the two years four, seven something. The 10 years four two something. That makes banking very hard for a lot of technical reasons we can go into. For most banks, technology is a problem. Most banks are an aggregation of multiple banks. They're not like us that has one technology platform. That's, by the way, brand new and totally modern. Banks have not been willing to. It's been a cost cutting game because a lot of banks this is why our strategy is so good NIM banks. So net interest margin, which is loan only, the model of taking a deposit and making a loan and achieving a return above your cost of capital through cycle, I think is very difficult and that's why we supplemented our platform. You know loans, investment banking, private wealth. You know all the different things we do for a client so that we can achieve that return, because a lot of the banks to have that return would have to maybe make a riskier loan to get a higher spread or what have you? So I think the NIM banking model to get a higher spread or what have you? So I think the NIM banking model especially after spring of 23, is hard. I think the technology spend is hard. I think there's a lot of banks that have too much commercial real estate. So our commercial real estate is a very small percentage of our total capital. Regulators want you to be maybe 250 or 300%. There's a lot of banks that are 400. That's too much, yeah. And when you have that much commercial real estate, remember a lot of its construction loans, and so the construction loans. You made that decision today and you're funding it in two years. So you're going to you're that that concentration, because those paydowns are, you know, like a five-year low and commercial real estate is going to keep growing. So banks marginal loan the dollar to make the next loan. The cost just went up, so they're going to slow down their lending while the commercial real estate gets absorbed. They can't be relevant to their clients with anything other than the loan product and if they're not doing that, they're going to slow down their growth and slow down lending. They can't be relevant to their clients with anything other than the loan product, and if they're not doing that, they're going to slow down their growth and slow down lending. They don't have the margin to spend on technology. Chris: And those are some of the problems. Yeah, there's cascades, right, totally. Let's turn a little bit to just kind of you and leadership. How would you describe your leadership style today and maybe how you feel like it's evolved over your career? Rob: I think you've got to do what you want other people to do. So I'm in Houston today. We're seeing six clients we talk all the time about it's about the client, not us. Ops exists to serve a client, technology exists to serve a client. It's not for the bank. And so we have become pretty client obsessed at Texas Capital, delivering the best outcomes for our clients. I mean, like the one deal I think I told you about, we sole managed the largest debt deal in the country last year. The largest sole managed debt deal in the country last year. That's after a money center bank failed doing it. We gave the client the best advice, knowing they'd probably go with the other bank. They did. The other bank failed them. They came back to us and we did it. Now we have a client for life. So give the client the right advice, do the right thing for the client, but your people have to see you do what you want them to do. So I'm with clients. We are aggressively serving clients, but we've managed the place very conservatively. And then I think candor and transparency is really important. Chris: I think those are great qualities, anything that you could point to. I always think people I'll speak for myself, but I think I hear it in others as well a setback or failure that you encountered, that you learned from, that made you better as a leader, as a business person, anything that comes to mind, that where you look back and go, wow, that was transformational. Because of that, how long do you have? Rob: No, I think we talked about junior program, one that always comes to mind because there's early on the program of what early on my career was. When I was a junior, you know, I talked to that junior class a lot and one of the things I tell them is be careful, because you know, building your brand sometimes is too easy, like you know, if you do something great, like I had some successes early on as being a good client guy, then I was the client guy, but also my brand that I got early on was, as a junior was I wasn't very good at details and as a junior an analyst associate your only job was details Right, and so I learned the hard way that maybe I needed to focus on the details. Now I would suggest that the people that work with me think I'm too focused on the details. But that's because I learned the hard way as a junior and people corrected me Right and I'm not sure if they corrected me the wrong way or right way. That was the old days, but they certainly made an impression. So I think that was one of the things I learned is details matter and details are important, and I learned it as a junior and that stayed with me throughout my career. The other one was one I think is interesting is later on, when we were talking about a promotion, one of my bosses told me that I think this is really important for people to know, because I think it's true. He said rob, I don't it, my vote doesn't matter. The vote that matters is everybody else on the floor that works with you, because I'm not promoting you unless they want you promoted, right and so I do think that you know that's a pretty good lesson too. Chris: Yeah, kind of well servant the well, servant leadership, for sure, and that kind of team mentality For sure, team mentality. And I've said forever, I think the lessons you remember the most are the ones you learned the hard way. For sure, so the details right. Chris: So he's like I'm not going to let that happen again. For sure, that's great. Well, I appreciate you sharing those up, but I think it's a great quality leadership to have that vulnerability and humility about you for sure. So I'm going to kind of move away from the business stuff. Okay, to wrap things up, I want to know what was your first job, my? Rob: first job was uh bagging groceries and stocking grocery shelves in high school I did the same thing, did you? Chris: yeah, uh, it was hot and yeah, I tell people we had to wear like black pants. Oh, yeah, these kids get to wear shorts. Now I'm like this is going easy on them. Rob: Yeah, I think one day one of the guys got mad at me because they made me restack all the remember when people used to return the glass bottles. Yeah, and it was in a cage in the back of the alley of the grocery store. It was about 110. And nobody had organized them for about three months and I got fine job. Chris: Very good. All right, you're born and raised in Texas, so do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Rob: Both Like a brisket taco. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, yeah, I like that All right. And last thing if you could take a 30-day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do? I'd probably spend half of it fly fishing in Montana and half of it quail hunting in South Texas. There you go, Just not this time of year. Not this time of year. That's right. Chris: Rob, I want to thank you for taking the time. I mean, I had no idea the details behind the transformation at Texas Capital and obviously what you and your team are doing and have done is nothing short of remarkable. So thanks for sharing that. Rob: Well, thank you, I think you know. We think Texas does deserve its own full-service financial services firm. Chris: Well, I'm glad you're delivering it. Thank you, take care. And there we have it another great episode. Don't forget to check out the show notes at boyermiller.com forward slash podcast and you can find out more about all the ways our firm can help you at Boyermiller.com. That's it for this episode. Have a great week and we'll talk to you next time. Special Guest: Rob Holmes.

On this episode of The DEB Show podcast, host Debra Eckerling discusses the art and craft of storytelling with authors Rob Kutner, Richard Walter, and Orly Zeewy. Rob is a humor writer, whose titles include Snot Goblins & Other Tasteless Tales; Richard (The Whole Picture, Deadpan) is also a screenwriter, consultant, and educator; and Orly's book is Ready, Launch, Brand: The Lean Marketing Guide for Startups. Rob, Richard, and Orly share their takes on storytelling – for fiction, non-fiction, and business – including story structure and standing out, as well as tips and anecdotes. About Story - Richard: Every story is a portrait of the creator; it's not a window, it's a mirror - Rob: A story is a transfer of energy; transferring our experience to an audience's mind - Orly: Stories are a living, breathing thing. They evoke powerful emotions and insights. When creating the story around your business, the hero is the solution (the brand); the villain is what keeps your client up at night. What Stops People from Telling Good Stories - Richard: People write too much. They start before the beginning and end after the end - Rob: There is a fear sometimes that people won't get rid of an idea because they think they won't come up with anything better. You find what works by figuring out what doesn't work - Orly: People have a tendency to try to talk to everyone. You want to tell a story that will be meaningful for the person who hears it How to Develop Your Voice - Orly: Be authentic and so memorable someone says: Where have you been all my life? - Rob: Try as many genres and mediums as you can until you find the right fit - Richard: Listen to your own voice and get out of your own way. Hear it and then economize. Everything the audience sees and hears has to have a purpose: to move the story forward Goals - Rob: Pick something you are doing with a storytelling component, and start with the ending/the feeling of the ending - Orly: Identify the villain of your client's story (what are they struggling with) and how you are helping them - Richard: All story is about identity. Who am I? How do I know for sure? Paint a self portrait, find our more about yourself Final Thoughts - Orly: Ask a lot of questions, listen more than you speak, and when you don't know your value, ask your clients why they work with you - Rob: A story is bridge between your mind and your heart and other people. People would rather hear a story, rather, feel a story, that hear a fact - Richard: What we – writers – do is crazy. Stop being so sensible and rational about it. Revel in the madness Learn more about: Rob Kutner: https://www.robkutner.com/ Richard Walter: https://richardwalter.com Orly Zeewy: https://orlyzeewy.com Debra Eckerling: https://TheDEBMethod.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover the fascinating ancient art of coppicing as we visit Priory Grove in Wales' Wye Valley, where the technique is still practised on a small scale to benefit both people and wildlife. We meet site manager Rob and contractor Joe to learn more about the coppicing carried out here, and how this interaction between people and nature has enabled the two to develop and evolve in tandem. Also in this episode, find out how an unfortunate end for ash trees resulted in a fantastic sea of wild garlic, the team's efforts to encourage dormice, bats, pine martens and other wildlife and which tree to identify by likening the trunk to elephants' feet!  Don't forget to rate us and subscribe! Learn more about the Woodland Trust at woodlandtrust.org.uk Transcript You are listening to Woodland Walks, a podcast for the Woodland Trust presented by Adam Shaw. We protect and plant trees for people, for wildlife.  Adam: Well, today I am off to Priory Grove, which is next door really to the River Wye near Monmouth in Wales to meet the site manager Rob there who's gonna give me a bit of a tour. It's predominantly made up of ancient woodland and provides a wide range of habitats for wildlife. Things like roe, fallow deer, they're known to forage throughout the area, and a wide variety of bird species, including the tawny owl, sparrowhawk, and the great spotted woodpecker, which can all be seen on the wing here. All very exciting and I've just got to find it and find Rob.  Rob: Hello, I'm Rob Davies, site manager, South East Wales.  Adam: So tell me a little bit about where we are and why this is significant.  Rob: This is Priory Grove woodland. It's quite a large site on the outskirts of Monmouth, but nobody really knows what its history is. It's it's called Priory Grove, presumably because it was attached to one of the monastic estates round here. And that probably accounts for its survival as one of the one of the largest ancient woodlands next to Monmouth. And it did retain a lot of its coppice woodland, which is quite important for biodiversity.  Adam: Right. And what we're, I mean, we're standing by some felled, are these oak?  Rob: These are oak. Yes, oak, oak in length.  Adam: So why why have these been felled?  Rob: This is part of the coppice restoration programme, so coppicing on this site has been a management tool that's been used for hundreds if not thousands of years in this area and it's used to produce products like this, this oak that will go into timber framing and furniture and all those good things. And also, firewood is part of the underwood and the the the hazel and the the the understory coppice. So products for people and in the past it was used for all kinds of things before we had plastic. But it's still very useful, and so because it didn't cease until recently on this site, the animals and plants and the fauna that relies upon this method that have evolved with it essentially in the last 10,000 years or so since we've been managing woods in this way, still are present here on this site or in the local area. So if you continue the cycle you continue this interaction with the wildlife and you can help to reverse the biodiversity declines. So it's very holistic, really this management technique. But it does mean that to make space for the coppice regrowth, because trees don't grow under trees, you know it needs the light. The light needs to be there for the coppice to come up again. You have to take out some of these mature oaks that were planted 150, 200 years ago, with the intention of being used in the future. So we're planting things and we're carrying out the plans, we're bringing them to fruition, what people enacted a couple of hundred years ago.  Adam: It it's interesting, isn't it, because it it it is an ancient woodland, but that doesn't mean it's an untouched woodland, because for hundreds of years it's it's been managed. Man has had a hand in this and not only that, commerce has had a hand in that, so often I think we think of these things as a dichotomy. You have ancient woodland, nice, pristine sort of nature, and then you have sort of horrible invasive commerce. Actually, I think what's interesting about this site is that there isn't that dichotomy. They both work in tandem, is that fair?   Rob: That's right, it's a false dichotomy. So the reason these woods have survived is because they were used for people, and because of the way they're managed, coppicing and thinning is quite a sensitive technique, it allows space for nature to be present and to develop and evolve in tandem, so they're not mutually exclusive.  Adam: Yes. So tell me about coppicing is an important part of this site, tell me a little bit about what you're doing at the moment with that.  Rob: Yeah, so we've had a grant actually from the Wye Valley AONB from, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, to to do some coppicing work on stands that were coppiced about 20 years ago. So we're continuing that cycle. And we've been working with a company called Wye Coppice Community Interest Company, Wye Coppice CIC, and they're quite developed in, in the Wye Valley area. And we formed a good relationship with them and through them we've been able to do half a hectare of coppicing up on the other slope higher up in the site there. If you like we can go up and meet Joe?  Adam: That would be wonderful. Yeah. You you lead on I will follow. Well, you can hear from this I'm a bit out of breath, we've claimed, OK, I'll be embarrassed to say it's a hill, a small incline, but we've come across this stand of of felled trees. So just tell me a bit about what's going on here.  Rob: Exactly. So all these stumps you can see scattered throughout the stand. This is the coppice, so it's cut down to just above base ground level there now and it will just regrow. So it's kind of a natural defence strategy that we're just exploiting. So it's it's been used to, it's, you know, since it evolved things like hazel especially, it‘s used to being browsed off by animals, the animals move on and then the tree just comes back. So it's like a phoenix strategy it comes back, back up again. We're just exploiting that. So we'll cut the tree to base and then we'll protect the regrowth from the browsing animals and then the tree will come again.  Adam: Right, and this is the work done by Joe?  Rob: Yeah, this yeah so this is the work done by Joe Weaver. Joe's just down the end there actually if you want to come and meet him.  Adam: OK, let's go have it let's go meet him. Ohh I've got stuck. OK, so Joe, this is all your handiwork.  Joe: It is, yes.  Adam: Tell me a bit about what what it is you do then.  Joe: So I run Wye Coppice CIC, we're a coppice contracting company and working with Woodland Trust, Natural Resource Wales and Wildlife Trusts throughout the Wye Valley and we're embarking on a project to restore areas of the Wye Valley to restore, do a coppice restoration project for for various organisations throughout the Wye Valley. The what you see, what you see here is about 1 1/2 acres of cut down trees with 7 or 8 standards.  Adam: What are standards?  Joe: The standards are the trees that we've left behind, so, so they're the large, they're the larger trees.  Adam: Oh, I see right. So you wouldn't be coppicing, these are very well established big trees, you don't coppice trees like that, you coppice quite small trees, don't you?  Joe: Yes, so all the small diameter understory trees we've cut down to ground level and and they will, they will resprout and grow back again. We can then come back in 10 years and recut them and have a healthy supply of continue, a continual healthy supply of pole wood.  Adam: And yeah, so what you're trying to get with coppicing is sort of quite it's quite small diameter wood, is that correct?  Joe: Yes, generally speaking, so this is a restoration project you can see this first cut is fairly large diameter. And so most of this will go to make charcoal but generally speaking after 10, maybe 15 years of growth, we'll have poles about sort of thumb size and maybe up to about 50 pence diameter.  Adam: Right. And that's ideal size, is it?  Joe: And that's a really good size for products like bean poles, hedging stakes and binders that go on the top of naturally laid hedging and then various other pole wood applications.  Adam: And and when you see a coppiced tree, evidence that it's been coppiced, there's, I'm trying to look over there, is is this where you see lots of different branches actually coming out from the stump in the ground? That's evidence that's been coppiced, cause it not just one thing grows, lots of them?  Joe: That's right. So you can, if you have one birch tree standing up, for example, you can cut that down to the ground, and when you come back in a few months' time, you'll notice about 5 or 6 shoots coming from that one stump at the bottom of the ground. So if we can protect that from deer browsing and rabbit browsing, then those stems, those five or six shoots will grow up into individual stems that we can then use use in pole wood products.  Adam: It's odd, isn't it that that happens, though, that you chop down one sort of main stem and you get four or five coming back, that's sort of an  odd natural thing to happen, isn't it?  Joe: It is. I think it's the tree's response to the stress of being cut down. So it sort of puts out a lot of it puts a lot of energy into regrowing new growth to try to survive because essentially these broadleaf species, trees, they're they're forever growing, you can cut them down they'll regrow, cut them down again, they'll regrow again. So it's a constant cycle of of regrowth.  Adam: Yeah it's it's like sort of, you know, thumbing their nose at you isn't it, going well, you cut me down well I'm gonna come back fivefold. You know, that's it's a sort of really funny response.  Joe: Indeed. But we can reap the benefits of that.  Adam: Yeah no, no, it's, I get, I get why that's good. And coppicing itself, that, and that's an ancient art, isn't it?  Joe: It has, certainly here in the Wye Valley it was practised at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to produce charcoal to power the Industrial Revolution until coal was iintroduced and so it happened for hundreds and hundreds of years here.  Adam: Right. So you think, do you think I mean there's no need for you to be an historical expert on the history of coppicing, but do you think that's the first big sign of it happening, sort of Industrial Revolution time?  Joe: Certainly around here it is yeah, and there's some of the coupes that we've cut, some of the coppice areas that we've cut here, we've found evidence of charcoal hearths. So you can see flat areas with bits of charcoal sort of sliding down the bank.  Adam: So that would be ancient sites in here, well, ancient, I mean, a few 100 years old of them actually making charcoal in this woodland?  Joe: Yes, in this woodland, throughout the Wye Valley all the way throughout the Wye Valley here, yes.  Adam: Amazing. Now so your company, it's not just a traditional sort of private business, it is a a different sort of form. Just explain how that works.  Joe: So we run a community interest company and that allows us to access grant funding if we need to. Essentially, we're run as a private business, but we are able to do community outreach work as well and that's part of what we do is to try to educate people about sustainable woodland management.  Adam: And how did you get involved in all of this then? Did you grow up as a boy going I want to chop down trees to make fences.  Joe: No, I didn't. I was walking in the Dolomites, I saw two stoats fighting and thought woodland life is for me *laughs*.  Adam: Ok, well, fantastic, never heard that, so inspired by the the battle between two stoats and the and and the Dolomites. That's fantastic, but a hard life, I would have thought to run a business to, I mean it's physical work anyway, but that's my perception from the outside, is it hard work?  Joe: It it can be very difficult, it does have its benefits. Obviously it keeps you fit and it gets you outside but yes, it is a hard life and and you know it's it's quite a technical job as well and the training is expensive so we're trying to introduce a training programme as well through through our through our business Wye Coppice to try to get young people interested in woodland management.  Adam: And do you find that people sometimes don't understand or or perhaps disagree with the fact that commerce and nature can be actually mutually beneficial? Do you find that an issue at all?  Joe: Yes I do. Yes, and we're we're we're always willing to stop and talk to dog walkers especially. Shortly after COP26, we had two dog walkers come past and shout at us for chopping the trees down, after sitting down with them and having a cup of tea, they bought a bag of charcoal off us.  Adam: Right ok very good there we are. You're bringing them round one by one, one by one, those customers are coming over. Well brilliant and we've had not a bad day. I thought I might have to put my wet weather gear on, but it's been it's been OK. Anyway well, that's brilliant thank you very much. That's been really interesting.  Joe: Thank you.  Adam: So we've got this stand of trees we're looking at Rob. A couple couple of oak. Did you say that was a lime?   Rob: That's a lime yeah.   Adam: That's the lime, that that one with lots of ridges in it is that the lime?  Rob: That's it, yeah.  Adam: That's the lime. So why have you left these trees? Is there particular reasons you didn't take these ones out?  Rob: Yeah. So these as you can see, these are all mature trees and so you don't take these decisions lightly. So when we coppice this sort of half a football field area here, there were thirteen of these big mature trees, trees you can barely get your hands around as they're so large, taken a couple of hundred years to grow, so you've got to be quite careful and quite selective, although you need the light. There's an old adage about oak trees, it goes something like this that to fell an oak tree you need three things. You need a good eye, a sharp axe and a cold heart because these trees, you know they've been grown and nurtured and developed, and they're impressive life forms. And so it's not something you do without considering it very carefully so so you can see a couple of trees in here which are a couple of oaks, good size, but they're full of ivy, very dense ivy and that's very good for wintering bats. For hibernation, or for potentially summer roosting.  Adam: So the bats would live just amongst the Ivy, they'd sleep amongst the ivy?  Rob: Yeah when it gets as dense as this, when it's really all knotted, entwined, there's lots of gaps behind it. You could stick your hand in and find little cavities and several species of bat, especially pipistrelle, they they will hibernate over winter in this kind of growth. So you really don't want to be disturbing this.  Adam:  Right. And and what what's, is there something specific about lime that wildlife like is there any particular wildlife?  Rob: Well, it's good for bees. It's good good good pollen.  Adam: You get beehives in there? Oh I see, the pollen itself is good.  Rob: They like the flowers. Yeah yeah it produces lots of the small leaved lime it produces lots of good flowers and and it will attract aphids which is actually a food source for for dormice in the summer. So they they feed on the feed on the lime sap, you know if you park your car under a lime tree, you'll get this very sticky kind of substance coming off it.  Adam: Yes, yeah, yeah. Of course it does. Yes. Yeah, yeah.  Rob: So that attracts aphids, attracts the dormice, it's good for insects who like nectar as well. So it's a it's a very valuable tree and and you know  Adam: So interesting it's it's not valuable commercially, it's valuable for nature.  Rob: Yeah, absolutely. And it's quite it's quite a special tree in the in the Wye Valley, it doesn't occur much outside this area naturally, and it's kind of an ancient woodland indicator in this part of the world, perhaps not officially, but it's a.  Adam: OK. Any other trees we've got here?  Rob: Yeah. The rest of the trees, then are beech.  Adam: Right and you've kept those why?  Rob: Yeah, because you can see if you look at this one here, it's got quite a few cavities in it at the base at the top, beech tends to do that. It tends to take, form little cavities, rot holes and ways in, and that's ways in for fungus and then they eat out and hollow the tree. So the potential for harbouring bats again is very high in these trees. Without sort of going into them, doing some invasive exploration, you can't tell, but it's it's very high potential for bats. So again, bats, all species of bats in this country are protected under law because they've had massive declines like a lot of woodland species. And so we'll do everything we can to retain that habitat.  Adam: It's it's the Field of Dreams, philosophy. You you build it and they will come.  Rob: Yeah, yeah. This as long as it stays there, it'll always be valuable as habitat and so at least then, there are future sort of veteran trees within this stand.  Adam: It is interesting you you've already, I mean, we've only done a short part of this walk so far, but you talked about whoever was managing this woodland 100 years ago knew what they were talking about. And I think that's fascinating that we don't know who that person is or who who they, who those people were. And in 100 years time, people won't know who you were p.sumably, but the the evidence of your work will be here. They'll go yeah, that was a good bloke who did all this and left us with something.  Rob: That's it, you you don't plant trees for yourself, you plant trees for the future generation so you know, I won't see the oaks I plant develop. I'll be dead long before they mature and it's the same for the person who did this. But you can see the ones we took out, the ones I took out and selected were tall and straight. And that means that the coppice is well managed, because there was enough light for the hazel in the understory to come up straight away. If you cut hazel to the ground and you protect it, in a couple of years, it'll be way above six, eight foot and it'll just continue to get higher and higher over the next few years. And what that does is it shades the stem of the oak and it prevents side branching. So you get this very tall initial first stem. And that's what you're looking for. And that's what these trees had. So this would have clearly been cared for and these trees have been selected, they were on a journey from the moment they were planted.  Adam: OK. And just on my journey of education about trees, how do, what, they're beech, I wouldn't be able to spot that myself, what tells you they're beech?  Rob: It's a smooth trunk. If you look at this one here now you can see I always think of them as sort of elephant legs. They're grey and they're tall and they're smooth and they quite often have sort of knobbly bits on the base like an elephant's foot. And if you go through a stand of pure beech, it looks like it looks like a stand of elephants' feet, really tall, grey stems and these big huge buttress roots.  Adam: Fantastic. I am never going to forget that and I will always think of elephants when I look at a beech, a brilliant brilliant clue. Thank you. Right. So where we off to now?  Rob: We'll walk around so you can see the top of the coupe and just see the extent of it and and then we'll walk back down perhaps and have a look at this oak.   Adam: Brilliant. Well we've come to the, over the brow of the hill and along this path, there's a tiny little path for me to walk, and on either side there's a carpet of green. And I think I know what this carpet of green is. Rob, what is it tell me?  Rob: This is wild garlic.   Adam: Yeah. This is the time of year, is it?  Rob: Yep, you can see the flower heads. Ramsons it's also called, it's just about coming into flower now.  Adam: Sorry they're called what?  Rob: Ramson.  Adam: Ramson. Is that the flower itself is called ramson, or is that?  Rob: Well, just the plant.  Adam: We call it wild garlic but it's it's real name is ramson?  Rob: Well some people call it ramson too.  Adam: Right OK. And I never, I mean I have never picked and eaten anything from a forest because I am sure I will kill myself, but all of this, I mean, I've seen loads of people do that, pick wild garlic and it's, I mean there's there's acres of the stuff here.  Rob: It can it can yeah any kind of wild plant comes with the caveats that you need to know what you're doing.  Adam: Yes, which which I don't.  Rob: Yeah, absolutely. It's funny yeah, this site is quite well known for its ramsons, for its wild garlic carpets. This this is in response to something here, quite a sad thing actually. We're right next, you can probably hear the road noise there, we're right next to the main road from Monmouth into the Forest of Dean, Staunton Road there, and unfortunately, a lot of the trees along the road edge were big, big, mature ash trees. And they all had dieback and they were all dropping limbs and about to crush a car. And so, you know, we take that very seriously in terms of health and safety so the trees just along the road edge, we left the ones in the wood, just the road edge trees we had to do something about them, so they've either been reduced or felled and what that's done in this woodland where in the last 60 years, you have had very little management, like most woods, post war, very little has happened. So it becomes very high, very closed canopy, very dense. And what's happened, because of the ash felling is, you've got this pocket of light here and the ramsons have immediately responded to that. So this wasn't here last year. This carpet like this.  Adam: What so this is this is brand new?  Rob: This is brand new. It was the odd plant coming up every year, patches of it.  Adam: I'm shocked because this looks like something from the Wizard, if this was yellow, this would be we'd be in the middle of the Wizard of Oz set here, the yellow brick road. It just I mean it it's just a beautiful, winding, lush, dense path of wild garlic. It looks like it's been here forever.  Rob: And in a sense it it was. It was just waiting for the opportunity, waiting for that temporary disturbance caused by the ash felling. And so like with the coppicing, that's what we're trying to recreate essentially, is these temporary pockets of disturbance where you you break up the canopy, you get this flush of greenery and then until the trees recover it and regrow again. So you don't want this homogeneous block of woodland really. You want, you want variation, because that's the key to success for, for wildlife and biodiversity, different niches, different ages. If you look closely, you can see it's not just the garlic either. You can see wood anemone, you can see greater wood vetch, you can see little violets. So, you know, quite quite a lot of species are now taking advantage of this temporary light that the ash felling's produced.  Adam: It is a nice positive message, isn't it? Because ash dieback has been a real tragedy. But even in the midst of problems there are opportunities which nature comes back with, it's an optimistic sign.  Rob: There is and so this as I say, you know these these trees would have coppiced without us because you know when animals browse them, they they they they come back after that so all we're doing is sort of recreating these natural processes through the management of the woodland. A once in a lifetime storm might have knocked these ash out or a hurricane, something like that, could have felled the whole area and then temporary open space, the plants capitalise and then the wood comes back again, so we're just just mimicking what nature does anyway.  Adam: I'm going to take a photo of this, put it on my Twitter feed. It's fantastic. So we've just taken a little stop on this path of wild garlic. So over to the right is well, I thought it was a bird box, it's a large bird box. You tell me it's actually something very specific.   Rob: Yeah, this is a pine marten nest box cause there was there has been a big release of pine marten. Pine martens are native to this country. It's kind of like a large weasel that lives in the trees. That's a really bad way of describing it, but it's a it's a mustelid. It's a large, impressive, intelligent animal and they were sort of pressed to persecute, to extinction, with persecution in the past. But they're very important in these woods for regulating, you know, the biodiversity, they, they prey on the grey squirrel especially, and they'll regulate bird numbers like any predator does. So it's it's great to see them coming back and it's a success story actually, because a couple of years ago now there was a release programme where captive animals were put into the Forest of Dean which is just over that direction. And so we put up some boxes and monitored them and pine martens are moving back into this area now. Whether they're using the boxes or not, we're not entirely sure, but they are moving in, so it's a, it's a really good story. So we'll do whatever we can to sort of encourage them because we've we've lost a lot of this old growth woodland that we're trying to protect and so they haven't got the nest cavities, so temporarily we'll provide this habitat.  Adam: And over the other side of the little dip, there's another pathway and it looks like the bank has been cut away and it's very black so that it doesn't look quite natural. What's going on there?  Rob: Well the the track that's been put in there is exposed, an earlier industry, so that's that's a charcoal platform. See what is it about five, five metres in diameter. Sort of sort of circular and very, very thick layer of charcoal. A huge fire has been there, but that's that's lots and lots of fires, one on top of the other.  Adam: So this is this is not current, this is probably a couple of hundred years old?  Rob: I think the last burn in this woodland would have been before the Second World War.  Adam: Oh right, so not that old.  Rob: Well, I mean, if they were still burning, they would have had the odd one, but this probably dates to sort of the the height of the the periods of the the late 19th century. So this here, it's been buried and forgotten about. But it shows you as Joe was saying earlier, at one point this was a managed wood and quite a few woods in Wales if you look on the maps you'll see things like coed poeth, which probably roughly translates as sort of hot wood or or burning woods, very roughly, probably, which gives you, may may give you an indication that these woods were worked and if you came here, you would have probably seen people living in the woods with the charcoal, tinner and charcoal workers, especially in the the 19th century, would have moved in in the summer to do the charcoal production with their families.  Adam: Just living in a tent or something?  Rob: Living in on site yeah, because then you know you don't want to move products, move things twice. You know, it's it's an economic, so you bring your family in, you produce your product, and then you come out with it at the end of the season so it's very peaceful here today. You can hear the birds. It's great for wildlife, but it would have been a managed landscape and we're trying to introduce a little bit of that. Obviously not people living in the woodlands anymore, but there's space for both here within this woodland, a bit a bit of coppicing a bit of management and reserve areas.  Adam: And I mean, I I hadn't quite noticed it while we were walking, but now we're we're standing here on this green carpet, there is an overpowering smell of garlic, it's quite extraordinary. It's very fresh, you know, sometimes when you're in the kitchen and the garlic it's it's, it's not fresh, it's pungent, but this is, you know, it's mixed with the sort of cool air, it's a really lovely smell.  Rob: It's making me hungry, actually.  Adam: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. Well I was thinking whether I should pick some for dinner.  Rob: Chop some up. Pasta sauce. It's lovely with that.  Adam: Yeah, yeah, yeah, lovely. And and there's another one amongst this wild garlic, it's clock, what was it?  Rob: Yeah, this one here, it's the town hall clock or moschatel as it's known.  Adam: Town hall clock that's it. So just, what's the what's its proper name?  Rob: Moschatel. Well, that, that's it's another acronym, ah pseudonym really it's moschatel.  Adam: Moschatel.  Rob: Or town hall clock. I forget the Latin actually, to my shame.  Adam: Is moschatel the Welsh word for it, or it's not  Rob: No, it's not. It's a general general word, just a colloquial local term.  Adam: And why is it called the town hall clock?  Rob: Look you can see these four, the flowers have four sides to them, like an old town hall clock would.  Adam: Right, lovely. It's really quite, quite a rich path we're wandering down.  Rob: You see the the bluebells are out look just now, if you look up into the wood there you can see them. In Welsh they're called clychau'r gog, which is the cuckoo bell.  Adam: Wow. Cuckoo bell.  Rob: Because it comes out when the cuckoo comes. Apparently, the grant paid for like a fence, contractors to fence off that, this boundary here, stop the deer coming in from the Dean. To stop the wild pigs actually, pigs are a  Adam: You get wild pigs here?  Rob: They're a nuisance round here, yeah.  Adam: Wild pigs?  Rob: They call them, they're not really boar, because a boar will produce like, I don't know, maybe a litter of six, and these pigs will do 22.   Adam: Right. Blimey. And how big are they?  Rob: They look like boar.  Adam: So and boar can be quite violent, can't they, quite aggressive.  Rob: Yeah, they're sort of half breed, half pig, half boar. They're big animals, got a cute little stripey piglets, just like a boar does. But they, you know, they're exponential in their reproduction, so they're  Adam: And and they're around this wood?  Rob: They're here.  Adam: So do they cause a problem with eating or do they nibble on the new trees and stuff?  Rob: Yeah, yeah, well, they sort of rootle, I mean you want boar, because they were here originally. You want boar, like the deer, you want them in sustainable numbers, they're all sleeping now.  Adam: Do they come out at night?  Rob: They only come out at night yeah.  Adam: I'll have to return.  Rob: Yeah. I mean you'd see them if you went up to the top path up there.  Adam: We haven't done a night podcast. I think we should do some bats and.  Rob: You can do bats, if you wait, while you're waiting for the badgers to come out, you can do the bats. There's a few sites around here where you can watch them.  Adam: OK, well maybe  Rob: I'm sure there's other Trust sites where people know.  Adam: Maybe I'll come back.  Rob: One summer when I was doing my bachelor's degree, I was working in Llanelli in like a, just a café just to get some money. I was working with the local girls there, I'd been out surfing in Llangennith on the Gower the day before and I was like just telling her how the seals came in because they chased the mackerel in just beyond the surf line and I was sitting there and the water just boiled with the stench of of fish and mackerel and I looked around and two seals popped up and they were driving the mackerel into the back of the waves to hunt them. I was telling her this and she was like, what, you're telling me there's seals in the water here, in Llanelli, where? I said just in the Gower. Seals? Like seals seals, like live in water? I said there's seals there, yeah, they've always been there, we just don't value what's around us.  Adam: We don't notice it.  Rob: We don't notice because you can't see it, you don't see it, yeah.  Adam: It's interesting, isn't it, Attenborough has done a series recently on the UK and you go, you don't have to go to Africa or Latin America to see these things.  Rob: There you go. I was in West Wales last week in Aberaeron, and you can see bottlenose dolphins. Increasingly under threat there's that number of point but yeah, but they're there. You can see the seals, you can see them all around us, yeah. This is doing well.  Adam: Well, I'm going to have to leave our little trip down the Wye Valley with some rather unexpected chat about seals and bottlenose dolphins and a promise to return one dark night to meet some bats. Until next time, happy wandering.  Thank you for listening to the Woodland Trust Woodland Walks with Adam Shaw. Join us next month, when Adam will be taking another walk in the company of Woodland Trust staff, partners and volunteers. Don't forget to subscribe to the series on iTunes or wherever you're listening to us and do give us a review and a rating. And why not send us a recording of your favourite woodland walk to be included in a future podcast? Keep it to a maximum of five minutes and please tell us what makes your woodland walk special or send us an e-mail with details of your favourite walk and what makes it special to you. Send any audio files to podcast@woodlandtrust.org.uk. We look forward to hearing from you. 

Joe Soltis, CEO, ChoiceLocal (Cleveland, OH)   Joe Soltis is CEO at ChoiceLocal, which Joe describes as “the top performing franchise growth engine” with a “money back guarantee.” The agency offers a wide scope of services for franchisors and franchisees of over 50 brands, enabling them to provide “Fortune 500 level customer service, results, strategy, and ROI on the franchisee level” for a “small and medium size business price.”  Large clients might be parent companies of franchise systems, franchisors owning 20 or more franchise systems where each system may have from 20 to 200 franchisees – and up to as many as 6,000 internal franchise units. Small franchise systems may have 10 units. For these smaller clients, the agency facilitates franchise development, consumer, new customer, location, company, and digital talent recruitment marketing. Joe says hiring is a challenge, especially in the franchise space. The agency needs to understand its client's hiring needs, the kind of candidates it desires, and the historical hire rates to know the number of applicants to target . . . then reverse engineer the hire rate/cost per quality candidate by channel and implement the most effective marketing strategy to ensure future growth. Joe says they use the same channels as they do for consumer marketing (in a different order), plus some that are recruitment specific. Joe notes that franchise operations need to beware . . . a lot of agencies will lock clients into proprietary technology solutions . . . that don't fit. ChoiceLocal strives to find the right tools for each client to build a “win-win” ecosystem where franchisor, franchisee, and the agency all win. He says it's important that the tool providers are companies sensitive to client needs, adaptable to a changing market, and willing to invest in “making sure that you can use their tool to provide the best in the world customer service to your end customers.” Joe started his career working his way up for 10 years in a company that grew to serve Fortune 500 companies. At a time of great personal loss, he changed the direction of his life. In his words, I always said I wanted to be successful so that I could help people, and that day it changed to “I don't want to just build something; I want to help people and I want to do it now. I don't want to be successful so that I can help people later. I want to do it now.” Joe started ChoiceLocal with the mission “to help others” – the agency's franchisor and franchisee partners, agency teammates (to make their dreams and aspirations reality), and people in the community.  Joe structured the agency with the goal of having employees work their 40-hours, then “unplug and leave work at work.” With a teammate Net Promoter Score in the 70s (far exceeding the “good” score, which is in the 30s), the agency has been a Top Workplace in Northeast Ohio for the past five years. When Covid struck, the agency created a ChoiceLocal Economic Stimulus Package to help its customers “grow through the downturn,” an initiative that Joe estimates saved 30 franchisees from going out of business.  Giving back to the community is “baked into” the agency's DNA, with 10% of profits dedicated to helping “kids in need.” Joe says the agency's “big hairy audacious goal is to help 10,000 kids a year.” As of this interview, the agency had already helped 6,000 kids in 2022 through such things as meal programs, partnering with Habitat for Humanity to provide a home for an in-need family, and through team members' personal volunteer work in the community. Joe says the next thing after achieving this goal would be to “raise the goal.” Recently, the agency spun off a dental franchise, Broadview Dental Group, which Joe targets to be “the largest provider of dental care in the United States within 10 years.” Expectations are that dentists following this franchise system “can have 4.5 times the profit of a typical dental practice and only have to work three days a week to do it.” In this franchise system, a dentist maintains 100% of the business's equity and, on retirement, can sell the franchise. Joe can be reached on his agency's website at choicelocal.com, by following ChoiceLocal on social media channels @ChoiceLocal, by following Joe on Twitter @helpothersjoe, or by connecting with him on LinkedIn.  ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Joe Soltis, CEO at ChoiceLocal based in Cleveland, Ohio. Welcome to the podcast, Joe. JOE: Rob, great to be with you today. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about ChoiceLocal? What is the firm's specialty? What is your superpower? What are you known for? Hit us with it. JOE: We're the top performing franchise growth engine. We work exclusively with franchisors and franchisees, and the reason we do that is we want to give Fortune 500 level customer service, results, strategy, and ROI, but we want to be able to do it when you look on the franchisee level at a small and medium size business price while delivering that. When we do that, we offer a money back guarantee. We're the first and only franchise marketing agency to offer that money back guarantee. We work with 50+ brands. We're one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S., members of the IFA, the whole nine yards.  ROB: Wow, congratulations. There's a certain clarity to that that is certainly appreciated. Let's peel it back just a layer. When we think about franchise, I think some of us think about restaurants, but there are franchises of all stripes. There is plumbing. There are franchise marketing agencies, for that matter. So what does a typical customer look like? Is there a particular range of franchises, of locations? Because you could have two or two thousand. What's a typical engagement look like? JOE: We work with some franchise systems that are owned by what we would call a platform, like a parent company that owns franchise systems. There are some franchisors that we work with that actually own 20+ franchise systems, and within each of those franchise systems there can range anywhere between 20 franchisees on the small side and 200 on the large side. So, we're talking within these companies 2,000-unit franchise operations, and some franchise systems that we work with even have 6,000+ franchise units within them. Also, on the other end of the spectrum, there are franchise systems that we work with that are 10-unit franchise systems. We power them on franchise development, we power them on consumer marketing and new customer marketing for their franchisees as well as their company and locations, and we also power their talent recruitment through digital marketing to drive highly qualified applicants. Staffing is obviously a huge challenge in today's world, and particularly within the franchising space. ROB: That's a little bit of a wider scope of services than I think we often hear in local marketing, especially once you get into the recruitment side. So that's interesting. Is it the same channels for getting customers in and getting employees in? Is it different? What's the mix of touchpoints there? JOE: It is the same channels, used in a different order, plus there are additional channels that are recruiting specific. Obviously, there's different job boards that are highly important in the recruiting space, and then there's also a whole host of digital channels that can be activated, from geotargeted Google Ads to Facebook advertising. Each of them has their strengths and their weaknesses. Our job within these franchise systems is to understand what their hiring needs are, who they're looking to hire, what their historical hire rates are so we know how many applicants we need to drive, and then we can also reverse engineer the hire rate by channel, and then we can from there figure out their cost per quality applicant by channel and then develop a marketing mix that's going to allow them to continue to grow. ROB: There's a lot going on there. Over time we've seen different platforms that have tried to jump to the forefront to help, I think, organizations like ChoiceLocal, handle marketing for multilocation, for franchises. What's the state of the tool ecosystem for this? Has any tool that tries to help with this problem and actually create a library of content to push out to different locations worked? Or has it not worked and you end up building some of those solutions yourselves? How do you look at dozens of locations, different local needs, some shared content, that sort of thing? JOE: There are a lot of agencies that will come in and sell franchise systems, their own proprietary tech in order to bring that about. What we've generally found is when these marketing agencies bring in their proprietary tech, it's more in the agency's interest and less in the interest of the franchisor and the franchisee. Essentially, it's “Here, take this marketing solution. Take our proprietary tech, and then it's impossible for you to leave us.” That's how they set that up, and it can create some difficulty and a lot of angst within these different franchise systems. When working in the franchising space, what you need to do is build a win-win ecosystem where the franchisor wins, the franchisee wins, and as a byproduct of that, as the agency you win as well. There's a whole host of various tools in this, from Rallio to WebPunch to SOCi. There's a lot of others. Yext. These are all various powerful tools that can be used and deployed. There's other powerful tools in the call tracking space, too. You have companies like CallRail who do a really strong job with this, with call analytics and those types of things. The job of the agency is to find the right tools that are right for that franchise system while also using their agency buying power to leverage economies of scale and do what's in the best interest of their client partners. ROB: If I hear you correctly, there's not a one-size-fits-all best franchise management tool. It is a little bit of a best of breed, it's a what are the needs of your particular brand/set of stores, that kind of thing. Sometimes it is Yext, maybe sometimes you bring CallRail to the table. You're the experts, and you're prescribing the menu that you recommend. JOE: Yeah, that is right. One thing, too, as you follow these companies – depending on how much they're investing in R&D, how much they're willing to listen to their customer, how much they're willing to allow their agency partners to fuel their product roadmap and guide their product roadmap – that's really how you're going to pick your partners, in large part. There's a lot of these SaaS companies that are not very customer service minded. They're more like “Get in, sign up for a product, and then leave us alone” kind of deal, and as an agency, that's not the kind of partner you're looking for. You're looking for ones that will invest in making sure that you can use their tool to provide the best in the world customer service to your end customers. Why I say that is that's something to look out for in the beginning. And the other reason I say that is the companies that are willing to invest in their customer service also tend to invest in their product development, and you'll notice there's ebbs and flows of who's good and who's bad when they do this. And things change, so you've got to find a partner that's always looking to change and adapt with the market as it changes and evolves. ROB: It's interesting how the cast of characters has changed. When I google for this problem space, Hootsuite is out there, Content and Sprout are out there contending for just a small slice of that franchise deal. But you know they're chasing every other vertical in social as well. I can certainly appreciate – we're in Atlanta; CallRail is a neighbor company here. Do you know their roots a little bit? It's an interesting background on them. JOE: It's a really neat company. ROB: The founder started off with a site to help people with BMWs that were out of warranty to find a local repair shop. My understanding is if you have a BMW that's out of warranty, you need a local repair shop. That's what I've heard. So, he started off doing lead gen for these local shops and then built call tracking to help prove the value of his BMWershops.com website, and ended up building CallRail from it. JOE: What's neat about CallRail, too, is they really have come in – there's a lot of companies that historically have played in that place, and they really trounced them. Some of their advanced features and some of their call analytics, listening to calls, transcribing calls, turning them into qualified leads, or basically saying what's a qualified lead, what's a hot lead, what's not a lead, and how they built some of that technology – it's pretty cool stuff. ROB: Yeah, there's a tremendous customer focus there. I do want to shift gears for a moment; I want to get to the origin story of ChoiceLocal. What led you to create this firm? What led you to this point of focus, of all the areas you could have focused on helping and niches you could have served? JOE: I served at a company that served multibillion dollar companies. I was a Vice President of Operations of Product Development there. We served Fortune 500 companies – FedEx, CBS, other multibillion dollar publicly traded companies. That's where I spent my day and that's who I served. We built a team of 180 full-time digital marketers. Kind of a neat story. Started as employee #8, within a few years worked my way up to VP of Ops and Product Development and did that. It was cool. I learned a lot and I had some really great mentors while I was there. The owners there have done some really amazing things outside of agency, just building multimillion dollar companies and multibillion dollar companies and taking some of them public, like NCS Healthcare and others. So, I learned a ton while I was there over that 10-year period. Then in 2012, we had a pregnancy. Went into an ultrasound room with my wife and there was no heartbeat. So we lost our son, Ben, pretty late in the pregnancy. I always said I wanted to be successful so that I could help people, and that day it changed to “I don't want to just build something; I want to help people and I want to do it now. I don't want to be successful so that I can help people later. I want to do it now.” That's actually how ChoiceLocal got started. In its simple form, our mission always has been – our mission and our core values were written prior to even having a business plan – our mission is help others. We help our partners succeed, our franchisor and franchisee partners, help their dreams and aspirations become a reality. We help our teammates' dreams and aspirations become a reality. We've been a Top Workplace in Northeast Ohio five years running. We have a teammate Net Promoter Score in the 70s, which is unheard of high. You ask people, “What is a good employee Net Promoter Score?”, the answer is 30. We're hanging out in the 70s. So, we really work to live that mission and really care about others. Working in the agency space, a lot of agencies will bring in talent, they will work them like crazy for like five years until they burn out, and then they leave and they go in-house. Having experienced that and have friends who've experienced that in other companies, I wanted to do something fundamentally different. That's why we founded ChoiceLocal and built it the way that we have. But our mission of help others is also giving back. We take 10% of the profits out of the company and we use it to help kids in need. Our big hairy audacious goal is to help 10,000 kids a year. We created the Benjamin Isaac Foundation, named after our son, Ben. We just gave a home to a single mother with three kids. Her name is Brie; she's got three beautiful boys. We just had their house dedication two weekends ago, and that was through Habitat for Humanity. We were the sole sponsor for the home. Got to meet her beautiful boys. We helped them move in, had the housewarming and a dedication. It was so cool. It's just so cool. We do tons of other stuff like that. So far this year – it's now June, and we are at a little over 6,000 kids that we've helped through various charities that we partner with. ROB: Well, 4,000 more to go and then another goal. JOE: Yes, raise the goal. ROB: There's a depth in that origin story. I think something that is interesting to think through – when you have a team, when you're giving to causes, how do you connect the day-to-day of what the team is doing to the causes that the company is giving to and really ensure that there's an authentic connection there? I think it can be very disconnected sometimes. Here's the owner, here's the team, we're building this stuff, some money got shot out over here – to a good cause, but maybe it doesn't feel relevant to the day-to-day. So how do you think about connecting the team to the cause? JOE: That's a great question. It's a really great question. The first thing is we hire for people that have the core values that we have. Family, giving, integrity in all things. There's certain ways that you can interview people to make sure that they have those. And if you actually study some of the psychology behind it, if you study various hiring techniques that are used in books like Topgrading and WHO and those types of things, there's ways you can interview for those core values and competencies to screen people out that don't have that. So, you're hiring people that believe what you believe and then you're coming into a culture that celebrates those core values and celebrates those things. For example, we have a team meeting every single month where we update on everything that's happening in the agency, what's going on with business strategy. We're transparent on financials and performance and all of those things so everybody can see what's going on. We have a part where we talk about help others and core values. In core values, people nominate teammates and they celebrate how they live those core values out, and we tell those stories. A lot of those core values are how we help our partners and internally, but it's also how we give back. And then we tie in our financial performance. We then say, “Because we were able to do this, we were able to give Brie and her three boys this gift.” We make it very personal. Along those lines, we also have quarterly volunteering. We try to get every teammate to volunteer once a quarter so they can see, feel, and touch the work they're doing. My personal favorite is when we go to the Boys and Girls Club of America. Those kids need love, they need support, they need good mentors, and when you go there, you feel fantastic afterwards because you've been able to deliver some of that for them. So that's really powerful. And then we also do this BHAG walkthrough. BHAG stands for big hairy audacious goal. We have this roadmap, and then we say, “Here's three kids that were helped because of this. Here's 1,600 kids that were fed for a year in a place of education.” We did this charity giveaway through our annual thing at the International Franchise Association called the ChoiceLocal 10k Charity Giveaway. People enter a drawing giveaway. There's a really cool story – there's a woman who served as a board member of the International Franchise Association; today she owns about 20 Taco Johns franchises. Very successful businesswomen. She picked the Great Harvest Heartland as her charity, and she ended up winning. What I found out after she won is that as a kid, she was so poor that she needed to go to the foodbank to eat. So, it was a very personal gift for her. That's the type of stuff that really hits home, when you always tie it to that personal story. And then when you say, “Because you were able to do this specifically,” and you name the person, “it allowed us to be able to do this.” Sorry, I'm passionate about this – the last thing I'll add to it is helping the business owner. This particular franchisee is having a really hard time and they're on the verge of going out of business. We had a good amount of this through COVID. We announced the ChoiceLocal Economic Stimulus Package for our customers. We have this whole “grow through the downturn” quarterly priority and theme. We saved probably 30 franchisees from going out of business during COVID, and that was really cool. We celebrated each one of those as a company during the team meetings and made a really big deal out of it, because it's a huge deal. They put their life savings into the business. Together, we helped save their business. That's flipping awesome. It's really cool. ROB: What an opportunity. I hear a certain proximity that you're referring to within the team. Is all of your team right there, one office, one team? Is that your world, or are people in different places? JOE: It used to be that way, pre-COVID. We were in the office three days a week, and Monday/Friday work from home. COVID hit and we went 100% remote. Then we had highest teammate Net Promoter Score ever, highest client Net Promoter Score ever, highest revenue ever by far, highest profit dollars. We're like, this is working really well. So we surveyed our team and said, “What do you guys want to do?” and everybody said basically, work from home, come into the office once. So, we instituted that. What we then found is about 10-15% of our staff in a given week would come into the office, and they'd come in on different days, and when they came in there was like 3% of our staff there. It felt a little lonely, and some people like that connectedness. So I just met with our leadership team on this this past week; we're probably going to be instituting now – we do a lot of stuff on Slack. I know a lot of companies do. Basically, we're going to have ChoiceLocal In-Office Day. It's going to be completely optional, but everybody that's going to go is going to go into Slack, fill out this poll, and RSVP and say “Hey, I'm going to be in the office this day” and try to get other teammates to come in. And then they're going to have a group of probably 30-40% of the company in on that individual day, and they can hang out together. Plus we do all the fun stuff. We have team meets once a month. Those are in person. About half the company comes to those; the rest are virtual. We bring in catered food. We're in Cleveland, so we're going to watch a Cleveland Guardians, which used to be the Cleveland Indians, game. ROB: Yeah, that's an adjustment there as well. JOE: Stuff like that. We do Topgolf. We do a big Christmas party every year. Stuff like that. It's fun. It's so fun. ROB: It sounds like an adjustment, but it sounds like listening to the team, it sounds like adjusting well. When I think about folks I've known in the agency world in Cleveland, there's no shortage of opportunity to lose your team to the revolving door of brands. That seems like it's probably the way of life there – not to mention the regional opportunities with vendors. It really does take some work to keep them on the agency side, I think. JOE: Historically, at my prior agency that was definitely a continual challenge. We launched ChoiceLocal with the mission of help others, with the goal – we're not perfect at this; I don't want to sugarcoat it – but with the goal of being a fast-paced, high energy environment, but you work 40 hours, then you unplug and you leave work at work. We were able to build our systems so that's possible. We historically have had almost no turnover. Now, with that said, this year during COVID, our turnover rate has spiked a bit, but it's nothing like I was ever used to. In a year we would have maybe, out of 100 people, like 1 to 2 people leave that we didn't want to leave. Historically. This year that number is probably up to like 4 out of 100. ROB: Yeah, that's turnover, but it's not a high turnover rate. It is managing what it is. It sounds like you have learned a lot along the way. As you think about lessons you've learned building ChoiceLocal, are there particular things you think of that you would wish to go back and tell yourself to do differently if you were able to? JOE: There's a whole host of things. One of the things I have as an advantage is I was a political science major, and I learned absolutely nothing in college that is useful to me today. [laughs] ROB: A beginner's mindset is what you're saying. [laughs] JOE: Yeah, exactly. There's this book called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, and there's so much truth to that. I was raised treat others the way you want to be treated, and that's how I've always operated. I've always brought that to what I do because I thought it's the right thing to do. But I've actually found it's an amazingly sound business strategy. What I'm going to say now may be a little bit controversial, but there's so much stuff that you learn in business school, like when you're getting your MBA and those types of things, and so much of that you need to throw out and ignore because it's trash. For example, you're a service-based business, so a person is not a commodity. A person is not a tool to be used. A person is not a KPI. They are a person with dignity, a person who has a family, a person who deserves to be cared about, loved, and appreciated. If you just do that and focus on that first, the business results tend to take care of themselves. But at the same point, KPIs are important. Accountability is important. Ensuring that you have that is critical. Knowing that you hire right for core values first and for performance second, but also critically important – all of that integrates really well, and those are really important things. The last thing, from a mistake that I made, that I'll say is there's a book called Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Else Smarter, and basically the premise of the book – and this happens for a lot of folks in agencies, particularly in leadership positions – how did you get successful? You got successful by busting your butt and being pretty smart about the way you do things. That's how you were successful. The weakness that comes with that is as you get a bigger team, you need to shut up, you need to ask questions, and you need to be humble. That's the next level. And that book, for me, as I was evolving and growing as a leader, taught me those skills. It played a really important role, and now it's something I believe in so strongly. I met with a future VP of our organization who's probably going to get promoted to a VP very, very shortly, and I said, “Read this book. Take it to heart and do it.” Then I said, “Here's all the stupid things that I did, and here's how this book helped me.” ROB: You start to pull apart some pieces, many questions come to mind. I start to think about – clearly, when you talk about future VP, there's some planning there. There's still some awareness of individuals in your organization, even though at 100 people, it starts to get hard to know everyone. Especially when some people aren't even coming in one day a week, possibly. It's an interesting mix. I think this probably had to be intentional for you as well – building up the leadership team. What are the pieces you've put in place at different stages in the business to build around you to be your best, but also to help the company be its best, maybe where you aren't? JOE: Hire generous people, people that love helping other people be successful. If you have people on your leadership team that don't believe that, don't have them on your leadership team. And if you don't believe that, work on it. [laughs] It's so critical. You need to hire generous people, surround yourself with generous people. It's funny; I was like, we're the world's best at marketing for franchise systems, world's best at franchise development, consumer marketing for franchising; we're the world's best at recruiting for franchise systems. Why don't we just own a franchise system? So, we launched a separate franchise system, hired a guy who led another franchise system to $750 million in network revenue to be the CEO of it. And he believes what we believe. What attracted him to us first and foremost – and he's got an amazing track record in franchising – was our values. He's a generous person. He believes in integrity. He believes in accountability and performance at the same time. So, you've got to find people that believe that and have those competencies. The other thing I'll say is it's important, if you're hiring somebody to lead a business, that they understand that business. You can do it and you can be successful if you don't understand it inside and out, but it's way harder. If you can find people with the right values but also who have worked at different levels in that industry over the course of their career, they can understand the strengths and weaknesses of various decisions, and when you make a decision, how it affects people in different parts of the organization or what you're actually asking and what it entails to make it happen. Which tends to result in better decisions being made, better business performance, less mistakes. Those are the types of things that you really look for. ROB: What franchise business have you got yourself into, then, now? JOE: The name of it is Broadview Dental Group. Our vision is to be the largest provider of dental care in the United States within 10 years. We have some aggressive plans, but I am very confident that we're going to be able to pull it off. ROB: And I've heard that some different models of roll-up franchise operating groups – I've heard they're taking the dental world kind of by storm. The independent dentist is starting to dry up a little bit. Are you seeing that? Is that part of the move? JOE: Yes, it is, and it's sad. What's ended up happening – there actually is one other franchise system in the dental space. I wouldn't call it a real franchise system. That sounds arrogant. I don't mean it that way. But if you look at how franchise systems typically operate, where they basically have some sort of buy-in and then some sort of royalty, it's set up very different with the buy-in being extremely, extremely, extremely high. It's different. But if you look at most of them, they're called DSOs or DPOs, and what they basically do is a dentist is like “Hey, I want to get my practice to the next level.” Then these DSOs or DPOs, which are typically funded by venture capital – this isn't always the case, but typically with venture capital, they care about one thing, which is maximizing shareholder wealth. They'll say, “Okay, you want to take your business to the next level? Sign here. We get 70% equity in your business up to 90% over time, and we can fire you if we want to, and we'll help get your business to the next level.” When you're a dentist and you're passionate about helping others and you're passionate about your practice and your trade, you basically just need a really good business mentor, and most dentists really haven't had it. So what we're doing is giving them 100% equity in their own business, a way to get to the point where they can have 4.5 times the profit of a typical dental practice and only have to work three days a week to do it, and all they need to do is follow our system. And they own 100% of their business. They can sell it when they want to, and when they sell it, they'll sell it for a higher multiple because guess what? In franchising, when you sell your business when you're ready to retire, it's worth more because it's a franchise system and it's proven. There's less risk involved. ROB: Right, it's not (Your Name) Dentistry. It is part of an umbrella. There's brand equity there, there's a system. They don't have to figure it all out. One of my college roommates, his dad was in the dental world, and when you mentioned the high fee to buy in – he always told me dentists like to buy expensive things, so I guess the franchise must be one of those things, just priced for the market, I suppose. When we look ahead to what's next for ChoiceLocal, what's next for marketing in the franchising world, Joe, what are you seeing? What are you excited about for the firm, for what is going to be necessary for your clients to continue as the marketing world evolves? What are you seeing? JOE: There's so much exciting growth ahead. One of the things that I love about being an agency that focuses on ROI and provable results is every time there's an economic downturn, it's good for the agency growth and it's good for your customers. What happens is when there's an economic recession, which I believe we're headed into – we have horrible inflation and there's certain policies that have to be implemented to bring it under control, and the result of that is going to be a recession. What happens in those cases is companies tend to pull back in marketing. But if you're driving marketing where for every dollar they spend, you're giving them $18 in new customer revenue, it's stupid not to spend that. You can grow through the downturn. You can take market share. Imagine putting a dollar in the stock market and getting $18 back within a year. It's a brilliant investment. It's a simple investment. So, what's going to end up happening is that's going to accelerate growth within agencies that are ROI-focused as this economic recession hits, and for however long it hits for. That's exciting. But what I'm also excited about in the newer leading-edge things within agencies is the ability for big data backed with artificial intelligence to transform marketing, to transform business, and frankly to transform medicine. I was talking with the COO of ChoiceLocal, who serves a role with Broadview as well, and we're like, who ever thought that two internet marketers would fundamentally change healthcare and dental care in the U.S.? You'd be like, “Explain that.” It's the same thing you do in marketing with big data. If you have a massive amount of data in a HIPAA compliant way, you can anonymize it, data mine it, and find correlations and causations and literally, with that type of patient data pool, you can change medicine. Similarly, you can do the same thing with marketing, where you can data mine, you can find ways to micro-target ideal customers based on who current ideal customers are – and you may not even know what some of those things are – and then you can target them and measure the performance and lift. That's crazy cool stuff. And that's the newer leading-edge stuff that's really exciting, particularly when you're dealing with franchise systems and the volume that's behind that. ROB: Right. You've got volume there, you've got a growing scale in the business. To think about leveraging it for more than just “Hey, we're bigger” – lots of interesting things there. Joe, when people want to find and connect with you and with ChoiceLocal, where should they go to find you? JOE: They can go to choicelocal.com. Everything is there. They can follow ChoiceLocal on pretty much every social media channel that exists @ChoiceLocal. So they can do that. They can follow me personally on Twitter @helpothersjoe or connect with me on LinkedIn. I try to post a lot of content there that's specific to purpose-driven business, which is a huge passion of mine, as well as franchising and marketing as well. So yeah, @helpothersjoe on Twitter is for me personally. ROB: That's excellent. Joe, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for sharing your experiences. Congratulations on what you've built so far and why you're building it. I think everyone listening has enjoyed the depth in the origin of the business and the intentionality as you build it. JOE: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for all you've done and thanks for having me on today. It really is a great pleasure. Really appreciate you. ROB: All right, appreciate you. Take care. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Susan Britton, Owner/ Principal Creative Director, Britton Marketing & Design Group (Fort Wayne, IN)   Susan Britton is Owner and Principal Creative Director at Britton Marketing & Design Group, a branding boutique agency that focuses on strategy, design, and helping its color-trended consumer goods clients better brand and market themselves. Sue started her career at Vera Bradley and rode a 9-year growth boom where things changed so rapidly the company had to reinvent itself every six months. (Revenues increased from $10 million to $400 million.) She left Vera Bradley on such good terms that they provided her with furniture for her new company and stayed on as clients with Britton doing catalogs and marketing for them for the next 10 years until Vera Bradley went public.  Sixteen years after she left her position at Vera Bradley, Sue says the experience “gave us a wonderful foundation to work with companies that are focused on home and colors, or fashion” – Britton's niche market. She believes that brands “really take off” when a brand is distinctly “nuanced” in a way that shows the brand is special and the agency builds a “very highly descriptive visual expression” reinforcing the brand identity and couples that with a “strong strategy.” Done right, the created assets can be amortized over time, broadly used, and will promote a “more devoted following.”  As an example of a typical client, Sue talks about working with a number of paint companies, the importance of tracking color trends and building brand uniqueness, and the challenge of reaching out to “the do-it-yourselfers and the do-it-for-mes and then the pros.” Some changes Sue has seen over the years are “a reluctance to invest in creative because it's changing so quickly,” the need for lots of online (and often transitory) creative assets, and the flux of brands vacillating between bringing their creative work inhouse . . . and seeking an external agency. Sue's agency has deleted some staff positions over the years and today outsources to partner vendors such less-frequently used services as building website backends or videography. Sue is a strong believer in work-life balance. Before Covid, her agency interviewed people to discover what they valued . . . and came back with these results: “Their family, whatever that looked like. Their community. Their spirituality, whatever that looked like, or wellness. And then their environment.” She says, “They've circled the wagons around their family in a really, really big way.” She describes this as “the new American middle.” Sue can be reached on her agency's website at: bmdg.com (for Britton Marketing & Design Group), send an email off the site, or email Sue directly at:  sue@bmdg.com Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Susan Britton, Owner and Principal Creative Director at Britton Marketing & Design Group based in my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast, Susan. SUE: Thank you, Rob. You can just call me Sue, that's fine. ROB: We'll go with Sue. Yeah, it's excellent to have you here. I want all the Fort Wayne stories that the audience might not want to hear. But why don't we start off first with a little bit of introduction to Britton Marketing & Design Group, and what is the firm's superpower? SUE: Well, we're in Fort Wayne, Indiana because my education happened when I went to work for Vera Bradley, which is located – their headquarters are here in Fort Wayne. I joined Vera Bradley when they were about $10 million, and nine years later they were about $400 million. We tried everything, we experienced everything, and growing at that fast rate, we were reinventing every six months what we were doing. So that was a real privilege, and like I said, a great education. Then I jumped off after about 10 years, and owner/founder Barbara Bradley Baekgaard and her partner, Pat, were really supportive when I left. They gave me furniture from the merchandising department and helped me get set up because they appreciated that they were female entrepreneurs and I wanted to be one again as well. Then we continued to work with Vera Bradley, doing their catalogs and some marketing for the next 10 years until they went public. It really gave us a wonderful foundation to work with companies that are focused on home and colors, or fashion. We worked with Peter Millar as well for a few years, getting them on the map. So really, our superpower, I would say, is design. It sounds very typical, but I think it's sometimes underappreciated. I guess it's hard to define sometimes, but when you have a brand that is really nuanced, when you have a very highly descriptive visual expression of what that brand is coupled with a really strong strategy, that's when it operates on all cylinders and when we've seen brands really take off. I think people talk about it a lot in this industry – the form and function, the art and science – but it has always been true and will continue to be true. ROB: I assume on Day 1, you were the one designer. Is that the case? SUE: Yes. [laughs] I was sitting there looking out the window on a rainy day, at my desk. I had two other family members involved with me, and we were like, “Oh my gosh, what did we just do?” But the work followed, and we worked really hard. It all worked out. We're here 16 years later and still figuring out marketing in the world today, which has gotten very complicated as well. ROB: I was going to ask, because design in and of itself can be a little bit tricky to define, but then the definition has even probably changed on you. How has the nature of the work you do, the services, the deliverables – what has shifted in those 16 years? SUE: I think it's how fast everything – the kind of creative assets that people need constantly, day in and day out online – in the past, when we started out, it was print. Catalog work, and you would do two-week photoshoots. Well, that has really changed because of the tentative nature of the imagery that people need and the quantity of it. But I think what happens today is it's easier to rely more on the science, which is more memorable – how many click-throughs – as we look at the success of an email campaign or whatever, a social media campaign. I've seen a transition for a couple of things. One, a reluctance to invest in creative because it's changing so quickly. But when they don't do that, then you could put anybody's logo on a picture on Instagram, like fashion or even home goods. It really needs to be nuanced in a way that you know when you look at it that that is a special brand. And it takes a little investment to do that, but there is a way that it can be done where you're really creating assets that are amortized over a certain period of time and used in every area. I see when companies do that, they really have a more devoted following. People respond so well to the uniqueness that that brand represents. Secondly, I think I've seen a change where in order to save costs many brands will bring their creative in-house, and that can be very successful, too, if they find the right people. It can also be easily unsuccessful just because of the complacency or the repetitive nature of the work. Focusing on one brand, day in and day out, I think sometimes people lose a little bit of edge. But not necessarily. ROB: There's definitely a lot to consider there. The pendulum of in-house versus – not outsourced, but out of house, working with a creative services firm. That pendulum seems to swing both industry-wide and then some clients really swing that pendulum back and forth as well. You certainly mentioned Vera Bradley as a foundational client; what does your mix of clients look like? Are there typical industries, other key clients you're able to talk about that you've snapped up since then? SUE: Yeah, what's happened since then is we really have honed our expertise in mostly color-trended consumer goods – I can say primarily purchased by women, but sometimes not. We've really worked into a lot of different paint company work. When you think about paint, it's kind of like chemicals in a bucket. It's really all marketing to talk about what's special about that particular brand of paint and to do it in a lifestyle way, but sometimes with humor. It's very color-oriented, so we're always working on trends, looking at trends, trying to look ahead to what's coming up that the consumer is looking forward to seeing. Also, we asked ourselves when we were getting into especially the home goods market, what makes us successful in Fort Wayne with these kinds of customers, the color trending customers, home group customers? We saw that it was like the everyday person. It's you and me, and so many percent of their consumers were everyday people. It wasn't the super high end or super low commodity end. It's really right there in the middle. So we've done a lot of research on that and have built an expertise around that particular consumer. That helps us work with these different companies. ROB: Paint's a really interesting one because nobody looks at your wall and can tell what kind of paint you have, and you probably don't know either. There's not a lot of word-of-mouth there, I don't think. Any paint could be any color. But you have an industry buyer – we've had somebody helping paint our house; I don't even know what they're picking. They know, absolutely, what they're picking for us, and then there's “What do I pick up when I wander down the aisle at Home Depot or Lowe's?” It's anybody, for sure. SUE: Right. And then they also have their pros that they're trying to respond to. They have the do-it-yourselfers and the do-it-for-mes and then the pros. ROB: Yeah, that's what I'm getting at with the pro that we work with. I don't know what they're picking. I don't ask for anything. They tell me where to go pick my colors. They say, “Go to this store and pick a color.” And I listen and I do it. SUE: Right. They have undue influence. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] You got ahead of us on the origin story and where the firm came from, and you mentioned, of course, that you are still the principal creative director, but I'm sure you don't do it all now. What did it look like to bring in let's say the second design creative, and what did it take to get over the hump of you not doing it and letting them do the work? SUE: It's probably a variety of things, but I think what's really important is to not only mentor but provide room for mistakes. We had a saying early on; we bring in interns and grow our own. We would bring someone in and explain the level of quality that our clients expect and then coach them on how to get there and make sure they were getting there. Then they would embrace it. And we really provided a non-threatening environment where people could really grow, we could really mentor them, and give them their own work to own and really work at. That's really what they're doing today. Some people that are here have been here over 10 years, and probably the last group we hired has been for 7 years. So we're probably getting ready to add another couple. But I think the important thing is respecting your team and allowing them to be different from you, but just making sure that the expectations are really clear and the goals of the company are clear too. But we also wanted to create an environment where they could have a life beyond work. I think we've all worked places where we just worked way too many hours and we couldn't have a personal life. Even before COVID, which I think has really brought that whole situation to light, we wanted to create an environment where family also comes first. So, if you're taking care of the people that are working for you, they're your human resources, and respecting them as much as you respect the work I think has been really key to our success and to having a well-oiled machine where everybody has been here a while and keeps it all humming. ROB: Do you think that sort of autonomy is partly – you mentioned people who've been there 7 years, 9 years – do you feel like there's a degree of autonomy where they get to do the work they would do even if they were out on their own, without the headache of being out on their own? Is that some of the mix? What's some of the secret sauce on that kind of longevity? SUE: I think it's very close to what you said. I think it's a way that they feel ownership in the work that they're doing, and as a team, we might group critique something so that it's not really threatening, but we're always looking at improvements so that they can grow into their work and they can own it, and I don't have to look over their shoulder. Because I don't think people really like that. Especially creative people. They have their own expression within a certain frame and having them hone that and be able to do that I think is what creatives really want to do. ROB: Certainly, with the amount of time you've had the firm up and running, I'm sure you've had to make some choices of where to grow and maybe some service offerings and lines of business that you've perhaps decided intentionally to not add. What are some things that maybe you have chosen to not do, maybe you keep partnering on them, maybe you refer them, maybe you say you don't do that? Have there been decisions like that along the way? SUE: Oh yeah, for sure. We used to have a videographer on staff and some photography, and we decided a few years ago that our expertise is a branding boutique agency where we're helping our clients brand themselves better and have a better marketing strategy and better nuanced creative. So we have partners that we use for website backend building or videography or some even just video editing, those kinds of services. We don't always need them consistently, or even photographers, because for every particular job you want to customize the right vendor to that particular project. They all have different levels of need, from high quality to a lower quality maybe, depending on budgets. It's nice to be flexible and then just plug in and play with those other vendors as needed. ROB: Got it. That makes sense. There's an element even where maybe you have enough work to keep a videographer busy, but you really need half or a quarter or a tenth of 10 different videographers rather than ten-tenths of the same person. SUE: Yeah, exactly. That's definitely true. ROB: Sue, as you reflect on the journey so far, what are some of the lessons you've learned in building the business – things you might go back and tell yourself to do differently if you were starting over? SUE: That's a good question. I think building an expertise is so important. I learned that from a fellow that was helping with us, consulting with us on our business a few years ago, and it's the best thing that we've ever done because it helps us focus on what we're really good at, what we have the right to win, and not try to be everything to everyone. I'm sure many agencies go through that, because you really do want to reach. You want to do something new and exciting. And sometimes that's fine, if it's not too far from your expertise, to stretch. But sometimes if you overreach, you get yourself in a difficult position. That's not really good for you and not good for your client, and it's not good for your team. So, I think really understanding what you're good at and owning that is key. In the past, we may have hired people that we thought, “Oh, we're going to build this whole department,” but that really wasn't going to happen. One thing is, people didn't always trust you to be able to do it. They would look at what you were traditionally good at and they would not trust that you could go that far the other direction. So, I do think you have to really focus. ROB: I can see that. It definitely helps you know how to talk to your clients as well, rather than being everything to anyone. But it's hard to get that conviction. You mentioned in some notes as we were getting this scheduled something about the “new American middle.” Tell me about the new American middle. What is that, and what is that expertise? How does that play into the firm? SUE: As we all know, marketing is really about values. If you're in lifestyle marketing, it's really about values, and it's a pretty complicated, noisy world. You're not going to get a chance to remember much about a brand with everything going so quickly, so it's really important that when you're marketing, you're really connecting and resonating with your consumers' values. As we looked at, again, who we were in Fort Wayne, why anybody should work with us, the kind of projects that are a good fit and companies that we could align with, it came back to that everyday person. As we dug in and we did a lot of research, we did some primary research, it was really illuminating to us that – and this was before COVID – we realized that the world had become less certain, and while maybe in the '90s or some of the more consumer-driven decades, things had really changed. When we interviewed people, the most important thing to them was their family, whatever that looked like. Their community. Their spirituality, whatever that looked like, or wellness. And then their environment. Those are the things everyone was really concerned about. They've circled the wagons around their family in a really, really big way. For example, if you're featuring maybe a woman with a handbag and that's the product, so many companies feature it as a product on a person. But if you would reflect them doing things with their family, they may relate to that photo more quickly on a social media post than a single one. It's just an idea of blending and taking your brand and looking at, with your competition also, what are the values that you compete over? What are the values you share? And what is the open space that they're not owning? Many brands are not owning family. If, for example, when you do your research, it pops up as a top important consumer value to those customers, then you can really reflect that through your digital expressions and your copy, etc., if that makes sense. ROB: Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned also – we talked a little bit about family. I understand that family's also important to how you operate the firm. How have you thought about setting up the work environment, setting up the work, setting up roles in a way that is compatible with families, in a way that maybe other services firms have a hard time with? SUE: I think one thing we do is, for example, with the creative team, we have three different creative directors so that when we're working with a client, usually there's one that's assigned, but they help each other out. So if one's going to be out for a week, they'll double up a little bit and do some handoffs just to get by through that week. And they know each other well enough that they can do that smoothly. In the past, I would say it was not the case. Early on, we had creative directors that were very specific about their work, which was great, but they didn't really overlap. But I think as we've worked into trying to be more flexible in our schedules, we've overlapped with each other so that we can help each other out when the other person's not in, and also, again, the work from home has really helped. I think it's helped many companies realize that, oh, we didn't lose productivity, and oh, this gives us more flexibility to have more work-life balance, and we haven't seen a drop in productivity. I think that's been of the nicer outcomes of COVID. ROB: How are you handling work from home? Is everybody home? Is there still an office? Do people come in anywhere at any particular time? How are you thinking through that? SUE: We feel like for our culture, to maintain a good culture, it's still good to have a building and a place where we can be. So we work two days a week in the office and three days a week from home. But sometimes people don't work in the office for the work because they may have a project that they really want to concentrate on, they don't want the distraction of office. But I think naturally now, the days in office become more meeting-oriented days. It's naturally flowed that way, and then the other days are more work days. I feel like it's been less distracting than when we were in every day. ROB: So, it adds a little bit of predictability, less Swiss cheese on people's schedules of meeting, work, meeting, work, meeting, work. But it also sounds like it's a little bit more of a norm rather than a rule in terms of how many days in the office per week. SUE: Yeah, we don't really use rules here in that fashion. [laughs] We're all here on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, try to get in. And people do. And I think people do like that balance because it orients you to be here and to be able to have meetings together and see each other, and then it's balancing to be able to work from home the other three. ROB: That's good. It's always interesting to hear the different ways that people are handling this. But I do think there's value – if you're going to still hire people and have people in a certain geography, it seems like being in the office sometimes matters. Otherwise, why not just hire somebody somewhere else? Which then you're also competing with everybody everywhere else for talent. SUE: Right. I think that's so true. It is really interesting to us how everybody's handling this whole thing and how it's evolving. It is true you can hire people remotely anywhere these days, and that's a good thing. It can be good and bad. I don't think we would be opposed to hiring somebody out of Fort Wayne, but it does sometimes get more challenging when you're trying to put everything up on a board. I mean, you can Zoom some of that. I think everybody's making it work, but there is a camaraderie. Actually, we do have someone who works out of Fort Wayne at this point and comes in every other week for a couple of days. That's great because you still get to see them. But everybody will handle it differently, I'm sure. ROB: Yeah. It's very, very interesting. I have a friend who just took over as president of an existing agency, and she lives in Atlanta, and the agency is in Knoxville. I think she's going to be up there every other week. It really depends on the age and stage of life. I think her children are grown, college-bound. Flexing life here and there is a better fit for different people at different times. But I think picking a lane – you've picked a lane for your team, and you let them know what the expectation is – that really helps versus what we see in the news where Apple's still trying to get their people to go to the office, but every time they try to get them to go to the office, they complain, a couple of people quit. It becomes this whole fits and starts, and “what are we doing here?” We ended up hiring primarily – during COVID was a lot of our growth, so we ended up being a distributed team without trying. We have folks everywhere from Florida to Georgia to California to now Canada. You know what lane you're in. You pick it, and people who will gravitate towards that will be your tribe, I think. SUE: I think so, too. It's really how you treat each other and how the culture is developed and how you respect each other. That's where people want to work. Location almost doesn't matter anymore. Many of our vendors are all over the U.S. We work with companies for photography, all over. Also video, also web development. You just try to pick the best vendors that you work well with, that you understand their quality level or their style. ROB: Yeah. Sue, when you look ahead, when you're looking at the future of Britton Marketing & Design, you're looking at the future of marketing and design in general, what gets you excited? What should we be looking for? What's coming up? What's going to be our exciting future? SUE: I think for us, we still just love telling a great story about a great brand that people have worked hard to develop and have put their heart and passion into. That'll just never get old, looking at someone's journey of developing an idea and then making it work. That is still really possible in the U.S., and I think that's always an exciting thing for us: to take that beautiful idea, brand that they've developed, and then really illuminate it. Give them a nuanced creative that shows it for what it really is, the heart and soul of somebody's idea, and then really laying that over a really wonderful marketing matrix where you've looked at the most inexpensive yet most effective way for them to go to market, and then how they reach the people who would really like this, who they can really respond to, to make their quality of life better. Also, the conscientious capitalism piece of it. What are people doing? How are they giving back? How are we as a community helping each other grow and be successful? I think whatever form that takes, it's always still going to be a really exciting journey from a marketing standpoint. So many people think of marketing and think, “Oh, they're just trying to sell me something.” No, that's not what we do. That's not what we get up for. It's really a lot more layered than that. ROB: Yeah, you loop it all the way back to the paint conversation. I feel like when I see paint advertising, a lot of it is about creating ideas of what's possible, it's about how you make people feel, it's about a combination of pride and hospitality. And maybe I'm making some of that up, but I think about it more on those levels. I'm not looking for a material datasheet comparing one paint to another. Maybe somebody in an industrial application is, but when I'm thinking about my home, my office, you're not showing me a picture of a bucket most of the time. SUE: Right. It's really your interaction with that brand – how does that brand make you feel about the products they have, the color ranges they have, the names? We had a project with Benjamin Moore years ago where we named a whole set of paint colors, and that was super fun for the team. They really loved that. Like some people will only buy paint that's the name of a food, like whipped cream or chocolate or something like that. It's funny what influences people. ROB: How did you come up with these names? Did you do research with consumers on their responses to these names? How did you get to the answer on that one? SUE: It was kind of a high-end line of paints that had different layers of pigments in them. The team would get together and – yeah, they didn't really research. They just knew what the goal of the name should be in terms of a style, in terms of what they needed to imbue. So, they would come up with a range of names, a couple of names for each color, and then the company would look at them and pick them. Since then, we've worked with other paint companies – some of the very prominent, and they don't like us to talk about it too much because they like us to just be quiet about it. And that's okay, because we do a lot of work with them. But it really is about the paint names; it's about how you talk about the paint, like you said, envisioning their new space or home and how it makes their home better. Paint is difficult for people to choose, so making it easy for people to select paints and pre-curating some for them is all really important. ROB: And I understand them wanting to take the center stage. That's what every client wants. That's what most people want. They want to be in the Story Brand metaphor. In the Hero's Journey, they want to be the hero and they want you to be the guide, that you help them be the hero. That's what we end up being there for when we're on the services side, I think, so it's hard to even market ourselves and show other potential clients how we can also be a good guide for them rather than using another client's story to be the hero. SUE: That's really true. It's funny; we really feel very successful at helping other brands illuminate what they are and what they do, and it has always been a struggle for us to do a good job of that about ourselves. I think we're a little humble, too. Midwest, you know. ROB: That's right. There is that Midwestern humility. Sue, when people want to find and connect with you and with Britton Marketing & Design Group, where should they go to track you down? SUE: They can go to our website, which is just bmdg.com, as in Britton Marketing & Design Group. They can send an informational email to us and we'll call them back. Or they can just email me as well, which is sue@bmdg.com. ROB: Excellent. Was it difficult getting a four-letter dot-com domain? SUE: We were surprised that it was not. That's why we snagged it. ROB: [laughs] Well, excellent. Sue, thank you so much for coming on, for sharing your journey. Congratulations on everything you have done, and we look forward to seeing so much more ahead. SUE: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for your time and for the conversation. I think we can all help each other by having these kinds of conversations. We all learn from everything we hear and read, right? ROB: So much, Sue. Thank you. Be well. SUE: Thank you so much. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Amanda Parker, President and Owner, Collective Alternative (Indianapolis, IN)   Amanda Parker is President and Owner at Collective Alternative, a full-service agency that focuses on growing small, mostly local businesses. She started her agency 14 years ago to bring together her background in strategy and development, experience as the Vice President of Marketing for a homebuilder, and passion for Mom-and-Pops, new home construction, and small, home-service businesses. Typical agency clients might include a local plumber trying to compete with bigger plumbing competition. In this interview, Amanda explains there are a number of differences for successfully working with small businesses as opposed to mega-brand clients. Marketers typically work fast. With small businesses, she has found that it is important to slow down, communicate with the client, and let them know what the agency is trying to accomplish, the end goal/objective, and the benefit of the end goal. They require a lot more “hand-holding” through the process, she explains, and they can't “afford to waste a single dollar.” Amanda feels it is also critical to “protect” these smaller clients, to watch both the market and the economy. She also believes an “it's just business” approach does not work. Larger companies have the resources and resilience to “experiment” with marketing strategies. With smaller companies, errors bleed through to the bottom line and can affect an organization's survival. With smaller companies,  It is so personal. It doesn't get any more personal for a small business owner. They have sunk everything into it. They're working 12-16 hour days. All they want to do is provide for their family, send their daughter to dance class, send their kid to college, whatever it is. It's personal. Amanda says she is quite cognizant of her personal weaknesses. In building her agency, she focuses on hiring people who can bring complementary strengths, identifies potential areas of growth, supports continuing education efforts, and brings in experts to help her team “accelerate” their careers. Some of the agency's local clients go national. One client they are currently working with provides rehabilitative and mental health care for first responders (fire and police). The client will soon launch a national first responder mental health platform called Shield, which excites Amanda because it facilitates open discussions of mental health. Amanda can be reached on her agency's website at: collectivealternative.com or thecaway.com, or by email at: amanda@thecaway.com. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Amanda Parker, President and Owner at Collective Alternative based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast, Amanda. AMANDA: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Very excited to be here. ROB: Absolutely. Great to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Collective Alternative, and what distinguishes the firm? What is your superpower? AMANDA: Oh, our superpower. Our firm is unique in we focus on small business. My background with agencies and things like that, I was on the larger accounts, but I really fell in love with the mom n' pops, the small businesses of the country, and wanted to give them an opportunity to compete and gain some market share. So, we really focus on those mom n' pop businesses. I love home services. When I did work on the client-side, I was the Vice President of Marketing for a homebuilder, and I fell in love with it. It got in my blood. So, we love home services and new home construction and all of that. But I just love my small business clients and to see their growth. It's just amazing. ROB: That's excellent. Those businesses, you say small; are they largely local? Are some of them national in scope? Is it heavy into services? Are you helping the local plumber go up against the big guys, or what are the industry specialties? AMANDA: The majority of our clients are local. We are definitely helping that local plumber go up against the big guys. Even the bigger guy in the area, right? Which I just love. But we do have some clients that are national, or they've started local and they've grown nationally. We have one client that started here in Indiana, and they provide rehabilitative care, mental health care, all of that kind of thing for first responders – for fire and police. And they are growing on a national scale, especially with a new product they're taking to market this month. So, it's really cool to see that growth and be a part of it. ROB: That's really exciting to be able to help with that. What is it that you think changed as the firm grows that makes it maybe a different firm specialty? How do you define small as in small business, and what is it that really makes the scope of what they need a great fit for you? AMANDA: My background is strategy and development, so I really focused on when you're a small business, you cannot afford to waste a single dollar. I really focus on the strategy behind everything that we do. We don't throw things at the wall to see what sticks. We are very focused, hone in on – we may do some A/B testing, but for the most part it's planned out. We know what the payoff is going to be. We know we're going to deliver the right ROI for our clients, and we really focus in on that strategy to make sure that every dollar they give to us is working for them and paying off. ROB: There's definitely a certain pressure. They don't have a lot of extra dollars for experimental budgets when you're talking about a small business. And I can imagine there's probably a range of services you can engage in. How far across the range are you going? You can do anything from SEO, you can do SEM, you can do paid organic social, you can do media, TV, billboards, out-of-home. How far does the rabbit hole go with these clients? AMANDA: We're actually a full-service firm, so we do everything that they need. One issue that I always heard from my small business clients was they felt like they had to repeat their initiatives over and over again to a number of different marketing partners. At one point they're talking to a PR person; then they're talking to a digital firm; then they're talking to an SEO firm. It was just all over the place, and they never felt like they had the unity, so they couldn't tell if their dollars were really working for them or not. I brought all of those different expertises in-house with different people leading those different areas, and now everything is under one roof and we all collaborate and talk together. So, they don't have to repeat and they can really see the benefit of it. ROB: Some services, it's pretty straightforward; you can show somebody “You're a plumber, we ran this ad, we tracked the phone numbers, here's your calls.” Maybe if they're really detailed, they can see what they got from that. How do you look at something that can be a little bit of a longer term investment? Let's say you're looking at – whether it's an awareness campaign on a digital billboard, whether it's maybe something where the outcome – sometimes it's not 100% certain how well you can do in SEO and what keywords you can optimize for. How do you think about helping them through that process of investing over time? The outcome is a little bit unknown, but directionally, you know because it rhymes with plenty of other clients that you've seen. AMANDA: I think it's more a matter of educating them and almost holding their hand through the process so they understand what it is that we're trying to accomplish, they know what the end goal or objective is, and they know what the benefit of that end goal is. A lot of times as marketers, I feel like we go so fast – and we know it, and we know the acronyms and everything else, so we just keep going and going and going, and we don't slow down enough to communicate to the client and let them know, “Okay, here's what this means for you, and here's why I'm doing it, and here's what I'm hoping to see out of it or I expect to see out of it, and here's what that means.” So just really overcommunicating that. ROB: Got it. I can certainly see that. And then there's I think also a challenge, then, of equipping more and more of your team to walk clients on that journey. How do you help give your team the playbook that is needed so that – you can't hold everybody's hand anymore, right? AMANDA: I can't. But I want to. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] All these nice little small businesses. They need somebody to hang out with them and help them and hug them, yes. AMANDA: Yes. I so want to, but I can't. So, it's really making sure that my team understands our culture, understands our mission. And if they do and they believe in it and they buy into it, then I know that they will continue to communicate that and advocate for the client. And that's what I've seen. It really comes down to educating the team on what our mission is and then making sure that they believe it in their soul and then get out there and do it. ROB: Excellent. You mentioned a little bit of your past life and some of the work you'd done for clients before, but that's still a long distance from actually starting your own agency. So, what was it that pushed you across that boundary and led you to start your own firm? AMANDA: I constantly heard that I was too vested in my clients and that “it's not personal, it's just business.” That kept me up at night. I struggled with that so much because, for a small business, you'd better believe it's personal. It is so personal. It doesn't get any more personal for a small business owner. They have sunk everything into it. They're working 12-16 hour days. All they want to do is provide for their family, send their daughter to dance class, send their kid to college, whatever it is. It's personal. I could not get that to settle with my soul, so I remember coming home one day and I told my husband, “Yeah, I'm done. I'm going to do this on my own and I'm going to make it personal.” And our tagline is “Making business personal.” He was like, “Okay, girl, go for it.” And that was 14 years ago. ROB: Wow, so 14 years. What have been some of the step functions, the inflection points on the journey? Whether it's key hires, whether it's service areas, whether it's a certain degree of scale or things that you don't do anymore that you used to, what have been some of those key points in the business? AMANDA: I feel like I have had this rollercoaster journey as a business owner. I'm sure a lot of business owners feel that way, but I have made some doozy mistakes where you hire the wrong person and they don't buy into the mission, but you just liked them so much, or you felt they had such potential but they don't want to realize it. I don't know. So, some bad hires along the way. But I've had some really great hires. I created a leadership team around me of some magnificent, magnificently talented people, and they are just incredible. I am so blessed to have them. As you know, this industry changes on a dime. Today it's one thing, tomorrow it's another. You have to stay up on that. So, making sure that we hire people who want to change with that and want to realize what's new – I mean, five years ago what was TikTok? Come on. It's just really making sure that we're staying on top of things, that we know what's coming, that we're watching the market, we're watching the economy. We have to protect our clients in ways that other firms don't. ROB: Have you found some local business clients for whom TikTok makes good sense and resonates well? What have you seen there? AMANDA: It's funny; because they're home services – and I will say, in Indiana compared to maybe where you are or California, we seem to be a little bit behind some of the coasts. Several of my clients, their big thing this year was getting on Instagram. It is what it is. And now I'm trying to talk to them about influencers and “let's get in with an influencer, let's do an influencer campaign.” It's harder for them to understand what that is or see the benefit of that, but they're coming around. We're doing some cool experimental things for them to see what that looks like. I know it's their trust in me that's pushing that, which I appreciate beyond words. But they're getting there. [laughs] That's all I can say. ROB: Sure. And I wonder also, not so much even for anything to reflect on you or your clients, but also as I think about the intersection of the businesses that you work with, simply put, the TikTok feed is not really optimized for local. That's not an axis that it tends to revolve around, so I could see it being a tricky investment just from that part alone. The dynamic isn't getting followed. The dynamic is showing up in the algorithmic feed and blowing up there. And TikTok would rather have somebody telling a joke or doing a dance or falling on their face or cute animals than “Here's how you prepare for freezing your pipes in the winter, and here's my dance for doing that.” It's a different thing. AMANDA: [laughs] Yep, exactly. ROB: You mentioned, and I'll pull on it a little bit – we don't always get a chance to talk through the thinking that goes into exec team, who's on that boat, what roles, what structure. How have you evolved and emerged and thought about this executive team around you and who's on it? AMANDA: I think pretty uniquely in the fact that I have tried to be very self-aware of my weaknesses. My skillset does not include design. It does not include website creation or even brand management, for that matter. So, I knew early on I need very strong people with me on that side that can see the strategy in that and really support me there. So having a creative director, a VP of Creative, was really important. She was my first hire, and she is still with me today. I have a designer that has been with me for 12 years. It's treating them like family, but filling in where I know that I am weak and I need to surround myself with strong talent. I think that has been so beneficial for me because then we've grown together. We can collaborate together, and together we do some really amazing things. ROB: It's interesting when you have someone involved who excels in an area that you need them. You need them to be stronger there. How do you think about continuing to develop those team members in areas where you're not more of an expert? There are places where you have your expertise and it's your job to equip and cast vision, and then there's stuff that you don't know how to do, and that's why people are there. How do you help your team grow with the firm? AMANDA: They still want to grow. They want to accelerate their career, they want to learn other things. We do a lot of training. We do a lot of bringing experts in. If they want to go to a conference or something like that, all of that is on the table. We do a lot of sharing newsletters, articles, videos. We do a lot of that back and forth so we all have that knowledge base, but they're still learning. And then it's constantly giving them a challenge. “Here's an area of growth that I see,” and getting them to realize that, see that, and then jump in and participate in it. ROB: It's always an interesting challenge, especially when you get outside of your wheelhouse a little bit, so I do appreciate that thinking. As you reflect on the journey of the firm, Amanda, what are some things you think about? What have you learned along the way? What would you go back and tell yourself “Don't do that, do it this way” if you could? Reflect on those things you might've done differently if you were starting from zero. AMANDA: Oh, my goodness, that list is lengthy. There have been a couple times that we were primed to grow, we knew we needed help – this is where I learned this lesson – and instead of hiring for culture or fit that way, we hired doers that could just support the work and do the work. It just didn't work out. It was a huge influx of people all of a sudden that we weren't ready for. We didn't train them appropriately. We did not set them up for success. That was a big lesson for me to learn, that I had hired the wrong way. I always try to leave people better than I found them, and I know those people I did not set up for success, and that was really tough for me. It was tough for me to get over that and move on to, “Okay, I had perhaps a negative impact on their life. I still need to take care of my clients and continue to build, so I need to reset. What does that look like so I don't do that again?” That's tough. It's tough as a business owner to know that you have that kind of impact. ROB: Yeah. But it's personal. You said it from the start. That part of the business is personal for you as well, so it's consistent. It pulls through. Even the wrong decisions aren't just like, “Oh, forget that person, they should've known better.” You see that in business, and some people operate that way, and that's personal. That gets taken very differently, personally. It's a different lane. AMANDA: It really does. It's kept me up at night. And then there's those things that if I could go back and tell this person “I'm sorry, I didn't know what I should have known” or “I hadn't learned that lesson” – you want to, and then at the same time, you're the boss, so you're always going to be the bad guy. [laughs] I mean, where's the line, right? ROB: Yep. We're in an interesting spot, an interesting turning point. We're coming into the summer of 2022. Everybody's done their different versions of office and no office, “how is my team structured, where is my team?” How are you thinking about the location and gathering of your team in-person as we're going through 2022? AMANDA: That's funny. When COVID came – and that was another lesson in and of itself – but when COVID came on, I was watching the news. I sent all my team home early. Before the mandate even rolled out, I had sent them to work from home. In the middle of May, my leadership team called me and said, “We're going back to the office with or without you.” And that was May of 2020. I was like, “Um, there's still a mandate.” I'm trying to talk through it, and they're like, “No. We need to collaborate. This is what we do for our clients. We're going back to the office June 1. You do whatever you need to do to make sure that happens, but we're going back to the office.” It just so happened to roll with the timeline; they had lifted some restrictions at that point, so we could. And we've been in the office since June 1st of 2020. We've been very fortunate with – we try to stay healthy. If somebody's sick, stay home, that kind of thing. But yeah, they want to be here. They want to collaborate. So that's where we are. ROB: It sounds like you didn't have to pull them into it. Did you have anybody who tried to move somewhere or tried to go remote first? Or that just wasn't your lane? AMANDA: We did lose two people. One person had to move to Texas to take care of her family, and then another person was just not comfortable coming into the office and she actually quit. That was unfortunate, because we liked both of them, but this is where we do our best work, and we have to perform for those clients. ROB: I'm sure you've had to, whether it was those folks and you had to backfill them or new roles you've had to hire – have you found that there are people who are ready to be in an office? That's a lane you've chosen and they're like, “These are my people, I want to be in an office too”? How are you seeing this from a recruiting advantage perspective? AMANDA: That's funny; I was just on an interview yesterday and she said she's worked from home since 2018, and she wants back in an office so bad that she's changed her career path and is moving over to marketing so she can go back in an office. It's out there. People want to be back to work. They want to be back in an office. I think you have a mix. There are still some people that are enjoying the work remote. But for the most part, I've seen, and we've heard in our interviews, people are ready. They are ready to come back in. ROB: I think a lot of people really want clarity, too. They want to know what the plan is instead of being in permanent limbo. You see some of the tech companies are back and forth, and people don't quite know. There's people who moved to Idaho from Silicon Valley. They're building a house there. They're not going back. AMANDA: Yeah, exactly. ROB: But where you're in limbo or it's like now you're going back – infamously, this past week, a VP of I think machine learning at Apple just said, “No, I'm not coming back to the office. I don't want to do that. I will take a job somewhere else.” Now, them announcing that loudly is probably a good way to get some recruiting calls as well. But I think people want to know, and when it shifts, I think that's when the moment of truth happens. We have hired all over the place, so we can't put the genie back in the bottle. We did most of our growth during COVID. We've found ourselves in making a different choice. But our choice is still that we're going to get together several times a year in a different place, and we're still going to get on planes and spend time with sufficiently large clients. I think people still kind of know that. They want to be in a lane where they value getting together sometimes, but they want to be at home. I think the clarity of letting people know, as well as the proof – people can see the proof. They can see the proof on your LinkedIn. Where are your people? If all of your people are in one place, they're going to take that message. If people are all over the place, they're going to feel safe being somewhere else. We just hired somebody in Canada, which is a whole other interesting thing. We'll enjoy getting to know her. AMANDA: I love the fact that remote opens up so much opportunity for people, and they can change to a different company or they can change to a different career path or whatever. I think that is perfect. But my team loves being together, loves to collaborate together. It's the culture we've built, so we're all here in Indiana and going to stay put. ROB: I'm glad it's working for you. As you're looking forward to the future of marketing, the future of services you provide, the future of your clients, what's coming up for Collective Alternative that you're excited about, for clients, for the overall trends in marketing in general? AMANDA: That's a great question. We have right now – and I mentioned it a little bit earlier – one client that is launching a new platform. It's called Shield, and it is a mental health platform for first responders, police and fire. I love the fact that we get to be very real and talk about how challenging their job is and how they do have those same needs that other people do. We get to talk about mental health openly. It's so taboo, especially in that field, so if we can start to penetrate that and really start to show that even anonymously, they can take these assessments and see where they're at, gauge what is going on, and they can self-assess – then maybe that helps them, or maybe that tells them, “Oh, I do drink a little bit too much. Maybe I should reach out and get some help with that.” Or “Maybe I should cut that.” Whatever it is so that they can be healthier, be better, and be better representatives of the community. So, it still has that community tie, but it's on a national scale. I'm really excited about that. As far as trends, like I mentioned, the influencer thing. We've got a couple influencer campaigns going on, one with a remodeling client of ours. He's all for it, so we're talking about lifestyle and remodeling trends, and it's been a lot of fun. Just doing some of those things to really set our clients apart and speak more to who they are and showcase that – I love it. I love it every day. ROB: That's exciting. There's a lot of good things coming up. I think it's a really opportune time to engage people in some change that they're seeking in their lives. I think people have realized – kind of like where they choose to work. They're in whatever rut they've been in, but there's some energy to do something different as other parts of their lives change. That's very exciting and very timely. Amanda, when people want to find and connect with you, with Collective Alternative, where should they go to track you down? AMANDA: They can visit our website, collectivealternative.com, or thecaway.com, or they can reach out by email, amanda@thecaway.com. Give me a call, you name it. There's a number of ways; you can find me all over the web. ROB: There it is. Excellent. And you can find you in your office as well. AMANDA: Right. ROB: [laughs] Thank you so much, Amanda. It's been good to learn about you, to learn about Collective Alternative. Thank you for sharing your story and your journey with the audience. Really appreciate it. AMANDA: Thank you for having me. It was so fun. ROB: Thank you. Take care. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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

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

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.

Erik Jensen (Salt Lake City, UT), Co-Owner and Chief Strategy Officer, Predictive ROI (La Crosse, WI)   Erik Jensen is Co-Owner and Chief Strategy Officer at Predictive ROI, a remote-first firm that helps “agencies, coaches, and consultants plant their flags of authority and monetize that position.” In this interview, Erik addresses the difficulties service businesses may encounter in developing a “position of thought leadership”:  Poor discovery and development processes. Failure to treat themselves as a client. Failure to understand “what it means to plant their flag.”  When agencies try to be everything to everyone, their messages will be inconsistent and unfocused. True thought leaders do not have messages that lack clarity and strength.  Erik emphasizes that it is dangerous for an agency to assume it knows why a particular potential client approaches the agency for help. Customers may come because: They know you, don't understand their problem, and are looking for a safe sounding board. A client gave them a referral – but the client may be sending “bad fits.” They saw your marketing efforts/work and have “nothing better to do” than to ask to see if you can solve their problem. Saying “yes” to work that is not in your sweet spot often means the work will take more effort and fail to be profitable. That's why, Erik says, it is important for agencies “niche down” to a well-defined target market . . . and to niche down fast. There are a number of ways to find this “ideal” market . . . SWOT analysis, an addressable audience audit, an assessment of past client successes and profitability . . . but Erik recommends asking three questions: What's your superpower? What are you really good at? What do you love to do?  Who do you love to do that work for, and why do you care about serving that audience?   Will you be able to make a great case study off of that client? You want the opportunity to do great work that you can leverage into future work.  If an agency serves multiple industries, Erik says, they're like the legs of a stool . . . not stable and not comfortable. He provides a solution: “Find a common problem that all of those industries share that you're really good at solving. That's the top of the stool.” Erik believes the case study question is pivotal in supporting agency success and that it facilitates agency growth by: Filtering and focusing business development efforts at the very beginning so that you only take on those clients for whom you expect your efforts will provide excellent results.  Forcing you to document your work to build a “body of evidence.” Providing social proof from past clients that says, “We're great, and we don't have to say it about ourselves. Here's what other people say about us.” Erik also provides a detailed overview of how to effectively bring on a business partner. Predictive ROI offers a free book on niching down, leveraging authority into a monetization stream, building great content, and clarifying purpose at predictiveroi.com/free-book. Erik can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook, and his agency's website at: predictiveroi.com. He invites people to join the agency's free weekly Q&A sessions, where 10 minutes of teaching are followed by an open-forum business problem discussion.  Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Erik Jensen, Co-Owner and Chief Strategy Officer at Predictive ROI, a remote-first firm – but he's based in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Welcome to the podcast, Erik. ERIK: Hey, Rob. Thanks for having me on the show. Actually, the agency is based in La Crosse. I am way over in Salt Lake City, Utah. So, we've got folks all over the place, which is actually kind of fun. For anybody that does or runs a remote company, you know what I'm talking about. For people that don't, that maybe gives them heart palpitations. But it works well for our team. ROB: That's pretty great. I'm sure they would like to come visit you. We did a family road trip out to Salt Lake City and back in summer of 2020. ERIK: There you go. ROB: We had some fun. We saw the great outdoors as a family but spent the better part of a month on the other side over in Midway. ERIK: Oh, fantastic. ROB: Love the area. ERIK: Yeah, there's some really cool things. I'm actually a native of Minnesota, so I'm a Minnesota boy, and I spent a lot of time living in Wisconsin as well, where I met my business partner, Steven. But yeah, it's been awesome moving out this direction and seeing all of the amazing things. It's just crazy. There's state and national parks everywhere. You throw a rock and you hit one. ROB: Yeah. But there's no humidity to be found. ERIK: No, which is amazing again. I think I still brag about the fact that there are no mosquitoes here to all of my friends and family that still live back in the Midwest. ROB: [laughs] You're not making any friends there, but we'll make some friends real soon. Erik, when you think about Predictive ROI, how would you hone in on the superpower of the firm? Where's the strength of the business? ERIK: We help agencies, coaches, and consultants plant their flags of authority and monetize that position. That's what we do. ROB: Dig into that a little bit. Tell us some more. ERIK: What happens most of the time when someone attempts to go through that process of developing a position of thought leadership, they have really poor processes in place. Everything takes a lot more effort, a lot more time, and a lot more energy. They struggle sometimes with the cobbler's kids, so they don't actually do their own stuff. They don't treat themselves as a client in a lot of ways. And for many of them, they don't really understand what it means to plant their flag. They kind of throw spaghetti at the wall and hope that something sticks, and what ends up happening is they try to be everything to everybody, which leads to a really inconsistent message, and not a great way to be seen as a thought leader or to hold that position. ROB: You've certainly planted your flag, so that's a good starting point. That's the opposite of the cobbler's children. That's good. ERIK: This is true. We put a lot of effort into our own stuff or try to – although I'm not going to say we don't struggle with that too, just like everybody else. ROB: That's right. Sometimes you do need that voice outside of yourself to really help discover that journey. Help crystallize this picture for us, apart from yourself, apart from Predictive ROI; what does this look like? Maybe there's a good example of a firm that you've worked with, what they found their authority was, and what it looks like to project that out into the market. ERIK: I'm going to use Agency Management Institute as an example because that's a pertinent example for anybody within the agency space. Agency Management Institute is run by a fellow named Drew McLellan. Drew has done a phenomenal job of staking his claim within that agency space to be a guide, to be helpful. His stance, his flag, is that most agency owners are accidental business owners. They were really good practitioners; they eventually got asked to do some work, and they're like, “Yeah, I could do that.” And then they got asked a little bit more because they did a really good job, because they're good at what they do, and before long they go, “You know what? I can totally do this. I can run my own agency.” So, they put out a shingle, and they don't realize that being a practitioner and being a business owner is different. ROB: Sure, and there are plenty of scaling hazards along that way. But along with that, I think, coming from an individual practitioner perspective, you know that people ask you to do something; you don't always know why. Often, it's because they know you and they know what you do, and they know what they want out of that. How do you start to turn the ship and help someone who just stumbled into this business to realize – I think there's an element of why the customer is coming to you that is necessary to figure out where to find more of them. How do you start to flip that conversation? ERIK: Customers can come to you for a variety of reasons, and it's dangerous to make assumptions about why they're there. A customer might come to you because they know you, and they don't really know the problem they're dealing with. So, you're a safe place to be able to talk to them and guide them on where they may need some help or some advice or some work done. The other possibility is that you're getting them from referral sources because you've done a really good job. Again, depending on if you've actually planted your flag or niched down, the story that's being told might be vastly different. For instance, we get asked all the time, “Hey, do you know somebody that does this?” Yeah, we do. But we only recommend people that have been really clear that that is the problem they solve. But oftentimes people will get recommended just in the general sense of, “Oh, you're struggling with that? I work with this marketing agency and they might do something like that. How about I introduce you?” What we've done is made it so that our referrals are uncertain about what we do, so they might be sending us bad fits, and they may not realize it. They may think they're doing us a favor. The other option is that someone comes into our ecosystem because of our own marketing efforts or because they've heard of us somehow through sales efforts, etc., and they have a problem and they want someone to solve it, and they've got nothing better to do than to ask. Why would they not ask? The challenge comes in when we say yes to all of those things. When we say yes to all of those things, we've made the decision to take on work that is likely not our sweet spot. We've decided to take on work that is probably not going to be profitable, and we've decided to take on work that is going to take more effort than if we were to stay in our sweet spot. ROB: What does the journey look like? Sometimes we intuitively know our sweet spot, and if somebody says it back to us eventually, it'll sound right. But sometimes we don't know how to say it. How do you help people uncover what they should tell someone else their sweet spot is that's actually going to make sense, going to fit, going to be the right engagement, going to be profitable, going to be the business that they can actually build and scale? ERIK: There's a lot of different ways to go about this. There's one that I prefer. When it comes to finding a niche or a target market, there are lots of folks who will do a SWOT analysis. They're going to do an addressable audience audit. They're going to go and look at past clients and see what it is they've done really well. They're going to see which clients are profitable and all that. I love those. Those are great opportunities to be able to educate yourself. The problem I see most often is that at the end of getting all that information gathered, someone is still sitting there going, “I could go 18 different directions. I could still serve all these different audiences in all these different ways with all these different pain points.” Yes, you should do that information gathering, but I would recommend asking a couple of questions instead. Number one is: What's your superpower? What are you really good at? What do you love to do? Number two is: Who do you love to do that work for, that you actually care about doing that work for? That's your “why” in many instances. I was going to use a more adult term for how to look at it, but I want to make sure that this remains friendly for everybody. [laughs] Anyway, I would approach: What am I really awesome at? Who, and why do I care about serving that particular audience? Then the third question which I think is really important is: Am I going to be able to make a great case study off of that client? If the answer is no, then you're probably not going to be doing great work and you're not going to be able to leverage that work into future work. It should act as a really great filter of “Can I make a case study from this client?” If you can do that, for most people, that clarifies a lot of where their niche and where their flag needs to be. There are some other analogies which I can also recommend. One is if you serve multiple industries, each one of those industries is like the leg of a stool. But it doesn't have a top, so sitting on that stool is going to be pretty uncomfortable. Really what you have is a series of sticks. What you want to do if you serve multiple industries is find a common problem that all of those industries share that you're really good at solving. That's the top of the stool. That's what you actually sit on. If you have one and not the other, it doesn't really serve you to be able to narrow down who it is you're serving and how it is that you're serving them. ROB: That case study question – is that more important simply as a mirror that you hold up and look at? Or do you have a held belief that case studies are a key part of growth? I think that would be my question off of that. ERIK: I do think case studies have a really interesting position in an agency's growth. One, they put a filter on your biz dev efforts at the very beginning so that you're not saying yes to everybody. Because if you don't believe that you can do great work for them, you're not going to take them on. That already changes most agencies in a pretty significant way. The second piece is it forces you to be documenting your work in a meaningful way to be able to tell a story. That's useful both externally, which I'll get to in the third point, but it's also really useful when you're talking to your client to be able to say, “This is the work that we did; here is the evidence for that work.” Which is, again, uncommon for a lot of agencies to want to have that conversation, that are excited about having that conversation because they're prepared for that conversation. The third piece is, what better way to be able to present the sort of things that you do than to be able to use social proof from others to say, “We're great, and we don't have to say it about ourselves. Here's what other people say about us.” ROB: That definitely makes sense. Erik, if we rewind the clock a little bit, how did you get here? How did you end up being the co-owner of Predictive ROI? What led you into the business? What led it to grow? What's the journey here? ERIK: I had an unusual upbringing. I won't dive into all of that stuff, but I was fortunate enough to be around a lot of business owners throughout most of my life. My family own their own business; my brother and I started our own businesses fairly young. We had several of those. I was really fortunate to run across excellent mentors at the right time in my life, and I had the tremendous fortune in finding the right business partner. For anybody that has worked alongside a business partner, it's a really important relationship to get right. If you don't get it right, I cannot imagine how much stress and frustration that would cause on a daily basis. So, I was really lucky. I actually met my business partner, Steven – I was going to school at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse; he was working in small business development at the time, helping with businesses and their business plans. I had a question about a business plan that a friend and I were doing through Duke University, and he helped me do that. But he did it in a way that really impressed me. He actually sat me down with potential investors. He tapped his relationships in order to be able to say, “Hey, here's a student who really needs help. I'd like to get him in front of the right people to be able to give him the right feedback.” From that day forward, I was really impressed with what I saw from him, as far as his ability to step above and beyond for those who he was helping. And he was apparently impressed with the way that I handled everything as well. He likes to tell this story; he went back and later talked to his wife that day and said, “I don't know when, I don't know how, but Erik and I are going to do something together.” Fast forward a couple years, and he had just started to get Predictive off the ground. He gave me a call and he asked me if I wanted to be a part of it. He and I had some good conversations. I specifically asked him to start off as an intern within the agency and to grow with it, and we developed a five-year path for me moving forward that led to ownership, and the metrics that I needed to hit, and the criteria and the milestones that needed to be met. So that was the journey. It's been closing on 12 years now. ROB: Wow. That's a lot of trust to put in someone else, to say you're going to start it together, but to start from a position of non-ownership and have to earn it. I guess you'd had a chance to get to know him a little bit, because if you didn't know somebody, there's a lot of ways to get messed over that way. ERIK: Yeah. I wouldn't suggest that it's the only path forward for people to consider. [laughs] But I do think for anybody that currently owns a company and is looking to bring on someone to step into an ownership position, that's risky on their part too. So there has to be skin in the game on both sides, and depending on how you want to structure that – it's completely up to you. There's great advice on that from a lot of folks. I wouldn't consider myself to be the best person to ask about that. But I would say there is a critical factor in that both parties need to have skin in the game on it. If they don't, it's easy to go, “I want to be an owner!” and not really understand what that means, not really understand the impact. There's been times when Steven and I have made the decision not to pay ourselves and make sure the team gets paid. ROB: That's part of the owner's job. That's not the attractive part of it. ERIK: But if you have someone that doesn't understand that and hasn't been part of the agency in a meaningful way long enough to know that that is part of owning it, when that decision comes, they're going to rebel against that pretty hard. ROB: Yeah, they're not going to be thinking like an owner in that moment. It is very notable. I'm sure that Steven had plenty of choices of people he could have – he was seeing a lot of people in their businesses, so it's a very special position that you hold. You also highlight it's an interesting thing about services businesses apart from others, where you have this progressive path to ownership. You have your startup world where there's vesting of equity over time, it caps – it's very different from the way that people can grow into a partner role. Do you have any insight? What is it that's special about services – even law firms, consulting firms? What changes in that world that makes it make sense to tip over and grant partnership? Because that's not always the case in let's say an air conditioning firm that scales or something like that. ERIK: Yeah, absolutely. Anything to do with the service industry is all about relationships. Now, that's true to a certain extent in all businesses, but more so. When we think about agencies, agencies live and die on their relationships, whether that is the relationships they have with their team, the relationships they have with vendors and partners to be able to provide certain products or services, the relationships they have with their referral sources or the ponds they fish in as far as where they get their business, or the relationships they have with their current clients. In order to be able to tell the difference, we have a couple of factors that we consider. We've talked about this pretty extensively, just because of obviously the journey towards ownership for me years ago, and obviously the journey since, because we do get asked about what that looks like from other agency owners who are considering that path. One thing is you absolutely have to treat the person as an owner from the very beginning. They may not have the opportunity to leverage all of that power, but they need to be treated as an owner from the beginning. That includes things like transparency about finances. That includes how to have difficult conversations. That includes being there when strategic decisions are being made, etc. I think a lot of people shy away from that and they want to hide so much of the business from a potential partner for a really, really long time. Then all of a sudden they're like, “And boom, now you're an owner! Look in the closet, here's all the other scary things you never knew about.” That's not a great way to set someone up for success. So, I think that's one thing to keep in mind. A second thing to keep in mind is that when we think about bringing someone on for a partner, we need to really make sure that the values are in line with who we are. Eventually someone is going to be making decisions for the team, for your clients, for your products, for your services, and your job as an owner is to multiply yourself as best as you can. But it's not just multiplying of tasks. You're moving up in tasks; you're not trying to multiply those tasks. You're trying to hand off other tasks, but you want those tasks to be done in a meaningful way that aligns with how you want the business to be conducted. So doing values checks along the way – hugely, hugely important, and making sure that everyone is in alignment on that. ROB: Right. Those values, much like the value proposition of the firm, it's far preferable to drive those from authenticity rather than something aspirational. You talked about looking for a market position and expertise, but really, I think quite often people have something far better within them. It's about finding it. ERIK: Yeah. Another thing that I think is useful for that is – we're big proponents of five-year career paths. When someone comes on, we develop five-year career paths with them so that they know what the journey looks like. There's nothing more frustrating for an ‘A' player in an organization than not knowing what moving forward looks like. That's a good way for agencies to lose their ‘A' players. Finally, we have different levels of decision-making. We actually structure the decision-making process. We have Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 decisions. Level 1 is “I've made the decision. I'm letting you all know.” Level 2 is “I want input, but I will be making the decision ultimately,” and Level 3 is “This is a group decision.” Starting off the conversations with the right tone and saying, “Hey, I want to let you know this is a Level 1,” or “This is a Level 2,” or “This is going to be a Level 3 decision” sets the tone for what others should expect from an outcome. That can help prevent a lot of frustration, too, if they're really invested in that outcome. If this is a Level 1 decision, they don't emotionally invest that same way. They go, “Okay, good. Level 1 decision. It's been made. I just need to be able to take it in.” ROB: Yeah, versus someone thinking that it's a group decision and it's an owner decision, and just the loss of morale, the loss of investment, a little bit of loss of trust. Certainly challenging. Sounds like some good lessons there. When you reflect on the Predictive ROI journey, what are some other key learning points / lessons you have that you would extract from the business and that you still think about, maybe? ERIK: You got like six hours? Because we could go a long time. [laughs] I think if there was one overarching lesson that I would really recommend or that we keep front and center all the time, it's niche faster and deeper. That's it. The faster and the deeper you niche, it makes every other decision in the company easier. No better way to put it. ROB: There's a clarity and consistency to your message. One of the things that you shared when we were scheduling this was about a book that might be interesting to our audience. Talk about that. I think it's very aligned with what we've been talking about. ERIK: I appreciate you bringing that up. For us, one of the things we talk about is peanut butter & jelly relationships. It's this idea that you've got to have the right relationships and keep your audience at the center. Business is hard. It requires a lot of sacrifice for those who go down this path. The right relationships, teachers, and resources make a world of difference. If it's you against the world, that really sucks. [laughs] It isn't even against the world. You just have to look for those who will help without strings attached. When you were talking about the book, we talk about authority positioning, we talk about niching down, and we talk about all of this coming from a position of being helpful. We try to demonstrate that concept in a concrete way with our audience to teach what we mean. We're happy to do that with yours, too. Anybody who wants a copy of our book, it's Sell With Authority. Free of change, you can get one. There's no weird shipping costs, there's no quick pitch when you get it. It's just a free paperback copy of the book. And we mean it. We actually spent hundreds of dollars recently to get a copy to a participant in our free weekly Q&As because that participant lives in South Africa. That's a whole other story. [laughs] But if you're on this journey to being an authority, we truly want you to succeed because the world needs more meaningful content and thought leadership and a whole lot less noise. So, for anybody that does want that, that's at predictiveroi.com/free-book. Pretty simple. Happy to send it to anybody that wants it. If you're struggling with niching down, if you're struggling with how to really leverage authority and turn it into a monetization stream, if you're struggling with your content, feeling like “I know we're supposed to do it but I don't know why” – it dives into all of that, and we reference it all the time. It's pretty good use.  ROB: That's excellent. I love the no strings attached part. We will get that into the show notes for sure. I think there's probably an inception layer here. Is a book a way that you would, for many clients, potentially recommend establishing that authority and that positioning? That seems like it's one of the tools in the toolkit for sure. What are some of the core pillars? ERIK: A book is what we would consider to be a tactic. It's definitely not a strategy. When we think about authority positioning, there are a couple things to keep in mind: your expertise, your point of view, and why you care. We talked about that a little bit earlier. All of that drives into this idea of niching down and planting your flag. From there, what we recommend is coming up with a core promise, like “We promise to do this. As a company, we promise to give you a return on investment.” That's our core promise. If somebody's working with us, that's our core promise. Everything that we do is driven by that core promise. Then we look at the three levers that have to be pulled time and time again for someone to be able to achieve that core promise. Those are the strategies that you're aiming for from a content standpoint. Everything needs to lead up into those three things. For us, we know that you've got to grow your audience, you've got to nurture your leads, and you have to be able to sell. If you've got those three things down, you're going to be running a really nice profitable business. If you forget any of those, you're not going to be running a business. [laughs] So we dive into those a little bit more. But when it comes to how to do some of this, a book is generally the product of having done a lot of that work already. Rob, let's put yourself in this position. If you wanted to, you could take all of the interviews that you've done, you could find a common theme because you're controlling the theme of these podcast interviews, because you had a clear goal in mind of what this podcast was going to deliver. This podcast is what we consider to be cornerstone content. It is regular; it is meaty enough to be sliced and diced; and it's not a one-trick pony, meaning if you wanted to – let's say iTunes closed down, no more podcasts. It's still on Spotify, it's still on Libsyn, all those other places. So, you could take your cornerstone content, which you had a strategy behind in order to create, you had a goal with it – what would it look like if you took 30 of those interviews and turned them into a book? By the way, somebody literally just did that. ROB: Yeah, our writer for our episode summaries regularly campaigns to do this very thing. ERIK: In fact, one of our books, Profitable Podcasting, half of it was written from podcast interviews and episodes. We wrote half a book without having to write half a book. That's the difference between when we think about the content that we put forward in order to help us plant a flag. Every time you put forward a piece of content, whether that is social media, email, blog post, book, podcast episode, video series, research series, case study, eBook, streaming – the list goes on and on and on. Every time you do that, you're taking a hammer and you're either pounding that flag deeper into the dirt of where you are, or you're flailing that hammer around somewhere in the air. It's your choice on how much of your effort you want to waste and how much of your effort you want to put towards your position of authority. ROB: There's a lot to think about there. That's good. Erik, thank you for that. Thank you for the book link. Again, that'll be in the notes. When people want to find and connect with you, Erik, and with Predictive ROI, where should they go to find you? ERIK: You can obviously connect with us through all the usual social media suspects, like LinkedIn and Facebook. Honestly, though, if you actually want to get to know us, go to our website, predictiveroi.com, and join our free weekly Q&A. Literally, it's a group of awesome people and business owners that get together; we do 10 minutes of teaching, and then it opens the floor, everybody asks questions about whatever they need to, to solve business problems. Again, our audience is agency coaches and consultants, so you're going to be surrounded by agencies, coaches, and consultants. I really like that because it's a great low-key way to get to know who people are without any sort of commitment or anything along those lines. And it's a cool way to learn something at the same time. So that's what I'd recommend. ROB: We find the weekly thing through your website, sign up, show up, open Q&A. ERIK: Yep. ROB: Excellent. Thank you, Erik, for coming on the podcast and sharing your expertise and where you have planted your flag. We are very grateful for it. ERIK: Absolutely. Hopefully, this was helpful. Rob, if there's anything else that I can provide afterwards, just let me know. If anybody's got any questions, happy to help. This was fun. ROB: Much appreciated. Thank you. Take care. ERIK: You too. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Donna Loughlin, is President and Founder at LMGPR, a public relations agency that works with “emerging market players and visionaries” to help them build out their Leadership (the “L” in the agency's name), Momentum, and Growth. Key to this effort is researching the client's “story” and the drivers for the client founding the business. The client/agency relationship typically takes a minimum of a year to launch and continues, in some cases, for up to 8 years until the client goes through its IPO. Media relations initiatives include earned content – “talking to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and trade publications” – and/or “creating original content” (such things as whitepapers and podcasts). Donna began her career as a journalist, working with Reuters, BBC, and Washington Post, and migrated into doing PR inside technology companies going through IPOs during the dot-com bubble. Donna, in her role as a “corporate person,” deflected phone calls from investors in other companies who were seeking her help by referring them to her friends . . . until the day she realized that she had sent away “$1.8 million in revenue.” It was time to start her own agency. Initially, she worked out of her home and consulted with smaller, venture-backed companies and VC firms directly to launch these new companies before they had any marketing, or even, in some cases, a product. Within 90 days, she found she needed to add media and PR talent. She searched online and built a network of independent consultants, working mothers taking time off to have children, who became another (internal) iteration of LMGPR – “Loving Mothers, Good PR,” and then brought on people as employees. Today's clients are widely varied in their needs. They may want to raise funds to start manufacturing a new product, bring a product to market, prepare for a SPAC or an IPO – or be looking to be acquired (as an exit strategy).  In this interview, Donna explains the discovery process the agency uses to find a client's authentic story, exploring such things as: What is the company product and strategy?  What is the genesis and the genius behind the product?  What are the six components of success? Are you relevant?  Are you bold and fearless? (If you're not, what can you capitalize or own that would make you stand out?)  Do you think out of the box? Do you listen to the market?  Are you a disruptor or are you changing an entire category?) Donna has found that the founder's passion is often still in a company's narrative for early- to mid-stage companies but the purpose of the product or solution may be missing. Hence: Why did you bring the product to market in the first place? Donna mentors college students and younger associates in her agency. She emphasizes the importance of maintaining a strong network throughout a career. She can be reached on LinkedIn under Donna Loughlin, by email at donna@lmgpr.com. Her podcast, Before It Happened (https://www.beforeithappened.com/), focuses on visionaries and the future they imagine. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Donna Loughlin, President and Founder at LMGPR based in San Jose, California. Welcome to the podcast, Donna. DONNA: Thank you so much for having me on the show. ROB: It's great to have you here. Why don't you give us an introduction to LMGPR and the firm's superpowers? DONNA: Absolutely. First of all, LMGPR stands for Leadership, Momentum, and Growth, and that's exactly what we do. I think that's our superpower: we work with emerging market players and visionaries and we help them build their leadership and their momentum and their growth. That obviously doesn't happen overnight; our relationships with our clients typically are a minimum of a year to launch and then going into, in some relationships, 7 to 8 years till they go through their IPO. ROB: Got it. You are focused in, obviously, a key technology hub. People are starting sometimes from nothing, and they may not even know how to think or speak – I'm assuming “leadership” is largely a marketing leadership/ thought leadership perspective. Is that where people are coming from? DONNA: It's a combination of things. Obviously, curating the authentic story of the visionary and the founders is a key component, but also really dialing back and looking at why they even began to want to bring a product or a service to market – those epiphany moments where they decided, “I need to solve this problem, I need to bring this market, and I am the chosen one. I'm going to be the one that's going to trade in the dog for a cat and put all my chips on the table and make it happen.” Oftentimes those conversations start on napkins before they even make it to a whiteboard, or over a quick cup of coffee or my favorite sparkling beverage, Topo Chico. That's about as raw as it can get. ROB: Got it. For some people, I think starting a firm can almost be more instinctive. How do you take someone who might not even be able to tell you why they started the firm and get to the core truth of where this impetus for the business came from and decode that in an authentic way? DONNA: It was actually almost a happy accident. I was a journalist before I became a professional public relations agent, so to speak. I was with Reuters and BBC, and I also did internships with the Washington Post. So, I had really deep editorial, journalistic roots that migrated into working with technology companies and working inside and doing a number of IPOs and very fast-paced IPOs during the dot-com bubble. All that experience formed into this factor that started bringing me into more firsthand discussions with the backers, the investors themselves, the angel investors, the venture capital investors, which is huge in the tech sector. So, I started getting a lot of phone calls from them asking for help when I had a full-time corporate job, and I kept referring the business to friends. Then I realized one day, wow, I just referred X amount of business – I think I calculated it was something like $1.8 million in revenue that I could've put on my own plate. And I was referring it to people because I was a corporate person. So, I stood back and thought, you know what? I actually think I have the makings for an agency. And that's exactly how it happened. I started working and consulting with the venture-backed smaller companies and going in-house and working with the VC firms firsthand to get the companies airborne before they had marketing, before they had, in some cases, a product. ROB: Got it. For someone who's maybe not as deep in the tech industry, how would you explain what a typical client looks like? What's a particular client that you could maybe drill a little bit into their own narrative and their journey to market? DONNA: First of all, there's no one-size-fits all. There's no typical client. Each client is a very specific need. Sometimes clients come to us because they need to bring a product to market; other times, they need to raise funding because they have a product, but now they need to go to manufacturing. Others, they're looking for an acquisition as an exit strategy, and others are getting ready for a SPAC or an IPO. So there's no one-size-fits-all, as I mentioned. But the process is the same. We like to take them through what I call a discovery process of looking for their authentic story. What is the company product and strategy? What is the genesis and the genius behind the product? And then being able to craft a story, looking at what I call six components of success, which are: Are you relevant? Are you bold and fearless? If you're not, what can you capitalize or own that would make you stand out? Thinking out of the box, listening to the market. Are you a disruptor or are you changing an entire category? Then as you mature and grow, it's being agile and also gaining speed. Once a company comes to market – I just came back from CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, last week, and it was really interesting to see what was hot. Every year, analysts forecast what's going to be hot. A lot of the companies that launched this year were virtual. They didn't go to the show itself. These are mega companies, big companies that are public-facing – transportation, robotics, and consumer electronics companies. They didn't show. But what did show well were the smaller companies that were a little more nimble and a little more scrappy in some ways and didn't necessarily have the big funding. They introduced products to market. So, you can still go to venues like that and see a little bit of a science fair. That's something I particularly am always intrigued with when it comes to the tech sector. There's always a little bit of a science fair, whether it's in Silicon Valley or it's in Atlanta or it's in Carolina or it's in Washington State. We have all these different belts of technology – Colorado, around the world, Portugal, parts of the UK, and even parts of Los Angeles have these gulches, so to speak, of innovation and technology. I think we're really lucky that we constantly have this cycle of newness in the industry. ROB: Absolutely. I heard a lot from CES this year where even some major exhibitors didn't show up at the last minute. You walk into a main hall, there's supposed to be a big booth and there's just like a QR code of what would have been there at the booth. It really seemed like a different experience, and maybe some embryonic companies whose stories were quite early. When you see someone who's maybe not as polished and hasn't been through your process, what are they missing from their story? What's a common founder error when they're thinking about communicating to market? DONNA: I think the one great thing about early-stage companies particularly, and even as they evolve and become more mature and ultimately public, is the founder's passion typically is still in the narrative and in the soul of the company. I think the part that oftentimes people miss is the purpose of the product or the solution. Why did you bring it to market in the first place? If you think of something as common as a paperclip, a paperclip is a pretty low-tech product, but it actually adds a lot of functionality. I can clip it, I can clip papers, I can use it to fix my iPhone, I can use it to pick something out of my teeth, I can use it to also do basic IT to my computer. Pretty low-tech. But I think one thing about a paperclip – and I'm dumbing this down to literally a flea and a tick – is that a paperclip still has a purpose. I think companies oftentimes lose sight of what their purpose is. What is that authentic component that you're trying to get a consumer or business to adapt or adopt? I think as companies get bigger, sometimes they lose track of that. You've got to keep a pulse on what customers want. You've got to keep a pulse on, if you're in a reseller channel, what does the channel need? What do the consumers want and what can your partners advocate as well? ROB: It is always a challenge to keep the spotlight off of yourself and to, as many would say, make the customer the hero. It can be challenging to remember sometimes, especially when things thrive a little bit. You have given us, Donna, some of your origin story and how you went from some of these news outlets and reporting to seeing an opportunity that was crossing your plate regularly. When did it become evident that this was going to move from single-player mode at first to multiplayer mode and you had to start thinking about maybe not doing everything, maybe training other people to do things that you felt like you'd been the best at over time? DONNA: Your best IP is your talent, right? Going from literally working from my coffee table and my kitchen table and whatever table in the house I wanted to work from as an independent consultant – it happened pretty quickly. Within the first 90 days, it was clear that I needed to find some other media and PR talent. So, I went online and found some great stay-at-home working moms who had taken time off from having children, and I created a great network of independent consultants. The working name for LMGPR internally was “Loving Mothers, Good PR,” because I had these amazing women that were working for me, and they had small children, and some of them are still with me to this day. Their kids are in high school now, and off to college. Quickly I went from an individual to a network of independents to employees, and when I hit that employee mark that first year, that was a scary milestone move. It was like having more children. I was then responsible for the caretaking and the creation and the mentoring of their careers and their finance and really being instrumental in that. I think that was a big business step for me. At the point when I made that migration, I think we had about 10 clients, and those were 10 retainer clients. I myself, the same year that I started the business, adopted two kids from Russia. So, I not only had an infant startup at home, I was managing and working directly with a lot of infant companies and taking them to market. I don't recommend anyone do that, but I'm a multitasker, so it seemed to allow me to thrive and focus. It was like the AM/PM type of scenario. As we've grown, we just celebrated a 20-year anniversary. I look back at the portfolio of companies that we worked with in the market – I'll take security as an example. Cybersecurity was huge when I first started my business. Now we have security and artificial intelligence and the security of intelligence and blockchain and the need for security in blockchain, and then we have all the different nuances of security that's built into the cars and the robots and all the IoT objects we have in our home. Watching the security world mature has been really interesting because all these products once upon a time were a la carte, and now we have all this integration. ROB: There is so much going on in cybersecurity. I looked on your roster of clients; I recognize one of our Atlanta favorites with Bastille, so congratulations on working with them. Some would look at your timing – and congratulations on 20 years, by the way – and argue that you might have started the firm at perhaps one of the worst times to start a marketing firm in Silicon Valley. DONNA: Absolutely did. [laughs] ROB: What made that not the case for you? People who weren't around or don't remember, I was working for a venture-funded startup in 2000 and 2001, and going into 2002, we had three rounds of layoffs. We cut the firm size down by two-thirds; eventually had to compromise on a sale to an EMEA firm that bought this company. With that retraction in tech at that time, what made it work? Because there weren't as many clients as there were two years before that. DONNA: What made it work was a lot of the bigger national agencies – and I have respect for the big ones like the Bursons and the Edelmans, and I've actually done work for them in the past – were closing up their regional offices in the Silicon Valley to San Francisco, and there were a lot of boutique agencies. So, my competition had shrunk. In terms of working with emerging market companies, their retainer rates were typically around $10,000, but in some cases there were maybe projects that were three month stints for $15k. Their budgets weren't quite as big, but if you did the calculations and you brought in thirsty clients and you were hungry enough to make a difference, you could build a business. And I wasn't the only one at that time; there were other advertising, marketing, and branding firms that also had the opportunity to pick up the slack, so to speak. Because the venture capital firms were a big funnel for me, I was getting venture-backed companies that had gone from scrappy to a little more of what I call the happy mode. They were probably six months to a year from bringing products to market. I think that was really a sweet spot, because you're absolutely right; the market was not – I personally know a lot of people who lost jobs and were moving out of the Valley and cashing out of their houses. And you know what happened in the housing market; it was just nuts. But I think it was using my own philosophy of being bold and fearless, and I never looked back. I think the only time you really want to use the rearview mirror is when you're driving, and I clearly was not going to look back. I could go work in another corporate job and cycle through that and do some great things but having the variety and being able to choose exactly the innovations and the technologies – you mentioned Bastille; recently FireEye was acquired by McAfee, and I worked with that company for their first five years, taking them from literally 3 and then 5 and then 10 all the way up to 1,000 employees. So, I'm known for being able to scale and grow the business, but also scale and grow with that business. ROB: That seems like a theme that would carry across from the venture side to the startups they work with. It's a very interesting customer acquisition channel. It makes sense. I think some of the venture firms would project into the market that they are increasing the array of services they can provide. They may purport to have a PR arm. How much of that is a trend? How much of that is still smoke and mirrors, where they may still be cobbling together services underneath the umbrella of the firm, so they provide it, but it's partnering with people who are focused practitioners? What's that mix look like? DONNA: I pride myself in that we do one thing and we do one thing only, and that is media relations. I don't do social media. I don't do product marketing. There's a whole list of things that we don't do. But there's a lot of great people in the marketplace that can do brand positioning, meaning the physical. I feel like our core strength is the written and spoken word and taking that and turning it into the narrative that then helps churn the media, whether it be earned content, owned content, or digital content. At one point we did have a social media team, and nobody really wanted to pay for it. I can't give away those services for free. Social media for a period of time was considered to be something really inexpensive that you could offshore, and there were a lot of offshore services. So, you were competing not necessarily with other agencies, but you were competing with this offshore – Fiverr and those types of services. You can't compete with that. The margins are too low. That's when I realized, let's do what we do best and what we're known for, which is creating the leadership, momentum, and growth editorial content, whether it's the earned content – talking to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and the trade publications – or it's creating original content such as whitepapers or podcasts or those types of things. That I feel is the most valuable for our clients. ROB: You mentioned upfront a couple of things. One, you mentioned the duration of a client engagement being on the longer side, and then you also mentioned retainers. It seems like that's potentially a very instrumental tool in thinking about how to grow the firm. You mentioned having 10 retainer clients and how that potentially would embolden you to be able to bring on an employee because there's a little bit more certainty than a bunch of little projects. How, though, should a client think about the value of PR over time? I think a lot of times people get that splashy placement, that earned placement, and they don't know whether money's going to fall from the sky or whether it's just going to shore up a conversation that we're already having. How do they think about value? DONNA: That's a great question. I do think engagement is so important in building your relationship with a client, and it's not about a transaction. It's about people, and it's about ensuring that the people in the room, whether it's the C-suite, you have your core executive team, you have your engineering team, your sales team – all these different operational groups within the company might need PR for different reasons. I think the best clients are the ones that we're working with in all aspects. Some companies are larger corporations, so we might just do PR for a division versus the whole corporation. But bringing value starts with having realistic and authentic conversations and being transparent and being open, being able to really understand the company going into 2022, knowing exactly their top three business objectives, their revenue goals, their client goals, their tech and innovation competitive challenges that they're seeing in the sales funnel. And to be able to look at PR not as a tool but as a strategic weapon that's going to allow them to meet those goals, but also to be able to drive revenue. At the end of the day, if my clients cannot bring in revenue – and I know each one of my clients has brought in revenue from very specific articles. Not every article is going to bring revenue, but the culmination over time of articles – we just did a poll this morning for a client; last year we had more than 1,200 articles that came out on a company that nobody heard of two years ago. Of those 1,200 articles, I'd say maybe 500 are really hallmark, feature-type articles. But the fact that we saturated the conversation within their market space, which is an electric motorcycle or transportation company, is a testament to being relentless. So, showing value every day, constantly thinking – I always think the same way I did when I was an intern or when I was an editorial assistant: How hungry are you? Every day, I wake up hungry and thirsty, wanting to get results. I still squeal when I get an article in Forbes or Bloomberg or Wall Street Journals or the cover of Road & Track. That personally is the integrity of what it is that I was hired to do. So it's showing that enthusiasm, showing that constant insightfulness of “How do we go faster? How do we go harder? How do we charge?” Not charge our client more but charge forward ahead to get results. ROB: You mentioned in the trajectory of clients, leadership, momentum, growth – I wonder a little bit, because almost all of your clients are at some point new to market and then hopefully catering to different personas as they grow, does that align in some way with the customer adoption / technology adoption cycle of early adopters versus where somebody is in the maturity of a market? Does that affect what the messaging is along that LMG and where you place the message? DONNA: That's interesting. Let's look at the electric vehicle (EV) market as an example. The first electric vehicle company I worked with was 10 years ago. Tesla wasn't shipping 10 years ago. I've been in that space for a while, so I think I have a vantage point of having access to the early market analysts and the early channel players that were selling EV products and really being able to understand that particular category. I fly. One of the things I love about flying is that I have a multitude of things that I need to make sure I'm in tune with when I'm flying. When I fly on commercial airlines, I can sit back and relax. But my name's on the door, so at the end of the day, if I'm not in control of my plane with my client and being able to understand all the instrumentation and all the landing gear that I need to – because at any moment, things can change. When I talk about being agile, it's like all of a sudden one of your customers came out with a product and they blindsided you, or you have a competitor that bought your #2 and #3 competitor and all of a sudden they're like Goliath. Stock market crashes. COVID happens. All these things happen. I think being calm and preventative – I don't like the word “crisis communications”; I like preventative conversations so that you can actually defuse things very easily and stealthily, before maybe even the client sees it happening. ROB: Got it. Certainly there's a nuance to it. As you reflect, Donna, on your journey with LMGPR, what are some lessons you have learned that you wish you could go back and tell yourself? DONNA: Maybe more sleep. [laughs] Ariana Huffington came out with a book about sleep not too long ago and I've yet to read it, but I thought that's pretty amazing. Here's this woman who's a real powerhouse and she's like, “Sleep is sacred.” I think the second thing I wish I'd kept tabs on – this is pre-LinkedIn – is keeping the power of the network and keeping in contact and networking with people throughout your entire career. I always tell the younger team members that I'm mentoring – not just through my agency, but I also mentor through a couple universities and I sit on a board at a university – that the power of the network is so invaluable. You never know exactly when you're going to tap in on something. I just got a text and the same person really wanted to talk to me. Text, and he Slacked me and LinkedIn me. It was like three different trifecta levels. Like, who is this man and why is he trying to get a hold of me? Well, we had worked together a good 20 years ago, back when I was a reporter, and he's transitioning into my career. He knew that because I was part of the digital boom and I was part of the networking boom and I was part of the security boom and all these other booms, I might know somebody who could be of service to him. He didn't expect that I was still in the industry; he thought I'd retired by now. I'm like, why would I retire? So, I think the power of that network and keeping connected with everybody in your career cycle is important. And I think the other thing is I've learned a lot from so many great people, mentors that I had access to, but I think taking time to mentor more is something – I mentor every day, but I recently got on the board for University of California Santa Barbara, working as a board member and mentoring women that are pursuing careers in STEM. I think STEM has become a commonplace term now, but we took so much of the STEM out of the classroom, and now we're fortifying. It's like with food. You take everything out and now you're putting it back in. I think that's an area where I personally would've taken more computer science or more math. I took all those core things, but I didn't pursue a career specifically in STEM. But I work with so many amazing people that are gifted in STEM. I feel like I'm street smart, and I think I would've loved to have taken some more of those classes when I was at UC Berkeley. ROB: That makes so much sense. STEM has certainly come into so many areas of our lives where it was not previously present. We rewind to the beginning of the firm, and not everybody bought a computer. Sometimes they asked an expert what to buy. Now people just walk into Best Buy and pick a computer. They require so much more knowledge, and you can speak to different needs rather than just “It's a computer.” There's features that people care about. DONNA: Do you remember – those listening might not remember at all, but you would go to Tandy RadioShack or some other component place and you'd buy all the pieces and you'd make a computer. The idea of walking into a big box store and buying a computer, needless to say under $500, just didn't exist. When I first started, I had a word processor, and then I had the first Apple – I'm dating myself here for sure, but I had an Apple Lisa. That was my first computer. ROB: Nice. Wow. DONNA: And nobody knew how to use it. They said, “Kid, you're the youngest one here. Learn how to use it.” ROB: I definitely built some computers from parts and everybody looked at me like I was a little bit crazy. But it wasn't crazier than what they wanted to charge me for it at the store. DONNA: It's amazing. You still have that computer? ROB: Oh, no, that was a while back. But golly, there was a GTE Data Services location in Tampa, Florida that ran a Boy Scout Explorers Club where we were stripping down, tearing apart 8086 desktop computers down to the case, what's the video card, what's the RAM – we knew all that stuff. It was a different time, but maybe we could all learn from it. Donna, when people want to get in touch with you and with LMGPR, how should they find and connect with you? DONNA: There's a couple places. LinkedIn I think is the best, under Donna Loughlin. And then you'll see LMGPR there. My email is donna@lmgpr.com, and I don't mind receiving emails from students and professionals both. I've talked about mentoring; I'm here to mentor the next generation in this industry. And then my podcast, Before It Happened, is also a great place to check out, which is a podcast that's focused on visionaries and the future they imagine. And there's obviously a lot of tech and innovation in that podcast. ROB: We will certainly get that podcast into the show notes for people to have a look and encourage everyone to subscribe. Donna, thank you for coming on the show and sharing from your wisdom and experience in the industry. It's definitely appreciated. DONNA: Absolutely. Thank you so much. Hopefully I'll see you when I come out to Atlanta. ROB: Sounds good. Be well. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Avi Kumar is Founder and CEO of Kuware, an almost 14-year-old business that bills itself “as a full-service agency, but a little bit more focused on strategy than actual implementation.” The shift away from “traditional marketing services and taking customers as they came” started 5 years ago. Today, the agency works with clients who want to put some strategy behind their efforts and are less concerned about the agency providing implementation. Avi says it was very difficult when the agency first made that transition to, while it was trying to grow the business, turn away customers that did not have a strategy focus. Current clients not only need be willing to work with Kuware's fractional CMO to develop a strategy . . . they also have to be ambitious about “big growth,” have funding or be ready to move to the next level, or to be invested in brick-and-mortar with a solid, fixed budget. When all the pieces are In place, the agency can say, “Get the whole package. We can really move you to the next level.”  If a prospective client is not yet serious about their business, they are not ready for Kuware. The planning process takes a few months. Although written for a longer period of time, the agency contract allows a client to fire the agency within the first month. This tasks the agency to provide enough proof within that first month to gain a client's trust that the value that will come. In this interview, Avi describes the challenge for a growing agency of deciding “who to turn away.” The agency does not “fire” its small, established clients . . . but once a new monthly billing threshold Is set (based on its 50% billing “midpoint”), it will not take on new customers that fall below that threshold. The agency keeps developing processes to meet client needs and raising that threshold as more clients come onboard. Avi addresses in detail the impacts of hiring in changing an agency, managing its expenses, and determining people's perceptions of an agency's capabilities. Avi started his career as an engineer, a microprocessor architect. On sabbatical from Intel, Avi decided to try ecommerce, did very well at it, and used it as an “on-ramp” to marketing. To ensure controllable costs and fast client service, the agency maintains a salaried development team in Avi's home-country, India. He pays everyone 20% over the market, so that in the 11 years the company has been in India, “nobody has quit.” The agency recently acquired a white-label PPC service which helps small agencies provide reasonably priced PPC for small niches in local markets. The PPC service is separate from Kuware's agency operations, but the agencies which use it are the same small agencies to which Kuware refers clients that don't fit its criteria. Avi can be found on LinkedIn, on his agency's website at: https://kuware.com/, or at: Avi@kuware.com. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Avi Kumar, Founder and CEO at Kuware based in Austin, Texas. Welcome to the podcast, Avi. AVI: Thank you, Rob. Thank you for inviting me to this. ROB: It's good to have you on. You're from one of those popular cities where everybody's moving to in Austin, Texas, but let's focus on Kuware for a moment here. Why don't you tell us about the firm and where you specialize?  AVI: Certainly. Kuware is now coming up on its 14th year as a business. We right now bill ourselves as a full-service agency, but a little bit more focused on strategy than actual implementation. We do do the implementation, but what we found is what was lacking for a lot of businesses is they needed to figure out what kind of marketing they should do because just saying, “Just do Facebook ads” or “Just do this or that.” So we added that layer five years back, and we service it through a fractional CMO or a part-time CMO who comes on board and helps guide the strategy, and then go to the implementation. That's what, in five years, we have evolved to. Before that, we were more traditional, just taking on business as it came in a sense. If somebody wants ads, okay, we'll do it. Need websites, being full-service, we'll do that. But now we only take clients who want the strategy as part of it and who want to spend time figuring things out before implementing it. So that's what we have evolved and started specializing that way. ROB: That can be a pretty difficult transition. Lots of people start an agency as the order-takers, the people who can say, “What's your budget? We'll do our darndest with it. What are you trying to do? You want clicks, here's your clicks.” How do you take someone who comes to you and they think they know what they want – there is this challenger sale moment where you're like, “Hey, wait a minute, let's take a step back. What do you really want?” Sometimes they're like, “No, I just want this ad. I just want to spend this budget. That's my job.” AVI: That's an excellent point. For us, I discovered this process along the way. We had some clients that had a few people in-house who were doing social media. We did their website and we managed the ecommerce and we were trying to do that. Then slowly, as I got to know the client for a while – and this client was with us for almost 10 years – after a few years, I said to them, “You know that person you keep hiring for social media and they keep quitting after six months? Why don't you give us that, too?” They said, “Okay, you got it. Makes sense.” Then I said, “Who's planning your marketing?” They hired somebody, a new person, young, assuming that they knew what they're doing, and in a year and a half they quit. So, I said, “What if we manage the whole thing for a fixed price for you? We'll do the strategy.” So that's how we started. This was a company, a brand of sunglasses, prescription glasses. They created the category. In this case, being a single owner business, but a pretty good-sized business, we fine-tuned this, and then we convinced them, “Hey, you should sell direct. Don't just sell through opticians only. Why don't you sell direct also?” They said, “No way. Our retailers would be mad.” So, we figured out a strategy, convinced them, and they almost doubled their sales without losing any retailers. Then I learned that this is what they needed – a little bit of the business side, but marketing-centric. If I go and build myself as a business consultant, it'll be hard to explain that. Most marketers do give some business advice for free and some marketing strategy for free. So, I said, “Well, this client was willing to pay, and he sold.” They sold the company to Hilco. Much larger, $300 million company. They kept us around for a year because they were actually amazed at what we could do with our team. And they had a 50-people marketing team. They let us run this, and then eventually they absorbed it in-house. That was the time I said, “Okay, we can do this for other clients and start selling it.” The hardest point was what you did identify: if somebody comes to us, “We've just got $2,000” – turning down that $2,000 was hard, because you're still building the agency. They're willing to give you $2,000 per month for a few months. We had to tell them, “Sorry, we don't do that anymore. You should really spend money to figure out what you need and then plan.” The other thing we started realizing is that this only works for companies who really think they want to double, triple, or who are brick-and-mortar who have fixed money already and they have a fixed budget. It doesn't work for somebody who's just trying and playing and not serious about the business. They need to be somebody who's also ambitious. Either they've got funding, or they have decided now to really move to the next stage. Only then can we tell them, “Get the whole package. We can really move you to the next level.” The other challenge is this stuff takes time, a few months. We sign them up for longer, but we have a deal that you can fire us within the first month. So, we've got to do enough in the first month to buy in their trust that, “These guys are not just planning. They're actually saying things which make sense.” It took us a while, but we do have a system now where we are able to show them within a month the value that will come. Even if actual sales might not happen, they will see enough plans to say, “This will work” and continue on a longer term contract. As a small agency, that's the thing you've got to decide at some point, who to turn away. We keep increasing the threshold – “This much, no, this much, no, this much, no,” and then we moved on from there. It was a transition, for sure. ROB: What size metric would you use to describe that you were at when you felt like you needed to start cutting off this low-end, very transactional customer? AVI: Basically, in size metrics, what we said is that when we switched to more than 50% who we were billing at least $5k a month, then we said we might lose some – we didn't fire any client if they were small ones. But we said, “We won't take anymore, because we have proven that more than 50% of our revenue comes from these bigger clients who are willing to” – so that was our criteria. Once we get more than 50% of clients paying $5,000 a month and they are going for strategy – and usually the average client ends up at 20 to 25. So, we said, “Don't take anymore. Just existing ones.” We do have some for now, 12 years, existing clients working. We're still doing their social media. But it's a lot fewer of them. ROB: That also makes sense, how you're able to then incubate this capability within the firm. It's hard to go from not having an offering to having an offering, but when 50% of your clients need the service, you're able to start building the processes, building the people. You're not trying to go from nothing to something. You're saying, “Here's the offering. Now we know how to maybe repeat it a little bit.” AVI: Absolutely. By the way, the building process part – even though we've been doing this overall 13 years and the last 5 years, this – it's an ongoing process. It's never set as a cookie-cutter, ever. Things change and the business changes. What we have said is just agree to the fact that the process itself will be changing, but we need a process. That's what we've been doing. ROB: Processes are all about enablement. They're not about restrictions, they're not about tying hands. They create freedom. It's hard to feel that, because I'm not a process kind myself, but it's necessary, or else you go crazy. AVI: Yeah, absolutely. ROB: Avi, what led you into this business in the first place? What led you to start an agency and originally start taking some ad budgets and then continue figuring out what the business needed to be? AVI: I worked for a major corporation. I was a microprocessor architect. I worked on Pentium 4. I worked on some low power processors for Intel and going into Apple. It was a very different area. So, when I wanted to do something, I realized it's impossible, almost, to start a hardware business. You want to do chip design? It's very expensive. And I did try that for about a year. I had some funding from the Chinese government, but it didn't go very far. Then I had to pivot and say, okay, I want to do my own thing. My sabbatical came up; I left Intel. I wanted to start something different. I had enough money from Intel, from stock options, so I said, let's play the stock market and do things on the side. That's when I started looking at ecommerce and started doing and selling things from my connections in China online. This was 14 years back or so. I was not expecting to do well. Everybody knows so much SEO, they're talking about techniques, and I'm a hardware guy. And marketing – I mean, yeah, I did have an MBS somewhere along the line, but they don't teach you marketing there. It was more management. So, I was thinking this would never work. But soon I found I became the number one seller of Windows XP online, and an Adobe reseller, by just doing a few things online. That's what got me thinking, okay, if I can do this in three to four months, then I think I can help others too and create a business out of it. It seems like it's not as – the system, everybody's not exploited it yet. I used to assume that marketing guys knew everything; “How will I learn this?” That's where we just kept on doing ecommerce. First a lot more ecommerce. We were doing Zen Cart, if you can remember that. Then moved on to Drupal Commerce and Magento. Did a lot more ecommerce initially. The thing was, ecommerce people have money. They're selling something, always. So that's what we did a lot more, and then we moved on to B2B. So it was more of a slow process, and I didn't trust myself in marketing for the first five years. I kept telling people, “I know slightly more than the customers but not much more.” That was a learning process also, just to try to figure that out. ROB: Right, but ecommerce is a pretty good on-ramp for a lot of mathematical minds. It adds up. You can put some money in, you can get some money out, get some feedback on whether or not you're doing a good job. This is one of these funny episodes we have from time to time where you're a computer engineer from UT Austin, got your MBA, I'm a computer engineer from Georgia Tech, I have my MBA, and we get to hang out and talk marketing. [laughs] We have these episodes every year or so. We have engineers who have made their way into the marketing world. AVI: The phrase I use is ecommerce is the closest you can get to engineering in marketing. If you're used to engineering, ecommerce is the closest thing you can touch which looks/feels a little bit like engineering. ROB: As you've had to grow the capabilities, grow the firm, sometimes you think about those key hires that have come at a moment where you needed a little something different in the business or it was really an inflection point. What are some of the people or roles that have made a difference in Kuware? AVI: Early days, the first hire which people talk about, it should be done earlier than later, before contracting. I'm talking about beyond contracting. Of course, contracting and outsourcing still works, and we all have done that and we still do some of it. But your first full-time hire I think should be done as soon as possible. It really changes the game because you have to think about two people. You have to make enough money for two people now. You start thinking more seriously than just playing it as a game at that point. You're responsible for people's salaries at that point. I think that was a key. And that person was great. She was not a great marketer, but she was a great person to work with. Then as I moved on, into the CMO world, I needed people with credentials beyond me so when I took them to clients, they'd say, “Oh yeah, they have experience. They can handle our CMO.” So those became our key employees later because their credentials they had from other places got us to easily sell that service – which we already knew how to do, but people still want to know who will be the CMO. Those became key people for us. I think the next key thing for me was stop outsourcing. We used to do development outsourcing to India. Being of Indian origin, I said, “I'm just going to go to India and set up shop,” because I learned my first outsourcing team were outsourcing to somebody else. Being an Indian, I thought, “They will not fool me because I'm Indian origin, right?” But that happened to me. So, then I said, “I want my actual salaried team in India.” If you have a system, if you are doing it for low cost, I would say start owning the piece of it somehow. To me, that building of the business that way gave us the stability that I never had to think – I mean, I can give a quote on any website without spending too much time now. I don't have to depend on a freelancer or somebody telling me how much it'll be so I can pad it and add my expense and do it because it's all in-house. I think that changed the game for us, and for our customers, because now when customers say something needs to be fixed, it'll be fixed overnight. And if it's a small thing, we don't even worry about billing it. It's not worth the time to bill it. And they're happy. Customers are happy that this happened so quickly. ROB: Right, it's a strategy to overserve. It makes a ton of sense. For people who find that idea, though, of salaried employees outside of their country intimidating, how did you get over that hill? I think about setting up a legal entity. What's the local compliance, what's all that look like? I would be scared a little bit. How do you think about it? AVI: It was a hassle, for sure, absolutely. I would rather do business, I used to say those days, in China than India. I spent a lot of time in China with Intel. In India, in many places, things are not as clear. So, it was just a question of, I'm going to risk getting two to three people, and how much is it? It's money which will go away. As long as I can afford that money, worst case, this will fail. That's how I started. I start all situations by saying, “Can I afford this failure, this much money, pragmatically?” And that's what I did with it. It worked. Great. We had to make some changes there. Another thing I did for outsourcing is I said I'm going to pay everybody over 20% the market. As a result, in our 11 years of company in India, nobody has quit. ROB: Wow. AVI: We have fired people because they didn't work out, but they don't quit because they're going to another job. And India is like Silicon Valley of 2000, where people quit every three months for more money. We have managed to do that by keeping the salary slightly higher and not getting too greedy on how we pay them and compensate them in India. ROB: Yeah, this past year we have a partner who's very much in that outsourcing space in India, and I feel like they had to do about 25% bumps across the board to stop the bleeding from people. They had really good retention and then they got hit by the COVID compensation wave over there. AVI: Yeah. I was concerned. My being of Indian origin didn't help that part, because that was definitely the same worry, a U.S. company dealing with these entities in India. ROB: One thing that you shared with us as we were booking is that you've recently undertaken an acquisition, which is a different sort of adventure in another entity. Talk about that process, how you figured out who you wanted to acquire, how you closed that transaction. AVI: Sure. For a year and a half, I was saying, “I need to grow faster; should I invest?” This opportunity – this is a white label PPC service. The reason I was very intrigued by this is we do PPC for our clients. Our clients' ad spends are in hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, so these are big, and they allow us to experiment. I thought, we do this and our clients let us do whatever; are we really good? There must be somebody who does only PPC. If anybody does only PPC and nothing else, they must be good because that's all they do. So, I used to keep hiring consultants from other companies to audit us. But anything they told us was not eye-opening. Some good ideas. When I ran into this opportunity, Rob Warner's company InvisiblePPC – he's out of the UK – I said, “Oh, you guys do just PPC ads, and you do it for agencies, and you are not working with a $100,000 budget. Most of your clients are spending $5,000-$10,000 a month, which means these small clients, if they don't see the results, are going to fire you. You've got to figure this out very quickly on $5,000, so you must be really good, right? I'm very intrigued just understanding how you do this.” I had a technical interest in seeing how he does it. As I talked to Rob more, I realized they really know. And by the way, the secret sauce, which I'm happy to give away, is simple: if you do the same kind of ads again and again, and once you spend hundreds of millions of dollars doing it for those sectors, you become really good. What the white label service does – it only works for smaller agencies who cannot do their ads, and we take only what we call smart niches. If it is a local business – plumber, HVAC – those we have figured out exactly, so we can tell you for $1,000, you'll get so many leads, guaranteed. Because we have been doing it for so long. It's unlike our main agency business. There, every client is special, is different. We have to figure out and tell them in advance the cost per acquisition, work together. Here, we are able to actually tell our clients that “This is what it'll be.” It's an amazing business that way. If it fits the right kind of client and right agency, it's like a no-brainer. You will not lose money. How often can a marketer go to a client and say, “Yes, I'll get you a lead for this much, guaranteed, don't worry, and first month you'll have it. You won't have to wait for two months for me to do planning”? That's what this white label business does. Once I saw inside, doing this again and again and spending that much money and becoming a Google Premier Partner and having access to all that is amazing. That's where I felt great – it's a technology kind of business, and I understand this stuff, and Rob had built a lot of tools which are proprietary tools that others don't have. I can tell who is advertising in the local market. I can use that. Even SEMrush don't do that. So we can really target that kind of thing. As a growth strategy, I think if it matches and you understand the business, then acquire. That's what I learned. If we were taking on something else which we didn't do at all, then we'd have to figure it out. At least the systems we follow there, but we know PPC. We have done it. We understand the business in general. And we can keep it separate in a sense and not mess with it. We are a big agency. Our clients are not the clients of agencies who come there, because it's a very different business. Also, as I was telling you, those $2,000 a month ones who we don't want to take on, now we can pass on to those agencies and say, “Hey, we don't deal with that. Here are some clients for you. You guys do their social, because unfortunately we don't take them on.” ROB: The predictability of it certainly makes sense. If you're a plumber, there's lots of places you can get leads, and you're going to pay for them. You're going to pay for Yelp, you're going to pay for Angie's List. If your PPC partner can't be in that ballpark or better – there's a price tag. They know what the expected price is, and you have to match it. But I guess those platforms also know what the going rate is for a PPC lead and they probably reprice a little bit according to the market rate as well. AVI: Exactly. It's just the volume and having done the same thing. HVAC in Boston to Austin will not be that different. It will be very similar pricing. We have data on both cities, so we can tell you exactly. I'm amazed at the fact that you can have this predictable marketing and still saying, “Let's figure it out together.” ROB: Some agencies are probably glad for the business, they're glad for the backend help. I can see some of them being a little bit apprehensive about working with a white label PPC partner that's also owned by somebody who could arguably steal the business if the client grows up. How do you calm those fears? AVI: In some ways, if they don't know the details, it's a legitimate fear. If I was an agency, I'd worry about that. Two things. There are different people running those two companies. I just own it, and I kept that team intact. My team is not talking to them. I mean, they're talking in the sense – our business, we transition to them the smaller ones. But otherwise, keep it separate. That's one. The other one is we have looked at the market. We don't take on local clients who need local SEO. These are exactly that. So those ones, that is never our market. Unless they are a nationwide company, they're not our client. It becomes a very different story. That's what we tell them. And here's the other part. I teach our company – we have started presenting to our company the details of how to build an agency. Exactly how to build an agency. That's available to our agency partners. We're teaching those as courses. “Go and build your agency like this if you want. This is what we did.” That's the added value we are giving to them. We'll tell you how we do it so you can compete with us and grow if you want to. That's open. Just to be fair, there's no doubt we will add more white label services. Right now it's pure PPC, but I do foresee – why not Facebook ads too? But we will keep that always focused on a special market, not for everybody because it just does not make sense. ROB: It helps to think about that all in abundance. There really is no shortage of business out there for most people in services firms; it's just about earning that business, being known, liked, and trusted, all of that sort of thing. If we rewind a little bit, Avi, and look at the big picture of Kuware, we look at the journey, what are some key things you've learned along the way that you might go back and tell yourself to do a little bit differently if you had to start fresh? AVI: One thing which it took me a long time to learn, because I came from salaried employee, very well compensated options and things – I was not used to this concept – even if the bank was willing to give me a loan, I would not take it. I said, “It needs to be bootstrapped or it needs to be VC funding.” So one of the things I would tell myself is, hey, if it is a business, you want to grow it? Get that capital. Not as equity capital if possible. That's the only way you'll grow, and it's okay. Be comfortable with it. The other part I've learned is that things will break. Get used to it. This took a while. Initially, “What are we going to do now?” When we acquired this business, things happened, and I realized that I'm so calm about it. It's okay. I would be surprised if things didn't break. That means something is hidden, something is not working right. That is the advice I would give everybody. Stay calm. You'll figure it out. Things will go wrong. It's a business. Things will not run smoothly, ever. In fact, if they're running too smoothly, then you're not aggressive enough. You're not growing. Things will have to break, and then they break, you'll figure it out. That's the advice I would give myself if I went back when I used to get very worried and unable to sleep. Now I can handle it. ROB: There are so many ways to respond to that breaking. There is sleeplessness, there is frustration. Some people take it out on people, and I think that's something people dread when they're going to work for a smaller, privately held business. Sometimes somebody needs to be fired, and the rest of the time you just go figure it out together. It's usually not the first one. It's usually not that somebody needs to be fired because it's usually my fault in the business anyhow. AVI: Correct. I tell people in my team, don't do the same mistake again and again. I learned this at Intel. You're allowed to every day do a mistake, but don't do the mistake you did yesterday. In a smaller business it's harder, but I said, “It's okay. It'll happen.” The other thing is a rule – we came up with this – a lot of times it's clients. At that time, I've got all the way down through the hierarchy that any of our associates can fire a client because it's not working. They don't have to go all the way to ask us because it's a big client. Some clients say “Eff this, eff that.” I don't have a problem if they talk to me in a friendly manner and they're friendly and they do that. But if they do that with meanness, then the f-word is a problem at that point. Then we don't take it. As simple as that. So, our employees feel very empowered, and as a result they go to bat for us. They will do extra work because they know they have the right to decide if somebody is not working right with them. Those are the kinds of things – that took a while. Earlier, it was always this worry about what'll happen. One client goes and what happens? But slowly – it's a journey, for sure. ROB: It sounds like you have your mind and your eyes already a little bit on what else might be viable as a white label service to add on. What comes to mind? Is it Instagram in a box? Is it SEO? What scales similarly?  AVI: The local SEO will scale. Facebook ads is very similar and will scale. TikTok ads will scale. They are very specialized services, and Facebook and all is harder, but it's getting very specialized. Anything which is specialized and localized will scale and can be added as a service, and it's harder for people to learn. Those will scale. But at the same time, I'm not of the mindset, like some other white label agencies, “We'll do everything for you.” If you're running a marketing agency, there's a part of it you've got to do. You cannot just be a manager outsourcing everything to somebody. You've got to find some areas where you're good, especially if you want to grow. You've got to start owning a few of those pieces. That's what I tell the agency owners. You don't do PPC right now, but if you find that's the area eventually you want, you've got to take it on. There are some things you've got to start keeping in-house. Otherwise you're becoming a manager and you will not learn the marketing aspects to grow to the next level. I'm not envisioning building a white label agency which does “Just give it to us, we'll take care of it for you. Just talk to the clients.” I want to keep it specific services which you handle here, and we will do it for you kind of thing. ROB: Got it. That's really interesting. It'll be interesting to hear as you evolve in that direction, as you consider more acquisitions. There's all sorts of mechanics to get into in acquisitions that we won't deal with in the moment, but are fascinating in and of themselves. Avi, when people want to find and connect with you and with Kuware, where should they go to find you? AVI: I am most active on LinkedIn. That's the best way to find me. Kuware also. I'm just Avi at Kuware. That will work. Also direct email will absolutely work. LinkedIn message will always work. Of course, LinkedIn has become a little bit – everybody's trying to prospect so much, and we offer a service too, so we are in the same game in some ways. But for sure, any message which has something substantial gets through fine. That's not a problem. LinkedIn will be the best way to find me. Avi at kuware.com would be the other great way to do it. I do hardly any Twitter at all. ROB: [laughs] Sometimes it's safer that way. Avi, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast, to share with the audience. We will be glad to keep an eye on your journey, and certainly wish you the best. Maybe we'll all get out to Austin next year. We'll see. AVI: Yeah, that would be great, Rob. Thank you. It was very natural talking to you. That part was absolutely great. I'm looking forward to staying connected and chatting more. ROB: Sounds good. Thank you so much, Avi. Be well. AVI: All right. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Leeann Leahy is CEO at VIA, a full-service advertising agency/communications company and winner of AdAge's 2019 Small Agency of the year. Via‘s 100 or so employees work their creative magic to unleash growth for such name brands as Arm & Hammer, Unilever (ice cream novelties Klondike, Good Humor, Popsicle), Perdue Chicken, and CarGurus. The agency has a few clients in Maine . . . a lot more nationally . . . and even some that are global.  Leeann says the agency makes small budgets work “much bigger and harder than they should” and runs on a critical balance of head and heart. In this interview, Leeann outlines the agency's 5 responsive principles: “be curious,” “think like the audience,” “be on time,” “be on budget,” and “create respect,” and 5 artistic principles: “figure it out,” “find the magic,” “believe,” “do work that makes you proud,” and “honor the process.” It's a formula that succeeds . . . as evidenced by the agency's 28 years in the business.  In this interview, Leeann talks about VIA's strategy for building two-way brand/consumer conversations and the magic of the “Aha! Moment,” when the mind jumps from “facts” to understanding. The process? Dig deep with clients to get beyond the facts and gain meaningful insights;  Understand who a brand's customers are, their experience with the brand, and their “journey  Analyze insights to reveal and unlock a pathway to connect consumers with the brand Bring real emotion to the table  Present the brand in a way that's useful, practical, and meaningful at a personal level . . . and not just talking at the customer. Leeann says, “It's not just selling attributes, but selling utility and meaningfulness and relevancy.” Six years ago, in order to streamline operations, the agency eliminated departmental siloes and set up interdisciplinary pods which are led by four equal partners:  A client strategy lead (who elicits from the client what is to be done and why),  A planning lead (who aligns work with client needs, market trends/ opportunities, and strategies),  A creative lead (who invents new products, generates advertising promotion, or “produces the show”), and  A project management lead (who oversees resourcing, time management, budgets, and scopes – how the work is done and when).  Then, three years ago, the agency established VIAlocity, a remote pool of diverse (culturally, ethnically, life-stage-wise, and ability-wise) freelance consultants (who may or may not be in advertising). These journalists, painters, photographers, or stay-at-home moms, who are kept on retainer, can be tapped for projects for an additional fee to collaborate on VIA's offerings. The program recently expanded to include some full-time remote workers. Leeann can be found on her agency's website at: https://theviaagency.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Leeann Leahy, CEO at VIA based in Portland, Maine. Welcome to the podcast, Leeann. LEEANN: Hi. Thank you for having me. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you kick us off by telling us about VIA and what the agency's superpowers are? LEEANN: VIA is a magical place that operates out of Portland, Maine. We are a full-service advertising agency, although advertising is a narrow term. We're really a communications company that helps unleash the growth potential of our clients' brands. We're about 100 people. I say we operate from Portland, Maine because that's where we're headquartered, but our clients actually are all over the country and indeed the globe. I used to say we don't have any clients in Maine, but we do work with a couple now. We're on a quest to bring the fun back into our industry. I think our superpower is that we believe in magic. We believe in the power of magic. We have 10 principles, and they range from “be curious,” “think like the audience,” “be on time,” “be on budget,” and “create respect,” which are the responsive ones, to “figure it out,” “find the magic,” “believe,” “do work that makes you proud,” which are the artistic ones. There's a really great balance between the head and the heart in those principles. The heart side of it I think is our superpower because we do believe in magic. We believe that it can be found if you have a smart enough strategy, or indeed, the strategy itself could be magic if you can dig deep enough and find some insights that are revealing and unlocking a pathway to connect a consumer and a brand. We believe that creatively, the choices you make and the craft you construct and the way you engage consumers – there's a lot of magic in that. And we believe all of this works to grow brands. We've seen it over and over again. I guess the last thing I would say is in our own culture, we believe that joy and happiness and fearlessness lead to better creative work. That's not just in the creative department; that's across the whole agency. So we find the magic and we believe it's possible. That's our superpower. I think it sets us apart from other agencies, because as I said, we're having fun where very few are. ROB: Right, a little bit of magic, a little bit of joy, and just this pervasive sense of optimism over pure execution. The head and the heart, as you said. Pull us a little deeper and give us a picture. A typical client is not in Maine, apparently, for the most part, but what does a common client look like for you all? What size, what stage, what type of brand? LEEANN: It really ranges. We've worked with Perdue Farms chicken for the last 10 years, and we're their agency of record and the lead of their integrated agency team. We set all the strategy for them. We help them understand their brand portfolio, architecture. We dig deep on consumer insights. We help them manage their branded versus private label conundrum that they're in in the marketplace. We create all the communications, whether it's broadcast-based or digital. We generate lots of social assets. And then we work with all of their other agencies – shopper, marketing, promotional, etc. – to make sure everyone's operating off the same strategy. That's one kind of relationship. Another one is we work with the ice cream novelties portfolio of North America for Unilever, so Klondike, Good Humor, Popsicle. In that instance, we're really unleashing a lot of work the client has done strategically and we're setting it free creatively. We come back with creative solutions that take what are sometimes considered small budgets competitively, and we make them work much bigger and harder than they should. They punch above their weight. We work with Church & Dwight. Arm & Hammer is one of our clients. They exist, believe it or not, in about 17 categories in the grocery store. You think of it as baking soda, but actually it's everything from baking soda to laundry detergent to kitty litter to toothpaste to deodorant to licensing agreements with Hefty and other garbage bags and things like that. It is a really wide range. For them, again, we're thinking through everything, from the customer experience on those brands and where we can hit touchpoints to creating the advertising itself to putting it in the market to doing the analytics. So we really have varied relationships with our different clients, and that's what I think keeps it fun for us. I've always loved being in advertising and on the agency side because we go deep, deep, deep on very different categories. I can be talking about baking soda for hours one day, and the next day I'm talking about people buying cars online with CarGurus, or I'm talking about modern commerce with another client, or I'm talking about financial services. We really run the gamut. Check into financial services. You can't get bored. ROB: You're talking about digging into that customer experience, and it seems like that's where some of the magic can come from. When you're talking about novelty ice cream, you're not selling features. For a lot of people, you are thinking through to an experience, an emotional attachment, a different season in their life, even, perhaps. You just can't get there if you're sitting up in an ivory tower, thinking creatively by yourself. LEEANN: Absolutely. We do a lot of deep digging and consumer research and ethnographies and anthropological digging into our consumers and our prospects, and we try to talk about them as if they're family members or friends. We don't describe targets as 18- to 24-year-old white men who play these following sports and believe these five things. That's not going to help us. We really need to think of them as maybe people who seriously don't take life that seriously. That would be a way you want to talk about the target. We try to get to the mindset, because that's where the magic happens. It's not that there's not a lot of rigor to get to that mindset; there is. But there's a difference between a fact and an insight, and too often, I think people confuse them, or companies confuse them. They do the research, they get the answers, they have a bunch of facts, and then they say, “This is what we need to talk to.” Facts are important, but they are really just stimulus from which you can find and articulate the insight, because the insight has to be much deeper and more meaningful. The way I like to think about it, you know you have an insight when somebody says it when you're describing a consumer or their mindset or their need state or something, and you go, “Oh my God, that is so smart and also so completely obvious.” It's like, “Why didn't I see that before?” That to me is an insight. I think we spend a lot of time differentiating between facts and insights, and that helps us to get to a richer understanding of who we're talking to. Once you have that richer understanding, you can create work that really hits that nerve dead-on. And when it hits that nerve, it becomes an engaging two-way conversation because now you've filled into my life as a brand in a way that's useful, practical, and meaningful to me, not just talking at me. ROB: That's really grounded, really human. Leeann, if we rewind a little bit, talk about the origin story of VIA. How did the agency come to be in the first place? LEEANN: The agency was founded 28 years ago by John Coleman and a couple of other founders and partners. Specifically, John Coleman and Rich Rico were working at a big software company together. Rich was in charge of the design of marketing materials and John was a salesman. As any good salesman does in an internal marketing organization, they call up and complain about the materials they're given and have rich conversations about how they can be better, which I'm sure came very, very happily across the phone lines. [laughs] But the two struck up a relationship where they really could trust each other and rely on each other and understand how they could make materials even to sell these multimillion dollar programs in a more meaningful way. It was, again, by digging into those insights and being different strategically and not just selling attributes, but selling utility and meaningfulness and relevancy. The two of them spun out and started with one division of that company, which was called ABB. By the end of that year, they had 12 divisions of ABB as clients. So the agency was born doing B2B work to support sales teams. Over the years, it evolved many, many times. We have a saying at VIA: Born in 1993, reborn every year since. Because John was an engineer by education, they were very at the forefront of the digital era and did a lot of big technology website strategy as the internet emerged in the late '90s, early 2000s. Then pivoted again after the dot-com bust of the early 2000s. Pivoted again to do a lot of design and corporate work, really built on the strategic consultancy background they had. They were doing really deep strategic projects for clients, and then also design components and nomenclature and visual vocabularies for clients. All sorts of things. Then evolved again to be more focused on some B2C, direct-to-consumer work, but on a more regional basis, and then evolved again to be nationally recognized, national brands targeting primarily towards consumers. Now, I would say we're the best of all of those bits because we understand the digital landscape in a way that many don't, which is why we work with Chick-fil-A as their social and digital AOR. We understand big business and complications, which is why we work with some B2B clients and we take very, very complicated stories and make them very simple and digestible and important, and why we have these very, very powerful consumer brands like a Perdue or a Popsicle or Golden Corral. These are clients that have real meaning and bring real emotion to the table with consumers. We get to do all of those things every day, and that's, as I say, the best bits of all parts of our history. ROB: It's quite a path to navigate, too, because a lot of people crashed on the rocks. They got fat and happy from the late '90s, the era of the million-dollar website. I'm sure some things were almost like shooting fish in a barrel for people who were digitally savvy. We kind of went through that again with social for a season, where people were splashing similar budgets. But it's kind of matured in. It doesn't feel like there's as much of that splash, and now it has to be substance. Go ahead, it sounds like you've got something to drop in. LEEANN: I agree with you. I think what people were doing was saying, “Ooh, I have to be on social because that's where my consumer is” – again, a fact but not necessarily an insight. Just because they're there, doesn't mean you have to be there. They would just create content and, as we say, “spray and pray.” Just throw it out on the social channels and figure, “Oh, that's good. People will want to engage with me.” And that busted. I think what we're seeing is now the brands that are most successful in the social sphere are the ones who are understanding their place in the conversation and maintaining that place in the consumer's heart and mind and being respectful of the conversation they're entering, but also offering and being additive to it. Maybe it's utilitarian. Maybe it's something that is a little bit of shared brand custody, as we call it, when you want the consumer to take ownership of some of the brand elements. I think it requires deep strategy and a lot of thoughtfulness. It's not just, “I had a television ad and I made a shorter version of it and threw it all over Facebook and Instagram,” because that's not how those platforms work. ROB: Let's look at the intersection of VIA and its origin story with you. How did you come into the business and then end up in such a position of ultimate trust? What did that journey look like? LEEANN: I started in the business as a planner, at the time called an account planner. In my days as a planner, I was an account planner, a brand planner, a strategic planner. I wore every single version of that title. But I grew up in this world of consumer insights and understanding that the agency role could be to be the conscience or the therapist, really, between the consumer and the brand – connecting and listening to both and connecting the dots: being the conscience of the brand so they didn't overstep, and being the conscience of the consumer so they didn't turn away or block out the brand. So I grew up in planning. I was Chief Strategy Officer on a global level at an agency, and then at a more local level at an agency, I worked on blue chip brands like JPMorgan Chase, the NFL, AT&T, and Johnson & Johnson, all those good things. Then I transitioned in about 2012 to general agency management. That was because I had a relationship with someone who ran an agency called Translation in New York, and he was looking to make it go from just a project-based consultancy to a full-service agency. He and I had a friendship and relationship and really respected one another's intellects and points of view on how to turn brands on. So I joined him and I was there for a couple of years. The agency was exploding. We were doing great things. But in that time, I actually met John Coleman, our founder, and we had a lunch that struck me because we shared a lot of the same values. We talked a lot about what the business could be and what we wanted it to be and the kind of work we wanted to do. Honestly, again, it goes back to we find magic and we believe, and that's that optimism. We felt like we could do work that would not only move people, but maybe even leave the world a better place. We had a great talk, a couple hours, and we walked away friends. It occurred to me after that conversation that I was laughing a lot, and I realized – thanks to my husband actually pointing it out – that in my role as president of that other agency, I was having a lot of success, but I wasn't really having any fun. I went into this business because I thought it would be fun and magical and creative, and that was the part that was being stifled. Over the course of like six months, John and I became friends; he offered me the opportunity to come up to Maine. I was like, “I can't believe we're moving from New York.” I was born and raised in the New York area. But we moved ourselves to Maine, and I have not looked back once. I absolutely love it, and we do feel like we tend to put people before profits. We tend to have a lot of fun. We enjoy each other. John has since stepped out of the day-to-day of the business, but the management team and the associates – everybody here, really – we strive to create an environment where people enjoy each other because it creates a baseline of collaboration and inspiration that leads us to better work. Kind of a roundabout answer to your question, but I started out on the insight side. I've always really been invested in the creative aspect of what we do. I think the culture in which we do that really feeds the creative, so VIA gives an opportunity to do all of those things: really, really smart strategic consultancy background, really important focus on culture, and now we've also brought in a Chief Creative Officer who has fabulous expertise in crafting. His name's Bobby Hershfield, and he's amazing at crafting ideas so that the way they're presented and put out into the world really engages the consumer in a very intimate way. ROB: What a journey. You've mentioned a couple of times this AOR, agency of record designation. You've probably seen that phrase change meaning a few times. What does it mean now versus what it used to mean, and how should ambitious agencies that are chasing that designation think about it? LEEANN: There was a time when all we wanted was to be AOR. We couldn't be bothered with projects. Not VIA “we”; I mean “we,” the industry. We kind of shunned the idea that we could pop in and be experts on a project, or consultants. I think that's not true anymore. There are lots of amazing, interesting projects out there that you can work with really interesting partner agencies on, and partner clients. We do a combination of AOR and project work. But I think when you are AOR, it is a lot more than just “we set the campaign and everybody else executes it.” That is not what it is at all. I think it really is about understanding deeply the business that the client has, how it sits within the competitive marketplace, what their operational realities are, what the political realities are, how that business can grow, identifying that growth opportunity, and then unleashing creative to optimize it and to really go out and get that growth. That means thinking through everything, understanding the consumer experience and the customer journey and where the brand can plug into it and where it shouldn't, and then concepting ideas that go through that journey with the customer. That means way more than “I'm making an advertising campaign around a single idea and then everyone's executing it.” Now it's “I'm understanding the business. I'm understanding the consumer. I'm bringing those two together in a thoughtful way, and I'm going to create an idea that hits at different points in different ways so that the effect is not redundant, but it is in fact cumulative. ROB: That would seem probably more channel-specific, which is why some of the AOR designations have gone more channel, do you think? LEEANN: Yeah, possibly. But I think it's also because we're in a business now where we're competing not just with other people who do the same thing we're doing, but we're competing with agencies that do different things than we do. You might have a client who goes, “I have a traditional agency of record and then I have a digital agency of record.” But in fact, that's just false silos. If you have somebody who truly understands your business, they're thinking of it as how the consumer is experiencing this, not just what channel it's going to be on. The channels are very secondary to the story you're trying to tell and how you want the consumer to experience that story. ROB: Right. The brand still has to live somewhere. You can't just have a bunch of fractured brands. LEEANN: Yeah, exactly. ROB: Leeann, as you reflect on your time in leading VIA, and even before that maybe, in the industry, what are some things you've learned along the way that you might do a little bit differently if you were going back and giving yourself some advice? LEEANN: I kind of had a feeling a long time ago, well before I was even in a managerial role in an agency at large – I was in a managerial role in my discipline of planning, but not at the agency at large, and as a planner, I didn't have to know the business of our business. That's one piece of advice. I don't care what level you are or what discipline you are; you should understand how this industry makes money. I got away with living in la-la land as a planner for a good portion of my career, not really ever even understanding how we billed clients. You can get bogged down by it, but I think it's also important to understand. There's a balance. But I had this intuitive sense that there was a lot of waste in agencies. A lot of wasted hours, a lot of wasted discussion, a lot of wasted time, and we weren't getting to the meat. We were passing a baton around the agency in the hopes that somebody would stop and hold the baton and be like, “Okay, now I'm going to work on this.” I refer to it as the “See below” email. You may have gotten one of these from someone once upon a time. I consider these evil. Someone gets an email from someone else requesting something, and they just pass it along to someone who works with them and say, “See below” – which they might as well have said, “I didn't bother to read this. I'm making it your problem.” The person under them very often sends it to a person under them, and it just continues from there. That's what I mean by passing the baton and not really stopping and thinking. About six years ago at VIA, we got rid of all of the department silos within the agency and got rid of the gatekeeper mentality that perpetuated that baton passing. We rebuilt the agency from the bottom up to be much more agile, to be much more collaborative, and to have much more fun together. We created these interdisciplinary pods that work around clients, and each pod is led by four equal partners and leaders. There's a client strategy lead who's responsible for understanding what's being asked of us and, more importantly, why. There's a planning lead who helps us to honor insights and market trends and opportunities to have a strategic pathway. So they're responsible for the way. We have a creative lead who's responsible for the “wow,” whatever that means, whether it's inventing a new product or doing an advertisement or producing a show. It's all under the “wow.” Then we have the project management lead, who's responsible for the how and the when, which is really about resourcing, time management, budgets, scopes, all of that. When we put them all on equal footing, something really wonderful happened. They started acting like real partners. They started understanding that they were mutually accountable for this client's growth and that they were all part of the same sentence. Longer than a sentence; it would be a run-on. But you get what I'm saying. [laughs] You couldn't just have a client call one of them and ask a question and necessarily get the “Yes, you can have that Tuesday at 3:00,” because they're not responsible for that. They have to go, “Wait, are you asking the right question? Why are you asking that? Let's think about that strategically. Let's see if there's a different creative response. And oh, by the way, I have to go check with somebody else to see how our resources go.” It became honestly faster, which is sort of counterintuitive, but it's faster to get things done. It's inherently more collaborative. And as a result of it being more collaborative, everybody feels included and they can see their fingerprints on the work, and that makes it more fun. I would've done that a lot sooner. I kind of had that specced out in my brain I want to say almost 20 years ago, and we wrote it up and then I didn't do anything with it. It took a long time, but six years ago we did it, and it has helped shape our agency. It's helped get to better work. It gets to better insights. We have deeper client relationships. As I said, we have a happier populace all around because everyone feels included. And frankly, as everyone else is complaining that procurement is out there squeezing the profitability out of agencies, I feel like we regained our ability to be profitable because we eliminated the fat. So I would've done that sooner. ROB: Certainly less layers. Some of that seems to also come along with the evolution of communication channels that are available. Maybe this is more relevant to – it sounds like your org is largely in Portland, even if your clients are elsewhere. But even on distributed teams, you almost get stuck in the “See below” thing; when your choices are “Am I going to call someone, am I going to text them, or am I going to email them?”, you fall into email. But now we have some tighter lines on messaging. People will hop in a quick chat now, even online, even on a Zoom or a Slack group chat. LEEANN: Absolutely. Listen, dispersed teams are the reality of the future. We at VIA do believe that we are better when we are together in person as much as possible, so we really do try to do that, and we're being very thoughtful about how to do that safely. We did go back to the office in July. But we also really appreciate that some people have certain tasks or certain roles that are just more productive when they're working as individuals and remotely. So we have a hybrid model, and it really boils down to what task you have and what role you're playing on a given day. But you're right. We've retrained everyone, because now I know I have to consider others as thoughts pop into my head. I can't just sit there and do my own work. Even if I am remote, I've got to reach out to my partners. So I'm going to jump on Slack, I'm going to jump on Zoom, I'm going to pick up the phone, I'm going to even shoot them a text. But the conversation is much more free-flowing, and I think it gets to better solutions. Then to your other point, the channels that are available to us are changing so much. We took that model that we used at the top of every piece of business and we then applied it in the creative department. Like, why do we always just have our directors and copywriters concepting? That doesn't make sense. Maybe there's a product design person or maybe a technologist or a promotional person who should be in those concepting phases. So we actually work in creative roundtables where it's not just a two-person team; we assemble the right team for each assignment and we draw from all different areas of expertise, and it's the same kind of collaboration. You're all mutually responsible for the concept, so whatever concept we have is born able to fit all those different places. ROB: There's a lot to pull on there as well, but I want to be mindful of our time here. What is coming up, Leeann? What's coming up for VIA and the industry as a whole that you're excited about? LEEANN: I think it's a great time to be in advertising, honestly. I'm excited that our competitive set changes every day. I'm excited that sometimes we're competing with media companies and other times with creative boutiques and other times with consultants. I think that's really interesting. I'm excited that the smartest and best agencies can get deeper in with the C-suite and not just the marketing department or the CMO. I'm excited for how we utilize remote workforces and invite more diverse populations into our agencies and into our industry as a result of that opportunity, because we can reach further afield. I think that fundamentally changes the experiences and thoughts that come to the table. Of course, if you want to really have a great brainstorm and great creative, bring together two completely disparate things and throw them into a room and see what explodes out of it. People who are together, people who are dispersed, people of different backgrounds, people at different life stages – it's all an opportunity for us to think more broadly. And because clients are starting to see that they need more partners in helping them think – even in-house agencies. I don't see that as a threat. I see that as an opportunity, because we can get in there and help them think through things strategically and stop them from navel-gazing, but also leverage them for their expertise that we don't have from being in the four walls. So I think the most exciting thing is how our competitive sets are changing and how that opens up creative opportunities for us. And in order to get there, I think we need to – well, I know, and we all know, but we're actively working to diversify our workforce so we can come to the table with different ideas that catapult businesses forward. ROB: That's a whole other area where distributed helps tremendously. LEEANN: It definitely does. ROB: Different circumstances, different places. You can tap a lot broader pool of people to come together. LEEANN: Yeah, we have a program called VIAlocity that we started three years ago, before COVID, if there was a before COVID. [laughs] We hired talent from all over the world who were different from us, whether they were different culturally, ethnically, life stage-wise, ability-wise. We hired them into this collective and put them on a retainer. They were mostly freelancers who worked in different fields all around, or people who weren't traditionally in advertising. They were journalists or painters or photographers or stay-at-home moms. We put them in this collective so that we could tap into them. The retainer bought us the right to have them engaged in our email system and assigned to a pod so they knew what was going on, and then when we activate them on a project, we pay them a project fee on top of that. They're able to work for other people as well, but it gave us access to a much bigger pool. And that was fully remote, with the idea that we asked VIAlocity participants to be in Maine five days out of each quarter. They didn't have to be five consecutive days, but five days, just so that we could get that chemistry and get to know each other. Now, post-COVID, we've actually expanded VIAlocity to not just be our fractional workers who are on retainer and get project fees, but we have a couple of full-time remote workers who are part of VIAlocity also. If you're full-time remote, you have to be at the headquarters for 10 days out of each quarter. Obviously, the health situation, dependent on that. But so far, so good. ROB: Assuming they can get back into their home country. We have a guy who's out of country and he hasn't been able to come see us because he's not sure he can get back in. He's a U.S. citizen living elsewhere. It makes it interesting. But I think we're getting closer, is what I can say. LEEANN: I think so. We're getting better at working together in different ways, and that's great. I still think there's nothing like a good old-fashioned collaboration when you're in person because you just can't interrupt each other or build on each other's ideas on Zoom the way you can naturally in a room. The energy's just not there the way it is physically. But if you can combine the best of the physical togetherness with the best of the remote work and what it gives you, then there's magic to be found. ROB: Magic. Right back where we started with the magic. Magic here at VIA. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Leeann. LEEANN: My pleasure. Thank you for having me. ROB: And for sharing your experience, your wisdom. You've got it very well-formed and very well-communicated. Glad to have you. LEEANN: Thank you. Sometimes I just nerd out on it, though, so that's a little weird too. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] All good. Wonderful, Leeann. Be well. Bye. LEEANN: Great. Thank you, Rob. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Ken Magma Marshall is Chief Growth Officer and Managing Partner at RevenueZen, an agency focused on helping high-growth-oriented B2B, SaaS, and professional service brands generate more demand and leads through SEO, content, and LinkedIn . . . to get real leads that actually convert. Ken started his agency four-and-a-half years ago. His first milestone was developing a successful, process that worked and that he could pass onto another person with his SOPS and get the same results. Instead of waiting for clients to request particular services like keyword research or gap analysis, Ken could tell a client, “In the first 90 days, we're going to do these two things that will lead to X outcome based on the research and analytics from my previous clients.” The second one, he says, came about when the repeatable system evolved to the point where he no longer had to tweak the system himself to continue to get targeted outcomes.  About six months ago, Ken's agency reached its third milestone, when it was aqui-hired by RevenueZen. RevenueZen, with a traditional focus on lead gen, appointment setting, and LinkedIn, got Ken's agency's assets, his knowledge of inbound technology, his presence on the executive team, and his agency's book of business. Complementary strengths have proved win-win. ReveueZen's clients are typically established professional, mid-market service companies that have good revenues . . . but may or may not be profitable. All but three B2C “outliers” are B2B technology companies, with 60-70% in SaaS (software as a service). Most of these companies have marketing teams, but are not problem- or solution-aware with respect to RevenueZen's methodologies, don't know what kind of solution they need, or don't know the right provider.  What do they know? They want results. Ken says it is imperative for the agency to qualify its potential clients through the discovery process – if clients don't understand customer lifetime values /average lead values, they are likely to have unrealistic expectations of the value of conversion or question whether they will get a positive return on spend.  Ken will be moderating a HubSpot's Inbound2021 session, “Long Live Forms, All Hail Chatbots: The Epic Debate of Booking Demos.” In answer any participants' subjective blanket assertions, such as a statement that “Chatbots are the future,” Ken will be asking such probing questions as: “For whom are chatbots correct?” What other marketing stack does the company use?” “How will the company measure effectiveness?” The objective is to dig to a deeper level . . . to determine which use cases are appropriate, who they're appropriate for, at what level of business maturity, etc. This year's online HubSpot Inbound conference is scheduled for October 12-14. Ken is intrigued by some of the newer technologies: Lead-qualifying software that captures online prospects' form data, qualifies leads programmatically in real time, filters their information to match rep data, and immediately either notifies the appropriate sales rep or establishes a live video chat. Conversion.AI software that generates scripts based on user inputs and expectations “learned” over time. Alex Boyd (RevenueZen founder and CEO) and Kenneth David Warren Marshall II (a.k.a. Ken Magma Marshall), can be reached on LinkedIn or on the agency's website at: revenuezen.com. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and it is that time of year once again. It is almost time for the Inbound Conference. Much like last year, it will be virtual, but what that means is this is the time of the year where this podcast gets a little bit more salesy, but in a good way. It's just a different flavor of the agency services world that we like to cover. I am joined today by Ken Magma Marshall, CGO and Managing Partner at RevenueZen based in Portland, Oregon, though he himself has newly moved to Brooklyn. Welcome to the podcast, Ken. KEN: Thanks for having me, Rob. Really excited to dive on it. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about RevenueZen and the agency's superpowers, what you're known for, where you succeed well for clients? KEN: There's the 10,000-foot view elevator pitch, which is that we aim to help high-growth-oriented B2B, SaaS, and professional service brands to generate more demand and leads through SEO, content, and LinkedIn. Or in layman's terms, we help our clients get real leads that actually convert. Really, the company itself is the story of RevenueZen before Ken and then my agency. I actually started an agency four and a half years ago, and about six months ago, RevenueZen acquired it. So now, whereas they were focused on lead gen, appointment setting, LinkedIn only, I brought the inbound methodology with me. So now we've got a hybrid and best of both worlds. ROB: Is that maybe also where some of the SEO flavor came in? I would say it's a little bit atypical for HubSpot agencies in the whole ecosystem, lead gen agencies, to know SEO as well as you're articulating. KEN: That's exactly right, and that's why we utilize the terms “demand gen” and “lead gen” very intentionally, because with SEO agencies you get the whole “These are our deliverables and our clicks and our keyword increases.” We're former salespeople. Three of our executives out of four were cold calling back in the day, so we understand how to map that search intent into pipeline, how things are going to go from each perspective that actually leads to those people converting, not just being users and clicks and searches. So full funnel knowledge helps inform the strategy. ROB: I'm going to pull on a thread that you mentioned in there. You mentioned being acquired. What does it look like to be acquired, and how does that happen? KEN: That's a fun conversation. If I were a startup in Palo Alto and I was a kid in college, that might look like somebody buying me for a certain undisclosed amount of money. But for me, it was more about joining a team that was a little bit established. My run rate at my old company I think was around 600,000 ARR. When RevenueZen acquired me, it was basically acqui-hire situation – they get all of my assets, my knowledge, me on the executive team, and all of my book of business. But the strength of it and really the allure for me, or I wouldn't have done it, is that they understood these lead gen methodologies and channels and had these systems that we didn't that strongly complement the inbound engine that I taught myself and learned how to build over the years. It was really that complementary partnership with a slightly mature agency where I could really hone in those growth focuses and new innovation initiatives. Because I'm a mad scientist at the end of the day, Rob. That's what I love to do. [laughs] ROB: Not to project too much of this onto you in particular, but in general, there's a certain amount of confidence and ego that flows into starting a business, starting an agency, and then layer on top of that the degree of confidence and resilience required coming from a sales background. How do you navigate that into – there is a mutual admission of need and benefit. You have to get past the outer defenses to even have the conversation of “Hey, maybe we should get together,” and number two, “How does that look so we can all feel like we have the right seat at the table when we're together?” KEN: Absolutely. My ego, to use an analogy, went into the boxing ring and did not come out on top for the first few fights. I had to sit down with my wife, my friends, family members, and we really chewed on it. I even chewed on it with the CEO of the company. Now I'm the CGO. We lived in the same apartment building. What it came down to was really just that I understood that he has a finance/sales – he worked at a revenue-based software company, very high growth. He has a ground level understanding of what it takes to scale, whereas, like I mentioned, my strength is in customer success and product development. I'm really gangster when it comes to those two things. So I had to look at it and say, he knew that if he could just bolt on these assets that have taken me six years to create, and I knew that with his ability to understand scale and the other two executives taking on those things that I don't do well – I hate this word because it's overused, but we could create some real synergy and grow a lot more quickly. It just came down to that: being able to do what I love and a little bit more stability. ROB: Especially early on, we all want a little bit more stability. Maybe not too much, but definitely more than that early entrepreneurial journey. KEN: Exactly. ROB: Paint a picture, Ken, of what a typical customer looks like, a typical client for RevenueZen. Is it B2B? What's the mix and focus there, and maybe the size as well? KEN: At this point it's all B2B except for three companies. Upwork is one of our clients; Nalgene is one of our clients. But they're the weird B2C outlier as far as consumer goods go, Upwork being this monster that it is. But most of them, 60-70% are B2B SaaS companies. These are technology companies. They have Series A, usually, investment. They've got a marketing team, but the marketing team are not problem- or solution-aware with our methodologies. They just know that they need to turn those levers because their investors or the CEO or whoever is talking to the, VP of Demand Gen or Marketing, and they just want results. They have money to do it, but they typically don't have the knowledge of what kind of solution they need or the right provider. So we can attach ourselves on as the Chief of Digital or an ad hoc CMO and guide them not only in knowledge-gathering, but lay the strategy out and then literally bolt on our team to execute it for them. Really, it's those kind of companies who are more mid-market. They're already established professional service companies, but as far as the SaaS companies, they have a go-to-market somewhat defined; they understand product-market fit. They might not be profitable, but they have good revenues. They really just need somebody to come in, tell them what to do, and have the army to do it for them. ROB: Do they typically have an understanding – you said product-market fit, but they might have a general understanding of customer lifetime value so they can measure you that way? KEN: Yes. Actually, when I'm qualifying them, and same with our CEO, we actually still do all of the sales. At my old company I sold every deal, and now it's just us two closing every deal. But when we ask them about CLV or even their average lead values if they have lead storing and they understand the value of a lead, that's actually done in the discovery process to qualify them as well. Because if they don't understand those values, they'll have unrealistic expectations when we start getting those conversions as to how much they're worth or if it's even going to return on their spend with us. Yeah, that's pretty imperative. ROB: I would imagine once you have provided a lead, that's an MQL (marketing qualified lead). Then there's that sales qualifying that happens after that. Is that typically on the client side? Is there an element of going further down the funnel that you get involved in? Where does that boundary start to happen? KEN: Yeah, we do lean more heavily on inbound these days. I would say it's about a 70/30 split as well. But the furthest we'll get is when we are doing let's say an inbound/outbound hybrid LinkedIn content marketing and outbound service – happy for you to go on the website and check out if you guys want to – the furthest we'll get is setting those appointments with them and then letting them take over. It's part MQL or SQL depending on how they define it, but it's appointment setting as far as how far we go. ROB: Which still can be, with the proper – it sounds like potentially a real blessing for a sales rep. You're hanging out and stuff shows up on your calendar, and it's people who seem interested in buying your software. That's a good way to wake up in the morning.  KEN: Right. That's why we love inbound. Not that outbound doesn't have its place, and in fact, for a lot of startups it does in the beginning. There's urgency. But that's why we love it, because these people are coming to you saying, “You've built my trust, you've educated me, I've compared solutions and then learned about your solution, all on your site. All you need to do is not give me a reason to put my credit card down.” ROB: Very interesting. You mentioned a little bit about the merger, but if we go a little bit further back, what led you to start your own business in the first place? And you got it pretty far along. That level of bookings is more than just typically one person in their closet. What led you to get started on the journey? KEN: Not that amazing, but I'm pretty proud of it. For me, I think I'm the cliché entrepreneur without any background in it. Nobody in my family, none of my friends. But I was that kid with the lawnmower, I had lemonade stands. I used to take my neighbors' trash and put it on my parents' lawn and sell it at a yard sale. I always knew I was interested in making money and seeing what I could do, but I didn't really have the background, or I would say some of the mentorship, to know that's what it was called and how to start a company. I went to school thinking that I would be a salesperson. I was personable, I understood psychology to a certain degree. Right around my junior year, I believe, I asked a counselor, “What should I be doing? I don't really like this sales thing” when I saw my first sales job that I could get. She's like, “You seem like one of those kids who should go check out that digital marketing thing.” That really was the spark, when I started to understand if I can reverse-engineer this thing called an algorithm, nobody knows what that is. I asked a bunch of people, I asked business owners – that's actually how I got my first client – and they had no clue. So that was my first lightbulb moment: I could start a business doing this. However, I've always been geared towards being an entrepreneur, and I always knew I would. That's why I quit my last agency after only being there for about two years total between both of them. ROB: As you got into the starting and progressing the business journey, were there any key inflection points? Obviously, the merger itself is a key point of validation. But before that day, there had to have been some key inflection points in the business, some points where it really seemed to be materially different than just rubbing two sticks together, making some phone calls and getting some clients. What were some of those moments in the growth of the business that were memorable? KEN: Obviously, I still have the first dollar I ever made. Still have that first check. That's the big one. That's the pure validation of “Somebody's willing to pay me money for this thing.” But apart from that, I think the first milestone that sticks out was going from freelancer to having a repeatable process that worked and involving another human being. That was the first big thing for me. I was on Upwork – like I said, they're now our client, so it went full circle. But I remember doing these projects, and I'm like, instead of people telling me what they want me to do, like keyword research or a gap analysis, I'll just say “In the first 90 days, we're going to do these two things that will lead to X outcome based on the research and analytics from my previous clients.” So I had this system that was starting to form. I could give it to another person with my SOPs and then they could do it, so it's now an actual business. That was the first one that was really exciting. The second one, I would say, is when I evolved from doing the work. I had downloaded this repeatable system to a point where I didn't have to actually implement the changes or the recommendations myself for us to still get those desirable outcomes. That required a coach, who was not cheap [laughs], and a lot of hours and mistakes. But we finally got it dialed. Other than the merger, that was one of the most exciting. And then your first six-figure year is always exciting too, as far as validation. ROB: I think people often underestimate the value of what they can do in terms of documenting a process, having people execute on it. The good part is you mostly don't have to think about it. I think the risk after that, however, is that that process gets stale. How do you go about ensuring that a process you've understood and documented can then be also maintained as the landscape changes over 3, 6, 12 months, etc.?  KEN: I think I'm going to answer that in two parts. When I was still general managing the other company, I am so obsessed with strategy; I'm a technician, I'm a strategist by trade. I'm not a banker, I'm not a programmer. So it was always easy for me to have that layer of QA and innovation just because I was reading this stuff every day. I remember – shout out to Rand – after one Moz Local, going to a wine bar and having a bottle of wine and getting to chop it up. But I always found that very easy because I loved that stuff and was interested in it. But now that I'm with this bigger organization and there's four executives, our COO might say, “Here's how we can squeeze out this operational efficiency.” The CEO is like, “Here's how we hedge against risk.” I'm sitting here – and I think that's why it's such a blessing to be in my position – as the Chief Growth Officer, all I think about all day long is how we can ink out that efficiency for the team, make our client have less friction but also stay on top of effectiveness and industry trends. So for me, the answer is simple. It's my job, and that hasn't changed at three companies. [laughs] ROB: That's a critical job, for sure. I would be remiss not to mention the reason this is an Inbound episode is because you are, in fact, moderating a session for Inbound. The session you're moderating is “Long Live Forms, All Hail Chatbots: The Epic Debate of Booking Demos.” Inbound is in October this year. I think it's usually Labor Day week, if I'm not mistaken, but things change in a pandemic. Tell us about that session, what you think you're going to talk about, and especially how you're thinking about moderating that session. KEN: I'll talk about the moderation aspect, because it speaks to who I am as a person and my temperament. Whenever folks get into very sensational language or subjective language, I like to systematically remove that and dive into the concrete, the nuance of what they're talking about and why it's effective. For instance, if somebody says “All hail chatbots, chatbots are the future,” I'm not going to give them a response. My first instinct is to give them a question of, for whom are chatbots correct? And what other marketing stack do they use? And how are they going to measure their effectiveness? That's how I'm planning on moderating things, by having these specific questions to get to the bottom of what use cases are each appropriate, who they're appropriate for, at what level of business maturity, etc. I want to make both people frustrated to get the most out of them. [laughs] I haven't talked to them about that, but now they've heard. That's my style of moderation. That's how I talk and that's how I do business. As far as forms versus chatbots, I go back to when I talk to clients who might come in for inbound, and we convince them they need to do an outbound hybrid on LinkedIn. Or they come in for only appointment setting and they want 10 SDRs tomorrow. I'm like, “You're so niche, and there's this clear keyword opportunity that you can own these terms and have a better ROI. Why are you hung up on that?” There's no right or wrong answer. I've actually used chatbots effectively, and I think forms and demos are perfectly appropriate, especially for a self-serve model. So chatbots have their place, forms have their place, but let's dive into the nuances of it to parse that out. That's my philosophy. ROB: There's a certain attention to that at any sort of conference. I know HubSpot goes to pretty good lengths to make Inbound not all about them, but it is to an extent still about them, and they will hop up there and talk about what they're doing, and they'll certainly talk about it in terms of their agencies, their clients, and the customers they're looking to acquire. They are very visionary in terms of looking outwards, but inevitably, they're also going to unveil some new toys, some new shiny objects, and it will be easy for that to be the topic of the next year, the chatbots – you name it, really. KEN: Yep. ROB: What are you hearing from the ecosystem? Is there anything, whether it's on the agenda at Inbound or bubbling up through the product roadmap, and even outside of HubSpot in the broader lead gen space, what do you see coming that's important? Certainly that isn't a shiny object, because the shiny objects are in service of an objective, as you highlight. KEN: While we're on this topic of qualifying leads and once something's in the pipeline, helping sales ops with their objectives and making their lives easier and helping them be more effective – and shout out to Chili Piper. I'm actually very intrigued by these softwares that are, once somebody fills out a form, qualifying them programmatically, and then based on that response, immediately notifying the correct rep. I've even seen softwares that will allow somebody to live video chat right after they've gotten qualified on the form. Those kinds of technologies that remove friction – and again, chatbots can do this, forms can do this; you can integrate both with these other softwares that I'm describing like Chili Piper – those are the things that I'm interested in. Sales ops is, I think – you see these crazy valued companies. I think that's the future of this stuff. Taking the friction from that person who's a user that might be a lead, quickly and programmatically qualifying them, and then diverting them to the correct part of your sales process or person or folks on your sales team and reducing that friction. I think that's where a lot of opportunities get lost. It's the classic somebody taking 72 hours to follow up with a lead that's inbound. Why? And the same thing as sending the templated email. That's also played out. People don't want that. They need a hybrid of both. That's what I'm excited about and what I'm hearing and seeing. ROB: That's really, really interesting. You may know their product a lot, you may know it a little, but when I speak of shiny objects, one of those shiny objects out in the world is AI and machine learning, but it also seems like this area where Chili Piper is playing could perhaps be a legitimate application. Are they looking at the history of the rep, the history of accounts, the history of places where they've been effective? Is that part of the routing of how they're getting the right reps to the right leads? KEN: Yeah, the cool thing is that they plug directly into the CRM. HubSpot, let's say you have a rep assigned to certain accounts based on – native to HubSpot, within HubSpot, let's say if the person comes in and they typed in “SEO” for their focus, or it includes in the form XYZ terms, then they can automatically say, “This person is qualified as a mid-market opportunity who has X, Y, and Z criteria. Give them to the rep based on our different filters that we've created within the CRM.” And then pushing it to the email address of times that are open for that rep in an automated fashion. We're talking about logging into something, back and forth emails, a form for somebody that might not be qualified – all these components are broken down into very seamless automation. That is what I think the uniqueness of their platform is. Those kinds of automations. There's lots of platforms that do one-off of each of those thing, but it's the fact that it's seamless and it directly integrates with the CRM. That's where I think the benefit is. ROB: It's almost a way to see how the things that they've announced over time, the tools that get rolled out over time, how it's accretive and how it starts to come together. Something like scheduling has been in some CRMs for a while. I recently logged into a CRM of one of our clients, and I was in there because they emailed me. I looked it up and they have our number of employees and our revenue. I'm like, man, I don't think I've seen that in someone else's CRM before. How'd they get that? Because we're a vendor. They're not going to go in and enter that data on us. That was entered for them. KEN: Exactly. ROB: You combine that with – you have some rules engines, you have some AI. It all comes together in a pretty meaningful way. KEN: I was going to say, that's so spot on. It's that accumulative knowledge put together in a way that's seamless that's the benefit. As you mentioned, calendar scheduling tools, integrations with CRMs, those have been around for a while. Even certain routing has been around for a while around automation of sending certain things out based on criteria. But the strength is really in the nuances of those experiences, like when somebody fills out a form, prequalifying them based on their responses in real time. How many different form softwares haven't taken advantage of that very simple opportunity that saves the sales folks so much time? Me and Alex, we're still selling. Every 30-minute call that we do is a pretty big part of our day as executives. So if we can, without even thinking about it, take care of that, have them go through and get that messaging out that they need within a really short period of time, we dramatically increase the chance that that lead will close without lifting a finger. ROB: It's really interesting. It's really meaningful. I think something that's also underestimated – in a lot of our processes that we document out, we put a lot of emphasis on humanizing the language of templates. I don't know if anybody's doing some good work around that. That is the hardest thing to do, but I daresay it might be one of the most important things to do: to write templates that don't sound like templates. KEN: Yep. ROB: I need tools for that, I think. KEN: We have lots of SOPs that we've attempted to do, and thank goodness that every software, even Gmail, allows you to do templates that you can drag and drop and place. But I've also been toying around with Conversion.AI to write these scripts based on inputs that we give it, but over time it obviously learns what we're expecting. That has been a bit of a game-changer in terms of templates as far as email follow-ups and responses with prospects. Or even in our SEO work, making sure that we can do optimizations at scale without having to burn out the strategists or charge these companies an ungodly amount of money. I am very fascinated by continuing to tweak and make automation work for us, and machine learning but without losing that component of human that all of us still look for. ROB: Super sensible. Ken, when we zoom back a little bit, across your founding journey, across your merging in with RevenueZen, what are some lessons you have learned on that journey that you might go back in time and tell yourself, if you had a chance to do them differently? KEN: What a question. Something I chew on regularly. I think the first would be that – Alex, our current CEO, my good buddy, has hammered home a lot that you can create a line of best fit, of effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity. I was so focused on the effectiveness, being 99.9% effective, that I forgot about that aspect of “I'm only ever going to be able to help X amount of people, and I actually can't help them that well because I'm personally burnt out from doing too much work.” I think that's a trap that creatives and agencies often get into, which is that we're so heads down on the custom, we forget about the scale and making it efficient enough to come down at a price point that's affordable to a broader market. So that's thing #1. Again, took a coach and a lot of money and a few years to learn that. The second thing I would say is when I go on a discovery call and I set the tone with the prospect, I tell them, “This is to make sure we're a good fit.” Salespeople have been saying that for years. Used car salesmen say that. But we've taken that in as a value of the company. I am so quick to disqualify in our CRM, in the pre-opportunity stage. That just saves headache for the strategists, it increases the lifetime value of our clients with us, and it's just better for our reputation. Good fits, good case studies. So that's the second thing: disqualifying them. I would say the third thing is the benefit of really good partners who complement your skillsets. As a solopreneur in the beginning, I think I had to learn a lot of hard lessons myself and chew on a lot of hard things without the aid of somebody. Whether it's a mentor or a co-founder or a really good book, just being insatiable about learning and getting help from others, external help, is invaluable. You literally cannot calculate the time and headache that it'll save you. ROB: Disqualifying almost seems like a subset of an SOP. What I mean by that is if you have to look at every lead that comes in and you have to think about all of their constraints and you have to say, “This person's in a closet by themselves and they haven't built a product yet, and they have $1,000 a month that they want to spend on inbound; what can we do for them?”, you'll kind of lose your mind trying to fit yourself to that opportunity, versus understanding when to say no, and maybe even sometimes “Here's someone else that would be a good fit for you to work with” and focusing on the things you do know how to solve. It keeps you from overthinking and getting paralyzed by choice, really. KEN: Ain't that the truth. Preach. Part of that, not only will we say this business/person is not a good fit, but what could we give them or how could we use the network effect to create value and have them go give a referral? So we do have templates of like “You're not a good fit, but here's some standard resources and here's a good one of our vendors as far as our partner program that we partner with.” That's exactly right. A good ICP defined, having that defined will save you a ton of headache and make your marketing better. ROB: As we round the corner, Ken, I can't help but highlight – you've mentioned a couple of times working with a coach and paying some real money for it. I know what that's like. How did you go about finding a coach that worked well for you, and to an extent justifying the cost? KEN: I'll start with justifying the cost. For me, I audit my time, and I audited my time in terms of how much dollars it was likely to bring in based on the activities. I started to hit this ceiling. Like, “There are all these operational inefficiencies that are holding me back, and I don't actually know how to solve them. The problem of why this is a bad thing, I have no clue. I guess I could learn about this or go get an MBA, but I'd rather just expedite that by paying somebody.” The ROI for me I knew would come because I knew I had a good system. I trusted in my “product” back then. But as far as knowing who was the right person, I always tell people to look for somebody who's done it multiple times but isn't so far ahead of you that they can no longer relate. I wouldn't want Jeff Bezos as a coach, even though he's clearly taken over the world. So this guy was a former founder three times over, but currently just wanted to give back. I mean, he charged money, but really it wasn't that much compared to the market and his expertise. I did a little bit of research. I got a beer with him. Those two components – he's done it before, I can sit down and have a conversation, and he's not too far ahead of me in my industry in the service business to be checked out and just in it for the money. I think if you look at it from that perspective, it's often worth it. That's what I would say. ROB: That's a great point also. Price is significant, but it's not always an indicator of quality. When I was interviewing coaches, I talked to – might be a wonderful guy, but he was a coach in a box. He literally had a box with a coaching methodology, and I think he was doing a career change. He was actually more expensive than the guy I ended up working with, who coaches execs of SalesLoft kind of legitimacy. SalesLoft probably pays him a lot more in total. But the credibility did not always correlate with price, is my point there. KEN: Hundred percent. ROB: Ken, when people want to catch up with you, connect with you and with RevenueZen, other than online for Inbound in October, where should they go to find you? KEN: You can check out either my or Alex's LinkedIn. Alex Boyd and Kenneth David Warren Marshall II, a.k.a. Ken Magma Marshall, on LinkedIn. RevenueZen, we're building a new website, so if you go to revenuezen.com any time in the next quarter, we'll have a lot of goodies in our Resource Center. That's always a great place to start. I'll say it now and I'll say it until the day we sell this thing or we keep doing it off into the future: I am always geeked to jump on a call with somebody who isn't our ICP to have a strategy conversation. It's not a sales pitch. It's me in real time, fixing stuff on your site and your pipeline and your methodology. I could do this just with my brain because I've been doing it for a while. So it's always good to get in touch, regardless of if you think you have the money or need SEO. I'll give you something to walk away with every time. ROB: That sounds like a YouTube channel. You let Ken give you help for free and you just agree it's going to be on YouTube in real time. KEN: I used to do that. That's how I used to prospect. That's how I got my first few clients. I would do a real-time, off the top of the dome analysis of their site and fix three to four things. I'd give it to the developers, not even the marketing contact, and the developers would be like, “You increased our page speed by like 60%. How did you do that? Aren't you an SEO provider?” I'm like, “Exactly.” [laughs] ROB: Excellent. Thank you, Ken. Hopefully we can meet up in the skin at Inbound some year when it's back in person. I wish you and the RevenueZen team all the best. Thank you for coming on and sharing. KEN: I would love that, Rob, and you're welcome to come to Brooklyn any time for a beer. Cheers. ROB: Brooklyn's awesome. Cheers. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Josy Amann is Co-founder at Media Matters Worldwide, an analytics-driven, brand-power-focused omnichannel media buying, and planning agency serving B2B and B2C clientele. In 2005, Josy and her co-founder left a large agency where they had been providing media buying and planning to start Media Matters – with no money and a two-pronged plan – to get their own clients and to freelance with other agencies. Their first client was a “gift” from their prior agency. Josy says referrals sustained the agency for the first ten years. In 2019, MMWW hired a leadership team to help scale the business, to be able to serve larger clients and to meet the variety of technological demands. Completely remote from day one, MMWW tripled its employees from 20 to 60 in two years – during Covid! Omnichannel marketing encompasses both traditional and digital advertising. Traditional advertising includes linear (scheduled broadcast) TV and radio, outdoor displays, direct mail, and print. Digital advertising may involve: Programmatic purchasing (using automated technology to buy advertising space) OTT (over-the-top) delivery (customized, precisely targeted content on online streaming channels, CTV [cable TV], digital radio), or  The utilization of banners, videos, and social media.  In this interview, Josy explains that digital outdoors has increased in importance because this adspace is:  More available than in the past,  More trackable, and  Can be purchased in dayparts as is done on TV . . . increasing efficiency and reducing costs by buying the time and location that reaches your target (commuting?) audience. Josy says buying advertising to promote brand power affects strategies, the types of media purchased, “and even sometimes the audiences.” Josie finds the need to adapt to constant technological change is both a challenge . . . and exciting . . . and notes, in particular some current issues that will affect her industry.  Internally, the MMWW media team leads the overall strategy of the business and provides thought leadership and communications planning by: Consulting with clients to define target audiences  Researching where the audience lives and how they consume media Determining what the client can afford and the most efficient way to use the client's budget Establishing a strategic messaging framework that seamlessly aligns audiences with the messages, types of media used through the consumer journey, KPIs, and client goals Traditional media (which requires relationships with channel representatives nationwide) and  Programmatic and social media (which requires experience on all the different platforms). Purchasing a client's strategic mix of:  Utilizing analytics and attribution reporting to ensure the interrelationships between the various media channels are supportive. Josy can be reached on LinkedIn or on her agency's website at: https://mediamattersww.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Josy Amann, Co-founder at Media Matters Worldwide, headquartered in San Francisco, California. Welcome to the podcast Josy. JOSY: Hi, Rob. Thank you so much for having me. ROB: It's wonderful to have you here. Why don't you kick us off by telling us about Media Matters Worldwide and what your superpowers are as a firm? JOSY: Superpowers, I love that question. I always tell my kids, “Focus on your superpower, focus on your superpower!” [laughs] Media Matters Worldwide, we are a media buying and planning agency. We've been in business since 2005. We are buying omnichannel media across all different types of businesses. Half our clients are B2B, half are B2C. But we play in the media buying and planning space and the analytics. It's kind of the dorky side of the business. ROB: [laughs] Perhaps dorky, but very important to get right and also probably quite easy to do wrong. When you say omnichannel, right now in 2021, what channels are encompassed in “omnichannel”? What should people be thinking of? JOSY: The landscape is shifting very quickly, but omnichannel traditionally means traditional – how you think about linear TV and radio in your car and outdoor and direct mail and print – and then everything digital under the sun. It can be programmatic media, it can be OTT or CTV or digital radio or banners or video or social media, all of that. Omnichannel is truly everywhere where you can possibly consume media, we are buying it. ROB: I know even out of home is getting very digital these days. Is that increasingly in the mix, or is it static but different formats? How does that fit into the puzzle? JOSY: Digital outdoors is much more in the mix because it's (1) more available, (2) more trackable, and (3) you can serve up ads on digital the way you do on TV. So you can buy dayparts. If you just want to buy when people are going to work and coming home, you can buy that. It's little ways, a little bit more affordable and more targetable. ROB: That absolutely makes sense. You look at these digital billboards, and sometimes I wonder – I'll see a local restaurant advertising that they're hiring, and I don't even know how the economics of that work, but I suspect maybe there's a branding component to it as well beyond just the hiring. But it's a little crazy to think about a little seafood restaurant running a billboard ad to hire somebody for their kitchen. JOSY: Yeah. You asked about superpower, and brand performance I would say is our superpower. Thinking about, exactly to your point, a restaurant trying to hire someone, that's really lower funnel type of advertising. That's very pointed. It's not trying to say “We're the best restaurant in the world.” We're trying to get someone in the door to get hired. That's brand performance. Brand is a whole different world of types of media you buy, the strategies behind it, even, sometimes, the audiences. So linking those two and providing analytics, providing the thought leadership and the strategy behind that – that's our superpower. ROB: Someone's got to be a superpower. That sounds overwhelming. That sounds like a lot of different goals, a lot of different channels, a lot of different objectives to pull that together. How do you structure your team to be able to manage that range of channels, of thinking, of objectives, even just picking from the menu of options for a given campaign? JOSY: That's a good question because that has evolved so much over the last 16 years that we've been in business. Structure of the teams is that you have to have your media team as the overarching strategic group. Part of that media planning team is comms planning. They are setting up that framework. They're going to clients and saying, “Who do you think your audience is? Let's think about it in a media buying landscape. That might look a little bit differently because we have different targeting abilities and things like that. Let's set up that messaging framework that aligns the audience with the types of media, with the messaging, so that everything is aligned through the consumer journey.” We're thinking about how these people are consuming media. We're thinking about what messaging aligns with them, and that could look very different for the audience. So that comms planning team is really in charge of heading up that overall strategy. The media department as well leads overall strategy of the business; however, underneath that you have to have people that have traditional buying experience, that have the relationships with all of the different stations in the country. You have to have programmatic media buyers and social buyers that know all of the different platforms. So it's a really, really specialized skillset of people we had to hire along the way. Programmatic media is new to the scene – what, seven years ago now? To keep a media buying agency in-house and really have all the chops in-house takes very specialized people to hire. But you have to have that overarching media team that brings it all together. ROB: Talk about the relationship side a little bit, because that sounds almost counterintuitive. We're all used to just firing up our web browser, we go over to Facebook, we push some buttons, we have a campaign that lets us do the same thing. And then you're talking about TV, you're talking about radio – I'm sure you're even talking in some cases about print or detail newspaper – and needing a relationship to get that work done. What does the structure of that industry and those buys look like? It's a different animal, for sure. JOSY: Yeah. There's a lot of nuances to media planning, and a lot of it has to come down to budget and audience. Doing the research, getting back to that at the beginning part comes planning. To think about where your audience is living and how they're consuming media is Step #1. Step 2 is budget. What can you afford? You can't run nationally TV if you don't have budget north of $80 million. So you really have to start thinking about the most efficient way to spend your money, but also aligning with the audience's media consumption habits. That's the relationship that's really the most efficient. Then when you're talking about KPIs and goals and all of that, all of that has to align as well. ROB: That budget part I think brings us to an interesting intersection. It sounds like a lot of moving parts. It sounds like I have to have a big budget to play in this game. Maybe it helps, just for context, for us to understand and think through a particular client or two and what an overall campaign looks like for an example client. What kind of messages do you have, where, to facilitate that overall buyer journey? JOSY: A typical client could look like – I guess it would be pretty different for the budget ranges. We have some clients spending $10 million a year; we have some clients spending $100 million. That looks pretty different. The $100 million might have a lot of TV that's happening, linear TV. A lot of connected TV. A lot of video is great across all different audiences. Then you might have a layer of programmatic media, especially doing a lot of private marketplace deals or retargeting, and then 30% of the budget could be social, 20% could be search. It's broken up to support each other. There's a relationship between media that supports each other, and that comes through when you're doing analytics and attribution reporting, looking at the relationship. If you run a CTV campaign, you'd want to see your organic search and your paid search lift. Seeing that relationship between your paid channels is really, really important as well. ROB: That definitely helps us understand how you can keep eyes on it, because there's a lot at stake, and what a tremendous responsibility as well to be managing that sort of budget for a client. What is interesting to pull on here – you mentioned the relationships on that traditional media side. You've been doing this thing for a while. Take us back a little bit in time. What led you to start Media Matters in the first place, and what does that origin story look like? JOSY: It's always a funny one to me a little bit because I'd just moved to San Francisco from New York. I had no idea what I was going to do. I didn't even have an interview yet. A girlfriend of mine from college called me and she said, “I have this agency that you should go interview for. The boss is great.” I said, “Okay, let me go do that.” Went to go interview at Lowe & Partners, big holding company, and I had no idea what I was even doing there. I thought I was getting a job in creative. I had no idea what media was. I got the job. Not sure how, but I got the job. [laughs] That was my entrance into media. From there, I worked at the big holding companies where it's a very different life. It's great in your twenties. You work an unbelievable amount of hours, and I learned a lot, fast. But then I realized, “I'm 29.” I'd gotten married a few years earlier. I wanted to have children, and I couldn't see how that was going to be possible in the big agencies. I had met my business partner; we'd worked together at an agency for four years. We had a really, really good balance of our backgrounds and also a balance of the way we think about the world. We both talked about it for years. “How are we going to start our own agency? What is that going to look like and how are we going to build an agency that we want to work at and can work at, having families and children and all of that?” That was really the biggest impetus. ROB: Wow. What did those first few years look like? I think all statutes of limitations are over on this. Did you have some clients that were ready to follow you away from the holding company world? How did you scrap together those clients that made it make sense to make a run in those early years? JOSY: We had a two-pronged approach. One was to get our own clients and the other was to become a kind of a super-duo of other agencies. We worked for a really large agency and did all of their media buying and planning. That was a great way to get involved and get billings up, because we came into the business with nothing. We didn't have any money. We didn't raise any money. We didn't have any money from family. [laughs] We just had the shirts on our backs and that was it. So that was one approach, and the other one was getting our own clients. Our boss that we had worked together with at that agency, Roger Becker, ended up giving us one of his clients that I had worked on. He said, “You guys are starting your own agency. Have this client. You guys would be a great fit for them.” That was really kind. Really, it was the kindness of him getting us our first client and then the freelancing option. ROB: That's wonderful, and I think that is one of the stories of, overall, the marketing and agency industry. There's not a lot of room, I don't think, for sharp elbows. It all comes back around. All the people flow through the industry and you end up being tag teams more than enemies. One of those transitions that a lot of agencies struggle with from the early stage is getting from – a lot of agencies will come up and do those sub-deals for other people. A lot of agencies will get an occasional referral. But at some point you have to sharpen the tools and go out and hunt the elephants yourself. What did the development of that capability look like for you all? JOSY: Definitely developed through the years. I'll tell you, referrals have been our best friend. Very, very lucky to have wonderful people surround us, our entire experience. Really early on, I guess I wouldn't say it was that hard, but it was a little bit hard being a woman in business, starting your own business, back then. We were very careful early on to have our website, and we didn't really want too many pictures of us on the website. We wanted the website to look a little masculine. Our logo looked masculine at the time. So we hid that until the last minute, till we could show off and actually go to a meeting and show them we know what we're talking about. That was tricky at the beginning. But then once we got clients and built those relationships and they saw, I think most of all, that we were authentic and we were not salespeople and we really cared about their business and cared about media, that took hold. So I think the referral side of the new business development is what sustained us for the first 10 years. But after then, I think you get to a certain size and you have a lot of people on payroll. We have over 60 people. Even five years ago, we were at 20 people. You have to start thinking a little bit differently. If you want the larger clients, business development starts to look different. ROB: Is that something you're still largely handling? It can be one of those challenges you see sometimes; for a services organization to scale that business development away from the founders can be challenging. How have you handled either scaling yourself or getting someone else up to speed? JOSY: We made a decision early 2019 to start hiring a leadership team. It was a huge investment in general and a big leap of faith that this type of model could work, because we were so used to being the Josy and Taji show. We did that. We hired a leadership team, and they are phenomenal. It was 100% the right thing to do, and they are responsible for the new business development. We still show up for the pitches. We still are I guess the face of the agency, but they are the substance and what really leads all the new business development now. It's just been a wonderful transition to have more of a team in place for that. ROB: Some things are easy to hand off. If someone else wants to build a deck or something like that, have a nice day. Some parts of that transition, though, are a little bit harder to get your hands off. What are the pieces that were the last to leave your hands and your calendar, if you will? JOSY: Hmm. I think it's managing the decks, managing the flow of conversation. We were so used to being so closely tied to that; that was really hard to let go of, that control. But once we did, everything became better. [laughs] Better than it was before. I was just so thankful. ROB: It sounds like a relief. It sounds like an opportunity. Goodness, even what you're saying about going from 20 to 60 people requires a leadership team, but it's even a little bit messy no matter who you've got on the train. How do you think about scaling the organization, scaling culture? How have you been able to triple the company without breaking everything? JOSY: Yeah, and that tripling has happened in two years. [laughs] It's been a wild, wild ride. I think the honest truth is always be looking at your architecture. We went from a place where our agency – and I know, Rob, you have a background in analytics – we would have a client that would have one or two analytics people on their account. They would basically do everything. They'd pull all the data, they'd help with the data viz, they'd do all of that. Now we need three people to do that job, one, because the technical side of the business has gotten a lot more fragmented and hard to manage, but two, working on bigger clients, you have to have a different architecture to support them. Again, I go back to our leadership team really taking a close look at their departments and how they're set up. And we've had to reengineer that, sometimes in six months' time because that growth was so fast. Having that strong structure is what I think makes you build for scale. And being flexible in that structure, because it might have to change pretty quickly. ROB: Absolutely. That makes sense. It sounds like it's still probably a whole lot to think about, but at least you're able to think about that structure and not as much about the decks anymore. JOSY: Yeah, that's true. [laughs] ROB: Josy, as you reflect back on the journey so far, what are some key lessons that you have learned in building Media Matters that you might tell yourself to do a little bit differently if you were starting over? JOSY: One of the key pillars of our agency – I don't know if it's really a lesson, but I think it's a lesson to other business owners and agencies – is that true transparency and honesty will keep your business alive. Over the last 16 years, there's been a lot of ups and downs in the market, in our company, in our lives, and to weather those storms, the honesty, the transparency, but also what we were just talking about with the team structure, the flexibility and being able to adapt and evolve – and we've learned that in the past two years with COVID – to scale a business during COVID… [laughs] It's like a double whammy. I don't know if I would've done anything differently, but that would be my biggest advice for people starting out. Remain flexible. Don't be tied too closely to things, and be honest and transparent with yourself, your clients, and your employees. ROB: Absolutely. You didn't really harp on it too much, but the mix of media that you have been handling has changed remarkably over the life of the company. If you're starting something early to mid-2000s and up until now, you didn't have social media. How people even used pay-per-click was remarkably different. The quality of what you can buy and display and how you buy and display has changed dramatically. If all you were doing was calling up TV stations and newspapers today, you'd be – somewhere else, is what I'll say. You wouldn't have 60 people. JOSY: Out of business. [laughs] It's remarkable. Our industry is so cool. The second you think you have a grasp on it, the second you're wrong. It's about learning and moving quickly. It's exciting. ROB: For sure. Something I think you bring to the table that's also interesting is a lot of us are kind of new to this working from home and building a company remote, but you have been distributed for a little while. What are some of the key tools and key cadences and ceremonies that you have found to be essential to building the kind of company you want to build, but not to meet everyone in an office? JOSY: It was built out of stubbornness. My business partner, Taji, and I live 40 minutes from each other. I was not going to commute to Marin; she was not going to commute to the city. So it was really out of stubbornness that we were going to figure out how to work from home, and that's how it started. Then everyone we hired after that point wanted to work from home, loved to work from home, loved the culture of working from home. So for us to grow organically since 2005 till now as 100% remote always, and we're hiring people across the country, we've always had the true culture of loving working remote. I think that's different because a lot of people are trying to get used to working remote, or companies are struggling with hybrid. You have the “us versus them” mentality, the people in the office and the people at home and how they're going to solve for that. When you have a culture that's always been remote, it's a whole different world. I think the advent of video and Slack and all the collaboration tools have really helped that throughout the years, but also, especially pre-COVID, getting together in person and really spending the time with each other, whether it be a new business presentation or a client QBR, whatever it is. Getting together in person whenever we can, it lasts forever. It really does. ROB: What does getting together look like for you? Has it been visiting people in different places? Has it been getting everybody together in one place? How does that work? JOSY: It's hard because a lot of our employees have families, so getting everyone together in the same place – we'd have to plan it years in advance. [laughs] I would love to do something like that. But it usually looks like either regional hub parties – we might have one in New York, we might have one in LA, Seattle, wherever it is – and then people will drive in for those hub parties, or it looks like “Hey, we have a client QBR or new business. Please fly in” and we all get together. It's a little bit more fragmented instead of having a whole company thing, but it works. ROB: It's interesting to hear what different people are doing. Maybe the good news of where we all are is that we're going to hear a few more people with ideas, best practices, trying things and all of that. I'll certainly say it's been strange adding people to our team that I've never met. But it keeps on happening, and you're probably used to it. JOSY: Yeah, we are. It is really strange, especially when you meet people in person for the first time after working with them for years and not seeing them, and then they're taller than you thought or whatever. [laughs] ROB: I think that popped up in my LinkedIn feed the other day, an article on “You look taller on Zoom” or something like that. We know what that's like. Josy, when you're thinking about what's next for Media Matters Worldwide and the areas of marketing that you touch, what's coming up that you're excited about? JOSY: I think the whole media world is changing yet again. Deprecation of cookies, how we're thinking about personalization with our audiences, and just even the media types in general – a new social platform will be invented in the next year or so. So really thinking about how to make authentic – and I always go back to transparency and honesty, but it's true for brands, too – how to be truly authentic with your customers. I think that is the biggest struggle for brands, and they're missing the mark, some of them. But some of them are doing an amazing job, and that's because they're getting to the root and doing the research about their audiences and really figuring out what makes them different and what makes them excited and thrive. To me, figuring that piece of the puzzle out, having the research tools, having the analytics that pull it all together, and the artificial intelligence that's involved in advertising now – that to me is all really exciting. ROB: There's a lot going on there. How do you keep those data people and data tools together? It's a lot to wrangle. It's a lot to bring into one place. What's in your toolkit? JOSY: It is. We have an amazing analytics department, and that's our toolkit: their knowledge, their understanding of the market. But also obviously all the technology that goes along with that. And it looks different for every client because a lot of clients come to you with their technology that you have to integrate with. There's a lot to unpack with new client relationships and how to integrate their technology into yours, and really how to make things as seamless as possible. That's the tricky part. ROB: That's right. When you're talking about the budgets, I'm sure there's many a data lake that you have to feed into, many an internal analytics team that you're accountable to as well. JOSY: Exactly right. I love that you know “data lakes.” [laughs] ROB: [laughs] The data lake where you put the data and nothing ever comes out, maybe. JOSY: Very murky. ROB: Makes absolute sense. I think it's very relevant what you said there, Josy, about that transparency. In services, we have technology, we have tools, we have things that we're buying, but a lot of times what they're buying is people. I congratulate you also for being able to scale having what I would perhaps strangely say is buyable people. You have people on your team that clients can buy into that are not just the founders. That's a real challenge to get past. JOSY: Yeah, it's something that happens organically, and only with the vision of hindsight can you say “That was a great idea.” [laughs] ROB: [laughs] Josy, when people want to connect with you and connect with Media Matters, where should they go to find you? JOSY: They can find me on LinkedIn, or go to mediamattersww.com. ROB: WW. Worldwide, right? JOSY: Worldwide. ROB: Excellent. Josy, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's good to meet you in this remote way, like you talk to your team all the time. Someday we'll all get out of our houses again. We'll figure it out. JOSY: Yeah, I'd love to meet you. Thank you so much for having me today. ROB: Sounds good. Thank you so much, Josy. Bye. JOSY: Have a great day. Bye. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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.

Carl Fremont is CEO at Quigley-Simpson, a direct marketing/direct to consumer marketing agency with its roots in longform television infomercials. The agency has pivoted numerous times from informercials to shorter form direct response TV to full-service media with a focus on digital marketing. With an almost 40-year career in direct marketing, Carl joined Quigley-Simpson. Six months later, Covid sent the company virtual.  In this interview, Carl reflects on the history of direct marketing. Twenty years ago, the required tasks included setting up call centers, and providing fulfillment, pricing, and promotion strategies for a variety of products. In today's digital world, the agency helps clients determine how to sell their products in different digital marketplaces and the mix of creative and messaging content that will be most effective. Carl explains that over the 18 years this agency has been around, it is well grounded in “in driving sales and building relationships with our clients' customers.” While the pandemic has increased many clients' focus on direct sales and short-term revenues because they are trying to “catch up,” Carl says that a business will eventually fail if it doesn't also invest in building its brand image and association.  What is the right investment balance for building brand awareness, association, consideration, guiding the purchase journey, driving revenue, and developing customer relationships? Carl says brand marketing is an end-to-end process. A careful analysis of data is the only way to determine the right investment balance to optimize the consumer journey and build a brand for the future. It takes a lot more investment and effort (and even bravery) to invest in a brand's image than to go straight for sales.   The balance of long-view brand building and quick sales requires a corresponding strategic balance of creative and messaging content and presentation. Every brand is unique . . . and the balance may change over time.  Carl believes that brands need to be flexible – to have the ability and willingness to adapt and adopt new ways of working and thinking – if they are to survive and thrive. “Every year is a new opportunity and a new way to accelerate growth,” Chad says. Today's brand-building is not just about touting a product's features and benefits. Winning the business is now “deeper” than “What will this product do for me?” Customers are asking such questions as, “What is the purposeful meaning behind the brand?” “What does the brand mean from a social side?” How is it giving back?” “What does the brand stand for?”  Chad can be reached on his agency's website at Quigleysimpson.com or through LinkedIn at Carl Fremont. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Carl Fremont, CEO at Quigley-Simpson with offices in both Los Angeles, California and New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Carl. CARL: Thank you, Rob. I'm thrilled to be joining you. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Quigley-Simpson and where the firm specializes? CARL: Sure, that would be great. Quigley-Simpson was founded 18 years ago by two entrepreneurs, and the co-founders, Renee Hill Young and Gerald Bagg, are still involved with the company. Its roots are similar to mine. It's in direct marketing. Today we say direct to consumer. I don't know when direct marketing got out of fashion and turned to direct to consumer, but we were really one of the first direct marketing/direct to consumer agencies. Our heritage, believe it or not, is in infomercials, in longform television. We pivoted. We pivoted many, many times and continue to do so, from longform infomercials to shorter form direct response TV to full-service media, in particular focused on digital marketing. So, our roots are very much grounded in driving sales and building relationships with our clients' customers. But we've evolved as the industry evolved because we needed to. Today, we've taken that heritage from direct to consumer, direct marketing, and applied it in a digital world. Twenty years ago, that meant arranging for call centers. That meant product fulfillment, price, promotion of different products. We're still doing the same thing, but in a digital world. What that means today, to correlate, it's how you sell your products on different digital marketplaces, like on Amazon or Walmart or Kroger, and using a plethora of different channels to market, including the creative and the messaging. The one thing that distinguishes us is that we're not only focused on the revenue creation, but on the brand as well, which is why we say our value proposition and what we stand for is both brand and demand: building the brand's image and awareness as well as driving performance, driving revenue. It's the balance of those two, between building the brand's awareness, building the consideration, all the way through the purchase journey through to driving revenue and customer relationship marketing. So, it's really an end-to-end way that you look at brand marketing today. ROB: It's really fascinating. Much as you're saying that direct marketing made its transition into direct to consumer, I think at some point B2B marketing stole the show from consumer marketing when it comes to the customer or buyer journey. It seems like consumer products have been the original home of the buyer's journey. How do you think about that journey when you're really talking about – you're probably involved in making sure product ranks well, lists well, looks great on Amazon, but you have to start with that awareness. How do you think about connecting the dots where you're going to make somebody aware of something that eventually they're going to see on Amazon and buy? What are the approaches? CARL: That's a great question. Today, as we know, especially with COVID and the pandemic and what's happened the last year, it's hastened the way in which we're marketing brands today. There's even a greater focus on the short-term revenue to make up for where we were. Many brands right away focus on that marketplace, on creating the direct sales without thinking about how they build the brand. At some point, Rob, you will hit a proverbial wall. You will reach a point of diminishing return on sales if you haven't built the brand and the brand association. So, the question, and what we help our clients determine, is what's the right balance for building that brand's awareness, association, consideration, and the demand side? As we all know, it takes a lot more investment and effort to build and sustain a brand's image and awareness than it is in a direct sales capacity. In the short-term world which we are faced with today about driving revenue, it takes brands greater investment and bravery, actually, to build that brand's image. What we do is help through data and analytics to determine what that right balance is between investing and building that brand's image or awareness to driving demand. How do you do that? It's both in the investment in media as well as the creative, the messaging and creating the right balance. There's no magic formula. Not one brand is like any other brand. Each one has its own unique situation for determining that right balance between the brand and the demand side. But using a number of data sources – looking at sales, looking at the marketplace, competitive insights and intelligence, consumer insights – all of that, bringing that all together, plus in many cases some primary research that's done, helps us with determining that right balance, the correct investment level between the brand and demand side. And as we know, Rob, nothing today is static. Everything is very dynamic. We may determine up front the balance between investing in the brand and the demand side, but that balance may change over time. It means also that because you have a message and efforts that are focused on sales and driving sales, it doesn't mean that the brand's image should not be well represented in that as well. So, it's not only looking at an investment; it's incorporating a brand's messaging and image even when you're doing more direct sales. ROB: Perhaps we can get a little bit more practical here, Carl. I recognize that every brand's a little bit different. Is there a brand you have worked with that you can speak about that might be an interesting example of this combination of the market research, establishing the brand, and not overharvesting the low-hanging fruit, but really building towards a good robust, long-term pipeline of demand? CARL: Sure. I'll talk about it from a category side because I don't want to talk about a specific client per se. But from a category side, there's a category I've been personally involved with for decades, which is in the consumer credit card industry. As we know, it's a highly, highly competitive marketplace. There are a plethora of cards and choices and opportunities. Building the brand's image and building the association that “that piece of plastic is right for me” is really critical in building that audience base – but not only getting the share of mind, but then the share of wallet. That's a very highly competitive category. In many cases, the brand features and benefits are very similar. All you really have to stand out and build that long-term value proposition is your image. It's what you stand for. It's how you relate to a consumer. And that's where there's a lot of research and insight that goes in. How do I connect someone to the right card, the right consumer experience that is right for them? If you go at it in the credit card by just the offer, you're not going to get that share of wallet. You may not win over their long-term hearts. You're just going to acquire them, but they're not going to have the longer-term value to you. It's creating that association that that card not only has the right features and benefits, but I associate to its image, I associate to the values that are behind it. And I think today, brands need to go beyond just their features and benefits of building a brand's image. Today that also includes building purposeful meaning behind the brand and thinking about what the brand means from a social side. How is it giving back? It's not just about creating that image and awareness and association. It's purposeful marketing. What does the brand stand for, for me? I think today with so many different social issues that we're encountering, especially in the past year, having a brand stand for something is very important for consumers. ROB: That's a really interesting conversation there. I'm in Atlanta; some folks here – I think an investor, and I think also Killer Mike – were involved in standing up Greenwood Bank. When you think about financial products, there aren't really very many products that can differentiate themselves by saying they're going to serve an underserved community and actually show it and mean it. Something I want to pull on that's interesting – maybe this trend is real, maybe it's not – it seems to me that the marketing world is moving in your favor, is what I would say. It seems like we're moving more and more away from considered purchases and more into habits. That's kind of what you're alluding to with the credit card. But our phones have switched more from a considered purchase to a habit of what phone I'm going to acquire with regularity. Or I even think in a completely different market about the cloud computing market. Amazon Web Services and Google, they're advertising, but they're really advertising for a share of your habit, a percent of where you're going to spend your money on your IT infrastructure. Have you seen more and more things shifting? Even with television, televisions are more of a habit than a considered purchase, I would say, now. CARL: Oh yeah. You mean the actual television set? ROB: Yeah, it's $200 and now $1500. CARL: I just bought one in a big box place – I'm not going to say which one – that was shockingly $100 for a 24-inch television. Who would ever think you can buy that? All of these consumer electronics – and we just had CES, so it's a good time to talk about it – they're utilities. They're part of our connected lives. Just as you talked about the phone, we know for years now that the phone is part of our connected life. It's not obviously just about making and receiving calls. It is connected to our life and how we shop, of course how we communicate, importantly how we receive news and information, how we socialize with our friends and colleagues. It has become a utility. The television is the same way. Now that we can stream, it's certainly a big entertainment, but with streaming opportunities, we can narrowcast, and that's what's happening. It's mimicking in some ways cable, but it's all on demand where we're narrowcasting even further information that is important to us. So, there's a blending of all of these utilities, too, all these devices. Over time – we've been talking about the Internet of Things for many years now, but it very much so will become part of our everyday lives. Now, the question is, getting back to marketing, how do brands participate in it? What is the brand role? Is brand's role this traditional just pushing messages out on all these devices? Does it contribute any value in any of the content that gets streamed? How do brands enter into this in a way that doesn't seem obtrusive, but seems complementary to what we're doing – the habits, as you said, that we have? As consumer electronics, consumer behavior and the way we're engaging with content has vastly changed. It's been doing that for years; it's just been accelerated because of the pandemic. With the way we shop also, that behavior has been changing for years but now is being accelerated. All of this is coming together. The devices, the way we connect, whether that's through brick and mortar or through digital, through the way we receive entertainment and news and information to the way we shop – all of that is merging together. It's all coming together, and in some ways, Rob, it is a little “back to the future” for us. When we started doing infomercials, they were entertaining and you were able to shop through them. So, there's a little bit of lessons learned from the past as well. But all of this is coming together and merging together. What brands are now faced with more than ever is, what's their role in all this? How do they play within all of this? Because the models have been turned upside down. ROB: It's really blinding, and it's interesting – YouTube is the new infomercial in a lot of cases, which is such an interesting shift. I want to pull on something else that you mentioned. You mentioned the firm itself is 18 years old. How long have you been with the firm? Were you the first transition away from being founder-led? Or what did that look like for you? CARL: That's a great question. I joined a year and a half ago, and I had no idea, like everybody else, what was ahead. After 6 months of being in LA and mostly focused in our Los Angeles office, everything turned upside down. I literally believed, Rob, that we would be back together in 2-3 weeks. None of us had experienced in our lifetime a pandemic, so there was no rulebook. I really thought we'd all be back. We were, like everybody else, improvising as we went. We had no rules. We didn't see it coming, so we didn't plan for it. It just sort of evolved and happened for us. So, I joined a year and a half ago, and certainly the last almost year now, being it was March that we had our work-from-home policy that went into effect and have been following pretty much ever since – never really thought that. But for me, Quigley-Simpson was a big comfort zone because my roots and heritage or where I've spent a vast majority of my almost-40 year career (September I mark my 40th year) has been in direct marketing and direct to consumer marketing. Very much so it's my comfort zone. It's where I've always been. I came on, thankfully, by our two co-founders to help evolve the company further. Again, the company was evolving and had many pivots long before I came, but now we have to make another big pivot. We have to continue our heritage of being nimble and flexible and adopting to the times as we always have been. And as we just talked about, the acceleration of how consumers are engaging with and watching television and other entertainment sources, how they are connecting their lives through multiple devices, their shopping behavior all have been accelerated. It has caused us to reflect on the future and look at what lessons we've had in the past and how we apply them moving forward. We're at a vantage point versus other agencies that we've always practiced this direct-to-consumer mindset with a heavy focus on brand and brand building. So, for us, this next pivot isn't that remarkable because we've always done it. Now the question is, again, how do we take our clients along with us on that ride? Because everyone is looking at how that acceleration, that often-used and overused word of “transformation,” how do we now accelerate it even faster to catch up with consumer behavior – your behavior, my behavior, everyone's behavior? ROB: It's quite a transition. People often say society to some extent has a reverence for the founders of different things, whether it's your Edelmans or your Steve Jobs or anything like that. But beneath that, within any company, quite often the culture of both the team as well as the client relationships, there's a magnetism. They're working there because they like and respect the people in charge. What do you think are some keys to making an effective transition there so that clients are not jarred and the team is not jarred by such a consequential change of leadership? CARL: I'm nodding my head. You can't see it because we're on a podcast. [laughs] I'm nodding in agreement with what you said. We're all in this together. We're all on the same path forward. For me and for us at Quigley-Simpson, it's about really partnering. It's not you against them; we're all in this together. We all are heading in the same path on that transformation acceleration. Really doing it together and being one team and having that trust with each other that we're going to go through it together and have a concerted roadmap is important. Now, what that entails, as I said before, is a commitment to each other and a commitment to trust and a commitment to open up on all sides – on the agency side, on the client side – information and data that's going to allow us together to assess the market, assess customers – which is where you always begin: with the customer. We're putting consumers in the center and building a roadmap for it. That roadmap and acceleration of the roadmap really depends on many factors. It depends on where you are, where any marketer is in that journey. What have you done before to bring together your whole database of your consumers? Is it all together? Is it in disparate databases? What have you done to put measures in place to protect your consumer privacy? What have you done to assess through all that data who your audiences are? And what have you tested and learned along the way? What roadmaps have you put in place along the way? That's what a lot of this is. It's putting together that roadmap, doing it together, and accelerating at the pace that is most comfortable for the marketer in terms of where they are. There is no one size fits all in terms of building a roadmap and accelerating. A lot of it – you used the word “culture” – depends on the culture of the organization. It depends on how fast they want to move. Today, everything's moving so fast and so accelerated that you really need to get together and have that roadmap established. But I believe that it first comes with a true, true partnership with everyone aligned on what the objectives are, what's going to be measured, how it's going to be measured, and it's always on. We're in a world of always on. We have been, but it is constantly dynamic testing and learning and then optimizing from there. Now more than ever, we have to be testing many different factors of the consumer experience along the consumer journey. ROB: Carl, if you look over your LinkedIn, you've been on quite a journey in some agencies of different magnitudes and size. What are some key lessons you yourself have learned along the way that you might revisit if you were starting over? CARL: That's a great question and a good thought. For almost four decades I've been in this. Adaptability is always key. You have to be adaptable to the times. That also requires a great amount of curiosity. You've got to be looking always at every year as a new year. The brands and marketers I've worked with and had the most success with never look at one year as the same. Every year is a new opportunity and a new way to accelerate growth. There's never a repeat. It's always, what are we doing now? What's new? It's a constant evolution. You're never done. You're always evolving. I remember saying to people who I've mentored and who've worked for me in the past, “This is the best time we've ever been in marketing and advertising.” Honestly, I've been saying that for 40 years because every year, it's constantly evolving. So adoptability and adaptability to the times that we're in and being curious about what is next, being curious around data and technology and what that enables, is really how you progress forward. If you are not someone who is adaptable and adopting new ways of working and thinking and don't have a curious mind, then you're not going to succeed and this business is probably not for you. You need to be able to constantly be changing and reinventing every year. And frankly, Rob, that's the exciting part of what we do. ROB: There are a lot of things on a lot of people's minds right now in January 2021, and I think there are some people who are holding on and hoping they can just get back to normal. I think that's never really true. Maybe it's just emphasized a little bit, or maybe it's – I think this is probably a little crazier than it's usually been. I'll just concede that. But if it's changing a little more slowly, you still can't hang on. I think the folks who have tried to hang on and come out of this past year and go back to what they were doing – I don't think that's going to go well. CARL: No, exactly. Now that I've just said things keep changing, there are some things that do stay the same, and that is great brands that tell great stories. That was definitely an art. We've been practicing at Quigley-Simpson, since early days of longform advertising, great storytelling for brands, and that art is on the present and will continue. It is being adapted into new forms based on technology and access to data. But the notion of building great brands through great storytelling will be going on in infinite times. We always need to be focused on that and take that great storytelling and adapt it to new formats, new ways of consumer engagement, new technology, and making sure that we are always connecting it to the consumer experience based on information and data that we know about someone. ROB: It's such a great point. I'm glad you're here to elevate the appreciation of the infomercial as an art – and I mean that, and I mean that in this way. People talk now about StoryBrand, they talk about that being rooted in the Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey, that Star Wars story structure. But it seems to me that that's kind of the story of infomercial as well: how do you make the person who will buy this product the hero? CARL: Exactly. ROB: And the product is the guide. The product is the tool. That is their lightsaber. CARL: If you think about it, in this short amount of time from where we've been, in that period for the informercials, you were both telling that brand's story and getting somebody to respond and to connect. Now, if we can take that same notion today about building a great brand through storytelling, through a value proposition, a unique selling proposition, and marry it to what matters to consumers, what's purposeful, and connect it to sales, to driving an action – that's what it's about. Adapting those principles that will always be to new forms of technology, new forms of media. ROB: That's very wise, and I appreciate it. I'm glad you're here to bring the perspective. Carl, when people want to connect with you and with Quigley-Simpson, where should they go to find you? CARL: Quigleysimpson.com is the best place, or through my LinkedIn, Carl Fremont, is probably the best place. I'm passionate about building brands, so the opportunity to talk to anybody about brand and demand – I can do that all day long. ROB: That's wonderful. Glad you have kept an openness while you also stay curious. Thank you so much for putting that out there. Carl, it's a pleasure to talk to you and learn from you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. CARL: It's been fabulous. Really appreciate it. Have a great day. ROB: You too. Be well. Thanks. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Phil Case, now Chief Client Officer, joined Max Connect Marketing after running an agency for nine years – one that consistently lost clients to this highly performance-based digital agency. One key to Max Connect's success is that 90 percent of its 47 employees are compensated based on the performance of the campaigns it runs. At Phil's previous agency, the sales team would work 6 months to close a new client and then hand the client over to the digital team. The digital team would complain about the extra time they had to spend running the campaign without that effort generating any more financial compensation. Aligning compensation with performance boosts the Max Connect team's motivation to go “above and beyond” to produce outstanding results. Max Connect's clients are typically national or international  B2B companies or companies that sell big-ticket consumer goods . . . especially purchases that involve a complex, nuanced customer journey that requires education, brand-building, and a focus on the customer relationship, and involve “a lot of datapoints.” Phil refers to these datapoints as the up to 100 to 140 “digital breadcrumbs” that people leave as they navigate a “considered” several-hundred- or several-thousand-dollar purchase decision.  The agency targets audiences based on “real-time in-market data, demographics, psychographics, and online intent,” runs that data through its proprietary algorithm, and then places frequent, hyper-targeted ads in front of that audience on multiple digital channels. The goal is to provide a customer journey with a high level of detail and a “personalized touch.” Phil notes that privacy concerns are creating an international trend toward a “cookieless world.” The immense amount of data Max Connect collects is stripped of personal information to prevent potential privacy law violations. The sheer volume of information provides an opportunity to gain the insights needed to build more specific, nuanced customer journeys and increase sales, but also to drive a company's ability to innovate – to create the types of products and technologies consumers will demand in the future. Phil believes most digital marketers make the mistake of assuming they know their audiences and how to reach them without any real-time analysis. Max Connect starts with identifying a client's audience through empirical data . . . analyzing on- and off-line conversion data, hypertargeting the audience, reaching out to them through up to six different channels, and then assessing which channels are most effectively converting audiences. Phil describes this customer journey approach as both “more personalized” and “ubiquitous.” Phil, who grew up in the deserts of Arizona, is enamored with the diverse outdoor opportunities in Utah. When the Bear's Ears monument controversy damaged the businesses of a large number of Utah-based outdoor brands, Phil worked with the brands' CEOs to found a 501(c)(6) nonprofit trade association to promote thought leadership, knowledge sharing, events, and roundtables . . . all to strengthen Utah's natural resource interests and outdoor brands. Phil's goals for 2020 were to “be more deliberate in decision-making” and to put himself out of his comfort zone – which would give him the opportunity to “grow and stretch.” 2020s' challenges provided that for him without his even trying. Growing and stretching remain goals for the coming year. Phil can be reached on his LinkedIn profile: Phil Case, https://www.linkedin.com/in/philcase/ or on his agency's website at maxconnect.com Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Phil Case, Chief Client Officer at Max Connect Marketing based in the Salt Lake City area right in the heart of the Silicon Slopes. Welcome to the podcast, Phil. PHIL: Great to be with you. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you give us the rundown on Max Connect Marketing and what capabilities are really driving growth there?  PHIL: It's interesting; at my last agency, I came across these guys more than a few times, and I consistently lost clients to them – a few over the last couple of years. As I was able to begin to get to know them and ultimately join the team over a year ago, I began to find out that not only did they have a uniquely digital-only focus, but it was very much data-driven with an audience-specific approach that I hadn't really seen anywhere else. In terms of their capabilities and being able to see that customer journey, the level of detail and personalization that they provided blew me away. ROB: What's a typical client that you're working with over there? PHIL: The more complex the customer journey is – and what I mean by that is, if there's more datapoints, if there's more digital footprints – we think of Hansel and Gretel and breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs that we leave as we make decisions in our own lives throughout the internet are immense. Most of us probably don't realize that. Going into a typical several-hundred- or several-thousand-dollar decision that a consumer might make, for instance, there's anywhere from 100 to 140 touchpoints or data digital breadcrumbs that you've left. What we do as an agency is harness that on behalf of the brands we work with. It could be an automotive client selling cars to a homebuilder selling homes to a SaaS tech company selling B2B software to consumer products and other brands in ecommerce. Really what unifies all of these clients across industries and sectors is when there's a nuanced customer journey, when there's education, when there's brand-building, but particularly when they're wanting to build a relationship with a consumer or a professional. That's when we tend to really thrive in terms of what we provide on their behalf. ROB: Got it. So, you're in both consumer and B2B, but the common theme is this is a larger ticket, considered purchase. It's not a “swipe your credit card right now and buy this piece of SaaS software you just saw for $10 bucks a month.” PHIL: That's right. It's when you're weighing options, you're doing your research, and potentially when there's a human being that you often will speak with, whether that's via chat – you're probably familiar with Backcountry and the guides and the experts or really gearheads that they provide at Backcountry.com. Comparing that with a car salesman or a homebuilder and a real estate individual involved, there's typically a human touch either verbally by phone or in person or via chat. That's when we tend to do extremely well working alongside that ecosystem. ROB: Got it. You've got web traffic maybe connected to email opens, maybe connected to digital chat, maybe with some logging of calls from a representative who's in on the sale? Is that a lot of the footprint, or what else is in that? PHIL: No, that's exactly right. I can get a little bit more into that, but to put it this way, when somebody in today's world goes and purchases a car – let's say you wanted to go get that new Mustang you've had your eye on. There's about 25 points that have been somewhat standardized across an auto buying journey, and 25 steps that need to be made. Up until this year of 2020, there's 19 of those that Google has now said “this is a digital first touchpoint.” Before, we used to think about car buying as “I want to buy a car,” so you just show up to a dealer and say, “I have no idea. Tell me what I ought to buy,” and they get those dollar signs in their eyes and they say, “Here's somebody that I can probably pull the wool over their eyes or sell them and guide them to what I'm going to either make the most money on or what my manager tells me we'll get kickback on incentives.” What's changed now is any time somebody steps foot onto a lot, they typically have down to the VIN number what they want to purchase. They know exactly what the dealership has, and they know what they're willing to pay because they've seen the invoice price. It's a little different. So as a dealer, those 19 digital touchpoints – with 2021, it's pushed us closer to 21 to 22. So, you literally show up to the dealership and it's, “I'd like to buy this car and I'm willing to spend X,” and it's a matter of will they do that for me or not? So, it's interesting. That's the challenge that businesses face now. Most of that research and backstory is done with research online. Consumers come more prepared than ever, and we need to make sure that whether it's across social channels, whether it's across video, whether it's just throughout the internet or on Google, you're being seen and found and providing relevant education and really driving that individual to purchase, that you're the right organization to buy that from. ROB: I laugh a little bit; I shared with you beforehand that I spent some time in Salt Lake City this past summer. What I didn't share is we were on a road trip and our van basically broke down, and we ended up purchasing a vehicle in Salt Lake City on the middle of a road trip from Atlanta. So, I've been on that journey in about five days. PHIL: There you go. And I'll tell you a little bit more on that note. Most digital marketers get it wrong, and they make assumptions about their audience that they'll behave a certain way or that they're a certain age or demographic. They feel like “Facebook can help me reach that audience,” so they have almost a single or maybe a dual channel approach by which they invest money in, and they say, “Is this channel giving me a return?” We think that's entirely the wrong way to think about marketing. We think you first identify your audience utilizing empirical data. Let the data speak for itself and let your audience be able to be uncovered as you're measuring and counting and looking at those conversions that come across your website or on- and offline transactions. As you understand then who that audience is, we feel like you first hyper-target your audience and then you reach them through four to five to six different channels. It's not about “Is this channel performing or not?” It's “Is this audience that we've defined converting at as high a level as this other audience?” It's really about being ubiquitous across that customer journey and providing a more personalized approach for that individual. For instance, if you've ever seen Minority Report where Tom Cruise walks into the store and he's got the new set of eyes, the Asian that he purchased from, you'll notice that it says “Welcome, Mr. Yakamoto. Last time you were here, you bought these jeans. Can we show you this size now?” That's really where we're headed. We've gotten to that level that in marketing, we should be able to provide a unique, curated, personalized customer journey for those audiences and individuals looking to interact with you as a brand. There's no reason that we're limiting ourselves by any one channel or medium. You should use any and all channels and mediums and digital marketing mix to allow you to reach that individual and develop a relationship with him or her. And that could be across anywhere on the internet. We all have different consumption behaviors and patterns. ROB: A lot of people do look at that Minority Report scene still as being a little bit intrusive and creepy, but we see that project into the world we're in as well. You'll hear people certainly say, “I was just talking about this thing the other day and then I started seeing this advertisement from something else. I know my Alexa was listening in on me.” I think sometimes we underestimate how much we've been influenced by some prior touchpoint or how much marketers just know our demographic in the first place. PHIL: I think it's a mixture of both. I think there's enough Big Data out there that we have an idea of the type of buyer profiles we're looking at, but I think you're exactly right; there is a lot of data collection that's happening on any of the big tech companies you can imagine. And just to address that point, we've been hearing as marketers there's going to be a cookieless world, that there's more stringent requirements in Europe and California, throughout the United States, with privacy. Which I think is a good thing. Any data that we collect is anonymized. We're in no way wanting to violate any PII type laws. But because we can integrate with Facebook and Google and these other major platforms and their SDKs and APIs, we can still get very granular data among audience with anonymized users in a way that not only allows us to have incredible attribution, but it allows us to get greater insight into the traits and attributes and digital breadcrumbs that really drive conversion. So even though we might live in a cookieless world, there's still a lot of anonymized data, and there's other ways to work through these big tech companies to almost replicate, if not even improve, the amount of data and personalization we're able to do. ROB: Right. It's almost like we've shifted the point of contact. If you think about a company the size of Verizon, all the different datapoints that they control, all of the different touchpoints, they may only do first party cookies on each site instead of third-party cookies, but if they can tie them together – and they certainly can – it seems like it's really going to move the boundary to some of these media companies selling the audience through to the people who want to buy it. PHIL: And particularly the consolidation we're seeing in media assets. I think you're right on. We see that – I'm forgetting the movie theater chain that's chosen – anyway, as you've noticed, some of the bigger movie producers are now simply coming straight out to HBO Max. It's interesting to see not only consolidation, but across networks and entities and as buyouts are happening, the amount of data being shared. To your point, it might all be first party data, but if it's packaged in such a way and they can have a holistic vantage point of a particular consumer across multiple properties, that data alone is very valuable. ROB: Right, because HBO Max is AT&T, it's TBS, it's TNT, it's Cartoon Network, it's Bleacher Report. It's a myriad of touchpoints. They're like a Fortune 5 company or something. They're going to figure something out. PHIL: And that really becomes the currency of the future. It's data. It's being able to not necessarily control data but have data in a way that you can draw insights that you know how to target your consumer, that you can provide more personalized marketing or touchpoints. Because we're collecting an immense amount of data, the companies that can harness that will have not only a more specific and nuanced type customer journey and approach and they'll sell at a lot higher rate, but it's that data that ultimately allows them to drive innovation, allows them to drive the type of products and technology that users and consumers are demanding in the future. So, I think we'll continue to see data be a major currency of business in the future. ROB: Very, very interesting. Phil, you mentioned seeing your own business that you built coming up alongside Max Connect. While you weren't necessarily at Max Connect on Day 1, what can you tell us about the origin story, and maybe the parallel journey you saw them on versus what you were doing that you learned from along that way? PHIL: I'll give a little bit of my background to give context. In college I studied international business and relations, and I actually for a semester did Arabic. I was working on a national political campaign for president, studying Arabic, really wanting to get into the government work. Then I met a girl who would become my wife, and when I described to her this vision of living in the Middle East and speaking Arabic and having our children in these international schools and I'd be a diplomat, she looked at me and said, “Well, that sounds incredible, and I'm really excited for you, but I probably won't be on that journey with you. I hope you can find a girl that will.” It caused me to pause, and as I began to reevaluate those opportunities of business, I began to gravitate into investment banking and finance. As I graduated with a minor in business, I had taken all but one marketing class and I kind of thought it was a joke. I thought, “This comes somewhat natural and it's easy. Who would ever read the textbook?” And I don't say that in a boastful way; I just didn't think very much of it. But when I looked to begin an internship and began in marketing, I was fascinated by it. For the first couple of years, I kept trying to leave to have my full-time employment be in finance and banking, but there was a moment in my career where I was speaking to a client and they said, “Boy, you must have the best job.” I said, “What do you mean?” They said, “I look forward to every week when we meet, and it's the highlight of my week because it's so fun. It's exciting, it's creative. It's what I look forward to. You get to do this every day.” I began to look at the solemn, stern faces and this lack of personality of those that work in the finance industry and I thought, why would I ever want to work in finance? [laughs] This is far too much fun. So, I've been in the agency world my entire career. My last agency, Fluid Advertising, I ran for about 9 years. I exited that at the end of last summer. But in that timeframe, one of my passions is the outdoors. I live in Utah; we were abundantly blessed with natural assets and resources, more so we feel like than other states. We have everything year round that you can imagine. So, I'm an avid hiker, mountain biker, I love to camp, I love to get in the backcountry and long distances in. But in the winter, one of my favorite pastimes and hobbies is hiking up a 2,000- or 3,000-foot mountain at 5 or 6 a.m. and then skiing down it in untouched powder. It's one you've got to be careful with because there's backcountry danger and avalanches. I'll tell you this: Salt Lake suffered a major earthquake in March of this year. It was right at the beginning of COVID. Everybody's a little nervous, and I decided one morning with a buddy that we were going to go scale a mountain and ski down it. So, we're in the middle of the canyons and the mountains, and you would think avalanches and earthquakes don't mix well together. I guess at 7:20 a.m. that morning, Salt Lake Valley suffered a major earthquake, more so than it ever had. There was damage and destruction. Not major as much as others, but fairly significant. My wife was just beside herself because all she knew was I'm in the middle of the avalanche terrain, hiking, and an earthquake happens and I must be dead. I didn't answer the first three times she called me because I didn't really have my phone on. Finally, when I answered – she thought I was dead. So, we finished the run, skied down, I got home, and it was one of those conversations of, “We'd better go get our food storage and how's your life insurance policy?” It was interesting; that day there was a major earthquake in the valley, we didn't even feel a tremor where we were. But with that context of my love of the outdoors, I helped launch the Utah Outdoor Association, bringing brands together like Black Diamond and Petzl and Specialized and Goal Zero and brands like Amer Sports – you have Solomon and Atomic and many other iconic brands. Most of them are located, at least their U.S. headquarters, in Utah. It's incredible. I found working with these brands that the Outdoor Retailer Show had left because there was a little bit of politics there a few years back. It got very political with President Obama and President Trump with Bears Ears and land grants of what's national versus what's state-owned land. It was interesting; in the midst of all that, Utah got left with a black eye and the brands themselves suffered because there wasn't leadership. So, working across these brands with their CEOs and executives, we formed a 501(c)(6) nonprofit trade association to help these brands band together to have a voice, to speak for themselves, to be able to further develop and grow what Utah's been, again, abundantly blessed with – not just in natural resources, but particularly with having an inordinate amount of outdoor brands here. We've begun to build over the last few years this nonprofit that I continue to be passionate about, and where we'll do thought leadership and knowledge sharing and events and roundtables. We'll tackle industry issues, we'll do joint marketing campaigns. It's been a lot of fun. ROB: There's certainly so much to direct people towards. If people get started and have a good experience, they're going to buy more of this gear. It makes a lot of sense. You just need to show people. I mentioned we were out in Utah and we did the Salt Lake City area and we did South Utah. I talk to people and I almost can't believe it when they haven't heard of some of the places around Utah because it is truly remarkable. PHIL: Again, there's wonderful places all over the country, but I grew up in Arizona, and in the back of my mind I always thought, “There has to be better places to live than a desert. Living in the foothills of beautiful mountains and all sorts of recreation, I certainly enjoy. To answer your other question on Max Connect, this agency began 8 years ago. Not necessarily a parallel story, although we were competitors. But they began in an attic. Couple of people left another ad agency, weren't being treated fairly. They recruited one of the top digital marketing minds that had done major work for Netflix and for Chevron and others. The four of them founded Max Connect, and over the process of time they grew out of the attic fairly quickly and another office building. We now have a massive space that houses about 47 professionals, most of which are doing the digital marketing efforts. It's all in-house. We work coast to coast. We work with international clients. They've built a remarkable team. The one thing I'll say that I think is somewhat unique is that most of the team – call it 90% of all employees – are compensated based on the performance of the campaigns we run. So if you as a client are selling more stuff – more cars, more homes, more software – we as an agency compensate our team accordingly so they have skin in the game. They're willing to go above and beyond because they know it means more in their paycheck. My last agency, we'd bring in a great client, give it to the digital team thinking “This took me 6 months to close. This is an incredible opportunity,” and they'd moan and complain and think “Now I have to stay an hour later to run this campaign and I'm not necessarily making any more money.” Just to have that alignment, even from a financial and performance perspective, it's been night and day. The team and the commitment and the willingness to really be strategic and insightful has been so fun to work alongside. ROB: Is that something that you then also put out in front of clients and roll out as part of the agreement? Or is it more subtle than that? PHIL: Some clients it's too much for. We actually have a homebuilder that every home they sell, there's a portion of that that goes into a digital marketing bank account by which it then funds the next month's marketing campaigns. So, we've gotten down to a transaction level. But a lot of clients will say, “I have a budget of $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 a month. We're going to deploy this with you. These are the results that I need,” and on the backend we then compensate our team with a portion of their compensation coming in terms of that performance. So rather than make it overly complicated, we just do that anyway. But with some clients that really want to dig deep, we're willing to structure a performance model. ROB: That would seem to me like that would create much more interest from your team and much quicker feedback on campaign data. Some people just know what they're supposed to spend in a month, and they spend it and then they ask questions later. Do you see a pressure towards tighter feedback loops? And how do you help equip your team with that information? PHIL: Great point. We have a lot of clients that are on a weekly cadence. We certainly will do a full month review where we're trying to draw a lot of insights and bigger pivots. But on a daily and weekly basis, whether that's a dashboard we're exposing to them that's starting to produce those insights and data or our team – I mean, our team's in every campaign almost daily because to get the level of results and performance, we have to. But on a weekly basis being able to report, “This is where we've been able to lower your cost per acquisition and this is where we've begun to pivot and adjust marketing dollars and how the response has been” – it is a tighter feedback loop, but it's one that for the client – I think we're more used to instantaneous type, “Hey, I put money in the market. Am I getting results?” So, we've really structured our agency around that. ROB: Right. You're talking about these longer buyer journeys. I guess there's an extent to which one week is probably rarely enough to fully measure something, unless it's me rapidly buying a car. PHIL: Some of the shorter cadences, we have several ecommerce and subscription. It's been interesting. COVID has driven that industry forward in unparalleled ways. It's experiencing as an industry phenomenal growth, and for most retail-like or brands that traditionally were selling in the, for the most part, wholesale consumer space, where there were distributors and people were buying it retail – because of COVID, what we've heard from big brands across the country and really the world has been, “Our traditional brick-and-mortar is down. Our ecommerce, we can't even begin to keep up with projections. We're 400% to 500% above forecasts.” They're saying, “How can we pour more money into both human assets, but particularly the digital ecosystem? Because that is our major focus moving forward.” We've actually pivoted as an agency and invested and put an entire team on just ecommerce alone. To put that in perspective, sometimes there's conversions that will take – it might be a multi-week period. But we're continually reporting on progress on touchpoints and conversions where the conversions for this week might have begun a customer journey that was the week prior. But what's important is there's week over week value creation and continuing to help sell on their behalf. ROB: It seems like once the Christmas push has passed, January could be a big opportunity. How are you looking at that with clients? PHIL: Again, there's a little bit of some cyclical nature of the businesses we work with, and some that really take advantage of the holiday season. But the cost of inventory is even more. We've had some clients that have actually, because they're not so much a Christmas gift-giving type sector, pulled back slightly in terms of their budgets because the cost per impression, the cost per click, the cost of inventory is high right now. We saw between the election – well, the election it feels like isn't over. But between that Black Friday and Cyber Monday week, the cost of all advertising spiked so dramatically because you still were getting political ads. You had the biggest month potentially ever of ecommerce that we've ever had in the history of ecommerce. So we see January as really level-setting with a lot of advertisers where it's really just blue sky. They're really excited because they can come out swinging. They've recalibrated; they've gotten past the Q4 push. They know that the cost of inventory, for the most part, is down. So we've done a lot of planning around Q1 of continuing – again, whether that's retail – but there continues to be major consumer type opportunities as we're building to tax-free day, as we're building to Martin Luther King and Presidents' Day weekend. Again, it depends on the industry, but that certainly has been a highly talked about timeframe for our agency. ROB: For sure. Phil, between joining Max Connect and building your own agency before that, what would you look at doing differently if you were starting over based on what you've learned on this journey? PHIL: It's interesting; first in my career it was very much about how I closed that next client and making sure I was involved in most if not all interactions and really trying to provide strategic insight. I realized it was all about me. I was a leadership athlete, I'd call it. It was “How can I singlehandedly push this agency forward?” It's interesting because we grew, but I don't think we grew nearly as quickly as we could've if I would've not only extended trust but continued to surround myself with individuals that can do the heavy lifting alongside myself, that were likeminded. I heard this terminology a few years ago, that it's not so much about being a leadership athlete, but a leadership coach. How do you help develop that next generation of leaders? How do you value the team and how do you work through others? It's about developing future leaders and helping them be totally comfortable in situations that may have been uncomfortable a year before, and really helping them in their own journey. And that's really where a lot of the satisfaction and retention comes about. Somebody is getting that fulfillment, there's autonomy at work, but there's also challenge, and they're continuing to be challenged mentally in the tasks they're taking on, and you're pushing them forward. So not only do they become more valuable to you running the agency, but they're becoming more valuable to themselves. Their earning potential continues to skyrocket, and they build that confidence. I think that's important. Another learning that I'd probably take away as I've reflected on this is focusing on the important few versus the eclectic many. So often, particularly in an agency that you're trying to grow, it's almost like “Hey, you want to pay us money? Great, we'll sign you up tomorrow. Let's go.” As you mature and as you take on bigger accounts, you begin to become more picky-and-choosy. But I will say that even with internal initiatives, just having a focus of just a few, just a handful, the simpler the better. I've found that the end of the row, the frontline employee, it's hard to focus on more than just two or three things at any given moment. So really simplifying business plans, simplifying go-to-market strategies –it's about the right clients. It's the bigger elephants, the mammoths that you're hunting. It's not about a race to more clients; it's a race to the right clients and providing real, lasting value on their behalf. I'll give you an example. I used to be the kind of guy that goes to a networking event, and it was kind of like, how many people can I talk to before this day is over? And how many business cards can I collect and then follow up with? Which I now know was the wrong mindset. Now the mindset is, is there a person or two in this room that I should get to know? And that's it. There might be hundreds, but what are the one or two relationships that I can walk out of here that might benefit her or him or might benefit myself? I think slowing down, taking a moment, and just being strategic with the decisions, the relationships, and the initiatives within an agency or a business in general – those are a handful of things that I've seen time and time again have proven themselves out, and a level of setting for the next agency and doing it right. I'd hopefully take that with me. The last thing I'll say with that – my two words for the year of 2020, which was well before COVID was a thing, were “deliberate” and “uncomfortable.” Those were the two words I wanted to take into the year. I wanted to be more deliberate in the decisions I made, in the turns that I took skiing. I wanted to be uncomfortable. I wanted to do those things that would put myself not only out of my comfort zone, but cause me to grow and stretch. 2020 just kind of took care of itself. I feel like in the future, that's where the growth happens, individually and with a team. So those are some words that continue to fuel me. ROB: That's all fascinating. It's very interesting to think about how the tone of those first interactions or the ongoing interactions with someone in a social setting sets it up. You can have a transactional interaction with them, seeking a transactional sale, or you can go deep and it sets the table for whatever you do eventually to be deep. It seems like there's symmetry there. PHIL: And the best clients that tend to stick around never begin from a transactional sense. Here as an agency, the two things we do well – one of those is digital, but the other that we do just as well is relationships. If you don't have both, you don't have a long tenured client. You tend to have a lot more churn. You tend to not be an integral partner of their business, and that's, I think, what clients value long term. ROB: Perfect. Phil, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. When people want to reach you and connect with you and Max Connect Marketing, where should they go to find you? PHIL: The only social channel I'm regularly on is LinkedIn. Profile Phil Case, linkedin.com/in/philcase/. Our website is maxconnect.com. ROB: Excellent. Thanks for sharing your journey, Phil. Congrats on everything, and onwards and upwards for Max Connect. PHIL: Hey, thank you so much. Great to be with you today. ROB: All right. Thanks. Be well. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

For 15 years, Leah Norton, Managing Partner at Fishhook, has been leading this communications team which focuses on “getting out the message” for churches and faith-based ministries. Leah had left her previous agency to stay home and raise her young daughters. She started working part-time at Fishhook, coming on board to build out the founder's ideas and work on long-term client relationships. Last March, with her girls in their teens and in the midst of the pandemic, she bought out the founding partner, Evan McBroom, and brought in a new partner, Shayla Kenworthy In this interview, Leah explains the similarities and differences between secular and faith-based marketing. As an example, many churches, in an attempt to be good stewards of their resources, are more likely to try to do their own marketing. The churches that work with Fishhook soon see that bringing on an outside partner is an investment that boosts ROI. Once Fishhook is involved, assessments of an organization's mission, goals, and its communications lead to branding and marketing strategies with a full range of integrated web design, social engagement, and YouTube channel “pieces.” Fishhook works to help churches uncover and embrace their stories and unique qualities and then to craft communications and marketing efforts that serve the congregations by bringing “hope and encouragement” to the church community. Much of what is happening in marketing in “the rest of the world” informs Fishhook's initiatives. Fishhook's goal for 2021 is to help client churches “make their communications very personal, creative, and authentic for the people they're trying to reach.” The agency is currently a team of seven – communication strategists, writers, graphic designers, visual designers, and web developers – and looking to hire. Client churches range in size from 40 members to as many as 80,000. Leah says that it is important that there be consistency between people's online experience and what they would experience on campus or in the church building. Covid has increased churches' awareness of online opportunities . . . digital programs that used to be secondary offerings are often now the main focus.  Leah is a strong believer in balancing priorities . . . in being “all-in” at work, but also being able to pull away and be “all-in” with family and friends outside of work.  She can be reached on her agency's website at fishhook.us, on Facebook and Instagram at Fishhook HQ, or by email at leah@fishhook.us. The agency provides a wealth of articles, webinars, podcasts, and videos covering communications and communications planning, strategies, branding, and digital ministry at: fishhook.us/learn. Transcript Below: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Leah Norton. She is the Managing Partner at Fishhook based in my home state of Indiana. She's in Indianapolis. Welcome to the podcast, Leah. LEAH: Thanks so much, Rob. It's really a delight to talk with you today. Thanks for having me. ROB: Yeah, it's great to have you here. We've already had a great warmup conversation about Indiana winters and so on. But let's talk about you. Let's talk about Fishhook. Tell us about the firm and where the firm excels. LEAH: Yeah, thanks for asking. The Fishhook team, we are 17 years old. I've been part of the work and leading the team for the last 15 years. Evan McBroom was our founding partner. Believe it or not, in the midst of the pandemic, in March, I fully bought him out and then brought on a new partner, Shayla Kenworthy. That's added all kinds of interest and drama to the year in the midst of the pandemic. But it's been good. It's just a great opportunity, and it's been a joy to continue leading in this season. We have a very interesting niche. We're a communications team that focuses on serving churches. All of our clients are churches and faith-based ministries. Evan, the founder, and I both came from corporate and agency backgrounds where we were working with incredible, large companies, organizations, and we loved that work. Loved doing communications marketing with those large corporations. For us, our faith is an important part of who we are, and we looked around and knew that churches and faith-based ministries and organizations needed more help. They needed an outside partner that would come alongside them to help them communicate and market well to serve people and to get their message out, their story told. So Fishhook was born, again, 17 years old. What we really focus on is coming alongside our churches to help them uncover their distinct story, what makes them special and unique, and to help them then embrace that story and then translate it through their communications and marketing efforts to serve people, to bring people hope and encouragement. I would say that is really our focus. We're a team of seven and growing. We're actually looking to hire. We're a team of communication strategists, writers, graphic designers, visual designers, and web developers. We both work on the strategy side to help our churches uncover their distinct story, and then as they're translating that into personal, creative, and authentic communications – those are the keywords we love to say – as we look to 2021, we want to help our churches make their communications very personal, creative, and authentic for the people they're trying to reach. That's what we strive to do. A lot of that is online, obviously, through social efforts and web, and then in other ways as well. So that's our focus. That's who we are. ROB: That is a super fascinating niche, and that is one we have certainly not had on the podcast before. So I'm eager to dig in deeper here. When I think of churches and marketing, first of all, you're talking about a completely different kind of conversion than most marketers, and that's fascinating. [laughs] LEAH: But there are similarities. It's interesting. There are parallels. We want to be learning and growing with many people, but I think of inbound marketing – the Inbound Conference over the years, that community has been a huge inspiration to us. That's just one example. And there's so much to learn as you think about what people maybe in the more secular world are trying to do with their marketing and sales efforts, or as they're working with employees or shareholders or trying to acquire more new customers. There's just so many principles. We are constantly learning from what's going on in the rest of the world and in the marketplace and thinking about how that applies to our churches and ministries. ROB: It is perhaps the original customer journey before we got so wise in these new marketing ways. LEAH: Right. ROB: When I think about churches and staffing and particularly communications, it seems to me that quite often, they take the communications piece in-house. More than most functions, they try to DIY. What is it that you've seen in terms of churches and perhaps their tendency to DIY and how they reach that moment where they actually realize they can maybe get in a better cadence working with somebody like you? LEAH: Great question. I think in a church setting – and this also probably applies to other nonprofits. I think there's such a focus on being good stewards with the resources they have. A lot of times you bring on staff and you try to really be careful with the resources, the budget that you have. In a nonprofit setting, for example, you know that donors have given money or you've worked hard to receive grants and that kind of funding, so you want to be so careful with those dollars and those budgets and stewarding it all well. I think more and more, our churches are seeing that, my gosh, there's so much value that comes with outside resources, outside partners. The folks that want to work with us really see it as a valuable investment that brings so much ROI to their work. A lot of the folks that contact us or we get connected with and start working with us, they know it's a significant investment, and we don't take that lightly. We are so grateful for what they want to invest with our team, and we always hope that there's lots of momentum and fruit and results that really serve them well. ROB: What's a typical range of members or attenders for the types of churches you work with most often? LEAH: We get asked this all the time because I think people assume that we work with maybe the largest churches who have maybe more resources available. We say at Fishhook that we want to help every church that is connected to us, is reaching out to us. We have the privilege of working with churches across the country. Rob, we work with some churches that have 40, 60, 80 people all the way up to churches that have 60,000 or 80,000 people, and everyone in between. For our team, that is just a blast that we get to come alongside churches of different denominations, different sizes, different locations. We work really diligently to listen to them and their situation. Who are they? Where are they located? Who are they serving? We try to be so empathetic, and like I said, to listen so well to what their situation is, and then to customize our work for that. We say we work with churches of all shapes and sizes, and we really do. ROB: It's really, really interesting, the range of sizes and the range of communications. There's a whole lot of different sizes of church in the world, obviously. What you do reminds me a little bit in parallel of Dime. Are you familiar with them? LEAH: Sure, tell me. Tell me more. ROB: My understanding is that instead of marketing, Dime is the finance arm of a church, where you need some expertise outside of yourself. You need to have somebody in a church to do the books. LEAH: Definitely. ROB: There are so many stories within churches of somebody running off with the money. So having somebody guard that and even guard your ad budget as well, and use it well – it seems like it's an expertise that is really hard to hire for within a church. Now, one trend I am starting to see significantly – and maybe we are just extra crazy down here in Georgia, but – LEAH: I think the whole world is crazy right now, Rob. [laughs] The whole world is crazy, oh my goodness. ROB: [laughs] The churches that are meeting in person are starting to really hammer that message. I am seeing this on signs, I am seeing Facebook ads for churches that are saying, “Hey, we're meeting in person.” That's a very obvious differentiator for some people. Everybody wants to meet together. I'm not sure I would recommend it, but we will sidestep that for a moment. It's a question of how, I think also. It's a question of how that needs to be resonant. But you, I would imagine, also work with some churches that are choosing not to meet in person right now, which seems to present a tremendous marketing challenge. I think we can probably extract something out to other businesses from this. How are you looking at these churches that are not meeting in person? How are they engaging new people? How are they differentiating? How do you make this “Join a Zoom call and watch our Sunday video” appealing? Or is there a completely different strategy you're seeing that's also working? LEAH: You are asking some great questions, because this year has actually been an unbelievable year for all of our churches. I would say in years past, most of our churches were very focused on what they were doing in person – the experience that people would have as they came onto their campus or came into their church. There were online offerings as well, maybe either services being streamed online or available on demand or maybe a group or a class that you could be a part of online, but that was almost like a secondary offering that our churches made available for folks. Well, we all have lived through 2020. In March, April, as our nation was really shut down, our churches were so quick to respond. Obviously, they knew they needed to close to be safe and to make that the priority, and then very quickly they made digital, their online opportunities for their congregations and communities, the main focus. Even now, several of our churches are meeting in person; they are making that available – but all of the data that we see – I would say most of our churches are seeing less than half of what they had seen pre-COVID. They're seeing less than half of their numbers coming back. For a variety of reasons, people are choosing to stay home and be incredibly safe. We hear our pastors and church leaders wanting people to do that. They want people's health and safety to be a top priority. So our churches continue to make those online opportunities a high priority and are thrilled to be connecting with people in that way. ROB: I feel like I could pull on so many threads and go so many different directions here. One thing that does fascinate me a little bit also – when you're working with churches, because a lot of the job is on the weekend, I think many churches struggle with boundaries. When you have weekly communications that need to go out, for the sanity of your own team, Leah, I imagine you have to set some boundaries that you hold to that the client doesn't really like. How do you think about being adaptable, but creating a cadence and a process that is respectful of what needs to go out and also respectful of your team, even if the client doesn't like it? LEAH: You're right, Rob. There's so many ways that we could take this conversation. This has become so important for our team this year, and this applies to our churches. I think it would apply to your listeners as well. No matter who you are, where you work, this year has rocked all of our worlds, and I believe it's been a huge gut check time for every single one of us. Are you passionate about the work you're doing? So for us at Fishhook, for our churches – but I'm hearing this from my friends who work in all kinds of companies and organizations; maybe it's even a friend who's a stay-at-home mom or dad - this has been a year where we're all feeling unsettled and you've had to dig deep to carry on. So for us, with our team, we've done a lot of soul-searching. Are we called to our mission? And how are we going to live that out? What we're finding through these months is that we feel more passionate about our work than we ever have, so we kind of let passion over boundaries sometimes drive us. How that looks for our Fishhook team is we try to just be all-in with our work, but then all-in with our families or our friends or things outside of work. Sometimes there is a time to run hard to meet a deadline for a client or to be available, maybe as you're saying, on a Saturday or Sunday if something comes up, to be able to help them and troubleshoot. But then you know there's also a time to have rest and downtime and to step away. So we are always trying to balance those priorities. In a given week, if someone jumped in to do something to help one of our churches on the weekend, are they taking some time during the week off, or are they working shorter days or whatever? So I would say day in, day out, week in, week out, we're trying to juggle that. We work with our folks to make sure that they're getting to be the person they want to be, both in the midst of our work, being super passionate about our work, but also as a wife, as a husband, as a mom, as a dad, as a friend, as someone involved in their own church, in their own community. ROB: That's a great combination of focus on the client but also on providing that rest when it's needed. You mentioned an interesting dimension. Even the journey of the firm is interesting here. You came into this company two years in. How did you become enticed to join and eventually even to go so far as to buy out your partner? LEAH: Thanks for asking. It's my own personal story. Again, I've mentioned my faith means so much to me. For me, I just feel like God has been at work in my life and He opened up some opportunities for me. Step by step, I was able to take those, and it leads to where I now have full-time work with this growing team and getting to do work that I care so much about. That's a huge blessing. I would say 15 years ago, Evan McBroom, our founder, had just started the firm, and his hope – it was kind of aspirational at that point – his hope was to serve churches and ministries. He was definitely getting some traction and taking on different projects. He is an entrepreneur. He has lots of ideas. We had started our family. I have an 18-year-old and a 16-year-old, and I've been here 15 years, so I had left the agency that I'd been with for several years and was staying at home with my children. I knew Evan; we got together for coffee. The opportunity to do some part-time work at that point so that I could be at home with my daughters and to also do this work with him to start building a team – I was at the right place at the right time. Really, our skillsets, Evan's and mine, matched so much. He had big ideas and was looking for someone to come alongside and really help put arms and legs to that. And that's really my skillset, to really build things out and to work on longer term relationships with our clients. He had gotten some initial projects going, and I had thoughts and ideas about how to make that work that would be even more strategic and longer term to support our churches and ministries. For me, that is a huge lesson as a leader. I'm always looking for who is my complement, who is our team's complement. As you're looking for who will lead with you, as you're looking at who will serve on your team, who brings what you need? Who complements you? We all have our different gifts and strengths, but who can come alongside you and really propel you forward? That's how it started with Evan, and we've been able to build the team. We have an incredible team. They all care so much about our mission and add so much to the work that we do, and I would say of the seven of us, we need every single person. I could literally walk through each person and say what they bring to our team that is just so important, both within our team as we work together internally, but then also as we serve and support our clients. ROB: For the sake of the audience that may not know what a typical cadence of communications looks like for a church, what are the different touchpoints of communication that you find yourself involved in? Let's say for a church that's using most of what you do, let's say on a weekly or monthly basis. LEAH: Sure thing. For us, our favorite relationships are the ongoing ones where we really get to know – and I would assume this is true for every agency setting, where it's an ongoing relationship. There's trust, there's open communication. Those relationships where you can each say whatever you're thinking – in a respectful way, but it's like no question is dumb, no idea is too big or too small. I just love those kinds of relationships with our clients. Often with our clients we start with branding work. Let me step back. We do assessment work and then branding work, and those parallel together. Those are a great complement together where we're working to understand that church, how they're communicating. Their key audiences are often their internal staff and leaders, their congregation, and then their community – and when I say community, I mean both locally, who is physically their local community, but then also online. So, really assessing what their mission and goals are, what they're trying to do, and then thinking about how their marketing and communications efforts can propel their mission and vision forward to connect with either young people or families or the people of their community, whatever goals they have set out. Often we're assessing who they are and what we see and then working on brand development with them, and then working to carry that out. What does that look like? Obviously we're doing a lot with our churches and their online strategy and presence, so web work and social strategies, and what they're doing with their YouTube channel. It's fun because our churches, more and more, are thinking, “Where is our congregation and our community at? The people we want to connect with, we want to reach, where are they at? We want to be there too.” That's what a lot of our work is spent on: “Who are you, church? Let's define that. Let's define your distinct story. Who are you already connecting with? Who's part of your congregation? And who are you striving to connect with? Where are they? Let's build communications and marketing efforts that will help you reach those people.” In the old days, I don't know, the '80s or the '90s, when I was growing up, in a church setting you would have a bulletin which was handed to you as you walked in on a Sunday morning. You'd maybe have a printed newsletter or a flyer or a postcard. There's still a place for a couple of print pieces here and there, but so much of what we're thinking about now is I would say two things. Their online strategy and how they're connecting with people digitally – what they're making available, out of weekend services typically, but also what they're making available every day. How are they engaging with people online, answering questions, giving hope, encouragement? What support groups or classes are available? Really, churches are doing ministry every single day of the week, and obviously, online you can do it 24/7 as well. So helping our churches really stretch to connect and be ready where people are. The other thing we think a lot about with our clients is their experience when people do come onto their campuses, interact with them, whether through an event or a service or whatever they might be doing within their church building. Is that experience reflective of who they are, what their brand is? Just trying to make all of this consistent so that any time you interact with a church, it's on brand. It tells their story, and they're bringing value to you. ROB: Brand experience all the way through to churches. Makes sense once you say it and once you think about it. Leah, when you reflect on the journey so far with Fishhook, what are some lessons you've learned along the way? What might you do differently if you were starting anew – let's say in 2021, so you don't have to assume too much about 2020. LEAH: Is this like lessons throughout my career? ROB: What would you do differently in building Fishhook? LEAH: If you do Enneagram, I'm a 3. Myers-Briggs, I'm an ESTJ. So I love to achieve things. Like, what's our plan? Come hell or high water, let's get it done. Let's move forward. That can be my go-to or my default. What I've learned along the way – and goodness, 2020 has been an incredible reminder for this – is there's a time to really be most focused on how I can help and serve others, and a lot of times it's time to set aside my own personal agenda or thoughts. In 2020, as I lead at Fishhook, there are times where it's like “But this is what I want to happen. I want to move this forward. I'm ready to go.” And it's like, you know what? That's not what our team needs right now, or that's not what our churches are capable of right now or asking for. It's not a good fit for the situation. So I have to sometimes set aside my own personal drive or my agenda. The other leaders – Shayla, Amy, who I lead with – they are so great at processing with me what's going on and what's right in this situation. We're continually thinking, what does our team need? How can we be focused on serving each other as a team in this season? We have some internal values that we try to live out. And then with our clients, what do they really need? What will really propel them forward? Let's care for them first, let's build the relationship first, and then we're going to help them go fast and far, we hope. Those are some of the things I've been learning. ROB: It sounds really helpful to have those sounding boards around you as well. Leah, when people want to connect with you and with Fishhook, where should they go to find you? LEAH: We would love for folks to check us out online, fishhook.us. We just launched a new brand experience and a new website in recent weeks. So we are really trying to get even more focused on who we are and the value we bring to our churches. You'll have to let us know. We'd love to hear from folks what you see as you take a look. We are trying to put out more and more content, so if you go to fishhook.us/learn, there's all kinds of content there to interact with. We'd love to hear from people. Also, on social media, Facebook and Instagram, we're at Fishhook HQ for that. I'm happy for people to email me as well at leah@fishhook.us. ROB: Excellent. Leah, thank you for coming on the podcast. Congratulations to you and Fishhook. This has been great to dive into an unfamiliar niche for this podcast, but also see how much really is theoretically consistent, even though the purpose is much higher in your case. LEAH: Rob, thanks so much for the opportunity. Appreciate it. ROB: All right. Thank you. Be well. LEAH: Take care. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

John Kriney, is Founder and President at OptFirst Internet Marketing, a Google Certified Partner (2010) that specializes in full-service online marketing campaigns and website, app, and landing page development. Campaign expertise includes customized search engine optimization; Google Ads search, video, display and shopping campaigns; cross-platform remarketing; E-commerce marketing; Facebook and Instagram ads for lead generation, sales, or brand building purposes; LinkedIn ads; and combinations of all of that.  In 2003-2004, John started selling after-market auto customization products in Los Angeles, CA; ranked his business first in searches for body kits and parts, and generated up to $3.5 million a year in sales. As things slowed in 2006, John sold that business. What to do next? Seeing his success, six business owners he had worked with requested his help with their online marketing. In 2008, John moved his business to South Florida, named it OptFirst, and provided his clients with profitable conversions. He made sure they knew how much much money they were making per campaign, per campaign type to ensure long-lasting relationships. When companies wanted to focus on branding, he demanded that both the target and the success be quantified.  He admits there are three types of competitors that may steal his customers: the one-off internet whiz kid who is someone's nephew, vertical internet marketing agencies that draw customers away by speaking the “right jargon,” and the traditional marketing agency that's trying to tack on digital as a service. “Lost” clients often return – a tribute to his agency's collaborative approach of “one business owner working with another.” OptFirst was one of the first early adopters of LinkedIn direct conversion campaigns and has been running campaigns for the University of Miami's Continuing Education Department, marketing 22 different programs on that platform for over 4 years. Because OptFirst's efforts with the University of Miami outperformed all other universities by 90%, LinkedIn took John and a University of Miami representative to lunch. They had proved a profitable campaign could be run on LinkedIn.  John believes you need 3 channels of incoming advertising for any business . . . so they also run SEO campaigns, Google Ads, and paid social for the University. In total, the agency offers 11 different campaign types, of which SEO has the lowest CPA. John has written 3 books on search engine optimization and internet marketing. He thought he would hand his 8-step SEO plan to clients and lose business because clients would now know what needed to be done. Providing that knowledge was “the right thing to do.” But it didn't work that way. The 8-step book made him the “expert” for work clients did not want to do. They would thumb through the book and immediately sign his proposal.  Since the pandemic, John created “the seven steps of becoming an author” and has guided half a dozen business owners to getting published. He says “There's no better way to control your Google presence than . . . becoming an author. When you put a book out on Amazon, there's a knowledge panel to be claimed as an author on Google, and then you really control your first page.” John says his “slogan” for the times is: “2020 is survive, and if you make it to 2021, then you can thrive.” He can be reached on his agency's website at: OptFirst.com, at John Kriney on LinkedIn, and by email at: john@optfirst.com. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by John Kriney, Founder and President of OptFirst Internet Marketing based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, John. JOHN: Rob, thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. ROB: Excellent to have you here. We were just chatting before the start – this is being recorded the day after the votes were cast in the election, but we don't know what's going on. But that's not why we're here. We are here to talk about OptFirst Internet Marketing. John, why don't you start off by telling us about OptFirst and where the firm excels?  JOHN: A little background on where we excel – and I think the backstory really paints the picture of our approach to how we work with clients and what our core strategy is. I started OptFirst after I sold a business, BodyKits.com. That was based in San Diego, California. If you can remember the “Fast and Furious” days where we had spoilers and bumpers and everyone wanted to make their Honda Civic look like a Lamborghini – remember those days? ROB: Oh yeah. JOHN: I really got onto that trend. This had a huge demand. All the product was coming into port in California, and Michigan was a huge spot for us, as well as South Florida. South Florida was a huge demand for body kits, spoilers. So, I dove in. We kicked it off in 2003-2004. That was when it was really hot. We ranked the website first for body kits, spoilers, and all the names, Buddy Club and all the crazy names we had for those body kits. I ranked for all those positions, and the business was doing millions of dollars a year. I think we topped off at $3.5 million. We had the volume. I could see the trend was slowing down as far as we hit 2006 and it wasn't so much about the body kits anymore and all the Fast and the Furious movies, so the trend cooled down. I sold the business to my supplier that was bringing in containers of product into LA. Through that process, I sold the business – everyone's read these self-help books, 4-Hour Workweek and all these books that we read for personal development. I was literally in my fifth week of sitting on the beach thinking, “What am I going to do next?”, and it came up, I've got these six other business owners that, through the last few years, I've worked with. They've called and said, “Hey, my name's Jim. I got your number from Bryan Bloom” or whoever it is. “Can you help me with my online marketing? I hear your business has grown really quick.” By the time I gave OptFirst a name, I already had six clients paying me monthly to help them with their internet marketing. In 2008, I moved myself and my business from California to South Florida. At that point, I gave OptFirst a name. So the backstory on OptFirst really is I'm used to working with other business owners in order to really focus on profitable conversions, make sure that they make money with their online marketing campaigns, and that eye always being on, every month, I want to show you how much money you're making per campaign, per campaign type – make sure you're making money so that we have a long-lasting relationship. I don't know about you, but I get clients that might be medium-sized or institutional, they're large clients, and they're like, “Listen, we just want to focus on our branding.” It's like, “No, you don't. You really don't want to focus on your branding. We have to quantify what the target is here and how we can quantify success. Because if you can't prove that you're making money through your campaigns, at some point shareholders and board members are going to want to know. If we can just cut that out in the beginning and set up the pieces to make sure that you're running profitable campaigns, we'll be together for a long time, happily.” I've got a local locksmith that's been with us for 10 years straight. He knows the ups and downs of the ecosystem of SEO. Let's say we're just talking about that. But through the ups and downs, making sure that she ranks – just last year, she was like, “We ran the numbers, and 39% of our new business comes from our SEO campaign. After 10 years, that feels great.” So that's really the approach of OptFirst: one business owner working with another. I think that can't be replicated as far as – we have two types of competitors that we may lose business to. Well, I guess there'd be three. There's the one-off internet whiz kid that is someone's nephew in someone's business and it's like, “This kid's the smartest kid ever.” The second is vertical internet marketing agencies. Sometimes we'll be running a campaign for 2 or 3 years for our client, and then a weight loss specific internet marketing company will come along and they'll speak the right jargon. They're like, “Oh, you definitely need to go this route.” Speaking the same jargon, we'll get clients that will try those companies out and then quickly come back. The third is the traditional marketing agency that's trying to tack on digital as a service. Those are really the only places that we ever lose clients to. I don't know about you, but that's our experience. ROB: You mentioned different sizes of clients. Is there a trend of when you started – you mentioned BodyKits.com; it seems like one of the interesting opportunities there was – I mean, it wasn't early early for ecommerce, but it was kind of early. I would imagine one of the opportunities there was dealing in a product that was worth shipping. What I mean by that is just that it's potentially a higher margin item that someone understands you have to pay to ship the thing when not everybody could do Prime shipping. So, what were those early clients? Because it sounds like your through-line, your prequel to the agency, was performance and converting. I would imagine that's been a trendline throughout. But the types of businesses that can afford to retain you and care about converting has probably shifted remarkably over the life of the company. JOHN: Oh, absolutely. Initially there were other old school manufacturers of widgets, let's say. It ran the gamut. But they could see that I was moving into a larger warehouse every 6 to 9 months. What we ran into – when we started, I remember the uproar of Overture, 5 cent bids. Overture had the audacity to raise from 5 cent to 10 cent clicks. We're like, “What? They're ruining ecommerce! Who's going to pay 10 cents for a click?” Obviously, that piggybacked on the whole Yahoo! infrastructure and when they really owned search. That moved over to Google. Obviously, in 2005 Google started winning, and it has ever since been winning the search engine war and the trackability through that adventure of AdWords, which is now Google Ads, really driving ecommerce. But what I was getting referred to is owners of products – I remember the owner of the last warehouse I had with BodyKits.com had the exclusive deal to Costco for golf pushcarts. She'd had it for like 20 years, but there's no money to make in Costco wholesale. They make sure of it. They whittle you down. So, she had this mass volume that needed another channel or outlet in order to be profitable. was getting people with products, and when I moved to Miami, I was like, okay, I've got these six clients. All I need to do is get myself out there, go to business networking groups and say, “Hey, if you don't have a website, let's get a website. If you have a website, let's either make it rank or do some ads towards it.” People in 2008 in South Florida looked at me like I was crazy. [laughs] I tried everything once. And being in South Florida, I've been tricked once in every which way you could possibly be tricked as far as a client-agency relationship. But I try not to be fooled twice the same way. Initially I tried everything. I even went to a Kiwanis meeting once. I didn't know if I was invited to it. These guys were all older gentlemen, over 70. I was like, “Listen, you guys need to get back in the business game. I can see they were all retired. What you need is a website. When you get that website, let's make it rank.” Then I was like, okay, I need to change the strategy. This is crazy talk. This is not going to work. But I tried everything. ROB: [laughs] It is remarkable the things that you'll try once. We don't talk about these stories very often. You've reminded me – I'd almost forgotten – I had somebody invite me to talk about social media marketing analytics at a Rotary club meeting. I did that, and great people, but not the best way to build the business. JOHN: Oh man, I'll never forget the Kiwanis stuff. Similar to the Rotary club. I remember that fondly because I've got account managers and junior account managers, and they'll be like, “Oh, no, I can't call on that business. I can't go to that” – I'm like, listen, I went to a Kiwanis club where everyone was over 70, everyone was retired. I still gave it 100%. In order to get business, I've tried everything once, and I've tried to be humble about it because you never know. And I tell you what – I've got a funny story for you, Rob. I saw when you sent me a connection on LinkedIn that we have a friend in common. I won't mention him yet. I think I actually, in my example, let it slip. But one of our connections in common is Bryan Bloom. Let me tell you a little backstory. Back in 2009, I had one client that I'd had since 2006, and he owned a moving company in San Diego, and I had him ranked first for 4 years for “moving company in San Diego.” He had three trucks. He used to call me every day. If he wasn't first – you know how there was so much jostling of Google Maps back in that day. If he was second that day, I'd get a call from California like, “Hey, John, what's going on? What have we got to do? I'm second today, I'm not first.” Because this was his whole marketing strategy – which nowadays I do not recommend. You need three channels of incoming advertising for any business. That's what I've come to and what I've noticed. I had an account manager at the time say – this guy was grandfathered in at a super cheap price, like $600 bucks a month, because that's what he could afford. He's like, “Why do you take this guy's calls?” I said, “Because it's key to his business. It's kind of a friend of a friend. Let's just leave it.” Sure enough, he was bought out by the largest moving company in Southern California. He bought him and he's like, “I really don't want your three trucks. I really don't want to keep your employees. I just want the number of your SEO guy, because I've been trying to get first above you for 2 years. Can't do it. Here's a check and give me the number of your SEO guy.” That was Bryan Bloom. I saw that was the connection we had in common. Time went on, and Bryan and I had a great relationship. He was Priority Moving. He bought out Gold Coast. Then time went on and Bryan said, “Listen, we've had a great relationship. I've decided to sell Priority to the largest moving company in California. And he wants to talk to you.” So, Republic bought Priority, and sure enough, they became a huge client for years on end. This one small SEO client became – I think the account was anywhere from $12,000 to $15,000. Now we were going national, we had Republic, we had Priority, we had Gold Coast, all in one portfolio. I saw Bryan Bloom as a shared connection and that brought up that story for me. ROB: Yeah, Bryan is a connection from – you know how this marketing world works, and certainly on LinkedIn as well. You just bump into people, and especially with this podcast, end up with some mutual connections like that. You mentioned some of those early clients, and then it shifted a little bit. What does your client mix look like now? Obviously, SEO has a tremendously local dimension to it. It also has a national dimension to it, and I'm sure you've been pulled in some different directions. JOHN: Absolutely. The client mix now is – we broke bread with Google at the end of 2010. I think that's when the real reach out was where they were like – I don't know your experience, but SEO was always kind of like the “let's trick Google so that we're first, and we're sure not going to buy AdWords.” It was a rogue specialty. I've been certified with Google as 2010 and I think as an agency since 2011. So that's when we all broke bread. They invited us into the fold and said, “You have these clients; why don't you also offer Google Ads?” Having that SEO base is, I think, really beneficial for any digital marketing agency. If we're ranked first – of those first six clients – and it wasn't Gold Coast, but people would call me and say, “I've got this widget manufacturing company. How much?” I was like, “It's $2,500 a month.” Half of them would be like, “Cool, I got your number from so-and-so. Great.” The other half would be like, “Why so much?” I'm like, “I have no idea what to charge you. That's the price. [laughs] This isn't what I do. I sell after market auto parts. You called me.” That's what it was. Those were the core six that I moved with. The mix now – it started with ecommerce and then getting out into the world and networking every which way. We've got some really cool, interesting clients. We've got the University of Miami. We're in our fourth year, so we're 4-½ years under contract with them. We do their continuing education. We've got 22 different programs that we market for them. Every 2 weeks, we drill down in their Salesforce – we've got our incoming leads and then we've got our closed leads, and we're quantifying our marketing campaigns, the profitability on spend, down to the last penny. That and a couple others are dream clients because that's where we want to be. We're running SEO campaigns for that client, but we're also running Google Ads, paid social. We were one of the first early adopters of the LinkedIn conversion campaign for the University of Miami. LinkedIn for so many businesses is the dream that never has come to fruition. It's like, “Okay, we have all these businesses on here, and we know who the marketing directors are. This should be the best place to market in all the world.” And it never came to fruition for us until the direct conversion campaigns were offered. I think that was maybe 3 years ago. LinkedIn reached out to us and they were like, “We want to take you and your client out to lunch because you guys are early adopters and you guys are outperforming all the other universities by 90%.” We were proving profitable campaigns on LinkedIn. So that's what our clients look like, whether it's lead-based or it's ecommerce-based. We even have a great client that we're working with called FlixLatino. It's like the Spanish Netflix. We're up to 11 different campaign types. We have a weekly meeting drilling down to each campaign, CPAs across every campaign. What's interesting – and I just gave another talk yesterday morning to a group of business owners – is that when we look at the CPA across all 11 campaign types, SEO is still the lowest CPA of all of our campaign types. I hear from businesses online, I guess there's a lot of mixed messages in media – coming from the day after the ballots have all been cast in the last election. 6 months out of the year, SEO is dead. It doesn't exist. SEO is dead. It's not real. The other 6 months, it's like, “Yo, you know where I can get that SEO? I heard that SEO is where I need to be. You know where I could get some?” It's like a whisper in a back alley. [laughs] That's our experience. I'm really glad you invited me on this podcast because even in the transitioning of clients to maybe wanting to try another agency, some of the greatest friendships and assets that I have are my relationships to other agency owners. Because you wouldn't believe it unless you spoke to another agency owner that has gone through the same thing. It's a wild journey and a wild story to tell. ROB: There's absolutely so much value in being able to compare notes, and particularly realizing that there is so much business out there. It's really rare that you're competing for business with somebody you know. You feel like it should be the case, but it just generally isn't. A lot of times those friendly agencies can also be helpful when you need some extra capabilities around you. If I rewind the story a little bit, you mentioned you were in that 2008-ish era in the business, and it's worth highlighting that was a time of some economic challenges, financial crisis, all of that sort of thing. We're far enough into this pandemic world now where some people think we're back where we started; some people say it's a K-shaped recovery, where some people are doing great and some people are doing not great. How do you see the similarities and differences between running an agency now and how clients are feeling versus that financial crisis era? JOHN: I think this really is the time – other than creating processes for how we run campaigns, I'm known for making one-off slogans. Really, I say 2020 is survive, and then if you make it to 2021, then you can thrive. I think that really encapsulates it. This is that time that certain businesses that we work with, especially the first 3 or 4 months of the pandemic, they had to put everything on pause. The local locksmith had 18 trucks, if I'm not mistaken, on the road; went down to one truck overnight, servicing all of the businesses that are in buildings in Miami Beach. It just came to a screeching halt. How can you make lemonade? Because we're all getting lemons. How do you make lemonade? Then other clients, like universities, the Spanish Netflix client I was referring to, they hit the gas. Universities increased two and a half times what they were spending. And of course, the app platform went four times what they were spending. So as an agency, you ride with the clients that you have that are stepping on the gas, and on the flipside, just working with clients that you could count on for monthly work – it sounds crass, but monthly billables – just freezing them and giving them that grace period until they got back on their feet. This is way different than the recession because I think there's lemonade to be made in every business. That's the talk that I've had with my business owners. Being based in South Florida, I would say everywhere from May to right at the end of the summer, all the way up to September, tourism slows down. It's really hot. People aren't going to South Florida. Tourism really drives the whole economy. So, I was already used to playing therapist 3-4 months out of the year. It just happened to transition where that happened during the pandemic. And I was able to really focus with certain clients on new products and services we could offer them where they could make best use of this pandemic. You may or may not appreciate this – I sat around and said, “Listen, I'm going to have half my clients step on the gas right now.” It's like summer just happened out of nowhere. That's the effect. I was like, “What kind of off service do I offer that I know has a lot of value and I know will really land with my business owners that we work with?” I've written three books on SEO and internet marketing and been through that process myself, so I was like, that really ties into our hire and reputation management campaigns, and those campaigns really are about controlling your Google presence. There's no better way to control your Google presence than all of a sudden under that same name becoming an author. Automatically when you put a book out on Amazon, there's a knowledge panel to be claimed as an author on Google, and then you really control your first page. So I was like, why don't I reverse engineer – and that's how I've done SEO and every other internet marketing service we have – why don't I just create the seven steps of becoming an author, put a price tag on it, go to my business owners, and say, “This is a great time, while you're slow” – I've always pitched this, but they're like, “I'm too busy to put my material together.” They have material that they've created. “I'm too busy for that right now.” I was like, “I know you're not busy, so how about becoming an author?” I've walked half a dozen business owners through the process of becoming an author through this pandemic. That was one of the added services in making lemonade out of the lemons that we all got for the business slowdown. ROB: And you had been an author before the pandemic? Is that right? JOHN: Yeah, I published three books. My most recent one on Amazon is The Online Marketing Manual. It's my least interesting book. [laughs] My first book in 2014 was my Jerry Maguire moment. I thought that I'd just figured out and reverse engineered how to make each client first. I woke up in the middle of the night, got out my whiteboard. I was like, “I have been figuring it out for 12 years. I've got an 8-step SEO process.” I'm writing it all over the board. The next morning, like Jerry Maguire when he goes “I have the client manifesto!” and is putting it on the boxes – I tell my whole team, “It's the 8 steps!” I thought that I would reveal how I'd been ranking websites for 12 years and I'd go on a big speaking tour, and I wouldn't have an agency anymore, but it's the right thing to do to tell everyone how to make your website first as a process. Lo and behold, I got the book finished, I brought myself through, I wrote a chapter every night, whichever step it was, and I honestly thought – just the naïveté of being in the moment and when you really get passionate about something – I would hand an 8-step SEO plan to a prospective client. I thought, they'll read it, they won't accept the proposal, but they'll know how to do it themselves. it's the right thing to do. They would thumb through it. Barely read it. They'd say, “You obviously know what you're talking about,” and they'd sign the proposal right there on the spot. I thought, “Why would you hire me? I just told you how I'm going to do it.” They're like, “Well, you obviously know how to do it, and I sure don't want to do it. Sounds like a bunch of geeky stuff.” I was shocked. [laughs] I was like, we're busier than ever. This is going to mess up my speaking tour. That never happened at that time. [laughs] It's funny how one thing leads into another. ROB: There's so many good lessons in there. This can be a moment to look at what assets we have sitting around and to reframe them. In that case you're mentioning you have this 8-step plan, and you twist it around and its proposals, and then I think we misconstrue what the purpose of a proposal is sometimes. The purpose of the proposal – you're seeking to inform, and indeed, you are. But in the process, it's also that proof of competence and that proof that they can trust you because they don't want to do it. And you also thought about having this knowledge of how to make a book, and you have the lived experience of using it well, and you're able to turn that around and say “What else can you do with it?” A college can focus on how people may not want to go to their campus, or they can focus on what is probably a pretty high margin product of their online course and selling that to people who are also sitting at home and have this opportunity of time to make themselves better. JOHN: Absolutely. So much has come out of this. So much information, misinformation. But businesses, I think we've finally got full adoption into the core need of internet marketing as one of those staples, those mainstreams – like the auto industry and dealerships have accepted and moved over to digital and accepted it as their core strategy. I see it now, and it took a while. I don't know if this happened at your agency, but initially people were like, “God, you've got to be busier than ever!” But I think there was this deer-in-the-headlights moment that lasted the first 3- ½ to 4 months. The businesses that had capital, that cancelled all their tradeshows, let's say – so they've got this excess budget – I think there was a deer-in-the-headlights. And I still see it happen where people haven't pulled the trigger, and I think that's finally melting. People are like, “Our core strategy needs to move, no matter what, to digital.” Which is amazing to me because I remember pitching dealerships back in '08 and '09 and looking down and saying, “5-8% of our overall marketing has been allocated to digital.” And just last year, being in a dealership and the client saying, “Hey, we've decided to heck with it” – this is before COVID – “we're going to go 100% digital!” To have that and be part of the industry during that transformation, I'm just like, Wow, they're really going to cancel their radio and TV? I'm shocked.” And only because I've been there for the whole history of it, and I see a lot of other industries finally pulling that trigger. I think that the election needs to pass and the commotion around it, any which way, and then I think we see full guns blazing to adopting new agencies and moving that – I'm still working with clients that are only at 30% digital because 70% was all their tradeshows booked out. There's an exorbitant amount of money that some businesses spend on that type of advertising. It's amazing. ROB: We saw the auto industry part right up front and center. We did an extended road trip this summer to my in-laws' place out in Utah and found ourselves realizing we needed to replace our car in the middle of a pandemic in not-our-home-state. They were kind of in between. Some stuff was very digital and easy, and some stuff was still – maybe the marketing is more up to it, but the actual buying process, they were pretty old school. They wanted to see you there in person. It was not very customer-centric, but that's okay. Business-wise, I agree. I've seen what you see. We have a Software-as-a-Service product, and we also have a software-product-development-shop kind of agency, and there was certainly this – March was almost like everybody kept doing whatever they were doing. April and May, we saw a lot of retraction. But then June, and from then onward, there's a lot of people who realize they've got to go full speed ahead. We were talking before – we're in hiring mode because people put those projects on hold for so long until they felt like they couldn't. Maybe we'll be in a micro version of that around the election. We're going to spend a week, we're going to count some votes, maybe we argue a little bit. But I think there are a lot of people who are fed up with waiting to serve their business. So, I'm definitely seeing that. John, when people want to find you and when they want to find OptFirst, where should they go to connect with you? JOHN: OptFirst.com is our domain. Information there. And then just like you did this morning, John Kriney on LinkedIn. I always review those and accept any connections there. I keep an open line of communication. That's always the best way. Anyone that wants to email me directly, it's john@optfirst.com. ROB: Super solid. John, thank you for joining the podcast, and best wishes to you and OptFirst. JOHN: Yeah. Hopefully you'll have me back on the show. I've listened to a lot of episodes, and you're doing a great job, Rob. I really think it's a service to the industry getting new takes and talking to other agency owners. I really enjoyed it. ROB: I enjoyed it as well. Thanks for sharing your experience, John. Be well. JOHN: Thanks. Bye.

Ian Garlic is CEO at authenticWEB. He started his career in marketing about 15 years ago as a consultant for one of the world's largest information companies – back when good video production required hiring high-end, expensive, technically-savvy videographers. When Google purchased its video competitor, YouTube ten years ago, Ian saw opportunity, left the information company, and started authenticWEB. As a video marketing agency, authenticWEB crafts journey-stage-specific, people-story videos designed to reach “the right customers at the right time.” The goal: to engage potential customers with emotionally riveting content to “earn their love.” For each client, the agency develops 10 to 100 video packages from micro content to 15- to 20- minute mini-documentaries. The different types of videos they produce include:  the overview video (most people's commercials),  service commercials (covering the different services provided),  how-to videos,  process videos (explaining complex processes so people understand what happens at different times),  topical video blog posts (including social),  videos covering frequently asked questions,  About Us videos (Ian notes that “About Us” is the second most useful page on a website, an important page for conversion, and that people usually go from the “About Us” to making contact with a company), and video case stories. The most effective video case stories involve interviewing a client's customers and searching for that gem of a story that will evoke a positive response in viewers. Ian says there is no way of telling who will give a good interview and who won't. From raw footage, authenticWEB parses different edits and formats for different clients at different stages of the customer journey. Ian develops videos content to help customers identify a client's business as an “authority” and “a new best friend.” The agency's clients include attorneys, doctors, dentists, and other agencies (because agencies often have a hard time marketing themselves).  YouTube: The Next TV In this interview, Ian elaborates on the increasing importance of YouTube in marketing outreach – he likens it to “the next TV.” YouTube videos need a “to be on point, perfectly messaged, and . . . delivered at the right time.” A website only gives you a piece of the interaction data. YouTube gets all the interaction data: including total and percent view time. That kind of feedback facilitates cross-platform video and content improvement. Online video production does not require the same high-end equipment used in the past. Ian notes that today he does his own videography and that he travels “light.” The production process is simpler, so that the focus stays on story and editing the story for the audience. Ian recommends reusing content. He explains, if you drive traffic to your YouTube videos, YouTube will increase your rankings. YouTube's search engine is second only to Google. A Google search will start a well-indexed video at the exact moment in the recording where the answer to the searcher's question is provided.  Some people think they can buy YouTube followers . . . enough to get their own URL. Ian reminds us, “You can't buy love.” Purchased followers won't necessarily view your content, so view time is sacrificed. Ian also discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of some of the online production tools. He can be reached on Linked in or on his agency's website at: https://authenticweb.marketing/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Ian Garlic, CEO at authenticWEB based in Orlando, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Ian. IAN: Rob, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. I think you've got a very distinct perspective that our audience will enjoy. Why don't you start off by telling us about authenticWEB and what your superpowers are? IAN: We've been around for a little over 10 years. We are a video marketing agency. We do some other stuff too, but it's all around delivering people-story video. We're really good at finding that story, understanding how these videos have to be crafted depending on where they are in the customer journey, and then crafting them to deliver and get a response. We create anywhere from 10 to 100 video packages for clients, and then ongoing we create video, do video SEO. Really, what we do is, like really good marketers, we help connect the client's story to their prospect's story and make them the authority. When someone walks through the door, they feel like already they're their best friend and the authority, and that's what the video does for our clients. So that's what we've been doing for about 10 years. We've worked with all sorts of professionals. We work with attorneys, doctors, dentists, and we're working with actually a lot of other agencies now. We have a lot of other agencies, which is fun, because the agencies have such a tough time marketing themselves. I have that problem. It's nice for us to help other agencies market themselves. ROB: Fascinating. I think I heard you say 50 to 100 video packages. That sounds like a lot. Is that different formats for different platforms, different edits? Or is that just that much content? How do you put that together? IAN: It's a little bit of all of it. It's different edits, different formats. You've got to consider where they are in the customer journey. One of the things we're known for is our video case stories. People fly me around to interview their clients to get that story out. I don't try to make people cry, but I kind of do. When you can ask the question the right way, you get that emotional response from your customers, and you have this powerful tool. We get these 30-minute interviews with their customers, and parts of that story need to be used in different ways, in different parts of the journey, from early on, just to get attention and awareness, to longer form customer stories. We're doing some 15-20 minute ones, like mini-documentaries. And then pulling micro content, little clips out of there. Plus, we make essentially 9 to 10 different types of videos. We make your overview video, which is most people's commercials. We make this thing called a service commercial – because most of us have different services, and we want to have a little commercial for each service. How-to videos, which are important, especially on YouTube. Video blog posts, where someone's discussing a specific topic. Under that video blog post, I consider a lot of social posts. We just call it video blog posts. Frequently Asked Questions are a big one. The core videos that we make besides those are micro content, but besides that, we're really known for video case stories and About Us videos. That's the second most useful page on a website. Most people throw up either a bio or some funny video, but really it's a converting page. If you look at your analytics, it's not only going to be in your top three or four pages – it can be out of there depending on what you're doing, but it's top three or four pages. But where people usually go after that is some sort of contact. So really having a converting video on there. And then process videos. We make a lot of process videos because people don't know what happens at different points. The more complex it is, the more people need to understand what's going to happen next and how this is going to look. When you add it all up and you do all the different points and all the different variations, it really quickly adds up to a ton of content along the customer journey. ROB: I've talked to people where they feel like they're intimidated to ask their customer to be on this sort of video. What have you found in terms of overcoming that fear? Is it ever really well-founded, or would people be surprised that more of their customers are willing to get on camera than they might ever expect? IAN: They'd be surprised. There's people you'd think would be great on camera that aren't. It's a numbers game. There's people you'd think would be poor, but have these amazing stories. One of the other things we do is audio interviews like this and then make them into videos with pictures, so it makes it a little easier. But it's the timing of asking, it's how you're asking. One of the things I always tell people is never ask for a testimonial. I don't even like using the word “testimonial” because that's when people really freeze up. If you've done an amazing job for someone and they're really, really happy and you ask them for a testimonial, it's like, “Oh my God, these people did such a good job for me. I'm really nervous about screwing this up for them.” They get nervous. So, I always tell people to ask someone for their story. Talk about something specific that you know is important. That will help. But this is the number one piece of advice I can give for anyone's marketing: install asking for those stories into your process at different points. People want to know what the onboarding is like. What is it like right after the sales process? What's it like if you have a strategy? What's it like a year after you're done with your project? Ask along the way. And you can ask the same people multiple times. You've got to dig for those, though. You've got to make it a habit. ROB: You mentioned you have been at this for a little bit. I think you said around 10 years. Talk about the difference in – I think there used to be a perception of video as being expensive, and it's probably still more costly than some methods of marketing. You mentioned I think a little hack in there of being able to take audio and turn it into a video. But how has your production process changed with the advance of different production equipment and tools over your time running the business? IAN: When I started 14-15 years ago now in marketing, I was in New York, and I would hire high-end videographers. I saw that, especially when we came online, we didn't need that high-end production. Now, I think production value is very important, but I see it inflate a lot because people are like, “I need this gear and this gear and this gear.” I've definitely trimmed down our production gear. Especially since I travel, I like it light. [laughs] I would say that's the number one thing. It's gotten lighter and easier to set up. There's a lot of cool things you can do now, especially with B roll, to make it interesting. So, it's easier now to – everyone can have a gimbal, everyone can have a slider. There's a few of these other things – you can get a nice 4K camera inexpensively. So we're doing a lot of that stuff still, but as far as the production process, we tweak it, but for the most part we've just been improving how we get the story, how we edit the story, what parts need it. I would say the biggest evolution – I started really in video around when YouTube was purchased by Google. That's when I was like, “Hey, this is going to be a big thing. This is going to be huge. You're going to have this search intense, and people are going to be able to find things on Google and find your video right at that perfect moment.” At that point, we still edited really well. We had a process for editing, but our editing process has evolved and evolved and evolved because now there's so much content out there. Your video needs to be on point, perfectly messaged, and needs to be delivered at the right time. Those are the things that we constantly improved, adding more copywriting principles into our video process and that type of thing. Those are the big ones, and then post-production has definitely evolved. We've evolved the post-production side and we're constantly talking about that. What can we do to make this look different, be exciting, be entertaining on the post-production side? ROB: There's a lot of acquisitions that show up as sort of interesting. What do you think it was about Google acquiring YouTube that really made you sit up and pay attention? IAN: (A) It was Google, and (B) video was just happening. There was this idea that you can get your face and your voice in front of someone using video. We can do that, but now Google was not going to let YouTube – that was doing okay at the time; it was having these moments – it wasn't going to let it go away. Then when they started blending the YouTube videos into the Google search results, that's when I was like, this is going to be a game-changer. If you get a video thumbnail into the Google search results, you can be anywhere on that page and people are going to click on it. They're going to recognize your face. They're going to recognize your voice more often. I knew that was going to be the game-changer. Google wasn't going to let that not happen. ROB: In hindsight, the acquisition price was significant. I think it was around $1.5 billion or so. What I think is interesting there is there's actually a cohort between them, Twitch, and Instagram. All of them, I think, were around $1+ billion in acquisition and all of them are probably right in the middle of what you do every day now. IAN: Yeah, for sure. Look at the YouTube acquisition; at $1.5 billion. Of all the acquisitions, that was a steal. It's the second most used search engine. We're putting all of our time and effort into YouTube because it's going to be the next TV. It already is. My son watches it. He's 6 years old. He knows exactly how to navigate it. My niece wants to be a YouTube star. She asked me all about the stats, and she's 10 years old. “What's the view time? How many subscribers does that person have?” At 10 years old. Other stuff will come and go; YouTube is not going away, and if anything it's an essential part of our life. ROB: Just got to keep her away from the comments a little bit – but we probably all should stay away from the comments. IAN: [laughs] For sure, for sure. ROB: Ian, what led you down this path to start authenticWEB in the first place? What were you doing before, and what made you head in this direction, which can be a little bit intimidating at times for some people? IAN: When I first moved to New York, I was still getting back into working in a hedge fund. Worked for one for a little bit, didn't like that. I worked simultaneously in commercial real estate. I was trying to decide – and I worked at one of the top restaurants in the world, actually, as a bartender. Just like, “Okay, what do I want to do when I grow up?” type thing. I was looking at the theme, and the theme was always marketing. I loved marketing, and I always loved digital. I've been on a computer since I was like 6 years old, which is a big deal because I'm not a millennial. [laughs] It all made sense. So, I went to work for one of the largest information companies as a marketing consultant. Loved it, but the advent of Google and YouTube I knew was going to be a huge thing, and also, I saw them not spending time getting to know the client story and really making good marketing. Everything looked and felt the same. It really did an injustice to especially the smaller people with the smaller budgets, because at that point it was who threw the most money at that search channel or whatever. Now, we separate it out and go, “I can serve and connect people with their perfect clients, and when they do that, they're going to love their business so much more. When people walk through the door and they know them already, they're going to love their business.” That's really cool when I get that phone call. It's like, “Man, you're right. People feel like they know me when they walk through the door, and it changes how we run our business,” which I always love. I knew we could do it better, so I started the agency, and yeah, it was easy since then. No, I'm just kidding. [laughs] Not easy. It's always this endless cycle of – you get the improvement, everything's awesome. It's a rollercoaster. We improve with systems and stuff over the years. Spent a lot of money on consultants, spent a lot of money on a lot of information, and it really improved and created all of our systems. That's helped a lot, but there's always things that are going to come up. But I always know, too, all I have to do is go look at LinkedIn one time and look at jobs and I'm like, “I cannot imagine having to go to a job.” I mean, I guess a lot of people aren't going to a job now, but I cannot imagine someone telling me what to do. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] A couple of looks at a job posting and maybe whatever some people have to wear to their office when they go to offices and that's enough? IAN: Yeah. I just look at LinkedIn for a few minutes and I'm like, “Oh no, I could never do this.” I could never go for another job interview. I'm officially unemployable. ROB: I think I heard you speak a little bit about discoverability within YouTube and video. You could sort of call it SEO, with YouTube, as you mentioned, being the second largest search engine. We've talked a good bit about the evolution of SEO for web on this podcast; we haven't really talked a lot about the evolution of search on video. Is search on video still fairly understandable? Are there hacks that people used to use that are busted and gone and bad tactics to listen to if you hear them? IAN: Yeah. There's hacks, but unlike a website – a website you kind of get some interaction data. YouTube gets all the interaction data. Yes, keywords are still important – matching up the keywords, understanding the keywords, going for the longtail – but getting that view time – that's why I talk about getting that reaction, getting them to take action. Total view time and percent view time are huge, huge things. So really understanding those “content hacks” of getting the view time is super important. Those are the big ones. I actually had someone the other day like, “I think I'm going to buy followers so I can get my own” – because when you get to I think 1,000, you get your own URL. I'm like, “But if you go and buy followers, on a percentage basis you lose that view time because they're not going to watch your videos. You're going to have these followers that aren't watching your videos and aren't interacting and you're going to lose that visibility.” Those are some big ones.  I would say those are the big things. And then always be reusing your YouTube content. One of the things I see so much that people don't do is they don't use their YouTube content in other places. You can email it out on a regular basis. If someone has seen it before, they can see it again, as long as it's not just a straight-up ad, if it's informational. Send that content back out. Those are the big ones because if you're driving traffic to your YouTube videos, YouTube is going to reward you with higher rankings. ROB: Got it. In some ways, Google may have seen this on YouTube first, because now in search they'll look at where you land; if that site is running Google Analytics and you stay there longer, they'll consider that as a search ranking factor. But it may have almost been inspired from the video realm. IAN: Yeah, the scroll and everything. It's a lot of the same stuff, I'm sure of it. They can't actually tell what you read, but they can tell what you scroll through. Also, now with YouTube, they're now indexing inside of the videos, and if you add the different parts of your video into your description with links to it, you can actually get indexed for that exact moment inside of Google, which is pretty cool. So if you answer one question in there, Google could pop it up and show – I'm sure we've all seen this now – where it starts the video at 3 minutes in because you answered this one question I just googled. That's another little bit of a hack I think everyone needs to be doing. ROB: That seems true certainly across really almost anywhere Google is doing structured meta data. They don't collect that data for nothing, and if you see them start to add that sort of meta data – they do this for recipes, for song lyrics, for your sitemap – they're going to use it at some point if you give it to them, it seems like. It's great that that makes sense on video as well. Ian, you've been doing authenticWEB for a little while now. If you were starting over today, what are some things you've learned along the journey that you might do differently if you were starting fresh right now? IAN: I would've niched down faster and harder. People fight the niching down, and I think it's more important than ever. I would've gone into paid ads for us faster, I would've been emailing my list more, and I would've spent more time on my sales through onboarding systems. We did a lot on our backend systems. I was always big into that. Within a couple years, we had it down to almost an assembly line. Obviously, there's art inside of there, but it allows us to fix things when they go wrong. But I didn't spend enough time on my sales and onboarding systems, and I've really nailed that down and it makes such a difference. ROB: What made you realize that you needed to focus? Was it outside feedback? Was it one day where you realized for the bajillionth time you didn't have quite what you needed? How did you come through on that? IAN: All of the above. I'm constantly looking at the business as a whole. Yes, I'm the technician and I like to know a lot about marketing. I love it. I have a podcast, the Garlic Marketing Show, and I'm always learning stuff. We just did the Giants a video learning from 40 experts' techniques. But really working on the business as a whole is a constant, constant struggle. Not a struggle, but it's exciting. It's like, “Hey, what can I tweak here? Where did this go wrong and how can in fix this?” That's a big, big thing. I've been in masterminds. We've had consultants. I'm still in a lot of groups. I talk to other agency owners all the time. And that's another mistake I made, too: thinking early on that I needed to do this all on my own and that everyone was my competition. Now I don't even view people inside that do the exact same thing as my competition. It's the same thing I told my clients Day 1, and I didn't listen to myself. We all want to work with someone slightly different, and if you market yourself right, you're going to get that person. The more of a community you can develop around yourself, the better you're going to be. ROB: That part definitely makes a bunch of sense. Ian, you've been in this for a while; there's always talk about new platforms, new exciting things. What is coming up for authenticWEB or maybe video marketing in general that you're genuinely excited for and think is worth paying more than a little bit of attention to? IAN: I still think it's YouTube. Honestly, I think using YouTube – here's another shift that we did. Once again, it wasn't in production, but it was a distribution shift. I'm always looking at how we're distributing the videos. YouTube used to be the platform that we'd put on the website and people would watch the video there. Now we're really trying to drive people onto YouTube as a whole because we want to get them into those suggested videos. We want them to watch more of our content. They want to watch video content. And when you're a professional, if you're an agency owner, if you're any type of service business, and you get people to see your face and hear your voice on a constant basis, that is the best marketing out there because you get that mere exposure effect. They will trust you more and more. YouTube is going to keep evolving it. They're getting better and better and better. They're changing around the algorithms, and it's hooking people more and more and more. I think TikTok is evolving, and if they don't completely screw with it with the government, I think it's got some legs now. But as far as really marketing a business and becoming an authority, I think it's all-in on YouTube. The other part is it's really hard to get spammed on YouTube because there's no messenger or anything. LinkedIn feels like it's gotten almost too spammed. I think people are going to have a tough time killing YouTube. ROB: Sure. It's certainly 5 to 10 requests a day that are straight-up pitches for business, at least, in my experience. IAN: Yeah. ROB: Are there any platforms – you mentioned TikTok; TikTok seems promising but early for both paid and organic. YouTube is pretty mature for both. Are there any platforms that are maybe not primary for organic content that you still see as being pretty effective for paid, even if that gets into ad insertions in other digital formats? How are you thinking about that? IAN: I honestly think TikTok for B2C, almost everyone needs to be there. If you think that moms and dads are not there, they are. They're watching their kids and then they're getting hooked. I think organic-wise – they have this crazy algorithm, too, that's so good at suggesting stuff for you. I think it's a great place also to test. But as far as other platforms go, then moving back to webinars, I think webinars are coming back. Using Zoom in a different way, using more of this course work, and we're going to figure out new ways to have groups on and have smaller groups. I think webinars are making a resurgence because so many people are now used to being on Zoom for a little while, where they weren't before and they couldn't really pay attention. Now they're used to it and you can really control the messaging there. ROB: Got it. I heard you mention Zoom, and I was wondering – is Zoom especially good at the webinar thing, or is it simply that the average person's familiarity with Zoom at this point is so common that it's not even worth trying to force them to learn something else? IAN: I think it's the latter. Everyone's on Zoom all the time. I remember with GoToWebinar, you have to download software and whatever, and some of these other webinar platforms are really glitchy. Zoom, yes, it had a shutdown recently, but for the most part it's pretty smooth. I think other things will evolve out of there and we'll get used to them, but Zoom works well for livestreaming. I personally use Ecamm, which I love, but Zoom is easy for people to use. I think that's the big thing. ROB: I'm not as familiar with Ecamm. For those who aren't, what does Ecamm bring to the table that's worth paying attention to? IAN: I've been doing a lot more livestreaming. The algorithms are really paying attention to the livestreaming. Plus, if you do it right, Ecamm allows really high quality, almost like a TV show, to your livestream. You can add text overlays really easily. You can do different scenes, you can do an intro. You can essentially be your own TV show manager with Ecamm. I loved it. It does really, really cool stuff and makes your livestreams that much more interesting. You can pull people in, pull people out. The other day I was on a livestream with Gino Wickman from EOS and people were making comments, asking questions. You can instantly pull their questions up from the comments onto the screen, which is really nice interaction. I do love things like Zoom and livestream because of that. We're seeing this hyper-personalization. And that leads into the other one, stuff like Bonjoro that make it really easy to hyper-personalize videos for clients and send them to them right away. That's where I'm seeing things going, this interaction – because you get that feedback and then you get improve your videos and improve your content and get across a few different platforms, getting that feedback and improving your content constantly. ROB: You're talking about that live TV show. One thing I just started playing around with a little bit, and I wonder if you've seen this and how it compares – have you seen this package called Mmhmm? It's very hard to pronounce. IAN: Yes, I have seen it. I haven't used it yet. I have seen it. It's similar to what Ecamm does. I think it has a few different features. But yeah, that's the kind of thing I think we're going to see more and more of, because you've got to keep them engaged. Those tools allow you to add that to your livestream videos. It's not just the livestream; you can keep them engaged and do a lot of those cool things. ROB: Right. The tools just keep on getting more impressive. Certainly, at the beginning of this pandemic, some good news was it was filmed from a home, but it was filmed with a real production team behind it. But the tools keep on getting pushed down and simpler, and you start to be able to imagine producing this Daily Show-looking production just with you and a pretty simple piece of software. It's shifting. It's remarkable. IAN: It is. That's where we have to get better at the content, which is great for everyone. It has to be more about the content, understanding who you're talking to, getting niched down and super specific about who you're talking to. It's not just about having video. ROB: That's true with search, that's true with video, and it's true with the production quality of the video. Everything seems to keep coming back to content and all the little tricks. You can play a trick on TikTok and get somebody to loop your video one more time than you thought by lying to them, but it's all going to catch you in the long run unless you make good content. It sounds like that's what you all at authenticWEB are focused on doing. IAN: Yeah, always making it better and better, figuring out better ways to get it, better ways to deliver it. That's what we do. ROB: Brilliant. Ian, when people want to find you and authenticWEB, where should they go look for you, other than sending a spammy LinkedIn request? IAN: You can send me a LinkedIn request. Just don't make it spammy. Tell me who you are. Tell me you heard me here when I was talking to Rob. That's a great way. Or you can go to authenticweb.marketing, check out our website, and hit me through the form there. Seriously, if you want to open up a conversation and text me on LinkedIn, go ahead and do it. Now, I do get a lot of LinkedIn messages every day that are 90% spam, so if I don't respond to you for some reason, I apologize. Feel free to follow up and say, “Hey, I just wanted to make sure you saw this.” ROB: Fantastic. Ian, thank you for joining us on the podcast. Thank you for sharing that journey and so much excellent knowledge, especially thinking about how to go deeper on YouTube and realizing that that ship has not sailed, that game is not over, and good content can still win there. IAN: Yes. It was great. Thanks for having me on, Rob. I appreciate it. ROB: It's a pleasure. Be well. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Welcome to Episode 40 of Rob and Helen's Datenight Podcast. This week Rob and Helen both take a personality test to find out what kind of people they are. Will they be a match? will it end in tears? Has Helen already killed Rob and this is Helen typing this pretending to be Rob? There's only one way to find out. This podcast contains a mammoth shout out to Madeline Rodgers! Enjoy the podcast Rob & Helen XXX

David Azar is Founder and CEO of Outsmart Labs, a digital marketing agency focused on riding new trends and platforms to drive more traffic, more visibility, and more online conversions. His agency works with clients to build a 360 strategy to drive those conversions in sales, traffic, and newsletter signups. David says, “Digital marketing changes so fast that it's about whoever adapts faster and whoever finds the opportunities in the market.”  The agency provides traditional digital marketing services -- Google strategies, Facebook, traditional social media strategies – but likes the advantage of being an “early adopter” of the newest trends. Where to be now, according to David? TikTok – the place where kids dance. Or not. In this interview, David describes the phenomenal growth of TikTok. The number of U.S. users grew from 27 million in July 2019 to 40 million in January 2020, and then to 65 million at the beginning of April, with 85 million users by mid-June. About 1 in 4 people in this country use TikTok, many of whom are “very involved,” to wit, 34% of TikTok users actively produce content.  David explains that TikTok's paid ads platform can cost over $50,000 a month. On the self-serve side, the budget can start as low as $1. TikTok has specific rules about content, posting, and addressing the audience, along with a powerful editing app. Videos created for Instagram won't work on TikTok.  David says now is the time for smaller brands to gain TikTok followers and community. The cost on TikTok is one-tenth that of Instagram. Big brand demand for influencers is low, so the spend on these initiators will produce a better ROI than an equivalent spend on TikTok ads. This cost is only going to go up, David warns. Today's users will only pay a fraction of what they will have to pay in a year to “get the same audience and the same followers.” The current TikTok algorithm promotes good content and makes it extremely easy to go viral. That, David says, will probably change. TikTok usually starts with a challenge. Someone responds to that challenge. The greater the number of people who respond, the better the chance that challenge will reach the “For You page “where everyone's going to see it and participate in that challenge.” Outsmart Labs partners with initiators who have up to a million followers to create concepts for its client brands. It then develops a first activation, one that will attract a lot of followers and eventually take the brand to the For You Page and “very large exposure.” Outsmart Lab clients have seen great ROIs on TikTok activation campaigns over the past year. Other areas of opportunity David discusses in this interview are local SEO and programmatic advertising. In regards to local SEO, David has found that close to 96% of retail establishments don't do anything to develop local SEO. Yet, many customers will look for a company offering a specific product or service in their community. Unfortunately, Covid-19 has impacted this “local market opportunity” for many businesses. But the situation also presents an opportunity for companies to rethink their websites and their business models. Programmatic advertising tracks customers from their cell phone locations and pushes strategic advertisements to these phones based on their location. Covid-19 presents an opportunity for companies to rethink their websites and their business models.  David can be reached at his company's website at https://outsmartlabs.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm excited to be joined today by David Azar, Founder and CEO at Outsmart Labs based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, David. DAVID: Hey, Rob. Thanks for having me. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Why don't you tell us about Outsmart Labs? Many firms have a superpower, so what is yours?  DAVID: That's a great question, great way to put it. I think our superpower is definitely our team. I think the team that we have together is what makes all of our campaigns very successful. At Outsmart Labs, we focus very highly on new trends and new platforms. First, to introduce what Outsmart Labs is, we help clients with having more traffic, more visibility, and more conversions online, and we really build a 360 strategy in order to drive those conversions, whether those are sales, whether that's traffic, newsletter signups. I think the team we have is a team that's very hungry. We are at the forefront of trends. We were actually one of Google's top agencies, rising agencies, which really allowed us to have access to a lot of data. We're not scared of trying new platforms. For example, right now, what we've been doing over the last year, which we've been seeing really great ROIs on, is TikTok. TikTok activation campaigns. I think what clients like is the mix of finding traditional marketing, whether it is Google strategies, Facebook, traditional social media strategies, and also inputting some newer platforms. At the end of the day, digital marketing changes so fast that it's about whoever adapts faster and whoever finds the opportunities in the market. I think our clients like that in us, understanding that some of the things might not work, some might work, but overall the strategy is going to be a very good strategy in order to scale. ROB: Excellent. It sounds like from your first introduction, you are very results-focused. How do you align a channel like TikTok – what do good results look like on that channel? Are you looking primarily at brand impressions, or is there a deeper level you can go to with a campaign there? DAVID: Great question. I think I mentioned what's really important now n digital marketing is not just doing one platform; it's really the 360 approach. Think of yourself whenever you're online and you're shopping for something. Most likely, if you see an ad for something you're interested in, you'll click it, but most likely you won't convert that first time. So over time, the more you're going to be seeing that ad, the more likely you'll say, “Okay, now I'll take the time to convert.” TikTok actually has a great opportunity at the moment. Even though it's been seeing humongous growth – and clients always tell me, whenever I offer them to go on TikTok and I go, “You guys should go on TikTok,” they tell me, “But I don't understand. TikTok is just kids that dance. I don't understand why that's my market.” This is when we tell them the growth of TikTok over the last year. They had 27 million users in July of last year, 40 million in January – and I'm talking in the U.S. – 65 million in the beginning of April, and on June 15th they had 85 million users. So, 85 million users means that now 1 person out of 4, almost, in the U.S. has a TikTok account, so pretty much anyone. It's all about finding the right way of – the way you're going to be marketing your product. It's not about just doing dance. It's about finding your core values and creating it in a creative way. At the moment, that we're at right now, it's a huge opportunity because the TikTok algorithm works a certain way where it's actually very “easy” to go viral on TikTok, and the algorithm really promotes good content. To answer your question of what a good ROI on TikTok looks like, it depends on what the client is. Depends on the number of activations they're going to be doing on TikTok. But I think that right now, what brands should really focus on is gaining followers and gaining a community on TikTok. As you know with Facebook, Instagram, and other different platforms, the organic reach goes lower and lower as time goes by and as more users are using the platform. We are at a time with TikTok where they haven't changed their algorithm yet, and so far, if you do a good video and you make it to the For You page, pretty much anyone with the right center of interest is going to see your video. The way we look at it is not only do we do organic content for clients, where we're going to be creating videos for the clients, but in order to have quicker results, it's about doing activations with influencers – what we call initiators for TikTok. I don't know how familiar you are with TikTok. I don't know if you wanted me to talk to you about how the trend works to get to the For You page. But usually you want to have a challenge, and then someone's going to do the challenge, and the more people do the challenge, the more likely your challenge will get to the For You page where everyone's going to see it and participate in that challenge. In order to ensure that the challenge is going to make it to the For You page where everyone is going to see your challenge and you're going to have a huge amount of exposure, we actually partner with large initiators and we come up with the concept of whatever the client wants. They tell me, for example, if it's a cosmetic company, “We want to promote our skincare line. We want to showcase it to as many people as possible.” So, we're going to come up with a creative concept. For example, there's a trend that works really well, which you've probably seen, which is people have all these cosmetic products and they act as if they're DJing, and the lights go on and off and you're pretending you're DJing with cosmetic products. Everyone was redoing it, and you can get a lot of followers and people exposed to your brand by doing that. So, we actually partner with initiators that have a million or up followers, and then we work with them in creating the concepts. We have a general idea, we work with them and say, “This is the hashtag challenge that we want to create.” They help us do it, and then they launch the activation with us. Because they have such a large following – and 34% of people on TikTok are active content creators, meaning people do actually want to create content on TikTok because it's kind of the whole goal of TikTok. So once those large initiators create this first activation, then as you see it, you want to participate, and little by little we ensure that brands go to the For You page and get a very large exposure. It's really a tenth of the price of Instagram. Budgets are significant for a small business, but for larger businesses, it's not that much – especially when you're looking at the reach you can have. A TikTok campaign right now, activation ranges between $10,000 and $20,000 for an activation, but you're going to be reaching around – depending on how well the campaign performs – 10 million to maybe 30 million views, people watching your content. This is incomparable to any other metrics. The reason I was saying – you were asking what the superpower of Outsmart Labs is; it's really seeing those opportunities in the moments they're there, because in 6 months from now, the algorithm is going to change. In 6 months, maybe 3 months, 4 months, we don't know when they're going to change it, but that opportunity, as great as TikTok is still going to be, it's probably not going to be as great as it is now. TikTok is going to have to change the algorithm, just like Facebook did before, just like Instagram did before, because they have to make sure the content they're showing is quality content. Because obviously, they make money by showcasing a large number of pages, and the more pages users watch, the more the platform makes money. So, they want to make sure people stay on the platform. That algorithm is for sure going to change. There hasn't been an announcement by TikTok; it's just knowing how digital works. But I think right now is really the time where brands need to go on TikTok. Also, a lot of large brands at the moment – we have a variety of clients, some very large international groups, and every time we pitch TikTok to them – it's changing now in the last month, but originally for the last year, it's always been, “We really like TikTok. We see what's going on on TikTok, but on a global level, we haven't decided how we feel about TikTok.” This is where I think a lot of smaller brands have such a big opportunity, because at the moment, TikTok isn't really crowded by the biggest brands. Except if you're the NBA or brands that are more talking to a Gen Z audience, which already got onto the trend. The other bigger ones haven't. So, if you're a smaller brand, it's really the time for you to take it upon yourself to go on the campaign. I actually have another example of showing how important it is to get on the platform early. We have this client – I can't name it, but it's a large high-end fashion brand. Family business. Not one of the largest ones you can think of, but fairly known in the world of fashion. I was talking to them, pitching them TikTok, and the person in charge of marketing is about 32 years old. I was telling him why he should get on TikTok now, before everyone gets on it, and he told me, “You're right, David. I definitely see that because as a brand, I was lucky that I was in the U.S. when Instagram launched, and I told our founder to create an Instagram account for our brand, and within one year we gained 500,000 followers.” In the last 10 years, they only gained 75,000 followers because the algorithm changed. At the beginning of Instagram, it was much easier to push your organic content. Same thing with TikTok. Whoever's going to be able to take advantage of TikTok now, they're going to pay a fraction of the cost they'll pay in a year to get the same audience and the same followers. I don't want to make the whole talk about TikTok and bore you with just TikTok, but it's definitely a fascinating platform. Digital is so fascinating anyway. Every month or two or three, there's something different where there are opportunities to be seen. It's just about finding a way to adapt your brand values and your message to that audience. ROB: Definitely. Even though it's been very focused on TikTok for a moment, I think it underpins even the name of the brand, Outsmart Labs. It seems like we're in this moment of this TikTok channel that you mentioned. Instagram's been through it, Facebook's been through it. Even Google, from a search engine optimization perspective, has been through it. I think two things were true. One is that the algorithm was at a point where there were true legitimate tips and tricks that work and help you rank that you can actually know and, to an extent, master or be very good at. The other one – I'm not entirely sure, but I think you may have implied – essentially, this is a really good organic marketing channel, whereas – I don't even know; are you doing paid on TikTok? Or is the opportunity on the organic side so immense that it's worth going deeper there? DAVID: It really depends what kind of brand you are. The TikTok paid ads platform is fairly expensive. Usually it's over $50,000 a month in spend, so it's not accessible to everyone. They opened the self-serve on TikTok, which you can start at $1 or whatever budget you want to put in, so we do use that as well. The thing is, usually clients want to have fast results. Because influencers right now are not as in demand by all the big brands and haven't had those large contracts, at the moment, spending $1,000 on TikTok ads versus $1,000 on getting more initiators, I think at the moment it's better to go with the initiators. But I think in 3 months it's going to be something different, and most likely you're going to see a big rise – and that's also why I'm sure the algorithm is going to change, because they can't let that happen because that's how they monetize and make a dollar on an initiator doing something on TikTok. So, it's a mix of both, but when you talk organic, you definitely should. Especially if you're a brand that's a little popular where you have a market that knows you. People are just looking for people on TikTok. I think the DJ Khaled example is a great example with what he did with Snapchat. I don't know if he was still very popular at the time – I don't know if you know what happened. He got lost on his jet ski in Miami and started saying, “I'm lost in Miami” on Snapchat when Snapchat just started. Everyone picked up on it and helped him to find his way. Then over the course of the year, he became the most popular person on Snapchat and now has the success and popularity that we know he has. So, it's about taking it at the moment and finding the right video. The organic does work really well, and people are looking for those brands. If you look at a lot of the brands that don't create any content at the moment, but they're a little famous, they have followers already on their account even though no one's really posting anything. So, I think doing some organic content is definitely great just because the algorithm works so well. If you do a good video – the thing is, you have to spend time in creating videos specifically for TikTok. Whatever you share on Instagram is just not going to make it to TikTok. TikTok has its rules, has its way of posting, its way of addressing the audience. The editing app is quite incredible in TikTok. So, you need to utilize all of that to make it work. It's a mix of everything. In order to have quick results, definitely activation with influencers is number one because you definitely see a switch right away. But obviously if you're going to be investing in the platform, you definitely want to think of also organic content and what you're going to be producing. A great tip I give clients that are scared and saying, “I don't know what I'm going to be posting if I do organic content” – first of all, that's what we do, so usually we take care of it. But other than that, the whole concept of TikTok is they suggest challenges and trends that they want people to do. Sometimes when you're a big brand or you're a little famous, if you just find a creative way to participate in a challenge, it gives you a chance of going viral. There's not that much creativity that goes into it because you know the trend and the kind of video that you need to create. ROB: Wow. It's very clear you are, as best I can tell, completely up-to-date on the now. Let's rewind a little bit, though, to the very beginning. What is the origin story of Outsmart Labs? What got you started in this business? DAVID: Actually, it started very early. I was 16 years old. Before even Outsmart Labs, just digital marketing and my love for digital marketing and the possibilities that it offers. When I was 16 years old, I was put on a project. We created the first professional sports team affiliate marketing website. It was for the team – I'm French; I'm from Paris, so it was the team of Paris. We had sponsors like Nike, a kayak company of France, large car companies. We went to the sponsors, they wanted more exposure, and we told them, “Why don't you give us discounts, and whenever a fan goes through our website and goes through to your page from our website, they'll get discounts from Nike, or on kayaks.” During that whole project, I was in love with how, as long as you think it, you can reproduce it. Then I fell in love with digital marketing, went to school at University of Miami, got very lucky that it was the beginning of Facebook and Twitter, so I got to see that grow. I started an event company when I was in school. All of our promotion was done through Facebook, and we had about 800 students come to our events every time, so I saw the power that Facebook had. Basically, a free tool was giving me the strength that a paid tool would give me. I always thought that was super interesting. If you think smartly, you technically don't necessarily need to spend a lot to get a lot. Doesn't mean you don't spend a lot of time, but in terms of actual dollars spent, it doesn't have to be that much. Then as time grew, I worked for a large firm called Amadeus, which is the reservation system of every plane ticket that you book. They didn't have a social media presence at the time or Facebook, so I did it for them. It was a fascinating project. I was like, “You know what? I'm doing this for all those different clients; why don't I just create my own agency and take it from there? I know there's a lot of people that don't know how even Facebook works or are new to the trends, so why don't I help them?” We started Outsmart Labs 9 years ago now, and it's been growing ever since. We have clients in a lot of different industries. What I really love – I personally love innovation. I personally love thinking big picture, thinking how to beat the system in ways like you were mentioning before, the secrets that are not really told, but that you guess from Google, but also applying the rules and putting it all together and making it work. So that's what we've been doing. We've been working with clients in hospitality, in travel, in luxury, even in mental health. I really love thinking about a lot of different industries. A lot of clients ask us, “But you've never worked in that industry. Is that a problem? I'd rather have an expert in whatever space,” and I tell them all the time, honestly, if someone is knowledgeable about digital marketing, there are so many tools out there that allow you to analyze all the competitors, analyze what they're buying, what they're doing, what kind of ads, what wording they're using, so it's almost not even that important. It's even almost better to use an agency that maybe doesn't have as much experience in the specific industry because in order to get to that level, they're going to have to do so much more research. Because it's changing so fast, that research is going to pay off into a smarter strategy than whoever did it a year from today. That's basically how Outsmart started and the logic and what I love personally about digital marketing, and I think everyone on the team is similar to that. ROB: That's really excellent. If you look out a little bit even beyond now – TikTok rose, it's working; there's probably some other platforms you've worked on – Instagram, there's probably some stuff you can do even on Facebook. But what are the next potential frontiers that you see coming? Are there maybe two or three new opportunities you see emerging that maybe it's just experimental budget for your clients now, or maybe it's already humming for a very select subset of them, but we might be thinking a little bit more about in 6-12 months? DAVID: One opportunity that I see that's a really big opportunity – unfortunately, because of the current situation of COVID and physical retail not being as open as it was prior, it might not be as big of an opportunity as it should be, but in a world where there's no COVID or in places where it's less affected by COVID and stores are open, local SEO is something that I see overperforming. It's something that not a lot of people put a lot of effort in. If you want a little definition of what local SEO is, it's how you get your retail business, your physical business, to show up on Google whenever someone makes a search query under which your business should show up. It's showing the closer local retails, whether retail or hospitals or mental health institutions or insurance companies or cosmetic stores or whatever that is. Local SEO is not necessarily very difficult to do in terms of what needs to be done; it's just very time-consuming. Because Google and all of those platforms create data, people tend to assume that because they're finding their business on Google or when they google their name, automatically they're registered within all the local directories within Google, within Facebook, within all of those platforms, which is actually not true. It's just a crawler doing it. So, actually spending a bit of time on local SEO – and about 96% of retail don't do anything on local SEO. I'm talking even the largest brands that we work with. Some of them tell me, “Everyone knows my brand. There's no point in me working on local SEO.” Sometimes if someone types in “cosmetic store near me,” you want that store to show up first versus a competitor. So, I think that's definitely a trend that I've been seeing. It's not necessarily a trend that's just now. It's been two years where no one's getting on that, and I really think it's working really well. Another thing that I would say – real-time bidding, programmatic advertising, definitely something we see also. Very efficient. Being able to target people based on their location, historical location or actual location, allows you to target and trigger a message very customized to each audience. Not necessarily something very new, and not necessarily something everyone's doing. It's also a little more expensive to do, so that's why maybe a lot of smaller businesses don't do it. But doing it smartly and using the tool for another purpose – which we do a lot for some of the clients that can't afford those budgets – you can really leverage programmatic advertising to your benefit to create a new audience, to track foot traffic in a location, to drive more foot traffic, to drive brand awareness. All of those are great things with programmatic. In terms of other opportunities, I think just being active in general. But that's not really an opportunity; that's just a truth. Those are the three that we're working on the most. Influencer marketing with TikTok mostly. We do YouTube, we do Instagram, but where we see the biggest growth is TikTok in that sense. ROB: For someone who's never dabbled in programmatic or real-time bidding or hasn't done so in a while, how has that ad inventory changed – the ad units, where they get displayed, how they're bought? I think it may not be what people used to think it was in terms of where the ads actually show up. Have they caught up to Facebook a good bit in terms of targeting? DAVID: What's interesting about programmatic is, first of all, not a lot of people know that this even exists. I think if more people knew how it worked, I don't think people would accept to share their location on their apps as often. Just to explain quickly how programmatic works, every time you download an app and you agree to share your location with the app, your device ID goes onto a stock market that anyone can buy. Along with that device ID, it gives your browser data saying you're using Chrome, Safari, your phone is in English, French, Spanish, and you were at this exact location. On average, someone shares their location between 25 to 40 times a day. With programmatic advertising, the great thing is we have a really great understanding of who every person is because it's not just what you search, it's not what you pretend to be on social media; it's actually who you are by where you live, what time you leave for work, what time you get to work, what time you leave from work, what type of restaurants you go to, do you run, do you not run, do you bike, do you not bike, and all those different things. Then how it works and where it's displayed – think of yourself whenever you play Candy Crush, whenever you read the New York Times or whenever you read CNN. There are ads on those platforms. Those ads are ad placements that can be bought by anyone and it can input your ad into that. This is how programmatic works. The beauty of programmatic from an advertiser standpoint is that as long as you can think it, you can do it. You can initially drive traffic – so you could have two competitors. Let's pick an example at random and say McDonald's and Burger King. That's actually a campaign we ran with one other restaurant. What we could do is geolocate every single Burger King, if you're McDonald's, for example, and say everyone that's waiting in line at a Burger King, I want to send an ad that says “Claim this $1 menu at McDonald's.” You see that ad on your phone, you can click “Add to your wallet.” It looks like the exact same thing as a plane ticket when you add it to your wallet, and then automatically it's claimed. Then you can trigger that alert once it's on the phone any way you want. You can say I want to look at the 10 closest McDonald's to this Burger King where the person redeemed this coupon, and any time the person comes within 100 feet of my McDonald's, I want a notification on his phone saying “Don't forget to claim your $1 menu at McDonald's.” Or you can say, people tend to go eat at 12:00; at 11:30, I want to send a notification to all those phones saying “Hey, don't forget to come eat your McDonald's.” And you can go back 90 days, so technically you can geofence every single one of your competitors' stores, go back 90 days, take all of the global data from all of those stores, and target those customers. The possibilities are endless with programmatic. ROB: There's absolutely a lot going on there. David, as we wrap up this conversation, what are some other things that we should know about either the journey of Outsmart Labs or what's next for you and the firm? DAVID: Two things we're excited about. The first thing is digital marketing has always been huge. Obviously, a lot of brands spend a lot of money on digital marketing. No one's really questioning the efficiency of digital marketing anymore. But still, for brands that are not ecommerce only, digital marketing came second to the retail business or their traditional marketing, and I think this whole situation of coronavirus has repurposed or made people reconsider the positioning of digital within their mix of marketing assets. A lot of companies have noticed that once they got all their stores closed, all they had left was their website. A lot of companies haven't even thought about where their in-store POS was not synced with the website POS, so all of a sudden they were left with nothing. So I think this whole coronavirus has gotten brands to rethink how to consider their digital strategies and understanding they should be relying a lot more on it because the chances of this going down is lower and people are shopping more online. To me, whenever I pitch a client, there's a lot of indication in terms of saying why it's necessary for them. I think the last 3-4 months in that way, we skipped through that. Now they know, “It's necessary, we need it; how do we do it?” I look very much forward to this because of the positioning of Outsmart. We tend to also pitch things that are not so traditional. As much as we do traditional, we always try to test things. You always need to pick your clients because not every client is willing to test things – and it makes sense; it's their money, and they want to maybe spend money just where they know the return on investment they're going to get. So that's what I'm really excited for. I think we're going to talk to a lot more clients. A lot more clients are going to be willing to be even more out of the box in terms of what they're going to try to do to differentiate themselves and basically have more real estate online. ROB: David Azar of Outsmart Labs, thank you so much for joining us today. I think you've given us a clinic on a bunch of very targeted and effective tactics in marketing. Congratulations to you and the firm on everything. DAVID: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure to talk for the 30 minutes. ROB: All right, David. Be well. DAVID: Thank you. You too. Bye. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Bonnie Mauldin, Founder and Managing Director for The Mauldin Group, left a career in medicine to start a general, full-service digital marketing agency, helping any client who knocked on the door. Today, The Mauldin Group provides professional web design, internet marketing, and business development training to clients in “healthcare, construction, manufacturing, senior living, and education.” Bonnie feels these industries are less regulated than others, like finance. Less regulation means her team can create marketing content and “freely share information, education, and entertainment online in a way that's fun and productive.” Mauldin team members (all lovers of stories, art, and design) partner with business owners who “had the courage to start their own businesses to stand out from the competition, to build exceptional brands online, to provide products and services in a way that no one else can.” Bonnie claims that her team's off-the-clock recreational activities are the “secret sauce” to their creativity. She encourages them “to play video games, watch movies, watch television series, and draw and paint and go horseback riding . . . to do anything they can to regenerate their creative juices.” That's important, when you are trying to “help business owners tell their stories in a unique way so they stand out.” How does The Mauldin Group get at the crux of a client's story? It's all in the pictures, video, audio, the origins of everything that the client has done, digging into “Where did it come from, why did it come to be, and where is it going next?” Bonnie sees the biggest mistake companies make in creating online content is in posting boring, dry, repetitive, or overly complicated material; preaching at someone rather than telling the organization's story; and failing to provide value before asking for the sale. Bonnie sees a trend where millennials and Gen-Z prefer social media (in particular, YouTube and Instagram) over cable television. This means content creators can produce independent films and video series . . . and gain an audience . . . just as cable television stations do. Google and YouTube are today's biggest search engines. Instagram and Facebook provide amazing demographic targeting. Younger people are watching short, funny videos on TikTok. Bonnie advises people to “Always stay on the lookout for what the young people are doing, because that's where the world is going.” Bonnie has been featured in The Huffington Post, Fox News, CNN, the AJC, and the movie The Inner Weigh. She has been awarded Business Person of Excellence and Business of the Year (Atlanta Chamber of Commerce). Enterprise.com ranked The Mauldin Group as a Top 10 SEO & PPC Agency in Atlanta. Bonnie serves as President of The Sales & Marketing Academy and on the board with the Greater North Fulton Chamber of Commerce. She is a seasoned speaker, teacher, business coach, team trainer, and author. She just completed a degree in Instructional Design and e-Learning and looks forward to using these new skills to help her clients train employees and communicate messages. Bonnie can be reached on her website at:  bonniemauldin.com. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Bonnie Mauldin, CEO of The Mauldin Group based in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to the podcast, Bonnie. BONNIE: Hey, hey, hey. Thanks for having me. ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about The Mauldin Group? Many agencies have a superpower, so what is your superpower? BONNIE: Our superpower is content marketing. My team and I are natural storytellers. We write poetry, we write stories for kids, novels, science fiction. A lot of us are Harry Potter fans and fans of Game of Thrones and all kinds of sci-fi stuff. We are just a band of nerds that love stories, love art, love design, and we've all gotten together and decided to help business owners tell their stories in a unique way so they stand out. ROB: Does this band of nerds have any particular industry that you work with more often than others? BONNIE: Yes. We do have five main industries that we like to stick to our guns in, and that is healthcare, construction, manufacturing, senior living, and education. ROB: Very interesting. How did you come to align on those different industries? Sometimes there's some interesting stories on what gets you there. BONNIE: Absolutely. We started off as a general digital marketing agency, full service, helping any and everyone. After a number of years of doing the work, we really narrowed down our niche by seeing the success stories of the companies that we did the work for. We saw a reoccurring account of tremendous success in those industries. Some industries are a little harder to work with, like insurance and mortgages and real estate and finance, and that's because these industries are heavily regulated and need a lot of security. We like industries where we can be free in writing our content and not have to get approval and permission from people to do so for the business owner. We can just put our heads together and share information, education, and entertainment online in a way that's fun and productive. ROB: You seem to know a lot about the writing interests of your team. Is that something that comes up much in the interview process? BONNIE: That's a good question. Yeah, I do like to ask, “What are your hobbies outside of work?” I also encourage the people on my team to play video games, to watch movies, to watch television series, and to draw and to paint and to go horseback riding and to do anything they can to keep them in a creative space and to give themselves enough room and enough time to take a break so they can relax, refocus, and regenerate their creative juices. That's really the secret sauce to the work that we do. ROB: It's so helpful to have those outside influences and those places to distract. I find that often some of my best ideas come when I am doing something where my brain is detached from work and is focused on something more in the physical domain, so it definitely makes a ton of sense. You seem to be very interested in the range of storytelling across different media. I know you mentioned video games, you mentioned poetry, you mentioned books. Obviously, there's film, there's TV, there's even streaming. Where are you seeing some of the more interesting storytelling emerge that inspires you, Bonnie? BONNIE: YouTube and Instagram are taking over for millennials and Gen Z. What I mean by that is this generation, millennials and Gen Z, are preferring social media over cable television. This is huge. This tells us that content creators can produce their own independent films and they can produce their own video series and amass an audience, just like a cable television station does. ROB: Those people are getting more and more capable. Sometimes you have things that are very raw and authentic; sometimes you have things that are quirky and better produced. Is there any direction that starts to go? Do we lose the opportunity to be raw and authentic as other people get the gear and up their game, or is there always a window to sneak in? BONNIE: There's always a window to sneak in. Just come from a genuine place of something that you're super passionate about, whether it's helping people or teaching people or just sharing your story. Naturally, the audience that is right for you will gravitate to you and attract to you like a magnet. Next thing you know, you have a whole group of people that really enjoy your content and they want more. ROB: You're in some industries where, for me, storytelling would possibly be hard, or perhaps counterintuitive for the audience, like how would you tell a story in something like construction? What are some counterintuitive ways you've been able to weave story into maybe a client or two of yours? BONNIE: Thinking about your childhood days and what influenced you when you were little to pick a certain subject in school and pick a certain major in college and get a certain job, these are the beginnings or the foundation of your story. The origin story of how your company began, the origin story of how you chose your first customers and what happened when you got your first customer and your first employee, and case studies of the clients that have experienced great success in your company, their testimonials and video, audio, or in text – these are all great bases to draw from when creating your story. Pictures, video, audio, the origins of everything that you've done. Where did it come from, why did it come to be, and where is it going next? ROB: That's a perfect segue. Tell us about the origin story of The Mauldin Group. How did you come to be and come into this world of entrepreneurial marketing? BONNIE: My story is a little unorthodox. I got my start in medicine. Went to school for clinical laboratory science, was pre-med. Worked in a hospital as a lab tech for a number of years, and I decided to resign to start my own business. This was back when Google was new, Facebook was new. These platforms were just taking off, early 2000s, and I wanted in. I did everything I could to learn about web design, social media, content, and started to produce high level content on a regular basis online and was able to garner an audience that really liked what I had to say. It allowed me to sell services like coaching and trainings and informational products, eBooks, and podcasts. All this led to me being in a movie. Someone found me online and asked me to be in their movie. I was like, “Cool, I'll do it.” So that was a great experience. I later had my own radio show at a local AM station here in Atlanta called Healthtopia, where I did celebrity interviews and book reviews. I just enjoyed the process of marketing this whole time, promoting my business, and I said, “Hey, this is a viable skillset. I know I can transfer this to help other businesses grow.” That's the part I like the most – telling the story, producing the content, producing the websites and social media. So, I started an agency, and as my book of business grew, I brought on a team. Now I have a full-time team of 12. We are a band of nerds. We love to write, we like to take pictures and video, we like to tell stories, and we help small business owners who are champions in their community that had the courage to stand up and start their own business to stand out from the competition, to have an exceptional brand online, to provide products and services in a way that no one else can. We partner with these companies, and we're their extended online marketing team to help them grow. ROB: That's excellent. Congratulations on getting from yourself up to 12 people, and also that passion that you shared for other people who are starting and growing businesses. They can be sometimes a little flighty, but also very ambitious and growing very quickly. Was your transition out of the medical field something that was gradual as you picked up these other aspects to life? Or was it more sudden for you? BONNIE: I'll be honest with you. All my life, when I was a kid, my parents told me to go to school and get a good job. Go to school and get a good job. I'm thinking, “Okay, which job should I pick? I like science and I like math. Okay, I'll pick medicine. I like helping people, so maybe that'd be a good job for me.” But I got into it and went to try it out and I'm like, “Gosh, I'm bored out of my mind.” The reason why is because it didn't appeal to my creative side and the fact that I love speaking one-on-one with people and being super personable and creating things all the time. The job that I had picked wasn't one that allowed me to do that. I'm a firm believer in having kids in high school, especially in their junior and senior year, take some type of aptitude test so they can see what their strengths are and they can see where their interests lie, so they can pick a job or career that's in alignment with what they're able to do and what they enjoy doing, so they don't have this drastic career change in the middle of their life because they find out that they should've been doing something else the whole time, and they don't waste tens of thousands of dollars on tuition at a college to focus on a career path that's not right for them. But that's a whole other show. ROB: [laughs] Absolutely. That sounds like a tremendous substrate for some additional change that we need in this world. You mentioned that you are into the world of content marketing. I think there are some tried and true tactics, and there are probably some tactics that have become a little bit stale. What are some things that people might think of when they think of content marketing that maybe don't work the way they used to? BONNIE: When it comes to content marketing, you are providing educational content, informational content, content that provides value and improves people's lives in some way. The biggest mistake that I see companies make when it comes to creating content online is being boring and drab and dry and repetitive, or too complicated. It's important to tell a story instead of preaching at someone, and it's important to provide value before you ask for the sale. A lot of the content that I'm seeing from companies is very salesy. It's “Buy my stuff, buy my stuff, I'm so great” instead of informative, “These are ways you can improve your life, this is how our product can serve you when you're ready.” It's not personable enough, attached to a person, place, or thing that's relevant to the buyer. ROB: It's real subtle, but that person, place, or thing that they're attached to, it's relevance, it's building that bridge from where that individual potential customer is to the company that's putting out the content. I think you already mentioned Instagram and YouTube as places where some younger generations are going. What are some new tactics you're commonly seeing – again, some of your industries, at a glance, wouldn't seem so novel in their channels. But do you find that the workforce is growing up a little bit where some of these other channels are relevant? Or are there some other unexpected marketing channels that are emerging content-wise? BONNIE: You have your tried and true Google and YouTube, the biggest search engines out there right now, and then you have Instagram and Facebook, which are great in the B2C space where your demographic targeting is just out of sight. You can target people based on what they've liked and where they are and what their interests are and their age and gender. Targeting on there is phenomenal. Then you have some of these emerging ones like TikTok, where kids are watching these short videos that are fun and funny. That is amassing huge audiences with young people. Always stay on the lookout for what the young people are doing, because that's where the world is going. Also, look at buying channels where buyer behavior is changing. People are more comfortable with purchasing things online, like clothes and food and household items, and it won't be long before houses and boats and planes are purchased online as well, without all the complications involved with doing that right now. So just looking ahead for the future, looking at how people learn, how people buy, how people relate to each other is going to be important to pay attention to so you can tap in early and ride the wave and not get left behind. ROB: Those waves are obviously always moving, but as of right now – and I might even have to look at my calendar to remind myself of when right now is – but as of July 2020, where does that line end up in terms of who should be looking at TikTok and who should maybe not yet be looking at TikTok, or something tricky like that? BONNIE: If you're under 20, more than likely you have a TikTok account; if you're in your sixties, more than likely you have a Facebook account. It's just a matter of where your demographic lies and you delivering consistent, high value content on that platform on a frequent basis. Most people are in an entrepreneurial mindset, especially millennials and Gen Z. They're 188% more likely to start a side hustle or a new business versus Baby Boomers, and the reason why is because Baby Boomers were able to get a steady job and collect a pension at retirement, where that is not happening anymore. Most people are staying at a job maybe 2-3 years max and then moving on to another job or getting laid off. So, people are thinking about different ways to bring in income. “How can I have something on the side that's going to give me reoccurring revenue, passive income, that I can make?” That's why you have this surge of small businesses opening, but unfortunately 50% of them close down within the first year, and then 95% of them fail within the first 5 years. So, you have a mass of people starting businesses and then having them not work out. I'm plugged into the Greater North Fulton Chamber of Commerce. I serve on the board of directors there, and the whole point of the chamber is to provide small businesses with support and community and a legislative voice so they can thrive and be successful. Small business owners definitely need to get a fair amount of training, mentorship, and support before they launch out on their own because there's just so much to know to have a successful business and to have it thrive and stay alive more than 5 years. ROB: Super solid, and you are well on that path of staying alive and growing, and congratulations on that. As you look back a little bit at what you've built so far with The Mauldin Group, what are some lessons you've learned along the way – things you might do a little bit differently if you were starting over from scratch? BONNIE: You need to have your vision in mind of where you want to be and have a roadmap on how to get there. If you are a solopreneuer, a micro business, and you're wanting to earn a good living and make a six-figure salary and serve a handful of clients, then just know that right off the bat and build your business for that. But if you are wanting to have tons of clients and you want to have a staff to support your client base, then build your business for that. Know what industries you're strong in and try to niche down in your services and your client base and the types of people that you're targeting and the problems you solve. Don't try to do too many things at once. Get really good at one thing and do it with excellence and become known for it. And make sure you have the right counselors, mentors, and advisors on your team, whether that's your accountant, your business coach, or some type of mentor who has done what you want to do and has been successful at it. It's important to have people in your life that can give you a roadmap instead of you making all these mistakes and having to waste a lot of time and money. The person that is your mentor can tell you, “Oh, don't do that, do this,” and then you're 10 steps ahead. So, if you don't take anything else away from today's podcast, I would just say have people in your life that can give you strong direction so you don't make too many mistakes. ROB: That's excellent. One thing we've heard from time to time on the podcast is people who were connected with a mentor and they concluded over time that while that person may be wonderful, they weren't the right mentor. Or even a lot of times, as many agency owners are accidental entrepreneurs, they find that they sort of inherited a vision from somebody else's idea of what their business should be. What have you found is helpful in terms of finding your own truth and direction when it comes to the vision and mentors that are good for you, not someone who may not resonate but is otherwise very capable? BONNIE: It all stems from your mission statement, your core values, and the type of customer that you're committed to serving. For me, I think it's tragic that 50% of small businesses fail because I understand to start a small business, people are taking their homes and refinancing them, they're cashing in their 401(k)s, they're asking friends and family for money, they're taking out credit cards and putting themselves in immense debt, they're taking their life savings, and they are stepping out in faith and starting a business because, doggone it, they want to be their own boss. They take all this money, this time, this effort, this fortitude to go strong, and they hit a brick wall because they didn't have the right information, the right marketing, the right sales, the right service, the right market need. Then they find themselves back in a cubicle again, having to get a job. I think that's tragic. I want to do everything I can to empower that business owner with the information they need to run a successful business, to have a strong sales and marketing team, to have the right mentorship in place, to know how to hire, how to fire, how to automate their business processes. The Mauldin Group is all about giving people that strong foundation and structure to be successful. When you're building your mission statement, it needs to be heartfelt like that. It needs to come from the problem that you're trying to solve and the person you're trying to solve it for, and then everything else can lay on that foundation. ROB: So, you don't want to end up back in a cubicle, Bonnie? BONNIE: Hell no. ROB: [laughs] That resonance with the customer matters so much, and that's something I think a lot of business owners are afraid to admit. Whether you say it overtly or whether they can judge on the same vibration that you don't want to be back in a cubicle and neither do they, that's just amazing for credibility. When we look forward a little bit, Bonnie, what is coming up for The Mauldin Group, and maybe even on the broader marketing landscape, that you're excited about? BONNIE: Thanks for asking that. I just got my degree from the University of Georgia for Instructional Design and E-Learning. I'm a lifelong learner. I'll always be in school, even when I'm 90. E-learning is where it's at. A lot of the kids around here are going to have to learn from home for the first time, and companies are going to need to train their stuff from home. Entrepreneurs are going to need to put together trainings for their staff and for their clients. Private training schools that are used to face-to-face training are going to have to transition into an online learning environment. I want to facilitate that transfer. I want to facilitate that change. I want to have my hands in the process of developing these online courses. A lot of people think it's easy to do; the problem is, 80% of people who sign up for an online course don't complete the course, and it's because it's not set up properly. It's not done with instructional design in mind. I want to set up online courses for companies, for entrepreneurs, and for schools so we can have some really good courses out that are interactive and fun and actually help people retain the information. That is the future for The Mauldin Group. Not only are we a full-service digital marketing agency helping small businesses with SEO, PPC, social media, and content, we're also going to add that e-learning arm to our agency where we're setting up those online courses. ROB: I want to reiterate – listeners, you heard the word “instructional design.” Not industrial design, not interactive design. Instructional design. That seems like something we're all going to need to pay attention to. I think a lot of people start off – I've known many people who have started making an e-learning course, much like they've started making a podcast, and then it never comes out. They tell you they're working on it, they tell you they're still working on it, they hit 10 hurdles along the way. Where is it that people seem to get stuck, where they think they can make an online learning course and then they just hit a wall? What are the hurdles there that people might not expect when they start out? BONNIE: The first thing is having a framework that you go by. An ISD (instructional designer) is going to follow something like an ADDIE process. ADDIE stands for analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. First you need to analyze who the course is for, why this person is taking the course, and what this person is going to do with the information. Then you need to design the course with a proper outline of what the course is going to be about, the topics, and the subtopics. Then you need to develop the course and decide if you're going to do this with video, with audio, with explainer cartoons, with whiteboards, with text or PowerPoint. You need to come up with the development and actually implement what the course is going to be. After you implement it, you evaluate the results. You get people to try the course out, see if they're able to retain the information by giving them some quizzes afterwards, looking at the work performance afterwards, looking at the results of their new skillset afterwards, and evaluating if the course actually accomplished the goal that it set out to do. Having that ADDIE framework as an instructional designer gives my clients the power to make a course that is functional, that is fun, and that actually accomplishes the result that they want. ROB: That's a great roadmap for success both in getting it done and also – I think we all see this – in giving customers confidence that it's going to get done, having that framework you can articulate on the frontend instead of just saying, “Trust me, I can build an online course.” It helps for them to know that it's rooted in some of the education you've just completed. That's probably a good segue. Bonnie, when people want to find you and find The Mauldin Group online – either learn some things from you or maybe even make some online learning courses happen – where should they find you? BONNIE: My main website is bonniemauldin.com, and all of my service offerings are there, whether you're looking for a nice website or a digital marketing plan to promote your business and an implementation team to give you ongoing service to make that work. I also serve as a speaker/trainer. Organizations hire me all the time to come in to teach and train their team. Also, I offer one-on-one coaching on a quarterly basis to give small business owners marketing strategy sessions. Lots of offerings at The Mauldin Group. With me personally, I have a passion for helping small businesses succeed. I have a passion for entrepreneurship and education, and I love to plug in with what people are doing when they're ambitious and they're innovative and they're ready to get some money in their pocket. I have so many ways to strategize with them to make that happen online. ROB: That is excellent. Thank you so much, Bonnie Mauldin of The Mauldin Group. Great to hear some more about your story and learn about learning. Have a great day. BONNIE: Thank you. Let's go to the top. ROB: There you go. Up to the top. Bye bye. BONNIE: Bye. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

In this episode, Gina Cocking and Jeff Guylay discuss business due diligence.  Due diligence is so important in any M&A transaction that we're devoting four episodes to the topic. Please stay tuned for upcoming episodes 004 through 006 about Due Diligence.  In addition to business due diligence, we'll cover financial, legal, and technology-related aspects of due diligence. Here are two key points from the discussion on business diligence in today's episode: 1) Organization is crucial in this process; every document will be requested, every question will be asked. 2) Prepare so that there are no surprises; every rock will be overturned.  Essentially, a seller needs to tell their advisors the good, the bad, and the ugly. You’ll see why we’ve named this episode “Uncovering the Skeletons in Your Closet”. This episode features guest Rob Humble to provide his insights from his involvement with transactions as both the buyer and seller. Rob is the Senior Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development at IAS.  In this episode, Gina and Jeff of Colonnade Advisors address the following questions: What is due diligence? (02:18) The process of working with the management of a company and, at a very high level, learning everything that possibly can be learned about the company. Colonnade Advisors turns over every rock to understand all of the strengths and weaknesses of the company, understanding both the past, present, and future. We understand why the company does certain things, what the contracts say, and what its obligations are. We do an assessment so that when the buyer or a lender comes in, they know what they're getting into. What is examined during due diligence? (02:48) Employee records, contracts, financials, lawsuits, marketing plans, training manuals, handbooks, analyzing turnover, customer concentration, unit economics, etc. All the skeletons in the closet, everything about the business. How does due diligence affect the Purchase Agreement? (04:41) A large component of the purchase agreement is the reps and warranties section, where the seller represents that everything they have shown and shared with the buyer is true and correct, etc. The legal agreement, the purchase agreement, governs the transaction and the future. What is a confidential information memorandum (CIM)? Jeff Guylay:  “When I think about the CIM, the confidential information memorandum, or the book, that's really a mix of disclosure, risk, and market business and how great is this company and what are the future prospects... also what's happened in the past and what are the risks for a future buyer, going forward.” Who is involved in due diligence? (08:13) Gina Cocking: “It’s handled by a number of people. If it's a private equity firm, the private equity firm team members are very knowledgeable and will ask a lot of questions in the business diligence segment. There will also be consultants that are hired from time to time, specialized consultants that understand the industry or the specific product that's being done, or sometimes they're HR consultants or specific marketing-types consultants.” What happens first in Colonnade’s due diligence process? (08:55) Jeff: “When we get hired to work with a client, the first thing we do is put together a due diligence request list and a data (request) list. We get together with the company, and we spend the better part of a day, and sometimes a day and a half, going through our lists and just asking question after question after question.”  What is the purpose of Colonnade’s due diligence? (09:35) Jeff: “The point of us going through and asking all these questions is to put our investor hat on or our buyer hat on and ask 90% or 95% of the questions that they (the buyer and/or investor) are going to ask. We want to make sure that we have all the right answers...before they're required by a buyer, and we want to make sure the story is consistent.” What if there are skeletons in the closet? (10:10) Jeff: “If there are any problems, let's hear about it now, because the worst thing you want, as we've talked about, is to have surprises later on or something come up at the last minute that can kill a deal or have a major change in pricing or terms.” Gina (10:34): “I'm your business confessor, for all the ugly and dirty and you-wanted-to-hide-it-under-the-bed (items; it's) time to talk about it because it will come out later, and the worst thing is to not be prepared for when that happens, so we need to know everything.” The advisor-client relationship is one of trust. What are the first questions asked when kicking off Colonnade’s diligence session with a new client, and how do those questions add to the story? (12:49) When and where was the company formed? What is the corporate history? What are the major operating entities? What are they doing, what's the purpose of them? Is there any tail liability that we should be thinking about or carving out? Why are these questions important in the due diligence process? (13:51) Gina: “Everybody remembers a story. It's great to hear the owner's story because we often are retelling their story later on.” Jeff (14:36): “When we launch into the market..we're the front line of communications. We're expected to be able to answer 90% or 95% of the initial questions that come through. We're telling the story, and the (Colonnade) diligence process is meant to educate us, to make sure that we're as fully informed about the history and the prospects of the company as possible.” What are some of the legal aspects of the diligence process? (15:00) Gina: “Not only do we have the different legal entities, but we also have different tax structures, sometimes they're C-corps, sometimes they're S-corps, and so you have all these different legal entities, all these different tax structures.” Jeff (17:21): “This is usually where we request the name and contact information of the attorney. If you have ten entities and there is no holding company, we should probably do some leg work ahead of time and clean things up. I know we've done that on a number of deals.” (Please note that the Middle Market Mergers & Acquisitions podcast will dedicate an entire aspect to the legal aspects of due diligence) What kinds of documents are requested in the due diligence process? (18:16) Gina:  “We're going to ask for all the formation documents, operating agreements, shareholder agreements, articles of incorporation, the state articles of incorporation, that can be three or four documents per legal entity... “ Jeff (19:10): “In addition to the shareholder documentation, we're looking for board minutes, board packages, (and) all the corporate organizational materials that have been accumulated throughout the years.” What important business aspects tend to come up during the diligence process? (20:32) Gina: “An important component of any transaction is customer concentration. That has a big impact on valuation, and there's a very logical reason as to why. If a customer represents a lot of the company’s revenues, the buyer's concern is, ‘Wow, what if that customer walks? What if you lose that customer?’ And then I just bought a company and it has 60% of the revenues that I thought it had. There are a number of PE firms... where their fund will say, ‘We cannot buy a company that has customer concentration of greater than 20% for one customer or 60% for the top three customers." Jeff (22:17): “The next topic we cover when we're talking about revenue is the sales force, so sales and marketing in general. We get a good picture of what they're selling and who they're selling to, and now the question is how are they selling? Do you have a direct sales force? Is it a channel strategy? What are the different ways that this company goes to market, and how are they selling stuff?”  What are some other questions that come up during business due diligence? (22:57) Jeff: “How do you pay your sales force? What sort of non-solicitation or non-compete agreements do you have with your sales force?  How institutionalized are the relationships? How long have they been around?”  Gina (24:29): “A (common) situation is when the buyer says, ‘I would like to speak to the end customer.’  We often get into discussions with the buyers about when those conversations will happen. Jeff (25:27): “The other thing I would comment on in sales and marketing is getting a sense of competitors, so what does the competitive landscape look like? (26:02): Part of the go-to-market discussion is how are you going to market against your competitors? So, what are they doing differently than you? How do you compete against them? And how are you going to win?”  Gina (27:00): “The next area that we start looking into is marketing channels and marketing partners. Clients sometimes have a partnership where they are co-marketing with another entity. We get really excited about marketing partnerships. It's not necessarily because there are a lot of sales coming through those channels, but because of the validation that they give to the company.” Gina (28:38): “The other side of sales is the cost of goods sold. Who are your vendors? We're going to look into all of your vendor relationships.” (29:32): “We will take a look at the pricing from the vendors. We'll be looking at the contract terms with the vendors.”  Gina invites Rob Humble, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development at IAS, who shares his perspectives from both the buy and sell sides as related to business due diligence. Gina: “How do you stay organized and keep the process moving quickly?” (32:10) Rob: “It's definitely like herding cats.  Upwards of 100 people, between advisors and internal folks. I believe, fundamentally, that time kills deals; so you have to be as efficient as possible.” It really comes down to two fundamental points in the process: 1) Preparation (Pre-game) 2) Truly committing to the sale process (Game on). “(Pre-game) we literally took our own medicine, and it took us a few months of answering our own questions before we had a data room that we felt was full. You can be much more strategic about the way that you present (the information) in your sales material, and you can also be more strategic about the rate and timing of when you release those documents. We used the diligence checklist that we use for the buying process...for creating our own internal data room.” Gina: “I think one of the biggest problems that companies run into is trying to stay the course and do their day job (running the business) while going through a sale process without all the wheels falling off the bus.” (34:00) Rob: “There are three components (to our success) that come to mind: 1) Designate a leader of the process. The best person for this is that utility player that is great at coordinating across the team and ensuring the organization is really given the attention that it deserves. You need a utility player that knows the organization, knows the people, knows the data, knows the system, and can run point for you. 2) Form a team that meets every week. That's a cross-functional team with the players that have access to the data systems and decision-making authority that you need to answer questions and have them be supported by the evidence that will ultimately get dug up in later diligence.  3) Follow a clear process. We were very careful. Gina:  “You did quite a few acquisitions over the last four or five years. But you were also involved in the sale of IAS. How did it feel to be in the hot seat? I mean, the tables were turned.” (39:00) Rob (39:17): “I loved it.  A sales process, at the end of the day, is just telling a story and supporting that story with evidence to make it as believable and credible as you possibly can. I loved the process of understanding what our story is, building the dataset to support that story, and then going out and telling the story.”  Gina: “Now, looking back on all that you've done, is there one piece of advice you would give to someone that is getting ready to go through an M&A process?” (40:07) Rob (40:36): “Get the right advisors.”  About Our Guest Rob Humble leads strategy and corporate development for IAS. Before coming to IAS Rob held strategy and corporate development leadership roles with financial services firms NetSpend and Rent-A-Center. Prior to his time in financial services, Rob held strategy, finance, and operations roles at Fortune 500 companies spanning the automotive, defense & aerospace, and chemical industries. Rob earned his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Washington U. in St. Louis, graduating magna cum laude. He also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. Rob lives in Austin, TX with his wife and two young kids. He enjoys hanging out with his family, distance running, watching Oklahoma Sooners football, and indulging in random interests including knitting, furniture building, and home improvement. Email: rhumble@iasdirect.com About Gina Cocking Gina Cocking serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Colonnade Advisors. She returned to Colonnade as a Managing Director in 2014. Gina began her career in investment banking at Kidder Peabody, was an analyst at Madison Dearborn Partners and an associate at J.P. Morgan & Co. She was a Vice President at Colonnade Advisors from 1999 to 2003. She left Colonnade to gain operating experience as the Chief Financial Officer of Cobalt Finance, a specialty finance company. She went on to become the Chief Financial Officer of Healthcare Laundry Systems, a private-equity backed company for which she oversaw the successful sale to a strategic acquirer. Gina served as the Line of Business CFO – Consumer Banking and Lending at Discover Financial Services. Gina serves on the Board of Directors of CIB Marine Bancshares, Inc., a bank holding company based in Waukesha, Wisconsin, that operates banking offices in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Gina received her BA in Economics and an MBA from the University of Chicago. Additionally, Gina holds the Series 24, 28, 79 and 99 securities licenses. About Jeff Guylay Jeff Guylay is a Managing Director of Colonnade Advisors. Prior to joining Colonnade in 2000, Jeff was an investment banker at J.P. Morgan in the firm’s Mergers & Acquisitions and Fixed Income Capital Markets groups in New York. He also spent several years in J.P. Morgan’s Chicago office. Jeff has over 20 years of M&A and investment banking experience and has served as lead execution partner on over 25 M&A and financing transactions at Colonnade. Jeff received an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management and a Master of Engineering Management from the University’s McCormick School of Engineering. Jeff received a BA from Dartmouth College and a BE from Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering. Jeff holds the Series 7, 24, 63, and 79 securities licenses. Jeff serves as a director of the non-profit Nurture, an organization dedicated to enhancing the nutrition and wellness of children and families. About the Middle Market Mergers & Acquisitions Podcast Get the insiders’ take on mergers and acquisitions. M&A investment bankers Gina Cocking and Jeff Guylay of Colonnade Advisors discuss the technical aspects of and tactics used in middle market deals. This podcast offers actionable advice and strategies for selling your company and is aimed at owners of middle market companies in the financial services and business services sectors. Middle market companies are generally valued between $20 million and $500 million. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the podcast, and please consider leaving us a short review. Learn more about Colonnade Advisors: https://coladv.com/ Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/colonnade-advisors-llc_2/

Justin Gray is CEO and Founder of LeadMD, a performance marketing consultancy. The agency concentrates on achieving tangible, holistic business goals – defining a buyer, launching a product, increasing revenue – to produce bottom-line impacts, rather than focusing on middle-process goals such as website or cost-per lead-optimization. Most of LeadMD's over 3,500 clients are B2B and B2C considered-purchase organizations – big market enterprises of $100 million and up.  A “considered purchase” is a complex buying decision, fraught with emotional and financial risks and potential rewards – one that requires extensive pre-purchase research and evaluation. In B2B, this space might include software purchases, but it is more than that. LeadMD's clients include technology providers (50% of clients are software providers), healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, and “anyone with a channel sale type of go-to-market.” LeadMD bridges the space between being a global strategy consultant and providing regional implementation. The agency has data science, strategy, and go-to-market teams – who set strategies, plug those strategies into a broad range of systems and marketing platforms, build processes that work for clients, measure results, and optimize performance over time. Justin says that broad scope of function is rare in the B2B space. LeadMD's consultants find the diversity in clients, the variety and unpredictability of problems and solutions, and the challenge of cobbling together customized solutions . . . exciting, and average 5 to 10 active, and widely-different campaigns a month. Close client relationships are critical.  New clients may come to LeadMD with a particular goal. The agency uses its “Catalyst Marketing Framework” that clearly states the client's objective and then provides a “laundry list” of what the client will need to have solidly in place in order to achieve the stated objective. This helps them align their activities to the objectives, and, in the end, produce significant, relevant outcomes.  Justin has discovered over the years is that many clients believe they already have a full understanding of their buyer profile. Often that “full understanding” is only superficial. Do they really know who their buyers are? All of them? Then, do they know the platforms where their buyers “hang out”? Probably not. Yet that information is critical to know because those platforms are where LeadMd's clients need to focus their marketing efforts.  LeadMD's 3-person data science team digs in at a deeper level that its clients have – researching the market, defining buyers, assembling ideal customer profiles – and then translates that information into engagement and messaging frameworks. LeadMD utilizes role-based psychological/personality profiling to select candidates who will strengthen the organization—either by reinforcing role-desirable traits . . . or by bringing a new direction to the role. The hiring process can take as long as 2 months. Fifty percent of the organization is employee owned. Justin can be reached on LinkedIn, on Twitter @jgraymatter or on his agency's website at: https://www.leadmd.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined by Justin Gray, CEO and Founder at LeadMD based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast, Justin. JUSTIN: Thanks, Rob. Appreciate you guys having me on. ROB: Fantastic. Why don't you tell us about LeadMD and where LeadMD excels? JUSTIN: LeadMD is what we describe as a performance marketing consultancy. It basically just means that our outcomes are aligned to tangible business goals, whether that be revenue increase, product launches, defining a buyer – something that's going to have a real tangible impact, not on the tactical side. We don't get into any engagements where we're trying to optimize a website or a cost per lead. It's going to be more holistic than that. Although we might conduct those tactics, we really desire to impact the bottom line of our clients – which are predominantly B2B and B2C considered-purchase organizations, big market enterprise. Our secret sauce, or where we made our bones, is by operating bridging two different spaces. Normally you either work with a really high dollar, white shoe global consultancy like Accenture or Deloitte and they will help you set your go-to-market strategy or your marketing strategy, and then you'll work with a much more regional partner that's going to help you, maybe even an independent consultant that would pop in and help you operationalize that stuff. We do both, and we beat out the Deloittes and Accentures of the world every day. Our real claim to fame is that we do stuff. Marketing operations is really the backbone of our organization. We've got the data science team, we've got a strategy team, we've got a go-to-market team, and these are all really smart people. But the thing that makes them truly unique is they know how to go plug that strategy into systems and make it work and measure it and optimize it over time, which is just a real rarity, unfortunately, within the B2B space. ROB: For sure. You cast an interestingly wide net with your description that is still narrow in an interesting way. You said B2B and B2C considered purchases. A lot of times I think when you look at performance marketing groups, that B2B considered purchase dials in pretty tightly on let's say software. There's not a lot of white space around that. But it sounds like when you talk about considered purchase in consumer and non-software – where does the rest of the range go beyond that preconception about software, software, software? JUSTIN: We've got probably five – because we've been in business for over 10 years, we've followed the marketing automation maturity curve, and we're a primary partner of many of those providers. I've got over 3,500 customers, literally from vape pens to traditional software providers and everything in between. But the primary concentrations we see are obviously technology providers, as you mentioned, software. Then healthcare, and that bifurcates itself into the payer/provider side and then the med device side. Both those industries, we've had a really strong footprint in. Then manufacturing. I describe it as when your grandma gets an iPhone happening in manufacturing right now. A lot of these organizations have really archaic marketing practices, but they're springing forward into the latest and greatest because it's become standard at this point. So manufacturing is a big one for us. Financial services, everything from traditional banking to online banking to credit unions. And then really, anyone with a channel sale type of go-to-market. That can be insurance brokers, that can be real estate – commercial real estate, predominantly. Anyone that's selling through the channel is also where we've seen a big concentration. But definitely, of that 3,500+, you're probably dealing with about 50% that falls into the software provider space. Still a big industry for us. ROB: Sure. But a fascinating range beyond that. If somebody looks you all up on LinkedIn, at least, if LinkedIn is to be believed, you have dozens and dozens and dozens of employees, but it sounds like you're talking about quite a variety of products and perhaps even thousands of customers. It seems like there's a story of tremendous leverage in there that I'd like to dig into a little bit, that you can be effective across such a range and across so many customers. JUSTIN: Yeah. I think that's just a function of necessity. With the rise of marketing automation and therefore marketing ops, there was this big talent vacuum that occurred. As we were building this agency and bringing people on and training them – and even advertising to them why they should come work for us versus go to the client side – the fact that they're going to get exposure to – our average consultant is running between 7 and 10 active projects every month. That's an incredible amount of exposure that they're getting. As I mentioned earlier, both from the strategy side of the house – fundamentally, how are they going to market? What does their buyer look like? How are they engaging this individual? – all the way down into how we make a platform like a Marketo work for that business. We're talking to a retail burger chain right now. Loyalty programs are their predominant reason for up-leveling their marketing ops tech stack and therefore the surrounding strategies. That's so much different than talking to a traditional B2B software provider. I think that's what frankly is the interesting part about what we do, and that's also what we hear from our employees over and over again, like, “I don't know what my day is going to look like, and that's the exciting part about it.” ROB: Sure, you have 7 to 10 different customers, each of which could ask you an interesting question that day or have something in their tech stack that might not be working quite as they hope. Do your teams specialize in particular marketing automation suites? Also, something I think is different – many agencies we've talked to will specialize in one. They'll have HubSpot and just be trying to increase the quality of metal that is associated with their agency with relation to HubSpot. Platinum, or I guess you can go to gems, too, with Diamonds. How do you think about the right tool for the client? JUSTIN: We were born as a Marketo consultancy, but right around the 2013-14 mark, we decided – Marketo was a predominant provider, and obviously still is, although owned by Adobe. What approach do we really want to be known for? Do we want to be known that all roads eventually end up at Marketo, or do we want to be a customer-driven solution provider? At that point, although we still have partnerships with all of these different providers, we really do take an agnostic approach where we're trying to understand, fundamentally, what is this business trying to accomplish? What is the best tech stack to reinforce that? And oftentimes that does go against hype. We may be recommending Pardot. We may be recommending an ESP, something that's much more in tune with the business goals rather than our traditional partnership. We do have specializations internally, certainly. We've got folks that have a big Pardot footprint, HubSpot footprint, Marketo footprint. If you think about the 6,000+ martechs on the market today, that gets pretty complicated pretty quickly. But really, we structure ourselves down into practices, and all of that will fall within our revenue ops practice. So those folks are constantly thinking about what skillsets we have, how we up-level those, how we maintain our certifications, and ensure that whatever comes long, we've got enough context to give the best performance for the customer. ROB: I think something that's implied – and tell me if I'm reading this correctly – by the tool stacks you're mentioning, your Pardots and your Marketos and whatnot are a little bit upmarket from the entry level marketing automation platforms. Is that a selection filter for the type of customer, or is that an outworking of the type of customer that you tend to pursue? JUSTIN: Yeah. When I say big market, I really mean $100 million and up. Everyone's got a different definition of their market levers, but for us, our best client starts around $100 million and goes up from there. I've got a Fortune 3 company right now that has an active engagement with us. So it is that mid enterprise level footprint. ROB: That sort of client often has a very high expectation of touch and relationship with their marketing providers. With that 7 to 10 customer per staffer ratio, the accounts they're serving, how do you retain that sense of touch? Or is it really, because you're delivering results, the touch is a little bit easier to manage and you're not just trying to say sweet things to them? JUSTIN: I would say regardless of how we've grown or scaled, the customer relationship has always been the centerpiece there. You're never going to get away from the fact that when something goes wrong or a customer has a question or a customer just wants a piece of information as they're going into a board meeting and they need that final piece that's going to make them look awesome, they're going to want to reach out and have someone answer the phone, answer their email, be on Slack, whatever it happens to be. Relationship is absolutely critical. Again, I think that's a unique element when you see an agency of our size that's still able to maintain not only great client relationships, but personal relationships within that. We've got folks that have called us on weekends where it's not our problem, it's not even in our space – maybe something happened in IT – but marketing knows that they've got this great partner that is great at problem-solving, and “Hey, let's reach out to them and see if they can help us.” I've been on those calls on Saturdays before. It's a tricky line. You want to make sure that you're setting boundaries and you're letting the client know, ultimately, we want a relationship and a partnership here, not something that's going to feel like a whipping boy. But I do think you can't get away from that within an agency. Any time you try to automate and people insert these separated ticketing systems and portals and things like that that their clients have to go through, I think that's always a bastardization of the client relationship. When I say 7 to 10, also, I should clarify that they may be hopping in and doing a piece of that project. Fundamentally, we've got principals aligned to those accounts that do all the account management and the relationship management. Because of your specialization, you might need to hop in and troubleshoot something on a Pardot platform or help with an integration for Marketo. But it's really critical that we maintain a one to few relationship with the folks that are charged with managing that relationship. ROB: That's aligned with what you mentioned earlier, with those different practice teams. But you probably didn't start off with a variety of practice teams, so how did this whole LeadMD thing get started? JUSTIN: The short answer is accidentally. Yes, you're absolutely right. Most agencies always start in the same manner, which is one person aligned to an account, like “Just don't piss them off. Just don't have these guys call me and say, ‘You're providing terrible service.'” Everyone focuses on that one to one. I think agencies go through a number of maturity inflection points, but certainly when you realize that's not going to work for your business long-term is probably one of the most difficult. But back to your question in terms of how this got started. I was a very young VP of Sales and Marketing at a payment startup. It was actually my first venture into startup world. I graduated in marketing. I had three marketing jobs after college; I hated all of them. Suddenly I stumbled upon this new world, which was startup. I completely fell in love with it from every dimension that you possibly could. In that business, we were selling through channel partners. We had 30+ different partners where our solution was integrated. It was a payment technology system. When we went to market and we marketed, we had to look like we were either marketing on behalf of that partner or co-marketing with that partner. We had that built into our standard agreements with them. I was managing an ESP with that requirement and pulling lists and sending out these blasts and trying to make it seem like it was a lead nurture thing, although we didn't even know what to call it back in 2006. Went out to Dreamforce and was talking to one of my buddies out there who owned a Salesforce agency. He said, “Hey, you should really talk to these guys over here.” We stumbled upon Eloqua, and I was like, “Wow, what is this?” So, we did this whole evaluation of marketing automation platforms back then, like V Trends. There were so many that are not around any longer. In fact, the only two that were in that cycle were Eloqua and Marketo. Marketo I stumbled upon eleventh hour. They had a little 10 x 10 kiosk out at Dreamforce, if that tells you anything about the year. ROB: [laughs] Which would still set them back a pretty penny. JUSTIN: Right, totally. Jon Miller, who's one of the founders, was working the booth. Bill Binch, who went on to become their CRO, was working the booth. I talked to those guys and described what I was looking for, and they showed me their platform. I was just blown away by the drag-and-drop nature, the intuitiveness of it and so on. I signed the contract right at that show. We came back, we implemented it, loved it, rolled it out to my team. Eventually I sold my piece of that business and figured I was going to do the typical, “Hey, let's go live in Italy for a year and take a year off” and so on and so forth. I flew over there. I took two weeks off. While I was over in Italy, a couple of my relationships called me and said, “Hey, can you do what you did over at this company,” which was called Billingtree. I said, “On a consulting basis? Sure, let me figure out what that would look like.” Those three clients who reached out became our first three retainer relationships. It was just me, operating in a spare bedroom, supporting these guys. Fortunately, because of the advent of marketing automation and the rise of these technologies, the phone just kept ringing. I had to bring on employees at that point, and before you knew it, we had 12 employees and I had to take an office space. Truly an accidental business for me. Not something I ever intended to get involved in. Never had run an agency before, never had run any sort of people-based business before. Always technology or payments. Just a really interesting experience that has really become the heart and soul of my businesses. I've sold four businesses since I've had LeadMD as an agency, and it's definitely the one that I am the most emotionally attached to. ROB: With the timing of you starting that business, you were a little bit before businesses probably cared about social in any way. Is that accurate? JUSTIN: That was the big conversation at the time, like, is social going to catch on? Who should be on social? Just like marketing automation, there were like 100 different social media platforms, like Big and – God, I can't even remember all the names of them. Just these random little – so everyone was playing around. I was thinking about it the other day. I can think of days where all I did was set up profiles on different social media platforms because we had no idea what was going to take off. Obviously, for business, LinkedIn has become the home for everyone, and that's where we spend the majority of our day from a sales engagement standpoint, from a content publication standpoint. But yeah, early days, that conversation was taking place across social, it was taking place across CRM, it was taking place across marketing technology and marketing automation. No one really knew what any of this stuff was going to become and if it was going to catch on. My early content creation was centered on that, like “What is this marketing automation thing and why should you care?” Every once in a while, I'll feel one of those little waves come around. Manufacturing went through that 2-3 years ago, where they're asking, “What is marketing automation and why should we care?” You get these little flashback moments as laggard industries fall into more desire for digital transformation and so on. It's interesting to feel that nostalgia when those circles come back around. ROB: I imagine when manufacturing comes around to it, you probably have some playbooks in place and some understanding of how to measure success. How do you help filter when clients are asking – you have some industrial software company who comes to you and says, “Tell us about TikTok.” Who's to say that TikTok doesn't become – at one point in your business, I imagine LinkedIn was not a place where people should be spending time. How do you start to filter and maybe experiment when something is potentially relevant, kind of relevant, or strategically critical? JUSTIN: Fortunately, questions like that all root back to the same answer, and that's the buyer. It's a great emphasis for us to start the conversation on “How well do you know the buyer that you're trying to engage? Are they spending their time on these platforms?” and really have that be the guiding light around a recommendation. Oftentimes when we first engage with a client, we've got what we call our Catalyst Marketing Framework. Essentially, it's just a big menu of dependency, like, “Hey, I want to launch this product in EMEA via a demand-generation go-to-market.” “Great, here's the 15 things that you need to have in place and shored up at a decent maturity level in order to succeed within that.” The box that always gets checked on there, i.e. the customer feels like they've done a great job around it, is, “I do customer profile research and buyer personas.” Then as we proceed down an engagement, that's also the box that tends to get rewound and revisited. We say, “Well, you felt pretty confident in that, but as we dug into the research that you have and the information you have around your buyer, there's some gaps there. Let's dive in and help you better define that process.” We have stood up a data science team. It's small but mighty. It's literally three people, but they're producing some awesome, awesome results in terms of market research, buyer definition, ideal customer profile assembly, and then the translation of that into engagement and messaging frameworks. Long story short, we answer those questions through the lens of the buyer, and it's a great opportunity for us to dive in where often a superficial look at who the buyer is has been conducted in the past. ROB: Right. I think a lot of businesses are pushed into inventing a fairytale about who their ideal customer profile is, and you having three data science people who know what to do with the data is many steps ahead from the forced hypothesis I think a lot of businesses get into. JUSTIN: That's the danger of data science, actually. The one thing we've learned about these services is you really have to set a strong foundation for the fact that data is going to be the determinant of what we do. Even when you think about the narratives that happen within an organization – like I'm extremely opinionated about who our ICP is. I get challenged all the time from our marketing team, like, “Is that truly correct still? That's something that was true 5 years ago. Let's go out and go into the market and do some research and validate that.” If you're going to open that door, you have to open the door to being really uncomfortable, because what you often find from a data perspective is incomplete data. It's the fact that you can't draw those lines without going out and doing customer interviews or prospect interviews and employee interviews. Therefore, organizations really have to be prepared to say, “A lot of these maxims that we've held up are not supported by data and may be untrue.” We've had to do a lot of expectation setting around the engagements that involve data science because the results are often quite different from what the internal narrative actually is. ROB: For sure. I appreciate your willingness to be questioned and not just to say, “I'm right and I know because I'm in charge and I've been doing this for a while.” I think that willingness to be wrong probably helps model what your own team does in engaging with clients and how to guide them through that process gently, where they may be wrong, but you're really just interested in helping everything be right. JUSTIN: I've had some meetings in the past where maybe we've involving a vendor or someone from the outside is sitting in – we had a leadership coach in, in Q4, and they were in one of these meetings and afterwards said, “Wow, the way your staff questions the things that you say, are you ever bothered by that?” My mantra is ruthless pragmatism. If you see something that doesn't make sense or isn't supported by something or you think it's assumed or you think there's a better way to do something, everyone here has the license to dive into that and really question that. I think sometimes that can be a bit uncomfortable for people from the outside. They have these strong lines of strata that are drawn where it's like someone breezes into a meeting, says something, leaves, and everyone just has to go run and do it. I think that's the value if you've got a really strong team and you embrace becoming a people-based business. ROB: That ruthless pragmatism sounds like a cousin of radical candor and that whole line of thinking. Have you had people where it turns out that it may not be a fit for the organization with that level of candor? Is there a way you filter for that on the way in? JUSTIN: We've done probably more work than I even want to admit around trying to profile for hiring and really getting into role-based profiling. We have a 200+ question survey. You don't have to answer all the 200 questions; it just says, “Answer these for an hour. Do at least 100 of the questions.” It is a psychological survey – I forget who publishes it; some university – but our data science team got a hold of it and scrubbed out a few questions that are inappropriate for an employer to ask, and now we give that up front. We don't provide the results of that survey to our team until someone's ready to make an offer. What we've done is essentially taken all of our employees, had them complete that survey – it is a personality survey, akin to a DISC or a Briggs-Meyer, and it really gives great insight into the traits and the skillsets someone's going to have. But we've also scatter-plotted those around role. So, we know that in our project management role, here's the big skillsets that stand out. We take the lens of, do we want to change that? Do we want to bring in someone that's more extroverted to push the team into a certain direction, or do we want someone that fits the existing mold? I will caveat all of this that we are by no means where we want to be in this process. It's always a maturity curve and a learning process. But I think for an agency, every single person I bring in is going to develop personal relationships with the client – I don't care if it's an associate, which is our lowest level of consultant, least amount of time in the chair; if we lose that individual, someone's going to say, “Hey, are you guys okay over there? I was really enjoying working with so-and-so. They're the key to my account.” Any loss of employee, whether it's voluntary or involuntary, is a natural stick in the eye of an agency, so we have to be really careful about who we bring in. We have to be really intentional about the types of people we're looking for. It all boils down to the desire to employ owners, like people that are going to own whatever they're working on. 50% of this organization is owned by our employees, literally, through an equity program. We want that to foster the type of environment that we're trying to create and be a representation of that. But that's so difficult to uncover, even when you take 2 or 3 months through an interview process. There's so much that comes out in the day to day that you just can't get exposure to. Every day we're trying to get better. ROB: Fascinating, Justin. Based on what you've learned so far in building LeadMD, what are some things you might do differently if you were starting over right now? JUSTIN: God, there's probably a host of them. I would say certainly one of the first things I would do is go to specializations earlier. We spent a lot of time trying to hire for these unicorn generalists that could do strategy and be really adept at tactics. We spent a lot of time pulling our hair out, wondering, “Why can't we find more of these people?” The short answer is because they're incredibly rare and rarely exist. I would certainly go more into a segmented and a specialty type of approach earlier. I'd also say – you have to remember the year that this was formed, 2009. People rarely knew what marketing automation was. They didn't know what it did. Certainly no one was implementing it around any sort of consistent methodology. We productized our offerings very early, but when we did so, we also really painted ourselves into a corner. For a number of years, we became a Marketo implementation shop because all of our products were focused on that implementation or optimization motion. Then we had to spend a lot of time unwinding that and getting back to our roots and fundamentals of starting with strategy, starting with the real reasons why, and building from there. The brand ramifications that that has in terms of the runway and the necessary rebranding and the time it takes to get that optic to change is something that added a lot of lead time to our business that I wish it hadn't. Productizations is really critical in terms of trying to define the quality of outputs, but I would not take such a laser-focused productization approach. ROB: I want to pull on something there a little bit, because I think what may often happen is that you're starting, and you're the superhero, and then you hire some people who are pretty good superheroes too and do all of those things, but as you said, they're sort of unicorns. I think sometimes there's a tension in the billing model that can make pulling that apart a little bit difficult. You feel like, “I'm charging X amount for a superhero; how do I switch to charging for a team?” Was that something you learned, or did you have a different path through that transition and that challenge? JUSTIN: Yeah, absolutely. Fortunately, there was a degree of immaturity and inexperience that set our original pricing. I'll say something that's quite embarrassing and I rarely admit: when we first launched this business, our rate per hour was $75 bucks an hour because I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Right now it's $300, and $500 for end version work. So, we had a lot of room to grow there because I was charging $75 bucks an hour for my own time. As we adjusted along the lines of what you're describing, which is you have this rock star, “I've been charging X for them; now I need to scale, I need to charge potentially the same X for that individual,” we were able to scale our pricing up on the upper bound rather than having to have it come down. Early days, I had a lot of competitors that were very upset with me because of the pricing that we were introducing to the market, and it was just my own inexperience, quite frankly, that made that happen. ROB: Now I think you have some pricing that is probably aspirational for a lot of people who are listening, who would like to figure out how to charge $300 or $500 just for their own time, much less for somebody who they've brought onto their team. I think there's probably a lot to learn in the middle there that makes it easier to learn –  JUSTIN: Sorry to interrupt, but we still run into downward pricing pressure, of course. We'll run into a $25 million hypergrowth organization with another $50 million bucks in funding, and they have no problem paying for anything. Like, “Okay, great, send me over the MSA.” Then we'll run into a global, highly visible, highly well known brand – and I won't say the name, but the biggest rideshare organization out there – and they'll throw something out like, “Hey, we don't pay more than $165 an hour for consulting.” We went through an incredible procurement cycle there. We don't dip down that low. The only thing that really adjusts that mentality for the client, I think, is being able to call in references and referrals from folks that look like them that say, “Yeah, an hour with them is expensive, but only because it's worth three employees. Only because it's knowledge that you're never going to get internally, you can't hire for it, and it's really uncommon what they're combining over there.” You've got to build up – and certainly discounting and things like that are critical to building up those referral sources and getting people to take a chance on you. But once you've got both a good stockade of references and folks willing to go to bat for you, I think that's the most powerful lever that you can pull there. Like, “Let me put you in touch with someone that you respect that we've worked with, and let me have them give you the story.” ROB: There's so much wisdom there to unpack. You're talking about the referrals; earlier, woven into the conversation, you also talked about LeadMD in a consulting role, and you talked particularly about benchmarking. You've positioned yourself alongside Deloitte and some other folks that I think really helps elevate that brand profile instead of saying, “Hey, we are Scottsdale Agency #25 and we are here to help you get some leads.” JUSTIN: Yeah, totally. People think in terms of stories. How many people have put “We want to be the Facebook of X or the Uber of Y” in their pitch deck? People need frames of reference, and I think that really helps them do so. We are the combination between the best strategic Deloitte out there and the best independent consultant you can think of, because they both have really great aspects to them, but they also both have downfalls. The reason we exist is to eliminate those downfalls. So I agree. I think you need to speak their language. There needs to be a shared vocabulary established there. ROB: Really solid. Justin, when people want to find you and LeadMD, where should they go? JUSTIN: They can of course go to the Google machine, but the best channel to get me at is certainly Twitter or LinkedIn. I'm @jgraymatter on Twitter. On LinkedIn, you can just search for me, Justin Gray. LeadMD is just leadmd.com. We use Drip, so there's a little chat feature on there. You can mention that you want to chat with me or anyone within the organization, and we can hop on and have a bit of a discussion there. I love to talk to anyone that's curious about business, marketing, sales, life, any of those topics. I'm happy to lend my time. I find those conversations very interesting. So if you have a question, please reach out. ROB: Perfect. Thanks so much, Justin, for coming on and sharing so much about that LeadMD journey. It sounds like a really excellent ride. JUSTIN: Thanks, Rob. Appreciate it. ROB: Thank you. Take care. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Alana Sandel, Chief Experience Officer of the agency, Marketing for Wellness, has a deep passion for helping people “to be well.” Her personal health struggles inspired her to create her agency, which focuses on quality of life, healthy foods, and fitness. “better-for-you products” – “to build brands for a better tomorrow” – especially brands with solutions for people with chronic health problems.  Alana notes that 60% of our population suffers from chronic health issues. COVID-19 is dangerous, but even more of a threat to people with diabetes, asthma, cardiovascular diseases, and other ongoing health issues.  Marketing for Wellness works to link “best fit” social media influencers with client brands. Media events have been crippled by the pandemic, so the agency is exploring virtual and augmented reality options (for education and entertainment) to replicate the experiences audiences used to have with high-touch media events, where such events balanced digital-touch social. Alana anticipates an unprecedented expansion of companies' use of augmented reality and virtual reality technologies to create meaningful experiences for their prospective clients.  Alana believes that the companies that survive will be led by people whose work “resonates to the core,” drives them, and feeds their passion. With the strain of the times, a lot of talent will become more affordable. People will develop common goals to help each other through this crisis. Companies not prepared to go digital will need to act quickly if they are going to survive. And right now, Alana notes, there are some great deals in both digital and traditional format channels. Today, people's immune systems are the only protection they have against COVID. When will we get a vaccine? When will we have a treatment? How is this virus going to change? What other viruses are going to plague us? When? Alana emphasizes, “The only thing that we can rely on is our immune system.” Many niche brands, Alana says, are developed in people's garages or kitchens, out of inspiration or desperation. Because these small-time innovators understand their customers' “pain points,” their brands come across as being “authentic.” She expects to see a lot of innovative product development, both in foods and beverages, with a strong shift toward healthier ingredients. For the future, Alana expects brands already in foods, beverages, and wellness will expand their offerings in support of our immune systems. Companies not in those industries may support their communities by investing in health and wellness initiatives. Smaller brands will increase their corporate citizenship contributions and make a tangible difference to society through the products they create.  A lot of people will continue to support their wellness experience digitally, but Alana does not put her trust in health gadgets. Devices may measure some vitals, but the most accurate and complete picture of an individual's health is in the bloodwork. Simplicity – eating better, thinking of food as medicine, eliminating toxins and artificial ingredients from our diets, and “moving more” are the way to win health, even without the gadgets. Alana can be found on LinkedIn at Alana Sandel, and on her agency's website at: marketingforwellness.com. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Alana Sandel, Chief Experience Officer at Marketing for Wellness based in Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to the podcast, Alana. ALANA: Thank you, Rob. Happy to be here. ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Alana, why don't you start off by telling us about Marketing for Wellness and what makes Marketing for Wellness amazing? ALANA: Marketing for Wellness is designed to help better-for-you brands to succeed in the marketplace. What makes us amazing is really our deep passion to help people to be well. Whatever we do now is really built around health and wellness and how we can help build brands that have the next amazing, great-tasting product that's gluten-free and dairy-free, or a fitness company that can get people moving and get them excited about living their life to the fullest. How can we make them successful? It's really about our passion, our values, and about an outstanding team of professionals who put their best to help many brands out there who need a voice, who need their stories to be told. ROB: There's certainly been an explosion of these better-for-you products. What do you think has created that opening and that opportunity? And how do you think about some of the challenges, because there's almost so many that it's hard to break through the noise? ALANA: What created this huge demand is a new generation of more mindful people who appreciate the fact that wellness is the new currency. People are much more conscious about the choices they make, about where their attention goes. I think we're dealing with a new generation that looks at our Baby Boomers and ask themselves the question, “How can I have a better quality of life?” I think this is one of the areas where we see a lot of demand. In terms of challenges, how you break through the clutter, I believe if your product is truly great and you have a wonderful story to tell – and especially if it comes from your experience, because a lot of those niche brands were created in a garage, in a kitchen. They came from either a point of inspiration or being desperate. [laughs] They really understand pain points. Usually these smaller, authentic brands really get their audience and they're able to get noticed. I think it all boils down to what you're really good at. ROB: At the onset, you alluded to, in your introduction, the food category and I think fitness as well as some categories. Are those maybe some of the hotter areas for this better-for-you movement? ALANA: Absolutely. These are our basic needs. Food is medicine, and I think a lot of people are starting to appreciate that fact. We're looking at food differently, and we're reading the ingredients. We're getting ourselves educated. Because of social media, things are going quite all right now. If you have a great product, people will endorse you, they will embrace you. If your product sucks and you're not being true to your claims, it will also become pretty transparent relatively quickly. When it comes to fitness, movement is life. If you are not out there, if you're not taking the time to invest into your wellness and not giving yourself time to take a class or go for a walk or just do breathing exercises, your body is not going to be happy. So, food and fitness are definitely two big pillars that people are paying attention to and taking better steps than we used to in the past. ROB: What marketing channels are you most often involved in? What are the key avenues to get the word out on a brand that probably can't do everything? ALANA: I think it's obvious now that social media is one of the most important channels, especially working with social media influencers. Our agency has spent a lot of time to create valuable partnerships, working with social media influencers directly or through talent agencies. It's really an art to find the best fit between the influencer and the brand to make sure there is really an authentic relationship where it doesn't feel forced or staged. Many influencers actually don't want that. They're looking for brands that they can represent with passion and brands that align with their values. Social media is basically a space that we embrace, that we enjoy working with, and this is where a lot of our work is done now. But obviously there are other avenues with digital marketing, and most recently I have to say, because we can't do media events like we used to – we really appreciated the balance it could create between high touch during the events and digital touch social. We're exploring options with augmented reality right now, AR and VR, and how we can replicate experiences for people to connect with brands around entertainment and education. ROB: That's a very salient trend. Some places are opening up, but to a large extent a lot of people still aren't going out. They're certainly not getting together for events in the wake of this global pandemic around COVID-19. Are you also finding perhaps some amplification opportunities that were less appealing before? You've got these influencers, and at least what we're hearing sometimes is that some channels are opening up for paid media in ways where you used to have to spend a little bit more money to get the same message out. ALANA: Rob, clarify your question for me. ROB: Have you seen any opportunities open up because maybe the cost for certain ad channels is lower because some retailers aren't advertising, some movies aren't advertising, so you can get let's say an impression rate or a click rate or something that's lower than it used to be? ALANA: Oh, absolutely. In the last I want to say 5 to 6 weeks, we've seen a lot of great deals on different channels. Both I would say in digital and traditional formats. Yeah, I agree with you on that. ROB: That makes sense. Alana, tell us a little bit about how you got into this Marketing for Wellness. The business is a little bit newer, but your industry experience is quite extensive. What shifted your attention in this direction? ALANA: When I started with my own journey back in 2001, I always had a commitment to myself that I'm not going to compromise on what I believe in. Early on, pretty much as a team, we primarily went after brands that we knew improved quality of life, but it was really a mix of organizations, from food companies to financial services companies and not-for-profits. Last year, I realized that I really want to polish my focus on working with brands that can make a special difference for people with chronic health conditions, because I think with 60% of our population having chronic health issues and with COVID-19 putting a lot of these people in a very vulnerable spot, I think those people that have diabetes, asthma, cardiovascular diseases, and others need a lot more support today perhaps than before, especially when it comes to food and beverage companies. So, Marketing for Wellness is designed to build brands for a better tomorrow, and we're focused on quality of life, but our special attention now goes to those brands that have a solution for people with chronic health issues. ROB: It almost seems like this was a little bit of a reboot, that you had built this career and you had built a firm that could do more things, and you felt the desire and saw the need to go focus in a little bit more. Is that part of the journey? ALANA: That's right. This is under my skin. This is something that I'm vested in personally because it's part of my personal wellness journey and the struggles that I faced. I know there are a lot of people out there with pain points that have not been addressed. Obviously, there are medications and there are a lot of health options, but at the end of the day what's important is what you do every day and how you invest in yourself. What type of food you eat, how you exercise, how you develop yourself from within, how you make your life meaningful, how you look for purpose – this is all interconnected. It's all one big holistic picture that creates wellbeing for people. But for those with chronic health conditions, it's a lot more challenging. It's a lot more painful. It's a lot more expensive. I'm really embracing those brands that have great products to help those people manage life much better. ROB: You can definitely hear the resonance between this business and your own personal journey. I couldn't help but think as you were talking earlier about influencers, and now about some of these different conditions, it almost seems like a very good intersection where there could even be brands that would pay some influencer more to advocate on their behalf – but someone who self-identifies with a particular health concern, a particular need, may just be so grateful to find a product that helps them, whether they're dealing with celiac or lactose intolerance or whatever, that they might choose your clients over a lot of other options. Is that part of the dynamic? You get to resonate also with your influencers? ALANA: Absolutely. I'll give you one example. I have the privilege to support Lively Foods. They are a manufacturer of a kefir beverage. It's a probiotic drink that is rich with good bacteria that loves your gut. It's especially important now because most of the health of our immune system sits in our gut. About 70% is there. So, taking care of our digestive health is critical. Lively Foods is so loved by those people who appreciate how good this product is for their lives, both for adults and kids, that they're extremely popular with influencers, going beyond food. You can see it on Lively Foods' Instagram channel, classes that range from fitness to mental and emotional health. Influencers are drawn to this brand, knowing that this is one of the best choices you can make on a daily basis to keep yourself strong and resilient by taking care of your gut. So yeah, this is exactly right, Rob. ROB: That definitely makes sense. I can't help but notice when you talk about originally launching a business in 2001 – many would say that was not the best timing. Many would say that this year is not the best timing. Of course, 2001, we had 9/11 and the dot-com bust. Along the way, you also kept in business through the Great Recession as well. What are you seeing, knowing that we're probably heading into recession now – or maybe we will have an amazing recovery, as the stock market seems to believe – but knowing that we may be into a leaner time, what have you learned, at least the past couple of rounds of downturn that you have been in business through, that you're thinking about as we look forward? ALANA: Great question. Here's my big idea. I believe if you are doing something that resonates with your core, something that drives you, something that you're passionate about, you're going to make it. You're going to be resilient, and you're going to find ways to sustain your business and yourself and your family. It's not going to be easy in the next couple of years, but there's going to be a lot of talent available that perhaps before were a little bit pricy for small to mid-size brands to tap into. There's going to be a lot of I would say common goals to help us through this crisis and find better solutions, so people are going to be drawn to ideas, and those people who have tools and solutions that can actually help us. So, I think we're going to see a positive transformation where people are really working together on projects that inspire them and connect them to their better selves, and this will give us strength and resilience. We're going to see a lot of great ideas. We already do. I believe it's not going to be easy, but at the same time, we're going to tap into some areas within ourselves that are going to give us that superpower. ROB: Right. This is the time where the tourists in the industry might go away, the folks who could stick around when you could just throw a stick and find someone who needed some help with digital advertising. Those types might be on break for a little bit. People need thoughtful performance, and they need someone who's going to adapt and find those opportunities. It sounds like you are on that journey. ALANA: I believe I am, yes. ROB: If we widen the aperture a little bit, Alana, having been in the industry for quite a while and having been a business leader, a business owner, what are some things you would do differently if you were – I mean, you are starting over from scratch, so maybe it's more interesting to say what are you doing differently this time that you left behind when you left your previous business? ALANA: Happy to share. One of the things that I wish I did from Day 1 is finding a mentor or mentors. For me, when I found my mentor, Ted Pincus, he was a financial PR pioneer. Unfortunately, he passed away. He made a world of difference within my life. Within the short time that I knew him, he led me to some really important decisions that I'd make. Because of his guidance, I joined an executive management course at Kellogg Business School. I revisited how I managed the business and how I looked at priorities. I would encourage everyone, no matter where you are in your professional development, whether you work for a small business or a Fortune 5000 organization, I think having the right mentor by your side, who can listen, who can reflect, who can give you guidance, is the most important step you can take towards your success. ROB: That process of finding and then also recruiting a mentor can be a little bit intimidating. In other words, some people would say that going up to ask someone to be your mentor is a lot like walking up to a stranger and asking them to marry you. How do you think about that process of, number one, finding someone who's resonant and isn't just somebody who seems important, and number two, building that relationship to the point where it's not such a weird question, perhaps, to ask for a mentor? ALANA: I think there are a number of options. My path to finding Ted Pincus, my mentor, was through another private organization where I reached out to some of the people I knew and I said, “I'm looking for help. I need guidance.” Once people got to know me, they said, “You should talk with Ted and see if he could help you.” Then Ted led me to another person who I greatly respect, Lloyd Shefsky, who was also a part of the Kellogg School, who led me to other ideas and opportunities. So, it's kind of a chain reaction. You talk to people, you connect with people, and you find the right person. I see many universities now, their alumni programs, offering that as an option, or there are now online portals where you can go in and look for a mentor or make yourself available to mentor someone. I think it takes a conversation. It takes creativity, how you reach out to people. If you set an intention and you're clear on who you need in your life now, I think you'll find the right solution as long as you're creative and resourceful. ROB: Which is all part of success anyhow. I did want to poke in on one thing you said there. You initially said you didn't say, “I need a mentor”; you said, “I need help.” First of all, asking for help is a tremendously powerful thing, and it's also a much lower commitment. How soon into that relationship did you feel like it was going to be a long-term one? ALANA: I knew right away. Ted understood me. He immediately responded to some of the issues that I had, and he really lent constructive support on many levels. This relationship was meant to be, so I was really fortunate to find Ted. ROB: That's great. You also mentioned there was a geographic resonance with Northwestern – around Chicago. People do have that affinity around their school that makes them more likely to help, I think. So that all makes plenty of sense there. For those of us who are not as deep in the wellness industry – I think a lot of us know the lactose, gluten – what are some surprising categories of product that you see coming up? Maybe some new client categories or just the digital marketing world making the universe smaller for people to find exactly what they need? ALANA: One of the things that I see coming, which makes me really excited – again, I'm going to use the example of food and beverage because I think this is going to be one of the biggest areas where we're going to see change – is innovation around ingredients, what companies are putting in our food now. There are a lot of breakthroughs around alternatives to sugar. In fact, my team a few years back was working with an organization, Tate & Lyle, as they were branded a sugar alternative, which was monk fruit. We were engaged in this process, which I was really passionate about. I think we're going to see a lot of innovation from a product development standpoint, both in food and beverage. Also, I see a lot of digital innovation of how people experience wellness. With COVID, there are a lot of restrictions. Before, you could go into a yoga studio and take a class with 30 people in a really tight setup; now, that capacity is probably going to be cut in half and classes are going to become more expensive. So, we're going to see a lot of people continuing their experience digitally in terms of how they're going to support their wellness. Another thing that I see, and actually I'm a part of, is I believe we're going to see a lot of smaller brands creating contribution to the society at large, not just bigger brands. For example, my firm recently launched a project for wellbeing, which is a not-for-profit initiative. We are developing a platform where we make it much easier for people to practice wellbeing. It's not only about employees; it's also about the wellbeing of employees' families and loved ones. So, we're actually investing resources to build a platform that can create more wellbeing and wellness. I think we're going to see more projects like that coming from smaller organizations. Fortune 5000 companies have practiced corporate citizenship for a while, but smaller companies don't have as many resources. But now, with the transformation we're seeing, I believe a lot of people will be driven to make an impact and make a contribution and to make it tangible so people can really feel the difference of their efforts. ROB: A lot of that can line up with these brands also owning their own platforms. I know I've seen some things. What have you seen in terms of shifts around smaller brands and ecommerce, perhaps, in this season? ALANA: Oh, my goodness. I think those companies that were not prepared for digital transformation had to wake up and get their act together really quickly. If you are not prepared to sell your product online –whether on Amazon, on Etsy, or maintaining your independent platform, or a combination of all – you're going to have a really difficult time sustaining business. I saw a lot of companies, overnight, getting an online makeover in terms of getting their ecommerce act together, which was very impressive. And I'm not surprised, because we have a lot of tools and technologies. You can build a website overnight. If you know what you stand for and what you want to say, you can do that. We built the For Wellbeing platform in 5 weeks, and it has thousands of resources. Technology creates opportunities right now for people who get it done quickly. ROB: The toolsets are certainly remarkable, between some of your lightweight website things, your Wixes, your Webflows, your Squarespaces, but even into – a friend of mine runs a company that has been in the grocery space. They're in technology for grocery gig economy work, and a lot of that went away, and they very quickly stood up not just an online store, but a multi-vendor online store. They're a mini Amazon that lets all their different clients sell food products online, and they did it so quickly. It would've taken months and months, if not over a year, to do this in different areas, and now a Shopify store – I think there's a reason their stock went up. It's just so fast, and there are so many tools that integrate, that you can be shipping just shockingly quickly. ALANA: Absolutely. ROB: Alana, we've pulled forward several years of digital transformation already, so where do you see the next horizon now? People who have been pulled into the future now, what is their next future that they're being pulled towards that they're going to have to figure out, as maybe a challenger food brand having a wellness dimension to it? ALANA: I think brands that can will market around wellness, and this is how Marketing For Wellness is set up, to help organizations to figure out how they can market around wellness. With COVID, you realize that our immune system is the only shield we currently have to protect us against COVID. We don't know when we're going to have a vaccine. We don't know when we're going to have a treatment or how this virus is going to behave, and are we going to have other viruses that might intrude on our lives? The only thing that we can rely on is our immune system. So we're going to see those brands that are already in the space, in food and beverages and wellness, stepping up their game and helping people to support their immune systems. But then we're going to see companies who might not be in that play – they might be in a different industry, but they want to support their communities. They're going to start investing into wellbeing and wellness initiatives. That's one area that I see. Another one, I definitely forecast huge growth for AR and VR technologies to take off, and for many brands, figuring out how to use it wisely, in a way that people can have meaningful experiences – and there are already some interesting innovations coming, like from Lego, where they employed an AR tool working with a company called 8th Wall to create retail experiences to get people to stay in the store longer and get engaged with the product and buy more. We're going to see a lot of the area of AR and VR, I believe. ROB: Around wellness in the past few years, with things like the Apple Watch, and as it's actually become better, we see people trying to quantify some parts of their health. Same thing with Fitbit. But a lot of the sorts of health that you're talking about seem like they are harder to quantify – for instance, the quality of the sugar in a particular product or the quality of your gut biome. Is there anything emerging that you see that may quantify a new area of health that has been a little bit unobserved that may help a category pop? ALANA: Let me first share with you my perspective on all the gadgets. I think they're awesome. I think we need them. I do want to know how many steps I took. But at the end of the day, if you look at the number of insurance claims, they're the same. We still see doctors at the same rate as we did a few years ago, regardless of how much investment has been made into gadgets and into platforms. This is just my overall position. The most accurate measurement of how well your body functions and the most precise measurement is your blood work because gadgets measure some vitals, but it doesn't give you a complete picture. I saw some really interesting technology coming out of Germany where they actually measure your wellbeing and your wellness using your frequency. It looks promising. But what I believe in today is simplicity. As long as we can get people to eat better and to perceive food as medicine, if we eliminate toxic ingredients, artificial ingredients from our diet, if we move more, it's a win. Simple steps. Even if we don't have any gadgets. [laughs] ROB: Yeah, simplicity more than technology. ALANA: Simplicity, yes. ROB: I dig it. Alana, when people want to find you and find your company, where should they go to find you? ALANA: They can find me in two places. They can find me on LinkedIn, Alana Sandel, and they can go to our website, marketingforwellness.com. ROB: That's a good domain for it. I like it. Alana, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been great chatting with you. ALANA: My pleasure, Rob. Thank you for inviting me. ROB: Now more than ever, I can say: Be well. ALANA: Thank you. ROB: Bye. ALANA: Bye. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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.

Ty Largo is Owner and Creative Director at Awe Collective, a full-service agency providing branding, advertising, public relations, digital strategy, content marketing, social media, video and photography services to diverse industries across the US. Sometimes the agency does (awe) inspiring work. Currently, in the face of Covid-19, the whole agency has shifted to “show up for clients in a different way.” Ty has been on phone calls, comforting clients crying about having to cut shifts. He has written emotionally difficult letters communicating a client's “hard messages” to their staff, vendors, and/or guests. He feels this kind of PR service is a privilege, an honor . . . and a burden. Even in these “weird and uncertain times,” the agency's role is much the same as in better times . . . to provide guidance. Ty recognizes that no agency can excel at “everything,” and wants every tool used for its clients to be “best in class.” He uses the analogy of a Swiss army knife: a tool made of many tools . . . none of which work particularly well for what it's purported purpose. Ty believes it is a strength to know where parts of his agency work like a Swiss Army knife and to be willing to reach out to a partner agency whose tool is “best in class.” If the client wins, then so does Awe. Ty explains further explains: The ideal situation for Awe is that they always have a good network of great partners to partner with in order to provide optimal client results. Awe can pass over clients to these same partner agencies when it is already working at capacity or when the client needs services Awe cannot provide. What has Ty learned over the years? In the past, when he was more “ego-driven,” he would tell a prospective client that his agency could do everything, and then “white label” work contracted through other agencies. Today, he just tells clients what his agency can and cannot do, recommends when a partner is best added to the mix, or admits, kindly, “Hey, this is not a fit for us,” and then refers the client to another agency. He says it's a relief “to be honest . . . transparent . . . not to try to pretend.” Business owners often feel they should say “yes” to everything. Ty reminds us there are other options:  you can compromise and you can say no. Ty went to college to study music, dropped out in his third year, and never returned. He hopscotched around industries and quit his job as creative director at a poorly-managed software firm on February 14, 2008 – the same day he bought his first house.  Ty started freelance marketing consulting, growing his business client by client. (He had no training in marketing, and this was during the recession of 2008) He never planned to have a business. (He had no training in business and he thought he was going to be a nerdy band teacher.) In 2018, Awe Collective was named the #1 “Best Place to Work in Arizona” by the Phoenix Business Journal. Ty attributes that award, and his agency's success, to his obsession with team wellness. “Are they happy? Do they feel like they're in an environment where they're being challenged and they have opportunity?” Ty can be reached on his company website at: https://awecollective.com/ Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Ty James Largo, Owner and Creative Director at Awe Collective, based in Tempe, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast. TY: Hello. Hi, listeners. Thanks for having me. ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Ty, why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about Awe Collective and what makes Awe Collective great? TY: We are a full-service agency based in Tempe, Arizona, but our work spans across the country. When I say full service, everything from branding, marketing, advertising, public relations, digital – everything across the board. Our clients are a diverse portfolio, which is great, especially in these very interesting, ever-changing times. Clients include everything from luxury, a Venetian resort and spa, to the California Democratic Party. So, we are definitely a very diverse and very interesting agency. We do a little bit of everything, which is great. But I say it on our website: we are not a Swiss army knife, and I hate when people say that because a Swiss army knife is the worst thing on planet Earth. Could there ever have been a worse pair of scissors invented, or a nail file, or a knife? A Swiss army knife can do so many things, but it does it so poorly in every facet that it's actually engineered to do. But we are not a Swiss army knife. We are experts at everything. We are that full tray of tools that is expertly crafted to be its best max effort in every different medium where possible. That's us. Awe Collective. ROB: Fantastic. We are right in the thick of the coronavirus lockdown, so maybe doing a little bit more Democratic Party and a little bit less travel and spa right now? Or how are clients reacting? Are some doubling down and planning for the time of abundance after? How does that look? TY: Candidly, in my past 6 days, I've been getting on the phone with clients that just need someone to virtually hug them as they cry about having to do tough layoffs, having to cut shifts, having to deal with the actual true person-to-person tough calls that have to be made – I think that's our privilege and our honor and our burden, too, as a PR agency. We don't always get to promote great stuff. Sometimes we have to do real tough messaging and level up for our clients. That's been the past 5-6 days, where I've had to write really strongly, emotionally generous, hard messages for clients to their staff or to their vendors or to their guests. So, it's not a great time. But per this podcast and per the arc of everything that you've done work on, we typically get to say really great stuff all the time. We get to have fun and promote really cool things and all the stuff. But in this case right now, I'm switching gears and my whole agency is switching gears to be able to show up for clients in a different way, where they need help delivering very tough messages. Yeah, it's a weird time. ROB: For sure. But what a privilege to be called upon in this time, what a privilege to be needed to help people get outside the things that they don't quite know how to say, but they know they need to say, they know they have to communicate. I like what you said about the Swiss army knife. You've even probably seen the 1,000 tool Swiss army knife that they were briefly selling and had become a little bit of an internet meme. But it's not that useful. It's a tool in origin, I think, more of bare utility and survival and not one of thriving. As you think of being the best of each tool that you provide, how do you think about keeping excellence in each area while also – you're not probably a couple thousand person company with whole pods of teams on each specialty. So how do you keep that excellence on each tool? TY: Great question. When I do talks, when I do public speaking, I'm pretty real. I try as much as possible to not do pitching and spin. I think one of my strongest top tier superpowers is knowing what I suck at. I think that's part of – if we're using the Swiss army knife analogy, you can't be great at everything. No one can be. No agency out there can do all of the things on planet Earth. So, you have to have a real chat internally and reflect on, “Hey, are we the Swiss army knife on this part? Are we that crappy pair of scissors that's in the Swiss army knife in this area?” And if so, let it go. Or pull in a partner to fill that gap. Pull in a partner agency that it's like, these guys are amazing, we love them. We can provide strategy and leadership from a client perspective; however, we just don't have the capabilities that this other agency has to that degree. It's more about letting ego go, I think, and being, in the best way, self-deprecating to be able to be high performance. You can still perform and show up for a client without having to try to do it all. There's power in saying “Hey, I suck at this; however, my friend over here at XYZ agency is rad, and we can give him good direction on it, we can keep it aligned to our strategy overall, but let's partner with this person.” It's not a moment of failure. I think a lot of agencies feel like they have to always be the best at everything. It's a moment of power, where you acknowledge power elsewhere and you acknowledge the fact that your superpowers are very different and very diverse. Pulling in a partner is not a threat to the work that you're doing with a client. It's a moment of strength, I think. ROB: I think it depends on what your goal is. The hard part and the ego part is to try and be the solution for everything, but that's not what your clients are asking for. If it's possible, what they'd love for you to do is to help them find a solution for any problem. That's a trust building exercise, when they come to you with a new problem and they say, “What about this? Could you help me?” You say, “Oh, I know this person over here, I know this partner” – because they don't. If they knew the partner, they wouldn't be asking you. TY: Right. In general, clients are calling us because they need guidance, period. It's not effective or healthy as an agency, or for the client, to mislead them on capabilities that you know you don't have expertise in or a specialty focus in. They're calling us because they want guidance. If you have a trusted partner that can do that for them, great. Do it. That's our purpose. Even in these times right now, too – again, not to make it a dramatic response, but more than ever, businesses are needing guidance and expertise. They're like, “What do I do?” So yeah, I think part of our model is to always have a good set of great partners that we can either partner with on clients or do a pass through where it's like, “We have a conflict of interest; however, we love this other agency, this other marketing provider that we love to death. We wish we could work with you right now, but we can't” – for whatever reason, whether it's a conflict or we're just at max capacity. I think that's an important thing for agencies in general, to get over yourself and just really, truly have a good network of people that you respect that you can refer work to or partner with on. It makes you that much stronger. It doesn't make you weaker. It makes you stronger. ROB: It's all in a good toolkit. I think there's an interesting question, and I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer to it: how do you think about when to white label, when to present the solution as part of your overall solution as an agency, versus when to partner where the partnership is more visible, and when to wholesale refer and not take any part of the business, but just pass it along? How do you think about that decision – if you have any sort of rubric for it? TY: I used to do the very ego-driven, “We can do it all,” and if I private label a select part of the service, I'll do it. I think these days, though, I'm very transparent. I'm very like, okay, cool, we'll do our consultation on the sales call, and if I really, truly feel like this is not something that we 100% can do, or if we have to partner or if we have to refer, I just tell them. And I have to tell everyone in this audience here, there's such relief in that, not trying to pretend. Again, I don't want to be the Swiss army knife moment ever, and as much as we have a wide-ranging capability suite for sure, there's so much power and relief in being able to be transparent and honest right from the get-go. Before we even send a contract or a proposal or whatever. Just being able to say, “This is a project that needs a very specific toolset, and although we can do that work internally, my recommendation is we pull in a partner.” Or “Hey, this is not a fit for us.” We always say that with kindness. We're really big on chemistry with our clients. We're very fortunate in the way that we can pick and choose who we do and do not want to work with, and if there's not a chemistry, if there's not a cultural connection, we still love on those potential clients. We'll be upfront and say, “This is not a fit for the kind of work that we do. However, we're very grateful for the opportunity to chat with you. We are inspired by where you're going with the brand. However, we'd love for you to talk with XYZ partner.” We've done that a million times. I think that's a big thing. You feel the need as a business owner to say yes to everything, but you can compromise, and you can say no. And there's power in saying it upfront versus going through the motions of a whole parade of fake, weird flirting when you're not interested, when you're having the worst date of your life. [laughs] It's a terrible date but you're still flirting; however, you know this person is not the one. There's power in real talk. There's power in being able to say, “No, it's not a vibe. Not a fit. I'm out.” ROB: For sure. Not that it's quite this extreme, but if you go to a really nice hotel and you go to the concierge, they do absolutely nothing, but they have a huge degree of trust because they can tell you anything with a high degree of authority. If we rewind a little bit, Ty, tell me about the origin story of Awe Collective. How did it come into being? What made you start this thing? TY: Oh, interesting. I wish I could tell you some very charismatic leadership message about the origin story of my company, but I can't. I went to school for music. I took a break from college 3 years in, and I'm still on that break 20 years later. [laughs] So I don't have a degree in anything, period. I've never studied marketing or PR or branding or anything in that sense. I kind of hopscotched from industry to industry. I've done everything from public education to IT to marketing to fill-in-the-blank moment. My last job that I had was I was a creative director for a software firm based in Arlington. It was not a great situation. I had really bad bosses and leaders, period. So, I decided to quit my job. This was 2008. I quit my job on Valentine's Day in 2008 – also the same date that I bought my first house. Great timing. [laughs] Believe me when I say I did not have a plan to have a great business. But yeah, I made a leap of faith and I made it at a wrong time to dive into a deep end of a pool that I didn't know was so deep. I started doing freelance consulting for marketing, client after client. It made sense at some point to call it something different than just having clients cut checks to me directly. I never had a plan to have a business, ever. If you had asked me as a kid, “Would you ever think you would own a business?”, I'd be like, “No, I want to be a band teacher. That's my purpose in life, to be a nerdy band teacher.” But fate has a different plan for everybody than what we think we're supposed to be. Flash forward to now, I started off not planning to own a business and now I own a business, and I'm very proud of it. My company has been named the #1 Best Place to Work in Arizona – not just in my industry, but period, across the board. I didn't plan to own a business, but I'm pretty good at it. It's because I love on my team so much, honestly. Even as we're going through these crazy times and I don't get to see them every day – that's probably the hardest part of my job right now. I don't get to see my family every day. I love on them so much. I'm obsessed about their happiness. I think when you do that, you don't have to worry about the performance. You don't have to worry about how good the work is going to be. The only thing I think as a leader you have to worry about and obsess about – and I'll say it again, obsess about – is how happy your team is. You should be waking up at night in fear of like, “Is everyone happy?” That's where the focus should be. Again, I'm not a trained business owner; I did not plan to do this or to work in marketing. I'm not qualified, technically, to work in marketing. But I love my team so much, and I'm so grateful that they are on this journey with me. It seems very basic to me, but I think it's so revolutionary to some people, and maybe perhaps to the listeners here too – you will thrive if you just take care of your team. You will thrive, period. There's not a big pitch behind it. Just obsess about the happiness of your team, and the work will be good. I promise, the clients will be happy. The clients will be plentiful. The clients will continue to grow, and you'll get more clients, all the things, whatever. That's the endgame, for sure, but if you really focus on loving on your team and making that your prime priority, especially in this time right now – I didn't go to school for business, whatever, but I just know what has worked for us, and I'll just tell you, that's what the focus should be. ROB: Beyond the instinctual, are there any habits or rhythms or routines in the business that you have, whether it's daily/weekly/monthly, that help you reinforce love to your team? I know that sounds a little bit mechanistic, but for folks who it doesn't come naturally for, that may be helpful to them, or even helpful in showing love to people who may have different ways of feeling love. How do you think about rhythm and routine? TY: Great question. We have our weekly team meetings, and we do it over lunch. Not catered in because that's still in our office space and it feels very technical and it feels very clinical. We have a gross, awesome, amazing, wonderful local dive bar that is approximately 1.5 minutes away from our office. We'll go there and sit on the patio and just be exposed to fresh air. It's a limited venue, so either you get chicken tenders or you get a burger – and this is funny because we have James Beard caliber clients that we could go to if we wanted to, but this is not about that moment. It's about how we can really, truly feed ourselves in a very comfortable context. So we go there, and there's a level of love in that situation where we get to have work talk, talk through the clients, whatever, walk through the next week that's coming up, forecast it, go through the forensics of the last couple weeks. It's a weird, twisty dynamic, and I think that's part of our routine. We want to mix it up as much as possible, because the stresses at work are challenging. Why not just sit at a gross dive bar where every table that you sit at is sticky? [laughs] Just mix it up. And the staff knows fully that we are ready, able, and capable of doing a very bougie team meeting, but there's something about the self-deprecation, collectively, of chilling at a gross dive bar, like, “Hey, get over yourself. Let's chill and let's have an 11:00 vodka drink and chicken tenders and just be friends because we love each other.” This is a space where we can be at ease. It's not at a conference table. It's not in a boardroom. We do that weekly. ROB: There's definitely something intangible about breaking bread together, about getting outside of the confines and the familiarity of the office, for sure. That's all really good stuff. What are some things that you've learned from building Awe Collective that you might do differently? Maybe some lessons learned if you were starting over, and things maybe you're already doing different going forward now? TY: Good question. If I could go back and do it again. Actually, I'll be honest – I don't know that I have any regrets. But I have advice. I think my path is very different than most business owners, period, let alone agency owners. I have no regrets because of the fact that all I did was always, endlessly obsess about my team's wellness. Are they happy? Do they feel like they're in an environment where they're being challenged and they have opportunity? The way I describe my company is this is not the place that you retire at. This is the place where you learn how to be a badass. I say that because I don't have high turnover; I have an incredible list of alumni who I've been very privileged to work with and to raise. That is my ultimate honor and purpose, to raise badasses. So, I don't have regrets in any way, shape, or form. I have pride in the sense that all I've ever done is obsess about the wellness and development of my team. As they move on, my alumni are not like a marketing specialist at XYZ Agency. Cody on my alumni list is a director at a global PR firm based in LA now. Another former alumni is a director internally at a global grocery chain. I think as a business owner, the tendency is to obsess about sales and very clinical things. That's responsible to do. Yes, do that stuff, or bring somebody on your team that does that for you. But – I sound like a broken record, but if I had to look back and think about it, I would have regretted not loving on my team. But thankfully I don't have those regrets because that's always been my obsession. It's been the critical key to my success, making sure that my team is growing, thriving. In their time with me, how much can I make sure that they make the most out of this for themselves? Everything else will just fall into place. Client success will fall into place. Agency success will fall into place. If you just focus on your talent, your team, who can say that's the wrong thing to do? It seems basic to me, but I think a lot of agency owners don't understand that. That should be your obsession. Obsess about every single person. If you have waking nightmares at night – which sometimes I do – it should be about that, not about “Is XYZ client happy?” or “Is XYZ client going to renew?” or whatever. Your eyes are not on the prize where they need to be. It has to be on the people that you should be loving. ROB: That's great. I hear a tremendous amount of positivity, a tremendous amount of even appreciation for the people that you have worked with. It's probably less scary – I think people worry when they go to work for a closely held business that their boss is going to be crazy and controlling. And I think a lot of people are, out of fear. I don't hear a lot of fear coming through. Certainly, fear of not treating people well, but not fear of the outworking of treating people well. TY: Part of having the privilege of being able to work with talented people is to know that they're not going to be with you forever, so just – I think that's part of the pressure to just absolutely endlessly love on somebody. You know they're going to be gone. Cody, who is one of my stars, forever amazing alumni, I've always known that he's going to move on – not away from us, but move on to something different. He needs more challenges. As a boss and as an employer and as a leader, you have to lean into that. You can't be sad about that stuff. You have to be very excited. I do feel like it is a family, and obviously my kids are not going to live at home for the rest of their lives. I'll be so happy when they go to their next steps. That's what it feels like to me. Again, it's an honor and a privilege, and a little bit of sadness, to see their next steps and to be a part of raising them where they are ready to go and be a badass somewhere else, and not take that as a loss, but take that as a win. I get to look at Cody and be so proud. Not to get too emotional but be so proud. It's cool. It's a cool thing. ROB: Fantastic. When people want to find you and Awe Collective, where should they go to find you? TY: I would say hit us up on our website, www.awecollective.com. Obviously on social too, as well. I feel like we've been very dark on social the past couple weeks, for obvious reasons, because we're dealing with this whole situation on behalf of our clients. We're there to support them. So, if our social channels seem a little quiet, that's why. But yeah, hit us up on the website. You can see a little bit more about our wide and weird breadth of the work that we do. There's a lot of our DNA in there, too, a lot of our voice. It's not just a big portfolio site. It's more like “Here's who we are; here's who we're not.” So, you can really, truly see the DNA of our company. We try our best to express that on our website. It's not a pitch. It's not a flashy, razzle-dazzle website. It's just like “Here's who we are.” It almost acts as a filter, if anything, for clients. If they want a very traditional path for marketing in general, you as a viewer on the website know that's not us. I think our website does a really good job of telling our story, and again, who we are and who we are not. ROB: Perfect. Ty James Largo of Awe Collective, thank you for joining the podcast and sharing with us today. TY: Thank you so much for having me and thank you to the audience for listening. This has been really fun, and hopefully informative for the audience here. I'm happy to do any follow-ups if needed. Go team. ROB: Perfect. We can all stay positive. Thank you, Ty. TY: Thanks. ROB:  Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Espree Devora, got tagged as “the Girl Who Gets it Done.” Later, when a friend observed her enthusiasm in tackling a number of business tasks for Tony Hsieh, then head of Zappos. Her passion for content creation began when she was in the 6th grade and her father gave her a video camera. She filmed hundreds of sequences featuring “extreme” sports (skateboarding, motocross) and built the first online action sports social network. In 2012, she attempted to start “We are LA Tech,” featuring local startup founders. She shot 12-episodes, but her enterprise partner refused to edit the material. Dead end. Two years later, in September 2014, Espree resurrected “We are LA Tech” as a podcast. By October 2014, it topped Apple's New & Noteworthy. She had learned on YouTube everything she needed to know to run a podcast. In 2015, Espree launched “Women in Tech” in response to the dire “glass ceiling” warnings so prevalent at the time. Her purpose? To “create a positive piece of content whose sole purpose is to show us what's possible, to expand our belief system, so listeners walk away feeling, “'If she can do it, so can I.'” Much of the theme of her work is what Espree calls “vulnerable leadership.” She wants to share “how people have built their companies and their professions in ways that are really empowering, and what can we learn from them.” In this interview, For people interested in getting started in podcasting, Espree recommends the technical equipment and software that she has found to be most helpful, planning and motivational strategies, She provides a series of podcasting training videos.  The first tool in Espree's podcasting toolbag was an app to help her maintain focus on daily goals, to help her deal with her fear of “ creating this thing, and then creating a thing that didn't work out.” Tools she uses today: An Audio Technica 2100 microphone, Sound Studio editing software. As podcasting has grown, the demand for podcasting training has likewise increased. Espree teaches everything from large groups to intensive, private, month-long master classes. She recommends continuous outreach to maintain relationships and lists a number of tools effective for doing this, and offers tips on techniques and frequency . . . in order to be “un—annoying.”  Espree had been scheduled as a speaker at this year's now-cancelled South by Southwest. She has given many presentations there in the past, performed live podcasts, and led meetup groups. She credits her success to being where hard work meets luck and opportunity, a variation of the Roman philosopher Seneca's “Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity." Espree can be reached on LinkedIn and all social at (Espree Devora), and onTwitter @espreedevora. Her podcasts are on: WeAreLATech.fm http://podcast.wearelatech.com/ and WomeninTech.fm http://podcast.womenintechshow.com/.  Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Espree Devora, “the Girl Who Gets It Done.” She is the Creator and Host of the We Are LA Tech podcast and also the host of Women in Tech. Welcome to the podcast, Espree. ESPREE: Hello, hello! Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. ROB: Very excited to have you here. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your own journey into becoming “the Girl Who Gets It Done” and hosting the things that you do?  ESPREE: Oh my gosh. A lot of people ask me when I became an entrepreneur, like when I made that decision. I feel like I was born an entrepreneur. I remember walking into Westwood Village with my father and looking into the empty office buildings, picturing what businesses I would put in them. As I went along my journey, I think I just became very resourceful in a lot of different areas, from junior high to high school to college, and eventually the tagline “the Girl Who Gets it Done” came from when I was hanging out with Tony Hsieh, who is the head of Zappos, and a bunch of his entourage. I was taking care of some things and people kept asking me, “Are you his assistant? Are you his publicist? Who are you?” My girlfriend who was with me at the time just said, “She's the girl who gets it done.” [laughs] It just stuck, and it's been that way for a really long time. ROB: Excellent. I think if you get a nickname around Tony Hsieh, you stick to it for the most part. ESPREE: Definitely. ROB: What about the journey into these podcasts that you host? When did you realize that was something you wanted to do and then really caught your ongoing attention? ESPREE: I think the first moment that I realized I was really excited by content creation was in the 6th grade, when my dad gifted me a video camera and I got to explore. I ended up building the first action sports media company online. It was the first action sports social network, and we produced hundreds and hundreds of video content across skateboarding, motocross, all these things. Then in 2012, I had this urge to continue creating content, but at that point in my life I was more interested in the startup world. I had already been in the startup tech world, obviously, building the first social network for action sports, but I didn't understand that. At that time I was just doing things. They weren't a global trend like it is now. Terms like “social media,” “entrepreneur,” “founder,” “accelerators,” these things were not a thing then. In 2012, when LA started to have more startups and have more founder stories, I wanted to capture that moment, so I partnered with someone to create a video series called We Are LA Tech. Unfortunately, that person didn't share the same work ethic I had. We shot 12 episodes, and that person's responsibility was to edit them and none of them were edited. My heart was broken. I waited a year, and I ended up going on a backpacking trip to escape this reality that this video series would never be completed that I felt so passionate about. While backpacking in Europe, my friend Mark who founded a company called BetaList, started showing me podcasts on his iPhone. At the time I was an Android person. He's like, “You've got to listen to these podcasts. They're so funny. You'll love them.” I get back to the States; I get an iPhone because I want to stay connected with my friends in Europe and it was the easiest way to do that at the time. I start listening to podcasts. I didn't realize that years before, I had actually been listening to two podcasts, Podcasts and Product People by Justin Jackson, who actually has now co-founded a podcast hosting company called Transistor. He was one of the early podcasters, and I just loved his show. But at that time I would move the audio files from the computer to my phone. It wasn't the thing it is today, so I didn't even know I was listening to podcasts. Anyway, at the same time, I was like, wow, if I start a podcast too, I never have to rely on a video editor again. [laughs] So in 2013 I started stirring up the We Are LA Tech podcast in my head. It launched in I think September 2014, and by October 2014, it was number one on Apple's New & Noteworthy. It was just really exciting. I'm completely a self-taught podcaster. I taught myself how to edit. I taught myself everything. I just watched a lot of YouTube videos, and I've been podcasting ever since. Then in 2015, I launched the Women in Tech podcast, and the story goes on and on. ROB: What made you realize that maybe it was worth at least experimenting with the Women in Tech podcast? Or were you all-in from Day 1 and you knew it had to be a thing? ESPREE: The Women in Tech podcast was inspired because at the time, these women's groups were becoming a thing. They were never a thing before. I'm like, “Oh look, that's me. I founded companies and I am a girl too, so I want to check out what's going on.” All these groups I would go to at the time, the whole conversation would be about how women are held back or statistics that are in the negative and this and that. I'm like, man, I've never felt held back. The only person I've ever felt held back by is me. If I had heard all these messages about how much was not possible for me, I would have never built the first action sports social network. I wouldn't have raised money. I wouldn't have done all these things because I would've believed it wasn't possible for someone like me. So I wanted to create a positive piece of content whose sole purpose is to show us what's possible, to expand our belief system, so listeners walk away feeling “If she can do it, so can I.” ROB: There's a common thread, it seems, between both of the podcasts. You have, with LA, an underappreciated market for startups – I think perhaps even still to this day, there's some very good companies, but also with a chip on their shoulder. And then with Women in Tech, similarly, there's sometimes a lack of appreciation, a lack of highlighting, a lack of encouragement in both cases, you're putting a positive spin on it rather than saying, “Hey, pay attention because you're not paying enough attention.” ESPREE: Yeah. I think my brand theme – I call it vulnerable leadership, where it's not that I want to just be positive. I don't want to be Instagram perfect. But I do want to share a vulnerable message in a way that we could shift our belief system to turn something that could be perceived as a negative into a positive. I think the process behind that is really important. It's not just about being like “Everything's great! You have it so much better than everybody else!” [laughs] It's about, okay, today sucks or whatever a person is dealing with, but here are the steps I went to, because do I want to feel sucky right now? No. If I don't want to feel sucky, what's something that I can do to potentially shift myself out of that mindset? I think that's what my shows exemplify, just vulnerable leadership: how have people built their companies and their professions in ways that are really empowering, and what can we learn from them? ROB: For those of us who are outside of the LA tech world, certainly we've heard of some of the newer fliers – I think maybe Byrd or Lime scooters is from there. I apologize for not knowing what you know. ESPREE: That's okay. ROB: I've definitely ridden plenty of scooters. But what are some of the companies that are maybe trending right now that people may not fully be aware of, but should be? ESPREE: Oh wow, trending? I don't know who's trending right now because I tend to stay laser-focused on sharing people's stories. But some companies that are iconic that you may have seen – of course, Snapchat is here. FabFitFun is here. There's really huge companies that are popular at least across the U.S., if not globally, that were created – Myspace was in LA. Google has tons of offices here now, and they're really a dominant force in the LA tech scene. YouTube has their Creator Hub here. It's definitely a thriving tech city. My primary interest is the lifestyle and culture of a tech professional, more than what is the latest gadget. However, if you tell me the latest video or microphone gadget, I will be interested, but that's just for personal, selfish reasons. [laughs] ROB: I was going to ask – I think a lot of people, when they hear about podcasting, they feel very intimidated in terms of the whole process, from creation of the content to editing and publishing. What was in your first podcasting tool bag? ESPREE: That's a great question. I'd say the first thing that was in my podcasting tool bag was actually the app. I don't even remember what it was called. It's like Daily Goal. It was some daily goal app. The reason that was the first one in my bag is because I was so afraid of, one, creating this thing, and then creating a thing that didn't work out. What I did was I created a goal every day. It could be like “create podcast artwork,” “get a microphone,” “schedule an interview.” Just one thing. And I wouldn't allow myself to not do the thing. I remember when I got my first podcast poster designed, and I didn't like the design and I thought it was really ugly, but my goal for that day was “post it,” like it's done. So I just went with it. It was about the forward movement; it wasn't about being perfect. I actually happen to really like that flyer now, but at the time I did not. That was my first one. Then as I became more educated by watching YouTube videos, I bought a Snowball mic because I knew my episodes would be in-person and it would be more than one person, so I wanted a mic that picked up more people. A Snowball mic is actually the lowest level mic because it's really meant for musicians, like a guitarist or something like that. It's not meant for multiple people. Those are for technical reasons that I can get into another time. Feel free to tweet me @espreedevora if you'd like to know more reasons why. But it was a Snowball. What I'd recommend to everybody starting out is an Audio-Technica 2100, and that's actually what I'm using right now. Again, I could share with you the technicalities of why in another conversation. Then I had my computer. I have a Mac, so I found an editing program called Sound Studio. I found it on a random forum. They do a terrible marketing job because they're very hard to find. [laughs] But they're an incredible software program. The way I describe it, it's like iMovie for audio. They just make it stupid simple to edit audio. It's great. So I used that. I remember my very first interview, I didn't even know how to record it. I was just confused, and I plugged the Snowball into the computer and I was trying to figure it out. It's scary, but what matters is that we take a step forward. In my speeches, when I give speeches on how to podcast, the thing that I tell the whole audience is on their way home, I want them to take out their phone and, in their voice memo app in their phone, I want them to record their first interview on the drive home, or their first podcast episode. Then I want them to send me that via Google Drive or email or whatever it is, because that's all that matters in the beginning, is taking a step forward and just taking action. ROB: If you take that step forward every day, which you were doing with your app, it's like those challenges when people talk about if you just get 1% done better every day, it really does add up. Are you still editing, or have you managed to delegate that opportunity? ESPREE: First of all, I happen to love editing. I call it “painting audio.” But it is not who I want to be in the world. [laughs] I'm very lucky; an editor that I hired in 2014 has been with me since, and he works with me and edits everything. I have other editors that I've worked with as well. So I do have the editing done. Every so often, I'll tell them that I want to contribute and I'll do an episode here or there, but I do not rely on my own time for editing anymore. ROB: It's the same as my experience. We actually did a quick cycle episode that we recorded yesterday about the financial stimulus involved in the CARES Act and how marketing agencies can claim that money for themselves to keep their team onboard. But normally, I have trained editors – and I think what you said before, audio versus video is very, very forgiving. ESPREE: Completely. ROB: If there's a glitch in the middle of a word, it's remarkable. You can just highlight it, delete it, and it sounds great all of a sudden, whereas if you did that with video it would look insane. ESPREE: Totally, completely. And there's so much that goes into video, from lighting, color correction, angles, audio. There are so many variables, you just cannot get away with high quality video if you don't know what you're doing. It's a huge learning curve. The main components of a podcast – and again, I can dig into this deeper in a different conversation – are the tracks: is each person's voice being recorded on a separate track or is everybody's voice on the same track? How does it sound, the mic that you're using? Are you doing it remotely or in person? Because that will have an impact on your equipment decisions. Things like that. But there's just so much more that goes into editing and shooting video. ROB: As you mentioned, all the information is out there. Everything is essentially figureoutable. I think there's a book to that effect. I first figured out how to record live because I was at the Social Shakeup Conference and I saw somebody there recording live, and I just walked up to them and asked them, and because they'd done it enough, they had a page that listed all their gear, and they had affiliate links. Normally I don't even click on affiliate links because I'm kind of ornery about that, but I totally clicked their affiliate links. It was something done with a mix of generosity and sharing, and if they get a few bucks, to your point, for that Snowball mic or for the Zoom recorder that we use when we're in person, who am I to be upset about that? ESPREE: Yeah, totally. But I don't have an affiliate link for you. [laughs] ROB: Maybe another revenue stream there. ESPREE: Yeah, it's something I've thought about. It's one of the many things that still is on my to-do list for way too long. ROB: But you're figuring it out step by step. How did you make that jump? I think a lot of agencies, marketers, organizations develop a competency without taking it to the next level. You went from creating podcasts to training people to do podcasts. How did you evolve into that shift? ESPREE: I think it's a few things. One, I was just asked by several people. I got into podcasting in 2013, when it wasn't a thing and it wasn't cool. It didn't start to become more – I mean, obviously podcasting has been around for several years, way before that, but it just became this mainstream thing in the last few years. In 2013, it wasn't on the radar. In 2014, it started to bubble up on the radar because of the StartUp podcast. Then Serial came out, so then the mainstream news started talking about podcasting, and it was a domino effect from there. At that time, I think it was just supply and demand. [laughs] Even today, it's supply and demand. People have a really hard time finding any indie production companies for podcasts, so I get a lot of inbound on that because I've been creating my show for several years. You can't find a lot of people who have been both producing and hosting for several years. Maybe they just started 10 episodes ago or something. I have hundreds and hundreds of episodes done and distributed. So sometimes it's just getting there early. Now my “why” is interesting. I get asked a lot to teach. Initially I did it just for the community so that they can learn and express themselves, but I found that it was really exciting to be a part of their journey in creation and to really help facilitate them creating something meaningful so it's not just another audio file, but it's something people feel mentally subscribed to. That's been great. So I do a couple things, whether I'm teaching classes for the general assemblies of the world or USC and organizations like that or I'm doing semi-private masterclasses that are a month-long immersive, and I meet with a small group of people and I have expert guest speakers on. It's just really, really fun. So I've really enjoyed it. That's why I do it, because I love it and love being a part of their journey. ROB: There's so many cool little hidden skills in there. I think you're able to keep going on a podcast because of that rhythm that you put into your life overall. I think people might not think entirely – you're based in the Los Angeles area, and that's content city. That has to partly pervade who's interested in talking to you. When I look at how you've picked up these skills along the way, one skill you picked up that I think a lot of people would look at with some jealousy is you have figured out how to be selected as a speaker at South by Southwest. That's where we originally intended to speak in person. How did you figure out that process? I know people who have been trying for years and can't sort it out. I imagine you did it one step at a time. ESPREE: Honestly, I feel like I got – what's that saying? “Where hard work meets luck and opportunity” or something like that, or preparedness? I've bene working so hard for so many years. I started going to South by as a journalist, and then I became a speaker at South by – I don't remember what year, but I've given many talks there and performed the podcast live and led meetup groups. But the meetup groups I've led have been the podcasters meetup, and like I said, in 2013 no one cared. I said I would do this thing; I was the only person offering myself up to do this thing. Or maybe there weren't a lot of people. And the talks that I've given have ranged from anything from in the early days it was more on entrepreneurship, and now, again, podcasting. It's just about demonstrating where my unique value proposition is, the unique insights, the energy that I bring to the table as a speaker, what makes me a speaker that stands out amongst the rest. So just really think about that for yourself. What is an interesting angle? Actually, I think I'll do a thing for you in a second, just for your audience, so you can have a little sampling of what that sounds like. The last thing is performing my podcast live at South by Southwest. I performed the Women in Tech podcast live last year and then also this year. Again, it's over time, establishing myself as a podcaster, my relationships, the audience that I have. The purpose and mission of why my content exists in the first place is very clear. It's just this stew of hard work, and then it's the luck of being noticed. Sometimes you can even manipulate being noticed. I should say positively manipulate, meaning that you're doing enough outreach, that you're using programs like Pipedrive and Contactually to make sure that you're continuously doing your outreach. That's maintaining your relationships. My mom comes from an entertainment background, and she always said – it was her or maybe my grandmother who said “the squeaky wheel gets the oil.” So when she talks about being in the entertainment business, she says they'd cast the people who called last because that's the person that was on the top of their mind. I'm like, that's really interesting. And it's true; the more you're on the top of people's minds, in a non-annoying way, the more they'll think of you when there's an opportunity. The more you make yourself helpful – I was featured in Forbes randomly, and the reason I was featured in Forbes, that feature happened because I was doing an interview I think a year or a year and a half before, and the interview went something like 3 hours late. So I was just sitting in a waiting room for several hours. I never complained and I just chilled there and I was nice about it. Then the person who kept coming back in to apologize to me was so grateful that I did that that when there was the opportunity for Forbes, I was the first person that was thought of. Just because I waited in a chill manner. [laughs] ROB: Which anybody can do. ESPREE: Totally. So it's like, how are you showing up to life in unique ways that make you stand apart? If it's okay with you, Rob, I'm going to do a quick thing. I'm going to show you how I start my speaking engagements and my podcast, because it's not this tone of voice. Is that okay with you? Can I do that? ROB: Run with it. ESPREE: Okay, cool. Everybody watch your eardrums just a little bit. I'm going to hold the mic a little bit away because I don't know the levels of how we're recording right now. But this is what it sounds like, and the reason why I'm sharing this with you is because this is what sets me apart and makes me a unique speaker and podcaster. I'd say the thing that sets me apart is my energy when I show up to the stage. Three… two… one… “Welcome back to the Women in Tech podcast, celebrating women in tech around the world! So excited for our next guest here today. Welcome…” and then you say the person's name. But that's just crazy, right? That's out of nowhere. Where it's inspired from is growing up, I was super into wrestling. [laughs] ROB: Yes, it sounds like wrestling. [laughs] That's amazing. ESPREE: I was super into wrestling and I loved the wrestlers being announced onstage, and then I was really into Steven Tyler's stage performance and how he would really be into the mic and really be energized. So that's why when I do my podcasts and my interviews, I stand. You never see people stand when they're doing it. I stand. And I do it for a lot of other reasons too, because of your vocal cords. Onstage, I stand. Sometimes I'll kick my shoes off. I'll never stand behind a podium. There's just all sorts of techniques. My friend Mark, who actually built the YouTube Player, gave me the best speaking advice. He said, “People don't remember what you say; they remember how you made them feel.” I think about that with my podcast. I think about that onstage. How am I making everyone feel? Are they feeling the way I intend for them to feel? And if not, what do I need to do? When I show up that way, the guest feels more energized, the audience feels more engaged, and to the event organizer, I'm a unique speaker that brings something different to the table. ROB: Absolutely. I love it. We have a wrestling announcement right here on the podcast. [laughs] I think you mentioned something that is really key that would be easy to get lost in the mix. You mentioned staying on people's minds in an un-annoying way. I think we are in a very perhaps more challenging moment for that, where people who don't have that skill may be a little bit lost. We are sheltering in place right now in our homes to avoid getting and spreading the coronavirus. What you can't count on is bumping into somebody in the halls, in a restaurant you usually run into, at a networking event. How do you think about staying on people's radar in an un-annoying way? Because quite often, I think people give advice of sending a link – and you actually did send me a very good link in our chat – but I think there are often times where that can feel still very inauthentic and people can tell. You're still just sending them a link because someone told you to send them a link to stay on their radar. ESPREE: A hundred percent. I think there's a lot of different ways, and we need to find the tools that are right for our own personalities. The kind of things that I look at – one of them, the first thing I want to say, there's a tool called Bombbomb which does video messaging. It's really great to make something a bit more personal, to show somebody that you care. I find that even when I send a Bombbomb video, if I don't say the person's name, they may think that I created it for a lot of people. I remember I made one for even my friend, who's also a customer, one time. She said, “You know, it was until you said my son's name, I thought it was a video for everyone.” It's really interesting to me because it was personalized. There's tools – like I said, Contactually. There's a ton of other tools. I know Tim Ferriss uses Evernote a lot. I don't necessarily know if he uses it for maintaining follow-up, but Evernote is a great tool. There's WorkFlowy. There's different programs that will spit out who you haven't followed up with lately. LinkedIn is such a powerful resource for all of us. I think it's about really thinking, who do you want to connect with? Why do you want to connect with them, and how often? And are you tracking that follow-up? I use a CRM system called Pipedrive, and like I said, I'm a huge fan of Contactually as well. I think Contactually is just a great follow-up tool. I've heard good things about Nimble. You could find out what's going on in someone's life via Twitter, via Instagram, via Facebook. Really paying attention to their social networks. I call it ego marketing. It sometimes sounds like a bad thing, but all of us – all of us – we operate on our egos. We feel like the world is revolving around us at all times. “What's that person thinking of me? What's that person doing,” blah, blah, blah, me, me, me. If you all of a sudden come to someone and say, “I watched your talk online,” and say the specific talk, and then say what you got out of it and maybe a timestamp, it is just so clear that that is about them. The kind of messages I can't stand – because I get an abundance of inbound messaging for the Women in Tech podcast, or even one yesterday, perfect example, the We Are LA Tech podcast. Someone messaged me asking to be on the show and they weren't in Los Angeles. If they knew the show, they'd know every single episode is from someone in Los Angeles. So obviously you don't care. You're just mass mailing. With Women in Tech, I'll get messages about the controversial topics someone could talk about, and if they knew the show, they'd know we do no controversy, no politics. So it tells me that you really don't care. I'm just some name on your list. So when you're thinking about follow-up, you want to think about: who do you want to follow up with and why? What's a meaningful way to follow up with them? And then tracking that follow-up. And not following up too much. Another example is somebody followed up with me three times in one week, and I hadn't seen any of the messages. Then on the third message they said, “I know you're probably getting annoyed with my messages” – which just shows me it's an automated system. “You're getting annoyed with my messages,” and the truth was I hadn't even seen the other two. My response back was, “One, I'm not interested, and two, I recommend you not follow up in such a short period of time.” [laughs] Imagine if I'm giving a talk, if I'm at South by Southwest this week, I am not really on email or paying attention. If you follow up three times this week, during this particular phase of my life, the chances of me seeing them is so low. That's why it's way more effective to follow up 3 weeks to a couple months apart. But just really be sincere in why you're even following up with the people in the first place. ROB: If you're following up 3 weeks or 3 months or anything like that, also, you have to have a mindset where you're playing the long game. You're not playing the short game where it's “How many times can I message you in 2 weeks and then either ignore you or maybe you've answered me.” ESPREE: Right. ROB: If someone looks at the Women in Tech podcast, I think one thing they'll realize is, number one, your level of commitment there. I think I'm seeing over 400, almost 450 episodes. But also, I think they'll notice that you do the work, and you do the work authentically. What I mean by that is you're not just cherry-picking and trying to ladder up to the biggest name. You have some names on the podcast that are known, but you also have – again, in this theme – people that your listeners might not know but they should. It looks to me like quite often you are going far and wide. You're doing the work of actually reaching out to people across the world, and probably even going there to have those conversations. ESPREE: Rob, I love how you did your homework. [laughs] You would be an email that I would open, because that is so spot-on. I get a lot of messages from a lot of super fancy people, thinking that they're just entitled to be on the show. My personal excitement is sharing a story of a woman that normally doesn't have access. I've traveled to Bosnia; recently I was in Kazakhstan. I've traveled to over 100 countries just to celebrate these women in tech in person, share their stories, be in their culture. People say, “Why not just do remotely?” I wouldn't see the bullets in the buildings on the streets of Bosnia if I wasn't in Bosnia, understanding that the girl I'm interviewing, as a child, she had to be in a bomb shelter to be safe from the war. These are just things you don't get on a 1-hour Skype call or something like that. So really discovering all these magnificent women in tech around the world, giving them the opportunity – I'm really proud that the Women in Tech podcast is, for the majority of guests, the first podcast they've ever been on. It just blows my mind. And it's not necessarily even, by the way, Rob, that these people aren't seasoned; they're just not the internet celebrities of the world. They're not the Gary Vaynerchuks. [laughs] Then I also have the more well-known people, as you mentioned, and I'm excited to share their stories as well. But my “why” in doing the show is not for social status. It's not to look good. It's really to be this bridge for women in tech around the world to be able to discover the resources and mentorship that they need to accelerate. Hearing stories of how women have pulled over to write notes, listening to the episodes, or shared the stories with their family, or investors have reached out to them because they've been on the show – truly social impact. It's amazing. So it's not about “do I look the coolest?” It's about “am I creating the biggest impact?” ROB: That resonates completely with who you are and what you want to accomplish. I think it's also a little bit of a secret – and it's not a secret because we're talking about it, but candidly, it makes booking a podcast a lot easier when you're booking people who are interesting and have a story, but it is their first podcast. They say yes a lot more. ESPREE: Oh yeah, I'm sure. Well, the one thing about women in tech – yes, I think your point is accurate, and, unfortunately, with women in tech – a lot of people ask me, “What's the biggest commonality of all the women in tech that you're met with?” They're expecting some technical answer. Unfortunately, the biggest commonality is that I think as a culture, oftentimes we feel we're not enough. So I will get women who will say “I don't think I'm good enough for your show” or “I haven't spoken before” or something. Then it's my responsibility as a person who wants to be empowering to give them the level of confidence, and also to say, “Listen, I wouldn't be picking you unless I thought you were good enough to be on the show, so how about I make the decision on that?” [laughs] I've had a couple people not want to be interviewed because they're scared, but yes, you are absolutely right that it's going to be a lot easier. You're also right that it's a huge pain point in the podcasting industry for new podcasters, or even a lot of seasoned podcasters, to get yeses from guests. It's a huge pain point. It is one that I do not have, and maybe that contributes to it, you're right. ROB: And you do in-person a lot, which always helps with that rapport. It would be great if we were, but that's not an option right now. We're not getting on planes right now. ESPREE: Totally. ROB: That is okay. We'll hope that we can meet up at South by Southwest next year, perhaps. ESPREE: A hundred percent. ROB: Espree, when people want to check out all the things that you're doing, where should they look to find you? ESPREE: Man, if only I had been smart enough to have one link that says all the things. [laughs] Honestly, look me up on LinkedIn, Espree Devora on LinkedIn. Add me there. It's also Espree Devora on all social – on Instagram, on Twitter, on Facebook. I do really engage on Twitter. And check out the podcasts, WeAreLATech.fm and WomeninTech.fm. ROB: It's all those little things. You put in the work on the domains too. ESPREE: Yeah. ROB: Fantastic. You're consistent on the brand. Espree, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been a true joy to get to know you a little bit, and I know our audience has enjoyed your challenging example of just doing one more thing each day and how that carries through in everything you do. ESPREE: Thank you so much for having me, Rob. This has been great. I'm happy that you made it remote and we were able to make this happen. ROB: That's great. Be well. ESPREE: Bye. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Email marketing is STILL the most powerful online marketing channel but ONLY if our emails are getting read and step 1 in that is getting them delivered... Adrian Savage is an expert in email deliverability, founder of Deliverability Dashboard and all about helping you avoid the Spam folder and win the email race to the Inbox. Including: What is ‘deliverability' - what does it mean? What's an average open rate? We're never going to get 100% of email subscribers opening so what's possible? How important your email platform is - and the one platform Adrian 'wouldn't touch with a bargepole' If our deliverability is poor, is that a good reason to move platforms? What happens if we do nothing? How long until we can expect results from our deliverability activities? TRANSCRIPT: Rob Tyson: Welcome back. This is Rob Tyson here and in the last episode, I talked to Dave Plunkett about how to run a partner program for lead generation. So do catch up on that show if you missed it, but I'm here today with Adrian Savage. Now, Adrian is an expert in email deliverability. He's the founder and the creator of Deliverability Dashboard. And he is all about helping you to avoid the spam folder and win the email race to the inbox. And this is really important because we'll talk about this but I think email marketing is still the most powerful online marketing channel but only, of course, if our emails are getting read and the first step in them getting read is them actually getting delivered. So I can't wait to pick Adrian's brains on all that. But before we welcome Adrian and get into all that good stuff, if you're listening to this show, chances are good you have professional expertise you'd like to monetize with an online business or an online component, perhaps, that breaks the time for money link. And if that's the case, I'd like to invite you. I have a free web class that's gonna explain why the ‘ascension model' or ‘value ladder' you've probably heard quite a bit about is actually a really bad approach for most people in your position, and exactly what you should do right now instead if you'd like to generate real cash flow quickly and finally get on the right track with monetizing your expertise online. So all that is free. All you need to do is pop along to robtyson.net/class for the details. That is robtyson.net/class. So as I said, I'm here with Adrian savage. Adrian, welcome. Good to see you. Adrian Savage: Hi, Rob. Thanks for inviting me. Rob: You are most welcome. And I think this is a really interesting and valuable topic for people. So what's your background briefly? How did you get into this rarefied area of email deliverability in the first place? Adrian: It has been quite a journey. I won't go all the way back to when I was 7 because that was when I became a geek because my dad bought an Apple II computer home and it was muggins here who taught him how to use it. I went down a very kind of traditional, academic, corporate career until about 9 or 10 years ago. My ex-wife moved to the other end of the country with my kids. So I went from seeing them a couple of times a week to every third weekend, and that was my big catalyst to get out of corporate life. I took my IT geekery and combined that with sales and marketing, and I got into the marketing automation space. And then I started to get clients who were having problems getting their emails into the inboxes of their clients and their audiences. So I first created some software to help with that because going back a few years, there was a lot more of an impact on where your emails were being sent from. So that was my first foray into email deliverability. And since then I've kept half an eye on that. And then for the last 12 months or so, since there's been some really big changes to how email inbox placement works, then I've had some very clear messages from the world that my expertise is needed. So I'm now focusing, maybe not quite 100%, maybe 99% on that. I still got a few other little things in this space that I'm working on. But most of what I'm doing now is just helping people get their emails delivered better, creating software that helps them do that, and just sharing the message as much as I can. Rob: And what is deliverability in the email context? How do you define that word? Adrian: So there is a lot of misunderstanding because sometimes people talk about delivery, sometimes people talk about deliverability. And they are two very distinctive things. The first thing is when you are sending an email or when your email marketing system is sending an email, then the job that the technology has is just to get it as far as the recipient's email server. So let's supposing that I use Google and you use Hotmail, then if I'm gonna send you an email, then my Google server has got to connect to Hotmail and say, "Here is the email." And as long as Hotmail say, "Yes, thank you. I have received it," then the delivery has been made. So that's just like a postman posting the letter through the letterbox. The problem is you don't know if there's a dog waiting on the side of that mailbox to chew the thing up and run away and it never gets opened by the person who was meant to get it. And deliverability is that part of it. It's once it's been accepted by Hotmail or Gmail or whoever, are they gonna put it into the inbox or is it gonna end up in the spam folder or the promotions tab or, heaven forbid, are they just gonna throw it in the garbage and it doesn't even get as far as spam, which can happen. And that is the deliverability part. And that is based on a lot more than just where it came from. And that's what we'll talk about today. But that's the key difference. You know, if you're using something like ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp, their job is to get it to the recipient's server. And they will do a very good job on that most of the time. But then what happens after that, that's where it gets interesting. Rob: And we would gauge this how, with open rates, right? I mean... Adrian: Yeah. It's a real challenge because you can't measure deliverability because, you know, we've got no idea. If someone hasn't opened the email, is it because they didn't care about it? Is it because they were too busy? Or is it because Google or Hotmail or whoever, bless them, decided not to put it in the inbox in the first place? So you're quite right. We can infer things through the open rates, and we can look at trends and things like that. And there are some testing tools out there that claim to be able to tell you whether you're hitting the inbox or not, but even those have got their limits. So it is very difficult indeed. And, you know, this is harder than SEO. With SEO, at least you can see where you are on the search rankings. There's as many different factors to get into the inbox as there are for getting to be number one on Google these days. But it is a much more of a kind of weird thing because you can't see what your results are. You've just got to infer it as in terms of are more people opening our emails or fewer people opening them? Rob: And with that caveat, I mean, what is an average open rate? I mean, I know it varies wildly, doesn't it? But... Adrian: Totally. It is an interesting one because, you know, we're talking a lot in this podcast about how to double your open rate. And, you know, a joke that I often make is that I can double anyone's open rates in seconds. And the way I will do that is I will remove half of the people from their email list who haven't opened anything for a while, and then the next time you send out an email blast, guess what, then if the same number of people opened as last time, then the open rate is doubled. So, it is a very subjective term because it depends on lots of factors. It depends on how engaged your audience is at the moment. It depends...then there is the content. There's the type of business you're in. But what I would say is that I've got clients that have messed things up to the point where they're getting a 0.2% open rate with Google, because they have upset Google to that point. I've got typical clients, maybe starting with a 10% to 20% open rate. And that's, you know, just that's what they've been getting without getting any advice from me without using any of my software or anything. If people are managing their engagement well, and they're doing everything they can, then you could expect maybe 35%, 36%, 37% open rates. That's the kind of amount that I'm getting typically with my mailing list when I'm managing the engagement. And then the other side of it is just well, how many people...or if a new person signs up to your mailing list, what is the likelihood of them opening something as well? So a good barometer is what percentage of new contacts are opening something from me? And if you're managing things well, then I've got clients where 80% of their new signups will open an email from them at some point in the first few weeks. So, you know, there are lots of different ways to measure it. But if you just look at the pure open rate, I would say that you can consider yourself to be doing well, if you're getting more than 30% opens. Rob: Okay, so most of us, you know, a bit of room for improvement there. Adrian: Definitely. Rob: For sure. And we will be using some kind of email software provider so it may be ActiveCampaign, AWeber, Infusionsoft, whatever it may be. Are some of these software providers just better for this than others? And if so, who? Adrian: It's a very interesting one because you can go to any Facebook group or mailing list or discussion forum about any of these platforms, and you can be guaranteed there will always be people complaining about deliverability and saying that emails aren't getting through, they will be blaming the platform. And now if someone's blaming Infusionsoft, then you can take the word Infusionsoft out, put ActiveCampaign in and someone else will be saying the same thing. So it's perception-based, very subjective. But in reality, these days, every single one of these email platforms has a very devoted, dedicated email compliance team, making sure they're not on blacklists, making sure they're getting a good 99-point-something percent delivery rate to the other servers. In some cases, the reputation of the system sending it has a small impact. But I can be absolutely certain and say that if you switch from one provider to another, then you are gonna experience a drop in your open rate regardless of where you're moving from and to. And the reason for that is because one of the reasons that you will suffer from poor open rates is if you do something that looks like a spammer. And guess what spammers do. They move from one platform to the next, to the next. So anytime Google or Microsoft or any of the big players see that you've moved platforms, they will instantly think, "Hang on, there's something going on here." And it might be that things recover again. But you will always have a dip to start with. And it's unlikely that you're gonna do much better than you did before because you've got to build everything up again. So I would say that in terms of how good the platforms are at getting their emails delivered, they're all pretty good. They all have the occasional problem. But it's not a reason to switch platforms. What I would tend to... When I recommend an email platform, comparing one to another, what I will look at is how easy is it to manage the various parameters that will help you to improve your deliverability. And the big thing that I'll talk about later with that is engagement. Because if you can't easily identify the people who are and are not opening your emails, then it's gonna be more difficult to send the right things to the right people at the right time. So, no, I won't call many platforms out for being good because there's lots of good ones, but ConvertKit is one that goes on my real kind of do not touch with a bargepole list, because they have a very, very kind of very poor way of measuring and managing engagement. And you can't even download the data to use from third-party tools. So all the email deliverability tools and software that I've written, I can't even connect that up to ConvertKit because they don't make that data available. Now I'm hoping that's gonna change. So maybe, you know, if people listen to this a few months down the line, maybe that's changed. But the biggest thing that matters to me is: how easy is it to manage the engagement? And most of the platforms are okay. Infusionsoft as an example is really good. ActiveCampaign, you have to jump through a few hoops. And to do a real good job, then you need to use my software to make it easier. But it does depend very much and I'd say, you know, because there are so many different platforms out there, then, you know, if you're choosing one at the start, then engagement management is one of the important things. If you're already using a platform, though, it's not a reason to switch as long as everything else is okay. Rob: Now, that's good. Well, I can speak from bitter experience here, because I actually moved from AWeber, which I'd used for many years, to ActiveCampaign, which I really like, by the way. I like ActiveCampaign, but when I did that, I wasn't aware that you could fall foul of this. Adrian: Absolutely. Rob: And I took a real hit early on. You know, it just wasn't the same and it took some time to get over that. So is there any way if we are moving platforms for some reason, is there any way to manage that process better than I did? Adrian: Yeah, totally. And the other thing is all about who you move across first because as I've already mentioned, it's all about who is engaging with you at the moment, and are you only mailing those. So if you can identify who has opened something from you in the last 30 days, and when you move to a new platform, send emails to those people first. Because that way then you build up a good reputation with your new platform because they want to see that you're a good sender. And at the same time, you're still getting a reasonable open rate. And that helps your domain sending reputation with people like Google, Microsoft, because one of the things they're doing now is they are crowdsourcing your reputation based on which of... Let's supposing that you've got 10,000 people on your mailing list, on average, half of those will be on Google. So Google will look at those 5000 people and say, "Right, how many of those people are opening Adrian's emails right now?" And if it's only 5%, 10%, then Adrian gets a poor domain reputation score from Google. If I'm getting 30%, 40% then I'm getting a good engagement reputation. So it's very much around understanding what they're looking for and just as much as you can, stack the odds in your favor by only starting with the most engaged people, then you can start to go further back. But it is like the law of diminishing returns. The longer it is since someone has opened something from you, the less likely they are to ever open anything ever again. Rob: Yeah, sure. And what happens if we do nothing? You know, if we don't do anything about deliverability these days, I mean, what is that gonna look like for us? Adrian: Oh, it's not a very good picture. Because the thing that people, a lot of people still don't get is how much the email landscape has changed. Because if you wind the clock back to those wonderful years, 10 years ago, you could build up a big list, you know, get as many people onto it, then you basically spam the crap out of them, email them as much as you like. And then you keep emailing until they buy, until they die, or until they unsubscribe. And that was, you know, that was how everyone did it. And that's how people still do it today in some cases. But if they do that now and just keep emailing, keep emailing, then you will see a very, very continuous constant reduction in the number of people opening your emails. Because typically I'm seeing about 10% of your audience disengages on a monthly basis. And that's the law of averages. Sometimes people, you know, they turn off their mail address, they might change jobs, they might lose interest, whatever it is, then, you know, you are typically gonna lose 10% of your audience through disengagement and apathy and everything else on a monthly basis. So, you know, you don't need to be a genius mathematician to work out that as time goes on, then you are gonna get fewer and fewer people opening. Now obviously, if you've got a good lead generation in place, and you're refilling the hopper from the top all the time, you might not notice as much. But if you're literally getting no new leads, and just keep emailing the old list time and time again, then you will see things decline. And that's one of the reasons that people say that email is dying when actually it's not. It's just people aren't necessarily getting enough leads and managing their engagement. Rob: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So these four steps, talk to us about those. Adrian: Okay, so very, very simple. The first thing you want to do is you wanna protect your reputation. And the way you do that is you scrub your email list, you make sure there are no spam traps on there, you make sure that there's no dead addresses that your email marketing platform hasn't picked up on. Make sure that there's, you know, you're not sending too many emails to role accounts like sales@, or info@ and that kind of thing. And scrubbing the list will find all those different bad email addresses. And then you can choose. In most cases, what you'd do is you would stop emailing all of the addresses that have been identified as bad. And that's just a good way of making sure that you're not hitting spam traps. I haven't got time to go into the detail about spam traps, but the simple version is they are email addresses that have been created either to catch people scraping stuff off the internet, which I'm sure no one listening to this would ever do. Or alternatively, people who aren't keeping their list clean because if an email address stops working, then it will bounce for a while, but then they will reactivate that address as a spam trap. And if you're still emailing that address afterwards, then you go on to the bad boys' list as well. So scrubbing the list helps avoid that, helps keep your reputation clean, and it doesn't cost a huge amount of money. The list scrubbing services will typically say you should do this every three months. But they would, wouldn't they? Because they get the money out of it. But I would say that if you've never done it ever, then you should, and it probably makes sense to do it periodically, maybe once a year, maybe more frequently than that if you keep turning up more problems when you do scrub the list, but definitely worth doing. Rob: So you would use...you would go to a specialist or use a specialist piece of software for this because there are tools built-in with, you know, ActiveCampaign, for example, where it will imply that it's gonna help you clean up the list. Adrian: Yeah, absolutely. Rob: In fact, it may even be called list clean up. So are you saying that's not really adequate or...? Adrian: It doesn't get rid of the nasties. It will certainly help you find the addresses that might have disengaged or might no longer work or anything like that. But if it is an actual toxic address that gonna cause you problems if you mail it, then it's very difficult for the email providers to help you identify that. So yeah, third-party tools that do that will do the job. And it's one of the things that I've actually added to my... I don't have any list scrubbing software myself, but my email deliverability utilities that I've got. I've got a free integration that helps you scrub your list in place on the platform, because normally, you have to download the list to a CSV file, upload it to the scrubbing service, scrub the list, download the result, upload it into your email platform, and it's a right faff when you do that. So I've written a little tool that actually integrates with that and you just literally press a button, and it will either scrub your entire list or a particular segment and then it applies a tag with the results. You decide what to do. So nice and simple. And I'll share more details about that when we get to the end bit. Rob: Good stuff. So that was step one. So basically scrubbing the list is step one. Adrian: Yeah, absolutely. So second step, then, so scrubbing the list is one of the ways to help your reputation. The next thing that matters massively is authentication. And this is about making sure that firstly, you're telling the world who you trust to send emails on your behalf, and secondly, making sure that your emails are being digitally signed by you. So the first thing is called SPF, which stands for Sender Policy Framework. And this tells the world which email systems you trust. So let's supposing that you're using G Suite for your business emails, and then you're using ActiveCampaign for your marketing emails, then you have one...you only have one SPF record. And in the SPF record, it would say that you trust Google and Active campaigns. So that way then when those emails come from those providers, the recipients will check that against your SPF record, and they'll see a big tick in the box if they come from the right place. If someone else has then sent it elsewhere, and they're trying to forge your email, then that gets treated with suspicion obviously. But spammers don't use SPF. So that's one reason to set that up. It's just one way of showing that you're legitimate. So that's nice and simple. And again, most email platforms, I think almost all of them, you might have to dig around sometimes, but they will give you the details as to how to set SPF up for those platforms. Then the second part of it is called DKIM. So, Domain Keys Identified Mail. Again, I'm gonna kind of call out ConvertKit as giving bad advice here, actually, because they say that you should only set up DKIM if you've got more than 50,000 emails a month going out, which is not strictly true. As long as you have got a good sending reputation, you should always set up DKIM, because Google, in particular, will use that digital signature that gets attached to every single email, as a way of proving that it was from you, proving it was legitimate. And if it's been DKIM-signed, then it means that, "No, it can't have been forged." So again, most email platforms, even ConvertKit, will do that for you, you just have to make a bit of a fuss. But, you know, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, Infusionsoft, you know, the list goes on, they will allow you to set this up. It might be called email authentication, it might be called DKIM, it might be digitally signing, but dig around, you can find it, very, very important to do that. Rob: Okay. All right. So that's step two, those two? Adrian: Yeah, absolutely. I will quickly mention DMARC, which is the third authentication method, which again, is worth doing. But you have to be very careful with DMARC. And make sure whoever sets it up for you knows what they're doing. Because DMARC will tell the recipients to reject and throw emails in the bin, not even the spam folder, if it's not set up right. So be very careful with that. But if you've got a properly set up DMARC record, that is another indicator that you're legitimate, but be careful with that. You know, DKIM you can't get wrong. It either works or nothing happens. SPF, you know, it's not the end of the world if you get that wrong, but, you know, you should make sure it's correct. But if you get DMARC wrong, your emails will suddenly stop going. So be very careful there. Rob: Okay. Proceed with a bit of care? Adrian: Definitely. Rob: Good stuff. So we've talked about scrubbing the list, we've talked about authentication, the third step? Adrian: Okay, so the third thing is about whitelisting. And this is really, really important. Because normally, you are completely at the whim of Google. You're at the whim of Microsoft. Whichever your email provider is, they are gonna decide which emails they show to you and which ones they don't. And whitelisting is a way of forcing them to show the emails that you tell them that you want to see. So as an email marketer, you want to be sharing these whitelisting instructions with your audience. And it's a bit pointless doing it by email because if the emails aren't getting through, they won't do it. So it means that when someone signs up for your list, the first thing you have to show them on your thank you page is how to whitelist you. And this depends very much on the platform that they use. Now the really clever solution is to actually detect what platform they're using and show them personalized whitelisting instructions. So if they're using G Suite or Gmail, you can tell them how to set up a filter to always bypass the spam folder. If they're using Hotmail, or Office 365 or something like that, then you can show them different instructions. And there's ways of actually developing custom code that goes on to the thank you page that can do that. I've done that for a few clients. I've done that on one of my own signup pages, I do that. But if that sounds like too much work, you can also get your own custom whitelisting instructions generated that will just show all of the different platforms on there and how to whitelist you. And if you go to a website and the address is simply whitelist.guru, I'll just repeat that, whitelist.guru, then there's a guy called Chris Lang, who has created a do-it-yourself whitelisting instruction generator. You put your name, your brand, your email address in there, press a button, and it will give you a nice pretty HTML page with your personalized instructions on that you can copy, save, put in your thank you page, off you go. So, very important... Rob: That's handy. Adrian: It's very useful. Bear in mind that not everyone will follow those instructions. But even if 10% of them do, then you're doing yourself a favor. And if people complain, they're not getting your emails ever, then those are the instructions they need to see. Rob: Okay, so that was whitelisting Adrian: Yep. So that leaves us one final step. Now, this is a little bit tenuous, because it isn't just one step. This is more about change your mindset forever. Because as soon as you stop doing this, then this goes back to when we talked about what happens if you do nothing. And this is all about managing your engagement, making sure that you are only sending emails to the people that have opened from you most recently. And if you find people that haven't opened for a while, then you need to maybe send them a reengagement campaign that I'll talk about in a sec. And if they still haven't engaged at that point, then basically, you get rid of them off your list. You're gonna be very ruthless with the way that you manage engagements. Because, you know, as I said earlier on, if only 5% of your audience is opening something, Google and Microsoft and Yahoo will think that you're, you know, sending out complete and utter garbage and they will start putting your emails into the promotions, into the spam, into the junk and so on. So it's important that you are maximizing the chances of people opening your emails by only sending your emails to the people that have recently opened something. And one of the biggest questions that I get asked is, "Well, how far back should I go?" And it depends very much on whether you've got a problem or not. If you haven't got a problem, then my typical rule of thumb is to send emails to people that have opened something within the last 90 days. If you've got a problem, you might need to dial that back a bit or if you want to have a really super-engaged list, then you need to dial that back to 30 days. And sometimes you're gonna have kind of a two or three-tier strategy here. So you might say that people who have opened something in the last 30 days, I'm gonna send them everything. I'll send them maybe two, maybe even three emails a week. If they've opened something between 30 and 90 days, then maybe I'll send something every week or two. If they've opened something beyond 90 days, then ideally, you would just put them through a re-engagement campaign when they reach 90 days of no engagement. And if they ignore that, delete them. Some people will still send the occasional reminder to those people. I would say if it's more than a year, never send them. But maybe between 90 days and a year, then maybe send something every month or two just to give them another chance. You know, the law of averages says that the longer since someone opened something, the less likely they are to open anything. And the other thing to look at as well is we talked briefly about new contacts and the likelihood of them opening something. If someone signs up for your lead magnet, and then they haven't opened anything from you within the first 7 to 14 days, the chances are, they will never ever, ever open anything. Again, they're just gonna be there hurting your sending reputation. So another thing that I recommend is if you've got a process in place for your new contacts, then maybe put something in where when it reaches two weeks, and they haven't opened anything from you, maybe put them through a little reminder. And then again, if there's no engagement, get rid of them. Because, you know, let's face it, if someone signs up for your freebie, and they won't even open that, the chances are they're never gonna be interested in anything else as well. So, you know, that is the main thing. It can be a very arduous task, managing your engagement, but the dividends that it pays off are massive. That is what will make the biggest difference. And even though you will see that you are mailing fewer people, then the open rate will go up very quickly. You know, I know that what we've talked about in the past is how long does it take before you see results. And I would say typically, it can take between one and three months for you to get really good results. When I've been working with, you know, some of my private clients, I had one that came in. They are on a just under a 12% open rate, and within three months, then their open rates had reached 25%. And even though they were mailing fewer people, the actual number of people opening the emails had gone up. So obviously, the number of people hadn't doubled, but it had certainly gone up a bit from when it was 11%, 12%. So, you know, it can take a few months, but as long as you are consistent, then that's what works. And the little tale of woe that I will share is don't let the fear get to you. Don't let the fear of loss and the fear of letting go. Because that same client the month after sent a bunch of email broadcasts to their entire list again without managing the engagement. And within two days, Google had downgraded their reputation and their open rate fell through the floor. It took another month to get that back. So you have gotta keep your nerve. And you gotta be very consistent with this. But the more you do that, the better you'll be rewarded. Rob: Wow. So were those really old people, you just feel it's just not worth having them on the list at all? You know, the chance... Adrian: No. Absolutely not. Because typically, if you send an email broadcast, just the people that have opened more than 90 days ago, you will get maybe a 2%, 3% open rate if you're lucky. But if you keep mailing those people that don't open, the chances are that you'll get 10% fewer people seeing your email in the first place. So it becomes a very simple trade-off that yes, you might get a few more opens, but fewer people long term will see those emails. Obviously, just because they're not opening the emails, doesn't mean you can't use those addresses for Facebook, custom audiences and retargeting, and things like that. So there's still a value in that data. It's just that you shouldn't really email them, you know, very often if at all. Rob: And, I mean, I suppose there's a bit of value in, you know, you could go to the lengths with if we call those people kinda dead subscribers, inactive subscribers, I suppose you could have a crack at... You know, if you had a large number of these, you could maybe take them to another platform and, you know, try send or two to them from different platforms. Adrian: It's interesting you say that because typically, you know, particularly now, Google and their machine learning is clever than all of us put together. And unless you can send a separate email from a separate domain with absolutely no connection to anything else that you've got, then it will probably be linked back to you somehow and your campaign sending reputation will still take a hit. So it doesn't really matter whether you do it from your current mail platform or a different one, it is more just about making sure that your overall engagement still stays high. So, you know, if you are gonna try and send re-engagement emails to the older inactive contacts, make sure you're sending lots of good stuff to the people that are opening so that the kind of the poor performance is slightly more lost in the noise. And that's why I said, you know, having this kind of two or three-tiered process where you're sending the most content to the people that are engaging the most. And that helps you then because at least then you've got a good reputation to start with. And if you are sending to the inactive people, then it's not gonna drag you down as much as if you're doing that regularly. Rob: It's nice, great. And I suppose the good news is that to a large extent, we should be able to automate a lot of this process, the reactivation process, that kinda thing? Adrian: Yes, a lot of the email platforms have some level of that. Again, they'll kinda help you do maybe, you know, it's the 80/20 rule all over again. They'll help you do kind of the 20% that has 80% of the impact, but you can always do it slightly better. That's one of the reasons that one of the best software that I wrote actually makes it easier to do that. Because sometimes, you know, I'll use both ActiveCampaign and Infusionsoft are good examples of this, is that they will give you, you know, enough to do a semi-decent job. But if you wanna really get down into the weeds in this and say, "Right, I'll have different strategies for 30 days versus 90 days versus more than 90 days," then it requires a lot of hard work and manual reporting. So sometimes the software that I've got makes that easier. But, you know, there's always a level of it that you can automate. Rob: Okay, no, great. Really, really helpful. So to wrap up, then, if listeners only took one nugget or piece of advice away, what should that be? Adrian: If I was gonna choose one thing out of that, obviously, all four are important. But I think, you know, managing...assuming that you haven't bought a list or something horrific like that, managing your engagement on an ongoing basis is the most effective way of keeping things healthy. Because that way then, assuming that spam traps and things like that don't open your emails, which most of them don't, then as long as you stop sending emails to people that aren't opening, then that will keep things clean, it'll keep your domain reputation up, and, you know, it will mean that as time goes on, then more people will see your email. So engagement, engagement, engagement. That's the key one. Rob: Excellent. Where's the best place, Adrian, if people wanna get more from you? Where should they go? Where can they check you out? Adrian: Nice and simple. So the first thing, I've got a free email health check service. And that works with most email marketing platforms. I'm adding more all the time. So right now if you've got Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Sendinblue, Constant Contact, then it already works with those and I'm adding others in. And that will just give you a nice simple score between 0 and 100 telling you how well you're managing your engagement right now, give you some hints and tips to improve that. And to get that you can go to emailhealthcheck.net and just sign up. If you're not using those platforms, then sign up there anyway and you can get added to my list. I'm always sending out blog posts and hints and tips, things like that. And also you can find me on Facebook, facebook.com/adriansavage. Connect with me there. I'm always happy to point people in the right direction if they need any help. Rob: That is excellent. And I can vouch for Adrian, because you helped me... I think we had a look at some of my stuff with your software and very enlightening it was too and I've began to do some of the things that you recommended. Adrian: Excellent. Rob: There we go. Good stuff. Well, Adrian, this has been really valuable. So just to say thank you. This has been really helpful. Adrian: And I've really enjoyed it. And thank you very much for inviting me onto the podcast. Rob: You are very welcome. And I will talk to you soon. Adrian: Great stuff. Thanks, Rob. Rob: Hey, it's Rob, again. Want to build a successful online business from your expertise? Well, the game has changed. There are bigger opportunities, but also bigger pitfalls than ever before. And I would hate for you to waste years figuring these things out for yourself. Now as a listener to this show, you're obviously a sensible person, right? So here's my invitation to you. Apply to jump on a call with me in the next few days and let's talk about you. You will get feedback on your ideas. You will get a product concept that is fit for right now and you will get a personalized sales and income plan to take away. That is free but availability is limited. So please go along right now to chatwithrob.com. That is, chatwithrob.com. Do that now. I'm looking forward to hearing from you. Once again, that is chatwithrob.com. Talk to you soon.

Email marketing is STILL the most powerful online marketing channel but ONLY if our emails are getting read and step 1 in that is getting them delivered... Adrian Savage is an expert in email deliverability, founder of Deliverability Dashboard and all about helping you avoid the Spam folder and win the email race to the Inbox. Including: What is ‘deliverability’ - what does it mean? What’s an average open rate? We’re never going to get 100% of email subscribers opening so what’s possible? How important your email platform is - and the one platform Adrian 'wouldn't touch with a bargepole' If our deliverability is poor, is that a good reason to move platforms? What happens if we do nothing? How long until we can expect results from our deliverability activities? TRANSCRIPT: Rob Tyson: Welcome back. This is Rob Tyson here and in the last episode, I talked to Dave Plunkett about how to run a partner program for lead generation. So do catch up on that show if you missed it, but I'm here today with Adrian Savage. Now, Adrian is an expert in email deliverability. He's the founder and the creator of Deliverability Dashboard. And he is all about helping you to avoid the spam folder and win the email race to the inbox.   And this is really important because we'll talk about this but I think email marketing is still the most powerful online marketing channel but only, of course, if our emails are getting read and the first step in them getting read is them actually getting delivered. So I can't wait to pick Adrian's brains on all that. But before we welcome Adrian and get into all that good stuff, if you're listening to this show, chances are good you have professional expertise you'd like to monetize with an online business or an online component, perhaps, that breaks the time for money link.   And if that's the case, I'd like to invite you. I have a free web class that's gonna explain why the ‘ascension model’ or ‘value ladder’ you've probably heard quite a bit about is actually a really bad approach for most people in your position, and exactly what you should do right now instead if you'd like to generate real cash flow quickly and finally get on the right track with monetizing your expertise online. So all that is free. All you need to do is pop along to robtyson.net/class for the details. That is robtyson.net/class. So as I said, I'm here with Adrian savage. Adrian, welcome. Good to see you.   Adrian Savage: Hi, Rob. Thanks for inviting me.   Rob: You are most welcome. And I think this is a really interesting and valuable topic for people. So what's your background briefly? How did you get into this rarefied area of email deliverability in the first place?   Adrian: It has been quite a journey. I won't go all the way back to when I was 7 because that was when I became a geek because my dad bought an Apple II computer home and it was muggins here who taught him how to use it. I went down a very kind of traditional, academic, corporate career until about 9 or 10 years ago. My ex-wife moved to the other end of the country with my kids. So I went from seeing them a couple of times a week to every third weekend, and that was my big catalyst to get out of corporate life. I took my IT geekery and combined that with sales and marketing, and I got into the marketing automation space. And then I started to get clients who were having problems getting their emails into the inboxes of their clients and their audiences.   So I first created some software to help with that because going back a few years, there was a lot more of an impact on where your emails were being sent from. So that was my first foray into email deliverability. And since then I've kept half an eye on that. And then for the last 12 months or so, since there's been some really big changes to how email inbox placement works, then I've had some very clear messages from the world that my expertise is needed. So I'm now focusing, maybe not quite 100%, maybe 99% on that. I still got a few other little things in this space that I'm working on. But most of what I'm doing now is just helping people get their emails delivered better, creating software that helps them do that, and just sharing the message as much as I can.   Rob: And what is deliverability in the email context? How do you define that word?   Adrian: So there is a lot of misunderstanding because sometimes people talk about delivery, sometimes people talk about deliverability. And they are two very distinctive things. The first thing is when you are sending an email or when your email marketing system is sending an email, then the job that the technology has is just to get it as far as the recipient's email server. So let's supposing that I use Google and you use Hotmail, then if I'm gonna send you an email, then my Google server has got to connect to Hotmail and say, "Here is the email." And as long as Hotmail say, "Yes, thank you. I have received it," then the delivery has been made.   So that's just like a postman posting the letter through the letterbox. The problem is you don't know if there's a dog waiting on the side of that mailbox to chew the thing up and run away and it never gets opened by the person who was meant to get it. And deliverability is that part of it. It's once it's been accepted by Hotmail or Gmail or whoever, are they gonna put it into the inbox or is it gonna end up in the spam folder or the promotions tab or, heaven forbid, are they just gonna throw it in the garbage and it doesn't even get as far as spam, which can happen.   And that is the deliverability part. And that is based on a lot more than just where it came from. And that's what we'll talk about today. But that's the key difference. You know, if you're using something like ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp, their job is to get it to the recipient's server. And they will do a very good job on that most of the time. But then what happens after that, that's where it gets interesting.   Rob: And we would gauge this how, with open rates, right? I mean...   Adrian: Yeah. It's a real challenge because you can't measure deliverability because, you know, we've got no idea. If someone hasn't opened the email, is it because they didn't care about it? Is it because they were too busy? Or is it because Google or Hotmail or whoever, bless them, decided not to put it in the inbox in the first place?   So you're quite right. We can infer things through the open rates, and we can look at trends and things like that. And there are some testing tools out there that claim to be able to tell you whether you're hitting the inbox or not, but even those have got their limits. So it is very difficult indeed. And, you know, this is harder than SEO. With SEO, at least you can see where you are on the search rankings. There's as many different factors to get into the inbox as there are for getting to be number one on Google these days. But it is a much more of a kind of weird thing because you can't see what your results are. You've just got to infer it as in terms of are more people opening our emails or fewer people opening them?   Rob: And with that caveat, I mean, what is an average open rate? I mean, I know it varies wildly, doesn't it? But...   Adrian: Totally. It is an interesting one because, you know, we're talking a lot in this podcast about how to double your open rate. And, you know, a joke that I often make is that I can double anyone's open rates in seconds. And the way I will do that is I will remove half of the people from their email list who haven't opened anything for a while, and then the next time you send out an email blast, guess what, then if the same number of people opened as last time, then the open rate is doubled. So, it is a very subjective term because it depends on lots of factors.   It depends on how engaged your audience is at the moment. It depends...then there is the content. There's the type of business you're in. But what I would say is that I've got clients that have messed things up to the point where they're getting a 0.2% open rate with Google, because they have upset Google to that point. I've got typical clients, maybe starting with a 10% to 20% open rate. And that's, you know, just that's what they've been getting without getting any advice from me without using any of my software or anything. If people are managing their engagement well, and they're doing everything they can, then you could expect maybe 35%, 36%, 37% open rates.   That's the kind of amount that I'm getting typically with my mailing list when I'm managing the engagement. And then the other side of it is just well, how many people...or if a new person signs up to your mailing list, what is the likelihood of them opening something as well? So a good barometer is what percentage of new contacts are opening something from me? And if you're managing things well, then I've got clients where 80% of their new signups will open an email from them at some point in the first few weeks. So, you know, there are lots of different ways to measure it. But if you just look at the pure open rate, I would say that you can consider yourself to be doing well, if you're getting more than 30% opens.   Rob: Okay, so most of us, you know, a bit of room for improvement there.   Adrian: Definitely.   Rob: For sure. And we will be using some kind of email software provider so it may be ActiveCampaign, AWeber, Infusionsoft, whatever it may be. Are some of these software providers just better for this than others? And if so, who?   Adrian: It's a very interesting one because you can go to any Facebook group or mailing list or discussion forum about any of these platforms, and you can be guaranteed there will always be people complaining about deliverability and saying that emails aren't getting through, they will be blaming the platform. And now if someone's blaming Infusionsoft, then you can take the word Infusionsoft out, put ActiveCampaign in and someone else will be saying the same thing. So it's perception-based, very subjective. But in reality, these days, every single one of these email platforms has a very devoted, dedicated email compliance team, making sure they're not on blacklists, making sure they're getting a good 99-point-something percent delivery rate to the other servers.   In some cases, the reputation of the system sending it has a small impact. But I can be absolutely certain and say that if you switch from one provider to another, then you are gonna experience a drop in your open rate regardless of where you're moving from and to. And the reason for that is because one of the reasons that you will suffer from poor open rates is if you do something that looks like a spammer. And guess what spammers do. They move from one platform to the next, to the next. So anytime Google or Microsoft or any of the big players see that you've moved platforms, they will instantly think, "Hang on, there's something going on here."   And it might be that things recover again. But you will always have a dip to start with. And it's unlikely that you're gonna do much better than you did before because you've got to build everything up again. So I would say that in terms of how good the platforms are at getting their emails delivered, they're all pretty good. They all have the occasional problem. But it's not a reason to switch platforms. What I would tend to... When I recommend an email platform, comparing one to another, what I will look at is how easy is it to manage the various parameters that will help you to improve your deliverability. And the big thing that I'll talk about later with that is engagement.   Because if you can't easily identify the people who are and are not opening your emails, then it's gonna be more difficult to send the right things to the right people at the right time. So, no, I won't call many platforms out for being good because there's lots of good ones, but ConvertKit is one that goes on my real kind of do not touch with a bargepole list, because they have a very, very kind of very poor way of measuring and managing engagement. And you can't even download the data to use from third-party tools. So all the email deliverability tools and software that I've written, I can't even connect that up to ConvertKit because they don't make that data available.   Now I’m hoping that's gonna change. So maybe, you know, if people listen to this a few months down the line, maybe that's changed. But the biggest thing that matters to me is: how easy is it to manage the engagement? And most of the platforms are okay. Infusionsoft as an example is really good. ActiveCampaign, you have to jump through a few hoops. And to do a real good job, then you need to use my software to make it easier. But it does depend very much and I'd say, you know, because there are so many different platforms out there, then, you know, if you're choosing one at the start, then engagement management is one of the important things. If you're already using a platform, though, it's not a reason to switch as long as everything else is okay.   Rob: Now, that's good. Well, I can speak from bitter experience here, because I actually moved from AWeber, which I'd used for many years, to ActiveCampaign, which I really like, by the way. I like ActiveCampaign, but when I did that, I wasn't aware that you could fall foul of this.   Adrian: Absolutely.   Rob: And I took a real hit early on. You know, it just wasn't the same and it took some time to get over that. So is there any way if we are moving platforms for some reason, is there any way to manage that process better than I did?   Adrian: Yeah, totally. And the other thing is all about who you move across first because as I've already mentioned, it's all about who is engaging with you at the moment, and are you only mailing those. So if you can identify who has opened something from you in the last 30 days, and when you move to a new platform, send emails to those people first. Because that way then you build up a good reputation with your new platform because they want to see that you're a good sender.   And at the same time, you're still getting a reasonable open rate. And that helps your domain sending reputation with people like Google, Microsoft, because one of the things they're doing now is they are crowdsourcing your reputation based on which of... Let's supposing that you've got 10,000 people on your mailing list, on average, half of those will be on Google. So Google will look at those 5000 people and say, "Right, how many of those people are opening Adrian's emails right now?"   And if it's only 5%, 10%, then Adrian gets a poor domain reputation score from Google. If I'm getting 30%, 40% then I'm getting a good engagement reputation. So it's very much around understanding what they're looking for and just as much as you can, stack the odds in your favor by only starting with the most engaged people, then you can start to go further back. But it is like the law of diminishing returns. The longer it is since someone has opened something from you, the less likely they are to ever open anything ever again.   Rob: Yeah, sure. And what happens if we do nothing? You know, if we don't do anything about deliverability these days, I mean, what is that gonna look like for us?   Adrian: Oh, it's not a very good picture. Because the thing that people, a lot of people still don't get is how much the email landscape has changed. Because if you wind the clock back to those wonderful years, 10 years ago, you could build up a big list, you know, get as many people onto it, then you basically spam the crap out of them, email them as much as you like. And then you keep emailing until they buy, until they die, or until they unsubscribe. And that was, you know, that was how everyone did it. And that's how people still do it today in some cases. But if they do that now and just keep emailing, keep emailing, then you will see a very, very continuous constant reduction in the number of people opening your emails.   Because typically I'm seeing about 10% of your audience disengages on a monthly basis. And that's the law of averages. Sometimes people, you know, they turn off their mail address, they might change jobs, they might lose interest, whatever it is, then, you know, you are typically gonna lose 10% of your audience through disengagement and apathy and everything else on a monthly basis. So, you know, you don't need to be a genius mathematician to work out that as time goes on, then you are gonna get fewer and fewer people opening.   Now obviously, if you've got a good lead generation in place, and you're refilling the hopper from the top all the time, you might not notice as much. But if you're literally getting no new leads, and just keep emailing the old list time and time again, then you will see things decline. And that's one of the reasons that people say that email is dying when actually it's not. It's just people aren't necessarily getting enough leads and managing their engagement.   Rob: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So these four steps, talk to us about those.   Adrian: Okay, so very, very simple. The first thing you want to do is you wanna protect your reputation. And the way you do that is you scrub your email list, you make sure there are no spam traps on there, you make sure that there's no dead addresses that your email marketing platform hasn't picked up on. Make sure that there's, you know, you're not sending too many emails to role accounts like sales@, or info@ and that kind of thing. And scrubbing the list will find all those different bad email addresses. And then you can choose. In most cases, what you'd do is you would stop emailing all of the addresses that have been identified as bad. And that's just a good way of making sure that you're not hitting spam traps.   I haven't got time to go into the detail about spam traps, but the simple version is they are email addresses that have been created either to catch people scraping stuff off the internet, which I'm sure no one listening to this would ever do. Or alternatively, people who aren't keeping their list clean because if an email address stops working, then it will bounce for a while, but then they will reactivate that address as a spam trap. And if you're still emailing that address afterwards, then you go on to the bad boys' list as well.   So scrubbing the list helps avoid that, helps keep your reputation clean, and it doesn't cost a huge amount of money. The list scrubbing services will typically say you should do this every three months. But they would, wouldn't they? Because they get the money out of it. But I would say that if you've never done it ever, then you should, and it probably makes sense to do it periodically, maybe once a year, maybe more frequently than that if you keep turning up more problems when you do scrub the list, but definitely worth doing.   Rob: So you would use...you would go to a specialist or use a specialist piece of software for this because there are tools built-in with, you know, ActiveCampaign, for example, where it will imply that it's gonna help you clean up the list.   Adrian: Yeah, absolutely.   Rob: In fact, it may even be called list clean up. So are you saying that's not really adequate or...?   Adrian: It doesn't get rid of the nasties. It will certainly help you find the addresses that might have disengaged or might no longer work or anything like that. But if it is an actual toxic address that gonna cause you problems if you mail it, then it's very difficult for the email providers to help you identify that. So yeah, third-party tools that do that will do the job.   And it's one of the things that I've actually added to my... I don't have any list scrubbing software myself, but my email deliverability utilities that I've got. I've got a free integration that helps you scrub your list in place on the platform, because normally, you have to download the list to a CSV file, upload it to the scrubbing service, scrub the list, download the result, upload it into your email platform, and it's a right faff when you do that. So I've written a little tool that actually integrates with that and you just literally press a button, and it will either scrub your entire list or a particular segment and then it applies a tag with the results. You decide what to do. So nice and simple. And I'll share more details about that when we get to the end bit.   Rob: Good stuff. So that was step one. So basically scrubbing the list is step one.   Adrian: Yeah, absolutely. So second step, then, so scrubbing the list is one of the ways to help your reputation. The next thing that matters massively is authentication. And this is about making sure that firstly, you're telling the world who you trust to send emails on your behalf, and secondly, making sure that your emails are being digitally signed by you. So the first thing is called SPF, which stands for Sender Policy Framework. And this tells the world which email systems you trust. So let's supposing that you're using G Suite for your business emails, and then you're using ActiveCampaign for your marketing emails, then you have one...you only have one SPF record. And in the SPF record, it would say that you trust Google and Active campaigns.   So that way then when those emails come from those providers, the recipients will check that against your SPF record, and they'll see a big tick in the box if they come from the right place. If someone else has then sent it elsewhere, and they're trying to forge your email, then that gets treated with suspicion obviously. But spammers don't use SPF. So that's one reason to set that up. It's just one way of showing that you're legitimate. So that's nice and simple. And again, most email platforms, I think almost all of them, you might have to dig around sometimes, but they will give you the details as to how to set SPF up for those platforms.   Then the second part of it is called DKIM. So, Domain Keys Identified Mail. Again, I'm gonna kind of call out ConvertKit as giving bad advice here, actually, because they say that you should only set up DKIM if you've got more than 50,000 emails a month going out, which is not strictly true. As long as you have got a good sending reputation, you should always set up DKIM, because Google, in particular, will use that digital signature that gets attached to every single email, as a way of proving that it was from you, proving it was legitimate.   And if it's been DKIM-signed, then it means that, "No, it can't have been forged." So again, most email platforms, even ConvertKit, will do that for you, you just have to make a bit of a fuss. But, you know, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, Infusionsoft, you know, the list goes on, they will allow you to set this up. It might be called email authentication, it might be called DKIM, it might be digitally signing, but dig around, you can find it, very, very important to do that.   Rob: Okay. All right. So that's step two, those two?   Adrian: Yeah, absolutely. I will quickly mention DMARC, which is the third authentication method, which again, is worth doing. But you have to be very careful with DMARC. And make sure whoever sets it up for you knows what they're doing. Because DMARC will tell the recipients to reject and throw emails in the bin, not even the spam folder, if it's not set up right. So be very careful with that. But if you've got a properly set up DMARC record, that is another indicator that you're legitimate, but be careful with that. You know, DKIM you can't get wrong. It either works or nothing happens. SPF, you know, it's not the end of the world if you get that wrong, but, you know, you should make sure it's correct. But if you get DMARC wrong, your emails will suddenly stop going. So be very careful there.   Rob: Okay. Proceed with a bit of care?   Adrian: Definitely.   Rob: Good stuff. So we've talked about scrubbing the list, we've talked about authentication, the third step?   Adrian: Okay, so the third thing is about whitelisting. And this is really, really important. Because normally, you are completely at the whim of Google. You're at the whim of Microsoft. Whichever your email provider is, they are gonna decide which emails they show to you and which ones they don't. And whitelisting is a way of forcing them to show the emails that you tell them that you want to see. So as an email marketer, you want to be sharing these whitelisting instructions with your audience. And it's a bit pointless doing it by email because if the emails aren't getting through, they won't do it. So it means that when someone signs up for your list, the first thing you have to show them on your thank you page is how to whitelist you.   And this depends very much on the platform that they use. Now the really clever solution is to actually detect what platform they're using and show them personalized whitelisting instructions. So if they're using G Suite or Gmail, you can tell them how to set up a filter to always bypass the spam folder. If they're using Hotmail, or Office 365 or something like that, then you can show them different instructions. And there's ways of actually developing custom code that goes on to the thank you page that can do that. I've done that for a few clients.   I've done that on one of my own signup pages, I do that. But if that sounds like too much work, you can also get your own custom whitelisting instructions generated that will just show all of the different platforms on there and how to whitelist you. And if you go to a website and the address is simply whitelist.guru, I'll just repeat that, whitelist.guru, then there's a guy called Chris Lang, who has created a do-it-yourself whitelisting instruction generator. You put your name, your brand, your email address in there, press a button, and it will give you a nice pretty HTML page with your personalized instructions on that you can copy, save, put in your thank you page, off you go. So, very important...   Rob: That's handy.   Adrian: It's very useful. Bear in mind that not everyone will follow those instructions. But even if 10% of them do, then you're doing yourself a favor. And if people complain, they're not getting your emails ever, then those are the instructions they need to see.   Rob: Okay, so that was whitelisting   Adrian: Yep. So that leaves us one final step. Now, this is a little bit tenuous, because it isn't just one step. This is more about change your mindset forever. Because as soon as you stop doing this, then this goes back to when we talked about what happens if you do nothing. And this is all about managing your engagement, making sure that you are only sending emails to the people that have opened from you most recently. And if you find people that haven't opened for a while, then you need to maybe send them a reengagement campaign that I'll talk about in a sec. And if they still haven't engaged at that point, then basically, you get rid of them off your list. You're gonna be very ruthless with the way that you manage engagements.   Because, you know, as I said earlier on, if only 5% of your audience is opening something, Google and Microsoft and Yahoo will think that you're, you know, sending out complete and utter garbage and they will start putting your emails into the promotions, into the spam, into the junk and so on. So it's important that you are maximizing the chances of people opening your emails by only sending your emails to the people that have recently opened something. And one of the biggest questions that I get asked is, "Well, how far back should I go?" And it depends very much on whether you've got a problem or not. If you haven't got a problem, then my typical rule of thumb is to send emails to people that have opened something within the last 90 days.   If you've got a problem, you might need to dial that back a bit or if you want to have a really super-engaged list, then you need to dial that back to 30 days. And sometimes you're gonna have kind of a two or three-tier strategy here. So you might say that people who have opened something in the last 30 days, I'm gonna send them everything. I'll send them maybe two, maybe even three emails a week. If they've opened something between 30 and 90 days, then maybe I'll send something every week or two. If they've opened something beyond 90 days, then ideally, you would just put them through a re-engagement campaign when they reach 90 days of no engagement. And if they ignore that, delete them.   Some people will still send the occasional reminder to those people. I would say if it's more than a year, never send them. But maybe between 90 days and a year, then maybe send something every month or two just to give them another chance. You know, the law of averages says that the longer since someone opened something, the less likely they are to open anything. And the other thing to look at as well is we talked briefly about new contacts and the likelihood of them opening something. If someone signs up for your lead magnet, and then they haven't opened anything from you within the first 7 to 14 days, the chances are, they will never ever, ever open anything. Again, they're just gonna be there hurting your sending reputation.   So another thing that I recommend is if you've got a process in place for your new contacts, then maybe put something in where when it reaches two weeks, and they haven't opened anything from you, maybe put them through a little reminder. And then again, if there's no engagement, get rid of them. Because, you know, let's face it, if someone signs up for your freebie, and they won't even open that, the chances are they're never gonna be interested in anything else as well. So, you know, that is the main thing. It can be a very arduous task, managing your engagement, but the dividends that it pays off are massive.   That is what will make the biggest difference. And even though you will see that you are mailing fewer people, then the open rate will go up very quickly. You know, I know that what we've talked about in the past is how long does it take before you see results. And I would say typically, it can take between one and three months for you to get really good results. When I've been working with, you know, some of my private clients, I had one that came in. They are on a just under a 12% open rate, and within three months, then their open rates had reached 25%. And even though they were mailing fewer people, the actual number of people opening the emails had gone up.   So obviously, the number of people hadn't doubled, but it had certainly gone up a bit from when it was 11%, 12%. So, you know, it can take a few months, but as long as you are consistent, then that's what works. And the little tale of woe that I will share is don't let the fear get to you. Don't let the fear of loss and the fear of letting go. Because that same client the month after sent a bunch of email broadcasts to their entire list again without managing the engagement. And within two days, Google had downgraded their reputation and their open rate fell through the floor. It took another month to get that back. So you have gotta keep your nerve. And you gotta be very consistent with this. But the more you do that, the better you'll be rewarded.   Rob: Wow. So were those really old people, you just feel it's just not worth having them on the list at all? You know, the chance...   Adrian: No. Absolutely not. Because typically, if you send an email broadcast, just the people that have opened more than 90 days ago, you will get maybe a 2%, 3% open rate if you're lucky. But if you keep mailing those people that don't open, the chances are that you'll get 10% fewer people seeing your email in the first place. So it becomes a very simple trade-off that yes, you might get a few more opens, but fewer people long term will see those emails. Obviously, just because they're not opening the emails, doesn't mean you can't use those addresses for Facebook, custom audiences and retargeting, and things like that. So there's still a value in that data. It's just that you shouldn't really email them, you know, very often if at all.   Rob: And, I mean, I suppose there's a bit of value in, you know, you could go to the lengths with if we call those people kinda dead subscribers, inactive subscribers, I suppose you could have a crack at... You know, if you had a large number of these, you could maybe take them to another platform and, you know, try send or two to them from different platforms.   Adrian: It's interesting you say that because typically, you know, particularly now, Google and their machine learning is clever than all of us put together. And unless you can send a separate email from a separate domain with absolutely no connection to anything else that you've got, then it will probably be linked back to you somehow and your campaign sending reputation will still take a hit. So it doesn't really matter whether you do it from your current mail platform or a different one, it is more just about making sure that your overall engagement still stays high.   So, you know, if you are gonna try and send re-engagement emails to the older inactive contacts, make sure you're sending lots of good stuff to the people that are opening so that the kind of the poor performance is slightly more lost in the noise. And that's why I said, you know, having this kind of two or three-tiered process where you're sending the most content to the people that are engaging the most. And that helps you then because at least then you've got a good reputation to start with. And if you are sending to the inactive people, then it's not gonna drag you down as much as if you're doing that regularly.   Rob: It's nice, great. And I suppose the good news is that to a large extent, we should be able to automate a lot of this process, the reactivation process, that kinda thing?   Adrian: Yes, a lot of the email platforms have some level of that. Again, they'll kinda help you do maybe, you know, it's the 80/20 rule all over again. They'll help you do kind of the 20% that has 80% of the impact, but you can always do it slightly better. That's one of the reasons that one of the best software that I wrote actually makes it easier to do that. Because sometimes, you know, I'll use both ActiveCampaign and Infusionsoft are good examples of this, is that they will give you, you know, enough to do a semi-decent job.   But if you wanna really get down into the weeds in this and say, "Right, I'll have different strategies for 30 days versus 90 days versus more than 90 days," then it requires a lot of hard work and manual reporting. So sometimes the software that I've got makes that easier. But, you know, there's always a level of it that you can automate.   Rob: Okay, no, great. Really, really helpful. So to wrap up, then, if listeners only took one nugget or piece of advice away, what should that be?   Adrian: If I was gonna choose one thing out of that, obviously, all four are important. But I think, you know, managing...assuming that you haven't bought a list or something horrific like that, managing your engagement on an ongoing basis is the most effective way of keeping things healthy. Because that way then, assuming that spam traps and things like that don't open your emails, which most of them don't, then as long as you stop sending emails to people that aren't opening, then that will keep things clean, it'll keep your domain reputation up, and, you know, it will mean that as time goes on, then more people will see your email. So engagement, engagement, engagement. That's the key one.   Rob: Excellent. Where's the best place, Adrian, if people wanna get more from you? Where should they go? Where can they check you out?   Adrian: Nice and simple. So the first thing, I've got a free email health check service. And that works with most email marketing platforms. I'm adding more all the time. So right now if you've got Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Sendinblue, Constant Contact, then it already works with those and I'm adding others in. And that will just give you a nice simple score between 0 and 100 telling you how well you're managing your engagement right now, give you some hints and tips to improve that.   And to get that you can go to emailhealthcheck.net and just sign up. If you're not using those platforms, then sign up there anyway and you can get added to my list. I'm always sending out blog posts and hints and tips, things like that. And also you can find me on Facebook, facebook.com/adriansavage. Connect with me there. I'm always happy to point people in the right direction if they need any help.   Rob: That is excellent. And I can vouch for Adrian, because you helped me... I think we had a look at some of my stuff with your software and very enlightening it was too and I've began to do some of the things that you recommended.   Adrian: Excellent.   Rob: There we go. Good stuff. Well, Adrian, this has been really valuable. So just to say thank you. This has been really helpful.   Adrian: And I've really enjoyed it. And thank you very much for inviting me onto the podcast.   Rob: You are very welcome. And I will talk to you soon.   Adrian: Great stuff. Thanks, Rob.   Rob: Hey, it's Rob, again. Want to build a successful online business from your expertise? Well, the game has changed. There are bigger opportunities, but also bigger pitfalls than ever before. And I would hate for you to waste years figuring these things out for yourself. Now as a listener to this show, you're obviously a sensible person, right? So here's my invitation to you.   Apply to jump on a call with me in the next few days and let's talk about you. You will get feedback on your ideas. You will get a product concept that is fit for right now and you will get a personalized sales and income plan to take away. That is free but availability is limited. So please go along right now to chatwithrob.com. That is, chatwithrob.com. Do that now. I'm looking forward to hearing from you. Once again, that is chatwithrob.com. Talk to you soon.

Rob May is a general partner at PJC, a leading venture capital firm. He was previously CEO of Talla, a platform for AI and automation, as well as co-founder and CEO of Backupify. Rob is an angel investor who has invested in numerous companies, and author of InsideAI which is said to be one of the most widely-read AI newsletters on the planet. In this episode, Rob and I discuss AI from a VC perspective. We look into the current state of AI, service as a software, and what Rob looks for in his startup investments and portfolio companies. We also investigate why so many companies are struggling to push their AI projects forward to completion, and how this can be improved. Finally, we outline some important things that founders can do to make products based on machine intelligence (machine learning) attractive to investors. In our chat, we covered: The emergence of service as a software, which can be understood as a logical extension of “software eating the world” and the 2 hard things to get right (Yes, you read it correctly and Rob will explain what this new SAAS acronym means!) ! How automation can enable workers to complete tasks more efficiently and focus on bigger problems machines aren’t as good at solving Why AI will become ubiquitous in business—but not for 10-15 years Rob’s Predict, Automate, and Classify (PAC) framework for deploying AI for business value, and how it can help achieve maximum economic impact Economic and societal considerations that people should be thinking about when developing AI - and what we aren’t ready for yet as a society Dealing with biases and stereotypes in data, and the ethical issues they can create when training models How using synthetic data in certain situations can improve AI models and facilitate usage of the technology Concepts product managers of AI and ML solutions should be thinking about Training, UX and classification issues when designing experiences around AI The importance of model-market fit. In other words, whether a model satisfies a market demand, and whether it will actually make a difference after being deployed. Resources and Links: Email Rob@pjc.vc PJC Talla SmartBid The PAC Framework for Deploying AI Twitter: @robmay  Sign up for Rob’s Newsletter Quotes from Today’s Episode “[Service as a software] is a logical extension of software eating the world. Software eats industry after industry, and now it's eating industries using machine learning that are primarily human labor focused.” — Rob “It doesn't have to be all digital. You could also think about it in terms of restaurant automation, and some of those things where if you keep the interface the same to the customer—the service you're providing—you strip it out, and everything behind that, if it's digital it's an algorithm and if it's physical, then you use a robot.” — Rob, on service as a software. “[When designing for] AI you really want to find some way to convey to the user that the tool is getting smarter and learning.”— Rob “There's a gap right now between the business use cases of AI and the places it's getting adopted in organizations,” — Rob “The reason that AI's so interesting is because what you effectively have now is software models tha

Rob May is a general partner at PJC, a leading venture capital firm. He was previously CEO of Talla, a platform for AI and automation, as well as co-founder and CEO of Backupify. Rob is an angel investor who has invested in numerous companies, and author of InsideAI which is said to be one of the most widely-read AI newsletters on the planet. In this episode, Rob and I discuss AI from a VC perspective. We look into the current state of AI, service as a software, and what Rob looks for in his startup investments and portfolio companies. We also investigate why so many companies are struggling to push their AI projects forward to completion, and how this can be improved. Finally, we outline some important things that founders can do to make products based on machine intelligence (machine learning) attractive to investors. In our chat, we covered: The emergence of service as a software, which can be understood as a logical extension of “software eating the world” and the 2 hard things to get right (Yes, you read it correctly and Rob will explain what this new SAAS acronym means!) ! How automation can enable workers to complete tasks more efficiently and focus on bigger problems machines aren’t as good at solving Why AI will become ubiquitous in business—but not for 10-15 years Rob’s Predict, Automate, and Classify (PAC) framework for deploying AI for business value, and how it can help achieve maximum economic impact Economic and societal considerations that people should be thinking about when developing AI – and what we aren’t ready for yet as a society Dealing with biases and stereotypes in data, and the ethical issues they can create when training models How using synthetic data in certain situations can improve AI models and facilitate usage of the technology Concepts product managers of AI and ML solutions should be thinking about Training, UX and classification issues when designing experiences around AI The importance of model-market fit. In other words, whether a model satisfies a market demand, and whether it will actually make a difference after being deployed. Resources and Links: Email Rob@pjc.vc PJC Talla SmartBid The PAC Framework for Deploying AI Twitter: @robmay  Sign up for Rob’s Newsletter Quotes from Today’s Episode “[Service as a software] is a logical extension of software eating the world. Software eats industry after industry, and now it’s eating industries using machine learning that are primarily human labor focused.” — Rob “It doesn’t have to be all digital. You could also think about it in terms of restaurant automation, and some of those things where if you keep the interface the same to the customer—the service you’re providing—you strip it out, and everything behind that, if it’s digital it’s an algorithm and if it’s physical, then you use a robot.” — Rob, on service as a software. “[When designing for] AI you really want to find some way to convey to the user that the tool is getting smarter and learning.”— Rob “There’s a gap right now between the business use cases of AI and the places it’s getting adopted in organizations,” — Rob “The reason that AI’s so interesting is because what you e

Rob is joined by Irish-American entrepreneur and billionaire David McCourt. David answers audience questions on how he got to be where he is today and what he hopes to do in the future, discover what it takes to solve business problems, curate and create million-pound ideas and learn how to start, grow and scale your own business. Tune in today for this insightful interview with self-made billionaire David McCourt. KEY TAKEAWAYS Q. How do you change your thought process to help you come up with different ideas? A. [David]I do one thing consistently, which is when approaching a problem I put myself in the future and I am able to see that problem already solved, I then turn around and look backward and I build a plan to get me to where I already am.  It can be overwhelming looking at a huge problem, people say “how did you have such vision to solve the problem?” It really wasn't that amazing at all, because when you put yourself in the future, it becomes crystal clear to you what it is going to look like and then you have to build a plan to get there. A. [Rob] I would say, be the person that disrupts you, rather than someone else. I am very much a big believer in disrupting yourself. I want to disrupt my own patterns, behaviors, and habits before my competitors do. I am always trying to imagine, if I was a competitor of mine, what weaknesses would I see? I then try and solve those before someone else does. I challenge myself to follow people I didn't think that I liked, to learn from people that have very different beliefs from me, because that can challenge the way I look at something. Q. How and when do you scale? A. [David]I personally, have never thought about business as having a goal to reach a certain size. I approach business as trying to solve a problem that I find would be interesting to solve and that the world needs to solve and through doing that you can make money. I look at it more as a problem that people say ‘that cannot be solved' whereas I say ‘it can be solved'.  I don't initially think about the size of the business, but if it is a big problem that nobody else has been able to solve before, then by definition you will be able to scale it. A.[Rob] There were three commonalities over the wealthiest people. One of those was the desire to serve vast amounts of people. Don't just have a plan or a goal but if you have a genuine desire to serve vast numbers of people, then you will connect the dots along the way and take the opportunities and partnerships. The second thing, a concept called the network effect. This is essentially a way to get to as many people on the planet as quickly as possible. Q.  Who were your main mentors when you started out on your journey? A.[David] I am the first to admit, I had a huge advantage number 1 I had an unbelievable mother and father, and I had a mother that constantly taught me that it was okay to fail, that constantly taught me that I would be something and that I would accomplish what I wanted to accomplish. Having someone that supports you in your life, gets you 80% of the way there. I have had different mentors at different stages, I was on board just after I finished college, and on that board was the first public millionaire in America. I had never met a millionaire before and he said something that was very interesting, he said: “you have to make what's important in your life instinctive, there are certain things that you are not going to have time to process, that you have to be instinctive”. After that, there was a man named Walter Scott, who was like a father to me. He taught me that taking care of your downside is the most important thing in business and the upside will take care of itself. My third was probably Jack Welch, he taught me a lot. A. [Rob] Out of all the successful people I know, I am one of the youngest. This is because I have pushed myself to have mentors who are 60 and 70 years old. I love having these mentors because they have so much more wisdom and experience than me so now I seek out being the youngest in a networking group. Everything that David fortunately had, you can create. Q. Did you leave the ladder or are you continuously putting those ladders down for people? A.[David] There is nothing that gives me more pleasure, that putting the ladder down for someone else. It is really an ugly characteristic that some people have. Once they make their money they want to distance themselves from people so that others aren't able to have it. There is nothing more rewarding than putting the ladder down for the next person to climb upon. I have made a lot of money, given a lot of money away and lost a lot of money, and I can tell you for sure, the difference between the times I have had money and when I haven't,  there is no difference, if what you're trying to do with your life is create something. Q.  What one world problem would you solve ? A. [David] If I could only solve one problem, I think if we can instill the sense of hope and dreams that America had 50 years ago back around the world, then we could solve all the problems. The America that I grew up in is a very different place than what it is today. That country of hope and dreams where anything is possible if we worked together is what could solve problems. The big ones are healthcare, housing, and education. The costs of these three are all growing faster than wages so by definition you can't catch up. So if you're growing up thinking that you will never be able to catch up, that is a terrible and dangerous place to be in. That is the world that we're living in now, and that is the problem that we need to fix. A. [Rob] The first time I met David, he told me “The world's biggest problems are also the world's biggest business opportunities right now”. It is easy to look at people that are the champions of dramatic change globally and forget that we can make a difference ourselves. There became a point where I looked around and noticed members of staff and thought “they've all got jobs, they're all paying their mortgages and they're all receiving benefits” I think it is easy to forget the value you make as an entrepreneur, I think a company done in the right way is one of the best ways to create value. Q. Do you ever feel that you don't know enough to get to where you want to be? How have you dealt with it? A. [David] I sometimes get a feeling, that time will run out before I accomplish everything that I want to accomplish. I worry about whether I have enough time to love all the people I want to love, meet all the people I want to meet and to go to all the places I want to go to. I worry about that every day, which is why I have to figure out a way to do it at scale. I don't feel that I should be doing anything different than what I am doing or that I am wasting my life. Am I worried I don't have enough time? Yes. Am I worried I am doing things wrong? No. I don't have a fear of failure, because I am a happy, healthy guy so I am 99% of the way there anyway. BEST MOMENTS “Having someone that supports you in your life, gets you 80% of the way there.” “Everything that is important in your life has to be as instinctive as being able to pick up a pencil when you drop ii, and that will free up your brain to be able to process the new incoming things” “What's the worst that can happen? You could become a starving artist and you might like it!” “I was born curious and optimistic”   VALUABLE RESOURCES https://robmoore.com/ ABOUT THE HOST Rob Moore is the host of the UK's no. 1 business podcast “The Disruptive Entrepreneur,” and “The Money Podcast” as well as an entrepreneur, property investor, property educator, and holder of 3 world records for public speaking. He is also the author of 9 business books, 5 UK bestsellers, and the global bestseller, Life Leverage. “If you don't risk anything, you risk everything” ABOUT THE GUEST David McCourt is an Irish-American entrepreneur with experience within the telecom and cable television industries. He was an early contributor to the development of transatlantic fiber networks and has founded and bought many companies in various countries. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Granahan McCourt, a private investment firm specializing in telecoms and media and has invested more than a €100 million in telecoms in Ireland. He made his fortune from the sale of his US phone company, Corporate Communications Network, to WorldCom for $14 billion (€12 billion) in the 1980s. CONTACT METHOD Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/robmooreprogressive/?ref=br_rs LinkedIn - https://uk.linkedin.com/in/robmoore1979 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A history of a history of west OlympiaMusic in this episode:Frog In The Well by Lucas Gonze used with Creative Commons licensePaper Crowns by Ditrani Brothers used with permission.Sleep by Ronny Tana courtesy of 2060 recordsSwing Gitan by Ditrani Brothers used with permission.Feathersoft by Blue Dot sessions The following is a full transcript of this episode:Rob Smith: One thing I know about the last name Smith, is that it makes you hard to find. I've always seen this as a benefit, but now I'm trying to find a random Smith. Larry Smith. I've been thinking about this guy for several months now. Ever since I learned he helped write a book that's long been out of print. I found a copy of this book on eBay, bought it for $25. It's called How the West Was once a history of West Olympia.On phone: Hey, my name is Rob Smith, and I'm calling for a Larry Smith who used to be a English teacher in Olympia at Jefferson junior high school. And I have no idea if this is the right Larry Smith, but he wrote a book called With some students and I wanted to talk to him about that book that he wrote. So, if that's you, Larry, if you're the Larry Smith..Rob: Here's what I know. Larry Smith was an English teacher at Jefferson Middle School in West Olympia. In 1974, his last year teaching at that school, he assigned his eighth graders a collective writing project. How the West Was Once is the product of that assignment. On the phone: Hey, my name is Rob Smith. I'm calling for a Larry..Rob: The book is small. I'm holding it here it's about eight by five, and just under 100 pages, black and white. My copy has this blue binding material holding it together. The cover's yellowing and only slightly thicker than the books pages. It's clear it was made on a budget. And yet it's well done. Those hundred pages are full of accounts of life on Olympia's West Side, from the mid 19th to mid 20th century. It's not definitive by any means. Some of the stories read a little like legends, and there's a few cringy passages. But the book adds real personal color to the history of West Olympia, a place I learned, once known as Marshville. Ever since I got my hands on this book, I've been thinking about the people who wrote it. I wanted to talk to them. What sort of teacher takes on a project like this? A lot of what I like to do with my audio work is record stories of older people. I see it kind of like time traveling, or preservation at least, it struck me that that's exactly what this project was doing. 45 years ago, in book form.I pay for this service that I use to look people up. It's kind of amazing. You can get phone numbers, addresses, email addresses. The problem is there's a lot of false positives, old numbers, dormant email addresses. Most of the time, you're just reaching out to the wrong person all together. So I went to Jefferson Middle School, the place where this book was written over 45 years. ago, I talked to the principal. He'd never heard of the book. The one who worked there the longest, a woman at the front desk, said she must have just missed Larry Smith. She started in the late 70s. I was told to go see the librarian. She knew the book, had a personal copy herself, but didn't know what had happened to the teacher who orchestrated it. I called the district offices, talk to someone in archives. They had nothing. So I decided to go back to the book, knowing i'd have better luck finding one of the couple dozen students listed in the credits. The first page is a list of names. And at the top of the alphabetized list is Rick Aarts. AARTS. I looked him up, called him, left a message. He called me right back! Rick was great. We talked a while about the book. and what he remembered about his teacher. He said Smith left an impression Only had good things to say about him. I asked him if he knew what had happened to Mr. Smith. Rick remembered something about California. Maybe he moved there for health reasons. He couldn't remember. Rick didn't want to talk on tape, said he'd be a lousy interview. I disagreed. But he gave me another name. So I stopped bugging him.Ray Houser just turned 60 he was one of the eighth graders that put together How the West Was Once Ray Houser: I lived on Decatur Street, which was probably a block and a half from the elementary school, and maybe 8-10 blocks to the junior high. Walked to school pretty much my whole life - typically with my buddy Bruce and Rick and, you know, we built these and developed these relationships and it was back in an era where you could ride your bike anywhere you wanted and you coiuld stay out late at night and we'd go to the park and... It was a little Mayberry.Rob: Bella biagio was also a student of Larry Smith.Bella Biagio: I was considered basically, maybe the class clown. Just because I am who I am and I continued. (laughing) I just you know, I'm, you know constantly.. things make me laugh and everything's comedic to me. So sometimes that got me in trouble.Rob: Ray and Bella both remember Larry Smith as an exceptional teacher. Bella, who as an adult would be diagnosed with ADD found relief in his class.Bella: He was one of the people... if anybody, you know, you didn't think you were done. He... you know what I mean? I f you had that in your mind, that was completely eliminated when you were in his class.Ray: What was unique about Larry was, he was a younger teacher back then, and I was a younger student back then - and he really took a genuine interest in his students and knew something about his students and And genuinely cared about his his kids. Rob: I interviewed Ray and Bella separately on separate days,Bella: Even though I am who I am, and I have this personality and everything. I also am very insular and somewhat shy,Rob: But they both landed on the same word to sum up their eighth grade English teacher 45 years later.Bella: But he just, you know, he was able to like, just take you and just make you feel really safe. I think that's a very good word for him.Ray: It was safe, it was safe physically, it was safe intellectually, and it was safe emotionally.Rob: Obviously, many of their memories have faded. But this feeling of safety has stuck with them all these years. Other memories have stuck around as well.Bella: He had a very distinct smile, a very distinct nose. It's it's weird that I remember this. Like I remember some of the clothing he wore. Like he would wear shirts with the little tie maybe, sports jacket maybe, a sweater or something but he was just always so like... Look he's so cool! And just just like little, the twinkle in the eye and the smile and lanky, sort of tall guy and his wife was beautiful.Rob: Larry's beautiful wife was another clue I had. I knew her name was Nikki. I'd left about a dozen messages for people I thought might be Larry, but none of the contacts had a Nicki associated with them. Then finally, one night as I was making dinner, the phone rang. The caller ID said Smith, Larry. I answered. An old voice told me that he was indeed Larry Smith. And he really wished he was the Larry Smith I was looking for.That night in kind of a fit of desperation. I just googled something like Larry Smith, English professor, California. And as you'd expect, I got a lot of hits. But I found this one in LA, a teacher, an English professor at LA City College. I clicked on his rate my professor page - years and years of glowing reviews. I knew it was a long shot - I mean, Larry must be retired by now. But I emailed this professor and went to bed. The next morning I had a new email. I hit record on my cell phone just before opening it.Rob reading email: ...and just based on the subject line, I think I might have found him… Ha. Cool. "Rob, haha, you hit the jackpot since I’ve never had been on Facebook or MySpace. I'd assume I'd be hard to trace. After Olympia. My wife and I moved to San Jose for four years. On to Coos Bay, Oregon for 16 at a high school, with two in the middle to work in Papua New Guinea to give our three kids a true cultural experience. Paso Robles, California for six, California Youth authority prison, then down to LA area in 2000. Where I continued with high school and adjuncted at several colleges. Now I'm in my fiftieth year with no plan on retiring…. Phone message:Thank you for calling the Whittier Union High School District. Please listen closely to the following options as our menu has changed. Para Espanol oprima a nemero 8. If you are calling from a touch tone telephone and... # Wait while I transfer your call…Larry Smith:Hey, morning, Rob.Rob on phone: Hey, Larry. How you doing?Larry: Good. Great. Hey, let me go grab Patty. She had a she had an event and so she's around here somewhere. She's the one with a phone.Rob I got ahold of Larry Smith in his classroom. He recorded his end on a colleague's cell phone. Larry: Okay, we're on.Rob on phone: Okay, well, um, can you just start, Larry, by introducing yourself, and maybe where you are right now?Larry:Yeah, my name is Larry Smith. I'm a teacher. This is my 50th year. So I've been teaching starting in Olympia, Washington and now I am in Whittier, California teaching at an alternative high school, and Los Angeles City College and living in Pasadena.Rob: Larry grew up near Seattle. It's where he expected to start his teaching career after graduating from Seattle Pacific University. But he finished school during a big recession.Larry: Nobody was hiring. And so I just started going further and further south until I finally found a district that did have an opening and I found the first one in Olympia. And so I had literally never stopped in Olympia. I'd never been on the Capitol grounds. West Olympia, I had no idea what that was. So the first time I really saw where I was going to be living was for my job interview and ended up really enjoying the area, rented a house. It was on Plymouth Street, a two story house in West Olympia for $65 a month! That's how bad the house was and how the economy was in those days.Rob: Jefferson junior high, it was a junior high then not a middle school, wasn't in great shape either. Larry says./Rob: It was pretty rundown, actually, you know, there was like three trees on the whole property. In fact, I think my second year there, we did a big project where we got a bunch of trees donated and the kids planted them along the front of the school and on the side. And I believe if you drive by Jefferson today and see any fairly large trees along the front, they were planted by my eighth graders that year.Rob: I asked Larry what he did for fun. Like, did he go downtown?Larry: No, I didn't. Downtown, my goodness? No, that's where the Washington and Reeves kids hung out. And I wouldn't dare do that. No I was pretty much Westside. I mean, You know, I would eat probably three times a week at Bob's Burgers, which was right across the street from Egan's drive in, which had the worst worst ice cream in the history of humanity, which was so grainy that it would literally sand your teeth down and would go to Peterson's Food Town to buy my food. And then went to church at a little church actually was built during probably my second or third year there, Westwood Baptist Church.Rob: He still had friends and family up north. He'd visit them on the weekends.Larry: So I would jump in my Volkswagen bus, hippie mobile and drive into Seattle and then come back on Sunday for church and then, you know, kind of that was sort of the ritual but yeah it was pretty much West Olympia. Rob: Larry started teaching here in Olympia at 22. closer in age to his students than to their parents. Far from home for the first time, he just folded himself into the west side community. Larry: It was just pure fun. You know, and as a bachelor first year teacher I mean I lived right in the middle of where all my students lived and you know, my door didn't have a, my house didn't even have a lock and I would come home from school and five kids would just be hanging out in the living room and I would be invited to dinner all the time. And, I mean, it was just really a big family thing.Rob: The Bachelor days were short lived. In his third year teaching, Larry magically reconnected as he puts it, with a woman he was engaged to years before at SPU. Within three weeks, the two were married. over winter break, Nikki resigned from her teaching position in Santa Cruz.Larry: And then she moved up and shivered for a year and a half before she talked me into moving south.Rob: It was Larry Smith's last year teaching in Olympia that How the West Was once was written.Larry: I knew it was going to be my final year. I just wanted to try something really unique. And I just happened to be really blessed by an incredible group of kids and wanted to do more than just daily and weekly assignments. And so we just took on this virtually a year long project. Ray:He explained it to us and said that we're going to, we're going to write a book as a class and it's like, oh, okay, well, what does that mean?Rob: They had to decide what to write a book about.Larry: We listed all the possibilities, and I remember one of them was all the uses of ivy. But that didn't seem like a book that would really sell and might have been a parent came up with the idea that we should do a history of the local area because West Olympia is really a distinct geographical region from the rest of the city.Rob: Larry says the first topic was wild John Tourneau, a mass murdering man of the woods that one of his students had told him about. A story he'd passed off as legend. Larry: We looked it up. And sure enough, this guy was a real person who was killed in a gun battle. And so he became sort of our first story and then it just took off. Ray: Everybody in the class got assigned different, different jobs, editors, interviewers, researchers, etc. And we kinda launched into this giant project.Larry: Different kids got more involved. Some of them were involved in every single aspect. But nobody was uninvolved. It's like the entire class picked up the vibration and parents were actively involved. I would get phone calls from people just out of the blue suggesting somebody to go interview. You know, the kids didn't have cars. They were eighth graders. So, their parents would drive them out to the middle of nowhere up to the end of Cooper point or somewhere and sit in the car while the kids went in and did the interviews.Rob: This was all on top of the regular duties of eighth grade English - reading, writing vocabulary. A lot of the work on the book, like the interviews took place after school or on the weekends. Ray and Bella did some of those interviews. Ray: My role was to actually go out and meet with the elder community of West Olympia. They were so gracious and so interested and willing and eager to share their experiences and many who had lived there their entire lives. Rob: Ray remembers a couple of those interviews in particular. One was with an old man that lived near the water and mud Bay.Ray: He wasn't a curmudgeon by any means. But he talked about how the changes and the you know the bringing of new businesses had kind of altered the community feel. And then the other was just an elderly woman who like I say she had cookies and lemonade and it was just exuberant and excited and wanted to meet with us. It was a little intimidating. I was in eighth grade and I was with Larry and my buddy Rick. And we really enjoyed spending time with her and just very gracious and very interested in sharing her experiences.Bella: Oh, they just thought it was so great. I mean, they just thought it was so exciting that one, we we're writing a book and two, what it was about, because, you know, nobody was gonna ask them the history of West Olympia. And they were really excited about, I think, I think people really enjoy telling the history of where they've lived, probably all their entire life.Rob in conversation: Yeah. Some of my favorites are the personal ones like the guy that did the ark, built the ark.Bella:Yeah. Why did he built the Ark? I don't rememberRob in conversation: I think he was waiting for the second flood?Bella: Yeah, you know that really live in it up, didn't it? (laughing)Rob: Each chapter of the book is a different topic or story. There's a chapter on the different incarnations of the Fourth Avenue Bridge, The story of Harry Beechy, a hulk of a man who lost his arm working as a longshoreman. I love the story of the streetcar that used to run up Harrison Hill, and take a right on Rogers, how kids greased the tracks one year as a Halloween prank. Each account was recorded by the kids during the field interviews, some on tape, some handwritten notes. The stories were written up back in class, then edited. Larry says plenty of the work didn't make it into the book.Larry: Certain stories, we couldn't verify. And so they were eliminated. The stories that weren't as well written and we just wanted it to be a crisp, concise, only the very best. And so the story about Harry Beechy, the guy that built the ark, and the plane that crashed into St. Peter's hospital, you know, they made the cut and so we really focused on them. Bella: Here's the art guy! Here it is! Oh my god, (reading)“Bill started work on ark II in 1922 and worked on it for four or five years before he finished it” (laughing) "Bill was an average man except for one thing, he built an ark". Oh, that's great!Rob: When the writing was done, Larry's wife Nikki typed it all up. This project wasn't over yet though. Students helped collate the pages and learned how to bind the books. There was marketing. They built wooden display cases to put in shops around town.May 16 1974, the students finally had finished products to show for their work.Larry: We just sold it I think it was for $1.25, which probably today would be about $15. Of course, every kid in the class had family members who wanted to buy them and the Daily Olympian published a story about it. And that developed some interest.Rob: The book sold out in no time, 1500 copies before school was even out for summer. Summer was when Larry and Nikki packed up their house on Plymouth Street.Larry: I basically put a fairly large group of them in charge of whatever was going to happen with a book. And they authorized and supervised another printing, continued to sell, continued to meet and determine where the money would be distributed after I left the school. I mean, this group was so responsible and incredible. Rob: Larry didn't know it, but he wasn't done with this group just yet. The following year, they won an award.Larry: Yeah, it was, it was like a new author prize that was given every year for the entire state of Washington. And it was so exciting to them and I, of course didn't know about it, and this was way pre-internet and nobody had my phone number but I got a... somebody, I think I had a forwarding address probably in the personnel office. And so I got a letter from the kids confirming that it was me and once they knew it was they purchased and sent me down a round trip plane ticket from San Jose to SeaTac and back to attend the, it was a governor's reception at the Capitol, and all the kids, it was funny because there were just probably 10 other adult authors and then like 50 kids (laughing) at this thing, that were still actively involved in this book, and they all got some kind of a metal certificate. I can't even remember what. But it was great, you know, best reunion I've ever had, even though it’d only been a year to just see, see how these kids had grown and just continued to be an enthusiastic bright group.Rob: In the end, about 60 Kids helped in the production of the book. 2500 copies were printed and sold. And much of the money from the sales was donated to help local senior citizens. Bella and Ray, both tell me that they think often about this eighth grade project and their teacher, Larry Smith.Bella: He really just made this thing happen. Like we wrote a book.Rob: Bella - whose last name in the book is Sabella, by the way - Bella has made a career in the performing arts, both on stage and in the restaurant industry. She says that Larry's class, that feeling of safety, helped her out of her shell and gave her a feeling of accomplishment.Bella: You know, feeling so like important and proud that we did this, you know? And, you know, I think it's a really wonderful thing that we all had that opportunity. 'Cause I don't think a lot of people get to have that kind of opportunity. They just don't.Rob: Like Larry, Ray Houser went into public education. He's worn a lot of hats over the years. From teacher to assistant superintendent. One of his roles had him traveling the country researching effective teaching strategies. It gives him a unique perspective on Larry's approach to teaching.Rob: I gotta say, Larry was lightyears ahead of his time when it comes to effective teaching strategies. And I've, I've done a ton of research. The whole idea of relevance, real world experiences, collaboration opportunities, engagement strategies, it was, now that I look back on it, I didn't know then obviously, as an eighth grader, it was, it was pretty incredible that he had kind of discovered how to engage his students, how to ensure that their learning was, was relevant and required them to work collaboratively. That's, that's the stuff we've been focusing on for the last 10 years and we're still trying to get into most of public education, he was doing it 40 years ago.Rob: Larry was modest when I asked him if he had any secrets to great teaching.Larry: Yeah, the secret is when you teach Junior High they're, they're too clueless to really know how bad you are. And if you tell jokes and give fun assignments, they might like it. But, you know, I don't know. It's hard to tell. I mean, teaching in some ways is hardly, it's not like a job for me because, it's like the old saying that if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. And it's… I got a, received a card from a student in that class that I tucked away somewhere that said "Mr. Smith promise you'll never grow up". And, unfortunately, my wife says that's the case.Rob: After the self deprecation. Larry got a bit more real.Larry: But really what it boils down to, it's kind of a 50/50 thing. You have to love the material and you have to love the students. And if you love the students, you're going to make sure they learn the material and if you love the material, you're going to make sure the students you know, have access, learn to love it as much as you do. And you just can't take things too seriously. When kids are in bad moods, you can't think that they're doing it because they're angry with you, but there's probably something going on in their home and, and a lot of that whole philosophy came in my very first year teaching probably three or four months into the year, a student who was a foster girl, her name was Valerie Good, was shot and killed by her foster brother in their home. And it just shook me to the core realizing how fragile life is and how special these kids are. And that stuck in my mind forever that you know, every single kid is really valuable and full of potential. And to this day, I think, after 50 years and probably 50,000 students I don't think I've met one kid who didn't have vast potential and some of them never realized it. Some ended up in prison, some ended up dying of drug overdose, some ended up suicides. But the possibilities were always there and, and since you don't know who's going to just blossom and potentially be the next, Michael Jordan or Barack Obama or, you know, great author, you just treat all of them as if that's going to happen.Rob: These days Larry and Nicky Smith live near Los Angeles. They have three children and six grandchildren. One of the things that Larry loves about Southern California is all the different cultures. He tells me that LA City College where he works is the most culturally diverse college in the world. Another obvious difference between here and there is the weather. Larry can't seem to get enough of the warm, sunny climate after his early years in the Pacific Northwest. Maybe this is the origin of the rumor that Larry and Nikki moved to California for health reasons. Despite the weather, Olympia holds a high place in Larry's mind.Larry: Of all the schools I've taught in, the class of 1974. Jefferson Junior High is the most memorable. It was that group that, I mean, all my kids in Olympia were great, but for some reason, it's like a convergence of the planets or something. But I still can look over the names and picture every single kid in that group. Great, great memories, and I wish I had been a more experienced teacher and had done a better job academically, but I'm sure if I could find out what you're doing. I would be so proud and so impressed and so amazed, and just, you know, blessed that I got to be a part of your lives for nine months, and that was the best nine months of my life. So thank all of you for sure. From the bottom of my heart.CREDITS:Rob: Thanks to Rick Aarts for calling me back. Thank you, Larry for checking your email. And on that note, Larry says if you're a former student of his, he'd love to hear from you. His email address is Smithoverseas@hotmail.com. Thank you to Ray and Bella, for allowing a total stranger to come into your homes and talk with you. Even if it was against the better judgment of your friend, Bella.Bella: My friend's like "hey, do you know this man?" I'm like, "No". he's like, "you're letting him in the house?" I'm like, "Yeah." He goes "Do you have something that if you need to kill him..." (Laughing)Rob: You heard music today by, in order, Lucas Gonze, two pieces by Northwest band Ditrani Brothers. The psychedelic track was by local artists Ronnie Tana, courtesy of Olympia's own 2060 Records. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions. Ending theme music by skrill Meadow. More info and links on all these artists in the show notes and welcometoolympia.com.I first came across the out of print book How the West Was once in the bibliography of a book that's very much in print. Understanding Olympia is a really funny and (smiling) mostly accurate guide to Olympia by David Shearer Water. You can buy it at Browsers, Orca Books, or online at buyolympia.com. Ending Theme Music by Skrill Meadow. With permission I posted the chapter on the ark builder, Bill Greenwood at Welcometoolympia.com. It's under the show notes for this episode. Also, this book wasn't the only extracurricular activity that Larry Smith did with his class. They also made silent films. Ray still has one of these and he shared it with me. Honestly, it's just a bunch of teenagers goofing around on the Capitol campus, but it was 45 years ago. Check it out. Welcometoolympia.com. It'll also be in the show notes. Finally, I thought it only fair that I give Egan's a second chance on Larry's behalf. It has been 45 years. I took my five and seven year olds recently. Rob at Egan’s: Does it taste grainy at all to you?7 year old: No, it tastes like ice cream a tiny bit melted with chocolate and vanilla mixed up together good.Rob: There you have it. I'm Rob Smith.

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.

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.

In this very special episode of The Disruptive Entrepreneur Podcast, your host Rob Moore welcomes you to this live Q&A mastermind to celebrate the 300th episode of the UK's No.1 business podcast. Entrepreneurs, tune in and discover how to overcome the challenges you face in business and in life and learn a little bit more about the public speaker, property investor and multi-million-pound business owner that is, Rob Moore. Learn the insider secrets to scaling your business, managing your money and finding the right joint-venture partner in this stripped back Q&A session and find out how you too, can become a Disruptive Entrepreneur. KEY TAKEAWAYS Q1: What is the single best thing you've learnt from running your business? Rob: The greatest thing I've learned about building a business empire, is managing one's self and managing your emotions. You have to get yourself in a balanced state and then make the decision, the right decision, for you and for your business. If not your emotion which for us is passion, leaks out with attrition, and that takes clients and staff away from your business. You must Learn how to separate yourself and become self-aware of your emotions, don't bring your past emotions and grievances into your business, manage and coach yourself to find the right solution and take wise counsel from those around you that you trust. Remember, your business will only grow at the speed that you grow, so compartmentalise your decisions and actions in order to move forward. Q2: What are the tools and software that you use in your business so that you grow & scale? Rob: The thing I've found with tools and software is what you need at the start, is not what you'll need once you've scaled. I write down everything that I do as a function and that naturally becomes a manual for your staff to use and to manage, and you do this until you can step out of your business. I tend to use people and empower them,  the three most important staff you will ever hire are an MD (managing director), PA (personal assistant) and a head of Marketing (Marketing Manager). Q3: How do you determine who's the right person to bring into your business? Rob: There are two answers to this question, usually we only see one polarized extreme due to when we are emotional, but there are equal upsides and downsides to seeking cash for the business, investment in your company or finding a business partner to help you grow. Investment capital and cash injections do not necessarily mean exponential growth, it can mean a lot of wastage and a lot of chaos. When you have money you use money as your resources and when you don't have money you use resourcefulness, creativity and hustle to solve problems. If you're going to get external partners to try not to lose your creativity and progressively invest in the growth of your business so you don't lose your desire to be creative. The best partner is someone who compliments your skill set and adds value to your business that you couldn't add yourself. Align a clear long-term vision with your partner so that you're working towards the same goals, however, ensure the application is different and diverse to grow your business. Q4: What three pieces of advice would you give your children about money? Rob: The challenge you have as a parent is not, giving the right advice, it's getting that advice through to them. You need to start really young and subconsciously educate them. Try to read hero based stories and insert the lessons about managing money and spending versus investing in these stories. Teach them as closely as you can to how the world really is and don't shield them from the world. Q5: How do you action the knowledge you obtain throughout life, and not be busy achieving nothing? Rob: Whilst you're young take risks, you can afford to take risks and learn from the mistakes. But the downside paradox of personal development is that ‘you should know more' and you feel like you should know everything. Don't beat yourself up about it, manage your emotions and allow yourself to fail, it's where you'll learn the most. BEST MOMENTS “The best marketing and creativity I've ever done is when I've had no money” “Our voids create our values and our fulfilment comes from filling our voids and achieving their values. Our strengths and weaknesses are intertwined, you cannot separate them” “The greatest gift you can give your children is to give them a balanced version of the way life is. If it's been hard for you don't protect them from that, if it's been easy for you, don't make it easy for them” VALUABLE RESOURCES https://robmoore.com/ https://robmoore.com/podcast/ The Disruptive Entrepreneur Community https://www.cfp-software.co.uk/cfpwinman-property-managers/ WhatsApp for communication Evernote for documentation WeTransfer for podcasting ABOUT THE HOST Rob Moore is an author of 9 business books, 5 UK bestsellers, holds 3 world records for public speaking, entrepreneur, property investor and property educator. Author of global bestseller “Life Leverage” Host of UK's No.1 business podcast “The Disruptive Entrepreneur” “If you don't risk anything, you risk everything” CONTACT METHOD Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/robmooreprogressive/?ref=br_rs LinkedIn - https://uk.linkedin.com/in/robmoore1979 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

"I'm calling shenanigans on that one... at worst I think its pseudo-spiritual-hippie nonsense." In this episode of The Disruptive Entrepreneur Podcast, Rob counters the idiom "It's all about the journey". Rob emphasizes that it isn't ALL about the journey but that it is equally about the destination. Rob talks about the importance of setting goals – how it makes the journey worthwhile and goal-driven and how it could lead to your own happiness. Discover also how to maintain the balance between the pursuit of your own happiness and the happiness of others. KEY TAKEAWAYS Setting up your goal is important since goal = destination. To embark on a journey, you must know what is the manifested results to make every grind and wait worth it. If we 100% believe in the saying “It's all about the journey”, no one will dare to strive, to strive, and to do what they have to do right now. They just let it be – let things happen on its own without their control. You have to balance going through the journey and being eager to reach your goal. “Happiness is progress towards a worthy goal.” Aim for worthy goals. Break them down to small chunks so as you go along the journey, you savour every progress you make. Rob: “There should a balance in the pursuit of your own goals and the goals of humanity.” It's okay to be selfish sometimes. Help others but also help yourself. Do sustainable projects where you can make money and also help other people. BEST MOMENTS “It's NOT all about the journey; it's PARTLY about the journey.” “You have to set a goal… It has to be as much about the goal as it is the journey.” “My Intense happiness is from the difficult challenges I endured and mastered and struggled and thrived.” ABOUT THE HOST Rob Moore is an author of 9 business books, 5 UK bestsellers, holds 3 world records for public speaking, entrepreneur, property investor and property educator. Author of global bestseller “Life Leverage” Host of UK's No.1 business podcast “The Disruptive Entrepreneur” “If you don't risk anything, you risk everything” CONTACT METHOD Rob Moore Official Website Rob's Facebook Rob's LinkedIn See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

Why does Feifei keep hitting Rob? There could be some confusion about the meaning of today's authentic English phrase. Find out what Rob really means when he says 'it beats me'

Kira Hug and Rob Marsh are back with another “guestless” episode where they talk about what they’re doing right in their own businesses and what challenges they are struggling with. Plus they recap a few of the things they’ve learned from the previous 10 episodes—like the importance of process, being willing to share and teach others without expecting to get something in return, taking time for yourself, balance and much more. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Rob’s book Rob’s newsletter The Copywriter Club Marian Schembari Pete Michaels Joel Klettke Case Study Buddy Roy Furr Tepsii Brian Kurtz Mariano Rivera James Wedmore The Copywriter Accelerator (link coming) Ry Schwartz Kate Toon The Hot Copy Podcast Sarah Grear Misha Hettie Ken McCarthy Leave a review on iTunes Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: Kira: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Rob: You’re invited to join the club for episode 30, as Kira and I talk about our favorite advice from the last 10 episodes of the podcast, plus what we’re doing right now in our own businesses, what we’re struggling with, and what’s next for The Copywriter Club.  Hey, Kira. Kira: Hey, Rob. How are you doing? Rob: I’m good. How are you? That’s kind of a loaded question knowing what you’ve just been through that last day or so. Kira: But how are you doing? Rob: Yeah. I’m doing great. Things are good, and I’m actually excited to chat a little bit about what we’re doing here today. Kira: Yeah. Before we jumped into this conversation and started recording I shared with Rob that I’ve been freaking out over the last 24 hours because my MacBook died on me unexpectedly. I guess you never really expect it to die. Rob: It is the nightmare scenario for ... I just can’t even believe it how bad that is. Kira: Yeah, because you do realize it’s your everything. It is your business. It’s like your brick and mortar. I was thinking, I was like, “This is almost as if my brick and mortar was just broken into and I had to shut down the business for a day.” I think just timing is never good for something like that, but especially this week. It’s two of my clients’ big launches and I’m working on another sales page, so I was like, “It definitely is not the vest week,” but that’s just how it happens, right? Rob: There’s never a good week for that kind of stuff, but yeah, this is a good reminder to everybody to back up your hard drives right now. Push pause on the podcast and go back everything up, because you will lose it if you don’t eventually. Kira: Yeah. This is really just a public service announcement instead of an episode. Back up your stuff now. Rob: Yeah, sponsored by all of the backup software out there. Kira: Seriously, all of the laptop rental companies must make out pretty well, but anyway here we are. I am excited to talk to you about what’s been happening in your business and also what we have brewing. Rob: Yeah, this is going to be I think a little bit different from most of the other podcasts that we do. We did something similar in episode 20 when we reviewed a lot of our favorite episodes from the first 20 episodes. I think we want to do some of the same today, but we wanted to start out just talking about what’s going on in our business, and what we’re doing right and maybe what we’re not doing so well. Maybe we should start with you, Kira, with what’s going right in your business. Kira: Okay. Lots of things are actually going right, although you wouldn’t know it if you talked to me.

Business guru and YouTube expert James Wedmore stops by the podcast to share his thoughts about creating a tiered business that brings in income at various levels and price points, how copywriters could be using YouTube to grow their audiences, what he would do if he were a copywriter wanting to create a course, and using the formula “Be, Do, Have” to build a life around the things that matter most. If you struggle to balance work with the rest of your life, this is a must listen episode. Check it out: Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Think and Grow Rich James’ Podcast Stu McLaren Tribe Wishlist Member Inner Circle Mastermind Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: Rob: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes, and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira: You’re invited to join the club for episode 25 as we chat we online marketing strategist, James Wedmore, about the power of creating courses, the value of masterminding with your peers, scaling up, and his ascension model. Rob: Kira, James. Kira: How’s it going? James: Hello. Kira: James, thanks for being here. James: Yes. Thank you so much for having me. As soon as I found out about your podcast, I was like, “Please have me on.” I feel like I have to impose, like, “Please have me over for dinner.” Kira: That was the only time I actually posted a promotion on Instagram for our show because I’ve been such a poor promoter on Instagram and I was so happy that you commented and wanted to be on the show. Here we are and I’ve worked with you. I’ve learned about how incredible you are and how you also attract this really amazing group of entrepreneurs and I know I’ve been able to think larger and think bigger about what I’m doing as a business owner through you and what you’re creating in the online marketing space. I think this episode particularly will help copywriters think a little bit differently about how they’re running their business or the direction it could go. James: Yeah and thank you. I do feel like, to be a little braggadocious for a second, that I do attract really great people into my life, which is how I found you. I mean by the way, I do have a love hate relationship with Kira Hug. Kira: What? James: We’ll get to that in a minute. We’ll start with the love, we’ll end with the hate. I mean, we were like, “Hey, we need a copywriter.” It was first try and it was a home-run. Normally, when you’re looking for people to attract on your team and people to work with, you know, it’s a little trial and error but it was just a home-run and it’s been such a great experience to get to know you as a human being, as a copywriter, and man, I hope we can get into this episode just what my experience inside of has been working with you. Here’s the hate side ... Rob: There’s wait ... I’m taking notes. James: Yeah, get your pens ready. I’m going into my 10th year of an online business. When I started, I was the stubborn, cocky, I can do it all myself, I got this kind of person. Copywriting was the last thing to really outsource, delegate, and let go of. I’d been doing it for myself for nine years. I think that was the first thing that you even commented on like, “Wow, you’ve been doing your own copy for this long?” The reason I did my own copy was because I thought I was good at it and I think your first draft of what you put together for us made me see just how much I suck at writing copy. Now, I secretly resent you for that. I really ... I was like, “Are you kidding me? This is ridiculous. My own stuff, my own stories, and someone else can come in,

The one and only Joanna Wiebe, who invented the title, conversion copywriter, joins Rob and Kira for the 14th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. They talk about Joanna's ambition to be a dermatologist (she's never talked about this publicly before), dropping out of law school on the first day, being a creative writer (and how that was a mistake), what she would do if she had to build her business from scratch today, where Joanna finds inspiration and a bunch of other copy-related questions.  Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Sponsor: AirStory Copyhackers Intuit The copywriter mastermind Fresh Skin Care Products Neil Patel Rob's Newsletter (which Joanna says is “really good”) Brain Clark Copyblogger Tim Grahl Jen Havice Deep Dyve Joanna’s post on time management Todd Herman Dan Kennedy’s Ultimate Sales Letter Breakthrough Advertising Joel Klettke Sam Woods Dan Martell AirStory Laura Weaver Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: Rob: The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at airstory.co/club. Kira: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Rob: You’re invited to join the club for episode 14 as we chat with the original conversion copywriter, Joanna Wiebe, about how copywriters can build a platform to get noticed, how she built her list, and what she would do differently if she had to start over today, how writers can command bigger paychecks, and what she’s learned working one-on-one with writers in her mastermind group. Kira: Hey Rob. Hey Joanna. How’s it going? Rob: Hey Joanna. Joanna: Hey guys. Nice intro. I love it. Your voices are both very radio friendly. It’s amazing. Rob: Maybe we need a radio show instead of a podcast. Joanna: NPR will pick this up, so don’t worry. Kira: That’s the goal. Rob: Joanna, we are really thrilled that you’re willing to chat with us. Maybe we could start with you just telling us a little bit about your story. I noticed on your, on the Copy Hackers site in your bio you mentioned that if you weren’t a writer you’d be a dermatologist, which kind of makes me laugh because I cannot even think of myself doing that sort of thing. But tell us a little bit about just your history and your story and how you became a writer. Joanna: It’s so long. I fell like it’s, like I have to get much better at editing myself when I speak, so apologies. Or that’s a terrible way to set it up actually. This is going to be a very exciting story. Are you ready? Rob: There you go. We’re ready. Joanna: I fell into copywriting. I had been a law student and I graduated. Kira: Oh wow. Joanna: Yeah. Kira: Didn’t know that. Joanna: No, for two whole days. I love the idea, like I love the LSAT. I finished my English degree. I went lived in Japan. Of course in Japan I was like isolated in the middle of Hokkaido which is the northernmost island and I was in the very middle of it. It’s snowing constantly for like nine months of the year. I was very isolated and I got some LSAT books and I just started practicing the LSAT. I went through thousand LSAT practice books and I really loved it. I loved the game side of it so I was like, “Well, maybe I’ll just like go and see if I can like, what if I just like become a lawyer. Okay, I could do that.” I took the LSAT and I got into law school. It was actually the night before, the night before my first day of law school my dad died, the night before. You’re like, “Oh crap.