Podcast appearances and mentions of rob when

What are the best ways to set up public, private, and academic clinical research partnerships? How do we get these public-private partnerships (PPP) to work most effectively? And who should be in charge of what in multistakeholder research collaborations? We will get those answers in more in this episode of Research in Action with our guests Rob King, President and CEO of FHI Clinical; and Dr. Kristen Lewis, Head of Clinical Operations at the Center for Vaccine Innovation and Access at PATH.   ---------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00;00;00;01 - 00;00;22;22 What are the best ways to set up public-private clinical research projects? Where does and should the money for such research come from and who should be in charge of what? We'll get those answers and more on this episode of Research in Action. Hello and welcome to Research in Action, brought to you by Oracle Life Sciences.   00;00;22;22 - 00;00;50;05 I'm Mike Stiles. And today we're just trying to outdo ourselves by talking to not one, but two very interesting people. First is Rob King, president and CEO of FHI Clinical. FHI uses Oracle's clinical trial software for their clinical operations and partner with public entities like PATH, which brings me to Dr. Kristen Lewis, who is Head of Clinical Operations at the Center for Vaccine Innovation and Access at PATH.   00;00;50;26 - 00;01;29;23 I could go through what each of these organizations do just to hear myself talk, But why do that when I have both of you here? So, Rob, tell us what FHI Clinical does. Yeah, I think Mike, so clinical in a contract, they were actually for profit and hearing of a large nonprofit called F8 had three ethically and while we are for profit empathy, our mission is to address unmet research needs and maximum social impact pouring into development of medical treatment around the world.   00;01;30;04 - 00;01;58;20 While we work globally, we tend to focus on the low and middle income country on the whole pharma and biotech client are also include nonprofits and government. Empathy. Well with biotech receive public funding and path having him be one of our client. Appreciate Kristen being here arguing that four years ago and I'm currently the CEO and I'm happy to be here.   00;01;58;20 - 00;02;22;19 Well great. Kristen what about PATH? Yeah, thanks for the introduction, Mike. It's a pleasure to speak with you and Rob today and have the opportunity to contribute to this discussion. So most people listening to this podcast may not be familiar with PATH. We're a nonprofit global public health organization with approximately 1600 employees worldwide. Our headquarters are in Seattle, Washington, and we have offices across the African and Asian continents and Europe.   00;02;22;19 - 00;02;53;00 Some of the locations we have offices in include Kenya, Ethiopia, Senegal, Uganda, Zambia, India, Vietnam, Ukraine. And I could go on, but I'll I'll hold hold it there. Our mission is to advance health equity through innovation and partnerships. We do this with the help of local and global partners by generating evidence, advancing innovation and strengthening local capacity to improve health in countries and communities that are experiencing disproportionate burdens of disease and barriers to well-being, specifically in low and middle income countries.   00;02;53;11 - 00;03;26;01 This includes working in over 70 countries across the African, Asian, Latin American, European and North American regions. Within Paths Center for Vaccine Innovation and Access, we drive the mission of achieving health equity using a three-pronged approach, including developing, facilitating and implementing global market and policy solutions to ensure sustainable supply and equitable access to vaccines. Supporting country led efforts to advance national health equity priorities, and to strengthen immunization system resilience and driving innovation and technological advances.   00;03;26;01 - 00;03;50;20 To accelerate and optimize access to vaccines. Now, this last point is where my work is focus. Thus, during today's discussion, I'll be speaking with the lens of developing vaccines for disease indications benefiting low and middle income countries, and the importance of public private partnerships in achieving that goal. And just to note, you'll note a common thread there in the introductions from both Rob and myself, and that's the low and middle income country focus.   00;03;50;20 - 00;04;15;17 And I think that you'll start to hear some commonalities come into play as we go further into this session. Great. Well, I think what I want to get into here is kind of what you talked about is the value of public private partnerships in clinical research. Rob, give me the honest first reaction that a lot of private companies have when it is suggested that they partner with a public or a government organization.   00;04;15;17 - 00;04;45;18 Is that something that they jump at with open arms or is there any hesitancy? How does that go down? You know, with recently reading an article about one of the first public private partnerships and it was how mail really hit home, like, you know, for most of our listener, what most people won't be familiar with are the initiative around vaccination for diseases like polio and Spanish flu, MENA and rubella.   00;04;46;00 - 00;05;33;19 And we tend to have short memories. And they and the devastating impact they've had on society prior to vaccination and treatment options or with also that treatment developed over HIV and AIDS and then most recently the COVID pandemic. So with that said, you know, private companies maintain the shy away from what we call the triple P public private partnership in the funding limitations that my, you know, government based funding required a lot of compliance when the whole myriad of regulations and public kind of activity may have restricting how and where or how and when fund your, you know, without experience are now horsepower in the public private partnership.   00;05;34;07 - 00;06;09;21 It creates see private companies to engage and may see growth for example will not serve as a prime contractor on government funding work because when you're in the accounting and you're when the regulatory compliance and you'll only see those of normal commercial contracts, therefore they can turn them and be overly burdensome for those companies to pay. And public private partnerships, you have to have an operational model that meets the unique need of that partnership.   00;06;10;03 - 00;06;36;15 And at the end of the day, you really can't you can't get value for society that public private partnerships have contributed to. And Kristen, from the nonprofit or public side, what what is the benefit of partnering with private companies? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think to answer that, I'd first like to highlight some of the major successes when these partnerships have come together.   00;06;37;04 - 00;07;05;23 PATH has played through public private partnerships. PATH has played a critical role in some of immunizations, created successes over the past 30 years in lmics low and middle income countries. This includes developing the world's first malaria vaccine, which has now reached more than 2 million children, eliminating meningitis epidemics in Africa following introduction of the A4 backed vaccine protecting over 300 million children from Japanese encephalitis, vaccinating millions of girls against HPV.   00;07;06;06 - 00;07;33;20 And I could go on. But those are some some highlights. Path has not achieved these accomplishments in isolation. These successes have been catalyzed via public private partnerships models, and they're examples of which the private sector alone may not have been interested in developing these indications. These vaccine indications for low and middle income country use due to financing or budget considerations or constraints or some of the points that Rob made earlier.   00;07;34;00 - 00;08;03;13 However, with partnerships between PATH and private entities, including finance mechanisms for rollout and use of the vaccines in the regions following development, we've been able to champion development and introduction of vaccines that might not usually have generated sufficient interest for the investment that's required for full development. So in a nutshell, public private partnerships are the bread and butter of our work and integral to the goal of achieving improvements in global public health among populations facing economic challenges worldwide.   00;08;03;24 - 00;08;43;19 Well, so it feels like these partnerships would automatically create multiple stakeholders. So, Rob, how hard is it to make sure that the goals and priorities are aligned amongst all these people and stay aligned? First, I think I have a, you know, expectation and the goals are higher for public private partnership and for commercial initiative. You know, eight you public five, there is an expectation that you're going to achieve the goal or outcome and you're held accountable for how those on her spent.   00;08;44;11 - 00;09;27;10 You're not accountable to a or stockholder, but general public. And you know, public funds are unlimited and there are every dollar may account for whatever goal they're trying to achieve. And we're spending public funds a buying or accounting of how this on her being spent and her limitation on this on and how there may not be extra funds or reserve goes back to if those funds start to run low and usually the public entity defines the impact and the work that has to be completed in ensuring that the funding is in place.   00;09;28;01 - 00;09;53;24 And they then tracking the work that the private company may have contractually in their you mean clear terms on what's being delivered and the restrictions that may or may not be around the funding for that deliverable. So I you agree that saying, though, priorities are paramount because of the fact that we're accountable to the end of the day, to the general public.   00;09;54;09 - 00;10;29;01 And Kristen, is there anything on the public or nonprofit side that's done to kind of make sure that projects aren't subjected to red tape or bureaucracies? I mean, I guess there's always going to be some of that, but to the extent that would might slow things down. Yeah, it's a great question, an interesting and insightful one. So Path we work as a clinical development partner and hold sponsor sponsor roles to implement clinical trials and generate evidence to support vaccine licensure, W.H.O., Prequalification and decision making for vaccine Introduction.   00;10;29;11 - 00;10;51;09 And our work spans the entire vaccine development and delivery lifecycle. And with this broad set of objectives, in order to achieve the aforementioned successes, we have worked with the same urgencies and efficiencies as our private counterparts. From a private lens, there seems to be a perception that the public sector does not come with the same development pressures as the private sector.   00;10;51;19 - 00;11;22;13 In other words, there seems to be a perception that the public sector works slow due to many policies or rules or paperwork, or is generally lacking a sense of urgency, if you will. Now, I don't have that experience working in government, so I can't comment on that side of things. However, in my experience working in vaccine development with a non governmental nonprofit for the majority of my career as well as a few years working for a for profit entity, I can comment that the intensity of work at a nonprofit has been similar to the intensity at a private entity.   00;11;22;26 - 00;11;46;09 While the root of the development pressures may be slightly different. The goal is to develop products as efficiently as possible, while also retaining high quality remain in both sectors. For private entities, I believe the term may be, quote, time as money and quote as a driving consideration. While for my work in the nonprofit space, what drives us is, quote, time is lives, unquote.   00;11;46;14 - 00;12;17;20 And that is really the driving consideration. But regardless of those driving considerations, there's still urgency and sense that we need to be as efficient as possible and ensure that we aren't were removing blockages, red tape, bureaucracy as much as possible. So, Kristen, I'm curious, just from your point of view, when the pandemic came down, that was an entirely different animal in terms and the need to get something done and get something done rapidly.   00;12;17;25 - 00;12;48;23 Just how different a process was that? Yes. So I wouldn't say that the process was necessarily different between the public and private side. I would say that we did things across both sectors in a a new way. So the COVID pandemic really brought home how there are many similarities between the public and the private sectors. Not everything differs according to operating model.   00;12;49;01 - 00;13;14;16 In fact, during the pandemic, the global public health and product development safe spaces, regardless of the type of sector, were going through the same waves of initial shock and uncertainty and how to continue the trials during the very initial stages of the pandemic considerations in terms of the risk benefit tradeoffs of operating non-covid interventional trials during that time, and depending on the type of trial availability of remote technologies and a product's importance to saving lives.   00;13;14;27 - 00;13;38;24 We had to take into consideration different ways and methods for making sure that those Non-covid interventional trials were completed. We also were involved with needing to identify new ways of getting the work done, which included catalyzing a more definitive shift towards identification of local partners that were in close proximity to the trial locations for ease and trial oversight and management.   00;13;38;24 - 00;14;04;12 Implementing remote solution for activities such as source, document verification, remote training, remote site assessments and other types of remote activities, identifying how to get supplies or equipment to the sites ahead of study. Start with supply chains being disrupted and finally determining how to maintain the trials and keep them running once up and going while continuing to deliver with with high quality and ensuring participant safety.   00;14;04;24 - 00;14;30;10 So from Passent, given our work is primarily focused in low and middle income countries, many of the challenges faced in the private sector high income market were further exacerbated due to the relatively slower adoption or uptake of technology surgical clinical trial advances. And this experience was important as it pushed for adoption of technologies that had been previously questioned due to fear of loss of data or other concerns, as with other areas of our lives.   00;14;30;11 - 00;14;56;28 COVID really helped to push the envelope in terms of finding new efficiencies and ways of getting things done. Rob When a partnership like this comes together, I guess this goes along with the expectation setting side that you touched on earlier. How are the roles and responsibilities assigned? I say that in the triple P or public private partnership it really different in that respect as compared to commercial partnership.   00;14;57;25 - 00;15;41;11 You know, the earlier the public finds an objective and a private is to execute that. Now the public entity may only outsource part of the work because they already have the skills and knowledge and the resources themselves. And then they will only outsource the pieces that they can't do themselves. But I think the main thing to keep in mind when a public private partnership is that the public entity, a steward of the public interest and liability and accountability for that public interest lies with them regardless of whether they outsource or not to a private company.   00;15;41;11 - 00;16;05;12 So I feel bad for Kristin and the pressure that they have on them as a public entity compared to myself and her private empathy, where I don't necessarily feel the same pressure we have. Some people might think that the role of public funding is just to get the project more money. You know, we tell you what we need, you go get it for us, and that's your role.   00;16;05;12 - 00;16;28;04 How true or not true is that, Kristin? Yeah. You point out an important consideration for pairing public funding with private resources. There is the potential that private entities may believe that we, the nonprofit, will help bring in key funder resources to augment a development program regardless of their development goals, in alignment with the use of the product in low and middle income countries.   00;16;28;13 - 00;16;54;25 However, in order to mitigate the potential for this misalignment within PATH, we focus on partnering with private entities. When there's clear alignment between Path's mission and the mission of the private entity. Additionally, this alignment has to be in writing agreed to via contract. It includes global access agreements for product availability and use. And so in summary, my experience has been that it's not true that the goal of public funding is to get the project more money.   00;16;54;25 - 00;17;16;10 The goal of public funding is to achieve an outcome that might not otherwise be achievable, given lack of private interest without the public funding to come in and co-fund an objective that benefits low and middle income countries. So we've got public and private represented on this episode with the two of you. What we don't have is someone representing the academic side.   00;17;16;10 - 00;17;45;27 Rob, do you have any thoughts on the role that that third leg of the stool plays or should play? Yeah, you know, there are academic institutions that also have private public anything in and out where I have a lot of admiration for the role of peer academia, Both public and private institutions rely on academia being a catalyst for innovation and providing health very specific areas of research.   00;17;46;24 - 00;18;13;00 There are a lot of academics out there. They're doing very research and I never know when that point of time in in hand. So at every level we rely on our advisory or academic consultant to keep us informed on very specific events or therapeutic topics. And this plays into whether the research into them or not that we intend to do.   00;18;13;10 - 00;18;51;08 And there's a large portion of investigator and key opinion leaders involved in research actually come from academia. On the flip side, academia also relies on public private partnership to bring their ideas into the research environment because they lack the funding to paint the vision or the technical knowledge on how to bring that idea to the next step. You know, I think the example that perhaps a lot of people have heard of are the bar industry days and Loreal, which is the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.   00;18;51;24 - 00;19;35;13 They host annually this event where people come in for ideas, for collaboration in partnership with US funding, and so they have it. So for them, the novel idea that aligns with the interests of the US government and they get the opportunity to collaborate with other companies that can bring that into fruition as well with funding behind it. So I think there are a lot of opportunities out there for academics to bring the right into fruition, but we have a great job of sort of pulling them in the right direction.   00;19;35;28 - 00;19;58;14 Kristen, I have to tell you, as a as a layperson, I kind of picture this three way partnership, and the first thing that comes to mind is that's a lot of cooks in the kitchen. So it's kind of amazing to me that anything gets done or gets done in kind of a timely manner. What are the essential ingredients of a truly successful collaboration in your mind?   00;19;58;26 - 00;20;34;24 Yeah, it's a very good point. And I will add on to Rob's comments regarding academia that academia is a very important partner in this setup. Academia generally is part of these partnerships. And so there are I would, as you put it, a lot of cooks in the kitchen when we're bringing these projects together. And the short answer and how we make these successful is to never underestimate the value of careful pre-planning and preparation and setting up the partnerships, including mission alignment, alignment in the partners scopes of work and roles and responsibilities.   00;20;34;25 - 00;21;11;19 I think Rob alluded to that earlier. And the Seven Seas of collaborations jump to mind, clarity of purpose, concurrency of mission strategy and values, creation of value, connection with purpose and people, communication between partners, continually learning or a growth mindset and commitment to the partnership. In addition, it's also important to lay a solid foundation underlying all of that of respect, trust and finding a balance between humility and confidence across the partners to make sure that everybody is partnering fairly and with trust and in good faith.   00;21;12;01 - 00;21;37;07 Yeah, you know, I don't want to start a fight, but who is largely responsible for big innovations in clinical health? I think the public gets the impression there are private scientists huddled together in one lab, and then government scientists huddle together in another lab, probably in D.C. That's not really the way it is, is it, Rob? I mean, how are the big, impactful innovations truly getting developed?   00;21;37;17 - 00;22;07;29 Yeah, I'm one I answer that question in the obvious here. I mean, there when we all work together and leverage the strength of all of our partners. I honestly do think that commercial or private things are faster innovation, but they have a feel and reward system. They're always our innovation, a profit making endeavor. I mean, why not? You have a good eye and you want to be recognized and rewarded for it.   00;22;08;12 - 00;22;36;24 But bringing innovation in areas where the opportunity for regular recognition and reward is not so great. And that's where public private partnership come into play. You know, as a global community, it's in our interest to innovate in low reward scenarios because the knock on effect is that the problem is not spread and that it allows a particular community to or region to prosper.   00;22;37;13 - 00;23;00;15 And so therefore, if people prosper, they're less likely to mean in the future and we can maximize their contribution for the greater good. Yeah, but Rob, when it comes to public health, people do seem to put the bulk of that responsibility on government. Like people didn't demand an answer to COVID from Pfizer. They demanded it from the White House.   00;23;00;15 - 00;23;29;27 So is that fair? I think fair and yet a moral issue that we can do a whole nother podcast around. So, yeah, but, you know, human empathy and theoretically the government are there to serve the public and the public good through taxation and donations. We expect the instinct to step up when the need arises. You know, the public can't hold a private company like Pfizer accountable in a crisis.   00;23;30;13 - 00;23;58;14 And then the obvious thing here is they hold the public entity responsible. The only problem is we pan who fund our public entity with a little support if possible, or we lose the funding that's already there with a whole myriad of special interests. We don't leave a whole lot left in crisis. We're also very bad at funding the future, whether it's for crisis or innovation.   00;23;58;27 - 00;24;25;25 We're not people that really think ahead, sometimes have public empathy, have to scramble to reallocate funds, and they usually can't staff up or get resources in place quick enough. And they turn to commercial companies that really have no restriction on growth and simply eat the money and make it happen. Rob What's the most gratifying thing that's come from working with Path from your perspective?   00;24;26;17 - 00;24;57;14 Well, I'll make this short with Sweet. We know toward the beginning of our path and we'll have similar missions now. Path being a public entity, hailing here for the greater good and not really for a reward or profit. Who? I don't know. But I feel I feel better about myself and my company associating and working with Light Path.   00;24;58;00 - 00;25;22;15 And Kristen, what keeps you bought into the whole public private partnership model? Well, it's it's that it's a factor that the model is effective in bringing new life saving interventions to low and middle income countries. So for me, it's the advancement of the public health mission and being able to efficiently facilitate implementation of health interventions for low and middle income income countries that wouldn't otherwise be available.   00;25;22;16 - 00;25;42;26 It's the ability to have a true impact to save lives. And this partnership model is is critical in making that happen. Yeah, but it can't all be gumdrops and rainbows. So what are some of the challenges as or wish list items that you both feel still kind of need to be addressed when it comes to the partnerships around clinical research?   00;25;42;26 - 00;26;18;16 First Rob, then Kristen how I think we can do a better job of building trust and sharing intelligence even in public private partnership. There in Singapore. If trust and holding on the information that can be of mutual benefit. And I personally would like to break down some of the barriers, you know, a key concept in public private partnership in the best value and in most cases that require public entity get like three quotes for some of activity or contract.   00;26;19;02 - 00;26;44;17 And then you have to justify why you can go with it. So we all know that paper is not always better, and I would like to see us define value in more ways than just cost. Also think they're alive and healthy. It can be shared around best practices of Kristin and I belong to a group that's publicly funded that share best practices.   00;26;45;07 - 00;27;25;20 But you know that sharing of best practice has been limited with sort of all that culture of caution. So I'd like to see more sharing and the assumption of positive impact on our party. And I think we held out a lot during the COVID pandemic, and I applaud that. I hadn't felt the call center for a large government project, and we had to do it time and when I reached out to a technology company to help me fill up that call center, the question was, how much are you going to pay me or what kind of, yeah, how quickly you need it.   00;27;26;12 - 00;28;06;15 And then we literally are without contract, without much, especially around term. And they phone up in record time and we work the other stuff out on the back end to mutual benefit. And I know that we can't always do that, but it shows you what possible. And Kristen, what gets your goat? Yeah, I guess there's two points that jump to mind in the first is that we have some more work to do and in terms of sustainable capacity development to ensure that the ground that we gain in facilitating research in low and middle income countries continues to be built without the loss of human or material resources that are built out for trials.   00;28;06;27 - 00;28;26;16 How do we do a better job of sustaining capacity that's been built following the completion of a trial or a set of trials at sites that we've invested in? That's an area that many folks are putting thought into these days, But I think we have yet to identify a solution to that. And I think that's that's something that we can do, do better at.   00;28;26;16 - 00;28;56;00 And I know we will. It's it's a work in progress. And then the second thing is the concept of equitable partnerships that needs additional consideration and support. And I think back to Rob's comment about assuming positive intent and working in good faith, there's a focus now on on transferring leadership and ownership of much of our clinical development work to the regions that are participating in the work so that they're really co-creating and co owning the development work in the development space.   00;28;56;08 - 00;29;17;00 While COVID helped to catalyze that shift, there's still some more push that we need to do within the global public health and development community to make this shift really, really be adopted and occur. And we have a bit of a way to go in terms of fully embracing the models that are led out of the regions that our products serve.   00;29;17;16 - 00;29;38;27 And I believe that the public private model and partnership is an area where we can help to facilitate this in the future. You know, I'd probably be remiss if I didn't ask about the role that you see technology playing and being maybe that fourth partner in clinical trials. Rob, I know you use Oracle's clinical trial Solutions. What does that bring to the table?   00;29;38;27 - 00;30;25;07 So I think, you know, you're in the COVID pandemic. Technology was really a shining star and allowed some things that we probably couldn't done earlier by embracing technology that people were perhaps hesitant to use before. So I think that certainly around Oracle, we were able to use many of the Oracle platform during the COVID pandemic. I think my favorite story, and people probably heard it before, I apologize to anyone hearing me repeat, is that I think how clinical it have at home, even you're a platform without join and so joined right before the pandemic and you're all now on my whiteboard.   00;30;25;16 - 00;30;50;07 My ideal platform for data collection analysis and sharing with other and a former colleague of mine who we recently joined Oracle dropped by the office and we were hanging out my office and he looked at my whiteboard and he said, What's the Oracle Product Development Plan doing on your whiteboard? I said, Well, that's not the Oracle product development plan, that's my plan.   00;30;50;18 - 00;31;21;25 And he said, Well, that exactly met what we're doing right now. And that was in of our use of clinical one. And, you know, just hearing differently, you know, what I had in mind and what the Oracle developer had in mind were the same. I don't think anybody with smart irony when they coming in the gene at that time drove innovation and all the partners on that, and it came at just the right time.   00;31;22;12 - 00;31;53;20 And Kristin, are you surprised by or frustrated by the technology capabilities that are available for your endeavors and what you're trying to get done today? Yeah, I'm excited for trial platforms in low and middle income countries to have the chance to further adopt technologies that have been utilized in other regions. I would say there's been some reluctance in adoption of the technologies that have been commonly utilized in high income country settings for some time, but that COVID has really catalyzed adoption of many of those.   00;31;54;22 - 00;32;16;19 There has also been some backsliding in use of those technologies since COVID. The urgency of the COVID vaccine development cycle more or less ended. And so what I'm excited for is that there was a push during COVID. We've seen it work in the past and that there's the potential for continued adoption of these solutions, such as these saucy diaries Pro ET cetera.   00;32;16;28 - 00;32;44;20 As we work through the challenges with implementation of those technologies outside of high income country settings. So there's there's a little bit of work to do in terms of adoption. But I think we're we're getting there and I'm excited to see the field further embrace those technologies. Well, it's great to hear about partnerships like this and what's increasingly becoming an accepted model for how we can get better results for people faster and for more people.   00;32;45;00 - 00;33;08;13 A lot of our listeners may want to learn more about what you've been talking about and what you do. So do each of you have a way they can do that or even contact you? How about you? Rob Yeah, so feel free to reach out to me quote unquote dot com. And I'm also only in and happy to sort of brainstorm with anybody.   00;33;08;21 - 00;33;39;20 We sort of can move the idea of public private partnership even farther and Kristen yeah our websites available WW w path dawg and it provides additional information on path and what we do and I'm also on LinkedIn then can be reached via that platform Perfect well if you want to see how Oracle is accelerating life sciences research and how it might be able to do that for your work as well, check out Oracle.com/lifesciences   00;33;40;00 - 00;33;58;18 Also be sure to subscribe to this show and we'll be back next time for Research in Action.

Rob Finn? …Hello Finn?芬恩?...你好芬恩？Finn Oh sorry Rob, you caught me napping. It's that time of day when I need to nod off – or in other words, fall asleep.芬恩: 哦，对不起，罗布，你发现我在打瞌睡。 一天中的这个时候我需要打瞌睡，或者换句话说，需要入睡。Rob Well, sleeping on the job – or sleeping at work - is no bad thing – and I hope today's programme will wake you up to the idea that sleeping in the workplace might be a good thing.罗布: 好吧，在工作中睡觉——或者说在工作中睡觉——并不是坏事——我希望今天的节目能让你意识到，在工作场所睡觉可能是一件好事。Finn Oh really! That's good to hear. I would have thought that sleeping at work was against the rules.芬恩: 哦真的吗！ 听起来还不错。 我本以为在工作时睡觉是违反规定的。Rob: Not in every office, Finn, and I'll tell you why soon as well as explaining some sleep-related vocabulary. But now you're wide awake, how about a question?罗布: 芬恩，并非每个办公室都如此，我会尽快告诉你原因，并解释一些与睡眠相关的词汇。 但现在你已经完全清醒了，有个问题怎么样？Finn OK, let's hear it.芬恩：好，让我们来听一下。Rob When the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was in power, she did her job with very little sleep. Do you know how many hours of sleep she is said to have had each night?罗布: 当英国前首相玛格丽特·撒切尔掌权时，她几乎不睡觉就完成工作。 你知道她每晚睡几个小时吗？a) Three hours 三小时b) Four hours 四小时c) Five hours 五小时Finn I always thought she got by, she managed her job, with just four hours of sleep a night.芬恩: 我一直以为她能过得很好，她能完成自己的工作，每晚只睡四个小时。Rob Not much, is it? We'll find out if you are right or wrong later. I'm not sure if she chose not to sleep for long or she just wasn't able to sleep for long. Someone who can't sleep is called an insomniac. 罗布: 不多，是吗？ 我们稍后会知道你是对还是错。 我不确定她是否选择不睡太久，或者她只是无法睡太久。 无法入睡的人被称为失眠症患者。Finn And I'm certainly not an insomniac. I enjoy sleeping all night and some of the day too. And Rob, you said napping during the day is a good thing?芬恩: 我当然不是一个失眠症患者。 我喜欢整夜睡觉，白天也喜欢睡觉。 罗布，你说白天小睡是件好事吗？Rob It's always nice to have a short sleep – or what I call 40 winks – during the day, but when you're at work this can be a problem. In some companies, like Google and the Huffington Post, workplace naps are positively encouraged. They're seen as a way to make staff more productive.罗布: 白天短暂的睡眠（或者我所说的 40 次眨眼）总是好的，但当你在工作时，这可能会成为一个问题。 在谷歌和《赫芬顿邮报》等一些公司，积极鼓励在工作场所小睡。 它们被视为提高员工工作效率的一种方式。Finn So you mean they work harder and are more creative because a power-nap – a quick sleep – makes workers feel refreshed and more alert. I like the sound of this!芬恩: 所以你的意思是说，他们工作更努力，更有创造力，因为小睡——快速睡眠——让员工感到精神焕发、更加警觉。 我喜欢这个声音！Rob An Australian health writer called Thea O'Connor, is a founder of a campaign called Nap Now which is trying to make sleeping at work more acceptable. She calls herself a 'naptivist'! Let's hear from her now. What does she say is stopping us from doing this?罗布: 澳大利亚健康作家西娅·奥康纳 (Thea O'Connor) 是一项名为“Nap Now”的运动的创始人，该运动旨在让人们更容易接受在工作时睡觉。 她称自己为“Naptist”！ 现在让我们听听她的消息。 她说了什么阻止我们这样做？I think that our culture is a bit crazy not to embrace it, and one of the reasons we don't is our attitude, you know it's quite counter-cultural to do nothing in order to get ahead. I just really see that it's time to disrupt the prevailing work ethic which is all about work longer and harder.我认为我们的文化不接受它有点疯狂，我们不接受它的原因之一是我们的态度，你知道为了取得成功而不采取任何行动是相当反文化的。 我真的认为是时候打破普遍的工作观念了，这种工作观念就是工作时间更长、更努力。Finn: Right, so she wants us to embrace – to accept – the idea of a workplace power-nap. But it is our attitude – the way we think about work – that stops society from accepting this.芬恩: 是的，所以她希望我们接受——接受——工作场所小睡的想法。 但正是我们的态度——我们思考工作的方式——阻止了社会接受这一点。Rob Yes, she explains that it is counter-cultural – so going against the normal way of thinking – to actually do nothing and have a snooze.罗布: 是的，她解释说，实际上什么都不做，打个盹是反文化的——因此违背了正常的思维方式。Finn That's why she is trying to change – or disrupt – our current work ethic of working longer and harder. She believes this doesn't necessarily bring better results. But Rob, is this idea just a fad – something that's popular for a short while?芬恩: 这就是为什么她试图改变——或者说颠覆——我们目前工作时间更长、更努力的工作理念。 她认为这并不一定会带来更好的结果。 但是罗布，这个想法只是一种时尚——只是流行了一时的东西吗？Rob Maybe, but research has certainly shown that good quantity and quality of sleep is important for our wellbeing. A few years ago research by the East of England Development Agency found 30% of people have their best ideas in bed compared to just 11% who have them at their desk. It called for companies to install beds in the workplace.罗布: 也许吧，但研究确实表明，良好的睡眠时间和质量对我们的健康很重要。 几年前，英格兰东部发展署的一项研究发现，30% 的人将自己最好的想法放在床上，而只有 11% 的人把这些想法放在办公桌上。 它呼吁公司在工作场所安装床。Finn Well, there aren't any in our office yet Rob. I think putting beds or areas for naps in the office would help us workers feel more able to rest and recharge our minds.芬恩: 好吧，我们办公室还没有人，罗布。 我认为在办公室里放置床或小憩区可以帮助我们的员工感觉更容易休息和恢复精力。Rob An alternative idea would be to change our working hours. The UK's Sleep Council claims the nine-to-five work culture does not fit into the natural sleeping pattern of the human race and bosses need to introduce a more sleep-friendly working day.罗布: 另一种想法是改变我们的工作时间。 英国睡眠委员会声称，朝九晚五的工作文化不符合人类的自然睡眠模式，老板们需要引入更有利于睡眠的工作日。Finn That sounds like a siesta to me - a short period of sleep in the middle of the day that people in warm places like Spain often have.芬恩: 对我来说，这听起来像是午睡——在西班牙等温暖地区的人们经常在中午休息一段时间。Rob: My problem with a siesta is that if I have a sleep in the afternoon I'd never wake up!罗布: 我午睡的问题是，如果我下午睡一觉，我就永远不会醒来！Finn Well before you nod off now Rob, could you please tell me the answer to today's question.芬恩: 罗布，在你打瞌睡之前，请你告诉我今天问题的答案。Rob Yes. I asked you if you knew how many hours of sleep the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, is said to have had each night? Three, four or five hours?罗布：是的。 我问你是否知道英国前首相撒切尔夫人据说每晚睡几个小时？ 三、四、五个小时？Finn I said four hours Rob.芬恩：我说四个小时，罗布。Rob You are right. It has often been said she needed just four hours of sleep – only on weekdays, not weekends. Well before you have another power-nap, could you remind us of some of the vocabulary we've heard today:罗布: 你是对的。 人们常说她只需要四个小时的睡眠——只在工作日，而不是周末。 在您再次小睡之前，您能否提醒我们今天听到的一些词汇：Finn Yes, we heard:芬恩：是我的，我们听到了:napping小睡nod off打盹sleeping on the job工作期间睡觉insomniac抢眼40 winks40次眨眼power-nap打盹naptivist潜入主义者attitude态度counter-cultural反文化work ethic工作风格wellbeing福祉nine-to-five朝九晚五siesta午睡Rob Thanks. We hope you've enjoyed today's programme.罗布: 谢谢。我们希望你喜欢今天的节目。

My guest for episode #251 is my friend Rob Kosberg. Rob is a #1 best selling author, founder of www.BestSellerPublishing.org and has been featured on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and the Wall Street Journal. Rob has spoken to and taught thousands of entrepreneurs, coaches and consultants how to stop hunting for clients and instead position themselves as the hunted through the power of being a published author. Through his Publish-Promote-Profit program, Rob helps his clients create their own professional, best selling book (guaranteed) and then teaches them how to use that book to grow their income via speaking engagements, free publicity and lead generation strategies. Rob used his own best selling book and these strategies to build his last company to over $1,000,000 in income in less than 15 months. Rob is passionate about helping small businesses reach their target audience via cutting edge marketing.  To start off our conversation, I asked Rob: “When you're among those who've reached a certain level of success— what do YOU see that's consistent in them?” What he's noticed is that the most successful invest in themselves, heavily. The invest their money and their time first in knowledge and networks. And, beyond that, in assets. . The difference between successful entrepreneurs and everyone else is that we look at money differently. We, as in entrepreneurs, look at money as either an investment or an expense. So, educational courses are indeed an investment!    Here's a Pro Tip: the next time you are looking to pay for a coach, a conference, or anything, ask: “How much is the investment to work with you?” Rather than, “how much does it cost to work with you?” Do you FEEL the difference? I DO! Rob let us in on what he calls a Massive Cheat Button:  “It is a massive advantage to learn from people that are ahead of you in business.”  In other words, if someone has already been there and done that, then you don't have to! You get to learn from so many around you.  Always learn from the next master. Period.  The most successful people are always the ones to study MORE! Is that you? And hey— maybe you'll finish this episode feeling ready and inspired to write your own story!  Happy writing!    Links:  Rob's Email: rob@bestsellerpublishing.org Rob's Website: http://bestsellerpublishing.org/next-best-seller

My guests today are David Ashcraft and Dr. Rob Skacel, the authors of a new book, What Was I Thinking? How to Make Better Decisions So You Can Live and Lead with Confidence. In this new book, David, the pastor of a large and influential church, and Rob, a licensed psychologist and executive coach, encourage readers to embrace risk and to live their lives to the fullest potential, in order to both run and finish the race with no regrets. David is Senior Pastor of LCBC (Lives Changed By Christ) Church in Manheim, Pa. Under his leadership, LCBC has grown from one location with a weekly attendance of 150 people and a staff of one to 18 locations across the state of Pennsylvania and a combined average weekly attendance of more than 20,000 and a staff of more than 280. Rob began his career in clinical psychology before transitioning to a business psychology specialization. He served in senior leadership positions, in the areas of quality improvement and organizational development, in the private sector and later at LCBC Church. 3:37 – David 101 David has been pastor at LCBC for 31 years. He and his wife have two children and two grandchildren. 5:19 – Rob 101 Rob applies psychology to a business setting. He helps business leaders lead more effectively. 7:12 – Why they wrote this book About three or four years ago, David had dinner with a mentor and it was an amazing experience. He then found out the man was accused of inappropriate behavior. David wanted to help people make wise decisions. 12:00 – Why does inappropriate behavior happen? We all have blind spots, and it's perplexing when we see people we respect make wrong decisions. Any risk-based decision comes with four propositions of risk – desire, opportunity, power and expectations. 14:00 – Small decisions become big Some decisions we make involve risk. Certain decisions, like having an affair or being sexually inappropriate, don't usually happen overnight. Decisions that are small over time tend to become big and we just instinctively react. 17:09 – Entitlement issues Some people make decisions based on their gut or feelings and they feel entitled to certain things. Slow down and have a thoughtful process in your decision. Don't just go with your gut and what seems right in the moment. 23:22 – How to make better decisions When we're struggling with something, we have to go right there to God and ask Him to show us things in ourselves that we need to see. Ask people to come into your life to help you improve. 31:50 – How David stays vulnerable David pastors a huge church. He tries to stay vulnerable, but he has to be careful who he shares things with. David's wife and children are good accountability partners for each other. 36:59 – Creatures of God As you grow as believers, there are ups and downs. You'll never truly arrive. In the midst of success, remember you are a creature of God and fully reliant on God. 39:44 – Speaking the truth in love If you see someone heading down a bad path, it can be difficult to talk to them about it. It's worth speaking up, but do it in love. 45:45 – Truthful feedback If all the feedback you get is critical, your relationship won't go very far. You need to offer positive, truthful feedback that shows you care. 53:25 – Get to know you David's favorite TV show growing up? Leave it to Beaver Rob's favorite dinner? Steak David's dream he has yet to achieve? Traveling to new places Rob's favorite music? Thomas Rhett's Slow Down Summer FEATURED QUOTES Any risk-based decision comes with four propositions of risk – desire, opportunity, power and expectations. – Rob Moral failures don't happen overnight. It starts gradually. – David Slow down and have a thoughtful process in your decision. Don't just go with your gut and what seems right in the moment. – Rob When we're struggling with something, we have to go right there to God and ask Him to show us things in ourselves that we need to see. – Rob CONNECT: https://www.bhpublishinggroup.com/products/what-was-i-thinking-2/ Thank you to our partner of the show! Are you looking to clean up your household cleaning products this year? MamaSuds would like to help! The best way is to simply start with one product. Every time you run out of a specific cleaning product, replace it with a non-toxic one. Another tip, purchase a product that has multiple uses. The MamaSuds Collection has many multiple use products (castile soap or the toilet bombs are just a few!). Their blog has lots of great tips and a castile soap recipe that you can print and make a lot of your own effective cleaners! Give them a try at www.mamasuds.com and don't forget to use the coupon code MOLLY for 15% off your order!

Rob chats to 365 Football Management ltd. Director David Lavelle and asks him about his role as an experienced football agent working with successful footballers and  football clubs. He asks him about how he entered the industry, his first experiences in the industry, what he does day to day, how his role has evolved over the years, the journey of young players, the attitude of managed players and their family, the reputation and changing culture of agents and how trust is utilised in management.    KEY TAKEAWAYS After seeing a football agent on TV and enquiring after the qualifications required, David studied during his time in the decompression chamber in his previous job as a saturation diver on an oil rig.  People imagine a football agents job to be glamorous but it requires a lot of administration and client upkeep. It involves travelling and is quite pressed and high powered. When David started his career there were roughly 500-550 agents available. Then the criteria for becoming an agent became much easier and that number grew to over 5000. Currently harder qualifications are being discussed. Managing younger players involves managing the player and their parents expectations. Its requires hard work and social media confuses the issue and makes a signed young player think they have already made it. Sometimes family can involve themselves in contract negotiations and confuse issues due to lack of experience and the urge to protect their youngster.  365 Football Management Ltd does much more than function as football agents. They look after the interests and well being of their clients on a personal level and treat them as more than commodities. BEST MOMENTS ‘It wasn't a career I set out to do, if I'm quite honest. Believe it or not I was a saturation diver on the oil rigs.' – David  ‘It's got to the stage where we had to make a decision either we run with it and I stick with the football or I take the easy route, or the steady route, and stay in the oil industry.' - David ‘I'm a massive believer that even though social media presents people as successful, behind all that is normally years and years of hard work.' – Rob ‘When the transfer window opens it's what I call “silly season” because it's not just necessarily sitting in the office 8-5 or 9-5 or whatever. There's days where, especially towards the end of the window, there are 16 or 17 hour days.' – David ‘Just because you're at a certain club that doesn't mean you've made it. You're a long, long way from making it as an academy player.' – David ‘I think now the games evolved that much, there's that much money involved and that you need to nail the contracts. Contract isn't just what you get paid per day or per week or per month or per year.' – David ‘If we can help in any way, if we can alleviate any problems or any issues that's first and foremost. And then with day to day living we have contracts throughout Europe in relation to car deals, house insurance, mortgages, financial advisors, all of which we trust 100%.' - David    GUEST RESOURCES David is an experienced football agent working with some of the biggest names in today's game in England, Scotland and Europe. As a director at 365 Football Management Ltd he is focussed on global client satisfaction and works with a carefully selected team of the finest professionals to offer clients amongst many other things:   • Club Sourcing • Contract Negotiation • Asset Management • Legal Counsel • Brand Management & Media Relations • Lifestyle Management   David can be contacted on any of the following:   Linkedin linkedin.com/in/david-lavelle-243438156 Website www.365-football.com   E mail david@365-football.com   VALUABLE RESOURCES Leader Manager Coach Podcast      ABOUT THE HOST Rob Ryles is a UEFA A licensed coach with a League Managers Association qualification and a science and medicine background. He has worked in the football industry in Europe, USA and Africa; at International, Premiership, League, Non-League and grassroots levels with both World Cup and European Championship experience Rob Ryles prides himself on having a forward thinking and progressive approach to the game built through his own experience as well as lessons learned from a number of highly successful managers and coaches. The Leader Manager Coach Podcast is where we take a deep dive examining knowledge, philosophies, wisdom and insight to help you lead, manage and coach in football, sport and life. CONTACT METHOD https://www.robryles.co.uk/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMPYDVzZVnA https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertryles/?originalSubdomain=uk Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/robryles See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

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.

David Finberg, CEO, Peaks Digital Marketing (Denver, CO)   David Finberg is CEO at Peaks Digital Marketing, an SEO and lead generation firm that focuses on a comprehensive, aggressive approach to “addressing all seven areas of an SEO campaign to get ROI rolling as early as possible.” Clients range from small, local businesses to major enterprises. Today's solutions must be comprehensive. Peaks Digital's fractionalized team operates as a cohesive unit and integrates multiple areas of expertise with its clients' teams . . . filling in the “gaps” and providing support in areas that will most impact its clients' campaigns. Highly agile, the team can address page speed, backlinks, content, reputation, user experience, and technical site auditing in a customized way that can truly “move the needle.” Newly built or restructured websites typically rank in an exponentially shorter timeframe than might be expected, and sometimes in as little as three months. Clients work with Peaks Digital on a month-to-month basis . . . which reduces client risk and barriers to entry. Peaks Digital focuses on relationships, educating, and empowering clients. “The proof is in the pudding,” David says. Clients who see results . . . stay. In this interview, David discusses some website “quick fixes.” Analyze your sitemap/URL roster for relevance, consistency, and functionality. Do a comprehensive content inventory/audit, especially of your older content. Do you have pages written years ago that have never generated any traffic? Review your Google Analytics.  Which pages have the most hits?  What are the topics, pages, questions, and queries on those pages?  What is the market doing on your site?  Examine content that may appear to be impactful, its analytics, and its search data. Does it even rank? If not, remove it, repurpose it, or rewrite it.  David recommends that companies “no index” those pages that have low quality or thin content. Otherwise, Google will downgrade your site  Years ago, David was tempted to chase “shinier things,” like Facebook. Mentors asked him, “How much money have you made off Facebook?” (None), then asked him, “How much money have you made off SEO?” (A lot . . . and growing.)” Their advice? “Double down on what's working.” He did. David can be reached on Instagram at: @Davidafinberg, on his agency's website at: peaksdigitalmarketing.com, or on a variety of social platforms. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by David Finberg, CEO at Peaks Digital Marketing based in Denver, Colorado. Welcome to the podcast. DAVID: Hey, Rob. Thanks so much for having me on the show. I'm excited to be here. ROB: David, it's great to have you here. Why don't you give us an introduction to Peaks Digital Marketing? What are your superpowers?  DAVID: That's a great way to lead in. Peaks Digital, we're an SEO and lead generation firm based out of Denver. We work with anyone from local business all the way up to enterprise, and we've really developed this claim to fame or system around providing great backlinks, great content, and really addressing all seven areas of an SEO campaign to get ROI rolling as early as possible. We do things a little differently in terms of the way that we approach campaigns. It's a lot more aggressive. We really map out a lot of the strategy and high-level, low-hanging fruit and also more aggressive opportunities, and take it from a more comprehensive approach. It's not just about one thing anymore – your content or your page speed. It's about having great reputation, great backlinks, great user experience. It's all these things. So we really like to take a more comprehensive approach. The great thing is the strategies work all the way up to enterprise, all the way down to local mom n' pop. We've got a fractionalized team here and an award-winning staff and process that goes into these campaigns. While we do offer more of the same kind of generalized experience everyone knows, like keywords and backlinks and title tags are important, we tend to take a more in-depth approach and treat it from a much more data-driven, ROI-based perspective. Our superpower is really coming in, getting a campaign kicked off, and getting them ranked in an exponentially shorter timeframe. Most companies say, “Hey, it's a year, it's going to be 12 months or 13-14 months.” We can come in and, especially if we built the website, there have been instances where we've been able to rank websites in as little as 3 months. You don't need to hire anyone. This isn't some big pitch. But it's really designed to be a comprehensive experience where you're not only getting someone who knows backlinks and outreach and web development; you're getting the content team, the analytics team, people that are going to help you with reputation management, your Google business – really looking at every area and leaving no stone unturned, and doing so in a fast way that'll generate some results earlier on than the traditional expectations. ROB: When you talk about really being able to come in and make a difference quickly, that points me to the idea that there may be some things that are relatively low-hanging, relatively simple, that I might be doing severely wrong, left to my own devices. What am I doing wrong that is fixable quickly with the right expertise and the right team around it? DAVID: That's a great question. One of the big, high-level, punchy items – I don't want to call it punchy, but high-impact items, is doing a content audit on your site. So often, we're dealing with multiple webmasters, multiple people, or maybe just multiple iterations of the site, and the business is evolving and changing and growing. So just like with your business, your SEO is going to evolve and change and grow. It's really important to take comprehensive inventory of your content on your website. One of the places that we like to start is looking through your sitemap and looking through your URL roster. Sitemap basically just tells you what URLs you have on your site. You may find that you have things like thank you pages or blog posts that were written four years ago by a contractor that never really went anywhere in Google search, never generated any traffic. What I suggest is you should highly consider going through your Google Analytics, looking at the pages that have the most hits and writing some qualitative data about those topics, pages, questions, queries that you're seeing on those pages. What is the market actually doing on your site? And then audit some of your older content. Google grades your site – think of it like a school project. There might be multiple components. There's a research phase. It's not just about the best pieces of content; actually, your worst pieces of content can grade you down. You could have 10 amazing pages that are A+, 10/10 content, and then you might have 2 or 3 pages that are considered what we call “thin” content or low value, low impact content. A thank you page is a pretty cut-and-dried example. Very little content on the page. There's nothing you can really rank a thank you page for. People aren't going to be coming in off of your thank you page. So, it's really important to what we call “no index” that page, or have Google basically ignore some of these pages that arguably could be seen as low quality or thin content. So, you're going through and auditing that, and then on the other end, taking a look at content that may appear to be impactful, but looking through analytics and looking through the search data to say, “Is this even ranking?” And if it's not, that's probably a good indicator that that content doesn't deserve to be on the site anymore and could be redirected, deleted, or repurposed/rewritten. Starting there is a really great spot. If you can take your site from a C to a B to an A in terms of content quality, it can have some exponential effects across your entire site as opposed to just improving one page at a time. This can actually have a much more impactful, exponential approach without necessarily having to invest lots and lots of time inventing new content. ROB: To draw a bit of a metaphor, it sounds almost like you're describing an overgrown yard at a house. It's just been left there, nobody's really done anything. People are there looking for something – maybe it's the front door – but they can't find it, or they're not finding it well enough. You paint it up, you make it look good, you trim some bushes, you prune some things, you highlight the good things, and then you're at a better place, it sounds like. DAVID: 100%. I love that analogy. It's certainly the truth for most people's sites. There's probably some spring cleaning you need to do. Let's get these edges hedged up and work through ways to improve the overall presentation of the site when someone comes in. Pretty succinct and concise example. I love that. I may take a note out of that. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] At least if somebody likes gardening and has an overgrown yard from time to time, perhaps so. David, tell me, what is the origin story of Peaks Digital Marketing? Where did the firm come from? DAVID: It was almost out of necessity. I started making websites when I was 9 or 10 years old – Angelfire, GeoCities. These are dial-up era free websites that you could have, kind of like a Myspace or a Facebook, but they were an actual website you would type in. So, I always had this desire to create content and then be able to structure that content in a more technical way, and a way that someone could interact with, like a website. Really, my love of computers and journey started with my dad. In the early '90s, he had a 90 megahertz NEC computer. For those of you that know computers, that's basically like a hundredth of the speed of what a computer is now. I learned a lot on that computer, and it really paved the way for a skillset that I would end up honing in later. I had a pretty different journey than most people. I actually started my career out of high school as a Mercedes mechanic and really learned the technical components of how to work on cars and the electrics and things, and then over time I got back into computers. Prior to starting Peaks, I worked at a startup doing SEO; same kind of project management, high-level SEO, some content is really how I got my foot in the door. We had a great business. To keep the story short, the business wasn't being managed properly. It was a bunch of younger guys who were getting their feet wet in entrepreneurship and didn't necessarily have the coaches and the skillsets to be able to have a sustainable company. We got really spread out. We were doing municipal financing over here and launching affiliate websites over here and then doing Facebook ads over here. It just wasn't concise. Looking back at the data and at that experience, the SEO worked really well. Policies changed. The way that you do SEO completely changed from that point in time. When we started Peaks, I really had to reinvent that. The process was like, okay, this works. The company disbanded. We were making money, but the money was going to people's moms' rents. One of my good mentors told me, “How you show up one way is how you show up every way.” So, if there are things happening on one end of the business, you shouldn't be surprised if other things, like the money, isn't being managed and the process isn't being managed and everything's not being managed. It was a great learning experience. I walked away with some practical skillsets and opportunities and really had to start over. I said, well, if I'm going to start over – it was me and one other guy running the SEO department at this company of 10 people. It's like, I could probably do this on my own. It was not a grand story; I moved in with my folks, which I thought I wasn't going to have to do. I was 26, 28 years old, having to move back in with my folks. They were not very happy that I took a risky move in entrepreneurship that didn't work out. It's like, “Go to college, finish your degree, go do these other things.” I thought, well, I've just got to pick something. One thing that I always go back to is computers. I actually took a job, another Mercedes job, which I thought I'd never have to do. Moved out to Boulder, Colorado, where my cousin lived. He's an entrepreneur and was like, “Come out here, get off the beltway.” I was living in Virginia/Washington D.C. area. Just wasn't getting the traction in that part of the world. The writing was on the wall. I was applying to jobs, wasn't in a great mindset, wasn't in a great environment being back at home, not having my space. It was just a difficult time. I said, “Okay, how do I make this a win? Let's start this company and start building out the framework of what I feel like the previous company I worked at could've been. If no one else is going to give me an opportunity, I'll make an opportunity for myself.” So, it involved taking that step back and going back to the world that I didn't think I was going to need to go back to, which in this case was the mechanic world. During my off time, I would literally build the website. I hired someone to do the logo. I just kept investing, and over time, you get a client and you start expanding. To me, that's where I say it came out of necessity. There's a timing of my life and a season of my life that was coming to an end, and it was embracing this new dream, this new opportunity, this new season of life. It was super uncertain, but that's how most great things start. They start in a garage or they start in an auto shop or whatever the case may be. Everyone's journey is a little different, but that's what mine looked like. ROB: Around that time, if somebody was looking at the marketing world, I think for most people, SEO wouldn't have been where they would've started. They would've started with – I don't know whether it was particular organic social channels at the time, whether it was some paid social – it was something, and it was probably wasn't SEO. I think I would say a lot of the parlor tricks that made SEO rise in the prior decade had begun to go away and it became this more disciplined and steady practice. What made you start there instead of chasing the shinier things? DAVID: That's an interesting question. I had temptations, even after I started Peaks. I was like, “I'm going to start doing Facebook!” I had a really great set of mentors and they were like, “How much money have you made off Facebook?” I was like, “Well, none.” “Okay, how much money have you made off SEO?” “Oh, a lot, growing.” “So why would you switch that up? Double down on what's working.” Part of it was at a more subconscious level, was this a right fit? It wasn't always clear. SEO isn't sexy. It's kind of like accounting; you need it. It's not like social, where it's fun and it's creative. It's more like research. I was thinking, and I had some talks with different people in my life, and everyone was telling me, “Pick something. You just need to pick something.” I looked back to my childhood; I loved making websites. I looked at what I was great at when I was studying in college and in school; writing was always my passion, telling stories or performing research, putting a story together. That's where I said SEO actually is a pretty good fit for that. You don't have to necessarily be a programmer, which is what I was studying in school, to be a hacker – a certified hacker; I'm not a hacker by any means. Depends on your definition of hacker. I think everyone's a little bit of a hacker. Not like a computer, break into someone's website. I was actually studying to go work at the NSA or somewhere that was more of a white hat place, not something that does bad things. But it was really like, I don't feel like I'm a 10/10 on coding. Could I be? Sure. But I'm a little bit more of a hybrid – a little bit of creative, a little bit of technical. A little bit of writing or a little bit of web design and then the technical behind that. That's where it really clicked, and it was like, I do just need to choose this. Let's start this. People need this. Every business needs this. It's crazy; the SEO market is so saturated. There's an agency on every corner. But very few people are investing the time in the innovation side of it. And to your point, a lot of those parlor tricks stopped working. Panda update came out and it was no longer about backlinks and keywords in your titles and image optimization. It was about the quality and the experience and what users are actually doing on your site, to make sure that people actually like the sites that are being promoted, and all these different variables. It seemed like Mount Everest. It was like, wow, I'm not going to be able to climb this pretty easily. Really just approaching it step by step, it was like, let's reinvent the link component. Let's reinvent the way that we address content to make sure that it has the right expertise, authoritativeness, trust, research, and maybe some original analysis, factual – how do we create the highest quality? We want to be the Mercedes-Benz, essentially, of SEO. So how do we find these levers to pull and present to people? That's really where the journey progressed. Imagine having a baby. It was like, all right, I've got to really commit to this. In order to be on Page 1, you have to be in the top 10% of sites. Only 10 sites make it to Page 1, so 90% of websites aren't going to be on Page 1. How do we approach this from a more data-driven angle and start looking at the market? Once I made that commitment like, “Okay, this is a good skillset fit; I feel like I've got a good balance here of technical versus creative,” now it's “How do we quantify this and make this into a scalable, repeatable product that people, no matter what industry they're in, can benefit from?” That was the next season of entrepreneurship, which is like “Oh my God, how am I going to do this?” [laughs] Definitely looking at the writing on the wall was the big commitment that I had to make to myself: not only is this going to be difficult, it's going to take a lot more time. I wasn't getting traction. The first year, I tried to give up a few times. I was applying for jobs. I'm like, “I'm not making enough money.” It was tough. Those first three years were really tough. But then once you reap the rewards of planting those seeds and harvesting what you've invested and you start to see it work for other people, the reward and benefit from that and finding that purpose – like, I can be of service. I'm finding my purpose. My purpose is to help other people succeed in an area that maybe seems like gambling. It's one of those scary things like accounting where if you mess it up, you can be in big trouble, and you don't always want to deal with it. And it's not that sexy. But on the other end, how to make it fun and innovative – we create different content programs and ways to plan out articles and map out articles to make it fun and enjoyable and still innovative at the same time. ROB: I do appreciate that advice you received from your mentors around looking at how you were already making money and not trying to get too creative. I know we all want to be creative, but I think also sometimes – everyone tells you, “You should do social media” and you're like, “Oh, I should do social media,” and then you peel back and say, “What am I strong at? Where am I succeeding?” You mentioned something earlier that I do want to come back to. You mentioned something about having a fractional or fractionalized team. Tell me about that. What does that mean to you? What does that look like? DAVID: To recap, having that fractionalized team is really where most businesses need to be. It allows you to be more agile and focus on all seven of those core areas that you need for SEO as opposed to more of a Gantt chart where it's just waterfalling down. You really need to have – whether it's your page speed, your backlinks, your content, your reputation, technical auditing of your site – all these different components are what move the needle. We saw this market offering, this gap in the market where most people know that they need a web developer, but can they keep that web developer busy all the time? Instead of going and hiring all these people and paying benefits and having multiple staff on salary or as a contractor that don't play nice together and don't coordinate together, how about we just bring it all under one roof, customize the package to their needs – some people already have a web developer and don't necessarily need to double down on that. But maybe they don't have a content person or they don't have a reputation management campaign running or anything like that. There is no cookie-cutter approach, but typically you need multiple areas of expertise. I'm a big believer of if you get the right people in the right seats focused on the right tasks, and they're all experts within their field, that is really what we set out to deliver to the market. Not a jack of all trades, master of none; it's the exact opposite. You get a team full of experts that are going to come and work as a cohesive unit and integrate into your team to get you support in the areas that are going to impact your campaign the most. On the other end, the other differentiator – and a lot of people do this now, but it's month to month – reduce the amount of barriers to entry and risks for people. I don't know if anyone here listening has ever been burned by SEO. I get calls every single day talking about, “Hey, we paid this person for 12 months or 16 months and it just didn't work out.” We say the proof's in the pudding. We don't want to have to lock you in. If you're seeing the results, you're going to want to stay, and we're here to invest in that relationship and frontload that work. So, thinking about it from a business perspective, you can't be that much different on the outside than – people know about our process, but it's like, “You're just another SEO company.” What makes us different? To us, it's really focusing on the relationship. If you were selling a relative of yours SEO, would you be locking them in for 12 months, or would you keep it flexible? Would you educate them through the process and empower them, or make them feel small? I don't know if you ever watch SNL, but they had this guy Nick Burns, the company computer guy, and he would just totally sh*t on people, basically – excuse my language; I don't know if we're allowed to curse here. He's like, “You don't know how to do this? Move. I'm the wizard.” It was very disempowering for a client. Our goal is to never make our clients feel small. Doesn't matter if we're the best at SEO; it's really about the communication, expectations, positioning of the product, and follow-through and follow-up. We're not perfect. If something goes wrong, let's call that client and make them a priority, make that face-to-face connection, and then fix it. Unfortunately, in this industry, there's a lot of bad press around SEO. It's like, “They sold me this thing and it didn't work” or “Every time I call them, they never call me back” or “They send me these reports and I have no idea what I'm looking at, no one walks through it with me.” There's all these different emotional touchpoints, just like you have in your markets and just like you have in your areas of expertise. As a smaller company, you can be more agile and cater to the culture and the process around those pain points. I tell my team all the time, there are plenty of companies that have crappy SEO. They just have really great follow-through and communication, and that's why people spend a year with them. Imagine if you marry that communication angle with the technical component; people will never want to leave, and you're not locking them in, so there's no pressure. Then it's really fostering that relationship and going through some wins together and all that kind of thing. ROB: It's really critical. Someone who is hiring an outside firm to do almost anything core to their business – and in particular, I would say marketing – they're making a bet that's not always easy, and they're making a bet that they expect to pay off. If they spend a year and get nothing, it's a year of their business and a year of their life, potentially, that doesn't move as fast as they want it to. It's so key to instill that in the team and how they interact and how they communicate. That makes a great deal of sense. DAVID: Yeah, it's not rocket science. It's just things that can be hard to do at times, especially when you have Google algorithms and other things that are going to make the day-to-day more of – “Whoa, I've got to focus on this algorithm.” It's like, no, let's actually just communicate what we're doing today and start there, and then we can come back and spend the 20 hours and grind or laser-focus on this thing until it's zapped. But communication has really been the cornerstone of our success, and the other is empowering that client, not making them feel small. Which can be frustrating for both ends if someone doesn't know what they're doing and they've made that bet and they're like, “I can't tell if I'm winning or losing.” It's important to have – at the casino, they have the guy that tells you how to play the game and whether it's a good hit or whether it's right. I'm not a huge gambler, but it's interesting. ROB: [laughs] I wonder about that, because in the casino they're telling you how to lose money over the long term. You're never going to get ahead. But something like marketing is not a zero sum game, and there's room for everyone to get ahead. I appreciate the thought you put into your clients, into instilling that empathy into your team, and the technical expertise of not selling – we don't have to sell magic beans in SEO anymore, and I certainly appreciate that with you and what you're doing, David. When people want to get in touch with you and with Peaks Digital Marketing, where should they go to find you? DAVID: Check us out on Instagram. @Davidafinberg is my personal Instagram handle. We're doing lots of tips, tricks, things like that. And then if you want a free audit or you just want to check us out on the web, peaksdigitalmarketing.com. Hit the contact page, get a free audit or read some articles, things like that. But yeah, Instagram @davidafinberg, peaksdigitalmarketing.com, and then you can check us out on social as well. There's some other platforms if you prefer.  ROB: Excellent. Thank you, David, for coming on the podcast. Best wishes to you and the team. Thank you for sharing from your experience and wisdom. DAVID: My pleasure. Thanks again. I really appreciate the time today. ROB: All right, take care. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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

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

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

Lisa Vielee is President at Well Done Marketing, a 15-yer-old full-spectrum, strategic, creative, and technical agency that provides design, branding, content marketing, public relations, and digital strategy services . . . but not traditional media-buying.  Lisa claims this small, independent agency is unusual for its size in that it has a full web development team and can “go straight from web design to UX, UI, and development, testing, and then continue with ongoing maintenance web development. Lisa explains that “design to development” can be a rocky handoff – but keeping everything “in agency” eliminates this problem. Today, websites, which used to be one-and-done “catalogs,” require constant updating to make sure they provide great customer experience, enhance and support the customer journey, and align with changing customer needs. New business comes into Well Done in one of three ways—through referrals, through “the dreaded RFP process, and finally, and through outbound sales. Dedicated service managers serve as primary points of contact for clients, represent the agency's team for the client and the client internally, and bring in the staff with required skill sets as they are needed. Lisa believes the agency's small size of 30-some employees promotes nimbleness and the ability to maximize budgets. The agency's clients present the agency with “problems to be solved” but solutions now are far more comprehensive than they were in the past. Lisa says it is important to “not just focus on the initial creative strategy” (which tends to live short term inside a campaign) but to take a wider view and develop marketing strategies aligned with long term business and brand goals. She says marketing, is “more than just distribution channels and the4 Ps” (product, price, place, promotion)—marketing needs a seat at the C table.  Lisa feels it is important to mentor younger people and asks them to define their “end goals” and “their visions of success.” She explains that some people may want to create a company, sell it, and become millionaires. Others may want a tight, small, focused team that provides meaningful service and personal satisfaction. Still, others just want to come to work and do a good job, day in and day out. Lisa says these are all valid and that, no matter what each individual is pursuing as success, Well Done will work to keep them challenged.  Lisa, who refers to herself as a “communications generalist,” did not start her career at Well Done Marketing. After earning a degree in journalism, she almost immediately went to the “dark side,” and worked in a variety of public relations positions. When her political candidate/employer lost an election, Lisa started her own PR firm . . . which grew until she had a choice, she either had to start saying “no” or add employees. She met with an old friend, Ken Honeywell, to ask him to mentor her and help her grow to the next level.  But Ken Honeywell had other ideas. He and a fellow freelance writer had started Well Done Marketing by outsourcing their services to other agencies. As they grew, they added visual and strategic skills and data management. Now, Ken wanted to add public relations to his firm's offerings. He brought Lisa on board to add PR and with the intention of grooming her to take over the agency's leadership as he started his 5- to 8-year journey toward retirement.  Six years in, Lisa understands the culture, knows where the agency excels and has developed her vision for the agency's future. Ken will be retiring at the end of the year. Lisa says the hardest part for her in stepping into the role of president has been giving up day-to-day client interaction. Her focus now is on agency-level problems and issues, expanding the agency from a regional to a national “marketing force,” and making it a legacy that lives beyond this transition in leadership. Lisa is available on her agency's website at Welldonemarketing.com. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Lisa Vielee, President at Well Done Marketing based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast, Lisa. LISA: Thanks, Rob. It's good to be here. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Why don't you give us an introduction to Well Done Marketing and what you do that is so well done? LISA: Well Done Marketing is a 15-year shop here in Indianapolis. We're a full-service marketing agency. We like to say that if it's strategic, creative, or technical, we probably do it. That's everything from design, branding, content marketing, public relations, digital strategy. Also, kind of unusual for an agency our size as a small/mid-size agency, we have a full web development team. So we can go straight from web design to UX, UI, and development, testing, and then ongoing maintenance for our clients, which is really great because sometimes that handoff from design to development can be a little rocky and some things can get lost in translation. That's part of the reason why we brought it in-house. For the most part, unless it's traditional media buying, you can find it here at Well Done. ROB: That's an interesting evolution, because for a time – and this may be part of your transition – web development used to be kind of one-and-done. It seems to me now that a website is never really done and needs to be adjusted alongside everything else that's going on with the brand. LISA: Absolutely. Websites have gone from brochures online to really more of a customer experience. It's the first thing people see and learn about your company, so keeping that content fresh has really evolved from being just updating blog posts to updating everything on your site and making sure it aligns with what the customer wants. The customer journey is paramount, and I think that's where having data and content and having that come together makes a lot of sense, and being able to change that in real time helps us as an agency, and we think helps our clients be really competitive in the market. ROB: Right. It turns it from this big event into just part of the cadence. I totally understand that. Can you maybe give us a picture through the lens of a particular client? What's a walk-through of a typical-ish client engagement for you? Who are you working with? What are the touchpoints? LISA: For any advertising agency, there's probably no such thing as a “typical” client. The clients that we love to work with are the clients that come to us with an overall problem to be solved. It used to be that was always an agency of record, but now it tends to be a project comes in and they recognize that marketing partners such as ourselves can help them do more than put a piece of content or an advertising campaign together. One of our philosophies is to not just focus on the initial creative strategy, but to really take a step back whenever we can and focus on the marketing strategy. That's really more aligned with business goals and brand goals, whereas a campaign – creative strategy tends to live in that campaign, that short term. For a lot of our clients, they'll come to us for a project and then find that we're asking questions and going outside of our lane, giving advice to them that goes beyond the campaign. Even if they don't continue with us, our hope is that we can help that marketing person or that marketing director really understand why they need a seat at the table in the C-suite, and that marketing is really more than just distribution channels and the 4 Ps. ROB: Right. As you talk about the range of services that you work with clients on, how are you then structuring the client engagement and the team around them? How are you establishing the primary point of contact and how do you bring people to the team around them? What's that structure look like? LISA: We have dedicated service managers responsible for all of our clients. They're the primary point of contact. Then we bring in people as needed. Again, as a small independent agency, we can be a little more nimble. We can maximize budgets that way. So we'll tell clients, with the exception of the initial kick-off meeting, where you want everybody at the table – other than that, you will see people when you need them at whatever stage of the process you're in. That account manager's responsibility is not only to represent our team for the client, but also to represent the client internally. ROB: It's such a key relationship and it's always interesting to think about how to structure it, because it's really make or break. There's a lot of stake there in that role. LISA: There absolutely is. A lot of agencies get started with the trifecta. You've got a creative person, a writer, a designer, and an account service person. For us, that's not really how we started. Our two founders were both freelancers, so they started with this loose coalition of freelancers. The two people were writers, and they started an agency based on providing good content. Their first clients were typically other agencies. Along the way, our founder decided that we could do more, that it really was about how he and his partner were thinking as well as the content that came out of it. So as the agency evolved, we found it made sense to show how that thinking works visually, strategically, through buys, through data management, and ultimately – my background's in PR, so also in how we were communicating to different stakeholders. ROB: Absolutely. I think you bring us to an important part of the conversation. You mentioned the founders of the firm, you mentioned those older parts. You've taken us through a little bit of the origin story, but let's talk about your journey into the firm, what you were up to before, and what it looked like to dive into Well Done, and now you're the president. LISA: I am a proud communications generalist. I graduated with a degree in journalism, went over to the dark side and started working in public relations almost immediately, and over the course of my career, I've worked in internationally recognized nonprofits; I've done a stint in two or three different agencies of different sizes. I worked in state government, and then, as is typically the case in government, eventually your candidate loses. When my candidate lost, I took some time to think about what I wanted to do and how I wanted to balance my work and life. I decided to hang my own shingle. You get to a point as a freelancer where you have to decide if you're going to start saying no to preserve your own sanity or if you're going to add people. I have trouble saying no, so I started adding additional people. Ken Honeywell, our founder, and I have known each other forever. Indianapolis is known as one of those “small town” big cities. Everybody seems to know everybody, and in the marketing and advertising space, we all have tended to work with each other or for each other. So Ken and I have known each other for years. We came to a point where I actually asked him to go to lunch because I wanted to ask him how to take the next step. I was under five employees; he at the time had about 20, and I wanted to ask him to be my mentor and really help me grow. It was a fun conversation because his answer was, “Well, sure, I'd be happy to help you, but I was hoping we could take this conversation in a different direction. I think we need to add PR, and why don't you come on board? And oh, by the way, I think you'd be a great successor and a great leader for Well Done.” Really, it was one of those I was looking through a door and he opened the window, and we started having that conversation. From the beginning, we were very intentional about not only how to add that service line and that different way of approaching a customer's communication needs, but also how we were going to approach the internal management of the agency. The staff immediately knew that it was a sign that Ken was going to retire. We always said it was a 5- to 8-year journey so that I could learn the culture, I could really come in and understand where we did our best work and what that meant, and also put my vision together for the second generation of leadership. And now here we are 6 years later, and it's bittersweet because Ken is retiring at the end of the year, but everyone is ready. Not ready as in “Get out of here,” but ready in terms of we know where we've been, where we're going, how our story is evolving. ROB: What I'm hearing you say is first day in the door, you were going from around five people in your organization to maybe around 30 or so? What was that jump in responsibility? LISA: Yeah, I was employee #24. In the last few years, we've added people. I think we're now at mid-30s. I'd like to think that bringing my company in was a good addition because we've been able to add clients and add people. But the other thing that I've realized, again, as that communications generalist, is I was well-positioned to understand the agency from a business perspective. A lot of agencies that are started the way ours started don't necessarily have the greatest business structure. I take this role of president really seriously in that I've given up being involved on the day-to-day – which was really, really hard. That was probably my biggest challenge at first. I didn't want to give up that day-to-day client interaction and being involved in solving their problems. It took me a couple of years, but I realized after time that my job was to solve the problems and issues of the agency and working on the agency. That's really set us up for success going forward because my leadership team, we have big dreams. We want to grow from a regional company to a more nationally recognized agency. And having someone at the helm of that is a really important part to making that happen. ROB: Was that the hardest part to let go of? The last responsibility you wanted to give up was working directly with the clients, then? LISA: It's been a 5-year journey. To be fully transparent, I am turning over the reins for my last client next month. ROB: That's progress, right? I think you highlight a neat opportunity for the entire services industry. There's seemingly always room for the next wave of companies to rise up from nothing to regional player to national player. Some of them get bought along the way and some of them stand strong. It's a great journey to be on. LISA: Yeah, I think so. It's exciting, for sure. In my experience, from the places where I've worked, a lot of agencies, especially in the Midwest – we're very humble people. It's kind of scary to share that big goal. But again, to have a founder who is so willing to help his baby get to the next step and bring on someone that can really make it become a legacy – because that's the other thing. Agencies tend to come and go as the founders come and go. It's been a real gift to have this opportunity to really work with our leadership team and envision where we want to go and make it something that can be a legacy for our founder. ROB: When you start to think about growth, there's lots of struggles, but there's a couple that constantly come into play. It's sales and execution in the services business overall. I think one of the hardest things to get predictable for an agency can be seeing a lane to predictable growth beyond – I think sometimes we just feel like we luck into business, we get referrals, we grow organically. How have you thought about scaling growth? I think that can be very intimidating. LISA: That's an interesting question, because we've tried several different models for that. We have had a couple of new business directors and have found – and maybe it's just my poor hiring, but we've had people that are great networkers and can open doors, but are not salesmen, and we've had people that are great salespeople but don't necessarily understand the agency business. We have now made business development a responsibility of our accounts team and really have encouraged anyone that has that dream client or that industry that they bring some expertise or they want to grow in, to bring that to the table, and we'll start looking for connections. I might be dating myself here, but it's a little bit like seven degrees of Kevin Bacon. Eventually we sit down and realize that there's no such thing as a cold lead. ROB: Right. What I hear you saying is that the accounts team function in an opportunity identification mode, and then it's more of a team sport after that. LISA: Yeah, it is. Let me take a step back. New business comes in in one of three ways. We've mentioned referrals; that's always a primary source, especially from clients who believe in what you do and think you're a good partner. There's always the dreaded RFP process. [laughs] It's a necessary evil of our business and can result in really good work. Then the third piece is that outbound sales. I think this is a place where ecommerce, SaaS companies – obviously, you get into the retail and consumer market, people do really well. But professional services tend to have a struggle in carving out time for that. I think that's the difference. That's where the lead really happens for a small agency to become more of a mid-size regional player: by recognizing that you have to sell yourself a little bit as well and go after some of those big fish. For a long time, we talked about how we were punching above our weight class. I've really challenged our team to start thinking, maybe we're in our weight class. Let's just punch where we are because we can do the work and we bring a special kind of strategy and thinking to the table that helps distinguish us from some of our larger competitors who may have scaled to such a size that the process is there, and it works for their clients, but we're a little bit scrappier. ROB: Right. There's an extent to which I think unless an organization is very intentional about seeking a particular size of opportunity – I know very small consultancies that pursue very large clients, and we've talked to a couple of agencies on the podcast that are 800 people and they're working with local plumbers. Those are the exceptions. Everything else seems like, to an extent, the right size opportunity ends up matching your speed. I can't quite explain the serendipity of it, but it seems the size of opportunity comes to you when you're ready for it, to an extent. LISA: Yeah, I completely agree. Serendipity is a great word. I have always referred to it as karma. One of the things any company has to do, in my opinion, as they grow is have the ability to say no. That's the local plumber thing. It's really hard to say no to business, especially – we're a 15-year agency; we lived through the recession. We're currently living through COVID, and third and fourth generation of COVID. There's a tendency to just take any work as it comes. I'm a firm believer that if you say “No, thank you” with a referral – “Let me hook you up with someone that might be a better fit” – that's karmic, and people remember that. They remember that you're good people, and when the time is right, that's going to come back around and it's going to serve you. ROB: Something I think you alluded to when you mentioned the SaaS companies, the startups, the software companies – it seems that sometimes service companies, agencies, will try to borrow maybe a little bit too much from those playbooks, and in the process they'll try to act like a SaaS company that's trying to sell $500 a month widgets, which is never going to feed the business sufficiently. How have you thought about the right granularity of sales? It sounds like by surfacing the leads through a thoughtful process with the team, you're avoiding this kind of “Let's blast the universe and everyone who could be our customer.” LISA: You couldn't have said it better. On my drive in to work, I listen to marketing podcasts much like this one, and I wish I could remember where I heard it so I could attribute it correctly, but I heard someone talk about issuing a challenge to agencies to decide where they live on a continuum. Are you an agency that makes things, or are you an agency that thinks things? So a true consultancy, which has become a bad word, or that widget-maker? I like to think Well Done leans more to the thinking things side. We're not a good fit for people that need widgets. We're going to be too expensive, or our process is going to be too frontloaded, or frankly you're going to get frustrated because we are interested in creating your brochure or your website. We're really interested in understanding not only how to find a solution for your problem, but why is your problem a problem? So we tend to really look at context as well as content. Our model is very audience-centric, and that means our client – we get that our clients have 1,000 things to think about. For us, we're thinking about them 100% of the time we're working on the account, but for them, our work is only a part of it. If we can ask smart questions, help them consider things outside of our little part of it, and take some of that off their plate simply by understanding the context in which they're working, then for us, that's really when we're successful at our job. ROB: That makes sense. You're going to naturally match pace with some of those clients that look like where you are as an organization and where you're comfortable. In the startup world, they talk about – not that we're hunting animals; people won't like that metaphor – but the question, are you hunting rabbits or deer or elephants? You need to know, because those tasks all take specific tools, specific teams, specific tactics, and you're going to have to build the whole organization around it. Or you're just going to wait around and see what falls into the trap, I guess might be the metaphor. [laughs] LISA: [laughs] And it requires some strength of character as an organization as well. When you hunt elephants, that's a longer play. It takes more people. You've got to see the elephant from every side, and there's some risk involved with that. So it's building some of that internal trust that this is going to be the right fit for us; this is going to fit our mission. For Well Done, our mission is to do good in the world and work with clients who are doing good in the world. That's not a fit for everybody. Yeah, sure, we could – what's the other analogy? – shoot fish in a barrel, as long as we're on the hunting theme here. You could shoot fish in a barrel and get all of those little projects pretty easily, but it doesn't help an agency grow, and frankly, in my experience, I don't think it is satisfying for people that really have a passion for this industry. ROB: Lisa, as you reflect on your tenure with Well Done, but also leading into that, what are some lessons you've learned along the way that you might want to go back and tell yourself to do things a little bit differently if you were starting over? LISA: Some of it is really personal to me and my personality, so I'm not sure how helpful this'll be, but all the personality tests I've taken, I'm a driver, I'm a high D, Type A. One of the things I've learned along the way is the bull in a china shop method is really not effective. It really, really is not effective. It really is about listening and learning and creating a culture of mentorship. Up, down, sideways, we all have something that we can teach one another. I think when I stopped moving and sat and observed this agency – and that was really a gift, to have that time to do that – that was when I recognized that the sum is greater than the parts. I know it sounds kind of cliché to say that, but you've got to focus on people as well as profits. I get a lot of questions from our team about “How big is big enough? How large are we going to grow?” It's really hard to put a concrete number to that for someone like me. It really is about we will be too big when we can't focus on our people and also maintain a profit that allows us to grow. That's the best answer I can give. That's when I'll know that we've grown too large: when our culture and our mission start to suffer. ROB: That is so much the answer that I think is hard to learn and hard to articulate. Start with the mission. What is the mission? We actually had a situation where our team said, “We're too small to be the partner that we want to be for clients right now in every respect.” But that's part of the goal of the mission: to have a place to go to. If you're not doing it anymore, then you realize you're not on the mission and it's too big. LISA: That's really interesting. I know several companies here locally that have actually decided to downsize because they weren't able to provide what they felt was best. I applaud that. I'm at a stage in my career where it's really important to me to start giving back to younger professionals, and one of the things I tell the people that I mentor is to really understand how you define success. Success doesn't have to be creating a company that gets bought and you're suddenly a millionaire. For some people, that's exactly what success looks like. But for other people it really is having a tight, small team and staying in your lane and providing the service that is meaningful for you and allows that personal satisfaction. I think generationally, that is starting to change. I think the younger generation gets the fact that there needs to be some personal satisfaction and that the career ladder is not maybe as important as it used to be, and the focus on personal growth. That's something that, again, talking about listening, we try to understand as people come on board. What is your vision of success? What is your end goal? If you want to go from production designer to designer to art director to creative director, if we know that, we can help provide a better career for you and also know that you are interested in growing with us. But you know what? If you want to come in and do your job effectively, day in and day out, there is absolutely room for that as well, and we're going to try to keep you challenged. That's something as an industry I think marketing and advertising needs to come to terms with: people that just want to come and do a great job every day are still so valuable to the organization. ROB: Yeah, it's a very timely both challenge and opportunity. In this time, I think a lot of people have reconsidered what kind of role they want to do, and when and where. People who want to max out compensation can play that game, and some people who want to do meaningful work can play that game, but they might want to do it differently from how they were doing it let's say two years ago. LISA: Yeah, it's a totally different way to think about business, and that can be a challenge, to be that kind of flexible organization. And again, there are very large agencies that are doing it really well. It just depends on where you want to go and what your definition of success is. But I think to your point, it also is really important that we change the business mindset to fit the people that are coming into it. ROB: Lisa, when people want to find you and connect with you and Well Done Marketing, where should they go to track you down? LISA: Well, they'd better go to the web, because I just said that's where everybody starts. [laughs] The nice thing about our name is it's really searchable. Welldonemarketing.com is our address. If you're in Indianapolis, we say our door is always open. We're right next to a Mexican restaurant with great margaritas, so you can come and see us too. ROB: That's wonderful. I do recommend a visit to Indianapolis. I've enjoyed some time there, for certain. Thank you so much, Lisa, for coming on the podcast and sharing your journey and the story of Well Done. LISA: Thanks, Rob. It's been a really great discussion. ROB: Be well. Thank you. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Karl Sakas is an Agency Consultant and Executive Coach at Sakas & Company where he consults with, coaches, and trains marketing agency owners struggling with various challenges related to their teams, their clients, and their services. His focus? To guide agency owners through risky decision-making, help them overcome constraints, enable them to grow profitably to the next level, and to make them “better bosses.” Karl has a strong agency operations background and has worked with agencies around the world. His team is often called in when an agency: Founder's network runs out and the agency needs to find new customers,  Is slammed by new growth opportunities, or Needs help on a sales process . . . figuring out team member and client onboarding processes, smoothing delivery, or developing strategies for building long-term relationships. In this interview, Karl identifies six agency “roles”: Account managers sell additional services to existing clients and keep them happy; Project managers ensure that work progresses smoothly and profitably; Subject matter experts (SMEs) . . . the craft-focused analysts, developers, designers, and writers; Broadly experienced, client-facing Strategists; Business developers, who provide organizational marketing, sales, and partnership-building; and Support, the overarching leadership, and operations management team that ensures smooth agency function. In this interview, Karl recommends that overwhelmed agency owners offload tasks in a prescribed order (subject to agency-owner preferences);  The SME work. Start using freelancers and later hire full-timers to do the highly visible client execution work. If an agency owner wants to spend all his or her time on “craft,” he or she should either be willing to hire six-figure management talent or shift to being a super-consultant and not own an agency. Project management, which is mostly (client-facing) internal coordination.  Account management, so the agency owner is not the first person clients call when they need something. Sales . . . or strategy . . . depending on what the agency owner wants to “keep.” Or a hybrid, e.g., where another member of the team qualifies the client and the agency owner serves as the “closer.” This person does NOT have to be the expert the agency owner is . . . so he or she can be hired for less than the agency owner would pay for a personal clone.  Karl notes that there is a big difference between delegation and abdication. He warns, “Don't just dump everything on someone and expect them to figure it all out.” The agency owner has to train these “replacements” and help them build the qualification process, so prospective clients, now vetted and talking with the agency owner, will be more ready to “sign on the line.” In 2016, Karl founded a CMOs-only mastermind group, where he guides non-client CMOs through their challenges. He compiles the data he gathers from these CMOs into anonymized insights which he passes on to his agency clients . . . to help them improve.  Karl has built a ranking tool to help agencies assess current and future client value, clarify “fit,” and optimize client satisfaction and agency profitability. He will be running an “Ask Me Anything” session at HubSpot Inbound 2021, sharing scripts for difficult client conversations, talking about commitment to warmth and competence decision-making, and presenting a Reason, Options, Choose (ROC) negotiation framework that guides agency/client conflicts through chosen options toward mutually satisfactory solutions. Karl can be reached on his agency's website at: sakasandcompany.com, where he offers free newsletters and articles. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Karl Sakas, who is an Agency Consultant and Executive Coach at Sakas & Company based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to the podcast, Karl. KARL: Rob, great to be here. ROB: Excellent to have you here. This is a part of our annual Inbound series of podcasts. Karl, you'll be speaking at Inbound, and we'll get to that in a moment. But why don't you start off by telling us about Sakas & Company and what it is that you all do? KARL: Through Sakas & Company, I help owners of marketing agencies grow more profitably. That spans a range of areas. I've worked with agencies all over the world, every inhabited continent, around dealing with growing pains around getting to the next level, whatever that might be for each agency owner or owners. I come from an agency operations background. I actually started in digital marketing as a freelance web designer in high school back in the days of dial-up. Since then, I've been an Agency Project Manager, Director of Client Services, Director of Operations. This is my third business since high school, and I'm a fourth generation entrepreneur. The work that I do, I love that I'm helping agency owners who often are in over their head and they're struggling with different challenges around how to grow, how to grow profitably, major decisions related to their team and their clients and their services. I love being able to help them out. Several clients call me their agency therapist. Let me clarify, I'm not an actual therapist. Everyone ideally has an actual therapist, but when it comes to their agency, I love helping people out – helping them, as one client put it, “calm the chaos.” ROB: When you mention focusing on growth, what I hear is where a lot of agencies end up feeling stuck – one of the transition points; you've probably seen a couple – is they hit a lid in one way or another in terms of founder sales. KARL: Yes. ROB: Is that where people often end up turning to you, in that area? KARL: Sometimes. In that case, thinking of founder sales, often it is the founder's network. Their network lasts maybe a year or two into the business; maybe it lasts three or four years. But eventually it's like, “uh-oh” – they've realized that if their network is going to buy, they've bought. It's funny; the marketing agency needs to do its own marketing. There's a shoemaker's kids problem. Sometimes people reach out. Other times, and more often, given my operations background, they'll reach out when they are overwhelmed by new growth opportunities. They've got more leads than they can deal with. Their salesperson or salespeople are having trouble keeping up, whether the owner is doing sales or otherwise. Often I'm helping on sales process. Given my background as a PM, helping with onboarding, figuring out their onboarding process, both for team members and for clients, how to sort out delivery running smoothly, and figuring out how to build long-term relationships. All of my consulting, coaching, and training is exclusively with agencies. I don't work with any brand side clients. But through a marketing association, in 2016 I founded a CMOs-only mastermind group. No agencies allowed. Through that, I'm helping the CMOs, who are not my clients, through some of their challenges and I get them together. I'm able to share anonymized insights from that to help agencies do a better job, like the CMOs keep talking about revenue attribution through agency, because otherwise you're going to lose your clients to someone who is. ROB: That makes complete sense. In the middle of that, you mentioned process. Does process tend to be one of those Kryptonites and Waterloos of agencies in general? It seems like you have this double effect. First of all, you have someone who has deliberately opted out of some of the structured environments they could work in in a big corporation. Then you combine that, often, with a free-spirited and creative nature to building the agency, which may not turn to process as its first instinct to solve problems. KARL: That is a great point. It varies by agency, but part of my intake process if someone reaches out for my help, I'll ask why they started their agency and how things have turned out compared to what they expected. A very common thread – not for everyone, but very common – is they were working at an agency and they're like, “I can do this better.” Or as one agency owner put it, “If the CEO is going to be a moron, I want to be the moron.” Sort of the “I could do it better.” The problem is that people often find when they are now in charge, they have some new empathy for their former boss. When they saw the boss wasn't always making the best decisions or what have you, now they realize what the boss was going through, juggling all of these different stakeholders, clients, team members, suppliers, and others, and now they often don't have a sounding board. Sometimes if they have a business partner, they've got their business partner as a sounding board, “Is this normal?” Sometimes their romantic partner, who sometimes is also the business partner, which adds its own layer of complications. Bu they're both in the same situation. One of my coaching clients said that our coaching work helped him free up time in his therapy sessions because he wasn't having to tell his therapist all about his agency challenges – which the therapist couldn't really help with. I mean, in pieces, but not “Here are the best practices. Let's customize them to you.” ROB: Right, the therapist can help you with the psychology of being in the role, but it doesn't necessarily get you to what's effective for business. I'm sure in some cases when it's a romantic partnership that are also business partners, you are kind of in a therapist role at times. When we get to scaling past this founder or you have too much business coming in even for the people who are in the sales role, the first lever I see people pull, often, when they get capped out on sales is they'll just go hire salespeople. They'll hire one or two and send them into the world and tell them to go sell things. I think it usually doesn't turn out too well when that's the plan. KARL: By accident, that approach sometimes accidentally works. But usually not. ROB: Sometimes you're scaling the founder-led sales a little bit and sometimes you're distributing. How do you processize and get it so that you have – I think an enemy sometimes in sales is authenticity. You really have to get the right people at least to reflect your own agency's brand in that conversation. KARL: It starts by understanding, should you even outsource sales or something else? In my work, I've identified six agency roles. You've got account management (keep the clients happy, sell them more work); project management (get the work done smoothly and profitably); you've got your subject matter experts (depending on your agency's services, those are your designers, developers, writers, analysts, that kind of thing), who are primarily focusing on doing their craft all day long; you've got strategists, who are sort of like a super subject matter expert (they have broader experience, they tend to have more experience in general, they tend to be fairly client-facing); and then the last two, you've got biz dev, which is really marketing, sales, and partnerships; and then you've got support, which is operations and leadership, keeping things running smoothly. When it comes to getting things off your plate as an agency owner, my recommendation is to follow roughly this order, depending on your preferences. First thing to get off your plate: the SME work. If you are the owner of the agency and you are still in the client execution tools all day long, you probably should outsource that to someone else – maybe initially freelancers, eventually hiring people full-time, that kind of thing. Get that off your plate, the things that are more visible to your clients. The next thing to do probably is project management, the mostly internal coordination, though PMs are indeed client-facing. Then you may want to do account management – not being the first person clients call every single time they need something. And then the question becomes – and this is the piece to your question of getting sales off your plate – depending on your preferences, you might choose to hire someone to help with sales while you keep doing client strategy, or maybe the other way. You want to do client strategy, you don't want to do sales. There is an in-the-middle option, which is maybe you continue as the closer, you're closing the deal, but someone else on your team is doing the qualifying. If this were a really large sales organization, that would be a business development representative. The good news is they don't need to be as much of an expert as you are, which means that you can hire them for less than you would hire a clone of yourself. And if they do their job and you help them build process – they're not going to magically know who's qualified or not – you ultimately will find yourself on the phone solely with qualified, or at least initially qualified, prospects. On the other hand, if you like doing all the conversations but you've outsourced everything else, okay. Do what you want to do, but if you're doing something that you'd rather not do – as the owner of an agency, you're in a lucky spot. Most people out in the world don't get to choose what they do day to day. It's your business. But you do need to take some steps to make it happen rather than just – instead of delegating, sometimes people will abdicate. Don't just dump everything on someone and expect them to figure it all out. ROB: Yeah, I hear two traps in there that are pretty common. One is the abdication. Two is really, a lot of people get into the business not to build a business, but because they enjoy the delivery work. KARL: Yes. And if that's what you love most, you need someone on your team doing the rest, doing the support work, operations and leadership, doing the biz dev work, marketing, sales, and partnerships, and so on. But it is worth considering. Occasionally, out of the over 400 clients I've worked with in 36 countries, some of the clients conclude they don't like running an agency. Sometimes they don't like the sales; other times they don't like managing people. And there are things you can do to delegate aspects of management, though it's not cheap. You're hiring someone with a six-figure salary, profit-sharing, and potentially some sort of equity to take over for you if you don't love doing that. But sometimes people conclude they don't want to run an agency because they want to do the craft, primarily, and in that case, I call that shifting to the “super consultant” model. They might have one administrative person helping them stay on track, but their job is to do consulting, do their craft, whether it's SEO or marketing strategy or PR or something else. If you want to do your favorite craft all day long, you probably should not be an agency owner. ROB: And that might take us a little bit into even your own journey. You were leading in agencies, building a career. There were obviously plenty of places you could've gone from there, but you've got a much more focused scope of services now. How did you come to this conclusion for yourself of how you wanted to help agencies that maybe wasn't managing a bunch of delivery? KARL: Thinking about the moving parts, I realized after working for one agency and then another, while I was at the second agency, there was this opportunity. Agency owners typically start the agency because they love the work. At my first agency, there were three founders; one loved design, another loved SEO, another loved development. At the second agency, it was development and marketing strategy. The challenge is, suddenly you start an agency, you're now a business owner. You're dealing with hiring and firing and office supplies, or making sure someone bought the office supplies so you don't run out, that kind of thing. Often that's not as much fun. In my case, coming from an operations background, I was usually doing the things the owners didn't like doing. For instance, one of my first jobs as a Director of Client Services at an agency – I think they had not mentioned this as part of the hiring process – learned in the first week that I would be telling all of the clients that our prices had gone up about 30%. We'd been at an old rate for a long time. And you know what? Because I had been working with clients as a web designer in the days of dial-up and otherwise, it worked. Out of all of our retainer clients, all but one renewed at the new rate, and the one that didn't continued working on a project basis – and also was kind of a difficult client anyway, so that maybe wasn't terrible. But they delegated that to me and I got it done. Everything down to figuring out health insurance plan options. So operations is often doing stuff the owners don't want – and I have some clients where the owners do do operations, but that gets into a division of labor. But I realized there was this opportunity. Owners often don't love running the business smoothly, but if you don't do that, you're going to go out of business. Someone has to pay attention to that. In my case, business was just normal. My parents are both career army officers, and as they retired and after they retired, they started a small rental property management business and they put the kids to work. I'm the oldest of five, and starting in elementary school I was helping with things like cleanouts during tenant turnover and things like that. So I would see them negotiating with various stakeholders – with tenants, with suppliers and so on. Talking about business was normal. By high school, I was running the web design and technology consulting business that I built solely by a mix of referral and word-of-mouth in the Washington, D.C. area. I was later a business major in college. And it even goes back further than that. One of my grandfathers was a business professor for 47 years and a management consultant, so I'd hear stories focusing on organizational behavior about working with big companies, like GE and Caterpillar and Nestle, helping them work more effectively with their employees. There's a big theme around that today. In a sense, my secret mission is to make agency owners better bosses. Having been an employee at one agency and then another, agency life is often this rollercoaster. If you're the owner, you're at least in charge of controlling aspects of the rollercoaster, but if you're an employee, there are limits. So part of my goal is, yes, make life better for agency owners, help them secure what is typically their number one or number two financial asset, but also make things more stable, make work better for their employees. So I'm helping the owners and their families; I'm helping, more indirectly, agency employees and their families. This is thousands and thousands of people all over the world. ROB: It sounds rewarding to you personally on several levels, up against your own values. You mentioned something in that, and I think it's a good time to transition. You were talking about a client that wasn't such a good client. What you're speaking on – you'll be on a virtual stage at Inbound. Maybe next year we can get back to a real stage. You have an “Ask Me Anything” session, so people are just going to throw random things at you. You're going to be there and ready to respond. Your session description mentions how to keep your best clients happy. There are many different potential definitions for “best client.” How do you think about that before you figure out how to keep them happy? KARL: Best client is going to be unique to each agency, but typically they're clients who pay you reasonably for the work you do. Ideally and most often, your best clients are going to be your highest paying clients. Not always. They are profitable within the relationship. If the client is 3% of your revenue, they're roughly needing 3% of your time, not 10% of your team's time. That isn't ideal. You enjoy working with them. If you see there's an email from them or a text from them or a call from them, you are hopefully excited to see that they're reaching out, and your team is also excited. You're doing work that you can see the impact and the client appreciates the impact. The client is open to new ideas, trying new things that'll benefit them. The client generally trusts you, trusts the advice you have. That doesn't mean they would never have any questions, but generally they assume that if you've recommended it, it makes sense to explore. There could be other factors as well. I've actually built a spreadsheet for that that I use with my coaching and consulting clients. It's the client rating or ranking matrix. You put all your clients in and you look at them in terms of a few key criteria. One is, what is their current value (high, medium, or low)? That'll vary by your client mix. And also, what's their future potential (high, medium, or low)? That'll help you decide, is this a client you want to keep as-is? Is this a client you want to try to grow? Or maybe you should assume that you might lose them. And sometimes, if there's a client, especially if it's a lower budget client, that probably won't grow and you don't like working with them – probably time to fire them. ROB: Do you have any way that you suggest firing a client? Because I think that's one of those things that can probably be a little bit intimidating and feels, to an extent, counterintuitive. KARL: One of the big drivers is whether you're firing them because you've outgrown them or you're firing them because there are major dysfunctions. I was talking with a client about this yesterday. They've grown; they have a legacy client at $2,500 a month. Their goal for new clients is to be $10,000+, but they had some legacy clients. They reached out asking if the client wanted to expand their retainer, and the client declined – which made sense based on where their business was. They certainly couldn't get to $10,000 a month. It seemed like it was time to part ways. My advice to the agency owners that I was speaking with on the call was: frame it as you've enjoyed working with them; “Here's another agency or two that might be a match.” In that case, I said, “Do you have agencies who would be thrilled to get that $2,500 a month client?” “Yes, agencies that are earlier in their lifecycle, things like that, that my client knows and trusts.” I said, “Offer to introduce them.” Whether there's a referral fee or not, that's doing the right thing. Create a smooth transition. Point them somewhere. There's a second category, which is that the client is significantly dysfunctional. For instance, I mentioned the client that didn't renew their retainer but just projects – I really liked my day to day contact. Her boss was kind of terrible. I was on the phone with my day to day contact one day; I made a joke about something. She laughed and she said, “Thanks, I needed that. We don't laugh much here.” So sad. Her boss was terrible. I could understand the environment. That wasn't a client that we tried hard to keep. The work was interesting, but not ideal. But sometimes it's worse. I had a client in Toronto who had a smaller client who she said was making misogynistic comments to her team. In a coaching call – it actually ended up being an emergency support outreach – she was like, “Can I fire this guy as a client?” I knew the backstory on the client's size and things like that. It was a smaller client. I hadn't heard about the employee harassment; that was newer. I'm like, “Yeah, fire him. And you're under no obligation to help him find another agency based on his behavior.” So sometimes I think I'm helping people feel more confident in taking action on things they probably know they need to do, but they're looking for a nudge. ROB: Sure. A lot of times in the lead chair of an agency, or really any organization, you're missing that sounding board, so it is good to have that from a coach, from a consultant, from somebody, for sure. Frequently on this podcast, we talk about lessons learned. It sounds like a lot of your business is defined, almost, by lessons learned and things that you would share. I'd maybe twist the question a little bit and say – normally I say “What have you learned?” I would say, when you prepare for an Ask Me Anything session, I imagine there's an extent to which you already know some of the lessons you're going to put back into the audience. So apart from some things we've already talked about, what are some of the top questions that you end up fielding and teaching back to the audience in these sessions? KARL: One is maybe the owner is really good at account management, but they're like, “How do I get my team to improve at it? They have potential, but what can I do?” There are two things to keep in mind. One is a concept called warmth and competence. It comes from a book called The Human Brand by Chris Malone, who's a former Fortune 500 CMO, and Susan Fiske, who's a psychology professor at Princeton. The idea of warmth and competence – and you can use this to make better decisions – is this: whenever you're interacting with a person or a company or other organization, you're thinking about how is the warmth, how is the competence (high, medium, or low)? High competence is you're getting the job done, you're delivering as expected, everything is according to the specifications. High warmth is, do you make the person feel special? Do you make them feel that you value them? It's not just about the money. You can apply this in your client relationships and also with your team, your employee relationships. If you commit to warmth and competence from The Human Brand as one of your core values, your team can make better decisions. And I talk about this with my team. What's the warmth and competence solution? If it's in line with the overall values and it is high warmth and high competence, do it. It makes the decision-making a lot easier, and that helps with client retention. The second thing to think about is, when you're delegating client services or account management or delegating more of it, what do you do when a client wants something that isn't aligned to what you want to give them? I will be sharing a resource at my Inbound talk, the “Ask Me Anything” on working with clients, which is a couple dozen scripts for different scenarios that may be a difficult conversation. For instance, you have gone over budget and you haven't warned the client. Or maybe the client wants something that isn't in scope, but they seem to think it should be. The solution to that, apart from come to my Inbound session and sign up for the bonus of these scripts for handling difficult clients – and I'm always expanding those; I've added several in the past year – is a concept I call Reason, Options, Choose (ROC). The idea there is as a negotiation framework. A client wants something; you don't want to do that, or at least not under those terms. You cite a reason. Say they don't like the price you've quoted for something. “We'd love to do that. That is the price for that scope.” But then you give them two to three options that you hand-pick. You might say, “We looked at the lower budget you mentioned. Here's the smaller scope we could do. Do you want the full price, full scope (Option A)? Do you want the smaller scope, smaller budget (Option B)?” There's also in that case an implicit Option C, which is client doesn't want to pay anything – great, we don't do anything and we work on a client who will pay us for something. So you give them a reason, you give them two to three hand-picked options, and then you let them choose. You're not making them choose any specific one, and importantly, they're not making you do something you don't want to do. And any of the options are going to be acceptable to your agency because you have hand-picked them. Reason, Options, Choose. ROB: That seems like one of those things – a lot of these are almost muscles you have to exercise and get comfortable with. It's not going to be easy. But it seems like once you pattern them and model them, your team would even get used to it and start to think in that same mindset. KARL: Yes. You want the team to internalize it. Actually, I discovered that in an inside joke way. A client had a birthday coming up and she was really into wine. She was also a big fan of Reason, Options, Choose, and she had told her team about it. So the team decided to make some fake wine labels and put them on wine bottles, and one of the wines the team called “Riesling, Options, Choose.” They included some pairing notes: that it was a bittersweet blend best served with a pep talk from Karl, lots of proofreading, and apparently stress-eating pretzels. The more your team can make better decisions on your behalf through things like warmth and competence, through Reason, Options, Choose – by understanding your values, by understanding what is important – really, it's three things. I call it your VGR: your values, goals, and resources. Values on how you operate, goals on where you want to go, and resources in terms of time, money, people, tools to get things done. Your team can make better decisions on your behalf and ultimately find ways so that you can work less and earn more. ROB: Plenty to digest there. It's so helpful to have these tools. I talk to my team a lot about – I think especially folks in smaller businesses get a little scared; they're in a smaller business because they don't want to be beset by process. But there's a certain amount of process that exists not to avoid intelligence decisions, but to avoid decision paralysis and inaction. That's I think where process is so helpful and enabling. You don't have to decide what you're going to send. For example, you get a resume of someone you want to talk to. How do you decide you want to talk to them, and what do you send them when you decide? Or do you want to freelance that every time and get stuck in the mud? These processes are helpful in a lot of ways. KARL: Absolutely. That also includes making time to think through when to change. You ideally aren't changing processes every single day so your team's like, “Is this version 3.6 or version 4.28?” It makes sense to do an annual review, quarterly review. And importantly, get input from your team. Just because you're thinking about certain priorities and that's important, your team has some concerns. Two examples on that. With my grandfather's consulting years ago – I'm into trains. Turned out he did a consulting project for the New York Central Railroad, and he was interviewing employees about what they liked and didn't like. An employee was in the switching tower one hot summer day, and my grandfather asked him what he liked and didn't like about his job. He said, “The biggest problem is it's really hot. I've asked them to put in some window blinds, and they've even been out to measure them, but they haven't put them in.” And he shared about a safety concern. My grandfather asked, “Did you escalate that?” The guy was like, “Why should I? They didn't care about the window blinds. Why would they care about that?” An example of a small thing at an agency – I did an anonymous culture survey, which I'll sometimes do with my consulting clients, asking all the employees about what they liked or didn't like and a number of other questions. One of the feedback points was about the coffeemaker in the office. Now, the two owners did not drink coffee. They'd heard there were some issues with the coffeemaker, but it wasn't really a personal problem for them. But the feedback was that the coffeemaker was always breaking. This was from an employee who was a bigger coffee fan. My advice to the owners was: this is not going to be the most impactful thing you do, but buy a new coffeemaker, and someone will be thrilled. ROB: Yep. It's so many of those little things that you don't even realize, and it's just such a simple cost, but the intention is where it matters. KARL: Exactly. ROB: Karl, we'll look forward to your Ask Me Anything session at Inbound coming up in October. Between now and then, and maybe after, when people want to catch up with you and connect with you and Sakas & Company, where should they go to find you? KARL: Visit online sakasandcompany.com. I have hundreds of free articles. I have monthly live office hours, answering questions live and free of charge with agency owners all over the world, and also a number of courses and things like that. The latest is Agency PM 101 for people who are stuck as deputized project managers doing PM on top of their existing job and they'd rather not. It doesn't have to be quite so hard. So that's Agency PM 101. But also, again, hundreds of free articles and a newsletter that more than one agency owner has said is one of the only emails they read. That's sakasandcompany.com. Check it out. ROB: The email newsletter is always worth a try. If you don't like it, everybody knows how to find the unsubscribe button. Sounds like it's well worth it to many agency owners. Karl, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's good to draw on your wisdom and share with the audience. Thank you for sharing at Inbound as well. KARL: Thanks, Rob. ROB: Take care. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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

Brandon Edwards started his career in the issues management / crisis / grassroots / public affairs-focused healthcare division of a multi-industry, multi-practice Santa Barbara agency. In 2009, a toxic rift developed between Brandon's growing medical services division and the rest of the faltering agency. Brandon and his division associates bought out their piece of the business and formed ReviveHealth. It took almost 6 years to go from being issue based to what it is today – a full-service. integrated, all audiences, all channels firm serving B2C, B2B, and B2P, the business to physician/provider side. Santa Barbara was “an extremely high-cost market” with neither a strong employment nor a strong healthcare base. In 2011 decision was made to move to Nashville, TN, which Brandon refers to as “the Healthcare Capital of the World.” He cites Tennessee's central time zone, big airport, abundance of talent, and lack of a state income tax as major incentives for the move.  Brandon feels his agency has a “good business moat” – healthcare is an extremely complex business with major regulatory impacts. Even if generalist firms are good at strategy, they won't be able to deliver in-depth, healthcare-specific strategies or may lack corresponding creative skills. Firms that specialize in “creative” have the potential to propose solutions that could “send you to jail.”  In this interview, Brandon explains how too many medical organizations try to bring customers in through “the side of the funnel,” perhaps by marketing heart surgery to people (who may or may not have a heart attack in the next two weeks). “That's not how funnels work,” he says. “You need to bring them in through urgent care, primary care, preventative care, diagnostic care – some percentage of people that start in the top of that funnel are going to end up needing other services, whether that's PT or surgery of some kind, and all of the other attendant care that comes with it.” What makes an agency in this niche market work?  First, Brandon says, “You have to start with the right people that have the right talent and the right knowledge base.” Even then, it can take 12 to 18 months for a new hire's skills to become a “mature practice.” Strategy has come from a deep understanding of the healthcare business. To be effective, creative work, which comes from outside of healthcare –needs to be interesting and provocative. And process? “Healthcare is not a hobby,” Brandon says. HIPAA restrictions dictate everything the agency does, including information architecture, how information is shared with clients, and marketing campaign design. One early strategy core to the company was the idea of “being built to be sold,” merged, or transferred to employees through an ESOP (Employee Stock Option Plan). The intention was to always keep the firm as if it were “for sale tomorrow,” which informed hiring, compensation, professional development, branding, business development, and marketing decisions. Profits were consistently poured back into company growth. The agency did not expand by adding offices. Instead, it invested in hiring to expand and deepen capabilities, increasing offerings, and buying the tools, technology and data needed for “doing the job” now and in the future. ReviveHealth was recently bought out by IPG, Weber Shandwick, which Brandon says has been and continues to be “a really positive experience.” From the beginning, he built to sell . . . and then, he sold. All it took was sticking to his plan and “little luck”  Transcript Follows:   ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Brandon Edwards from ReviveHealth based in Nashville, Tennessee. Welcome to the podcast, Brandon. BRANDON: Thanks for having me. ROB: Why don't you kick it off by telling us about ReviveHealth and what the agency's superpowers are? BRANDON: Revive is a healthcare-only agency. We're healthcare focused. Located here in Nashville, which a lot of people know for country music, but it really is in many ways the healthcare capital of the world. It's a pretty phenomenal healthcare city. While we founded the firm on the West Coast, we relocated out here to Nashville in early 2011. Our superpower is really helping healthcare brands thrive. It's helping healthcare brands that want to lead the way. What we mean by that is really bringing to bear the full spectrum of marketing communications in the truest sense of the word “full-service” in a way that is very strategically focused on what we view as an underserved segment of healthcare. Most healthcare firms are dominated by pharma or government or med device; our clients really focus on the provider sector of healthcare. So hospitals, health systems, large physician enterprises as well as health tech and health services. ROB: It's an interesting place to get into. I think there's probably some interesting stories around the conviction to move. How do you go about saying, “I'm in California” – it's like the opposite of the Beverly Hillbillies. You're like, “Tennessee is the place where we gotta be.” BRANDON: It might be the opposite of the Beverly Hillbillies, but I'll tell you the people from Tennessee are probably tired of Californians moving here. There's no state income tax in Tennessee. It's a huge growth market, and yet everywhere Californians go, so go property values. We drive up home values in a very unflattering way. The story is actually kind of interesting. We started in California. I'm from California, my wife's from California, we founded the firm in California. We started the firm September 1st, 2009, and we all remember what was happening in 2009. The recession couldn't have been any worse. If you think about the unique aspects of headquartering a professional services business, particularly one that is highly specialized in healthcare, we were located in an extremely high-cost market without a strong employment base – without a strong healthcare base, actually. All of our talent was going to have to come from somewhere else. In 2009, no one could move to Santa Barbara because they couldn't afford to buy a home there if they couldn't sell their home. No one could afford to sell their home. If they were married or had a partner, that person couldn't find a job in Santa Barbara. So, we really reached the conclusion that for purely strategic purposes, we had to go where the talent pool already existed. We considered a couple markets, but it wasn't even close. Nashville was far and away the lead for us. It has a big airport, central time zone, really easy to get around, and has an incredibly deep talent base. I didn't initially know I was going to move my family here. We thought we'd open an office and staff it. My wife actually suggested we move here. I'd been on the road 150, 200 nights a year for our whole lives, and I think the entirety of her pitch was “If we move to Nashville, you'll get to have a lot more dinners at home and be with the kids more,” and that was it. She's a rare person that volunteered to leave Santa Barbara. ROB: Yeah, that seems like a direction that a lot of people wouldn't go, except what you said: to an extent, you were a frontrunner. I imagine this past season, you read about what's going on with real estate prices, and basically everywhere is functioning as a suburb of the California real estate market. I think you might've beat some of your friends to Nashville. BRANDON: Yeah. We were maybe the front edge of the wave in the summer of 2012, and now the wave is in full force. It's everybody relocating here. It's California, New York, Chicago, big cities fleeing to a slightly smaller city, but a city where, again, there's no state income tax. From an affordability standpoint, it's a very different animal.  ROB: When we think a little bit about your specialty, Brandon, what is it? What are the distinct needs both from a strategy perspective as well as a channels and distribution perspective of this healthcare group specialty market? BRANDON: It's a very nuanced segment. On the one hand, I think we feel like there's a good moat around our business from the standpoint that generalist firms can't really parachute into a highly specialized area like this and deliver the same kind of value and strategic counsel that we can. So our competitive set is a bit more limited. You also tend to attract people who have more specialized careers. In some ways, from a recruitment standpoint, it's self-selection. My phrase for it is “healthcare is not a hobby.” It's an extremely complicated business with an intense regulatory overlay, and it also is highly emotional for people. I think maybe finance is the closest area to it in some ways because of all those factors. From our standpoint, the tradeoff that most clients had before Revive was they could pick a firm that could really help them with strategy, but that firm was going to suck at creative. The flipside is you could hire a firm that was really creative and interesting, and some of the work they were going to propose would send you to jail. Being able to bring together this deep understanding of the business so that the strategy is rooted in a deep understanding of the business of healthcare, how the organization is going to make money if you keep its mission alive, coupled with creative that largely comes from outside of healthcare so that we have fresh ideas and really interesting, provocative, and effective creative, was really not a value prop that existed in our industry 12 years ago. ROB: It would seem to me that part of that story of being able to bring in those outside folks, those new perspectives, but not going to jail, also plays into process a little bit. How have you thought about the emergence of process, of getting that regulatory overlay and consistency across the organization? BRANDON: First, I think you have to start with the people part of it. I promise I'll answer your process question, but if you don't start with the right people that have the right talent and the right knowledge base, my view at least is there's no process that's going to save you from that. When we look at more senior level leaders in the firm in particular – I would say even mid-career and up – we look at people who already have a pretty deep established understanding of healthcare. If you bring in someone who's never touched healthcare and they've been in business for 15 or 20 years, I defy anybody to sit and explain HIPAA to someone in a way that's going to make any sense to them. There are so many aspects of the industry that normal people just cock their heads and say, “That doesn't make any sense.” It's like, you're absolutely right, and it's just the way it is. So I think it starts with people. From a process standpoint, you still have to have process and safeguards. We do extensive HIPAA training. HIPAA and the restrictions around use of data dictate everything about our information architecture, how we share information with clients, how you design marketing campaigns that can be effective and still be well within the bounds of those. So you really have to think through the processes in terms of not just what you do in a normal agency to get good work, but to get good work within the guardrails of what's allowable in the healthcare industry. ROB: That seems like a totally different mindset, and I can see that domain expertise from the experienced voices helping to train and bring up the next wave of talent. One thing I'm curious about – the timing of your focus in the space seems impeccable. The narrative of this past 10-15 years of the consolidation of the healthcare groups, the rise of these regional healthcare-group-sponsored office parks – it's a real thing. I see it all around me. How did you end up at the right spot on that wave? It could've been easy to be too early and easy to be too late. BRANDON: Yeah. I would love to tell you that it was incredible wisdom and vision on my end, and that just wouldn't be true. [laughs] I wish that's what it was. There were a group of us that were in another agency. We were essentially the healthcare practice, a place where I was a minority owner, and it was a multi-industry, multi-practice firm but had built up and created this healthcare presence within that firm. But that firm was very focused. It was essentially an issues management / crisis / grassroots / public affairs firm, so the healthcare practice we had built was very focused on those kinds of services and that kind of work for clients because that was the firm's positioning. And I think it was the right positioning for that firm. We got to 2009 and the rest of the firm outside of healthcare shrunk dramatically. Remember, this is the same time that the ACA was being debated and passed. This was the same time that there was going to be a substantial need for all kinds of expertise in the healthcare space, including marketing communications work. I think unfortunately, when you're in an agency that may be struggling a little bit – what do they say? Character is revealed by difficult times, not created by it. I think what was unfortunately revealed in that moment was a somewhat toxic culture in the other agency. So, when we looked to buy out the healthcare practice and form Revive, we really viewed it as an opportunity to go from being a healthcare practice in a diversified agency to becoming a healthcare agency, as well as an opportunity to really diversify the offering into truly full-service integrated marketing work. For us, there was this really great established base of clientele to work from and help to fund that expansion, but what started was a journey that took I would say 5-½, almost 6 years to go from being issues-focused to being a truly full-service integrated firm. ROB: From a channel mix perspective, you mentioned a PR and comms legacy; what does the channel mix look like today, and where is it heading within the healthcare space? BRANDON: I think the simplest way to put it would be it's really all audiences, all channels. We've gone from planning for earned to planning for earned and social to planning for every stripe of media and every stripe of channel and bringing in people with integrated planning backgrounds, bringing in people that are deep in digital and social and traditional. We actually plan and buy our own media across all channels. Very unusual for a firm our size. But one of the interesting nuances working with media buying, for example, in this space is that most media buying firms really want to buy large campaigns on a regional or national basis, and hospital media in particular is bought almost exclusively on a local community basis. The joke is if you go to work for a big brand, you're going to spend $50 million in $5 million chunks; if you go to work for a hospital, you're going to spend $5 million in $50,000 chunks. It takes a very different structure and thought process to create the media function. And that's just one thing. You still have to think about all of the creative and all of the different areas. We really think about all audiences, meaning we're looking at consumers, we're looking at current and past patients, we're looking at employers and brokers, we're looking at physicians and board members and donors, and then the people within those hospital or healthcare organizations that are purchasing from our health services and health tech clients as well. We really have both B2C and B2B as well as B2P, the business to physician side. It's really a robust channel and audience mix. ROB: It's a really fascinating mix, and it reminds me, as you talk about the regulatory overhead, I could see somebody 10 years from now – you mentioned Fintech earlier; I think various dimensions of Fintech seem like they're positioned both for some real growth versus synthetic growth, but also probably a good bit of regulation ahead. I think if somebody has a brain for that sort of thing, they might do well to start navigating the legality. There might be a good practice there. BRANDON: I'm sure you're in the same boat; I talk to a lot of younger people that are interning or are interviewing with us or whatever it is, and I think there's this tendency when you're younger to think about the sexy things, whether it's gaming or sports or whatever it is. Yet I believe in many ways, the best way to create a career that's going to maximize your value is to find these industries where you can develop indispensable knowledge. I think healthcare is one. I think finance is another. I think maybe once upon a time, defense department type work was. Maybe higher ed. There are some industries that require an incredible amount of focus, and perhaps the skillsets aren't as transferrable between working for one set of consumer products or CPG or whatever it is, but boy, it sure is value-creating for you from a career standpoint. ROB: Brandon, to switch gears a little bit, one part of your story I think we would be remiss not to touch on is the experience of being acquired. Many firms have that wish, but I think I heard recently maybe 1 in 400 agencies will actually ever be acquired. How did that process commence? Was that something you engaged in intentionally? Were you just sticking to your knitting and somebody took notice of what you were doing? BRANDON: We have a lot of flaws as an agency, just like any group of people does. But not being strategic and thoughtful isn't one of them. In our very first strategic plan, September 1st, 2009, when there were four of us, the strategic plan says “Revive is being built to be sold.” There's a little asterisk next to “sold” that says “It's not really about sold; it's about merged or an ESOP to employees or whatever.” But the thinking was, and I think a lesson learned perhaps from previous agency experience, is the worst thing you can have is an agency that you need to sell and can't. It's a bit like owning a home. They always tell you when you're younger, don't have the most expensive house on the street. You don't want to own a house you can't sell. And most people love their home – of any day they own it, the love it the most the day they put it on the market because they've done all the things to make it beautiful and have curb appeal. They've landscaped it, they've painted it, they've fixed all the little dings and scratches. I think agencies are a lot like that. We viewed it as we wanted to keep the firm always like it was for sale tomorrow, and that meant how we hired, how we comped people, how we did professional development, how we thought about our brand, how we did business development and marketed ourselves, how we paid ourselves. We took the view that the owners would comp themselves as employees. We would not take money out of the business; we would pour everything back into growth. So it was always about building enterprise value. We didn't really set a timeline on it. I think maybe in that first plan we said 10 years, and honestly we just sort of made hat up because it seemed like a long time. It turned out not to be. [laughs] But we went into it with that attitude, and it became a filter for every single decision that we made for the business. And I think in a lot of ways it helps to keep you from being selfish. It's really easy to have a great year and think “I think maybe we should pull a bunch of money out and go buy something cool” or whatever, I don't know. We didn't do that. The only money we took out of the business was for taxes, basically, and our individual compensation, which was set and didn't change much during all those years. We would call the question every year in strategic planning, and every year the answer was “No, we're good.” Then we get to the end of 2014. We had grown 60% that year. We had added digital content, social, we had purchased another firm, and we got to the end of the year and called the question of strategic planning, and the group unanimously said this would be the right time to look for a partner. “Let's find someone who has been through this process of integration and can help us do this better and help us grow faster and help us avoid the pitfalls that come with going from being a single discipline firm to a really diversified agency.” ROB: It's interesting to hear that intentionality from the start. I think there's probably some threads to pull on there. For instance, I think you mentioned casually ESOP. It would be good to dig into that. When you think about building from the start, a technology startup will think about issuing stock options to their employees to ensure that they get to share in an acquisition. But that's so often incompatible with a services organization. How did you think about employee comp, sharing in an exit, that sort of thing? BRANDON: Probably not as well as we should've. [laughs] I think you'd always be better at this the second or third time than you were the first time. Let me back up for a second: we had a great experience with the sale. We went about the process in a very nontraditional way. We had a great experience with the transaction. We had a great experience with the earnout with our buyer, which is IPG, Weber Shandwick. You hear all these terrible stories from people, and I will tell you that we had none of that. we had a really positive experience and continue to. Our executive leadership team – we had no senior level departures at the end of the earnout. That's very unusual. Just a good experience. That said, I think we could've done a much better job – I could've done a much better job – leading up to the sale. We did not spread equity around as much as we probably should've. It wasn't so much that we sat down and decided not to as just it hadn't been a part of our plan, and by the time we went to sell, it was probably too late to make meaningful changes to the equity structure. We had five shareholders and five phantom equity holders just before the sale, and we then converted the phantom equity holders to real equity right before the sale because that was our buyer's preference. ROB: What is phantom equity? BRANDON: Think of it as another way of creating an incentive compensation structure that doesn't represent real ownership, so it doesn't necessarily give a holder rights to a percentage of the firm's profit or something like that. The upside is it can be given and taken away just like a bonus would; the downside is it gets taxed in ordinary income instead of capital gains. So it's a little bit more attractive for the company, a little bit less attractive for the holder. It may be a little bit less attractive, but it's substantially more attractive than getting nothing. I think ultimately, I wish we had distributed a little bit more ownership to some key people, particularly some people who really killed it in the last 5 years, but once you've entered into the transaction, it's too late to change the equity structure. ROB: And it's definitely tricky often, and not necessarily in your case – turnover in services can be higher. You also are dealing with the multiples that you sell for, typically. They're not the same in services as they are in startup land. What I want to pull on a little bit now – you mentioned a couple things. If you're building the sell, what comes to my mind is you have to be carrying decent margins on your services to be attractive to purchase. But then you mentioned that you and your partners were also not taking money off the table. I think where that probably points the flashlight a little bit is towards the question of: how do you strategically reinvest meaningful margins to build a business? I think that's where a lot of people typically throw up their hands and just take the money off the table. BRANDON: Yeah, and I don't think that's irrational. I say this as a predetermined outcome for us because this is what we wanted for our business, but to be fair, it's not at all irrational or even maybe a negative to say, “I don't want to sell the business. What I want is to get it to a point where I don't have to work so hard and I can make pretty good money and it creates an annuity for me and my family.” Yeah, there's some dangers of that, but there's dangers in selling too. So I don't know that there's a right or wrong answer to it. I think in terms of reinvestment, we really looked at it in two branches. I'll tell you up front the one we decided not to do, and that was that we were not going to expand on the basis of offices. We were going to look at reinvestment in people and technology as opposed to places. We've never opened an office for a client. We've never been in that mode. We've always had as few offices as we felt like we could get away with and still attract the right talent. So we looked at it in two ways. Early on, it was really reinvestment in hires that would expand our capabilities – sometimes deepen them, but mostly expand them. The reason I think that's a reinvestment is very often, when you're bringing on someone to build out a new capability, there isn't going to be enough revenue there really to justify that hire for some period of time. Typically for us, it was 12 to 18 months from the day we hired someone to the time that was a mature capability or mature practice. We would look at reinvestment in building out these capabilities, and that meant a creative department, that meant a media department, that meant digital capabilities, social media, content, research, all these different areas over the years. I would say hand in hand with that was reinvestment in the tools, technology, and data that could make those people effective. What does our media department need to do its job? What does our analytics group need to do its job? And what are they going to need in the future? What do we need to do in terms of data-driven marketing, whether that's Salesforce or other platforms that we use? All of which carry pretty sizable price tags and some of which are more difficult to monetize with clients than others. I think those are the big two. I would say a distant third was the constant reinvestment in brand building and business development for our firm. We have spent about 5% of revenue on an annual basis from the time we had 10 people in new business and corporate marketing, brand building, for Revive to always be punching above our weight, always be growing. As a result, we're showing 12-year compounded annual growth rates of about 25% a year. ROB: Wow. Sounds like a good company to buy if you're IPG. That's good. And you're still there, which must mean it's also a good job. BRANDON: I would like to believe that they could've bought anything they wanted and chose us. I find that flattering and a statement of confidence from them. But yes, they've been great to deal with, and honestly I've been glad to be here. It's nice to be part of a really great company. ROB: That's great to hear. That's a good acquisition story. Brandon, when you're looking ahead a little bit, what's coming up for ReviveHealth, and maybe more broadly healthcare marketing, that you're excited about? BRANDON: I think in some ways, in our segment of healthcare marketing, the pace of change is accelerating to where many of the things we're seeing now in healthcare marketing are the things that you would see more commonly in other industries. Typically, hospital marketing in particular trails other industries by a few years. We're starting to see that gap close. We're seeing a great deal more emphasis on data-driven marketing and personalized marketing. We're seeing a great deal more emphasis on social media and social media engagement – which, given how personal and human healthcare is, is sort of strange that it's just catching up to other industries now. But I think the biggest shift we're seeing is a mindset shift from hospital operators who have been accustomed to spending the bulk of their budgets on traditional advertising to build brands to hospital executives who see the power of real 4 Ps marketing that will drive volume and profitable growth to their institutions in a way that I think is almost taken for granted in many other industry sectors. ROB: Right. That's actually really interesting because many hospitals are massive institutions, but now they're also living under an umbrella where there was just one location and now there's four, and there's an attendant group of facilities around it beyond that. It's “Who's the brand?”, but also “Where is my local version?” That's what it seems like to me as a consumer. BRANDON: Not to be too flippant about it, but I think we all drive around town and you see these billboards with “heart surgery this” and “knee surgery that.” Does anybody really buy on that basis? I mean, it's not like you drive around and say, “That's interesting. I hadn't really thought about it, but my knee does hurt. Maybe I'll have surgery after all.” It's sort of silly when you say it like that. To me, this industry just begs for highly targeted, highly personalized, data-driven marketing. If I get you into what we call the top of the funnel – urgent care, primary care, preventative care, diagnostic care – some percentage of people that start in the top of that funnel are going to end up needing other services, whether that's PT or surgery of some kind, and all of the other attendant care that comes with it. I think most hospitals have tried to enter the funnel from the side, and it's sort of a joke for us. That's not how funnels work, right? You pour things in the top and they come out the bottom. We don't get to come in and say, “I just want to find those people that want to have heart surgery in the next two weeks.” It's like, no, let's engage people who are going to need heart surgery in six months, in a year, in two years, in three years. Look at more the lifetime value of the consumer as opposed to the transactional value of the consumer, and recognize that physicians play a huge part in it. Most of us go where our doctors tell us. ROB: Right. It starts with being in the provider network at some point. BRANDON: Absolutely. Who you have contracts with from an insurance standpoint, what your medical staff looks like, how effectively referrals are processed, if you provide easy access for consumers – telephone, digital, as well as other methods. It really is all 4 Ps of marketing. It is not just promotion. I think the industry was pretty dominated by promotion prior to maybe 5 to 7 years ago. ROB: That is tremendously interesting. Thank you, Brandon, for sharing your journey. Congratulations on everything you accomplished leading up to and even after the acquisition. It's a great part of the story to tell, and it sounds like the national marketing community is better for it. BRANDON: We have a great team, and anybody that does what we've done in the last few years and doesn't acknowledge some meaningful amount of luck is probably not being honest. [laughs] You can work hard all you want, but if you don't have a little bit of wind at your back, it's going to be pretty tough. ROB: The humility is definitely welcome. We all need a little bit of that luck, and sometimes you have to survive long enough to be lucky. Coming out of 2009 is nothing to dismiss either. Thank you so much, Brandon. We wish you and your team the best. Thank you for sharing your story. BRANDON: My pleasure. Thanks. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Will Cady heads the Creative Strategy Team at Reddit, which he describes as a platform of more than 100,000 different, intent-driven, purpose-driven communities representing 100,000 distinct cultures . . . and an “incredible petri dish of niche subcultures that are emerging and influencing or becoming mainstream culture.” He says that “people go to Google to search for information . . . and to Reddit to search for what other people have found.”  Reddit's Creative Strategy team sits between these “very curious” subculture communities and the brands that want to find their place in these communities. Will says the Creative Strategy Team's mission of “turning curiosity into understanding” runs both ways . . . 1) brands need to understand the different cultures on a deeper level to know what is coming in the future and 2) Reddit need a deeper understanding of the brands and how they meet cultural needs of the different communities. He explains. “Brands are made up of humans” and, when these humans tell a story, they gain the ability to build powerful connections and customer trust. He says Reddit is a place where brands can be proud, vulnerable, ask forgiveness, explain changes in how they do business, find out what customers want . . . and to bring something to a community that was never before available. He says marketing today is not “going in the direction of building trust” . . . Building trust is already a critical component of today's marketing. Reddit is best known for the AMA, where people present their “positions” and invite people to “Ask Me Anything.” For brands, an ad looks like any Reddit post, but is delivered to an audience of people who go to pre-selected communities. This “promoted post” can host text, an image, a GIF, or a video.” The upvote and downvote mechanism is optional. Comments can be on or off. Will uses origami as a metaphor for this, where the promoted post is the piece of paper . . . which can be folded into any shape. A brand can engage Will's team to create promoted posts. However, the platform has been built to be incredibly rich in capabilities, but at the same time, simple, for those who want to go the “do-it-yourself” route.  The opportunity to use promoted posts to research market trends or test user perceptions is huge. Will provides this example: Chipotle had observed the variety of trending diets (paleo, keto), announced that it was developing “Lifestyle Bowls,” asked the groups following these diets what ingredients they wanted, and then launched the bowls, thanking those who had commented for helping to make the product “right” . . . with resounding success.  Will's personal history touches on music, mysticism, and marketing, all of which, he says, center on knowing, studying, and playing with what moves people. In addition to leading the Creative Strategy Team, he teaches meditation, reads tarot cards, and jams with musical groups . . . a bow to his 15-plus years as a professional musician. He used Reddit as his “secret weapon for learning” and a way to promote his music long before he took his first position with the company. He says the Reddit of the years from 2013 to 2016 “felt a little bit more like a Wikipedia or a Craigslist . . . (a) ubiquitous part of the internet, but it wasn't a business.” When he started working in sales at Reddit, the company did not have a viable ad product . . . the new and very small sales team had to build it.  Today, Will sees Reddit as a hybrid of tech and media, a bellwether of social trends, and a place for brands to build relationships with their customers. In order to move forward into the future, media, tech, marketing, and businesses in general will need good answers to three questions:  Why are we here?  What are we doing for humanity?  What are we doing for the world?” Interesting questions for all of us. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by our guest, Will Cady. Will is the Head of Creative Strategy at Reddit, and Will's based in Los Angeles. Welcome to the podcast, Will. WILL: Thank you. Thank you for having me, Rob. ROB: I think everybody probably listening understands and knows Reddit on some level, so I think it would be interesting to understand your role within that Reddit world. WILL: The creative strategy team at Reddit, our mission is we turn curiosity into understanding. And Reddit, if nothing else, is full of curiosities. As a platform with over 100,000 different communities representing 100,000 distinct cultures, it's proven to be this incredible petri dish of niche subcultures that are emerging and influencing or becoming mainstream culture. What the creative strategy team does is we sit in between the community and the brands that want to activate and find belonging, find community on this platform, and we really provide understanding going both ways – understanding for those brands to look at all of these different cultures and understand them at a deeper level so that they can find their place, they can understand the future that's coming, and then also Reddit user behavior, they're very, very curious. They seek. They don't scroll. They're there for a reason. We want to pair that curiosity with a deeper understanding of the brands when they come in to talk about how their products, how their services are really meeting the needs of the cultures of the different communities that people are a part of. ROB: That's a fascinating place in the ecosystem. I love how you said that people seek. It really resonates with my own experience with Reddit. There's a lot of sites that you can go to and if you're not logged in, you don't feel like you're missing much. But if you're not logged in on Reddit, I feel like you're missing the world. It's not even like some sites where they feed content to you and you feel like you're being fed to an algorithm. It really is feeding curiosity. I think it would be interesting for us, Will, also to understand – I think you have a very interesting journey at Reddit yourself. Talk about how you came into this wild world of Reddit and what your own career path has been within the organization. WILL: It's a long and winding and strange journey. My career, by my expertise, I sit at this strange nexus point between music and mysticism and marketing. Today I'm leading the creative strategy team, also teaching meditation, doing strategy reports, doing tarot readings, all of the above, jam sessions and whatnot. For me, they all actually really come together in a very coherent way, which is not expected, but it's interesting. You look at music and marketing and mysticism. You look at all of these things, and really what they are at their center is knowing what moves people and studying what moves people and playing with what moves people. I spent about 15 to 20 years as a professional musician, building a meditation practice and all that, and when I moved from Boston to Los Angeles, I started to realize when I stepped into digital media at a music publisher magazine that there was a lot I had to learn about what resonates in culture. What actually catches and reverberates and becomes movements, becomes these really big mainstream cultural ideas. I got really, really fixated on that. I started to really longform my experiments with this. And I would always go to Reddit. Reddit was kind of my secret weapon for learning. It's how I discovered teachers like Alan Watts. It's how I promoted my music into different communities that utilized some of these audio lectures from Alan Watts. I saw my music videos go to the front page of Reddit All, all the time, and really drive hundreds of thousands of listens in a moment. As a marketer, I would always think, how can I understand what we're really trying to achieve here through the lens of the communities that this brand is trying to reach on Reddit? And then if I'm really lucky, how can I find a way to get this content that we're creating for this brand in front of the Reddit audience? At that time – this is about 2013 to 2016 – it's surprising how different media was, even really not that long ago. But looking narrowly at Reddit, Reddit felt a little bit more like a Wikipedia or a Craigslist. It was this ubiquitous part of the internet, but it wasn't a business. It wasn't something like a Facebook or a Twitter. I saw that Reddit was starting to hire some folks, and I knew. I knew that there was this incredible power on the front page of the internet that a lot of people around me in the media industry didn't really understand. So it was really a no-brainer for me to take that job, and it was an exploratory role. It was like, let's see what the Los Angeles market can be and do for Reddit. I started as a salesperson, and I was one of a very, very short list of people representing Reddit in a massive market. We basically said yes to every email and phone call that we got. We took all the meetings. We found that Reddit has a lot to offer everybody. If you want to do an AMA, you want to do some research in terms of market trends or user perceptions – all of these things that are around advertising, Reddit has value to add. We didn't have, really, a viable ad product in 2016. We had to build it. We've built a great platform now, but in that time in between, we really had to tell the story: “Listen, this is the most influential audience on the internet, and your brand's got to at least be listening to it, if not speaking to it. So let's keep talking. Let's figure out a way to build a partnership.” That became the basis of the playbook that is a massive part of the brand partnerships operation and is serviced by the creative strategy team. ROB: It's interesting; you started down this path. You mentioned the AMAs. When a marketer wants to think about the entry points to marketing on Reddit, obviously there are organic avenues – which you may enter at your own peril. When it comes to you, your team, what sort of entry points are possible on a self-service approach and what kind of entry points are a little bit more structured? WILL: The AMA is a really good metaphor for how to do Reddit in general because it's a conversation. It's a dialogue. You're coming to the platform, and when an AMA is happening, it's a live experience. It's an exchange between you and the community, and it's really based on this idea of being human. There's this thrill. It's so funny that it was so massive on Reddit so early because even though it's text-based, it's very fresh and relevant to some of the experiences we have right now where if it's a celebrity – John Boyega or Chris Pratt, Hosier, some of the AMAs I had the privilege to work on – the users in that thread were just so excited that they were on the same URL as somebody that they really admire and respect. You're working with that kind of excitement to create a moment of remarkable connection that feels really authentic, vulnerable, and human, and is not the kind of thing that you would typically see in a press junket. It was unexpected and it was different and it defied the way that things felt for fans before. Today, we do that with brands. The big truth here is that brands are made up of humans, and when the humans behind the brands show up and they tell a story, it's a moment to foster a very powerful connection that builds trust. Brands have a place where they can be proud, they can be vulnerable. We've had brands come to us and say, “We have a Super Bowl commercial. Let's talk about it.” That was the first time anybody on Reddit could say “I have a Super Bowl commercial.” That's a moment where brands are bringing something to the community that the community of people couldn't bring to themselves beforehand, and it created this excitement. We've had brands come to the community for mea culpa. “We're making a big transformation” or “We're trying to explain what has transpired over the last couple of months.” It's an opportunity to meet human to human, to recognize that there are human beings on other side of that keyboard and build trust from there. This is really where marketing is – not even headed, it's where it's at right now: thinking about building trust. The AMA has been around for a long time, and it's elegantly simple. Ask Me Anything. It represents the blueprint of everything that you can do with platforms like Reddit. ROB: And it's so helpful to have a coach like your team as someone's heading into that. So the AMA is one of those ad products that's available; what's the range of ad products that are available to a brand who's thinking about marketing on Reddit? WILL: This is interesting. Talking about the team, the creative strategy team is incredibly sophisticated at these things. They're so sophisticated that they make it easy. That's the important lesson that I've definitely learned on my path. Reddit has such a depth to it that there's so many exciting things you can do, but it's really remarkably easy, and you've got to start with what makes it easy. That's the focus of the creative strategy team. We can drive this thing at 150 miles per hour if you want, but let's start at 20. Crawl, walk, run. Let's do some interesting engagements here. From an ad standpoint, the atomic unit is called the promoted post. It looks like a Reddit post. It can host text, it can host an image, a GIF, a video. You can have comments off, you can have comments on. It's got the upvote mechanism, the downvote mechanism if you want to use that and get a great signal. And it looks and operates in the same exact way as any post on Reddit, the only difference being that through the targeting, you can control who does and does not see that media. The way that I look at things from the creative strategy team is through the metaphor of origami. [laughs] The promoted post is a piece of paper, and we make cranes, we make boats, we make all manner of different things out of that simple piece of paper. That's the AMA. That's the megathread, which is a vast, longform bit of text that explains all of the product details. Really great for our car buyers and our computer buyers and our tech audience. We do conversation posts where we do something like a writing prompt, where we co-create with our users. We put web comics in there. We put videos in there and GIFs and memes. But it's all one ad unit. So it's elegantly simple with the potential to be staggeringly sophisticated. ROB: When someone's thinking about getting into this atomic unit of a promoted post, is it something they can dabble in self-service? Do they need to engage with your team? There's certainly advantages for that sometimes, but can someone dip their toe in the water and fire up an ads account and a credit card? Or is it more complicated than that? WILL: They absolutely can. We have a self-serve platform, an ads manager. You can jump right into the promoted post and you can select your targeting. It has great parity with the kinds of ads managers you're going to see on other platforms. We've spent the last 3 to 4 years really investing in building that, and it's a great way in. ROB: It certainly sounds like it. When someone starts to think about how to do well on this, one thing I think we'll think about is targeting. How should we think about targeting? What's the menu of possibilities? Are you looking mostly at targeting people who follow a certain subreddit, people who have commented? What's a good targeting campaign look like? WILL: That's a great place to dive into now because the ads manager is going to look like what you experience elsewhere. You're going to be able to target based on interests, but what those interests are constructed by is slightly different than what you have elsewhere. It's not a social graph. It's not based off of people's identity, their information. It's based off of the communities that they go to. It's a community graph rather than a social graph. So if you have the interest category of auto enthusiasts, for example, that's going to serve your ad to people that are engaging with a constellation of subreddits like “What car should I buy?” or the Toyota subreddit or the WRX subreddit. Everything from the broad interest in cars to the make and the model. And Reddit has something that is also really remarkable here when it comes to this kind of targeting, and its intent. When you look at a community like “What car should I buy?”, when somebody's engaging in a community like that, they're not just interested in cars. They have the intent to buy a car. They are in the market. They are looking for that information. We have intent-driven, purpose-driven communities for everything imaginable – for vacuum cleaners and climate change and everything in between. ROB: I'm so glad you mentioned intent because that was certainly in the back of my mind. When you're talking about users following subreddits, it reminds me so much of the power that has made Google search so powerful for so long. It's always been that someone was intentional in what they were searching for, and you weren't just slicing demographics 10 different ways. It's really piquing my curiosity in a big way. I think something that leads us to that marketers should probably think about: what should marketers not do when they're entering into the world of marketing on Reddit? WILL: I love that you brought up the similarities with Google there. If Google is where you search for information, Reddit is where you search for what other people have already found. We've found that when it comes to the trust that people have in the information on products and news, Reddit was closer to Google than it was to the rest of social media in terms of scoring tremendously high on the trust that people put into that. Because it is a resource that people use for information. It's hard to find information that you can trust online right now. Reddit is a place that verifies through other people, like “Here's my actual experience.” So whatever that life moment that you go through – and I myself have gone through so many in the last couple years; I've gotten married, I've gotten a home, I've gotten a juice machine. [laughs] In each of those scenarios, I was using Reddit for my product journey to really figure out, what can I trust when it comes to learning how to go through this passage? For brands, I think they've got to really be cognizant of the role they should play in meeting people on that journey. There's value in simply being there, just knowing that Reddit is on the path to purchase and that there's an incredible amount of consideration that people are putting into that path when they're on Reddit. And just show up. Just show up and wave your hand and say, “Hey, happy to be here. This is our product, this is our info.” It's super simple. You can take your marketing that you're using in other channels and put it in the right place at the right time, knowing how important this platform and this audience is. And don't overthink that. Then beyond that, it's an opportunity to really engage. Once you've gotten some signal, place a few different bets, a few different targeting cohorts that you set up with your creative. See what's resonating. Maybe you might be surprised, actually, at who's engaging with your ads. Maybe it doesn't actually match your expectations. That might be a way to step into an intersectional audience that is really an opportunity that you hadn't considered. Begin to have a dialogue with them. Turn the comments on when you're ready (you can start with the comments off). Have a prompt and bring the humans behind your brand on board. Say, “This is our R&D team. We've noticed that you're changing the way we think about vacuum cleaners, the way we think about home gardening.” That's a huge space for transformation right now. Have a conversation. Show up authentically and really be there for them. To provide a story and a case study here, that's exactly what Chipotle did a couple of years ago. They released the Lifestyle Bowls, which were based off of the cultural observation that all of these diets were emerging, like the paleo diet, Whole30, keto, etc. We have communities for each of those, and they're robust and very, very active. So Chipotle with their ads, they turned the comments on and said, “We are making lunch items for your diet. What should we put in it?” They stayed in that conversation and they had a back-and-forth. When they came back around, they were able to say, “Lifestyle Bowls are out and you helped us know how to make them right. Here they are.” And the trust they earned was incredible. The call to action was very, very powerful because all of the Redditors who had participated in that said to their coworkers, their friends, their family, “We're going to lunch at Chipotle because I've got to try this bowl that I had a hand in creating.” It created a cultural moment in these niche subcultures that, as the tide rose on all of these different diets, Chipotle's Lifestyle Bowls rose with them. ROB: It's interesting that you mention that because Chipotle with those bowls – they actually come across as quite authentic all the way down to the store. I was at Chipotle a month ago and they had cauliflower rice, which I imagine is part of this, right? WILL: That's where that mission statement of the creative strategy team comes into play. We turn curiosity into understanding. At first it's like, cauliflower rice? That's a curiosity. It's strange. But then when you understand the reasons for that and where it comes from and how it fits into culture, it shows itself to be a tremendous opportunity. So what we want to do is highlight things like that early and often so that our partners have more time to develop their products and their marketing and be agile in the moment when things like that really come to bear. ROB: All the way down to the store, that entire initiative feels very authentic, very – not to say this inappropriately in a food context, but it feels organic. It just feels right. So it's awesome to see that stemming from the Reddit ecosystem. When you think about the different communities – obviously this has been a big year for Reddit news-wise. You may be tired of talking about it or you may not be, and it's not as much in the moment right now, but the entire Wall Street Bets, GameStop, crypto rotation – there's a few news cycles on that alone. What's interesting about that is it's not that that movement started this year; it's that that movement became visible this year. Are there some other communities that you think are maybe waiting for that moment? Are there types of conversation that you think might be driving a news cycle next month? WILL: I'm not tired of it. I'm grateful for it because it revealed a 10-year-old secret to everybody, which is that Reddit communities are staggeringly sophisticated and influential. I've been telling that story for a long time, and now I have a story that everybody recognizes and everybody has the full context on. Before, I was telling the story of McDonald's and Szechuan sauce and the Rick & Morty community, or the March for Science, or some of the fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders, or when Reddit flooded a hospital ward with pizzas for a young cancer patient. All of these really remarkable stories of Reddit doing exactly this for over 10 years, and now there's one that really has become the shorthand, where everybody saw and understands, I think in a very intuitive way, the power of Reddit. That's what GameStop and Wall Street Bets really represents. It's the power of Reddit on the world stage. And we know that it's going to happen again because this is Reddit doing what Reddit does. It's very well-spirited. It's the human spirit, and it's so important for the voice of communities to be able to influence culture in this way for the decades that are ahead of us. I think that there are quite a few communities right now that we can expect to see some similar kinds of moments from. It's rarified that you're going to have something that reaches the kind of stratospheric level of the GameStop moment because it was just this revelatory moment. But I think that what was learned by communities and the broader web and culture is that there are really powerful ways to vote with your dollars that we kind of understood as people beforehand, but now we have tools that we didn't have beforehand to really have a collective impact together. So I think we're going to see different versions of people voting with their dollars together in other sectors that are going to be really, really interesting. In a lot of what we saw with that, people were just throwing one dollar or five dollars into the pot or something like that, and there was this sense of collectivism and what we can do together. We're going to see that I think in a lot of other areas. I also think there are some more subtle shifts that are coming. I've been keeping an eye on the sustainability communities on Reddit for some time, and there's a whole underbelly of people that are raising their own chickens and making sourdough and growing vegetables in their backyard, and it's emerging into this – I always look for the language. I really like this community called Zero Waste. It represents an idea that I want to live a life that is not producing any waste. It's an aspirational lifestyle in a totally different direction than what we considered beforehand. This community was having a discussion earlier this week about whether or not brands belong in a community like this, and how they felt about seeing brands move towards product packaging and messaging that at its best is contributing to the cause and at its worst is what you would call greenwashing. There's an example of some soap company that had paper packaging for the soap, and when you peeled back the paper there was a plastic container on the inside. [laughs] The sentiment that came through in that community was that they really want brands to be a part of this. They're really, really encouraged to see that brands are stepping into changing the way they manufacture their products, that they're making pledges to support things like community gardens and all of the different circular systems that are going to save our planet and going to save all of us. They know that brands have influence. They know that brands have resources and power, and that can really shift things the way they like to see them. So I think we're going to see that influence not be one of those dramatic spike moments that Wall Street Bets was, but I think over the course of the next 10 years, it's going to be this protracted rising tide that is going to shift the way that we all think. I think that term, “zero waste,” is going to be very obvious to all of us in the future. But it's very clear to just a niche subculture on Reddit right now. ROB: It's going to be probably interesting. What strikes me about Wall Street Bets is you have this intersection of democratization. You have this democratized community on Reddit, but then you have the democratization of finance, and you have these apps where you can fire up an app and make an investment. At the intersection you're talking about with zero waste, there will be some communities who will – you'll probably be able to buy carbon credits and point them in places you can't think about right now. Some communities on Reddit will love that and use that, and some will hate it. You'll have all pieces of that out there. It seems like looking for areas where something tangible is being democratized is maybe a good place to keep an eye on Reddit.  WILL: Yeah. I don't know if we've got the time to really dive into the depth of this one here, but the very nature of the way we exchange value is changing. The digitization of currencies is supporting that, and there are currencies that belong to communities; there are currencies that belong to causes. All of that can facilitate a moment where the two things I described come together. You have a purpose – zero waste, sustainability – and you have the realization of the things that we can do when we vote with our dollars together. Those can come together and create real change in the world, and we're going to see that over and over and over again. ROB: And Reddit's been in the middle of that for longer than most with Reddit Gold and all that. It's interesting how long it's been hiding in plain sight on Reddit, is what I would say. WILL: Isn't it? It's crazy. [laughs] ROB: I think there's one other interesting thing to pull on. Reddit has this legacy of being – it just feels techy. It may have been unapproachable for some, but now so many digital natives – you've been at this forefront of – this is true in a couple of cases – Silicon Valley mindsets meeting the LA media landscape. That cultural alignment, what does that look like over time? How has it evolved in your time there? WILL: Wow. The LA/San Francisco connection is a really, really interesting one. There's a dynamic between tech and media. When I first started, it was like this denial that media could act like tech and that tech could act like media. Vastly, vastly different things. I would say both industries were kind of looking down their nose at each other. Over the following years, they've really seen a tremendous amount of interplay on the level of how the funding works and how the talent is hired and how the products are developed, and of course, the user bases. Is Netflix a media company or a tech company? It's really at a place right now where we're understanding that tech and media are very, very much a hybridized thing.  I think over the course of the next few years, that element that is very, very present in marketing around purpose and intent is going to come in. There are so many options when it comes to our media and there are some many options when it comes to our platforms that all of these businesses really need to think about their why and about the intent of their brand and the intent of their users, and build against that. I think there are other centers than San Francisco, New York, and LA that are really ahead when it comes to thinking about why. They're unexpected because they're different voices. The voices of sustainability, for example, are not coming from metropolitan cities. They're coming from places like Hawaii. They're coming from different mindsets altogether. That's I think a really, really exciting place as the soul goes back into business. Media and tech, for them to find their place in the future, and for marketing to find its place in the future, they have to have a good answer in terms of “Why are we here? What are we doing for humanity? What are we doing for the world?” ROB: Wow. It's such a great point to bring it down to. This has been a tremendous privilege. Thank you so much for this grand tour of how to think about Reddit for marketers, what the options are, and how to do so thoughtfully. I think the authenticity of the brand comes through in how you and your team are thinking about these things as well. WILL: Thank you. Thank you for giving me a platform for my voice. I appreciate the time.  ROB: Fantastic. Have a great one. WILL: You too. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

John Vuong started his Toronto-based agency, Local SEO Search, in 2013 with the goal of helping small- to medium-sized businesses in North America, UK, and Australia improve digital presence in their local communities.   John had ten years in advertising and sales for print media directories with their online performance-based networks and then worked for 5 years at Yellow Pages. Through this experience, he honed his understanding of how to dig out a business's gaps, opportunities and challenges, its potential customers, where those customers were located, what those customers wanted . . . and what businesses themselves were looking for in an agency. John explains that product characteristics, physical proximity, convenience, and/or services are only the beginning of the variables to consider in “positioning” a company. Whatever it is that a company's customers want needs to be prominent on its website. John says, “Make it easy for people to realize what you offer.” John believes “Google My Business” is “the biggest asset piece for the local space” – it is what sets local apart from traditional organic traffic. This link between Google search and maps is critical. Small business owners need to understand how people “shop, navigate, and search for information.” Websites at the local level need to be simple for Google to easily crawl and index user-relevant information.  Typical clients for this agency are professional service businesses (dentists, lawyers, physio/chiro, massage, and anything medical spa-ish), trades (e.g.; plumbers or roofers) and B2B businesses (e.g.; manufacturing, distribution, and e-com) – businesses that more competitive in nature, have higher revenue expectations, and have a higher lifetime customer value. John says the process of building a business takes time and work – that there are no shortcuts for things that are worthwhile. Local SEO Search has specialists that develop SEO strategy, build links, create content, and manage social media. The agency employs web developers and graphic designers. But even with that variety of services, the agency's focus is totally and simply on the attributes and signals Google uses to rank websites. John' strength is sales. Yellow Pages taught him a lot about business. He met business owners where the businesses had been in existence, not just for years, but for lifetimes. How? “They took care of their customers. They relied on word-of-mouth, referral business. They understood how to run a really good business – service, pricing, competitors, unique selling proposition, understanding all their products and services. Inside out, they knew how to run it.” John sees the internet as the “new Yellow Pages.” When he started his agency, John had to learn how to deliver, how to hire and manage people, how to provide customer service. “There's so much more to running a business than just sales,” he admits. John values honesty and hard work and admits that he “went door-knocking at the beginning to get clients, and it worked.” Today, he says, he's “just looking for good people to connect with. Good, honest, real businesses that not just need and acknowledge that they need help, but they're good people” who “have business experience and knowledge and insights on what real business ownership means.” Those are the people he feels he can best help. John can be reached on his agency's website at: www.localseosearch.ca.  Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by John Vuong, owner of Local SEO Search based in Toronto, Canada. Welcome to the podcast, John. JOHN: Thanks a lot for having me, Rob. I'm excited to be on your show today. ROB: Super exciting to have you here. Why don't you start off and tell us about Local SEO Search? I think we might know what your superpower is, but why don't you tell us about it?  JOHN: Yeah, definitely. I started this agency 8 years ago, back in 2013. My sole purpose is really to help the small to medium size businesses service their local community and really help them for their digital presence, so make them appear more visibly on search, in particular Google. ROB: Interesting. We've talked to some different SEO firms, but a lot of times they're more on that “trying to rank for a keyword,” that B2B software client. How does that work differently with local? How do the tactics and mindsets differ when you're trying to be the pizza place somebody finds when they look locally? JOHN: There's a lot of different nuances. In my background – and maybe I'll take a step back before I even start with starting the agency. I actually worked 10 years prior in advertising/sales, and I dabbled in traditional advertising/sales and print media directories, some online affiliate performance-based networks, and then I resided and worked for 5 years at Yellow Pages. For me, I really learned a lot about local businesses, understood what gaps, opportunities, and challenges they had, and what they wanted to look for or to in an agency, or someone that they wanted to build their trust and relationship with. When I started this company, it was all about understanding them, asking the right questions, and understanding what they really, really cared about in terms of staying connected and harvesting a good relationship long term. For me, that's all I needed to get into this agency world without knowing how to run an agency. Working at Yellow Pages is not your traditional digital agency. It was more traditional channel print media, telephone book. But I learned a lot from a big company, how to run a real company. In terms of local, the big thing for me was understanding who their customers were, understanding their challenges/problems, and ultimately the customers that were consuming their product or service. Fast forward to now Google and how local sets themselves apart from the traditional organic traffic, Google My Business is the biggest asset piece for the local space. How you understand and claim and verify and rank for a lot of terms to be on that prominent proximity or relevant map is so critical for a lot of these small business owners because that's how people shop, navigate, search for information. For you as a business owner, I feel you have to understand what your customers are looking for. The keyword gap analysis, great, but positioning so that you actually know exactly that pizza shop, what people are looking for, seeking out – is it the weekly specials? Is it the different toppings? The convenience factor, proximity, free pick-up, Uber, whatever? There's so many different variables. Understand that. Make it prominent on your website, and then make sure that Google recognizes that it's inside your schema markup, your sitemap. Make it easy for people to realize what you offer that's accessible and simple for your customers. ROB: Dig in a little bit just for a moment on schema markup. That's something I think some of the amateur SEOs like me out in the world might know less about. JOHN: Schema markup is just the way you sort your information on your website so that Google can index things. It's another way to add attributes within your website. The key about everything you do in terms of not just digital, but in your business, is to make it as efficient as possible for your customers. The more simplistic it is, easy it is – just like your sitemap on your website, making it so simple that Google can go in there and crawl it without trying to navigate five layers deep on the content piece that's relevant for the user. If you mark it up so it's simple, so that Google doesn't have a problem indexing your site, it allows you to then make it a clean transfer of information/content to the actual users and make it easy for Google to then crawl and index your site. ROB: Thank you for digging into that. It's an interesting through-line going back to your work with Yellow Pages. You've been helping businesses be found by people for longer than you've had a business. That's pretty fascinating. I wonder what a typical customer looks like for you. I might've pulled you down a path with that pizza restaurant example, but who are we talking about for your customers, usually? Are we talking about doctors or lawyers, home professionals, retail businesses? What's the meat and potatoes of who wants to be found locally and wants some help with that? JOHN: Our typical persona/avatar type of client is the professional service-based type of business, whether it be dentists, lawyers, physio/chiro, massage, anything medical spa-ish, as well as trades, which are the plumbers, roofers, etc. And of course, the B2B kind of businesses – manufacturing, distribution, e-com, etc. The reason for that is typically it's more competitive in nature, and in a local marketplace – I live in Toronto, Canada, and it's one of the larger metropolitan areas in all of Canada. There's more competition in dentists than there are barbershops. Therefore, if you are in business for a higher ticket service type sale of your client – and the lifetime value of a dentist is 7 years – so the value of acquiring a customer, you want the good type of avatar, a good ideal lead nurture of a client. Understanding that whole process, understanding who you want to cultivate, understanding how you want to portray your brand or yourself as a business cultivates the best lead source if you do SEO properly with the right company, yourself, or freelancer contractor. It doesn't matter. If you do it properly, you should have an inbound lead flow of quality clients begging for you, for your service. Those are typically my type of clients because of the price point, the value that they're looking for, and how difficult it is to get new customers in any other form of media channels, from social to paid ads to traditional, tradeshows, print media, radio, television. There are so many different media sources, but I feel SEO still cultivates the best lead source of your ideal type client. ROB: That makes sense. You started walking down a path I was interested to get into. Obviously, SEO is the name you hang on the front door of the business, but you mentioned other marketing channels. Have you engaged more deeply into paid and content and some other things? Or have you kept it pretty tight around SEO? JOHN: My agency focuses on SEO only, but there's pillars within SEO. We take care of the strategy; we have specialists. We also have link builders. We have content creators. We have web developers, graphic designers, social media management. But that is all attributes and signals of what Google is looking for to rank a website. Anything that is required to rank a website, that's what we touch. Anything outside that, which is usually paid – like if you're doing paid ads on social or Google Ads or behavioral networks, performance networks, email, that's different. We only focus on being a full-service SEO agency that's more of a boutique agency. ROB: You must've had clients, though, ask you to manage their paid budget. How have you looked at that temptation, potentially, and said no to it? JOHN: We have that daily, actually. A lot of clients know they need SEO, and I tell them there's a ton of agencies that offer full-service from paid ads to SEO to content, and they break it up, and that's fine, a la carte. I just want to be really good at one thing and do it right and be known for it. There's different strategies, different agencies out there. I just feel there's a big enough marketplace for being the best at one thing. If you're known for doing it really well, that's what people know you by, and that's enough business to be had. I could dabble into digital, like paid ads, and hire someone in-house and take it over, but I'm not a true believer in that. [laughs] I have to believe in it at a very high level to really be a big, strong proponent of selling it. ROB: Right. Super-duper interesting to keep that sort of focus. You mentioned your journey, you mentioned coming through that Yellow Pages background. It almost seems like there might've been a journey for you within that previous role before starting the company where you started to see something shift. What was your journey from “Hey, I'm working at Yellow Pages, I'm working with these businesses” to “I'm going to go start my own business”? Because it's a big difference between having someone who pays your bills and figuring out how to pay your own bills. JOHN: The journey definitely is something that I feel is a mindset journey for a lot of people. When I was at Yellow Pages, I was there for 5 years. I learned a ton about sales. I had the privilege to meet with thousands of business owners, and I was being mentored by them on what it takes to a business owner. And that's something that was invaluable at that time, for me to then pick their brain on what really mattered in not just business ownership, but in life. These people were so grateful to be ultra-curious about how they ran their business, what really made them happy, and what ultimately they wanted to do for their community, for their family, to have a good lifestyle. That's what resonated with me, along with, of course, selling ad space in a more dated format like the print directory, which allowed me to know that there was a gap in opportunity in the marketplace. People wanted to go with someone they trusted, or a company, but they didn't know how to do it and what was involved. So I wanted to be that transition piece. As you know, paid ads in the Yellow Pages was a diminishing return on investment. People were spending more than ever, getting fewer people transacting. The return on investment was lower, and people like myself were spending more time on Google to do search results. I knew there was an opportunity digitally. I didn't know anything about SEO at that time. I just knew there was a gap in the marketplace to add an idea, and I knew there were people willing to pay for someone or something to help them. That's all I really needed to get my foot in the door. But it was all timing as well. I did extremely well at Yellow Pages and ads, so I was doing well in sales. My wife gave me the go-ahead, because she had a stable job opportunity. For me, it was more, look, I can go get another job, maybe work at Google, work at another ad agency or whatever – or I can try something. Basically, she said, “Go for it.” The first couple years it was a struggle to learn how to run a business. [laughs] More so than the SEO thing at all. My strength was sales, so I was out there selling from Day 1. The first two months, I already had 10 clients. So, the sales aspect wasn't the challenge; it was more about now I had to figure out how to deliver and hire people and manage, customer service. I realized there's so much more to running a business than just sales. ROB: For sure, that is an interesting part of the journey. I wonder a little bit – I don't know if Yellow Pages ever tried this, but I know a lot of the TV and radio stations and the conglomerates around them that used to sell to local businesses tried to make this transition. They've been selling TV ads, radio ads, billboards to these local businesses for forever. A lot of them tried to make the jump into selling digital advertising and selling SEO, but it just doesn't seem like that transition worked for them. What is it that made it hard for those organizations to turn the corner where they already had the client relationship and build up that new line of business? JOHN: I think the biggest barrier for them was they were so comfortable with the margins they had. With a big company like Yellow Pages, they were so comfortable with a directory that they billed monthly for ads where they printed an ad, and the cost was less than one-quarter of a month. I knew the cost and the margin of retaining a customer and getting them to buy ads in their asset, which was the printed book. Now you go digital and the margins are a lot less; to get into that and then not know what expectations and profitability is, it's going to be bad on their shareholders because ultimately it's all about big business. For me, that's where this was a huge gap. I'm realizing, now that I've been doing this for 8 years, why do these business owners gravitate towards smaller boutique companies? Because the big guys will try to cut corners for cost – not deliver on the actual results. They're trying to do as little as possible and earn as much money as possible. ROB: And they're not used to doing the execution at all. You put something in a book and you're done versus managing a relationship, actually having to do execution, having to apologize. I'm sure something goes wrong sometimes in the Yellow Pages, but not the same way – I know of an ecommerce site that stood up their ecommerce site and WordPress had a setting that said “Don't Index Me.” That was kind of a problem for their SEO on a site migration. It doesn't usually happen that way in print. JOHN: Exactly. Again, digital is so multi-touchpoint and so many people need to be involved. With traditional media, like newspaper, flyer, tradeshow, radio, television, they already own their asset piece. It's a sunk cost. So, for them, it's all about ad spend and people. When you look at what is required for digital to perform, you invest a ton of money. For these companies that were so reluctant to spend and invest, and so comfortable with that profit margin, very difficult to get that mindset. Especially when they're older in terms of the older generation. They're okay with the status quo. They don't really forward-think like what we see today. As digital agencies, we have to look ahead. We have to stay ahead of the curve. ROB: You mentioned those first couple of years where you were learning a lot about running a business. You mentioned that you had some customers pretty early. Was there a point where it felt like you had turned a corner and you said, “Okay, we're not just trying this, we're doing this” and hit escape velocity where you'd built up a team now where you saw that ahead of you? JOHN: My goal to do this was either commit, do it properly, or not do it at all. For me, my intention was spend less time in the business eventually and learn as much as I can, early days. Because I did have a family but I didn't have children yet, I had time. I didn't have a lot of money because I bootstrapped everything. It was like, I've got to figure this out. I've got to make this happen. I've got to make this work. I didn't really have a digital background. No technical skills, no SEO skills. I had to learn it. I had to figure it out. My background was always just sales, but then I had to learn how to manage and operations and bookkeeping and all that other stuff that I needed to run a business. But that's the challenge of business ownership and entrepreneurship. You should always try to grow. You should always try to learn. And there are going to be tons of mistakes along the way. You have to acknowledge it, move ahead, and get better every single day, every hour. Challenge yourself. Figure out, what are the gaps? Where are the opportunities? Talk to people and get out there and learn. There's so much to it, and we only have a 30-minute podcast, so I don't even know where to start because there's so much I've learned over the last 8 years. ROB: It's such a big journey. I think you came into SEO at a pretty interesting time. SEO has an early baggage of being a gimmick business rather than a discipline business, or at least some people were very much in the gimmick business for a while. Were there any gimmicks or tactical short-term wins that you had to look at early on and either steer away from or get bit by once or twice to learn – I feel like what I would say is the best way to be found is to be worth finding, but it took us a while to get there in the SEO industry. JOHN: Yeah. There's so many hacks, fast ways. This is life in general, I feel. I was very fortunate working at Yellow Pages, where I met these business owners that were generationally in business – not just 5, 10, 20 years, but think about different lifetimes – 50, 100, 150 years. How did they survive without the internet? Internet's only been around for 15-20 years, right? Google has only really taken off in 10-15 years. It's transitioned and transformed the way we shop and our behaviors. Imagine these businesses. What did they do so well to keep them sustained? They took care of their customers. They relied on word-of-mouth, referral business. They understood how to run a really good business – service, pricing, competitors, unique selling proposition, understanding all their products and services. Inside out, they knew how to run it. If you take that foundation and you put it now digitally, people don't put that much effort in the foundation of a business online. They're looking for shortcuts. And in life, typically there's no shortcuts. Just like any profession – not just in business and entrepreneurship, but profession as in if you're a dentist or a lawyer or a doctor or a plumber, is there a shortcut to become one of them? Probably not. You probably have to go to school. You probably have to apprentice. You probably have to work as an associate. You've got to put your years in, training in, learning in. By the time you put in your 10, 15, 20 years, then maybe you have enough savings to start your own business. But now, with internet and with a lot of social media and videos and podcasts and everything, people find that it's easier for knowledge and information to be transferred. You can access information at your fingertips. There's so much information and intel at your disposal. However, there's not a lot of experience at your disposal. A lot of people think there's easier ways, faster ways to earn a living, and they get bitten by these videos or ways to do it. Just like a sports athlete, I'm all about mindset. I'm all about habits. If you look at one of the top basketball players – Michael Jordan, LeBron James – or Tiger Woods – how many years of training did they have to harvest? How many hours, how many years of dedication from help, practice, failures, to actually become that? People forget that in terms of business, and that's why in the first couple years of business ownership, a lot of people fail. They watch a video, they read a book, they listen to a podcast, and they purchase something on Wix or Squarespace or Shopify and build a site thinking, “Now I have a business.” But they don't have business experience and knowledge and insights on what real business ownership means. That's the gap that I'm saying. In terms of what I've seen over the years, I'm more a mature business now because I've learned from the type of clients I want to work with versus the type of clients that are not even real business owners yet because they're not profitable or they don't know how to run a business. I don't want to train someone how to run a business to be working with them, if that makes sense. People that are starting off or have an idea aren't my clients. ROB: Right. Those clients tend to go away. It's a great point about the athletes and about the experience. I think I heard you mention before “I didn't have kids yet,” which makes me suspect you may have them now?  JOHN: Yeah. ROB: So I think because you have experience, you don't have the time you used to have. Tiger Woods isn't as young as he used to be, and at one point he had to retool his entire swing to stay competitive, and there are still things he changes in his game now. Because he's not as young as he used to be, now he has to heal two broken legs, I think. That's what I think I saw, I don't know. But he's going to figure out and adapt, and experience is going to be the thing that gives him what maybe having raw energy and pure physical prowess gave him early on. We still have to work all those muscles. But it's a great point, a great analogy. JOHN: Yeah, ultimately it's mindset, right? What you feel will be what you want to do for a very long time. A lot of business owners are in it for the wrong reasons. They're chasing money or chasing fame and glory or trying to be the best, but they don't put in the work to become it. Business ownership is the same way. SEO is the same way. Digital ad agencies are the same way. I'm not selling a fake promise. I'm being authentic in terms of the journey. I want people to realize how long it takes, what's involved, and let them make an informed decision. The more you're up front with any transaction or interaction you have with your customers, the more likelihood they're going to stay with you for the long term. ROB: You're still doing it. You have more people, you have in some ways more opportunities, but also more problems. So, what is it at this point that makes it worth it to you? JOHN: I'm really just looking for good people to connect with. Good, honest, real businesses that not just need and acknowledge that they need help, but they're good people. The challenge with digital agencies – and again, I'm not your traditional agency coming from the ad world. I come from Yellow Pages, and that's all I built my business around. Long-term trust in clients that have a problem, fixing the problem and answering it. It's not rocket science, but it's very simple. People overcomplicate things with funnels and landing pages and different ways to try to cultivate new clients. I'm the type of guy that just went door-knocking at the beginning to get clients, and it worked. These things that really foundationally set these business owners apart when they first started still apply. People are always looking for shortcuts; there's no shortcuts. ROB: And it turns into – generically, not speaking specifically to the business – saying you're in the business of helping good people achieve what they want in their business in a way that you're skilled and enjoy. Isn't that what I think most people want from their work? JOHN: Not only will I give it all my best effort and my team will do what we possibly can for all clients, I'm trying to cultivate good, ideal customers that you want coming to you and positioning yourself as a thought leader. So, for me, I think a lot of business owners need to realize why they're in business, who they want to go after as their ideal type of client, and then focus heavily on that versus trying to take anything they can. Yes, maybe when they're first starting, you're doing that because it's like survival mode. But then you realize as you mature in your business what you really want to be known as. Who do you want to cultivate as an ideal customer? Just have fun. A lot of people forget about why they started the business in the first place. ROB: That's great advice, John. You've shared a lot of good lessons along your journey. Is there anything else you can think of – a key moment, a key decision you want a do-over on if you could? Obviously, we can only move forward, but if you could change something on the journey? JOHN: For me, I wouldn't, actually. Even though I made a ton of mistakes – I mean, I still make mistakes every day. I'm learning. I'm constantly eager and I'm hungry to want to be better. I don't have to be the best, and that's okay too. I'm always trying to get better. I know there's gaps in the agency. I know there's gaps in client expectations, and we can do more. I'm all about generating more value for my customers, taking care of my clients, taking care of my staff, and being a better human and living a better life of joy and happiness. If I'm enjoying that entire journey and process, that's what being a business owner should be about. ROB: That's fantastic, John. When people want to find you and Local SEO Search, where should they go to find you? JOHN: They can check out my website. It's www.localseosearch.ca. We're located in Toronto, Canada, but we service clients all across North America, UK, and Australia. For us, it's all about helping good people and informing them with decisions and letting them decide. I equip people with insight and knowledge, and they make their own decisions of who they want to work with and what they want to do. But just be informed. I think that's the biggest thing about SEO. Know what you want and go out there and be realistic, because there's experts or a lot of information out there; you just don't know who to trust and what that really means. ROB: When one goes to Google and types in “local SEO search,” I can affirm that you're proving your craft. You are the number one organic result for “local SEO search.” Not only that, there's like four or five ads above you, which means people really want that spot. It seems like there's some evidence here that you can do your job, John. JOHN: Thank you, Rob. ROB: It's pretty cool. And you're above people like BrightLocal and folks who would really like that slot. That's pretty impressive. JOHN: Yeah, Whitespark, BrightLocal. All of them have their own business. I feel just stay the course. It's a long game. Have fun, enjoy it. ROB: Sounds good, and we shall. John, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been great to hear your own journey and wisdom from it. JOHN: Thank you, Rob. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

John Limotte, Founder and CEO of Mustache Agency, started his career as a film producer making indie and arthouse films. When that business became more difficult (impacted by, among other things, the rise of the internet), John looked for a way to use his skills doing something that looked more like a real business. He saw potential in the field of marketing for “more cinematic . . . epic . . . more longform storytelling.” So, he started a very small video production agency and took jobs one by one to see where things would go. Ten years later, Mustache is a creative content agency with client services spread across three lines: integrated campaigns, video production and post-production, and social. The core of the agency's work is content and digital content, with a focus on storytelling and creating epic, engaging video content . . . doing high-quality, cost-effective work. Even from the early days, the agency produced hundreds of videos a month. The client “playlist” includes such “big names” as Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon, a lot of tech disruptors, Instacart, Grammarly, and YouTube. When Mustache works with Facebook and Instagram, the agency gets the “inside scoop” on their best practices, new products, what's working on the platform, and how to tailor content for the platform. John says the agency is learning from the platforms “how to hack them,” but then admits that the only real hack is creating “really good, sticky content.” Working on those platforms has increased the agency's effectiveness and provided the opportunity to work with the digital disruptor brands that heavily advertise on those platforms.  John says the key to his agency's success is “hiring good people who are passionate, have expertise, and know what they're doing; keeping the focus on high level storytelling; and demanding that whatever content goes out still moves the needle.” He says, “There is no hack. There is no foolproof system.”  You need to think about who your audience is, you need to think about who you are, and you have to think about what you want them to do and the best way to get them there, and you need to do that . . . through content and storytelling. You still need a hook. You still need to make people laugh. You still need to tell a story, have a journey. Even as the formats and the aspect ratios change, those things remain the same.  Mustache has never focused on a single vertical. John sees a lot of upside for his business across a wide variety of verticals. Why? John says industries today are evolving in the direction of increased video content . . . especially since COVID. He sees another upcycle and no end in the demand for and consumption of content.  John is best reached on his agency's website at: mustacheagency.com. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by John Limotte, Founder and CEO of Mustache Agency based in Brooklyn, New York. Welcome to the podcast, John. JOHN: Thank you, Rob. Nice to be here. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Would rather be up in New York, but we can talk about that. Why don't you start off by telling us about Mustache and where the firm excels? JOHN: Sure. Mustache is a creative content agency based in Brooklyn. We essentially offer three lines of services: integrated campaigns, video production and post-production, and social. Our clients are pretty evenly spread across those buckets. But at the core of everything we do is content, video content. We came up as a video production company focused on storytelling and creating epic, engaging video content. Eight or ten years later, depending on when you count the start date, our focus remains the same and it continues to be what we do best. ROB: It seems like you've really had the privilege to work with some clients that others would dream of. How do you make that jump from starting with – I don't know if it's you and a camera or what it looks like, but how do you start punching so heavyweight to work with some of these big names? You can run off whoever you're comfortable talking about. JOHN: Our first client was a plaintiff's law firm in the Bronx, and we were doing some pretty tactical digital marketing and $1,000 videos for him. We dubbed him “the King of the Bronx” and did a lot of man on the street videos of him because he was a true man of the people. From there, it's evolved greatly. These days we're working with everyone from Facebook, Google . . . Netflix is a big client of ours, Amazon, a lot of tech disruptors, Instacart, Grammarly . . . we do a lot of work with YouTube. How we got there is a great question. I wouldn't say that it was any sort of thought-out path. Some of it is just, I think, good fortune. But from the beginning we were focused on content and digital content, storytelling, video storytelling, and just doing that really, really well and cost effectively in a model that was outside the traditional agency model back in say 2012. With that focus, a lot of these companies just found us. We did some viral video campaigns, some YouTube campaign. We were doing some episodic web content that got some attention. In a lot of cases, being in the content business led to the work proliferating because we were creating, even from the early days, hundreds of videos a month. From there, word got out and eventually we found ourselves working with some of these bigger companies. I should say those are not retainer clients; we would be at an entirely different scale. These are all giant organizations that work with tons of companies in different niches and different capacities. So, it's the biggest companies in the world, but sometimes they're just small little campaigns that they hire us for, and we've been really fortunate that they do. One thing I'll add about that, too, is that for us it's created a kind of virtuous cycle. When we're working with Facebook and Instagram and we're talking about best practices, new products, what's working on the platform, and how to tailor content for the platform, we're learning from the platforms themselves how to hack them, really – although the truth is, there's not a lot of hacks except creating really good sticky content. But there are a lot of things you can do that we learn from them, and those make us more effective. I think that led to more work with the digital disruptor brands that are doing most of their advertising on those platforms. ROB: It's interesting because Instagram really has the visibility to look at every video that's made, just about, and decide who they want to work with. It's a pretty high compliment. One thing I want to pull on a little bit is that you mentioned even early on having hundreds of videos in flight at a time. That sounds overwhelming to me. I wonder how you're able to keep track of all of that. I know a bunch of people who have started video agencies, and not many of them that I know have crested that 10-20 person range. So, I wonder if there's some key in how you manage that scale and beyond that has helped you make it over the hump. JOHN: I will say that scaling great creative at good pricing is the bane of our existence. It's a challenge that you never win, in a way. It's never over. There's always the quest to do more and to do it better and to do it more cost effectively. I've never had that feeling of like “Oh, we cracked it. We're good.” It's just something that you have to continually be working at. We have a lot of smart people who spend a lot of time thinking on this problem and what kind of systems, what kind of processes. But again, one of my themes is that there's no hack. There's no foolproof system. There's not some proprietary technology that we've developed. At the end, at the core of it is hiring good people who are passionate and have expertise and know what they're doing, keeping the focus on high level storytelling, and demanding that whatever content goes out still moves the needle. People often ask me why we never focus on a particular vertical because we've always moved across verticals. I think for us, the question is easy because our focus has always been content, storytelling – just focused on that. We've built up a lot of expertise around that capability. At the same time, as I said, we're always working on the best workflow, the best system, the best structure. We've done a couple of reorgs over time as we gain new insight. We've also benefited from the fact that it's been organic. It's not like we started Day 1 making 100 videos per client per activation. I think much like the industry itself, it started with a TV 30 and then a couple of cutdowns, and the business has grown from there in terms of iteration and scale. We've had the good fortune of growing – from there it was 10 deliverables and then it was 100. Every client is different. Every circumstance is different. It's not like you need 100 videos or you need 10. But generally speaking, the numbers have gone up, and they've gone up steadily so that we've been able to adapt and adjust as the volume and the needs increase.  ROB: I think I have an idea, but for all of us, including me, what is a cutdown? JOHN: Basically just taking a 30-second spot or a 60-second spot, whatever the longer form of the content might be, and cutting it into smaller pieces – 15s, 6s, and so on. ROB: Got it. I think we've all seen that and now we know what to call it. It seems like one key may also be your involvement on the social side. With that as a line of service, it seems like that would give you insights into not just the overall raw performance of the content, but more specifically, you can get into the metrics and look at the performance of the content with the audience it was intended for as well as uncovering unexpected audiences. It seems like that would feed back into strategy. Are the platforms giving you the metrics you need to draw that sort of insight? JOHN: The clients are mostly pretty proprietary in terms of the platforms themselves, but you're able to track in social and digital performance yourself and see how things are working. When we're working with brand clients, often they'll share with us the data and the results, so we're also able to see from that. So yeah, it's been a tremendous feedback loop. In some ways we came into this with a very non-data, very intuitive approach, like “What is an insight that feels resonant? Let's tell a story about that in a way that to us feels compelling and impactful.” You never lose that eye towards the content, but then once you start working in social and you start getting more digital execution and getting that information about what's working and what isn't and you start being able to test different things and different hypotheses about content, then you're approaching it from both sides. You're using both your intuitive instincts around content and storytelling and you're able to look at the data. I think that's a pretty powerful one-two punch. ROB: For sure. John, if we rewind a little bit, go back in time even before that plaintiff attorney client, what was it that led you to take this jump and start the firm in the first place? Where did Mustache come from? JOHN: It was born somewhat of desperation, to be honest. I was a film producer back in another life and I was making indie films and arthouse films, the type of things that would go to Sundance and South by Southwest and hopefully find a distributor for it. I loved the business, but it was changing and becoming more difficult. Actually, with the rise of the web, that began to threaten that business in some respects, or at least in the form that I knew it. So, I started thinking about where else I could apply my skills. Is there something that more resembles an actual business? Film has this magical fantasy element to it where you're inspired by a story and you make it and hope that the world loves it. I was certainly drawn to the fact that there is a business that rewards creative and content and needs good stories. Especially at the time, in 2010, it felt like there was a real opportunity for more cinematic and epic storytelling, more longform storytelling. There was some minor identification of an opportunity and a shift. I think it was that combination of me looking for something new, seeing that there might be a place where this thinking might resonate, and then just starting in a very small and taking it job by job way and seeing where it went. ROB: It seems like very good timing. All of these video platforms emerged, and coming from a different perspective, you kind of got to take on being a video agency digital-first, where people probably had more TV experience. It's really interesting timing there, especially as all these video platforms have come around. I think we all know the key video platforms that we talked about and how Twitter has become, to an extent, a video platform, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc., and then TikTok is in that conversation as well. Is there anything emerging that maybe is not quite in the mainstream conversation that we need to think about? JOHN: I'll say this. As I think about where the business is going, I feel somewhat stunned by the level of change that I think is upon us and the level of acceleration in technology and platform adaption and adoption. Every industry is moving towards, and evolving very quickly, especially since COVID, in a way that supports and needs more video content. If you think about obviously e-comm and omnichannel thinking around e-comm, if you think about the medical business, healthcare, it's becoming online and more digital. Work from home, IoT, driverless cars are going to need content inside them. I don't have my eye on anything new so much as trends that we've been tracking for a while just exploding, an inflection point on those trends, and the need for content. I think a lot of people think content's had a great run. People have been saying content is king for 15 years now, it's a cliché. But the truth is, I feel like we're ready for another upcycle in the demand for and consumption of content. I just see no end there. So that's our focus. Does that answer the question? It's not exactly something new, but it's what I'm thinking about. ROB: I think so. One thing that strikes me as you get into it is the absolute explosion of different formats and lengths. When you talked about the cutdowns earlier, it used to be a 30-second ad was normal and you knew the aspect ratio. But now you have square, portrait, landscape. Do you want 5, 10, 30 seconds? Are you injecting this ad in the middle of somebody playing a game? Where is this thing going? It seems like that continues to shift. You don't have to worry about Quibi, but you might have had to on ads that had to be able to be rotated to different aspect ratios. JOHN: We had to. Quibi was a big client of ours. [laughs] So yeah, we were very much up in their business and we did social for them. We've been thinking about these things for a while, and I think you're right; it's sometimes overwhelming to think about the proliferation of formats and lengths. Two things I'll say about that. One is that the core of what we do remains unchanged. You need to think about who your audience is, you need to think about who you are, and you have to think about what you want them to do and the best way to get them there, and you need to do that, at least for us, through content and storytelling. You still need a hook. You still need to make people laugh. You still need to tell a story, have a journey. Even as the formats and the aspect ratios change, those things remain the same. At a certain point you realize that it's helpful in some ways because you're like, okay, it hasn't changed that much. We're still doing essentially the same thing; we just need to make sure we have the expertise we need across these platforms, whether it's Twitter or Amazon, so that we know how they speak on those platforms. It also brings me to one other thing I like to talk about. A lot of times you'll hear people say with the amount of content becoming so overwhelming, people's attention spans have shrunk and people don't have time or interest in anything longer form. What you used to have to tell in 60 seconds and then 30 and then 15 and then 6, now you have to tell in 3 or the blink of an eye. I don't think that's true. I think there is an element of having to use the right format and length, the right platform, but you just need to think harder about how to make your content break through, about a hook, about something to get people's attention. Sometimes and in some ways the answer might be longer form content. I certainly reject the notion of a race to the briefest, shortest form content possible. ROB: Certainly understood on that. I've heard some conversations on how quickly you have to hook someone. Maybe they'll stick around, but do you have to set the hook sooner to earn the rest of their attention? JOHN: Well, that's true. It's true because people's thumbs are moving. Attention spans have changed. I do think that notion is very true. You do have to hook them because otherwise you'll lose them. ROB: I appreciate that I think you're holding strong to the value of, as you mentioned, storytelling, of creativity. It reminds me a little bit of these rules in the world of standup comedy. I think you're supposed to make them laugh every 6 seconds, and if you don't, then they'll not like you, and if you do, then they probably will like you. But then you have Dave Chapelle. Dave Chapelle gets to be himself, and he's not going to make you laugh every 6 seconds, but he has his own style that is nonetheless extremely popular. JOHN: I think that's a great point. The rules may be true and relevant, but the real artists break free of them and are able to operate outside them. Some things can be true and not true at the same time, and I think it's true whether it's the comedy rules or the rules of advertising. ROB: Indeed. John, looking at your background, looking at how you built up on the film side, I think that's interesting. This is not your first rodeo, starting a business. JOHN: That's right. ROB: You did that, you started over with Mustache; if you're looking back at what you've done, what have you learned that you might do differently if you were starting clean? JOHN: It's a really interesting question. I often think about myself say 10 years ago, and I often come to the conclusion, “What a dumbass you were 10 years ago. You really didn't know anything. If I had just had all the knowledge and experience then that I have now, I could've done so much more.” I think that's true now, but at the same time, all the experiences, all the choices, they were all made in a way that I'm happy with the way they played out. So, there's no one thing that stands out. I will say, though, one thing does stand out and that's diversity and inclusion. I think we've all come to understand the importance of that, and it's something that's been on my radar from the beginning of Mustache, but I didn't give it the attention that I should have in the early days. What I would say is it was very existential. You're young and you're hungry and you're small and you're desperate for any work. If someone wants to work with you, you're like, “Yeah, that's great. Let's go.” So you're less discerning. I had less time to think about it and really plan and do the work. I feel like maybe that is one thing that if I could go back and talk to myself 10 years earlier, I would've given myself that one bit of advice. I've found once we've done that, as we've done that over the years and gotten better at it over the course of the last 10 years, how beneficial it's been for the work and for the clients and for the culture. So that's something. ROB: What did the steps look like to start to turn that corner? I think we all understand the tyranny of the urgent, the “I have to solve this problem now. I need to hire this creative by next week or next month” or whatever it is. What did you put in place to get more intentional there and maybe recruit some people you might've otherwise overlooked? JOHN: That's really interesting because it never ends, especially in our business, which tends to be really fast and furious. A good chunk of our business is project-based. So, in some ways it's the realization that the perfect moment never comes. People talk about wanting to have kids but they're too busy, and they keep telling themselves they're too busy. People will say to them, “It'll never be the right time if that's how you think about it.” That's how I think about this. There's never a moment where I'm like, “Okay, I've checked off everything on my list. I've got it completely under control. Now I can sit back and do it right.” It just doesn't happen. You have to prioritize things and move things around. You have to do the things that you have to do, that feel like imperatives. I think for me, that was the shift. It was like, we're never not facing a client rush/crisis/huge opportunity that I have to focus on because we need to get it. What I had to do was figure out within that context how to move forward anyway with the things that matter. I think once that switch flipped and we were like, we're going to start building that into every choice and everything we do, then we started getting the results that that kind of work suggests. ROB: When you're on that topic, it makes me think back – we had an agency we talked to on this podcast at South by Southwest a couple of years ago. They're a neighbor of yours, but that doesn't mean you've heard of them just because you're in New York. The Soze Agency. Are you familiar with them? JOHN: Yeah, yeah. Isn't it a freelance style, like a loose affiliation or collection of creators or something like that? ROB: I believe they call it a co-op. When I first heard it, it rang as a very Brooklyn thing to say that you were a collective and whatever else. JOHN: I love the Keyser Söze reference. ROB: They're super, super intentional in this area, and I really have appreciated following them since they were on the podcast. But they have an equity model that is interesting. I think they're going to opensource – I don't know if they will or not. I don't mean to speak for them. Everyone vests in ownership, but then they don't take it with them when they leave, so it goes back into the pool and everybody gets to share. JOHN: Yeah, it's very interesting. I've thought about that over the years and struggled with how to pair that with the imperatives of running a small business in an epically fast-changing landscape. But I think it's really interesting, and I've certainly spent time thinking about if it could work, how it could work, what the problems are. In some ways, Mustache was a dictatorship in the sense that if I saw an opportunity or wanted to make a change, I just did it, and there's nothing faster than one person deciding to do something. And that speed was critical at times. But on the other hand, there's things that might've been lost, good choices and good opportunities that might have been missed because we didn't have a more collective style. So, it's a real head-scratcher in some ways. I see the upside; I get stuck on some of the downside. But I think there's something there and I think there's a future there. I just don't think I've figured out how to crack it exactly. ROB: Someone's going to have to pay some lawyers some money to figure it out, and that's a trick too. I think what's interesting is I have been previously very much in tech startup land, and there's a model there that's predicated around growth and around increasing valuations and giving equity. It just doesn't apply in a services firm. You can't hire somebody and give them 1% and then have them walk out the door a few years later. Then your cap table is just a mess. You can't keep giving people this promise of the unlimited upside. When a company goes from a $10 million valuation to a $100 million valuation, they can get away with giving away smaller and smaller chunks in a way that would seem silly in a services firm. JOHN: It's interesting you say that, Rob, because as you were saying, it also occurred to me that the valuations matter. If you have a billion dollar pie, it's a lot easier to split up. The other thing has to do with margins. We're in content/creative. It tends to be a very low margin, tight business. If you're not in the tech valuations, you at least need to have a business model that's geared towards really high margins, really fat profits, because that gives you a little more leeway to do things. And maybe that's self-serving in some way, like if you implement the model, you'll move towards a space that is more profitable. But I think you need one or the other. Those valuations or you need to be in a business that's not razor-thin margins, I think, to make it work. ROB: It's good to have the conversation. I hear from some people who say a services firm, you want 20-30% margins. I don't know how that holds up, but I think what you're saying about setting the sights high – it just gives you more freedom to execute. I think that's what you're hinting it. We went all virtual, and if your margins are good, when you have people coming from six different cities, you can talk about flying somewhere and meeting up. JOHN: That's right. ROB: If you don't have good margins, then you say “We're all going to hide in our caves and never meet each other.” JOHN: [laughs] That's right. So true. My reality. ROB: [laughs] John, when people want to get in touch with you and with Mustache Agency, how should they connect with you? JOHN: Our website is the best place to start, mustacheagency.com. There's plenty of different ways you can contact us from there. ROB: And people should go to that website. It's very visually stimulating. I think it puts your work in a very good light. JOHN: Thank you. ROB: I'm glad the work has gone into the front door there as well. Sometimes it's hard to spend the energy on yourself. JOHN: So true. ROB: Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, John. I think it's been helpful to learn from your journey and helpful to think about the areas of business, the lines of business you've chosen and how they synthesize together and where all this video, and particularly advertising, is going in the digital land. I really appreciate it. JOHN: Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun. ROB: All right. Be well, John. Bye.  Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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

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

Justin Seibert is President at Direct Online Marketing, an agency that focuses on and excels at – direct online marketing – to move clients' ROIs in a positive direction. In this interview, Justin describes the process of developing strategies to drive quality traffic to its clients, converting that traffic into leads, and sending leads through to generate sales. Justin says the process of vetting potential clients is “very long.” Some of what the agency looks for to get a good fit: Medium-sized businesses provide the greatest opportunity to make an impact. Smaller businesses will not be able to get benefits commensurate with what it will cost them to work with DOM. In the case of larger businesses, the agency will not be able to move the needle as much. Highly niched businesses, either the lead brand or the challenger brand within a specific niche. These businesses are not “household names” unless the household is one already familiar with that particular industry.  Almost any industry. The agency works heavily with a number of SaaS (Software as a Service) companies, higher education, and ecommerce retail and less so with everything else – from “manufacturing to finance to entertainment.” In 2001, Justin started his career in Los Angeles, working for a company in the financial industry. The company had been highly successful with radio marketing but was looking for the next thing . . . and assigned Justin the task of figuring out how to use the internet to generate quality leads. His office was right next to the sales floor, so he got fast feedback on how good a job he was doing.  In spring of 2006, Justin moved into his basement and blogged at least five days a week, trying to get the word out about digital marketing. By October, he hired his first part-time employee. Justin says he always liked the idea of hiring people . . . because of the positive impact it would make on those individuals, their families, and on the community at large. But, planning and timing the growth of a company, especially when there is no outside funding, is a challenge. Justin explains, There are two classifications: 1) the revenue producers (sales, marketing, and 2) the internal administrative staff. He now has the confidence to hire for those internal functions when he perceives it is best for the company.  For “client-facing” employees, Justin looks at the current book of business and the pipeline to decide which functions to hire and when. The problem is in the timing. If he hires ahead of need, he may not have the cash flow to support those new hires. If he hires when everyone is swamped, the workload increases even more because the new employee needs to be trained. Cultural fit is paramount – but not intransigent. The agency's employees are virtual due to Covid, the culture has changed, and, in the middle of all of this, Justin has been hiring. Two things Justin notes as important when starting an agency: 1) Know what your process looks like. (He cites Marcus Lemonis's “People Profit Process.”) and 2) Get some sales training early on. Sales plus process is key. Justin can be reached on his agency's website at: directom.com or on LinkedIn at Justin Seibert (S-E-I-B-E-R-T). Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Justin Seibert, President at Direct Online Marketing based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the podcast, Justin. JUSTIN: Thanks for having me, Rob. Excited to be here. ROB: Excited to have you here. The name of your agency is tremendously straightforward, but tell us how that points you, points all of us, to your superpower and what you do best as an agency.  JUSTIN: I love it. I realized going into this that I'm really horrible at picking out names for agencies, but the reason that we chose it was I believe in being very straightforward. I just want people to know what we're good at doing. What I imagined this agency and what my strengths were and what I wanted to be able to offer to clients is about results, and not about being clever, not about being funny or winning awards. It was about how we could actually move ROI in a positive direction for them? So “Direct” was really important to be part of the name, and then “Online Marketing” just being what we specialize in. If you fast forward to today, what we do really, really well is strategizing on how to drive quality traffic to our clients and then help them convert that traffic into leads that become sales. I hate saying this because it sounds so cliched, but clients see us as trusted partners, and that's so important in this industry, as you're aware, just because there's so much snake oil out there. We want to be able to be that beacon for people that they can say, “Yes, we know that our agency has us covered, and they're acting as an extension of our team.” ROB: Makes perfect sense. One challenge that can happen that I've seen when you're setting that expectation with a client who is coming to you because they expect results – that can mean different things to you and to a client unless you align on expectations. How do you set that initial engagement and the expectation that all the leads are not going to show up tomorrow, but they also shouldn't be waiting a year for something to happen? JUSTIN: I think it's really important to get on the same page up front. I speak with a lot of people, our team speaks with even more people, and we turn down partnerships all the time just because we don't feel it's a good fit. We have a very long process, longer than some people would like. A lot of times it's “Hey, can't you just send us a price list or something like that?”, and we're like, “How can we do that when we don't understand what your goals are yet?” So, we spend a lot of time to understand what their needs are, who they are, to then evaluate to see if we even believe we're a good fit. Assuming that they still think it's a match, then we continue down that process. And a lot of times, depending on the particular service we're talking about, we are even sending them a projection range of what we think is realistic to see if that aligns. Sometimes it doesn't, so they choose not to go with us; sometimes it doesn't, and they rethink if this is even the right strategy for them. Sometimes it doesn't align and they say, “Do we really need to rethink what our expectations are?” Because when we haven't done that, Rob, it's exactly what you're talking about where we get into it – we know from doing this all the time and knowing the industry and knowing what is reasonable that we may be hitting something really well, but it's not what their expectations are. So we really try to get that up front as much as possible. ROB: Totally makes sense. Even within this performance and driving leads market, there's such a wide range of customers. You can look at anything from the medical profession and elective medical procedures to local services, plumbers and whatnot, all the way through to Software as a Service and almost bleeding into potentially high-end commerce. What sweet spots do you see for Direct Online Marketing? Is there a typical client that you find yourself engaged with? JUSTIN: There is a typical client in terms of some respects. Number one, it's a medium size business. A smaller size business, probably for the price of doing business with us, it's not going to drive the value that they need. If it's a larger business, we're not moving the needle as much. We're not being as impactful as we'd like to be. So, it's that medium size business, it tends to be a good fit. The more niched they are, the better. We typically tend to deal with clients that are the leader or the challenger brand within a particular niche, where if you talk to somebody on the street who isn't familiar with that industry, they have no idea who the client is, but if they're familiar with that group, they go, “Oh yeah, of course I know who that is.” We've worked with some really big brands, but that's not common for us. What's common is that market leader or the challenger in a medium size business. When you're talking industry, we're all over the map. We purposefully made that decision when I started the agency that we weren't going to specialize in one particular area. Again, there's some common traits, but in terms of industry we do a lot with SaaS, Software as a Service. We do a lot in higher education. We do a strong bit in ecommerce retail. But outside of those areas, anything from manufacturing to finance to entertainment, all the way down the line. We've worked in dozens and dozens of different industries. ROB: When you say higher education, I can't help but obsess in a little bit on that. I would imagine at the onset of this pandemic and the first year of virtual for many of them, there's been tactical adjustments. But when they're looking ahead to 2021, what are you looking at for the education world, and strategically how they are setting themselves up to recruit that next class in such a pool of uncertainty? JUSTIN: That's where the partnership really comes in. I love this question, by the way. We have to understand, how are they adjusting? Depending on what they're looking to do and depending on where they are geographically has a big impact on what their approach is going to look like. I'm thinking through one client right now. They're taking students in dorms this year. They are, for the most part, not doing anything but singles, and there's more spacing. So, they had to find more housing and had to get really creative with what they were going to do there. Or they had to turn those students into virtual, or they had to turn them away. Fortunately, they were able to find some solutions for that. Understanding what ground rules we have to work with is really important to understand that. I think the bigger thing within the industry is – and this has been coming for a little while now – “Am I getting the value out of the dollars I'm paying for higher education, particularly if I'm taking out student loans, which could be $60,000 per year?” It's really imperative on the schools to be able to show the value they're getting and what they're able to do to help students post-graduation. I think that's what the universities and the colleges are trying to convey right now, and we're trying to do in terms of helping more. ROB: It sounds like a good challenge. But to your point, this is a strategic challenge that has been underway for a while, and like so many things, it has been accelerated during this time. That makes so much sense. If I believe your LinkedIn a little bit, it seems like you have been in this industry, in this business, for a little bit. Rewind us back to how Direct Online Marketing came to pass and what made you decide to do this instead of going to work for somebody else. JUSTIN: I started getting my feet wet and really learning everything when I was living in Los Angeles. A company in the financial industry had hired me. This was back in 2001, very much the Wild, Wild West days still of digital. I was there for a few months, and they said, “We've been really, really successful in, of all things, long-form radio marketing. For us to grow, we need another marketing leg. We think it's the internet. Go figure it out.” I had no background in this whatsoever. This was brand new to me, like it was brand new to most people. What was really awesome – I had so much latitude to try things. If you remember this, for people that know the search engine days, this was back when it was goto.com. It was the first year of Google AdWords at the time. So, everything was brand spanking new. But what was so instructional for me was that I sat right next to the sales floor. This was all about generating quality leads. If I was sending them bad leads – I'm looking at my numbers thinking, “Hey, I'm doing an awesome job,” but if they were getting bad leads, not only was I not producing and wasting their time, but then they would start to look at my leads as a waste of their time and not put the effort they needed to into those conversations. So really getting that feedback from them on what I could do to keep the numbers up but also improve the quality of leads – and then really seeing the fruits of my labor, where if you looked at the sales board, I could see by source what was going in there. If we fast forward 4-½ years later, when I moved away from Los Angeles for family reasons, when I started with them, they were a $25 million a year company total in revenue. When I left in 2006, they were doing $35 million a year just attributable to paid search. I don't say that to brag. They had a tremendous, tremendous management team, they had an awesome sales force, it was a good market. But I bring that up because if you still remember back to 2006, as crazy as it seems today, people still weren't sure if Google and digital marketing was really a thing or if it was something that was just a fad, the way that they saw the bubble burst back in '99, 2000, 2001.  I had that knowledge that this was a real thing, and logically it makes sense. This is direct mail on steroids. I couldn't have been any luckier to have that as my background for when I moved and then looked at my next opportunity. ROB: Once you decided to go in on building this business, did you have any partners early on? Or was it just you and a card table in a closet coffee shop early on? What did it look like? JUSTIN: Absolutely. It was me in my basement, trying to keep the kids and the dogs upstairs so I could do some work and go out there and hustle. I used to blog every day, literally at least five days a week. I had to do something to get us out there and to get known a little bit and build that up. That was in I guess April/May of 2006. By October, I hired my first employee that was part-time at the time, and got some really horrible office space, but it was the only one that was correctly priced. So, it worked out for my needs. Then went off to the races from there. ROB: Excellent. Maybe from Day 1 you had a pretty good degree of confidence from your experience. At what point did it become evident that you were going to be doing this for a while and with more people involved? JUSTIN: That's a really good question. I think there's two ways to approach it. Some of this is more apparent today with the advent of the solopreneur. I don't think that model was quite as prevalent back then. But I could do that and be a contractor, or I could hire other people. One's not better than the other; it's just what fits you. I like the idea of hiring people for a variety of reasons. One, when you look back at what my dream was, I really take a lot of pride in being able to employ people and to help them make their livelihoods and to add to the local community and to help support their families. I feel very blessed to be able to play some small part in those things. So that was part of it. But part of it, too, was there are so many things in life that I am horrible at, or at least not very good at, that by being able to bring in people that are better in those areas than me and to be able to concentrate on the one or two things that I'm okay at was helpful. And then the final thing was, do I ever want to be able to take a vacation or a sick day? Of course, as an entrepreneur, you don't at the beginning. But do I want to be able to do those at some point? I really can't if I'm just doing it on my own, or it's a harder process. So, to build out a team – we have a tremendous one these days, and really, I've been lucky through the years with having really great people – that really was the right model for me and for DOM. ROB: Along that journey, have there been any pivotal hires that you realize in hindsight really helped you scale beyond yourself? JUSTIN: Yeah, there's been a few things that have happened. One of the challenges with growing the business, especially if you're not taking outside money, is you're in this position of “Do I hire now or do I wait?” If you're basically operating off of cash, you have to wait until you have the business to be there, so then you scramble to fill that position, get there, and then go on to the next spot. As you get bigger, then you're putting real strains on your people that are already working to the bone as much as they can, and now they have to become less productive because they're going to train somebody up and then move on from there It's been a constant battle for us. It's been getting better now that we get larger and that we have a little bit more flexibility with the things that we do. But I guess for agency or just business owners in general, what I'd share is that there are stages of the business. There are certain things, like getting our operations in order, that I couldn't really have somebody dedicated to for a long time. That's the type of thing where they're not being “productive,” even though they're incredibly important to being productive for the agency and for our clients and everything else. Everybody had to take their own pieces of that. I would say we've had a few different instances where it was great to be able to get to the next step. At the beginning of this year, we changed our model up once again and broke out a new department. So we're always looking at those areas. But I've been really, really lucky to have so many tremendous people that work here because without them, none of the success is possible. ROB: That's excellent. You mentioned outside funding. Very, very few agencies are able to raise outside funding, and arguably it doesn't really make sense to, either, in most contexts. You mentioned within that cash flow and the challenge of stressing the team, when to hire. You have some people on the team now; how have you resolved the decision of when it's time to add people or when it's time to stand pat with the team that you have? JUSTIN: If you look historically, sometimes you have your hand forced and sometimes you have that situation for yourself. When I had a little less gray hair than I do today, I remember we were a smaller company – I would guess we were maybe eight people, nine people at the time. I don't remember the exact number, but I had two key people that were managers of the company. I got notice from the one woman in the afternoon, let's say on a Thursday, and I go to sit to talk with the other one Friday morning, and she's like, “Well, I have more bad news to give you.” So, within 12 hours, I had all of my management team give notice. That was a scary proposition, and we had to learn from that and what we could do, but we got through it. I would say, as tremendous as those people are, we're better off today because of the learning from that. We're at a point now, though, that there's two classifications. There's the people that are in some way revenue producers from the standpoint of they're in sales, in marketing, or there's some other need that's not a client-producing function. Maybe a manager of a department, something along those lines. Where I've gotten now, I have enough flexibility that when I've identified that, I'm no longer scared. I just say, “I need it. This is what's best for the company. I'm going to go do it.” On the client execution side of things, that very much is more a function of, what does our book of business look like today? What does our pipeline look like? And then based on that, knowing which functions we need to hire when. ROB: You mentioned having two managers leave quickly – all of your managers, in fact. JUSTIN: Yeah. ROB: What do you do in that scenario? You can elevate internal staff, you can try and make a quick hire – although sometimes that doesn't work out so well – you can just eat the pain for a while and figure it out yourself. What path through did you take, and what would you do differently now, maybe? JUSTIN: I want to think through what I would do differently now, but let me answer the first part of that, which is a combination of factors. One, leaning heavily on some outside resources, from mentors to HR teams to other people that could give advice and help us get through it. One is putting my head down in the sand and just getting through it until we can get through those different pieces. I think you always have to take a step back and evaluate, why are you there? What do you need to do differently to avoid these issues in the future? Part of it can be through hires. But really, that was a turning point, along with going through a program with Goldman Sachs and Babsen College called the 10,000 Small Businesses. I don't want to derail, but I came to this epiphany all around the same time of how important culture was. And shame on me for not understanding that before. I had kind of taken the path of “I don't want to force culture down people's throats. I really care about these people in a very deep way, but I don't want them to feel like work is their life. I want them to have a work-life balance. So, if they don't want to share things with me or the office, I don't want to force that on them.” I didn't understand how much people were looking for that culture and how important that was. When we look at the things that led to our success and all of our growth in the last 6 years, fixing the culture to now where we have a really strong culture – and it makes hiring easier, it makes retention easier, it makes our outcome better – has been such a huge part of what we do. ROB: I definitely understand that desire not to overwork people. But also, I think people want to come to work. They want to like where they work. They want to like the people they work with. It sounds like that's something you've been able to form over time. What aspects of culture have shifted during this season of people largely being virtual, and what things have stayed the same, but maybe in different ways you didn't quite expect originally? JUSTIN: I was really worried about that. I think there were a couple things that helped us out. One is the fact that we have such a great team already, and we have people that are bought in and interested. The other thing – we added a lot more communication. Everybody was already used to Zoom; we'd been using that with our clients forever, so those things were pretty easy. And we're a digital marketing agency. We're not a manufacturer. So, switching to home wasn't as challenging as it would be for other people. But I think one of the things that helped us out, based on some comments and some feedback I received from the team – I think they were really appreciative of the fact that they weren't getting furloughed, they weren't getting their salaries reduced, and in fact they actually saw that we were hiring. We were growing and adding more people during a very turbulent time when everybody's world was turned upside down. I think some of those things played in our favor and didn't really have anything to do with me figuring things out. But the big one was really just increased communication. I will tell you one of my big worries still is I believe there's benefit to people being in the same office and bumping into each other and overhearing conversations, and that's gone right now, for the most part. Our offices are open; some people are choosing to come in. We've left it to them for now to decide whether they feel comfortable with that or not. We have a few people coming in. Most are staying home. But I look forward to getting to a point when we can continue to have some of those in-person conversations. ROB: Absolutely. Likewise. I definitely miss that camaraderie and the knowing each other in that casual way that comes from being in the office. You mentioned a little bit the lessons learned from that management shakeup that you had, but what are some other things as you reflect on your time running Direct Online Marketing that you might consider doing a little bit differently if you were starting from zero? JUSTIN: Looking back, January 1, I always say “I can't believe how stupid I was last year.” I am constantly on the move for how I can get a little bit better and how I can learn a little bit more. The one that I'll say from an agency – and then I'll give another one that I talk about typically with entrepreneurs – from an agency perspective, I really didn't get how important operations was, which I sort of touched on before. It's “We're marketers. We're so smart. We just figure this stuff out.” That's a really good recipe for letting things fall through the cracks and not being consistent. I would just say understanding what that process is going to look like – start out with it from the beginning. If you're not one of those people, like me, that is – I'm not the person that likes setting up processes. I can do it, but it's not what I'm naturally attuned to. But spend the time and do that. Very much the Marcus Lemonis's “People Profit Process.” That's the process part of that. The other one that I talk about frequently is I wish I would have done sales training earlier. What people don't realize when they come from another office, they worked for someone else, to then starting their own endeavors – whether you like it or not, you're a salesperson now. You are out there building the business. Sales has such a dirty connotation in our world. People don't like sales. They think of used car sales. But sales is really, ideally, just providing value and providing aid to somebody and being able to match that. We don't do hard sales. If you're a good fit, we'd love to talk with you. If you're not, good luck. I hope you find somebody that's a better fit for you and hope you are going to be there. The process of sales training is just learning some techniques that work for you to make sure that you're aligning with the person, you're understanding what their challenges are and how you might be able to help. The business could've grown much faster had I done sales training earlier. ROB: Was there any particular sales training that you went through that you found effective, or is it really almost anything is better than almost nothing? JUSTIN: I would say the latter. I've gone through a few different ones. I've had my team go through some different ones, and I think you pick the pieces of things that you like out there. I think Sandler is a pretty common one that I got a lot out of, that my team has gotten a lot out of. But if you look at it, I think there's an emphasis of finding the pain, and to me it has more of a negative connotation when you think about it that way. It's true you have to have the person understand what their challenges are and how you can help them, but I'm more of a positive person. I try to be. So I'd rather orient myself around what's my solution to help them. That's why I say, again, I think it's great – some people are diehard advocates. It's a wonderful system. For me, I take about 95% of it and just tweak a few things. ROB: Sandler does come up a lot. I think what you've hinted at – a lot of marketers find themselves much more relational sellers rather than the process and pain. It can feel a little bit more formulaic than maybe an entrepreneurial marketer. JUSTIN: Sorry to interrupt, but on that front, I think the formulaic part is really important because there's certain things you need to do. My sales process has become much longer than many other agencies out there, but I've found that it's really important for me to do because when I skip those steps, I'm not getting the right solution that the person needs or we're not aligning on it. So, I do think it's really important to develop your formula, whatever it is, and practice it enough that it's natural. I understand why people don't like that idea, but I think that if you're doing those things, it still can really help. ROB: Absolutely, yeah. Feeling natural versus unnatural is perhaps one of the bigger obstacles that people do have. Justin, when people want to find you and they want to find Direct Online Marketing, where should they go to track you down? JUSTIN: Easiest thing is to go to our website, directom.com. I'd love to connect with people on LinkedIn. That's where I'm most active on social media. If you look me up, it's pretty simple. I'm sure if they're listening to this, they'll see the spelling of my name. It's S-E-I-B-E-R-T. I would love to connect with people there. ROB: Sounds great. Justin, congratulations on the journey so far and the success so far and, heck, even staying in business through one and now arguably two recessions. That alone is something, but to do that with a team around you is quite a thing, and to go through so many transitions, starting from the world of Google ads being surprising to people to having to master so many more channels just to serve a customer well. Congratulations on everything so far, Justin. Thank you for sharing your story. JUSTIN: Rob, thank you so much. ROB: Be well. Thanks. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Twenty-nine years ago, Alvaro Psevoznik, CEO of DM Agency, was a 19-year-old Argentinian law student, designing flyers for hospitality clients in exchange for admissions into nightclubs. Alvaro found himself frustrated with Argentinian politics – which is plagued with fiscal instability, political corruption, de-motivational handouts for a large percentage of the (unemployed) citizenry, and a cycle of massive financial crises every 5 or 10 years. Alvaro's experience was, no matter how hard one worked and saved, bank accounts could disappear overnight. This constant uproar, Alvaro says, makes it hard for people in South American countries to plan and work toward a future. Alvaro moved to the U.S. in 2002 and went back to hospitality marketing. He claims that early adversity provided lessons that helped him survive the 2007-2008 recession (which closed some of his small- and mid-sized clients' businesses) and prepared him for today's Covid-19 challenges. In this interview, Alvaro talks about the importance of positive messaging, adaptability, and being “transparent” when faced with crises. He emphasizes that changing Covid-19 “rules” requires fast response.  Today, DM Agency is a comprehensive, full-service, one stop shop for digital marketing solutions. Alvaro explains that there are costs associated with trying to provide a wide range of client  services—you either risk people discovering that you are not as “good at everything” as you claimed, or you find yourself supporting an expensive, diverse “stable” of top talent in order to be able to “deliver.” If he were to start over today, he says he'd focus on specific industries and doing only what he was best at doing – lead generation through online advertising. Most DM clients are restaurants or hotels, but DM has also started to expand into the Esports -- organized, online, multiplayer video game competitions that produce $2-3 billion a year through advertising and sponsorship. Esports, Alvaro says, is huge. DM has virtual offices concentrating on Esports in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and South Florida. Alvaro has created “splinter” agency entities – pretty much the same staff/different “labeling” – that focus on specific unrelated industries in order to avoid such questions as, “What would a restaurant marketer know about marketing windows?” Agencies often advertise that they are “bilingual. Alvaro says that DM is bi-cultural. Speaking Spanish is different from thinking in Spanish or Latino. DM understands that the Spanish community in the US is not a homogenous group – the culture of origin varies significantly by geography across the US. The agency divides Hispanic marketing into four regions: Mexico and North America, Central America, South America, and the South Florida Cuban community.  Aside from South Florida, how do cultural differences play out across the United States? New Jersey, New York, Chicago have strong Puerto Rican communities with some Mexicans and Dominicans. Mexicans as a majority are located more on the West Coast – Arizona, Texas, and California. Because the words, the accents, the thinking patterns, and the cultures in each community are different, marketing needs to be different. Alvaro hires Hispanic staff that mirrors each targeted audience – so the messages “rings true.” Google translation does not work. Neither does human translation if the culture, vocabulary, and thinking patterns of the translator are not the same as those of the target audience. Authenticity cannot be faked. Alvaro can be reached on his company's website – DM agency, as in digital marketing agency – dmagency.us Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Alvaro Psevoznik, the CEO of DM Agency based in Hollywood, Florida. Welcome to the podcast. ALVARO: Hey, Rob. Thank you very much for having me. ROB: Yeah, absolutely great to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about DM Agency and what makes DM great? ALVARO: DM Agency is the conclusion of 29 years of evolution, learning, growing, going back to small – especially after this pandemic – making mistakes, and many other things. Fortunately, good things, I'd say. When I was thinking, “What makes us different?” I said, “Too many things.” But I want to put in three things. Full service – I mean we offer for real a full service solution, a one-stop digital marketing solution to our clients. We can help most industries, but we realized a few years ago that we are really good and we have a lot of experience with hospitality. Mostly restaurants and some hotels. Now we're stepping in the Esports niche and we are doing really good things in that niche. We are a bicultural agency. It doesn't mean that we are bilingual. You can have anybody in your company speaking Spanish but thinking in Spanish or thinking in Latino is a very different thing, and we are different because of that. We've got this mindset and we understand the Latino community, the U.S. Hispanic community – which is not Mexicans only, like a lot of marketing managers or marketing directors think. These are the three things that make us different than most of the other digital agencies that I see in the market. ROB: That's fascinating, especially with that “not bilingual, but bicultural” distinction there. And for certain, the U.S. Latino population is not homogeneous in any way. How do you even think about bridging the gap? Because you could even get into many, many cultures beyond the Latino community. How do you find that messaging that transcends maybe some of the different cultures? There are different countries, and each country is different. We think our country is different; you mentioned you're from Argentina. Argentina is different from Mexico, Mexico is different from Cuba, and on and on and on. How do you balance it? Because obviously, many marketers are not going to go in for a 20-culture campaign most of the time. ALVARO: Yeah. It's not a 20-culture either. Mostly we divide Latin America when it comes to marketing let's say into four regions: Mexico and North America, Central America, South America, and there's a fourth one that applies mostly to South Florida, which is the Cuban community. When we build content for South Florida, where you also have Dominicans and you've got a lot of Mexicans as well and you've got a lot of Venezuelans and Colombians, the job is a little more difficult. But since most of the community are from Cuba, we focus on Cuban-oriented content. We're used to it. I moved to Miami 18 years ago, and the first thing I heard in Spanish was a Cuban accent and Cuban words. So, we got used to it. New Jersey, New York, Chicago is a different thing. You've got a lot of Puerto Rican community mixed with some Mexicans and Dominicans. So, the message is different, the words are different, the accent, if you do some video content, is going to be different. And then you've got the Mexicans, which are located mostly on the West Coast – Arizona, Texas, and California, of course. The message is not that complicated when you have to target these audiences. Now, I was talking about accents and words; there is also a cultural thing that you have to consider when you are building a message. These days we are focused mostly on digital and mostly on social media. I don't want to go deeper into this, but I'm going to just give you a quick example. When we build a campaign for the West Coast, when we know that most of the audience is first, second, and probably third generation Mexicans, we hire Mexican copywriters, Mexican voiceovers. We adapt the message to the community or to the target audience by using people with the same background. We do the same thing here in Miami and South Florida, and we apply the same system in other markets, and it works pretty good. ROB: It's sensible, but it would be completely opaque to somebody who didn't know how to break it down so clearly into four cultural segments. I think that's really, really fascinating there. I want to highlight also something you mentioned about your tenure in the industry. We are here – I don't know where we are in the midst of this COVID thing anymore. Are we in the middle? Who knows? But it is August of 2020. With your time in the industry, this is not the first set of economic headwinds you've seen where you've probably had clients react, you've had to think about changing tactics, changing messaging. How many times would you say you've navigated business through a downturn at least kind of like this? ALVARO: I'm laughing here because it was more than once. [laughs] Going back in the day, I started 29 years ago, when I was 19. Argentina is a market that goes up and down every 5 to 10 years. You've got a huge crisis every 5, maybe 10 years if you're lucky. So, I've seen a couple of crises in the market. But moving forward to the States, I had to deal with the 2008-2009 crisis. It was not only a recession; it was a huge crisis. I remember a lot of my clients went out of business. They just closed their doors. We had to downsize our company and adapt the message. Back in '08, it was the beginning of social media, and we were exploring that niche and that industry. I remember that we had to adapt the message to something very positive. People were doing really bad in those days. A lot of people lost their homes, lost their jobs. That was a huge impact, especially for mid-size companies and small size companies back in the day. The way we did it back in '08-'09, and now because of the COVID situation, was being very transparent. You've heard, Rob, this message, “We are in this together,” and it's true. We are in this together. At some point we were so tired of reading and listening on the radio, “we are in this together,” but at the end of the day, we have to adapt to the situation and understand that there's a lot of last-minute changes to do in your communication in businesses. I'm going to give you a quick example. We work with a lot of restaurants. Here in Miami, we got a lot of back and forth with regulations after COVID. “You can open up to 50% of capacity”; 48 hours later, they closed the restaurants again. It was chaos. We had to adapt to that. I feel the frustration of every restaurant and hotel owner, and I also understand, and my people understood, the frustration on the other side – customers, making plans for a wedding, for a bar mitzvah, for a vacation, and being frustrated. This is when we as an agency had to adapt our message and be very close not only to our clients, but to their customers as well. ROB: You mentioned a greater frequency of downturn in Argentina. For those of us who are not from that orbit, what's the difference maybe between the occasional big messes we have here, and it sounds like a more frequent – is it even more expected, perhaps, in Argentina? ALVARO: Yeah, the biggest word that synthesizes everything is corruption, like most countries in Latin America, some countries in Africa. Argentina is a big country. It's a rich country with poor people and rich politicians. I don't want to make this interview a political message about Argentina, but I think it's the situation that a lot of countries in Latin America have to deal with. Something worse than Argentina is what happened in Venezuela in the last few years. You've got a huge percentage of the population below the poverty line. In Argentina now – we used to have a populist government that gave all kinds of food stamps and all kinds of help to people. At the end of the day, you've got a government that is supporting a lot of people that are not working. A huge percentage of the population are not working because they get a check every month in the mail. That's what makes Argentina a country that doesn't give you the chance to plan long term. That's one of the reasons I decided to move to the States back in 2002 and start from scratch. I remember December 2001, the government froze everybody's bank accounts. Business and personal accounts were frozen. If you had $100, you were done. If you had a million dollars, “I'm sorry, but it's in the bank. We don't know when we're going to return that money.” That's why when you move and you start doing business in markets like the U.S. market, it's a completely different thing. You can plan ahead. Even if you get a pandemic, even if you are in the middle of this situation that we were talking about in 2008-09, the recovery is much faster than any other country I would say probably in the world. That's one of the things that I love about this country. We can recover. We will recover. And this is not a political statement. It's a fact. We're going to recover sooner than later. And I agree with you, we don't know when this pandemic is going to stop, when the effects of the pandemic will cease. If the pandemic probably stops, I don't know, in November – I don't think so, but let's say November – but the effects are going to be long term, especially in a couple of industries that I have to deal with: hospitality and tourism. It's going to be really, really hard. ROB: Yeah, restaurants may not be the same for a while. But there may certainly also, I think, be fresh opportunity for the ones who really iterate on their model. I appreciate the broad perspective you bring on Argentina and those differences and the downturns that you see there due to corruption. I don't feel like it's political. It is certainly helpful. I do want to take a turn towards some of the aspirational things you have going on in your world. You mentioned when we were talking beforehand that you have not just DM Agency, but you have a little bit of an empire growing. Tell us about the sister/sibling agencies that you have to DM and the broader marketing ecosystem that's on your mind on an average day. ALVARO: Empire is such a big word but thank you very much. I like it. [laughs] When I was doing this in Argentina during the '90s, my first customers were restaurants. The work that we were doing was really good. I had no marketing education back in the day; I was just a law student designing flyers to get free admissions into nightclubs and free drinks. Our first customers over there were restaurants. So, when I started again my business, now in the United States, back in 2002, my first customers were restaurants. A few years ago, I realized that half of my clients were in that niche and the other half was getting confused. “Hey, you're working for a lot of restaurants, and I sell impact windows and doors,” which is a huge niche here in South Florida. “I don't trust a guy that works for restaurants to reach people looking for windows.” I realized that I needed a second brand. It's not a second agency; it's almost the same team except for a couple of professionals that are focused, like myself, in the food and beverage industry. We created Foodie – which is a social media term that came out a few years ago – we created Foodie Restaurant Agency, basically offering the same services, a one-stop shop of graphic design and branding, social media, Google ads, Facebook ads, reputation management – which is very important for restaurants these days. Then, with a couple of partners, and after getting a couple of licenses to operate in Latin America and the U.S. Hispanic market, we started a third brand called EsportsHQ. As you know, Rob, Esports is a huge $2-3 billion a year industry when it comes to advertising and sponsoring. That's basically one big team under the DM Agency umbrella and a few small teams specialized in restaurants for the Foodie Restaurant Agency and Esports for the EsportsHQ Agency. That's how I distributed my team and our marketing. When we have to market ourselves to restaurants, we go as Foodie Restaurant Agency, and the same thing with the Esports agency. ROB: When did you start in Esports? ALVARO: We started back in October 2019. A friend of mine who works in a big company told me, “Hey, there's something big called Esports.” I said, “That's gaming. That's what my son does when he's bored.” He told me, “It's way more than that.” He introduced me to the industry, and he told me there's a huge opportunity for the U.S. Hispanic market. As you know, there are two budgets. A national company is going to have two different budgets – when it comes to advertising, I mean: one for the general market and one for the Hispanic market. When it comes to TV, for Univision or Telemundo or all the radio stations in Spanish. That advertising money comes from a separate budget. So, he told me there's a huge opportunity for the U.S. Hispanic market and also for the Latin American market. I couldn't do it by myself, so I invited him to join me. I got a couple of customers in Colombia and in Argentina, and we started this company, EsportsHQ. Because of the pandemic, some things were a little delayed, but so far we've got virtual offices in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and here in South Florida. We are closing a couple of deals for Q4 and Q1 2021 with big brands that understand that you've got a huge number of gamers, but you have a much bigger, way bigger, number of viewers. There's a lot of people that, instead of watching TV or watching a movie on Netflix, they are watching games now. Instead of a football game or a soccer game, they are watching people playing Fortnite or League of Legends, and there's a huge market over there, and we are after that. ROB: I was going to ask what the key games were right now. League and Fortnite. And then what is the marketing opportunity? Are they sponsoring teams? Are they sponsoring streaming broadcasts? What is the advertising opportunity? ALVARO: They are sponsoring everything. There are brands sponsoring teams. They're sponsoring players. I always use this analogy with soccer, which is my favorite sport. Or basketball. You as a brand sponsor a team. You can sponsor a player. Let's say Adidas. They are sponsoring soccer players with their shoes or their clothes. You can run ads during a game broadcast. You can place ads on the commercials. It's the same thing on Esports. When you are a sponsor, you can put your money in all of these different fields. That's what we are doing with a couple of companies we're dealing with. They are going to sponsor a team that is huge in Mexico. They won several tournaments all over the world. They are going to sponsor and buy airtime on Twitch, which is the most relevant platform for gaming. They also want to have their own tournament, to be not the sponsors of the tournament – the owners of the tournament. This is how big Esports is becoming these days, Rob. ROB: Wow. When you get into it, it sounds more like sports than you would ever imagine, even all the way down to the equipment. I have a friend who's been running a company for a while called Control Freak, and all they make is add-ons for video game console controllers to make you better at playing Esports. When he first told me, I thought it couldn't possibly be a business, or a good one, but it certainly has been for them. It's a big, big ecommerce business. ALVARO: It's a big, big business. A few months ago, we were writing down a list of everything that is related to Esports, and I think we got like 95 or so different things, from sponsoring a game to mousepads. I'm serious. Mousepads, keyboards, headsets – you name it. There's opportunity for every single industry in this niche. Like I said, it's between $2-3 billion a year on advertising only. You didn't hear that 2 or 5 years ago, right? This is huge right now, Rob. ROB: Wow. I heard it from your mouth, and I believe you. Alvaro, when you look at the time you've been in business, you've got a good bit of experience. What are some things you might do differently if you were starting over today? Not that you would want to do that; I'm sure you've earned what you've earned. ALVARO: We are a full-service agency, so we've got all kinds of services. If I could start over, I would focus on two or three. I can't do it now because most of our clients like us because we give them everything under one roof. I could say now a virtual roof. But we give them a one-stop solution, so it would be really, really hard for us to change that. But if I could do it from scratch, I would say “I want to be the best on this or that service. If you need those other services, we can introduce you to our strategic partner or we can refer you to somebody else, we can work with your agency for this or that service.” That's one of the things that I would change if I could. One of the learnings that I have and I'd like to share with everybody is focus on one or two niches. I know we can do ads for window specialists, we can do random campaigns for dentists, jewelry stores, liquor stores, hotels – at the end of the day, it's so complicated because they are so different. Those industries are very different from each other. Even if you use Google ads for all of them, even if you post on Facebook for all of them, the industries are so different and the audience is different. So, one of the things I always tell my colleagues – even we were talking earlier about my presentations at some universities. One of the things I told one of the guys that was starting his agency at the age of 22, almost the same age I was when I started back in the '90s, is by showing that you know everything and you can do everything, you won't keep a customer. You may seduce the customer. You may sign the customer. But in a 3-6 month period, they're going to realize that you are not good at everything. Or, like in my case, we pay a high price to be good at everything we do – because we are good at branding, at social media, at reputation. The high price is that I have to have very expensive human resources to have the best people on each different department. So, make it simple. Focus on one, maybe two services that are related to each other, and keep it there. You're going to do great. That's what I would do if I could do it again. ROB: Where would you focus today and why? ALVARO: That's a good question. I wasn't ready for this one, Rob. [laughs] I would focus on lead generation through online advertising. I would leave social media – of course, I would use social media as an advertising platform, but I would leave social media content and engagement, reputation, web design, I would leave everything out of the picture if I could. I think this is where I would focus. ROB: What's appealing about those particular areas right now? Is it you know how to find the expertise? Is it opportunity to differentiate in those areas? ALVARO: I think as an agency owner, it's a very good source of income. When you bring your customers solid and qualified leads to their businesses, they pay very well. They don't mind paying. The reason I would do that only is because of the good income that I would get from that. ROB: Got it. So, at this point, you know what the margins are in different lines of business; you know if it's just creative, do people know how to pay more for that? Maybe they don't. But they definitely know how to pay for twice as many leads. ALVARO: Yeah. When you bring value to your customers, they don't mind paying. A very good lead and a qualified lead is value. That's what they need. Out of the restaurant industry, of the few customers that are not in that niche, we work for a company that sells and installs impact windows and doors. They were struggling with three or four different agencies, and the problem was that – yeah, the signs were nice, the website was cool, everything was okay, but they were not getting leads. When they came to us, they said, “Hey, we like everything that we got, but we have zero leads. Nobody calls our phones. What can you guys do?” So, we took over the account. That was almost 4 years ago. We built a strategy for them, and we understood where the problem was. I don't want to go deep into that, but the thing is, we created a strategy, we understood the problem, we did our market research to understand the industry because we were not familiar with that niche, and it's been over 3 years that we are bringing results to these guys. What do I mean by results? Leads. The website is there. It's cool, it's nice. The designs are nice. The content that we put for them on social media is okay. But they are getting the leads they're after. And especially during this pandemic, when everybody was downgrading their budgets, I told them, “Hey, do what I'm doing with my agency. I doubled my advertising budget. You do the same. If it doesn't work out, I don't know how, but I'm going to pay you back.” So, these guys went from around ten grand a month to $22,000 a month, and guess what? It paid off. They had to hire more people to work for them. It really worked. So, lead generation, when it's done in the right way, with a strategy and understanding the market, understanding the culture – because by the way, we did campaigns in Spanish and English. Not only translated from English to Spanish, but talking to people in their language, not doing just a translation. You know what I mean. ROB: Yeah, I get it. ALVARO: It works. When you understand the market and you tell them what they want to hear, and you come, of course, with a good offer, like affordable windows and doors, there's no doubt that it's going to work out. ROB: It probably felt like a disadvantage for a while, but such an advantage now, coming from your own background – you're here and you can find people with an expertise in the American market any day of the week, but to find people with expertise in the Latino market that want to work for someone for the right reasons, you have that credibility naturally. I'm sure it's a hiring advantage. ALVARO: Yeah, it is an advantage, and our customers – I am so thankful that they understand that we are not just a translator. You can use Google Translate. I've seen actually a lot of things in Spanish that were translated with Google Translate or from somebody who speaks Spanish in the office, but it's translating. It's not creating the content in Spanish and for that market. It's a huge advantage, definitely. ROB: Fantastic. Alvaro, when people want to find you and the DM Agency family, where should they go to find you? ALVARO: Very simple. DM, as in digital marketing: dmagency.us. ROB: Excellent. Thank you very much for joining us today and sharing your broad journey and experience across bicultural marketing, Esports, hospitality, and so much more. It's quite a journey. ALVARO: Thank you, Rob. I really appreciate it. I enjoyed it, and I hope we can do this again in the future. ROB: Sounds great. Let's find a good time. I'll catch you soon. Be well. ALVARO: Thank you. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Melissa Libby, owner of Melissa Libby & Associates (MLA), started her career in hospitality. Today, her friends call her the Restaurant Whisperer In this interview, Melissa talks about the challenges restaurants have faced in the face of Covid-19, the changes yet to come, and the lessons she has learned in her 27 years of restaurant marketing. In recent months, MLA has helped its clients pivot to curbside delivery, takeout, and/or to serving different retail markets. Some of the adaptations? Restaurants have:  Started low-overhead ghost kitchens/pop-ups that provide different menus from what is available in brick-and-mortar restaurants Converted parking lots into patios for outdoor dining Elevated curbside packaging and pickup to elegant “experiences.”  Started selling off their wine cellars, offering some great wines at good prices.  Melissa advises, to further support your local restaurant, “Tip well.”. Because restaurants typically do not have a lot of money, they value public and community relations over traditional advertising. As restaurants open back up, which clients are most likely to return for dining “in”? Turns out demographics provide no clue. Dining in is the more profitable option . . . but it's tough to figure out who to target with the “come back in” messages. Each individual will have his or her own level of comfort and timing for when it “feels safe.” Melissa notes that “online ordering technology is glitchy.” She has seen some improvement already and thinks it will quickly evolve to something “way better, very quickly.” Third party delivery services take a significant cut of the food delivered. So, she says, order from the restaurant, and pick it up yourself.  Melissa lauds the Georgia Restaurant Association for lobbying to get the necessary changes made to help Georgia's restaurants survive. When Melissa talks about the early days of her business, she says that she did not plan for success. She did not ask “What do I do if I get more clients than I can handle,” she asked, “What am I going to do if I fail?” She feels she would have done better to plan for success and to prepare for success. Melissa used a siloed PR business staffing model until she figured out that did not work for her. She then divided her staff up by what they liked to do best and where they excelled. This made her staff happier, and her organization more resilient. Now, when an employee leaves the agency, the body of knowledge connected to a client remains intact because everyone in the agency has been working with that client.  Melissa can be reached on her agency's website at: ThinkMLA.com. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Melissa Libby. Melissa is the owner of Melissa Libby & Associates based in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to the podcast, Melissa. MELISSA: Thank you, Rob. ROB: It's fantastic to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about MLA and MLA's superpowers?  MELISSA: All right. MLA is 27 years old, based in Atlanta. Our superpower is restaurant marketing. My friends call me the Restaurant Whisperer. [laughs] That's what we do. We help restaurants get business and keep business. ROB: It's quite a time to be thinking about restaurant business, because here we are in – what month is it? August, I think? I have to check my calendar – of 2020. We are still in various stages of COVID-19 lockdown. So, in this time, in August 2020, what are you seeing/doing/hearing when it comes to restaurant marketing? MELISSA: Well, it's a strange new world, that's for sure. It's changed over the past few months of what we've been doing, and it continues to change as things happen. But it all comes down to getting the message out to the people who want to support a restaurant, want to dine at a restaurant, or want to have takeout. We've helped our clients pivot to curbside or takeout or a whole different retail market. Whatever they need to do to stay in business and stay afloat, we help them with that and help them get the word out to people. And then as Georgia reopened and people were able to dine in at a restaurant, we started getting the word out about that. What's interesting from a marketing perspective, and something that I hadn't really thought about – you can't pick a demographic and say, “Okay, this demographic feels comfortable walking in and dining in a restaurant and this one doesn't, so we have to focus on this.” You can't say, “Older people don't want to dine in a restaurant, so let's market to the younger people” because that's just not the case. What I've found is that there are people in every demographic that feel comfortable dining in and in every demographic that don't. It's an extremely personal decision, so it's been really, really hard to figure out who those people are and how we get to them. Because with the dine-in, that is going to be the more profitable avenue for the restaurant. There's been a lot of that going on. A lot of messaging, a lot of safety messaging to make people feel comfortable, a lot of internal messaging to the staff, a lot of website writing, a lot of social media message crafting. It's just been really, really challenging. ROB: It's interesting that you mention the dine-in diner as being more profitable for the restaurant, because I am a big fan of restaurants. I am a big fan of good restaurants. I am a big fan of many of the restaurants that show up on your website. Even from early on in COVID – I think I felt like I was trying to do them a solid by doing pickup, but even continuing to do so, because I am one of those folks who's probably not going to dine in at a restaurant. But what can I do as a pickup order diner to help with the profitability of a restaurant versus maybe what someone dining in and sitting down is doing for them to make them a better customer? MELISSA: Definitely picking up instead of ordering through a third party delivery service is certainly a help to the restaurant because the third party delivery services take a pretty significant cut of the price. So, if you can go and pick it up, that's what you want to do. If you don't want to dine in, do that. Now in Georgia, they're about to let restaurants sell alcohol, so if you can order your beer or your wine – a lot of restaurants have cocktail kits – anything like that helps them. I have several clients that are selling their wine, basically, their wine cellar. And these are amazing wines that you can get at a really great price. So, do that, tip well. That's what you can do to help. I feel like with dine-in, they get that alcohol order that they're not going to usually get with the takeout, and they also obviously have the service staff who receive tips, the people that wait on you. So that's what you can do to help. And don't get me wrong; all of my clients are very, very grateful for the people that are coming, even if they're not coming to dine in. They're grateful for them. So please keep it up. Another thing – and I should've mentioned this – everyone is doing outdoor seating now. So that might be your gateway one day when you're ready to dining back in, to go sit on a patio somewhere. People are turning their parking lots into patios. They're doing anything they can to get some patio seating, and people are loving it, even as hot as it is here.  ROB: I know some places have given a temporary reprieve on allowing restaurants to sell alcohol and also in terms of compromising what is allowed for outdoor seating. Are the alcohol sales becoming something more permanent that is being permitted for pickup? MELISSA: No, it's COVID specific. It would be great if they would make it permanent, and I guess it's a possibility, but that has not been discussed. ROB: It seems like it would take perhaps – and I don't know this industry as well from the side that you see it from – it seems like it would take a more potent restaurant lobby than maybe has formed up to now. Or is there a stronger restaurant lobby that is forming in recent years to help represent – because independent restaurants just don't have the same leverage that let's say a large chain has. MELISSA: Yeah. The Georgia Restaurant Association is absolutely amazing, and they are our lobbying group. I don't know if you recall that we got the Sunday Brunch Bill passed. It used to be you couldn't drink alcohol until 12:30 on Sunday, and now I think it's 10:30 or 11:00 or something. That took like 3 years or more. It's ridiculous. It takes forever to get these things through. But the Georgia Restaurant Association and Karen Bremer, who's the head, they are big-time our advocates from the restaurant community standpoint. They have been instrumental in getting all of these things to happen. ROB: That's good to hear. MELISSA: They are definitely representing everyone. They really, really are. ROB: When all this started, I'm sure you had some clients who were already doing online ordering, some who resisted it very much at the onset, probably some who flipped over, maybe some holdouts. What were the stages of technology enablement that you've seen across your client portfolio? MELISSA: It was very interesting to watch that. Anybody that was already doing online ordering immediately took it up a notch and they were great. And then you have fine dining restaurants like Aria and Umi, and they're like, “How am I going to do takeout? How can you take out sushi?” It goes against everything that they have ever dreamed of for their restaurant. Then a couple of weeks go by and they're like, “Yeah, we've got to figure this out.” And they did. In the case of Umi, they got beautiful packaging and they really figured out a way to create the Umi experience, even insofar as how you drive up and how you're greeted and how you receive your food. Everything about it is very Umi-like, and it's probably some of the more expensive takeout you'll ever get in your life. Umi has a broad menu that you can choose from. Aria took a different stance and they do two choices a day, and they post their menu every single day of what's tonight's menu. Some people get Aria three or four times a week because it's different every night. They've got a beautiful curbside pickup. I guess we probably have a couple that don't do online ordering or takeout, but it's few. It was hard, because we had to get the technology set up, and that's always painful. ROB: I imagine in Umi's case, they may have also been tracking – I think there was a sushi restaurant up in New York that went to some sort of like $800 takeout. Did you see this? MELISSA: [laughs] No, I didn't. ROB: Yeah, there was a New York sushi restaurant that went to $800 takeout. I saw some very elevated packaging from Sugarfish, which is a smallish/medium-ish sushi chain, that really did elevate that experience. My own experience has really been that during this time, it has become a time for those who are in the hospitality industry to think about hospitality far more than just being in the food and feeding people industry. MELISSA: Absolutely. That's exactly right, and Umi is the perfect example of that. They took their current offering and put it to go. They really did. And the love and care that they give you when you're dining in, you receive via takeout. They have now opened it for dine-in, but the takeout was such a hit that they kept that going. I wonder to myself if they will continue that when they don't have to anymore. ROB: I'm very much excited, especially the restaurants that have figured out how to be hospitable in their takeout and have that passion for serving people. I'm indeed curious how that will continue onwards. You mentioned that MLA has been in the hospitality industry – you mentioned you've been in business for 27 years. Have you been deep into hospitality from the onset? Let me start there. MELISSA: We have. I started the company in 1992. My background was I had a job at Hyatt. I was working in the hotel business. My contacts were already in the hospitality business, so those were the type of client leads I was getting back then. Then as '96 and the Olympics started getting closer, Atlanta's hospitality scene started to beef up a little bit. then when the Olympics hit, I think the whole world saw Atlanta for the great place that it is, and before I knew it, I was focusing on restaurants. I don't think I could've done that when I first started. I don't think there would've been enough restaurants to keep me employed. But that changed, and I was a part of it. It was awesome. ROB: It's amazing to stick with it for that long. I think some people start off in the serving hospitality, but they find a hard way to make it a rewarding business for themselves as entrepreneurs and they start to get wandering eyes for how to better serve other clients. Particularly, I think there's a perception – and a reality, depending on the client – of the margins in the world of being an agency driven around the hospitality industry. You seem to be happy to have made it work for coming up on three decades. How do you attribute that ongoing passion for the industry – and also, you've been able to hire people as well. You're not a one-person show, just scraping by, taking pictures yourself and posting pictures of food. How has that worked well for you? MELISSA: There's no question that I love the industry, and I think that has to be – I'm sure I could go work in another industry and make more money, but I do love the industry, and I love working with the restaurant owners and the chefs. It's a very creative group of people. It's a very entrepreneurial group of people. I really enjoy working with other people. I love to be in a meeting and go, “Hey, I have a great idea. Let's do this!” “Okay, that sounds good.” Boom, off you go and start doing it. It doesn't have to run up a flagpole of approvals and all of that stuff so that by the time the idea is finally approved, it's completely different and 3 months later. I really enjoy the atmosphere of what we do. I feel like from focusing the way that I do and focusing my team in the way that I do, we're just incredibly efficient. The fact that we represent a lot of restaurants makes us a huge value to the media, so they can just make one phone call and say, “I'm looking for recipes using apples” – and this is a true story; got it this morning – and I can make like eight calls and then, 3 hours later, call the reporter back and go, “Okay, I've got” – and this is true – “a Brussel sprout and apple salad, I've got an apple pie, I've got this, I've got this.” The reporter has only had to make one call and spend 5 minutes. So, I think that's made us very efficient. You're right; restaurants don't have a lot of money, but I have to say that they value public relations and community relations and communications over more traditional advertising. Because it stretches a little bit more. Their money will stretch a little bit farther with us than it would two ads that month. It really has been – I've made a living. [laughs] I pay my bills, almost always on time. ROB: And sometimes you get some good meals along the way, and that's pretty good too. MELISSA: I definitely do. I definitely do that, yes, for sure. ROB: Wonderful. When we think about some of these clients – entrepreneurs, and I think restauranteurs sometimes in particular, may have a reputation of being a little bit hard to corral. When someone comes in with that need for that story, for that recipe, some of them might not even read your email until the next day. I think a lot of people, even more broadly beyond the hospitality industry, would wonder: is there a secret? Is it that you just know so well into the businesses that you can maybe bypass the entrepreneur and go straight to a chef internally? Is it that you tend to work with restauranteurs who have their details together more? Is it that you're sometimes able to just know things well enough that you can be a proxy for them? Or a combination of everything? How do you tighten those lines of communication? Because everybody wants, I think, that level of execution and responsiveness to be able to pull something from an idea to a published-in-the-media message quickly. But clients may not always make that easy for you. MELISSA: Oh, for sure they don't. [laughs] The answer to your question is certainly all of the above. Every single client is different, has a different way that they like to be communicated with. We just have to learn, “Okay, this guy, if we text him at 2:00 it's going to be our very best time to get his attention. This one, we've got to call because he knows if I'm calling, it's got to be really important. Otherwise I'm just going to send him an email. This person likes all five things put in an email at the end of the day. This person likes everything in subject by subject email.” We really just have to figure them out. But they all are paying us to get the word out, so if they take too long or don't answer or whatever, I just let them know, “Hey, you missed an opportunity. This is why, so next time, here's what we've got to do.” They get it. And we also know on our end who's fast to answer – and I tell clients this when I first meet with them about “Are we going to work with you or not?” I always say, “There is no question, the people that answer us quickly and thoroughly are the ones that get the best press. So that's what you've got to do.” They always go, “Okay, okay, I'm going to do it!” And then some do and some don't. But it's the truth. You get out what you put in. But if we get a last-minute request and we don't have a lot of time, we have our go-tos because we know who's going to respond. That's the goal, to be a go-to. ROB: You've been in this business a while longer than some of the recent shifts in the food media world. It seems like between web outlets, between review sites and increased interest in the TV landscape around food, the culture of food and interest in good food has shifted mightily. What is trending now? What is evergreen now, and what is withering away in terms of getting attention within the hospitality industry? MELISSA: That's a really good question, and I'm not sure, given everything going on, that I can answer that with any great knowledge. I've seen the food industry go through all kinds of changes, and I think that food as an entertainment avenue is here forever. I just can't see that going away. But I think that with COVID and the concerns of the large gatherings, and even the very tight quarters, that's going to – I don't want to say go away, but I think there's going to be less of that. I think people that are opening restaurants right now for sure are not cramming tables in. They're also not making a humongous restaurant. So, I think we're going to see some more medium-size restaurants with a lot of space. I think we're probably going to see some lower priced menus. Just a more mainstream, low-key, as everybody gets back into it and figures out – I just can't imagine people opening a big, flashy, fancy restaurant right this minute. And that's not to say that they won't, and that's not to say that they wouldn't be successful. But I think if you were making your decision today, that would probably not be what you would do. Now, there are people that are well into the planning for a restaurant that's supposed to open next week or in a month or whatever, and they have to go with what they've got and use the guidelines from the state until they don't have to anymore. ROB: The intersection that you sit at, I'm sure that your existing clients and people getting into the industry even look to you to an extent for strategy as well. One thing you hear swirling in the restaurant industry is diversification of business model. Some people are already going into events. That's obviously changing a little bit. Some have been going into additional retail product lines. What are you suggesting to clients as they think about where to go with technology enablement and where to go with overall restaurant business strategy, possibly diversifying? MELISSA: One thing that's big is the ghost kitchen/pop-up idea. I have a couple clients, Drift in East Cobb is doing a lobster roll pop-up calls Pop's Lobster Shack. They did it kind of out of necessity during COVID. They made this takeout window – and I don't know if you know this, but lobster was really, really inexpensive. I don't know if it still is, but all the lobster fishermen didn't have anybody to sell to because all the restaurants up there were closed, so everybody got lobster really cheap. I don't know if people are noticing, but you can probably get lobster at Applebee's right now. I don't know. But anyway, they started this lobster roll special called Pop's, and it's been unbelievably successful. We had a meeting the other day and they were like, “I think we're going to just keep this going. When lobster's out of season, we'll do something else.” I already had some clients that were talking about that sort of ghost kitchen idea, where you do something different than what you already do in your restaurant, you have a different menu offering, but you don't have the building and the huge branding and all the expenses that go along with it. You just sell it on Door Dash or whatever the situation is. So that's definitely happening right now. As far as technology, I think the online ordering is glitchy right now. I see it already getting better, and I think it's going to get way better very, very quickly, and people are going to be able to, as you suggested, order merch and maybe seasonings and all that stuff in a much less clunky way than they even can do right now. I'm excited for that to happen because it's been painful, some of these online sites that we've been working with. ROB: I can't imagine, and it sounds like you've had to. Melissa, as you reflect on the business as you have built it thus far, what are some things that you would consider maybe doing differently if you were starting over from scratch? MELISSA: That's a very good question. One of the things that I always tell people when they say, “What should I know before I start a business?” is I did not plan for success when I started. I planned, “What am I going to do if I fail? When am I going to decide it doesn't work, and then what am I going to do?” I spent a lot of time thinking about that, but I didn't spend any time – not even a minute – thinking about, “What am I going to do if I've got more clients than I can handle? What am I going to do if there are not enough hours in the day for me to do all the work by myself?” I never thought of any of that. I spent probably 2 or 3 years running like a crazy woman, trying to hire a person here and there, do this, do that. Always that's my first thing that I tell people: plan for success. Have some people lined up. Have some things lined up to support you if it goes well. That's always been my best learning, because it's like “Why didn't I do that?” And then many years ago – but it was still well into the business – I realized that the traditional PR business model or way of setting up your staff didn't work for me. You probably know this, but it was always account supervisor, account executive, assistant account executive, little silos, and they did everything. They met with the client, they wrote the business plan, they wrote the press release, they sent the press release, they did everything. I realized I would come back to the office and go, “Hey, we got a new client,” and everybody would duck their head like, “Oh my God, don't give it to me, don't give it to me.” I was like, oh, this is not good. So I divided everybody up by what they like to do best and what they're best at, so now we have writers and we have media relations people and we have social media people and we have client services people. If your thing is meeting with the clients and writing timelines and writing plans and checking off lists, then that's what you do. And if you're a great writer and you can sit in a quiet room all day long and write, write, write, write, write, that's what you do. It was just a huge help, and it changed everything. And then there was an added bonus of if someone leaves, the brain trust does not walk out the door because everyone has been working on the client. So that was a big learning, and it's something that I'm glad came to me at some point in the years. ROB: Sure. One thing I think adjacent to that is in this case – and it's fairly common in the PR industry – your name is on the door, and that can be a challenge in bringing in other people. How have you addressed the challenge where Melissa is quite often the person who goes out and earns the trust of the client, and your reputation is a big part of the value that you bring, but at some point your client's going to have to work with somebody who's not Melissa? How have you handled that scaling yourself problem? MELISSA: It's a good question, and it worried me so much for a long time. I felt like I had to be at every new business meeting, I had to really, really be involved and really assure the prospective client that I was their main contact and all of that. I think the true answer is good people. I have people that have been with me 11 years, 8 years. I've been really fortunate to have long-term employees who are awesome, and the client just wants somebody that's going to help them get the work done. I love client meetings, so I go to as many of them as I can. The beauty, though, is I don't have to write the agenda. I don't have to take the notes. I don't have to do the follow-up. I'm just spending that hour of my time brainstorming with that client or advising that client or listening to that client. So, I'm giving them my best. I'm giving them what they expect from me and what they value from me, but then I have a very competent person and a whole team behind that person that's going to take care of the details. Over time, I've just gotten more and more comfortable with it – and that's truly what it was: me getting comfortable with it. I think it was more in my head than it was anything else. I think the clients are fine with it because, once again, they're being taken care of. If they weren't, I'm sure they would say, “Melissa, you schluffed me off on this person and they're no good.” But fortunately that does not happen. Also, one of my key employees took on the new business development role a few years ago, so she is bonused on the new business that she brings in. She takes a really instrumental role in that, to the point where now sometimes we have to be sure that the prospective client realizes that she may not be the person that they're going to see every day too. It's funny. It's kind of transferred over a little bit. ROB: It definitely makes sense. It sounds like one of those things you find along the way; you took it from your name and your person being the reputation to when people bring in Melissa Libby & Associates, your reputation is also the people you bring to the table and who does the work. MELISSA: Yes, exactly. ROB: The brand is still you; you haven't shied away from that, but you've expanded what it means. MELISSA: Right. And as you'll notice, we a long time ago started using MLA as our logo. Our web address was MelissaLibbyPR.com; now it's ThinkMLA.com because we wanted to expand beyond the PR and be more than that, and then we also wanted to shorten it and use that MLA more. It just takes my name out of it a little bit. Just a little bit. ROB: Perfect. Melissa, when people want to find you and MLA, where should they go to find you? MELISSA: ThinkMLAcom. ROB: Excellent. Even in the website, it's changed a little bit. Or was that always the address? MELISSA: No, it's changed. ROB: Very good. Melissa, thank you for enlightening us on your journey with Melissa Libby & Associates as well as the journey of the hospitality industry during this time. I've learned a lot, and I think the listeners will have as well. MELISSA: Thank you. I enjoyed it. ROB: Be well. Thank you. MELISSA: All righty. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Jay Owen, Founder and CEO at Design Extensions, started building basic websites at age 17. He worked for a number of years as a “solopreneur,” hiring contractors as needed, and, as a company, made as much as six figures. When the economy collapsed in 2008, Jay's business was still doing well. He looked around. People were losing jobs. Things were in crisis. Idea? He'd create a full-time job for somebody. His StoryBrand Certified Agency and HubSpot Goal Partner has been in business and growing for over 20 years. Today, Design Extensions employs about 20 people, a great size because Jay has been able to create scalable systems that don't break with the absence of one person. In the past 5 years, following Mike Michalowicz's book, Clockwork, the premise of which is that there should be no one person in which the company is dependent, Jay has “replaced himself” at every level. The company can now survive, even if Jay is gone for as long as 30 days. Jay says, “A lot of business owners find marketing very confusing and expensive,” and it often does not work. He explains that the agency's job is not to build websites, put pixels on a screen, or write good content for clients. Applying Design Extensions' proven growth strategies to clients' businesses helps them grow – by clarifying their messages and developing and executing effective plans, the agency enables clients to gain attention and acquire customers. The agency plans to add a consultancy arm to provide coaching and strategy direction, to make sure businesses have clear growth plans for both marketing and business fundamentals.  In this interview, Jay recommends a number of books that have been pivotal for his agency. The agency's messaging is built around Donald Miler's “StoryBrand,” as described in his book, Building a StoryBrand. Jay says that most people talk about themselves too much when they should talk about the customer's problem and how the company's solution can help the customer win. The customer needs to be the hero of the story. When Design Extensions changed the message on its homepage  to align with StoryBrand concepts, incoming leads doubled. Telling the one thing that makes a company “special” is rarely all that special. Three unique things can become very special.  Kim Scott's Radical Candor inspired Jay to have the courage to “be exceptionally clear with where improvement needs to happen,” as long as that correction was paired with caring immensely for the individual. Jay believes it is his “responsibility to create a space where people can fail without failing catastrophically.” Little failures will make people stronger. Gino Wickman's Traction provided the framework for the processes, procedures, and systems needed to make his business scalable and long-lasting. His final hiring interview, from Dave Ramsey's EntreLeadership, involves Jay and his wife taking the prospect and spouse to dinner. Jay's book, Building a Business that Lasts (Without Sacrificing Family) is currently available on his website, jayowenlive.com, for the cost of shipping and handling. He has a podcast of the same title available on that website and he is on “all the social media.  Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Jay Owen, Founder and CEO at Design Extensions based in St. Augustine, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Jay. JAY: Thanks for having me, Rob. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you tell us about Design Extensions and what superpower you all bring to the marketing agency world? JAY: Absolutely. I find that a lot of business owners end up in a situation where marketing is very confusing and expensive. They're not going to waste a lot of time and marketing on money that doesn't work, so what we do is help them clarify their message and then put together the right plan and then execute that plan so they can get attention and acquire customers. We've been doing that for the past 21 years, and we've grown every single year. We love taking those same business growth strategies we've used for ourselves and applying those to other businesses to help them grow. That's our focus. ROB: You've kept the pitch pretty tight. I think that speaks to what you might be able to do for someone else. And 20 years is a while to keep the same business operating, and particularly in the marketing world, where things keep on moving. What are some of the constants that have been true throughout the life o the company, and what are some of the changes you've seen that you've been able to incorporate into your own story? JAY: Gosh, so much has changed over time. When I started this thing, first, I was only 17, so I had no idea what I was doing. I was just building basic websites at the time. If that's all we still did today, we would probably be in pretty big trouble as far as the company goes. Plus, that first year I only made about $5,000 in total revenue, and that wouldn't work these days. [laughs] A lot has changed. This is probably one of the most dynamic industries that exists with regards to the speed of change. When I started this business, AltaVista was one of the leading search engines. Yahoo was the king of the internet. AOL was a monster player still. Now the landscape is totally different. There were no iPhones back then. There were no mobile sites. You couldn't have an application on the web. The idea of having a Software-as-a-Service business online was not a thing. All of that has changed over time, and we've just had to adapt with it. Ultimately, it's rooted in what our mission is. This is what I tell our team all the time. Our job is not to build websites for people. Our job is not to put pixels on the screen. Our job is not even to write good words for them. Our job is to help other people grow their business. Now, that often looks like some of the things that we do, like help people clarify their message so they can have a clean, clear message that actually gets attention. It looks like building websites. It looks like running marketing campaigns. It looks like developing applications. But the root of it all is, are we helping people grow their business, yes or no? If the answer is no, that's not a service we should offer anymore. That's really been the guiding light, that clarity of mission over time. But gosh, I've learned a lot along the way. ROB: Absolutely. Is there maybe a service that you did stop offering with that degree of clarity where you came to a moment and said, “We shouldn't do that anymore”? Is there an example we could look at? JAY: It's funny because there's one specific one that just happened recently. We'd not been offering this service for a while, but my office admin was going through some expenses and cleaning out some company stuff and said, “Hey, do we need this ‘print@designextensions.com' email address anymore?” We're not really doing print work anymore. We used to do a lot of print work back in the day, and print is still needed sometimes; I'm not one of these digital marketing guys that believes all of traditional marketing of print and billboards and radio and TV are useless. They're not useless. They have a place. They're often overpriced, but that's a different situation. But we don't do that at all anymore. We don't print materials for clients; we'll send them out if they need to be. So that's a service that we ended up cutting. It wasn't in the best interest of us or our clients and it doesn't exist anymore for us. ROB: Even though in a moment, it might be the most reliable time to reach somebody with some direct mail. JAY: Yeah, I'm not opposed to direct mail at all. There's plenty of opportunities for these kind of things, like I said. It just didn't align correctly with our vision as a service. But with that said, we might help somebody craft the message that's going to go on their direct mail. For example, one of the biggest problems most people have is they talk about themselves too much. Really what they should do is talk about the problem that their customer is encountering and how their solution is going to help them solve that problem and help the customer win the day. We often want to position ourselves as the hero of the story, and really the customer needs to be the hero of the story. So even with something like direct mail, just changing some of the words that you use on those postcards or flyers or brochures can have a massive impact on the outcome. That's where our focus is more on versus actually producing the deliverable in that case. ROB: You mentioned that “hero of the story” language and framework. That's definitely become more prominent. It's strange, because it's the most timeless of stories, but it's become much more prominent recently. Have you seen an evolution in understanding of how to build a good story over the life of the business? JAY: Yeah. I've always said that everybody's selling something; it's just a matter of what. Our job is to understand that and help tell the story to basically get the customer to buy. But over time, one of the things that's been hugely helpful for us is a framework called StoryBrand by a guy named Donald Miller. He wrote a book called Building a StoryBrand, and we use that framework in our messaging now. It's stuff that we essentially already knew, and they're not totally new ideas. It's just a matter of packaging it together in a way that's so clear that it really, really works. We started using this framework for ourselves, and just by changing our messaging on our homepage, we doubled our incoming leads. When we found that out for ourselves, we thought, “Hold on, this works really well. We should do this for everybody.” So now we're actually a StoryBrand Certified Agency, and that's one of the power cards in our deck, if you will, of things that are really helpful when we're helping a company grow. ROB: It's a big name behind that. I think sometimes when agencies look at that sort of program, they worry that if they affiliate with that instead of maybe cultivating their own secret sauce, they're going to become a commodity. How have you looked at using the StoryBrand to elevate rather than reduce value of what you do? JAY: Great question. I think I have had those same concerns over time, and there certainly are pieces of the puzzle that we go, “Hey, this is how we do it that's exclusive to us.” But I've been in business long enough to know that there's only so many ways that a wheel's going to go around, and sometimes you just need a clear plan on how to get that done. I think a lot of companies, regardless of whether they're a marketing agency or any other type of business, are looking for that one thing that differentiates them. I think that's a mistake because I think it's very rare that one thing differentiates a company. What I do believe is that if you take three unique things and put them together, it becomes very special. For us, for example, three of our uniques would be something like we're a StoryBrand Certified Agency, we're a HubSpot Goal Partner, and we've been in business and grown for over 20 years in a row. If you combine those three things together, there's only about three or four agencies in the entire country that fit into that model. That's where there starts to become a uniqueness. And just because we're tied onto the HubSpot bucket for one thing or tied onto the StoryBrand framework for this thing, I don't think that makes us a commodity at all. I think that it's a combination of knowing how to use those things across multiple areas that actually gives us a lot of strength, and we can take strength from multiple other experts in order to make that happen. ROB: I've heard that referred to sometimes as talent stacking. To be able to take that large Venn diagram with big circles – there's even a decent number of agencies that have been around for 20 years; not a ton, but some – but some of them are still trying to sell you on 15-year-old SEO tactics, and that might not be such a good idea. HubSpot also gives you potentially the differentiation of some of the different levels. Is that something you're conscious of as you're building the business? You're not going to drive a customer to something that's not helpful to them, but some eyes on when you're ready to level up the HubSpot to show that you have been even more successful than some people with HubSpot? JAY: Yeah. The other thing too, though, is I will drop either one of those things if I don't think they're the best for our customers anymore. HubSpot, for example, we were a HubSpot Partner years and years ago, and it just wasn't the right fit for our client base at the time. We ended up dropping it and using other tools that we piecemealed together. Now we've come back to it, and HubSpot's changed a lot over the years too. Now they have a great free entry level product, so we can put lower end clients on it that might not be ready for a very expensive marketing suite where they're paying $1,000+ a month just for their software, but they can enter on the free level and it works really well. Ultimately, for me, we're going to use whatever tools or services we think are the best fit for the client. I always tell my team, I couldn't care less how we did it before; all I care about is what the best way is to do it. We're going to develop what we believe is the best practice across all these different disciplines, and we're going to keep doing it that way until we find a better way. And as soon as we find a better way, we're going to change it. That's how I operate. If anything, I have to temper that a little bit because I am very comfortable with change, and that can be disruptive for a team if you don't give them some stability over time. ROB: It's that balance of both change, but also there's probably an inversion point that you've had to go through in the life of the business. There's one point where in order to grow things beyond yourself, you have to define a process and have somebody follow it. And then there's a limit where you now have people who understand these tools better than you and have to be able to come to you and come to the organization and recommend change and a better way to do that. How do you think about getting that expert feedback from your team back into the agency, now that you're a couple of steps up in scale? JAY: I like how Andy Stanley puts it. He says as organizational authority increases, individual competencies decrease. I think you could also say as an organization's size grows, even if you were the one who did all the things at the beginning, which I was, at some point you're no longer the best anymore. It's funny because it's an interesting transition where – I used to always sell clients back in the day that they got to deal with me the entire time. That was the pitch. The pitch was, “Hey, the great news is you don't have to deal with a sales rep who's going to hand you to an account manager who's going to hand you to a team who's going to do all these things. You can deal with me from beginning to end.” That was a true advantage at the time, in the same manner that now it's a true advantage that you don't get to work with me anymore. [laughs] Because my best and highest gifts are in overarching strategy; they're not in building a website for you. And the proof is in the pudding because the websites we produce today are a thousand times better than anything we produced 5 or 10 or 15 years ago, and I have nothing to do with them anymore. I think that's the big challenge for a lot of entrepreneurs, especially agency owners, I find, because many agency owners started as a professional in the craft. They were the ones who put the pixels on the screen. They were the ones who wrote the words. At some point you have to transition from being the marketer to being a business builder, and those are different things.  ROB: You indeed mentioned that you started as an individual contributor building websites, and then it morphed and evolved. At what point did you realize that maybe this was going to be a company that could employ some other people and was going to be a long-term thing instead of – I think we start off building websites sometimes – it's a thing you can do. When you're 17, you're like, “I'm going to do this for the next 20 years.” JAY: Right. For me, years ago – gosh, I guess I was probably 21 – I'd just gotten married. I got married pretty young. The company I think at that point was making about $25,000 a year. I was waiting tables on the side and also going to school, and my wife was doing the same. I didn't think I could make it work. I didn't think it was going to be a full-time business. I thought it was really a hobby to some extent, just based on the dollars I was able to bring in. I went to work for my uncle in that season because he ran a successful insurance agency. I thought he would fade out, I would fade in, and why not? It was kind of a silver spoon. It seemed like a good idea. He's got a black Mercedes and a house in the mountains and a house towards the beach. “I would like to have that,” so my 21-year-old self said. But I worked for him for 6 months and hated the insurance industry. One day I came home, and I knew I'd married the right woman when I came home, I was kind of upset, and I said, “Babe, I could do this, and I probably could make a lot of money at it, but I think I'm going to hate it my whole life” and she said, “So quit and do what you love.” I remember that season going, “I wonder if I'll ever have enough work to keep myself busy a whole week.” But what I didn't understand at that time was the difference between owning a business and owning a job. What I really owned at the time was a job, not a business. I didn't pay myself very well and I didn't have very good hours, and I had the opposite of what most people want when they start a business, which is time, money, and freedom. I had none of those things. It took time for me to finally get that working as a solopreneur, if you will. I used a lot of contractors eventually and had my own thing. It was working pretty well. I got up to a point where I was making six figures as a company and feeling pretty comfortable, but then the economy collapsed in 2008. I'd used a lot of contactors but never had a full-time employee. I looked around, and people were losing their jobs everywhere and things were in crisis. My business was actually doing pretty good, because it turns out people need marketing in downturns because they need to get attention and acquire customers. I thought, “I think I can make a job for somebody. I think I could create a full-time position and pay somebody as a W-2 employee.” That was a big change for me at that point over using contractors. So, I did. I created a job. I did a really bad job at knowing how to hire or fire or do anything else, but I learned along the way. And now we have a team of about 20, and it's a great size because – I always said I never wanted to be more than 10 people, but I realized at some point a couple of things. In order for me to create scalable systems that didn't break when one person was absent, I had to be a certain size to pull that off, and I also had to be a certain size so that when one person went on vacation, I didn't get two jobs for the week. There were years where I dreaded the summer because I'd have one person go on vacation and I'm like, “Great, now I have two jobs this week” – which is fine; I'm not scared of the work, but it gets exhausting after a while. Now it's very different because we've worked really hard the last 5 years to make sure there's no one person the company is dependent on, including me. We proof tested that about a month or so ago. I took a 30-day RV trip with my family and didn't work the whole time. That's a big barrier of success for me, even more so than anything money can provide. Once you lose money, you can always go get more of it, but once you lose time, you can't get any more. Especially with my kids growing up fast, that was a big deal for me. That's kind of the story of growing it over time. ROB: When's the next trip? JAY: Next year. I plan to take the same amount of time off pretty much every year. I don't know if we'll do an RV trip every year, but I think it's healthy for the business for me to take that amount of time off. The idea actually came originally from a book called Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz. Same guy that wrote Profit First. It's called Clockwork, and he basically says an owner or a founder needs to be able to leave for 30 days and the company keep functioning, because typically most companies go through a full cycle of business in 30 days. It's the only way that you know that you've actually replaced yourself at every level. The company becomes more valuable, number one, but it also protects the team as well, because what happens if I walk out and get hit by a bus? Does the company collapse in 2 weeks because there's no figurehead anymore? If so, I didn't do a very good job of building a business that lasts for them, and ultimately for my family as well. So that's how I think about it. ROB: Excellent. What was the timeline from when you decided to take that trip and maybe when you started telling people, and then when you actually took it? What was that timespan? JAY: I planned the idea of it before the pandemic, first of all. [laughs] Last year I read this book Clockwork, and over time I had been working my way up to being able to take more time off. First of all, I love the work that I do. I don't need to get away from it. But I do. I say I don't need to – a lot of entrepreneurs are like that. We say we love the work that we do. I love to work all the time. That's great, but our brains actually do need physical rest. That's why we often have these bursts of ideas in the shower or while driving or right before we fall asleep or right after we wake up. There's real science behind this stuff. Our brains are able to come up with things that they wouldn't otherwise come up with when we give them the space to do it. So last year I read this book Clockwork and I thought, “All right, I'm doing that. I've done 2 weeks, so now I'm going to take a full month and see how that works.” My plan was to do that around this time of year this year. I actually ended up taking it earlier because of the pandemic, believe it or not. We sold our house right at the beginning of the pandemic; we have a new one that we're building. So, we had about 3 months where we had nowhere to live and I thought, “This is the time. I'm just going to do it now.” I'd like to say there was some kind of grand plan. I had told the team that was my intention this year and I needed them to be thinking about that, because every time I leave, one of the questions – even if it's just for a week – I always tell the team, “If there's anything you get to where you go, ‘We need to wait till Jay gets back before we can do X, Y, or Z or before we can decide this or figure it out or whatever else,' that's a problem. Whatever that is, write that thing down, and then we need to fix that so that it's no longer dependent on me.” I think that mentality has been a huge driver for our growth. What happens if I'm not here? How do we grow the company? It gives everybody else the opportunity both for success and failure, and that's one of the big mistakes I think a lot of leaders make: they don't want their team to fail. But when you think back, how many things did each of us learn from failure? The answer is a lot. I believe it's actually my responsibility to create space where people can fail without failing catastrophically. I don't want people destroying the company, obviously, but some little failures here or there are good for everybody. ROB: That's such a good lesson there. When you talk about mistakes or maybe things you'd do differently or things you've learned from, what are some other things you've learned along the journey of building Design Extensions that you might do differently if you were starting it up today? JAY: Two big things come to mind. The first is however much time you think you need to hire the right person, you probably should quadruple it because it's so important to get the right people in the right seats. When we rush to hire people because we're in some kind of super busy mode or whatever it is and we think we need to fill a seat, I almost always mess that up. Patience in hiring has been a hard one for me because I'm a very fast mover. I'm like, “All right, let's go. You seem like you could figure that out. Let's make it happen.” So I'm very patient in hiring. The other thing for me personally – this is more of a personal weakness – is being willing to give direct and candid feedback early on. Some people don't have a problem with this at all, but I do. Ultimately I've realized that it's because I want people to like me. I want to just be one of the team. I want to be everybody's friend. I want that so bad that at times, I'm willing to not be clear enough when there's problems, and that is a massive mistake. It is not in anybody's best interest. So, I've had to really work hard at that. A book that really helped me with that was Radical Candor by Kim Scott. She talks about this idea that you can care immensely for someone and be exceptionally clear with where improvement needs to happen. Those things are not counterintuitive. But some people fall off one side of the cliff or the other. They're either exceptionally clear, but they don't seem to care about the people at all – and she calls those people “obnoxiously aggressive” – and the other one, which is where I tend to fall off the cliff, is you show that you care deeply but you are not as clear as you need to be when there's problems, and she calls that person “ruinously empathetic.” Which is interesting because when I was younger I wasn't empathetic at all. I had no empathy. I think through almost 20 years of marriage and five children and 20 years of business, you start to develop – you've walked through enough fire that you do have more empathy for people. But the danger is believing that trying to be super kind to them at the expense of truth is going to be helpful for them, and it almost never is. Not for them, for you, or the company. ROB: It's really good to share both sides of that on Radical Candor, because I think some people have heard it and run into somebody who maybe learned too much of the wrong lessons from it. It's always good to go back to the source and process through these things through our own filter. You mentioned this situation where things are really busy and you really need to hire someone, and you're talking about taking longer to make that hire. To do that, how do you manage the onslaught of work in that season while taking the time you need to make the right hire? JAY: I think a lot of it comes down to being able to think far enough ahead. If I need to hire somebody, the chances are I needed to be thinking about that a month ago or 2 months ago. So, taking the time to evaluate what the issues are for the company and plan for that makes a big difference. I think most people can wing it. If you're scrappy enough and smart enough, you can probably wing it to about 10 people and a million dollars in revenue, but after that things start to fall apart really quickly. For us, one of the big things that helped was a book called Traction by Gino Wickman. I know I'm throwing a lot of books out – which ironically, I used to never read because I'm dyslexic. But they're really, really a helpful framework. I am that traditional entrepreneur that really has a problem with process and procedures and systems. I feel like they're a cage for me. I feel like they're very corporate-y – but they're not. They're required in order to build a scalable business that will last. Traction gave us the framework for that, and as it relates to hiring, what happened is because we set these annual goals and we have these quarterly planning meetings, both as a leadership team and as a full team, we can see ahead of time what the issues are, when we're going to need to hire, and plan for that accordingly. Right now, we're working on hiring a new role, and we're just willing to take the time for it. Matter of fact, one of my team members the other day was like, “We could probably cut that last interview to speed things up.” I'm like, “Nope, not doing it. I'm not cutting the last interview.” I even go to the extent – this sounds kind of crazy, but it's actually great – I stole this from Dave Ramsey out of the book EntreLeadership; I will do a spousal interview at the end. It's not what it sounds like. Basically what happens is my wife and I will go out with whoever the team member is and their spouse, assuming they're married, and we'll just have dinner. The idea behind this is be with somebody in an environment that is not a traditional interview, because most people, including probably you and I if we were in that scenario, exaggerate and are moderate liars in interviews because we just instinctively are trying to put on our best self. When you see people out in the real world at dinner or something, they can still put on their best self, but you start to get a picture. I also think it's important to realize that when you're hiring somebody, if their spouse is like a monster, you might be bringing that into the company too, and you've got to be aware of that. ROB: You've mentioned a lot of books. I think there may be one other book you haven't mentioned yet. I do believe you have a book of your own that we should know about. JAY: Yeah, I do have a book. It was one of those things where everybody kept saying, “You should write a book. You should tell all these stories and put them together in one single plan.” I never felt confident enough to do that, but I finally did it. It's called Building a Business That Lasts. My podcast is actually by the same title. The idea is, what does it take to build a business over time? Most businesses fail in the first year. The vast majority do. Many more fail within the first 5 years, and very, very few make it to the 10-year mark. So on the podcast, for example, I interview people that have been in business for 10 years or more, and selfishly, I learn a lot because I get to talk to other business leaders and entrepreneurs and hear their stories. The book is just my story, my framework of how I have made that work, and the subtitle is important to me, too. It's “without sacrificing family,” because I've seen plenty of people along the way that have grown great businesses at the expense of all of the people around them, especially those closest to them. I probably have risked that at points, but I'm doing my darndest to try and stay married to the same woman my whole life and have kids that grow up and are as well-adjusted as they can be in this crazy world. ROB: For sure. That is excellent and noble and worthwhile. Where should we find that book? JAY: You can get a copy by just going to my website, which is jayowenlive.com. There's a button right there that says, “Get Jay's Book.” We actually have a free offer right now; you just cover the cost of shipping and handling and we'll send that book out to you. Also on my website is my podcast and other materials that might be helpful if you're looking to build a business to last. ROB: Excellent. Jay, what's coming up next for you and Design Extensions that we should be looking forward to you hearing about? JAY: Great question. We are adding a new wing onto the company over the next couple of months and into the next few years. We've always been an agency. What I mean by agency is we do the work for you. But what I've found over time, especially in this new economy as people are starting new things, is they might not be able to afford the agency. They might want to be able to do some things themselves. They might even have some team members in-house that can do some of those things, but they need some guidance along the way. They need a guide who has been through it before and knows how to help them make those things happen. We are in the process, in the very early stages right now, of building onto the agency a consultancy. I see those two things overlapping. The idea is essentially for us to be able to provide coaching and strategy around building a business and making sure you have a clear plan, not just for your marketing, but for business fundamentals as a whole. I run a marketing agency, but you can hear just in this conversation we've had how many things we've talked about as it relates to hiring and firing, teambuilding, how to keep yourself sane in the midst of it all. So. we're going to be building a consultancy on top of the agency. Both of those things, though, really feed well into who we are as a company as a whole, which goes back to that mission of helping other people grow their business. ROB: Fantastic. Jay, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. We know where people should find your book; where should they find you and your firm when they're looking to find you, online or otherwise? JAY: They can still just go to my website. That's the main place I want people to go after this interview, jayowenlive.com. My agency is linked to on there, the podcast is linked to on there, the book is linked to on there. Depending on who they are and what they need, those are great places to check me out. And obviously, I'm available on all the social media, so wherever you happen to be, LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram, I'm out there. If you want to connect, you can always find me in the DMs on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn. ROB: That's excellent. Jay Owen, Founder and CEO of Design Extensions, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been a pleasure.  JAY: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Rob. ROB: It's a pleasure. Be well. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Justin Ramb is President and Sandra Marshal, VP of Client Services, at Bigeye, a full-service B2B and B2C agency that focuses on audiences, creative work, media and analytics, and data.  Understand audience:  Use primary and secondary research to discover who they are, where they consume media, what they look like, and what triggers them to convert Develop marketing personas that match two or three target audience personas Test strategies against those personas to ensure activities align with objectives B2B:  Use current customer data to develop lookalike audience and personas based on existing data Develop personas based on where company wants to head. Is it looking to capture new clients or new types of clients? Supplement data with key stakeholder interviews, additional research, online research, and quantitative/qualitative research. B2C: Bigeye utilizes specialized tools to learn about a client's audience and customers Creative: As part of persona development, the agency tests messaging, colors, headlines, and photography for optimal audience response. Rather than resent the parameters of defined personas, the creative team appreciates understanding the target audience. Media and Analytics  As part of persona development, the agency explores media usage. Media develops a persona-based media plan and begins placement in that media Utilizing Google Analytics and custom dashboards, the Analytics team tracks establishes targets and KPIs Data  24/7 analytics data provides information about how things are performing.  Data answered the questions: Where can things be optimized? How are conversions going? Do the real audiences align with those targeted?  Bigeye started in 2002. In this interview, Justin describes the chaos of those early years and the ultimate discovery that the agency's greatest success was driven by hiring team members who were committed, skilled, and aligned with the agency's direction. Sandra added that the agency also has to “arm” new employees with “the appropriate support,” foster a sense of collaboration, and avoid over-siloization.  Justin outlines the updated review and review cycle program (structured through a program called Lattice) the agency uses to keep everything running smoothly. Every two weeks team members submit a four-question online survey that covers how they're doing, what roadblocks they have, and anything they want their manager to know. Every quarter, team members submit three or four agency- and personal-growth goals. These are used to project the agency's direction in the subsequent quarter. Finding a mentor, someone a step or two ahead, can help a startup avoid pitfalls. Justin comments that if you find an outside counsel and can afford that person, it's probably not too early. He also mentions ways to find such help for free. He says strategic, balanced growth is healthy growth and believes that a company that is not growing is dying. Justin and Sandra can be found on their agency's website at Bigeyeagency.com, where visitors will find an “incredibly updated” blog.  Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Justin Ramb, President of Bigeye, and Sandra Marshall, VP of Client Services at Bigeye, and they are based in Orlando, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Justin and Sandra. JUSTIN: Thanks for having us. SANDRA: Thank you, Rob. ROB: Absolutely. Excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Bigeye, and what is your superpower? JUSTIN: Bigeye is a full-service ad agency in Orlando. We do a lot of different services. Full service, but we definitely focus on four key areas of audience, creative, media and analytics, and then data. We're very focused on that and serve a variety of clients all over the country and several around the world. ROB: Very cool. Is there any particular vertical or size of client that tends to be in your sweet spot? JUSTIN: We serve a lot of different clients. Whether it's a startup, a D2C, somebody just getting off the ground that's looking for a really comprehensive strategy moving forward to launch their product or service, or all the way up to very large CPG brands that support lots of different brands under them. So, we've got a wide variety. We have engagements that mostly focus on multiple pieces and customer journey, brand development, execution, media, and then the analytics and optimization. That full spectrum is what we focus on with our clients. ROB: Right on. Knowing your pillars does provide part of the story, so maybe it's interesting if we step through those a little bit piece by piece. When you talk about audience, what does Bigeye talk about when they're talking about audience? JUSTIN: We're really focused on audience. We believe that's the start of almost all of our engagements, all of our initiatives – really looking at, who is the audience we're going after for that product or service? It's really important to understand that audience, who they are, where they consume media, what they look like, and what are their triggers to convert. We spend a lot of resources upfront to understand that audience. We've got a whole insights team, led here by our Vice President of Insights, Adrian Tennant, and he leads the team to really dive into that, both in a primary research way, or we'll grab secondary research as well. That will then also get us into audience personas and developing those personas to have a target of two or three personas we're going after, and we'll always match what we're doing back up to those personas to make sure we're always leading with that strategy. SANDRA: And Rob, it's really been incredible to see how well that's resonated with our clients. To see them be able to relate to an actual person and some of the persona development that we've done has really set a phenomenal foundation for many of our projects. Keeping that person in mind for the duration and the lifecycle of the work together has been really, really compelling. ROB: It's truly critical. You mentioned the startup side of the world; a lot of times when startups are asked to articulate their audience, it almost feels like an exercise in creative writing rather than in fact. Helping them dial that in seems like it would vary quite widely by customer. You mentioned that primary and secondary research. I'd imagine on the consumer side, you may have datasets at your disposal that the client might not even have, or maybe something within their data that they don't know. But then on the B2B side, are you diving in sometimes and interviewing their existing customers, their potential customers, and going deep on that personal level there? JUSTIN: Absolutely. On the B2C side, we spend a lot of time looking at that audience and customer with some really great tools that we have at our disposal to get to who they are. On the B2B side, it is important to grab the current customer data. We can develop a lookalike audience and really develop that persona based on existing data, and/or there may be businesses that are looking to capture new clients, new types of clients, and that's where we'll go through quite a few exercises with the client to understand those and develop personas based on where they want to head. We'll supplement that with key stakeholder interviews, additional research, online research, quantitative/qualitative research. We always want to make sure that we're matching it back up to solid data. ROB: You put creative second in that list, and I'm sure that's no coincidence. It sounds to me like given that focus on audience, the creative has a deep, deep link to the audience that's being targeted. Number one, how do you think about creative? And number two, how do you help the creative types to view that audience information as a useful constraint rather than maybe a limitation on their creative juices? JUSTIN: We find that a lot of the work that we do actually arms creative to produce better creative. They love to understand exactly the customer, the audience that they're designing for. After we define those personas, we will often then go to another step before we get into creative of researching and serving audiences to make sure that we're creating creative for them. We'll test messaging, we'll test colors, we'll test headlines, we'll test photography, and we'll find out what those audiences most resonate with. We have all that data; we will then turn that over to our creative team, and then they'll match that up to what they're envisioning to create for them. They absolutely love it. It probably initially was like, “Wait, what's going on here? We'll design what we want to design,” but now they've come to really appreciate having some solid information before diving deep into what they do. ROB: That definitely makes sense. Stepping through, you talk about media and analytics. Those are both words I think that have known meanings, but they mean perhaps different things to different people. What do media and analytics mean within the world of Bigeye? JUSTIN: We will continue the journey with our customers and clients. We've now created the creative; it's all matched back up to the personas, and in that persona development, we're also understanding where they consume media. Where most can we get in front of them? Obviously, in today's world, it's a lot of different places. Yes, it's Facebook, it's Instagram, but it's also driving down the road. People still commute. Out of home is still important. It may be a lot of other platforms. So, we will develop a media plan, again based on the personas, and then begin to place that media and watch it through the analytics team. ROB: Got it. Then analytics in that case is useful as part of the planning process, whereas data is probably completing that loop and tying the results back to the business objectives? JUSTIN: We watch that data, those analytics, nonstop. It is so important in the 24/7 world to watch how things are performing. Where can we perform optimizations? How are conversions going? Are we matching up to the audiences that we've outlined? It's really important that we're looking at those analytics. We create custom dashboards. We go beyond just relying on Google Analytics and we create those custom dashboards specifically for the targets and the KPIs that have been outlined early on in the process. ROB: That entire story makes sense. Tell us a little bit about the origin of Bigeye. How did you end up starting this thing in the beginning? JUSTIN: We started back in 2002, pre-internet, pre a lot of things nowadays. Frankly, it took quite a few years to figure out what the hell we were doing. It was a lot of trial and error. Figured out what we did best, what we did worst, and ultimately what we ended up finding was what caused the most success was to hire properly. Bring on team members that were not only committed, not only skilled, but really were part of where we were headed as an agency. We brought on Sandra in the client services and account department and we brought on Seth Segura, our creative director. Still here today, and really defined, where do we want to go? That's what has led us to the focus of audience, creative, and media. ROB: Was one of those practices more prominent in the earliest of days? JUSTIN: Hiring was just so important. Again, it took us a number of years to realize it was all about who was going to be on the bus with us. We knew that we had to get the seats filled, and frankly a lot of what we do can be taught. There is some skill to it, but a lot of it can be taught. So, understanding the aptitude and attitude of people that we were hiring, and was it part of the culture that we wanted to build at Bigeye? SANDRA: I think to add to that, too, one thing that we identified early on was not only did we have to look for those good cultural fits and those amazing skillsets, but we also had to make sure that we were arming the people we were bringing in with the appropriate support and other members of the team to make sure all the wheels were continuing to run smoothly and there was an incredible sense of collaboration with everybody. We did not want everybody to be working in silos. We wanted to really make sure that there was the appropriate amount of department building that was also occurring while we were looking for this incredible talent. JUSTIN: One of the big “ahas” for us was doing better reviews and review cycles. It was really interesting to me. To the fault of our own, we were doing a really bad job at performance reviews. We've done it multiple different ways through the years. We've done annual reviews, we've done anniversary reviews, we've done 360 reviews. Oftentimes we'd forget about it until somebody said, “Hey, can I get my annual review?” I do think that's pretty common in agencies. We're running hard, clients are demanding things, things are changing, so the review cycle and performance reviews was something we realized if we were going to grow, we needed to make sure we put something in place that could help that. So we did. Now we're on a great schedule. We do two-week sprints where we do updates every two weeks. Team members will submit a four-question online survey – how they're doing, what roadblocks they have, anything they want their manager to know. So, we've got these pulse checks with our team members. Two weeks in agency life can feel like a year, so we wanted to make sure that we were touching base. Then we do quarterly reviews. We ask our team members to develop three or four goals for the quarter, all aligned with the growth of the agency, but also personal growth. We meet with them on a quarter basis, we review the quarters, and then we project where we want to head for the next quarter. And then we'll do the annual review, which obviously is the bigger one and more extensive, but critically important to continue to check in on the growth and the development of our team members, but also of the agency. ROB: Right. I think people coming from some agencies would perhaps be a little bit shocked by that level of regularity, if you're able to actually keep it in sync. How did you come to that degree of structure? Do you have a disposition towards structure and you just had to form the idea, or were there some tools that came into play to help you arrive at some of those conclusions? JUSTIN: The “aha” was when a team member came to Sandra and I and said, “Hey, can I get my annual review?” and we said, “That's not right. We need to put something in place and we need to stick by it.” We did a lot of searching and we ended up with a tool called Lattice. Lattice is an online tool that allows such great structure, but a lot of flexibility. You can customize what works best for your agency. We have found it to be incredibly successful. SANDRA: It's helpful to not find ourselves in an annual review where surprises are being uncovered about not only employee progress, but as a manager, how we could've helped them better through the past year. So, these reoccurring checkpoints really help us as leaders to be able to know where we can step in and either coach better or help to refocus energy. I think it's definitely a two-way street in all of these reviews. ROB: That definitely makes sense. You said the agency started in 2002, and that was certainly one “aha” moment. What are some other things, when you look back at the journey, that you see that you might have done differently if you were starting from scratch that you learned along the way? Maybe some lessons learned? JUSTIN: I'd say two things. One, looking back, I would've been quicker to bring in outside counsel, somebody that can give us wisdom, that can consult with us, can look at our business, can look at our processes. Bring them in and really allow them to take a look at everything. We did that about two years ago. We brought a gentleman in from Boston and allowed him to look at every single thing of the agency and to give us his feedback and his thoughts and his perspective about what we were doing – what we were doing well and what needed to be tweaked. I wish we would've done that much earlier. There was so much wisdom that came out of that. It was critical. Secondly, I would say really defining our focus. What are the services that we really want to focus on moving forward over the next couple years? What are the industries we want to focus on? I do think agencies are prone to take anything and everything as long as it pays the bills, and yes, that's important – but to really internally know as a team, “this is where we're headed, both in an industry focus and in the services that we want to offer,” and then align everything with that. ROB: When you mention that outside counsel, I imagine this sort of person can go by many different titles – some sort of a consultant, perhaps a coach, that sort of thing. I think there are some people you're not sure if you can trust, so how did you identify someone that you could trust to speak into the business in that way? JUSTIN: We wanted somebody that knew our business, was not in our business, but that can consult with us on the business. We found a gentleman who does search consulting, works with procurement departments for agencies, and allowed him to come in and really pick everything apart. He was a part consultant, he was a part coach, mentor to me and to Sandra and the leadership team. He was just really critical as we moved forward with the incredible growth that we've had over the last couple years. ROB: That part is exciting. It sounds like you've more than gotten your money's worth for whatever the arrangement was. I think sometimes when I talk to folks who are earlier in their agency journey, there comes a point where they're not sure when they should start spending what could be a significant amount of money on this type of help. How would you think about when is too early to start squeezing that outside counsel to help you get outside your business and grow? JUSTIN: Great question. I don't think it's ever too early if you can afford it, but I also think there are some ways to get some counsel that may not be so expensive or structured. I know, early on in the agency, we sought out people, other agency owners, to connect with. We didn't feel like there was some sort of competition there. We could have lunch with them and really talk shop and get some wisdom from each other. It wasn't a formal thing, but we got together to at least have some counsel because we were young, we were small, they were larger, they had already been through the ups and downs. I think that was really important to have as well, which a lot of people can do if they search, especially nowadays where you can jump on a Zoom call or something like that. ROB: That's a good way to frame the current environment in terms of the opportunity as well as the constraints. I think it's really helpful what you said there. It's twofold – one is finding the people a step or two ahead of you and looking to them for some ways to move forward, and also, I think what you said about if you can afford the person, it's probably not too early – I think that creates something a lot of businesses may want to find earlier than they do, which is a lens of profitability, a lens of healthy margins. How have you thought about healthy growth, especially as your team has grown? JUSTIN: Healthy growth to me and to the leadership team at Bigeye is strategic and it's balanced. We want to grow. If you're not growing, you're dying, so we want to make sure we continue to grow. We've been blessed and fortunate over the last couple years to grow rapidly, but we will continue to do that strategically, and we'll do it in a balanced way. We're not here to drive our team to burnout. We're going to have a work-life balance. We're going to make sure folks get out of here on time to go to their families and other things. Now, everybody's going to be available and be able to communicate, and afterhours, because clients will need something, but we're going to do this growth in the right way. We're not here to drive everyone to burnout to then go sell the agency. That is not the focus for us. We're going to continue to grow and develop a really great agency in the U.S. ROB: Then you also mentioned the importance of focus as one of the lessons that you've learned. Have there been lines of service or particular types of work that you have shut down? If so, what did you shut down and how did you realize that you needed to? JUSTIN: Sandra, correct me if I'm wrong – I don't know that we've shut down any services. We have fine-tuned our services in the sense that we know the ones that will be a win-win for both us and the client. There are services or engagements where if it's maybe a one-off engagement, that's probably not the right fit for us. We're looking for multiple initiatives, a longer-term engagement than just doing a website or something like that. SANDRA: In addition to that, too, I think we've identified through that when we need to acknowledge that it's not necessarily our expertise per se, or if we know of someone who may be doing it better than us, we're not shy to admit, “We want to make sure this is achieving the ultimate goal that you have, so let's bring in either a partner or some outside help and counsel to be a part of this project together.” ROB: That makes sense. A lot of times when it comes to partnering, you see a spectrum. Some agencies have a strong preference towards white-labeling their partnerships; some of them have a strong preference towards always surfacing and strictly saying “this is a partner,” and some of them tend to go somewhere in between. How have you thought about that decisioning process about if it's explicitly always a partnership, almost always a white-label, or in between? JUSTIN: Most of the time nowadays we're comfortable in our own skin, and we'll do a partnership. I think most clients nowadays have multiple agencies that they're working with. They understand that not every agency can offer everything. They're okay with having those partnerships as long as the agency is managing it; they don't want another thing to manage. And they appreciate the fact that we say, “That's probably not our most expertise, and we'd like to bring in this partner to walk alongside this journey with us.” They definitely resonate with that and appreciate that. SANDRA: And actually, I'd say a good majority of our current clients were working with other partners and all playing in the sandbox together. So, it's been interesting the shift that's happened over the last couple years where that's almost become commonplace. I think really making sure that we are not only developing that relationship with the client, but really being appreciative of others involved, has also helped to create seamless, great projects. JUSTIN: That was probably a big “aha” of several years ago that the days of Agencies of Record are pretty much gone, from what I can tell. Clients have multiple agencies that they're using or vetting or working with, so they understand the partnership aspect and definitely appreciate it. ROB: That's a great point in serving the client well. Sometimes it may seem that what a client wants is a one-stop shop, but it's really worth clarifying. It's not that they want you to be superhuman. They may want you to be a trusted guide to help them find someone to do everything. They may not want multiple points of contact. They may not want multiple billing relationships. Or they may want all of that. It sounds like you can serve them well by figuring out how they want to be served and what it is that they're asking for, which is probably not for you to be Superman. JUSTIN: Absolutely. Almost everything we do, we do in-house. We're pretty control freak, so we like having folks here under one roof. We like to offer those services. Most of the clients that we work with understand that. They like that and really resonate with the fact that we can offer all those services to them, but also to work with other agencies as well. A lot of the clients come to us because they're just overwhelmed. There's so many things on their plate, there's so many platforms they want to be on. They want to stay ahead of the curve, but they're just trying to keep up with what's on their plate currently. So, they're coming to us to really help backfill a lot of the work that they know they need to be doing. ROB: That clearly makes sense. When you're looking ahead, what is coming up in either the marketing world in general or particularly for Bigeye that you're excited about? JUSTIN: I'm going to continue to say and double down on the idea of audience. Everything we do is going to tie back to audience. I believe for us, it is resonating. We will continue to do the persona development and tie it to creative and media. There's so much opportunity to understand and segment audiences. We can drill down to very, very micro levels of who we're trying to reach. I think we're just beginning that, and we'll continue to dive deeper into it. SANDRA: And because of that, too, I'll just add onto that, we've been able to engage with some really incredible brands. My hope and my outlook towards the future is that we build on those relationships with those incredible brands and we start to work with even bigger and larger brands as well, doing innovative projects and really working on incredible marketing strategies and initiatives for some really cool people. ROB: When you say audience, I can't help but think one of the audience platforms that is a little bit more in the news lately is Facebook, and some brands opting out of advertising on Facebook, and probably some other brands stepping in and maybe claiming some cheaper inventory there. How are you seeing clients think about Facebook in terms of what marketing they put there? JUSTIN: From our team and from clients, they're cautiously watching it. We've not had any clients or any recommendations to make major shifts in their media budgets because of what's going on there, but we are watching it. There are several things like that that we need to be mindful of and we need to be watching for our clients and making appropriate recommendations as we move forward with that media. We have not seen a dramatic downtick in the cost of that. It's still an expensive platform because of the targeting that Facebook has, but we'll continue to watch it. ROB: Got it. One thing I've seen, at least on the brand side, is some brands have maybe not shifted their overall budget, but they've shifted how they spend it. Some of them are scaling back on the brand advertising and drilling more into let's say driving ecommerce or some sort of online conversion, or more outcome-based and less of the potentially risky brand marketing. JUSTIN: Yes. Conversion is key, and everything we're doing leads to conversion in some way. Now, that doesn't mean that brand awareness is not important; it is, and placements like on YouTube, which tend to be more of a brand awareness play than a direct conversion – most people don't click the ad on YouTube – but you need to be there. That's where the audience is. It's the #2 search engine in the world. We know our brands that we work with need to be there, but we're focused on conversions along with making sure the brand stays relevant, stays top of mind, and all matching back to, where is that consumer going to consume that media? ROB: Super solid. Justin, Sandra, when people want to find you and Bigeye, where should they find you? JUSTIN: Bigeyeagency.com is where you can find us. There's a lot of information there. We keep our blog incredibly updated. A lot of great information there. ROB: Sounds great. Any last words you want to leave with our audience before we get on with your day? JUSTIN: Appreciate your time, and look forward to hearing feedback from folks. ROB: Sounds great. Thank you, both of you, for joining today. It's great to get to know you, and we'll all look forward to being down in Orlando for some fun things at some point, once we get through this whole pandemic thing. SANDRA: I hope so. Hope to see you, Rob. ROB: Sounds great. Be well. JUSTIN: Thanks, Rob. SANDRA: Thank you. JUSTIN: Bye. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Brian Lawson and his brother left their jobs in engineering, IT, and software development to found WebMO (Web Marketing Optimizer), a digital marketing agency. From the beginning, they focused on optimizing organic visibility/SEO and doing Google search ads, not just studying digital marketing tactics, strategies, and analysis, but digging into the “behind the scenes” mechanics. Today, WebMO is heavily data-driven, does everything digital marketing, and serves a large number of diverse and predominantly small-businesses nationwide. WebMO's “super-detailed” understanding of Google Analytics, conversion tracking, visitor engagement metrics, and the conversion heuristic enables the agency to fully understand clients' market spaces. Over the years, the agency built their own analytical tools. The combination of three major Google data points – Google Analytics, a company's Google Search Console data, and the data compiled in a company's Google my Business listing – provides a clear understanding of a company's “true space in the market.” Education is the beginning of WebMO's relationship with its clients. Brian loves to break down complicated technical concepts. He is used to speaking to groups of people, and loves running free workshops to help business owners understand complex concepts. As a result of this proactive training, WebMO became a Google Partner. When Google introduced the Grow with Google program, which encourages small business organizations, chambers of commerce, public libraries, agencies, and other organizations to participate in live feed educational workshops, WebMO was on board. Because of the huge number of people who have gone through WebMO's workshops, Google recognizes the agency as a “high impact partner.”  Education on how Google works, Brian says, “is absolutely critical.” After defining a client's market space, the agency evaluates the client's unique situation, and then makes recommendations. Because Brian's agency works with smaller companies with smaller budgets, “testing” the market and quantifying the response works well. Instead of spending thousands of dollars for a huge campaign, the clients may spend a few hundred. WebMO is then able to quickly show them the ROI on that investment. Brian says, “If it's going to fail, fail fast and fail cheap.” Covid-19 changed the agency's operations. Although WebMO has been unable to meet with clients in person, it continues its educational outreach through weekly updates. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Yelp are constantly tweaking their policies . . . WebMO is working to keep clients aware of these changes. One of Brian's more recent presentations covered “how to look at Google Trends to truly understand the impact that this [Covid-19] situation is having on your business.” Brian explains that Covid-19 has affected businesses in several different ways. Companies that provide such things as bartending services for parties are devastated. For other companies, like air conditioning repair companies and plumbers, it's business as usual. For the last category, exemplified by companies that sell cleaning supplies, provide in-home nanny services, and medical professionals who are still working, traffic has gone “off the charts.” In addition to having its own clients, WebMO partners with agencies that need an invisible number cruncher. When asked what he would have done differently when he started his agency, Brian said, he should have been “a little quicker to respond to where our clients were probably needing us most.” He seems to be doing that now. Brian can be reached on his agency's website at: www.web-mo.com Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Brian Lawson, Owner and Co-founder of WebMO, based in Tucson, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast. BRIAN: Hey, thanks, Rob. I appreciate you having me on. ROB: Brian, it's great to have you. Why don't you start off by telling us about WebMO and what makes WebMO great? BRIAN: Awesome. We are, as you mentioned, a Tucson, Arizona based digital marketing agency. I've always introduced our company as being a little different than quite a few others in our space because of our backgrounds. The co-founders, myself and my brother, come from a much different background than the typical marketing agency background. A lot of times people that provide the types of services that we provide, like websites and digital marketing and SEO and Google and YouTube and Facebook and all that, tend to come from either the design world or sometimes a traditional marketing background. Our backgrounds were in engineering, IT, software development, all those things. So, from the very beginning, we started approaching all of these digital marketing tactics and strategies and analysis with a much greater emphasis on the machinery, the real techy stuff that's lingering behind the scenes. You think about Google as one example; Google's a company that has 20,000 engineers and 300 designers. So, taking that real math-based, almost “super nerd” approach, if you want to think about it that way, is a good way to approach it given the kind of issues we're dealing with. We tend to be – again, compared to most – a little more data-driven, a little more analytical. We definitely tend to be sometimes a little skeptical of other things that some others in our industry are saying. That gave us the foundation for a very unique and somewhat successful agency. ROB: It sounds like that would also shape the sort of client who comes to you and resonates with you. What sort of clients are drawn to and resonate with this approach? BRIAN: We have a pretty large variety of clients, which thankfully serves us well when things in the market go up or down. We don't really specialize in any one kind. We have some larger end clients that pretty much just engage our services purely for the data analysis part of what we do. We're one of the few agencies who have a complete understanding of all the things going on with Google Analytics and conversion tracking and embracing some of the math that's in our industry, like visitor engagement metrics or the conversion heuristic. We really get super detailed on that. But interestingly, that overall idea is also very appealing to a small business. If you're a house painter and you've been through multiple agencies so far and no one's really been able to figure it out, when they hear that story, it's like, “Whoa, these guys are super into this stuff and they're really technical and analytical.” In a way, it gives that client a reason to believe that maybe this time will be different. Our industry, digital marketing, is old enough now to where most businesses out there have had at least one or two or more experiences with other efforts, and most of them haven't been exactly what they were hoping for. So as an agency – and I would say this to any agency – one of the things you have to really get out there for a client is a reason to believe that this time, things will be different. For us, it's that. It's our unique value proposition, that idea that we're going to take a closer look at the data, but because we have this deep level of understanding of how this stuff works, we're going to find a way to get things happening that maybe weren't happening before. Now, on top of that, I also happen to be a business owner, and I have been a business owner for 30 years, so when I'm talking to another business owner, it's like, “Oh yeah, you get it. You understand.” So a lot of our clients – I'd say the majority of them – definitely fall into the small business category, with a few exceptions being some of those higher end companies that want to bring us in for the analytics side of things. ROB: Very interesting. What sort of toolkit do you bring to bear on that analytics problem? I think people look at tools all the time, and often having right thinking is much more important than the tools, but having good execution is also helpful along those lines. What's your go-to? BRIAN: We've actually done a lot of in-house compilation things, if you want to think about it that way. We're very heavy on the technical side. We have a team of 23 people total, very heavy on the techy side. A lot of developers and programmers. Because of our background being software developers/app developers, we really didn't have to rely on finding third party solutions to do most of what we do. We were able to grow them from the ground up. One example is, for instance, if you're trying to analyze a company's visibility. Let's say you've got a local PC repair guy, whatever, and they want to really understand how they're doing online. We rejected this idea of rank reports way before everyone else did. Even when we entered into this business probably close to 10 years ago, we immediately looked at that model and said, “This doesn't make any sense.” Clients were getting these reports that said “Hey, you're #3 on this term and #6 on that term,” and it all seemed so useless, honestly. Clients were already saying it was useless because they were looking at these reports and saying, “Whatever. Yeah, you found that I'm #3 if I type this exact phrase or whatever; what good does that do me? What do I get? Am I going to get a prize for this? What's the reward?” So we almost right out of the gate rejected that model and said rank reports are about useless, especially when it comes to local visibility. We started creating our own analysis tools that combined, at the time – and now more than ever, in today's market – the three major data points in Google, which is the data that's being accumulated, of course, in Google Analytics, your Google Search Console data, and all the data that's being compiled in your Google My Business listing. The only way to get a really accurate understanding of your true space in the market is with all three of those data points being combined. And then taking it a step further – and again, just putting your mind in a small business owner's frame of mind, they say, “Yeah, I get that I have traffic and I understand that all these people are finding me on these different words and phrases, but again, what does it really mean?” So we'll look at a market and say, “You are in Phoenix, Arizona; there are 50,000 searches per month, roughly, for people looking for plumbing repair. As a business, you, Mr. Plumber, are visible about 33,000 of those times.” Like I said, compiling all this data. That's the starting point: understanding your percentage of market share as opposed to just saying, “Hey, you're showing up in the third spot on this particular search term.” Then it just goes from there. If you're going to have any chance of getting a client or winning a new customer, they have to be able to at least see. As a business owner – and of course, we teach them this – the very first question you should be asking is, “How ubiquitous am I? If there's 50,000 people searching per month, how often am I one of those people that at least appears in front of somebody's eyeballs?” That's just one example. ROB: Absolutely, that makes sense. You talked a little bit about your technical background and your co-founder, your brother's background, coming into starting this business. But in particular, what was it that made you decide to start this business when you did? How did you go from the technical background to “I am going to start a digital marketing agency”? BRIAN: It's interesting. A couple things. We're serial entrepreneurs, as most business owners tend to be. From early on, from about the early '90s, about 1991, we had started an IT services company that was pretty much helping businesses with, at the time, the very confusing world of internal LANs and inter-office communication and computer networking and all that, and then branching into internet configuration and everything else. So, I had a very deep, good long list of local businesses that trusted us for pretty much everything technical. This buildup started happening probably around 2009-2010 with clients saying to us, “Hey, you guys are awesome in helping with all this other stuff, but I can't find anybody that can explain this to me or help me with this.” Almost getting dragged into it from that standpoint. We were thinking, “That's interesting, but let's put a pin in it.” Meanwhile, again as serial entrepreneurs, we did a tech startup. It was a home-based internet security product. I won't get into a lot of detail, but we had the old venture capital funding and all that, and we had developed a marketing strategy for that online. And it was good, using a combination of SEO and Google search ads and all the other things. We had it really cooking. After some investors came in, they basically said, “Hey, you guys are engineers. You guys are probably really good at communicating what you know about your product, but you're not marketers. You don't know what you're doing there. Let's hand that over to this agency” – it was in New York City, one of the bigger agencies out there. “Let's let them take care of that part.” We're like, eh, okay, let's see what happens. Sure enough, we watched what they did and we were doing it better. Our results, everything about it was far exceeding what one of the top agencies in the country was doing. So of course, the little lightbulbs go off in our heads, thinking, as soon as this current tech startup is behind us, between the demand that we're seeing from the boots on the ground, all the people out there that were literally begging us to help them, and combining that with the affirmation that we were truly, truly good at this stuff, our course was set. That was about 10 years ago. ROB: It's interesting how oftentimes through that experience in another business, you find out – sometimes it can be wanderlust and you just try to do something different, but in this case you were able to find something that you could do differently and successfully. If I rewind the conversation a little bit, you were talking about some of these rather complex things. I think if you ask a client sometimes to pick an attribution strategy in Google Analytics, their eyes glaze over. It sounds like you have the strength and knowledge to be able to prescribe that for them pretty well. But marketing also requires going one step further when you're working for a client and helping them understand. How do you think about helping these owners understand something like attribution when you get to something like beyond first click, last click, even attribution, and you're trying to tell somebody that an ad gave them 20% of a lead? I think it'd be pretty confusing. How do you think about getting those concepts through to clients? BRIAN: That's a great question. Early on, we really embraced this idea of the client relationship model, starting with education. I'll come back to that in a second, but really making sure that our client is truly educated. We weren't oblivious to the fact that, for the most part, in our industry, the number one reason why clients drift away is because they make a comment that says something like, “I didn't know what they were doing.” They honestly didn't understand what was happening. So first is education. Then it's evaluation of their specific situation. Only after that we make specific recommendations as to what they should be doing. The education side – as it turns out, I love talking about this stuff. I'm a passionate advocate for the entire model of digital marketing. I love getting in front of groups of people and explaining these things. Because of my background working with businesses on the IT side, I spent many, many times in boardrooms and in front of employees from companies, really breaking down very complicated technical things into little anecdotes and analogies and fun ways to think about stuff. So I was always very capable of doing that, and I really truly enjoyed it. We got way ahead of the curve on that and early on started doing workshops, just free education workshops that would be designed to get business owners understanding this stuff. Because they're dying for information. Even today, even though our industry is a little bit more mature, still so many business owners are quite oblivious. They really don't understand even the basics, let alone some of the more complex concepts like you mentioned. So we hopped on that train big time, and interestingly, it led us – because we're also what's considered a Google Partner; we have a Google Partnership status, and about 3 or 4 years ago, Google introduced this program called Grow with Google, where they were encouraging small business organizations, chamber of commerce, public libraries, or whatever to allow Google to do these live feed education workshops. At the time, since we were a partner, they were opening it up to agencies as well, so we started becoming involved in that. We did that so much that we became the only agency, at least in the state of Arizona, that Google recognized as one of its high impact partners. That was strictly because of the sheer number of people that have gone through our workshops. I know that's sort of a long roundabout way to answer your question, but yeah, education on that stuff is absolutely critical. There's also another element as well. There's getting a client to the point to know enough to know that they'll never truly understand it, and then they basically have faith in you at that point. They say, “Okay, I get that it's really complicated. I don't think I fully understand it, but I'm fully convinced that you understand it, and as long as at the end of the day I'm seeing results and I see that you're attentive, that's really the key.” ROB: As we were chatting before we started recording, that background you have in doing this education has really helped in the moment that we're in. We are in the middle of this coronavirus national shutdown, everybody work from home situation. How are you adapting your agency to operate in this new, fully remote environment? What parts of that do you think you might stick with even once we're all back together in person more often? BRIAN: That's a great question. Like we were talking about, I love the live workshop. I thrive in that environment where I can be interactive with people and gauge – if I'm saying something that's flying right over their heads, I can usually pick that up. So the challenge, for all of us really – and this doesn't just go for workshops; it goes for meetings, it goes for everything that we're doing right now – is to try to find a way to offset that disconnect. Like we talked about before, there's no substitute for that live connection. That being said, I think there are also some opportunities right now. I think that as of today – I feel like we're still, sadly, in the early stages of this; we're hopefully maybe a third of the way through, who knows – but I think after we settle into the new normal and people realize that, “Okay, I'm going to be here a while. I can't, even if I wanted to in some cases, be as productive as I was before because I can't do meetings, I can't do this, whatever. I'm stuck at home, not even driving” – I mean, for some people, an hour or two of their day just opened up because they don't have to drive cars. Again, for business owners and for those that are truly entrepreneurial, I think they are going to shift over to this mindset of saying, “You know what? With all this free time, I'm going to use it to make things better. I'm going to finally understand this thing I never really understood before. I'm going to figure out how to program my TV.” Whatever is on their list of things. From a business standpoint, they might actually be more interested in circling back to saying, “When I come out of this, I've always wanted to try Facebook ads, but I don't know how to do it.” So I think there will be an increase in the number of people that are at least interested in listening to or participating in some form of webinar or podcast. I don't think we're there yet; I think people are still in the “I've just got to figure out how to work remotely.” But once that settles in, I think there might actually be some opportunity. Back to your question. We were doing a pretty steady series of live events. We've obviously switched those over to all webinars. Even in the month of April that we're in right now, we've allocated every Thursday morning from 9 to 10 a.m. – we're just doing updates. There's so much information coming out in waves from Google and Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram and Yelp, and they're all offering money this and credits for that and changing their policies. So, we're allocating that time just to get everyone up to date. But then we're also layering in really interesting topics. Like I think the one we're doing tomorrow is how to look at Google Trends to truly understand the impact that this situation is having on your business. This is something anybody can do. You don't have to have this high level of analytical skills to go to Google Search Trends and see whether or not people are searching more often for this, less often for that, or about the same. Once you're looking at that data and saying, “Interesting. People are no longer searching for this; however, they really are searching for that now,” that actually might help you course correct and maybe adapt your strategies a little bit. So yeah, we're still 100% all-in on the education side. Obviously switching over to webinar, for better or for worse, and then hopefully getting back to the normal mode once all of this is behind us. ROB: Are there any interesting examples of the Google Trends shifts you've seen on behalf of clients that you might be able to share? BRIAN: Absolutely. People ask me, “How are you guys doing?” We have such a diverse number of clients that we're really seeing all three scenarios. We're seeing some that are just devastated, sadly. We have clients that specialize in providing bartender services for parties and events, and of course, they're wiped out. Their entire book of business from now through May no longer exists. Our guidance to them is saying all the people that had these events are going to have to reschedule, so even though you're not finding people that are looking to do it right now, you might find them later. We have some that are seeing no impact whatsoever. If you're looking at AC repair or plumbing repair – pipes and air conditioning systems have absolutely no respect for the stay at home orders. If they're going to break, they're going to break. They're not going to wait until everything's normal, so there's no reason why there'd be less search on that, and there isn't. If anything, we're probably going to start to see a sudden uptick of that. People are home more often, and if you're in a state like Arizona where it's going to get into the upper 80s this week, they're going to be putting stresses on systems that they didn't really have to before with their kids at home and working from home. So I would expect they may grow a little bit. The third category of businesses that we work with are actually seeing increases. We have businesses that sell office cleaning supplies. We have businesses that offer nanny services for people that come to their homes and watch their kids. Again, there's a lot of people that have to go to work. All the people in the medical industry. So there's an example of a huge uptick. Their website traffic and the amount of leads they're getting is off the charts. So we really are in an interesting situation where we get to see all three of those scenarios playing out. ROB: That's an interesting mix, and probably encouraging to have that combination of some clients that are needing you a little bit more while some of those other clients maybe need a little bit less while they figure out this time. BRIAN: Right. It's almost like having a stock portfolio. [laughs] It's good to have diversity. You've got your winners and you've got some of them that aren't so good. ROB: When you think about your experience in building WebMO – and it sounds like you have some experience from building prior businesses as well – what are some things you would do differently if you were starting WebMO from scratch that you've learned? BRIAN: That's a good question. I saw that previously, and it's always hard for a business owner to do that, when you see yourself as being like “I've got this figured out.” But I would say in the early years, we found our lane. We found this lane and we were very committed to sticking to it. We were like, “We don't want to build websites, we don't want to do social media, we don't want to get into this, we don't want to get into that.” We were very much specializing in really optimizing organic visibility/SEO and doing Google search ads, because we had that down. We mastered those two things. We were probably a little more reluctant than we could've been to just open up and be more responsive to what the market was asking for. There was probably a few years where we just said, “No, no, no, no, no.” Again, hindsight is 20/20. I don't know, maybe it was better to do that. But today, through growing and evolving or whatever, I think the lesson with most small business owners is you have to listen to the market. You have to provide what your client wants, ultimately. You can't be too stubborn about saying, “No, no, this is all you need.” But on the other hand, you can't be running around like a crazy person saying yes to everything and getting into areas that are outside your expertise. I would've probably gone a little sooner into getting more into a lot of the other stuff that we do. Now currently, we do stuff across the board. Of course, we build websites, and we have campaigns running on everything from Spotify to obviously all the social media platforms and LinkedIn and direct email campaigns. You name it, we probably do it, if it's in digital marketing. I probably would've been a little more open to doing that sooner if I could roll back time for a few years. But again, you can't really second guess it too much when you like where you're at currently. We're very happy with where the business is now. It's always tough to say – but if I had done that too soon and I hadn't really mastered it, maybe it would've done more harm than good. It is a tough question, but that's probably about the closest I can get. Just being a little quicker to respond to where our clients were probably needing us most. That would probably be it. ROB: Are there any new directions that you think you might be getting pulled in, but you're not quite sure yet? BRIAN: There's certain things that I've just never been a big advocate of when it comes to marketing in general. There's certain tactics that I'm not probably ever going to be convinced to do. Things like spam. We're never going to tell a client, “You should be blasting spam out to people's inboxes.” Sending advertisements to people's text messages is to me crossing a line that I just will never feel comfortable doing. Yeah, you know you're going to get email solicitations from people you don't know; you accept that. You know you've got to see commercials when you watch TV. You know you're going to see ads on websites. You know if you're a Facebook user, you're going to see advertisements. But texts to me are our one safe space where we can be sheltered from getting bombarded with ads. We've had clients before say, “Hey, what about these?” and I'm just like, “I don't think so.” I think I'd still be reluctant to do something that I know, anecdotally, people in general just really, really don't like. Even if there's a possible ROI on it, there's probably some areas where I wouldn't feel comfortable taking my clients. ROB: I absolutely understand that, and I totally agree with you about crossing those lines. It's interesting what you mentioned on being pulled toward social earlier and resisting it. In a way, one of the things I end up seeing as I have these conversations is a lot of the people who got really good early at doing the core search ads and that sort of thing stayed away from social when it was fluffy and then came back into it when it wasn't “Hey, let me make a nice organic post that goes viral and gets a lot of activity,” but “Oh my goodness, Facebook ads is becoming sophisticated, and look at these tools we can bring to bear.” I think there may be a theme there. Also the case in email. I think a lot of clients weren't ready to use email intelligently for a while. BRIAN: I would say that's exactly correct, and that almost mirrors precisely how we approached it. I didn't like social media management because of that very reason. It was fluffy, like you said. There wasn't a lot of ways to calculate an ROI. There wasn't as much engineering and math and science behind it. It was way too obvious what you were doing and not doing from a client's perspective. There wasn't anything you could bring to the table other than really clever writing skills. It just didn't go to our core value. It's like, we're math guys, we're science guys; how in the world does that apply to making a clever, quippy little Facebook post? But then, like you mentioned, things got a lot more interesting when some of these more sophisticated targeting tools – that's about the same time we started hopping into it, because then there was a value add. That's the thing. As an agency, as a business owner, or whatever, if you're not doing something that's adding value that's obvious, your lifespan with them is going to be limited. I always explain that with any transaction. You have this perception of value that the client or the customer sees, and if they see the cost being at about the same level – there's a value, there's what you're getting, and then there's the cost that they're paying for it – if that is out of balance, if they feel like “I'm paying too much because they're not doing this,” then it's going to be trouble. The problem that we ran into, and a lot of people ran into with social media management, is that it's so obvious what you're doing. There's no secret. They're looking at your posts, and for better or for worse, they're saying, “That's it? My 16-year-old could do that. I'm paying $1,000 a month. I could just hire a part-time person and have them do it all the time.” So it's really hard to explain or to get across to somebody that what you're doing is something that you're uniquely qualified to do, that somebody else couldn't do as well. About that time when ads became a little more sophisticated or whatever, it fit into – one of our core, principal beliefs is this idea that there are no expert marketers, only experienced marketers and expert testers. So, we started embracing this idea that every single strategy out there is probably worthy of testing. If you're looking at Facebook, if you're looking at Instagram, if you're looking at Spotify, whatever, you don't have to buy into this idea that you spend thousands of dollars and do it whether it's working or not. You just have to take a testing mentality and say, “I'll try it. I'll throw a few hundred bucks at this.” And if you're working with somebody like ourselves, who's very good at analyzing data, with a relatively small budget we can drill right down and say, “There you go. That little budget that you ran for 2 months, here's precisely what it got you. We may have run across the tactic that will work.” On the other hand, some things don't work. It's marketing, right? You're going through your ideas; some things are going to work, some things are going to fail. If it's going to fail, fail fast and fail cheap. That is the beauty of digital marketing. You don't have to necessarily do an ad buy that you're committed to for 6 months. You can actually try a small budget test. I know that was a long circle around, but that mindset of adopting this idea that our job is just to test things for our clients – we just need to execute tests – that then opened up everything. Everything from Yelp to LinkedIn to Bing and YouTube and whatever. That's what got us into that, after that first wave of pure social media management abated a little bit. ROB: That seems like a great principle to carry forward, this idea that you might not say no to something you don't believe is effective; you can test it, and you can even probably keep testing it as long as you are changing something and you're not just in a rut of experimental nothingness. BRIAN: Exactly. That idea of A/B split testing everything from your landing pages or conversion pages to your ad copy – again, the beauty of digital marketing comes back to data. If you have data, you can literally look at it and say, “That ad got a 3% click-through rate and led to this sort of visitor engagement when they got to my website. This ad had a 4% conversion rate, but had lower visitor engagement.” Okay, that's some great information. It's very unique that way. It's extremely hard, if not impossible, to get that level of detail on traditional marketing methods. Radio, TV, billboards, magazines – there's basic things you can do, maybe track phone calls, but the unique thing is you can't get into the mind of somebody watching a TV ad and see how they're reacting to it. When they come to your website or a landing page, based on all the math that we are able to apply to this, you can really understand the people that are there that appear to be engaged, the visitor engagement metric. It's pretty common in our industry. It's exciting to me. I'm super passionate about it. This is the kind of thing where I teach people this in a workshop and a lightbulb goes off. They're like, “That makes sense!” You can actually get a better understanding of if your marketing is even moving generally in the right direction. ROB: You definitely know your numbers, Brian. When people want to find you and WebMO, where should they look you up? BRIAN: You can just go to www.web-mo.com. That's our website. Or you can just type “WebMO Tucson” or “WebMO” Arizona, “WebMO.” You're going to find a few references to us out there. We do work with clients all over the country. We're based in Arizona, but we are definitely nationwide in terms of the clients we work with. We love to partner with other types of agencies. We have a lot of partnerships with website designers, traditional marketing agencies, where we provide these services behind the scenes and basically make you look awesome because we're back there crunching all these numbers and generating all this great data and reports. Meanwhile, you're talking to your client and saying, “Hey, look what we did!” Sot hats a good way to initiate the conversation. Sign up for a workshop. Ask for a free report where we can obviously analyze your market. There's lots of actionable steps once you get to the website. ROB: Excellent. Thank you so much, Brian. Best wishes to you and WebMO going forward. We'll look for you online. Enjoy. BRIAN: Thanks, Rob. I appreciate the time. Stay healthy and safe and all that good stuff. ROB: Indeed. Take care, Brian. Thanks. BRIAN: Thanks. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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

Sangram: "We were doing everything wrong from an outside perspective....36 years old...just had a 2nd kid....going to start a new company....trying to invent an entirely new category called Account Based Marketing....We're gonna do it!" Rob: "When it seems like it's the absolute wrong time, sometimes that's the perfect time to 'jump off the cliff'." Sangram: "That's where the growth happens..where relationships are revealed....not in good times, but in tough times." Sangram Vajre tell us his Terminus origin story on this 3-minute clip from episode #23 with Sangram Vajre. Short on time? (Parents, I feel you) Here's a fun recap I wrote about my interview with Sangram: https://dadthebestican.com/sangram-vajre/

Those who are invested in the stock market are looking into 2018 with optimism. GDP growth is up, profits continue to rise and the economy's in a good place. But what changes could impact the markets in the coming year? And are the tried and true investment strategies of the old days still relevant? We sat down with associate professor of finance Rob Neal to discuss these topics. ---- Do you have a question? Looking to get help on a business decision? Know a great guest for our show? Email roipod@iupui.edu so we can help your organization make better business decisions. ---- Ready to take your next step? Check out if a Kelley MBA is right for you: https://bit.ly/3m2G6D5 ---- Show Notes: Shane: Happy New Year to all of you – hopefully your 2018 has gotten off to an outstanding start! And now it's the time to think about what this upcoming year has to bring – and how you can dominate it and accomplish your goals. With this being a new year, there brings new opportunities and challenges in business – none more pressing than the financial markets. So in this episode of The ROI Podcast – we'll be talking outlooks for the markets – and how you can maximize your returns in the stock market. (The ROI Podcast Music) Shane: It's a new year and a new episode of The ROI Podcast presented by the Kelley School of Business on the IUPUI Campus in downtown Indianapolis. I'm Shane Simmons and the associate dean of academic programs here at the Kelley School, Phil Powell is next to me. How's it going, Phil? Phil: (Response) Shane: Today we're taking a look at the 2018 financial markets – and also giving our listeners some tips when it comes to investing, especially when it comes to retirement. Phil: You know, when we look at the financial markets and where they're at and where they may be going, I think back to the mid-2000s where we had a massive segment of growth before the markets collapsed. According to Rob Neal, associate professor of finance at the Kelley School of business on the IUPUI campus, when looking at the markets there are certain factors we look at. Rob: When we think about what drives the markets and stock prices, usually we focus on three factors: corporate earnings, interest rates, and measures of market ratios. When we look at the earnings part, what we saw was from roughly 2014-16, that three year period, earning growth is pretty much flat, save for the S&P 500. Now in 2017, it's rebounded, it's up about 10% for the calendar year so far, which is above its long-term average. Our forecast going forward for next year are slightly higher, about 11%, so that's good news for a market forecast. On the interest-rate side, the current federal funds rate is sitting about 1.25% - the expectations going forward are that we're going to see another interest rate increase 25 basis points in December, and probably another 2 or so in 2018. That's going to take the interest rates up to about 2%, which are still relatively low, certainly on a historical basis. Phil: And you heard Professor Neal mention earnings as one of those three factors that really drives the markets and stock prices. Recently, we just saw productivity growth rate over the last two quarters surpass 3 percent. Shane: And for some of our listeners out there – define productivity growth rate. Phil: (Defines Productivity Growth Rate) Phil: So my questions to Professor Neal was this: Is productivity growth going to be one source that could drive extraordinary earnings growth? Rob: Any time you can do a better job of utilizing resources to produce your products you're earnings are going to benefit.  Rob: my hunch is if we're successful on the corporate side of trying to keep our tax rates more inline with worldwide global averages, then it is going to have a net positive impact on productivity going forward. We've got some demographic changes that we are working against us in productivity and are probably scaling back our long-term productivity estimates, but from my perspective I see a lot of positive developments on the technology side. A lot of innovation going on. Internet of things developments. New censors being able to monitor workflow, and even being able to get traffic patterns to improve. Rob: I think were on the cusp of a lot of potential innovation that's going to have a positive impact. Phil: So some of you out there listening may be thinking this is interesting and has a very positive outlook – but let's not forget what happened to so many people during the crash of 2008 – losing thousands of dollars. Some may say the stock market is like the lottery or like gambling in Vegas. If you're afraid to put your money in the stock market because of that – here's what Professor Neal has to say. Rob: It's definitely NOT the same thing as going to Vegas. You might think about buying a lottery ticket. Alright, all of you listeners out there, don't buy lottery tickets, please. Your payoff to a lottery ticket is about 50 cents on the dollar. Now if you want to blow your money, go to a casino. You can play the slot machines and your payoff there is going to be 90-95 cents on the dollar. Now if you keep on doing this, the probability that you're going to be broke is essentially 100%. But it's going to last a lot longer if you gamble in a casino versus doing it with a lottery ticket. Now in contrast, when we look at the equity markets, on average stock prices go up on an inflated-adjusted basis about 7 percent per year. So you've got that working for you. One of the big risks investors face, and we face it right now and you might think the market is expensive and you want to get out, but being out of the market long term is highly risky and it's a guaranteed failure rate. So you're never going to be able to grow your resources enough to do what you want to do in retirement or down the road. Phil: And Professor Neal says one of the best financial decisions he made was during the crash of 2008. Rob: One of the best investment decisions I made was during the financial crisis. I'm always getting calls from neighbors asking what do I do? The best investment decision I made was to do nothing. So I just stayed put. I rode it out, and for everyone else, you've got to understand that if you get to 7 percent annual rate of return, it's not going to be without risk. There are going to be times when you are going to lose a bunch of money. But what you want to do is focus on where you are likely to be 30 years from now. 20 years from now. 40 years from now. And what's the best plan for getting there? Phil: And another tip, that may seem obvious but a lot of people still don't do this – is contribute enough to your 401k that your employer can reach its maximum match contribution. Rob: From a retirement perspective, this is something that everyone should do. If you have an employee match, be sure to contribute enough to get the maximum match from your employer. That's free money and you're never going to see a rate of return like you get on that investment. So that's rule number one. Rule number two is thinking about an investment in an index fund, it doesn't have to be U.S. funds, in fact, I would encourage a certain amount of global diversification. If you look at European markets they tend to look more attractive on a valuation basis than American markets do. But our historical rate of return on inflation-adjusted dollars is about 7 percent per year on the market. (Closing Music) Phil: Bottom line is the economy is looking pretty good next year, markets are looking good, there are always questions about it. But in terms of your investment strategy, put it in an index fund and just don't do anything else. Rob: put the money in, leave it. And hope for her best, based on the info we have, that's probably the best strategy. (The ROI Podcast Music) Shane: So wrapping this up – it looks like going into 2018 we are in pretty good shape. And we're looking at returns on equities to be positive, but maybe just below that 7 and a half percent average over the past 50 years… Phil: (Response) Shane: That's going to do it for us. Thank you to professor Rob Neal for his insight. And for all of you listeners out there be sure to go to iTunes, Subscribe and Leave us A review – we'd love to get your feedback on the podcast. We'll talk to you all next week!

This week on Ask Rob & Rob, Mike... Asks Rob & Rob –  When it comes to refinancing, should I consider a longer term deal to avoid fees? Rob D & B agree that this is all about the numbers, but it can be tricky to work out. Get your mortgage advisor to do the calculations and work out what is best for you. Remortgaging can be an expensive business and even if the costs are not being paid out immediately, they are definitely still very real costs.  Rob D asks his broker to give him all the figures including any associated fees, just to be 100% sure that he chooses the best deal when re-financing.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.